Working Life

I pull back the lens a bit on the Black Lives Matter movement to consider how the uprising is touching the consciousness of workers around the globe, especially in Africa. Chris Johnson, the regional director of Africa for the Solidarity Center, joins me in a conversation about the close relationship between racism and economic oppression, […]

Read the full story

There is no way to downplay the risks to U.S. frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic—and I’ve dug into that in the past month or so, in our various segments talking about workers in health care, postal service, hog and poultry processing, airlines, rail, and subways. It’s dangerous and frightening—and it’s exponentially more terrifying when […]

Read the full story

Take your shirt off. Or your pants. Almost certainly those garments and others were made in a faraway country, by people making pennies who work in horrendous conditions. I think we all know that when we are told to think about it—but we don’t think about it on a daily basis. I talk with Sonia […]

Read the full story

Wait, didn’t we just talk last week about the attacks on government workers? Well, a week doesn’t go by when another attack against people, who keep our society working, isn’t launched by this administration—this time it’s the workers at the Environmental Protection Agency. AFGE Local 1236 Bethany Dreyfus joins me to give us the lowdown […]

Read the full story

If you are looking for a place to see the scourge of free market capitalism at work, you don’t have to look further than Bangladesh. I talk with Monika Hartsel of the Solidarity Center about the thousands of workers in Bangladesh who have been recently fired for protesting and demanding better wages. I, then, welcome […]

Read the full story

The rich are living the creed of the 1987 film “Wall Street”: Greed is good! Consider this: 26 billionaires now have a collective wealth of $1.4 trillion—equal to the wealth of the bottom 3.8 billion people on the planet. That’s just a smidgen of the immorality I discuss with Oxfam America’s Paul O’Brien, whose organization […]

Read the full story

A quick “birthday” promo: you are listening to the 100th episode of the podcast. Make today the day you become one of our small financial supporters—go to workinglife.org, click on the Patreon link and sign up to be a monthly contributor. Every bite of food you take contains a lot of sweat and tears of […]

Read the full story

  We start this week’s podcast by remembering Paul Wellstone, the progressive firebrand who died exactly 15 years ago in a small plane crash while campaigning for re-election. I, then, bring us the voice of Bruce Franks, a powerful leader of the Black Lives Matter movement in St. Louis and across the nation. I also sit […]

Read the full story