Tenant Unions Under Attack by Landlord Lobby

Red Menace

Politics, Society & Culture, Philosophy, News

4.9 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

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Summary

In this episode, Breht welcomes on Seth from Omaha Tenants United for an in-studio discussion about OTU's slate of recent successes organizing several tenant unions, and a subsequent new legal assault on the organization by the local landlord lobby. The legal implications of this attack are truly monumental for virtually all forms of organizing. They also discuss how landlordism is a feudal hangover with modern capitalist dynamics, the differences between tenant organizing and labor organizing, tenant organizing as a particularly potent site of struggle, and the material underpinnings of recent superstructural shifts in many people's views of landlords.

Local media interviews Seth on the issue HERE

OTU's Drake Court Tenant Union (Local 252) covered in local media HERE

Increasing number of renters turning to tenant unions in the Omaha metro HERE

Fed up tenants: Renters form unions to hold leasing companies accountable HERE

Learn more, support, and contact OTU here: https://omahatenantsunited.wordpress.com/

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Transcript

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0:00.0	all right everybody today we have back on the show seth from omaha tenants united he's been on the show
0:11.8	several times throughout the years in fact i saw you go on black redguard recently and um people
0:17.6	were confusing oh you with me and OTU with Rev Left.
0:22.0	Obviously, those are different entities.
0:24.3	But, I mean, I appreciate and like the connection that people immediately draw between us.
0:29.8	We are obviously, you know, friends, comrades locally do a lot of organizing work together and have, honestly, for many years at this point.
0:36.4	Shit, going back to 2017 16 yeah
0:40.7	something like that yeah don't even have like similar voices though like you got some big fans out there
0:45.8	they sound like you absolutely i think probably somebody just heard o't too you and they think RLR and
0:51.5	they don't really listen to the show or something and just i I don't know how you confuse us, but it's fine.
0:55.8	I accept it.
0:56.8	Anyways, welcome to the show again.
0:59.3	For those that don't know O'TU, do you want to kind of talk about it and maybe even update
1:03.9	people on some more recent successes that your organization has had?
1:07.4	Yeah, certainly.
1:08.5	So yeah, what up y'all? I'm Seth, co-founder and co-chair of Omaha Tenants United.
1:13.6	We started back in 2018, largely. Started out, you know, mainly just helping individual tenants or small groups of tenants directly confront their landlord to force them to make changes or repairs that they
1:28.8	have been failing to do and forcing them to like give money back that they would do
1:33.4	or try to steal by double charging for rent or um you know just simple deposit robbery
1:40.4	um had a lot of success with that and then know, fortunately in the past year or so,
1:45.6	we've really been able to scale things up to where actually have been forming larger-scale
1:50.2	tenant unions. So we were able to successfully establish Nebraska's very first tenants union last
	...

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