Shows
Running On AirRunning On Air: D2, E7 - Pettyjohnblue and TasiniOn this episode of Running On Air, Portland District 2 candidates Jonathan
Tasini and Antonio Pettyjohnblue join KBOO's Althea Billings to talk about
the issues North/Northeast Portland is facing, bringing a broader vision to
Portland government and the race so far.
2024-10-1500 min
LWVPDX PodcastsInterview with Jonathan Tasini, candidate for Portland, OR, City Council, District 2This is a podcast of an interview with Jonathan Tasini, who is running to represent District 2 on the Portland City Council. Mr. Tasini speaks about why he is running for this position and his ideas for addressing important issues in Portland.
2024-10-0707 min
Working Life PodcastEp 220: Inside The Amazon Union Vote Count!; Yemen Is “Hell On Earth”Subscribe to the show today!
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I have discussed a number of times the union organizing campaign at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. So, as the ballot counting is now underway, I thought today we could add two aspects to the conversation, while we await the final results which could take a number of days.
First, people don’t really know how the hell the ballot count happens, what’s the process, what does it look like so I thought it would be worth checking that out a bit. A...
2021-03-3155 min
Working Life PodcastEp 219: A Social Fund For The Planet’s Poor; Challenging A Corporate MouthpieceSubscribe to the show today!
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I’ve spent a lot of time on the crisis facing workers around the world who before the pandemic even hit us faced some pretty dire economic realities. Tomorrow, a high-level group will convene, virtually naturally, to talk about creating an international social fund to assist lower income countries to come out of the year-long pandemic economic shutdown. Cathy Feingold, director of the AFL-CIO’s international affairs department and deputy president of the International Trade Union Confederation, which represents 200 million unionized workers worldw...
2021-03-2436 min
Working Life PodcastEp 218: There Is No Debt Crisis; Taking Down A California Corporate DemocratSubscribe to the show today!
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It’s those zombie voices again. The ones who rise up from the dead, or from a hidden policy corner, to start the drumbeat of fear about “debt” and “deficits”, all in order to block progress for the people.
There is no debt or deficit crisis. We have plenty of money in the richest nation in human history—and we should be spending big right now, especially with interest rates at rock-bottom lows. So, today is your antidote of information to combat the claim of...
2021-03-1732 min
Working Life PodcastEp 217: It’s All North Carolina—The Fight for 15 and The Campaign For A Progressive U.S. SenatorSubscribe to Working Life today!
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Episode 217:
It’s all about North Carolina today—the fight for better wages and the campaign to get a progressive person in the U.S. Senate, all of which is connected to my two guests today who represent the theme of the just-marked International Womens Day.
The sad outcome of the push to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour tells us two things. First, there is a big house cleaning needed to make way for politicians who actually care about workers. Seco...
2021-03-1042 min
Working Life PodcastEp 216: Wealth Tax On The Table; Two Trillion for The Global Poor; Joe Biden and Union OrganizingEpisode 216:
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The number that sticks in my mind today, and has since I heard it, is 40 percent. While over half a million people in the U.S. have died of COVID in one year, while millions of people have become sick, while millions of people have lost their jobs, savings and homes, and many people have been forced to wait in long food lines to get enough to feed their families—while all that was happening, the billionaires—the top 0.05 percent in the coun...
2021-03-0356 min
Working Life PodcastEp 215: Big Pharma Wants Poor People To Die; Unions Fighting Myanmar Coup—ReduxEpisode 215:
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You aren’t going to be surprised by this news: Big Pharma is killing people. All over the world. And the real kicker here is: after you, the taxpayer, gave billions of dollars to Big Pharma companies to come up with a vaccine for COVID-19, Big Pharma is keeping that vaccine from getting into the hands of millions of people in poorer countries—which will come back to hurt every American as well.
Under the World Trade Organization rules, Big PHARMA gets *lengthy* mono...
2021-02-2445 min
Working Life PodcastEp 214: YOUR Four Talking Points For $15/Hour Minimum Wage; Alabama Is Amazon Unionizing Ground ZeroSupport the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast
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Right before our eyes, in these very days and at this time of crisis, you can see so clearly this bankrupt system, defended and promoted by greedy CEOs and spineless politicians, but a system people are trying to rebel against and take down. And that’s the picture of two really important fights—the fight to get millions of workers a $15-an-hour minimum wage and the organizing campaign at Amazon.
