Hello and welcome again to Redhacks, your favorite show about being a lefty journalist in a neoliberal world.

It is with enormous glee that, due to popular demand, we return for season two of the show.

As always, I'm Joanna Romero, your host with a geographically unplaceable accent,

and I am here to remind you that Red Hacks is hosted by the incredible Politics Theory Other podcast.

To keep abreast of all things, politics theory, other, as well as to listen to the entire

season one of Red Hacks, you should follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and subscribe

to the Spotify or SoundCloud channel at Paul Theory Other. Today we are recording from Brighton,

where we are taking part in the phenomenal

the World Transform Festival, and we've sort of taken over at TWTFM headquarters. What is more,

my guest is the amazing American journalist Sarah Jaffe. Sarah has spent the last decade covering

all sorts of labor struggles in the U.S. from the teacher's strike in Wisconsin to the organizing

efforts of tech workers in Silicon Valley. She's also the author of Necessary Trouble and the co-host

of the podcast Belabored, a fellow at the Type Media Center, and she's currently working on her next

book. Sarah, I am so happy to have you on the show. I am so happy to be on the show. So we're going to start with

my usual starting question, which is literally how the hell did you get into journalism?

I was an English major, which is a terrible thing to be because while you're waiting tables,

everybody keeps asking you if you're going to become a teacher. And when your answer to that is no, they all look at you like, oh, so you're going to be a waitress for the rest of your life. And I was actually very bad at the service industry because I'm kind of mean. But it turns out that it gives you great skills for interviewing people. And so I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life.

So I wasn't stuck in the service industry forever.

And I started writing things for little local publications.

I was in New Orleans at the time.

So I stumbled into being the film critic for this little feminist newspaper that somebody had started up.

Then I moved to Colorado and I wrote about, well, first movies and then music and then started a political column at this little website called Caffeine Buzz, which was also a local pop culture publication.

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