Reinventing Solidarity
Episodes
Episode 66 - An Abundance Agenda for Workers?
25 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Can we have an "abundance agenda" that works for workers? The renowned Harvard University economist Dani Rodrik argues that we can - so long as we acc...
Episode 65 - Making Sense of the Radical Right
27 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Radical right-wing politics is commonly understood as a cry of the “left behind” - working-class voters who lost out in the transition to a post-i...
Episode 64 - "The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It"
26 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Capitalism is commonly understood as an economic system, but Columbia University legal scholar Katharina Pistor argues that its more properly understo...
Episode 63 - Lessons from 100 Years of Black Labor Activism
08 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At a live event at CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, CUNY SLU Assistant Professor of Labor Studies Cameron Black moderated a lively panel discus...
Episode 62 - Introducing New Labor Forum Editor Chris Maisano
16 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At a live event at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, New Labor Forum Editor-at-Large Micah Uetricht interviews the journal's new Editor Chri...
Episode 61 - Labor Against Authoritarianism
17 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Reinventing Solidarity, we feature a keynote address from National Education Association president Becky Pringle from a conference ...
Episode 60 - Intersectional Organizing: Building Solidarity in the Labor and LGBTQIA+ Movements
09 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This episode brings together Joanna Wuest, Brittani Murray, and Jaz Brisack to discuss how queer organizers build community within their workplaces to...
Episode 59 - Jaz Brisack on Union Organizing Today
05 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
New Labor Forum’s Micah Uetricht speaks with labor organizer and former Starbucks barista Jaz Brisack about the Starbucks campaign, the practice of ...
Episode 58 - Interrogating the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic
09 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Historian Erik Baker talks to New Labor Forum's Micah Uetricht about the sanctified place of the entrepreneur in American history, and why the entrepr...
Episode 57 - Can Federal Workers Beat DOGE?
27 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Episode 57 - Can Federal Workers Beat DOGE? by CUNY SLU
Episode 56 - Class Dealignment and the Two-Party System
10 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
New Labor Forum editor-at-large Micah Uetricht speaks to the Center for Working-Class Politics's Jared Abbott about Democrats losing working-class vot...
Episode 55 - New Directions in Labor Politics
06 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Understanding what labor must do under a hostile new presidential administration requires reflection on unions’ successful political strategies in r...
Episode 54 - An Interview with the UAW's Jonah Furman
06 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It's been a new day in the United Auto Workers since the election of Shawn Fain as president in 2023, with the union carrying out an aggressive organi...
Episode 53 - Labor, Big Tech, and A.I.: The Big Picture
04 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What does the rise of artificial intelligence mean for workers and organized labor? And just what is AI, anyway? New Labor Forum editor-at-large discu...
Episode 52 - Free Trade, Repressed Workers
04 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How free was the imposition of the free trade model in the late-twentieth century? Not very, suggests political scientist Adam Dean’s research. The ...
Episode 51 - The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee
30 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Times change, in society, politics, and economics, but the labor movement rarely does. Which makes the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC)...
Episode 50 - Queer Working-Class Politics and the U.S. Labor Movement
14 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why are unions essential to LGBTQ liberation? Why is union organizing that advocates for all workers essential to uplifting queer workers? And why is ...
Episode 49 - Worker-to-Worker Organizing Goes Viral
09 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
As innovative new union organizing campaigns have taken off around the country in recent years, Rutgers labor scholar Eric Blanc argues that we can se...
Episode 48 - The Child Care Facilitated Enrollment Project for Working Families
02 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
At a time of crushing childcare costs in New York City and around the country, the labor-backed Child Care Facilitated Enrollment Project is one brigh...
Episode 47 - "The 2023 UAW Strike: A Turning Point in Labor History?"
13 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The United Auto Workers achieved a real breakthrough in their 2023 strike against the Big Three automakers. For this episode, our new editor-at-large ...
Episode 46 - "Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World"
28 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the work of creating a more just and sustainable world, which strategies hold the most promise for overcoming the enormous obstacles inherent in 21...
Episode 45 - Logistics Workers Rise: UPS, Amazon, and Long-Haul Trucking
06 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we examine the recent threatened strike and massive contract victory of the Teamsters as that union took on UPS, the nation’s larges...
Episode 44 - "The New Terrain of Veterans Affairs"
31 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This episode focuses on a discussion of publicly funded and operated health care in the United States. If this might seem a pipe dream with no nationa...
