The Labor Notes Podcast

77,000 California Educators Are Joining Forces

California educators across the state are joining forces in their fight for full staffing, safe and stable schools, and competitive compensation in their contract negotiations this year. The “We Can’t Wait” campaign involves 32 locals covering 77,000 public school educators in California. That’s about a quarter of the California Teachers Association’s total membership, and those educators serve 1 million students.  Educators spoke with Labor Notes organizer and pod co-host Danielle Smith about how they united around common issues, lined up their contracts and organized their coworkers to maximize their leverage.

Grocery Workers at the UFCW are Organizing for a Fighting Union

What grocery workers are organizing for, and the way they’re doing it, can be a model for working class unionism.
In recent years, reform-minded members of the United Food and Commercial Workers—UFCW, one of the largest unions in the U.S.—have ramped up their campaigns to make their union more democratic and responsive to the needs of its 1.3 million members.
These members have organized toward resolutions at the 2023 convention, including to have direct elections of the international union’s top officers.
They sued the international in the spring of 2024 over other union democracy issues, pointing out how the UFCW allocates fewer delegates to larger locals. 
And they’re leading more vigorous contract fights and campaigns than we've seen in these sectors in decades.
Their fight can tell us a lot about how vital a reform current can be in transforming a union to actually represent its members’ interests, and fight for the working class as whole.
 
 

Stewards’ Corner: What if Union Meetings Were Actually Good?

Most union meetings are, frankly, pretty dry and ineffective.To an outsider, the agenda looks more or less the same every month, and it seems like the usual suspects show up to either pat themselves on the back, or fight. Labor Notes Organizer Joe DeManuelle-Hall joins pod co-hosts Danielle Smith and Natascha Elena Uhlmann as they share ideas to make union meetings more engaging and useful. 

Beyond May Day, Part 2: Organizing in the Authoritarian Whirlwind

In this moment of existential struggle, what would it mean for our unions to act like a movement? How do we make sense of and tie together the multitude of attacks against working people?
We're joined again by Luis Feliz Leon, who walks us through strategic organizing formations and building on our victories.
If you haven't listened to part 1 of our conversation, don't miss it! We establish why unions are such a critical site for building power, and concrete tasks for organizers today.

Beyond May Day: Part 1

Billionaires and powerful interests are attempting to hijack our government to marginalize dissent, crush worker power, and drive immigrant workers and trans people out of public life—and that's just their starting point.
Meanwhile, workers have been building actions with their coworkers, most recently at more than a 1,000 May Day rallies across the US.
How do we escalate from this month's massive rallies and walkouts? How can workers build a movement that can resist against state terror and carry a vision for a society that works for all of us? How and where should we be meeting each other right now? 
Labor Notes Organizer Luis Feliz Leon joins the pod this week to talk about what organizing in this phase can look like.
This is part 1 of a two-part episode. Tune in again on Friday, May 23, for part 2! 

Stewards' Corner: Did You Know You're Allowed to Read Your Boss' Emails?

Stewards are often thought of merely as enforcers of a union contract on behalf of the unit. But as unit members themselves, stewards are in a real position to organize their co-workers—not just play a form of de facto legal defense in individual grievance cases. Joining this week's pod is Labor Notes organizer Joe DeManuelle-Hall, who leads Labor Notes stewards’ workshops on how to think like an organizer, and how to get the information you want from the boss.

Everything Sucks! Here’s What We Can Do About It

Labor Notes Organizer Barbara Madeloni joins the pod to share her notes for building power in a weary and anxious moment: Keep walking toward each other; Make a sober assessment of our landscape (avoid toxic positivity); and respond to attacks while building an offensive movement—one with a vision for providing the things people need to have full lives. As a one-time reform president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, Barbara learned what it meant to organize in the face of attacks on public schools in Massachusetts. Here’s how she thinks some of those strategies could be put to use now on a broader scale.

Mexican Autoworkers Faced Down Tariff Threats and Won Double Digit Raises—Plus, Labor Notes May Issue Preview!

Workers at GM’s Silao, Guanajuato plant had a salary review period right in the midst of Trump’s tariff threats.
It would have been easy for the company to extract concessions in the face of widespread uncertainty, but workers held the line and won double-digit raises for the second time in recent years. Their winning streak is also forcing pro-boss, company unions to wake up and deliver for workers—if only for fear of a union election they’d likely lose. They’re also hard at work building a new union culture—moving workers from a mindset of “Everyone steals, but hopefully you guys steal less” to feeling a sense of ownership over their union. Their fight demonstrates that militancy is the answer to navigating turbulent times—and the whims of bosses and billionaires everywhere.

Union Members are Leading the Defense of Immigrant Workers

There’s a straight line from years of bipartisan support for ICE and CBP to the alarming political repression we’re experiencing today, where workers and students are being ripped from their daily lives and hauled into detention centers hundreds of miles away. Over the past year, union members and workers centers have been more intensively building networks and resources to support immigrant workers.They’ve been organizing to win contract language to protect members from employers simply handing over confidential information or workplace premises to ICE agents; drafting and sharing know-your-rights resources; and mobilizing support at rallies and actions to stand with those being targeted. That groundwork is mobilizing worker-led resistance to deportation actions against immigrant workers including farmworker union leader Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez, and sheet metal worker Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a member of the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers, whom the administration shipped off to El Salvador from his home in Maryland. 

Facing Privatization And DOGE Attacks, Postal Workers Are Fighting Back

How does a letter get from rural Alaska to tip of Florida for less than a dollar? The U.S. Postal Service of course!The USPS is such a staple of our daily lives, it’s easy to take the public service for granted. But corporate greed has threatened to privatize and consolidate the agency in ways that would make the service more costly for the public and help the rich get richer.Fortunately for us, the USPS isn’t just a vital public service but also the largest union employer in the U.S., and postal workers have long been engaged in a fight to protect our mail.Now with the Trump administration setting its sights on the agency and DOGE sniffing around, postal workers are building on the organizing they’ve already done and continuing their fight for the future of the postal service.