It’s infuriating to keep reading about these so-called Democrats, and, of course, every single...
2021-02-1738 min
Working Life PodcastEp213: Bi-Partisanship Kills; Amazon Workers Organize!; Unions Confronting Myanmar CoupEpisode 213:
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“Bi-partisanship” is an idea that should make everyone sick to their stomach. When someone is out to kill you, or your nation and community, making a deal for the sake of “bi-partisanship” or, its related political spineless copout “compromise”, makes no sense when the end result is injustice and a worsening of our lives. That’s what I start out with today—a topic I also wrote about in my new newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
Quick, who said just a couple of days a...
2021-02-1052 min
Working Life PodcastEp 211: What Corp. Interests Are Infiltrating The Biden World; Global Inequality At Record LevelsEpisode 211:
“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.” The discerning quick minds among you will know that that’s a snippet of the speech by Michael Douglas’ character, the corporate raider Gordon Gekko, in the 1987 film Wall Street.
Truth is, Jeff Bezos makes Gekko look like a penny ante small-time crook. And the crooks who control government on behalf of big corp...
2021-01-271h 11
Working Life PodcastEp 210: Is Europe Taking Climate Change “Just Transition” More Seriously?Episode 210:
I am guessing everyone who listens to this show considers himself or herself an environmentalist and cares about the planet. You believe in science—a shocking notion—so you get the climate change emergency. We know we have to do some pretty radical stuff to keep this spaceship habitable for generations to come. Here’s the problem: there isn’t enough real thought by environmentalists and politicians, with numbers to go along with the thinking, how to take care of workers who will be hurt by the closing down of the fossil fuel industry.
Support the Working Life Network here: ww...
2020-12-1639 min
Working Life PodcastEp. 209: It’s Not A Game—World Cup Workers’ Rights Fight; Europeans Leap To Protect Gig WorkersEpisode 209:
Soccer, football, whatever you call it—it’s not my thing at all. Give me baseball every day, 365 days a week. But, what is my thing is making sure workers in every sport aren’t exploited—and that has been a reality for years when it came to the rights of workers who worked on the staging of soccer’s quadrennial World Cup, including the upcoming one in 2022 in Qatar. A worldwide outcry put a brake on some of the worst abuses in Qatar and set the stage for even more workers’ protections for the 2026 World Cup, which will be staged in...
2020-12-0948 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 208: Goldman Sachs/AFL-CIO On Same Page—Pigs Fly!; Taxing The Rich—The Fight LoomsEpisode 208:
Back in the spring, I had a good chuckle when I found a topic of agreement between the AFL-CIO and Goldman Sachs, as well as agreement from lots of heads of states, many labor folks and business titans—creating trillions of dollars in grants, not debt, to give to poorer countries needing immediate financial aid right away to contend with the pandemic. I’m circling back to this idea I first explored on the podcast in May, this time in a chat with Isaac Evans-Frantz, director at Action Corps, and Don Wiviott, a farmer advocate based in Iowa.
Fasten your...
2020-12-0248 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 207: Ending the Pandemic in 30 Days; Speeding Up Poultry Processing Lines—Insane!Episode 207:
Ideology is in the way of a simple plan to end the pandemic in 30 days. Yes, 30 days: Lock down the country and pay everyone up to an annual wage of $90,000 to stay home. I’m resurrecting the argument I made months ago because the debate about a stimulus is on the agenda again—after Republicans have basically said fuck you to the entire country for months when it comes to aiding the people. My explanation of the plan leads off the episode.
Then, high up on the list of pandemic utter chaos has been the way in which political lead...
2020-11-2047 min
Working Life PodcastEp 206: Perez Still Has A Job?; Georgia, Georgia, Georgia; Arizona Hikes Taxes To Fund SchoolsEpisode 206:
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Three questions post-election are on the menu this week. First, how does Tom Perez, the chair of the DNC, still have a job? Perez has been incompetent for a very long time. He was the choice of the Democratic Party elites back in 2016—a guy who knows zippo about the mechanics of an election. And, voila—the party loses seats in the House, fumbles the chance to take the U.S. Senate, and even worse, fails to take back legislative chambers at the stat...
