Welcome to the vast majority. I'm Jacobin managing editor Micah Utrich.

The most important development in the United States labor movement in at least two decades is the Teacher Strike Wave.

That wave started in Chicago in 2012 when the Chicago Teachers Union, led by a group of

leftist and militant unionists that took over the union in 2010, went on strike against austerity, and incredibly they won.

I wrote a book about it called Strike for America Chicago Teachers Against Austerity.

And then last year the strikes kicked off in West Virginia and then all of a sudden they were everywhere,

Oklahoma, Arizona,

Kentucky, Louisiana, California, Colorado, Washington.

That's not even the fullest. That's like half the states where teachers have gone on

strikes since last year. This is an incredible development that could spell a massive

change in the fortunes of organized labor in this country, and nobody has covered that strike

wave closer than Eric Blanc, who has a new book out in the

Jacobin series from Verso called Red State Revolt, The Teacher Strikes, and Working Class Politics.

Now obviously I'm a little biased here but I have to say this book is absolutely incredible.

It is a more in-depth portrait of not just one strike but three of them than anything

that I am aware of that's been published in years and it's written by

somebody who was there on the ground in all of these places and interviewed over a hundred

teachers and had access to their Facebook groups and text messages.

And it's just an incredible document with an incredible number of lessons for other kinds of labor struggles

around the country. There's so much to dig into in the book that Eric and I talked

for a very long time so we decided to split our discussion into two episodes.

This one focuses on how the strike wave came about, why material deprivation of workers isn't

...