Episode 43 - "The Strike: Labor's Most Powerful Weapon"
03 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies faculty member Stephanie Luce speaks with trade unionists Judy Gonzalez and Bob Master about the conditions whi...
Episode 42 - "Independent Unions: The Allure of a Failing Strategy"
28 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This episode offers a provocative assessment of independent unionism as a strategy for building worker power in the U.S. In conversation with New Labo...
Episode 41 - "Labor Power and Strategy"
31 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This episode tackles the big labor organizing questions of the day: What is the relative strategic importance of organizing workers at the commanding ...
Episode 40 - "The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives"
03 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Adolph Reed, Jr. describes Jim Crow as a result of decades of post-emancipation contention between freed slaves, white farmers and la...
Episode 39 - "Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism"
03 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Author Rick Wartzman describes Walmart’s decade-long effort at reforms in response to ubiquitous criticism. Low-wage labor was a chief focus of that...
Episode 38 - "Making Hope and History Rhyme"
06 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past half-century, labor activists Marilyn Sneiderman and Stephen Lerner have been responsible for spurring major strategic advances in union...
Episode 37 - Why We Need Debtors' Unions
02 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A dramatic increase in national consumer debt began in the mid-1980s and currently stands at 16.5 trillion dollars, making it a key feature of capital...
Episode 36 - The Worker-Led Upsurge: Amazon and Starbucks
04 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Solidarity against the odds is what workers managed to achieve at the JFK8 Amazon Fulfillment Center on Staten Island and at the Elmwood Avenue Starbu...
Episode 35 - Who Pays for Inflation?
02 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The fact that current inflation rates are higher than they have been in decades weighs not only on households and businesses, but has also shifted the...
Episode 34 - Organized Labor and the Global Climate Crisis
05 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Sean Sweeney, Director of SLU’s Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, speaks with journalist Laura Flanders about continued botched efforts by countrie...
Episode 33 - "Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing"
24 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This episode offers a discussion of Andrew Ross’ recent book, Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing. Ross shares his firsthand account of t...
Episode 32 - The Future We Need: Organizing for a Better Democracy in the Twenty-First Century
10 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Journalist Laura Flanders speaks with Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta, the authors of The Future We Need, Organizing for a Better Democracy in the 21st ...
Episode 31 - "100 Percent Democracy"
06 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Commentators far and wide have been sounding the alarm for American democracy. The question of who can vote and who ends up voting is central to this ...
Episode 30 - Fueling Financialization: Organized Labor, Pension Funds, & Worker Power
30 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 2021 the pension assets of U.S. workers stood at 35 trillion dollars and amounted to fully 62 percent of all global pension assets. For almost half...
Episode 29 - Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India
08 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we turn to India’s two-millennia-old caste system that has often been compared to our own structures of racial oppression. A recent...
Episode 28 - Reimagining Elder Care: Workers & the 'Care Grid' in an Aging Nation
03 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Nearly alone among industrialized nations, the U.S. leaves the elderly, the infirm, and their loved ones to fend for themselves in the complex tangle ...
Episode 27: "The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together"
18 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Progressive commentators in the U.S. have long debated the primacy of race vs. class in our political and economic life, and therefore its role in org...
Episode 26 - NYC Labor And The New Mayor
07 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Less than a month into the new mayoralty in the City of New York, we assembled a panel of leading journalists to delineate Eric Adams’s vision for t...
Episode 25 - "Winter After The Strike"
14 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The poetry of our guest, Gregory Pardlo, is some of the finest, engaged work written in the U.S. today. He brings us the striking air traffic controll...
Episode 24 - Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism
01 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This episode draws on New Labor Forum’s cutting-edge Books and the Arts section edited by Samir Sonti. Here, the book in question is PORN WORK: Sex,...
Episode 23: "Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle Class Society
03 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Close attention to the qualities of working-class culture is in short supply in this era of ubiquitous distain for the working-class. This measure of ...
Episode 22 - Challenging Monopoly: Antitrust Reform, Workers Rights, & Economic Democracy
12 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Throughout much of U.S. history, anti-trust movements – joined by farmers, laborers, abolitionists, and small businesspeople – were a force to be ...
Episode 21 - What Are Unions Fighting for at COP26?