2020-11-1130 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 205: Stiffing Corporate Lobbyists; Short-Time Work Salvation; Nurses On The LineEpisode 205:
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It’s the permanent government—the corporate lobbyists who have friends in both parties. It is at the heart of why we don’t have Medicare for All, why the Pentagon is rolling in dough and why banks and Wall Street rip us off. Jeff Hauser, the executive director of the Revolving Door Project, talks about what the strategy looks like to limit the influence of the corporate elites in a possible Biden Administration.
The pandemic has ripped through the world, killing and sicken...
2020-10-2859 min
Working Life PodcastEp 204: COVID and Inequality—A Love Story; Landslide Coming!Episode 204:
The catastrophic failure to shrink global inequality has given COVID-19 the perfect breeding ground: tens of millions of people are at risk of hunger, extreme poverty, sickness and death because, overwhelmingly, most countries do not spend enough on public healthcare, and they have weak social safety nets and poor labor rights.
Now, this is a feature, not a bug, of the supply chain of global capitalism—keep people poor, enslaved and desperate as a way of making huge profits. To be sure, as I discussed in a recent episode, workers in Haiti, one of the poorest countries on the pl...
2020-10-2150 min
Working Life PodcastEp 203: Biden Tax Ideas Are Weak Sauce; Give More Power For The Post OfficeEpisode 203:
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When Donald Trump and his minions are eviscerated in less than three weeks so the country can survive, I can’t think of a better illustration of the fight still to come for progressives than taxes. Joe Biden’s tax proposals are, well, meek. Every time Joe Biden made a big deal during the TV mud wrestling verbal sparring with Trump that he wouldn’t raise taxes for anyone making under $400,000, I yelled back, “why the hell not?”.
Really, you won’t ask people earni...
2020-10-1448 min
Working Life PodcastEp 202: Trump Is A Tax Cheat—But Lots Of Rich People Dodge And Cheat Thanks To Both PartiesEpisode 202:
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For a sliver of time, the political world was talking about how Donald Trump cheats on his taxes. Virtually every rich person does what Trump does: they use the tax code to dodge paying their fair share, which costs the country tens of billions of dollars every year.
Rich people move their money around, hide cash in trusts, foundations, hard-to-understand complex partnerships, a web of limited liability companies, and, especially for those who run companies, in overseas operations. And they have an army...
2020-10-0742 min
Working Life PodcastEp 201: Firefighters Face The Infernos—And The Devastating Long-Term Health ConsequencesEpisode 201:
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I’ve been thinking a lot about firefighters these days, what with the jaw-dropping video we see virtually every day of these monstrous wild fires scorching millions of acres of forests in California and Oregon. For the record, these fires are absolutely driven by climate change—so what we see today will be a feature every single year, with all the widespread devastation of communities and the loss of human lives and wildlife.
Recently, I was sheltering in my home like tens of thou...
2020-09-3000 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 200: Racism at Tesla; China Is Rocking Green TechnologiesSupport the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1
Episode 200:
CEOs like to play a three-card monte shell game. They want everyone to focus on their rhetoric about all the supposed wonderful things they do—say, creating a “green” friendly product—and, at the same time, when people aren’t paying attention, they run their company using fear, sexism and racism. That sums up the world of Elon Musk—which we talk about today.
Musk is anti-union and runs an operation that makes workers sick at sky-high rates, as I documented almost more...
2020-09-2300 min
Working Life PodcastEp 199: We Have A Price For A Worker’s Life: A Few Thousand $; COVID-19 Dangers For Building WorkersEpisode 199:
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What’s a worker’s life worth? To you and me, it’s priceless. Capitalism, though, doesn’t see it that way—a worker’s life is a cost of doing business, a life easily disposable when it comes to making profits. And the corporate world has an accomplice in this immoral scam where workers are disposable: the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
Smithfield Foods, a massive pork processor making billions of dollars every year, did almost nothing to stop workers from...
