News & Updates

WEEKEND LABOR ARTS CALENDAR

Fri: LaborFest: A Cautionary Tale: The Dark Side of Housing in the Wild, Wild West of California

Fri: Coup d’Etat – The Philippines Revolt (Australia 1986) (CA)

Sat: High Iron (WY)

Sat: LaborFest: Turkey, The Rise Of Fascism, Erdogan, & The Working Class

Sat: Social and Economic Justice Film Festival (CA)

Sat: LaborFest: Oakland General Strike Walk

Sun: LaborFest: San Bruno Mountain Wilderness Walk

Sun: LaborFest: The Attack On Higher Education & Project 2025

Ongoing: Power & Light: Russell Lee's Coal Survey (DC)

In Chicago, a tenant union is continuing its rent strike as they fight their evictions.  Read more here.

SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE Trailer (2025)

Film about Bruce Springsteen's journey crafting his 1982 album "Nebraska," which emerged as he recorded "Born in the USA" with the E Street Band. Directed by Scott Cooper, starring Jeremy Allen White. Coming this Fall.

Mansion On the Hill; Bruce Springsteen

“This captures the feeling of working class children who look at the wealth of others, becoming conscious of all the things that they might lack and conscious of their diminished place in the world.” @raymarsh4620

These are the ones, the poor, the laboring unaffected

    unsophisticated salt of the earth agonized ones

These are the people, Ma Joad's people, the blues

    singer's people, the backwoods & back alley ones

The ones who put one foot out at a time

    one day at a time & go on & on & on

From These Are the Ones, by Andy Clausen, in The Blue Collar Review. Click here to read the whole poem.

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CLICK HERE for our complete labor arts calendar; look for our Labor Arts Calendar edition on Monday

1877: Workers stage a general strike – believed to be the nation’s first – in St. Louis, in support of striking railroad workers. The successful strike was ended when some 3,000 federal troops and 5,000 deputized special police killed at least eighteen people in skirmishes around the city.

1890: New York garment workers win closed shop and firing of scabs after 7-month strike.

2005: The Teamsters and Service Employees unions break from the AFL-CIO during the federation's 50th convention to begin the Change to Win coalition, ultimately comprised of seven unions. They say they want more emphasis on organizing and less on electoral politics. CTW is now the Strategic Organizing Center and currently consists of SEIU, UFW and CWA, which is affiliated with both the SOC and the AFL–CIO.

“A song can make the powerful tremble.”

Georges Brassens, French singer-songwriter and poet.

Life and Times of a Black Wobbly (Encore)

Ben Fletcher was one of the most important black labor leaders in American history. Yet he’s almost entirely unknown. In today’s show, from the Working Class History podcast (originally aired here on 7/23/23), we learn about this little-known dock worker and labor organizer, who helped organize thousands of workers on the Philadelphia docks into the most powerful multiracial union in the country. 

LAST WEEK’S QUIZ: Postal unions and the Postal Service signed the first labor contract in the history of the federal government on July 20, 1971.

'Saturday Night Live’ VFX Artists Ratify Historic First Union Contract (7/18)

Sing, Strike, Remember (7/12)

Anne Feeney Hellraiser Fund Offers New Grants for Activist Artists (7/4)

Mall Protest Art Channels Mother Jones’ Spirit (6/27)