Democracy and the Right To Organize
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This tape features excerpts from the National Labor Teach-In held in Washington, D.C., April 24-25th, 1998. Sponsored by Scholars, Artists and Writers for Social Justice (SAWSJ), this convocation brought together scholars, students, labor activists and educators to advocate, debate and celebrate the right of workers to organize.
Selections from the program include:
1. John Sweeney, President of the AFL-CIO;
2. Julian Bond, Chair of the NAACP Board of Directors;
3. Betty Dumas, an Avondale Shipyard Worker from New Orleans;
4. Kate Bronfenbrenner, Projessor at Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations;
5. Richard Bensinger, Director of Organizing, AFL-CIO
6. Elaine Bernard, Director of Harvard's Trade Union Studies Program;
7. Ken Paff, Director of Teamsters for a Democratic Union.
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Action Motown '97
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Reporting on the giant AFL-CIO demonstration in Detroit on June 21, 1997 for the locked out workers of the Detroit News and Free Press. The program includes sound from the demonstration and excerpts from speeches of locked out workers Sandra Davis and Josephina Espinosa, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, AFL-CIO Secretary Treasurer Richard Tumpka, Teamster President Ron Carey, Newspaper Guild President Linda Foley, and Southern Christian Leadership Conference Director Joseph Lowery. It features an interview with locked out newspaper worker Susan Watson and Teamster organizer Michael Zielenski.
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Union Summer '97
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These are 3 - one hour programs. The first program is about the 10 month strike by 4500 Wheeling Pitt steelworkers for a guaranteed pension. The workers are calling for large institutional investors like Merril Lynch to assume their responsibiltiy for a decent settle-ment. Also included is the campaign to organize poultry processing workers in Morganton, North Carolina. They are calling for Labor Secretary Alexis Herman to follow through with Dept. of Labor's promises to investigate the poultry industry.
Our second program focuses on the eroding American Dream. UPS workers fight for full-time jobs and temporary workers in Cincinnati organize for justice. Our special guest Michael Moore pokes fun at the corporations that run it all while trying to joke the labor giant out of its slumber. Moore, fights downsizing with his wit in his book "Down-size This!" and video "TV Nation" .
In our third program this summer we talk with United Farmworkers of America Vice-President Dolores Huerta about farm-worker organizing in the strawberry fields of Watsonville, CA and the apple orchads of Washington State. Then we'll go to Detroit for an update on the newspaper lockout with Susan Watson, a locked out worker who is Editor of the union's strike newspaper The Detroit Sunday Journal. Then back to our studios for an assessment of the impact of the UPS strike on labor's comeback with labor educator Tom Juravich and Teamsters for a Democratic Union leader David Pratt.
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Union Summer '96
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These are 4, one hour, special broadcasts which aired in over 25 cities nation-wide. You can hear our special program on the October '96 Teach-In With The Labor Movement, held at Columbia University featuring John Sweeney, Cornell West, Linda Chavez-Thompson, David Montgomery Jose Lauluz and Frances Fox Piven. This is the first such "Teach-In" building bridges between the Labor and Campus movements for social change. It sparked a series of nation-wide teach-ins which continue to this day.
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