2020-09-1600 min
Working Life PodcastEp 198: Pigs Fly—The Fed Says Jobs Are THE Priority; Hotel Workers in The AbyssSupport the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1
Episode 198:
The most important political figure in your economic life—to be sure, the boss of a company has got a lot of power—is not the president of the United States, no matter who that is. It’s probably the head of the Federal Reserve Board. We know interest rates are at historic lows and mortgage rates are crazy low because the Fed has intervened to keep the country from collapsing even further into the abyss we are in, an abyss Republ...
2020-09-0900 min
Working Life Podcast#197: Staunch Conservative Reveals She’s Voting For Biden; Workers Fear Speaking Up On COVID SafetyEpisode 197:
The last name “Hoover” is, if I can use this term, a brand name in conservative circles. Herbert Hoover was the 31st president of the U.S. who served during the Great Depression, taking office in 1929 the year the stock market crashed—an apt historical reference for today perhaps since the economic implosion we are living through is the worst in a century dating back at least to the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s.
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His great-granddaughter Margaret Hoover has kept t...
2020-09-0200 min
Working Life PodcastEp 196: Poultry Plant Killing Fields; Desperate People Jam The Bank Lines; Bidding To Win In FloridaEpisode 196:
It’s never enough to remind people every single day how many workers are out there on the frontlines risking their lives in the pandemic. I’ve talked about those folks regularly on the show: the transit workers, retail workers, and teachers. And, surely, the workers who put food on our plates are right up there on the list—like the folks that are crammed together in poultry processing plants who are getting sick by the thousands and dying by the hundreds. Alexandre Galimberti, Senior Advocacy and Collaborations Advisor for the US Domestic Program at Oxfam America, talks with me abo...
2020-08-2600 min
Working Life PodcastEp 195: How To Steal An Election 101; Haitian Garment Workers Rise UpEpisode 195:
Voting in America, compared to many other countries, is not easy. That’s always been true. Donald Trump’s relentless effort to undermine the vote in November, in this case by crippling the postal service and trying to make it impossible for ballots to be counted on time, is surely corrupt. But, the undermining of the vote is made easier by a rickety election system that has existed for decades. Miles Rapoport, a former Connecticut Secretary of State and, now, Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy at Harvard’s Ash Center, talks to me about the threat to voting this F...
2020-08-1900 min
Working Life PodcastEp 194: Hollywood Tales—A Union Win In Cali, A FL Progressive Aims To Fire Debbie Wasserman-SchultzSupport the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1
Episode 194:
Today the show is all about Hollywood. Hollywood, California and Hollywood, Florida. Hollywood, California is in a rumble. For most performers in the entertainment business, residuals are the foundation to making a living—either a solid middle class living or somewhat less than that. Over many decades, residuals have been tied to various things such as repeat showings of a movie in syndication or sales of DVDs. Now, it’s all about streaming.
Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com...
2020-08-1200 min
Working Life PodcastEp 193: The States Go Broke; The Democratic Convention Approaches…YawnEpisode 193:
The pandemic has ripped a hole through every state budget in the country to the tune collectively of over $550 billion. That red ink is more than half a trillion dollars in money states won’t have—which translates into millions of people losing their jobs, services being decimated that we all rely on, attacks against people of color who are employed disproportionately in decent-paying government jobs and an economy that won’t recover if aid is not dispatched. Pronto.
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And it doesn’...
2020-08-0500 min
Working Life PodcastEp 192: NAFTA Horrors in Mexico; Shaking Up The Florida Democratic Party; Bezos DissemblesEpisode 192:
By the time you are tuning into the show, Jeff Bezos, one of the great scars on the economic landscape, will have finished his song-and-dance testimony before Congress, during a hearing that mostly focuses on the massive anti-competitive power of the big tech firms like Amazon and Google. But, long before today, Jeff Bezos has always been the poster child for the CEO who doesn’t give a shit about workers and only cares about a single thing: how to become even richer than he is. The man is a scar on humanity. My observations about Bezos leads off th...
2020-07-2900 min
Working Life PodcastEp 191: Uyghurs Are The Slave Labor For Global Companies; Tax Dodgers Love to Knee-Cap the IRSEpisode 191:
China’s leaders and wealthy elites are willing partners of global capitalism, opening up its doors, willingly, to Wal-Mart and huge multinational companies so those companies can produce trillions of dollars of stuff using cheap slave labor—in good capitalist style. Since 2017, China has been conducting a steady campaign of mass transfer of more than a million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minorities into a vast network of ‘re-education camps’ in the far west region of Xinjiang, which Uyghur activists call “east Turkestan”.
Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: secure.actblue.com/donate/w...
2020-07-2200 min
Working Life PodcastEp 190: EXPOSED—Big Pharma’s Greed, Lies and Poisoning of America: Wages For All!Episode 190:
Here is something we can all agree on I think—drug companies are blood-sucking, greedy cheats who cannot be trusted with the health and welfare of tens of millions of people. Am I right? And that’s even more true as we watch the global scramble to be the first company to profit big-time from a vaccine for COVID19. So, I’m going to focus on the Big Pharma corruption today with a friend and investigative reporter, Gerald Posner who is the author of a mind-boggling expose “Pharma: Greed, Lies And the Poisoning of America”
Support the Working Life Network he...
2020-07-1500 min
Working Life PodcastEp 189: A $6.5 Trillion Stimulus Plan Now! Hong Kong Labor Activists Under The GunEpisode 189:
Let’s go really big! I outline a $6.5 trillion stimulus—more than double what the Democrats in the House passed—because that’s what the people need over the next year: $1.3 trillion in wage guarantees; $715 billion for state and local governments; $600 billion for a “Pandemic Medicare For All”; $1.5 trillion to cancel all student debt; $200 billion for a rent and mortgage freeze…and a lot more. Fight me on the specifics—but let’s expand the debate and the way people think about what is possible, what is needed and what should be done.
Support the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/Wo...
2020-07-0800 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 188: Corporations & the Pandemic Killing Fields; Taking A Cleaver To The Pentagon BudgetEpisode 188:
Big companies don’t give a second thought to making big profits during the COVID-19 pandemic even if that means thousands of workers—and their families—will get sick and die from the virus. Actually, it’s a feature not a bug, no pun intended—in food processing, all those workers who make sure you get beef or chicken on your plate, are getting sick by the droves, and the only way that happens is because companies, big rich companies, keep dangerous plants operating unsafely because to make things slightly safer would cost them a few bucks. That’s criminal in...
2020-07-0100 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 187: The Vultures Gather; The Coming State Budget ApocalypseSupport the Working Life Network here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast and at ActBlue: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/working-life-1
Episode 187:
Private equity vultures love a great economic crisis. Circling above their wounded corporate prey, they wait until a company is too weak to survive, and, then, swoop in to pick up the pieces at a bargain price—which usually involves cutting thousands of jobs, too. And, now, a new rule will allow private equity firms to put their grubby hands on everyone’s 401(k) plans. Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the nation’s leadin...
2020-06-2400 min
Working Life PodcastEp 186: Global Workers Hear BLM; The Would-Be Governor Who Stopped A Man’s ExecutionEpisode 186:
I pull back the lens a bit on the Black Lives Matter movement to consider how the uprising is touching the consciousness of workers around the globe, especially in Africa. Chris Johnson, the regional director of Africa for the Solidarity Center, joins me in a conversation about the close relationship between racism and economic oppression, and how African workers are linking the BLM movement to their own economic oppression.
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How would you like to have a governor who saved a...
2020-06-1700 min
Working Life PodcastEp 185: How Do I Get My Damn Unemployment Check—We Have The Lowdown; Corporate PR SlimeEpisode 185:
The big news—it’s the first regularly scheduled Working Life TV Show!!! View the show now and sign up at:
www.youtube.com/WorkingLifeWithJonathanTasini
But, all our audio podcast listeners will still be able to hear the show in the long-time format.
The unemployment system is in chaos—jammed phone lines, crashing websites. People can’t get the checks they desperately need to pay for simple things like food, utilities and rent. So, I decided to devote the lion’s share of the show to dig into why this happening—and give concrete tips on how to access the system...
2020-06-1000 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 184: Racism and Economic Oppression; WORKING LIFE TV DEBUTS--LIVE STREAM TONIGHT!Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast
Episode 184:
In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr gave a speech entitled, “The Other America”, in which he said, “It’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good solid job.” This was a theme he repeated time and time again throughout his life because he saw the unbreakable bonds between the twin evils of racism and economic oppression. He made those links right up to the day before he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968 when he marched in support of striking sanitation workers.
