The Labor Notes Podcast

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. 

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

What do you do when neoliberal ghouls are set on privatizing services you love and rely on? For Mexico City’s trolleybus workers, the answer was building a coalition of public transit riders, climate activists and labor allies prepared to fight back. They turned fear into action, and supporters into organizers—mobilizing commuters who relied on the transit network to bring other riders into the fight. As Trump’s schmuck parade sets out to dismantle critical public services millions rely on, we can learn from Mexican workers’ fight to stave off privatization and win vital investments in their public transit system. PLUS: You heard it here first—it’s pod co-host Danielle’s birthday! Her one birthday demand, we mean wish, is that you subscribe to the pod and leave us a review. Happy birthday Danielle!!!

Facing an administration bent on privatizing public services, federal workers are flocking to their unions in large numbers and connecting with one another through the new rank-and-file group the Federal Unionists Network. TSA agents are among the latest groups of workers organizing a response after the Department of Homeland Security decided earlier this month to abruptly end their collective bargaining agreement.