We hosted a Working People live show at The Real News Network studio in Baltimore on May 18. In this panel discussion, co-hosted by Max and Baltimore writer and editor Rebekah Kirkman, we speak with a diverse panel of worker-organizers from around the city about their respective struggles to unionize their workplaces, what being in a union means to them and their coworkers, and what all of us can do to support one another and grow the labor movement in our town. Panelists include: Dever Cunningham, MOM’s Workers United (Teamsters); Martin Yepes, Teachers & Researchers United (United E ..read more

It's been over 100 days since the catastrophic derailment of a Norfolk Southern train carrying over 100,000 gallons of toxic materials occurred in East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb 3. Since then, residents of East Palestine and the surrounding area in Ohio and Pennsylvania have had their lives turned completely upside down. Entire families have been uprooted from their homes, with many having to live in hotels or wherever they can find shelter, unable to return home out of fear of exposure to chemicals that were spilled into the water and soil from the derailment and spewed into the air from Norfol ..read more

Hollywood writers represented by the Writers Guild of America, East, and the Writers Guild of America, West, are on strike for the first time since 2007-08. As Alex Press writes in Jacobin, "The WGA (West and East) called the strike just before midnight on May 1, with its leadership unanimously voting for a work stoppage after six weeks of negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) over a new three-year contract that covers some 11,500 film and television writers. Announcing its decision, the union said that the bargaining table responses of the AMPTP, wh ..read more

Announcement: Our next live show will be on Monday, May 8, from 5-7pm EST at the Canadian Labour Congress’ 30th Constitutional Convention in Montreal! We took Working People on the road and hosted another live show on March 21 in Atlanta, Georgia, in collaboration with the Action Builder / Action Network team. In this panel discussion, Max speaks with local organizers about the specific challenges workers in the South face in their workplaces and in their efforts to organize—and how they are finding creative ways to overcome those challenges today. Panelists include: Chris Daniel of the Georgi ..read more

Max and Jules want to wish everyone out there a happy May Day (ie International Workers Day)! To commemorate this most sacred of holidays, we are sharing with our audience the audio of a special holiday crossover edition of Rattling the Bars, The Real News Network's weekly YouTube show about the violence and victims of the prison-industrial complex—and how we can fight against it. In this episode, Max sits down with Rattling the Bars host Mansa Musa, a former political prisoner who was locked up for 48 years, to talk about the history and spirit of May Day, and about how this day reminds us th ..read more

Graduate student-workers at the University of Michigan are still on strike after hitting the picket line for the second time in three years at the end of March. In the time between the Fall 2020 and Winter 2023 strikes, according to the union, the gap between graduate workers' average pay and the cost of living in Ann Arbor has tripled. Facing a cost-of-living crisis and fighting for a slate of core demands—from a living wage and affordable childcare to better protections for international students, access to gender-affirming healthcare, and the creation of an unarmed, non-police emergency res ..read more

Kayla Denker is a military veteran and a trained archaeologist who has worked in the private sector and for the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. She is also a trans woman living in America, and every day she navigates the difficult and increasingly dangerous terrain of living her life as an out trans person—estrangement from unaccepting family, hostile encounters in public, and a growing right-wing political crusade hellbent on scapegoating LGBTQ+ people as the ultimate evil and the source of society's ills, stripping them of their rights, and outwardly calling for the elim ..read more

Bryan Mack is a second-generation railroad worker from Florence, South Carolina, with a Masters in Music Performance. Both Bryan and his father worked for CSX Transportation, each hiring out at times when there were statistically few Black employees or employees of color working on the railroads. For 17 years, Bryan has worked as a conductor for CSX; in that time, he has seen and experienced firsthand the worsening conditions as the industry has been taken over by greedy executives and upper-level managers hellbent on cutting costs and maximizing profits for their shareholders at the expense o ..read more

Under the new leadership team led by General President Sean M. O'Brien, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters are re-introducing themselves to the bosses and to the world as a fighting union, and they are gearing up for their biggest test yet: the impending negotiations of the IBT's contract with United Parcel Service (UPS). With UPS employing over 350,000 Teamster members around the country, theirs is the largest collective bargaining agreement in North America—and the current contract is set to expire on July 31. With national negotiations set to begin this month, Teamsters leaders are ..read more

Graduate student-workers at the University of Michigan are on strike for the second time in three years, officially hitting the picket line this week. Speaking to The Michigan Daily, Amir Fleischmann, chair of the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) Contracts Committee, said, "Grad workers are very frustrated. They’re struggling to pay rent. They’re struggling to afford childcare. They lack access to gender-affirming care. And I think we’re saying enough is enough. The University needs to give us a fair contract now.” On top of that, the University of Michigan administration is once again se ..read more