...
2020-06-0300 min
Working Life PodcastEp 183: The People Should Own The Vaccine; Joe’s Bad Tax Ideas; Union Spends To Save Members’ LivesEpisode 183:
If I say that drug companies are sleazy leeches whose CEOs make millions of dollars while basically killing thousands of people who can’t afford outrageous drug prices, you’d shrug your shoulders and say, “yeah, well, duh.” Drug companies make these huge profits largely because of an absolutely insane system of patents, which you could stop with a change in the law. It’s especially important to get this idea in our heads right now with the rush to create a vaccine for COVID-19, which makes drug companies salivate over the prospect of pocketing huge profits for something that shoul...
2020-05-2700 min
Working Life PodcastEp 182: Nationalize Payrolls Now; Gig Work Is Exploitation; Domestic Workers In The PandemicEpisode 182:
Calling people “gig” workers is a subtle trap. “Gig” can sound anywhere from upbeat to just a mundane description. The truth is the “gig” economy is just another way of exploiting people and it’s a dream for all capitalists to have a pool of workers who can be used and abused at the beckon call of a supply chain or a big tech company, at the lowest cost possible. And not a surprise—lots of gig workers are at great risk during the pandemic. I explore the lives of “gig” workers in a conversation with Bama Athreya, an economic policy fell...
2020-05-2000 min
Working Life PodcastEp181: Greed Drove Retail’s COVID-19 Collapse; IMF’s Trillion-Dollar Money Machine; Rich FoundationsEpisode 181:
Here’s a no brainer observation: It would be hard to find any areas of agreement between the AFL-CIO and Goldman Sachs. Well, I got one—it turns out that the AFL-CIO and Goldman Sachs, along with scores of heads of states, labor folks and business titans, are on the same page about one idea which hasn’t gotten a lot of attention—creating $3 trillion in grants for worldwide distribution by the International Monetary Fund to countries needing immediate financial aid to contend with the pandemic. You’ll learn all about this fascinating global tale in my conversation with Mark Weisb...
2020-05-1300 min
Working Life PodcastEp 180: Fixing The Pandemic’s Financial Ruin; Trump Wants To Kill Beef & Poultry WorkersEpisode 180:
It is quite something to hear the elites in Washington—especially Republican members of Congress and the menace in the White House—blather on about wanting to wait to see how well the previous, inadequate fiscal stimulus works before deciding whether to do anything else. That’s while tens of millions of people are in the streets, huge lines of hungry people form every day across the nation and states and cities are on the brink of financial ruin.
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States and cities not only employ collectively millions of people but, my god, t...
2020-05-0600 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 179: Global Workers Face COVI-19 Rampage With Little Defense; The Corona “Dirty Dozen”Episode 179:
There is no way to downplay the risks to U.S. frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic—and I’ve dug into that in the past month or so, in our various segments talking about workers in health care, postal service, hog and poultry processing, airlines, rail, and subways. It’s dangerous and frightening—and it’s exponentially more terrifying when you look at the global threat to workers.
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Think about what tens of millions of workers in poorer countries, with far fewer resources, are facing. The images coming out of Africa, As...
2020-04-2900 min
Working Life PodcastEp 178: Postal Workers Face The Pandemic As The Service Struggles; Amazon Workers ProtestEpisode 178:
Here’s a little riddle: What has 157 million daily delivery points, 35,000 offices and 500,000 workers? It’s your U.S. Postal Service, that would be the service that really is a democratic, small “d”, institution—it’s there for everyone at a reasonable cost, no matter where you live or who you are.
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Putting it mildly, postal workers are frontline workers—and to pile the safety and health dangers on top of everything else, the service is facing a massive budget hole because of the collapse of the economy because, obviously, less commerce means...
2020-04-2200 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 177: Is Your Chicken Worth A Worker’s Life?; Stimulus Done The Right WayEpisode 177:
The dinner plates of millions of people are soon going to be an interesting place to focus the mind on the balance between the desire to fill bellies with protein—poultry and pork, mainly—versus the worthiness of peoples’ lives, specifically the lives of the workers who process the chickens and hogs in plants across the country.