29 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This episode airs as COP26, the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference, gets underway in Glasgow, Scotland. Our guest, Roz Foyer, General Secretary of th...
Episode 20 - Labor In The Age Of Finance
22 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Samir Sonti interviews Sandy Jacoby, author of Labor in the Age of Finance: Pensions, Politics, and Corporations from Deindustrialization to Dodd-Fran...
Episode 19 - Occupy Wall Street: Ten Years Later
04 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
On September 17th, 2011, approximately a thousand people massed in lower Manhattan at the towering edifices of the “Vatican of capitalism.” This m...
Episode 18 - State of the Unions
17 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the first episode of the 2021-22 season, Paula Finn holds a conversation with Ruth Milkman and Stephanie Luce assessing the U.S. labor movement’s...
Episode 17 - Reckoning with Race and Class on the Road to Social Democracy
03 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This episode features a debate regarding the role of race vs. class in efforts to advance a Social Democratic politics. It draws on a panel which was ...
Episode 16 - A Public Energy Response to the Climate Emergency
18 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Discussing three important articles from the spring 2021 issue, New Labor Forum columnist Sean Sweeney hosts a conversation with Sinead Mercier and Do...
Episode 15 - "The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry & the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America"
03 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
New Labor Forum Books and Arts Editor Samir Sonti hosts a conversation with Gabriel Winant, author of the recent book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Ind...
Episode 14 - "Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat"
16 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Across the political spectrum, there’s a widely held view that the decades-long increase in immigration to the U.S. has put U.S. workers in competit...
Episode 13 - "Work Won't Love You Back"
05 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This episode features New Labor Forum columnist Sarah Jaffe in conversation with New Labor Forum Consulting Editor, Ruth Milkman. They discuss Jaffe’...
Episode 12 - Lessons from the Frontlines of Fights for Democracy and Black Lives
12 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The past year has been a perfect storm of reckoning with racial violence and white supremacy, assaults on the basic practices of democracy, and a pand...
Episode 11 - Black-Led Antiracist Unionism: The Legacy of Ben Fletcher & I.W.W.
26 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This episode shines a light on the political and intellectual contributions of Ben Fletcher, one of the most important, yet least well-known African A...
Episode 10 - Seismic Shifts: Organized Labor & Covid's Impact on the Economy
16 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Barely one week into the Biden Administration, CUNY faculty member and New Labor Forum Consulting Editor Joshua Freeman interviews Heidi Shierholz, Se...
Episode 9 - The First 100 Days: Policy Priorities for Labor & Social Justice Movements
30 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this latest episode, Professor Deepak Bhargava speaks to Judith Browne Dianis, Executive Director of the Advancement Project, and Dorian Warren, Pr...
Episode 8 - The Poetry of Border Crossing: A Conversation with Javier Zamora
08 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This episode brings poetry to the crucial task of reinventing solidarity. New Labor Forum Editor Paula Finn hosts a conversation with award winning po...
Episode 7 - Public Health, Private Equity, And The Pandemic
18 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As the coronavirus surges across the U.S. during this holiday season, the biblical “no room in the inn” has become “no room in the hospital.” ...
Episode 6 - A Global Public Goods Approach to Combatting Climate Change
04 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
From Durban, South Africa, New Labor Forum columnist Sean Sweeney interviews human rights and environmental leader Kumi Naidoo. In 2009, Naidoo became...
Episode 5 - Economic, Racial, and Immigrant Justice: A Progressive Congressional Agenda In 2021
14 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This episode benefits from the exciting public programming we do at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. Since the corona virus surged last spr...
Episode 4 - Confronting COVID: Workers on the Frontline
02 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This episode airs on the eve of the 2020 elections, with nearly everything hanging in the balance – from our nation’s ability to withstand the COV...
Episode 3 - Making It Real: Resilience Work and the Green New Deal
16 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Today so many of us live with deep anxiety about the peril of climate change and the fact that so little progress has been made to halt it. This podca...
Episode 2 - COVID Capitalism: The Political Economy of the COVID Pandemic
29 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Samir Sonti probes Leo Panitch about the character of the advanced capitalist economies through which the Covid-19 pandemic spread so rapidly. What ha...
Episode 1 - Which Side Are You On: The Labor Movement and #BlackLivesMatter
21 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this inaugural episode, David Unger and Kafui Attoh look squarely at the tragedy of police violence against people color, and at the unions that re...