Strike! Strike! Strike! ...with Alex Press
Upstream
Upstream
4.9 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 28 October 2021
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With strikes in a wide variety of private sectors popping up all across the country — Kelloggs, Kaiser Permanente, coal miners in Alabama, John Deere, The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), Taxi Drivers on hunger strike in NY, and more — the United States might be on the verge of a strike wave, and we've brought on the perfect guest to explain exactly what's going on. Alex Press is a staff writer at Jacobin Magazine, host of the Primer podcast, and author most recently of the Jacobin articles, "US Workers Are in a Militant Mood" and "Halyna Hutchins's Death on the Set of Rust Was "Not a Freak Accident." The Conversation will bring you up to date on all of the labor activity currently underway, but will also zoom out to explore the state of the labor movement more broadly, taking a deep dive on how the pandemic has transformed the movement, unpacking what's really behind the so-called "labor shortage," and getting to the root of why workers are starting to stand up to bosses in a way that we haven't seen for quite some time.
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Transcript
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| 0:39.5 | Please do that if you can. Thank you. And now on with the show. |
| 0:58.1 | Strikes show where the power is, right? I mean, the whole illusion of employment is that the boss |
| 1:12.4 | knows best that it's the company that employs you, you know, and you're lucky to have a job. |
| 1:16.8 | But in fact, as soon as workers withdraw their labor, everything grinds to a halt. And that is |
| 1:21.4 | an illuminating moment for everyone involved. It can be a politically transformative moment. |
| 1:26.9 | It isn't necessarily going to, you know, lead anyone who's been on strike to become like a socialist. |
| 1:32.1 | But it does provide a moment where you can link up one employer's abuse and exploitation to the |
| 1:37.9 | broader kind of ecosystem in which it operates, which is capitalism, and that empowers the boss to |
| 1:42.7 | do that, that encourages them, that protects them when they do such things to workers. |
| 1:57.3 | You are listening to an up screen, up screen, up screen, a spooky podcast of demonic documentaries |
| 2:09.6 | and cryptic conversations that invite you to unlearn everything you brought you new about economics. |
| 2:17.6 | I'm Della Pumpkin and I'm Robert Grave Mound. Happy Halloween. |
| 2:23.1 | In this blood-curdling episode, we're talking strikes. Yep. It's not just shocktober. It's strike |
| 2:30.4 | tober, with strikes in a wide variety of private sectors popping up all across the country. |
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