Support the podcast here: www.patreon.com/WorkingLifePodcast
To put it bluntly, workers are getting sick and dying from COVID-19 just so millions of people can chow down some meat product at dinner. And those products may be harder to find because the vi...
2020-04-1500 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 176: A Deadly Match—Bad Trade Deals And Corona; Jamie Runs For Secretary of StateEpisode 176:
When we come out of the immediate pandemic crisis, then, maybe we can have some accounting of who and what is responsible for the needless deaths of thousands of people—and among the “who” would be, say, politicians who are making themselves look like heroes today—I’ll just say, randomly, New York politicians—even though they sat on their hands in January when the World Health Organization issued a worldwide pandemic warning, which you think might have made those same aggrandizing politicians—say, in New York—think, “gee, maybe I should make sure we are stocked up with the right equipmen...
2020-04-0800 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 175: Health Care Workers and Transit Workers Face The PandemicEpisode 175:
The other night I was watching an episode of Season 3 of Ozark and there was a scene in which the mother, played by Laura Linney, walks out of a supermarket with her son, both of them pushing a shopping cart. My head went immediately to, without a thought: I hope they sanitized that bar on the cart where their hands were placed…and then a few seconds later I laughed. That is where our heads are at these days—but, for lots of frontline workers out there, it’s all very real, deadly real, terrifyingly real.
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2020-04-0100 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 174: Retail Workers on Corona Frontlines; Amazon Maims; Cori Bush RunsEpisode 174:
When I have snuck out briefly in the past couple of weeks to safely get a few items at the supermarket, I made sure to thank the workers in the aisles and my cashier for being on the job, and I also tell them be safe and careful. They are supremely vulnerable to getting sick.
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Those retail workers, who still have jobs despite many stores having closed down, are forced to show up at work, mainly because they have no choice—their boss hasn’t shut down and the workers need the...
2020-03-2500 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 173: Corona And Class Warfare Part II; Stopping A Multi-Billion-Dollar CEO Pension Tax BreakEpisode 173:
Last week I asked everyone to consider the coronavirus pandemic as a pretty clarifying picture of class warfare—who are the people who get hurt most when millions of jobs go away or at best are in limbo because of a nationwide shutdown? It’s working people, minimum wage workers, service workers—almost none of whom have enough cash in reserve to pay bills, unlike the rich who have made their wealth by exploiting workers. Who are the people most vulnerable? It’s the people who either have to still go to work or can’t afford to stay at home be...
2020-03-1800 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 172: Corona In The Age Of Class Warfare; McKayla’s Bid To Knock Out HoyerEpisode 172:
Pandemics might be one of the single best mass events to shine a light on class warfare, especially in the U.S. Rich people don’t have to worry about getting sick—they can afford extensive care in a country in which millions of working-class people can’t even afford to see a doctor for a run-of-the-mill reason. If a rich person gets sick, well, he can just sit home in his pajamas for as long as needed and never worry about paying next week’s rent, while a fast food worker or other service worker on an hourly wage is...
2020-03-1100 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 171: Bloomberg Isn’t Alone Muzzling Workers; Ramos Runs in New YorkEpisode 171:
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You may remember me using this before because the idea comes up again and again in the struggle of workers to get some power at work. In his ballad “Pretty Boy Floyd”, Woody Guthrie sang these words:
“Yes, as through this world I've wandered,
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen”
Today that’s real life, and today, I chat with Hugh Baran of the National Employment Law Project about forced arbitration, a mumbo jumbo legal term that basically means mill...
2020-03-0400 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 170: Experts Give Thumbs Up For M4All; Two Progressives Run For CongressEpisode 170:
I try to mostly stay away from long monologue and ruminations, leaving the topics to be explored in conversations with my guests. Today, a little change because of the issue—I’m going to dig into a recent important study that shows what is pretty obvious to anyone looking at the numbers—Medicare for All saves money and lives. That’s the conclusion of experts who published their peer-reviewed findings in The Lancet. You will want to catch this one to grab some easy talking points for future debates.
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Which will be a goo...
2020-02-2600 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 169: Progressive Economics Shifts The Debate, And Chalks Up Wins; Harper Runs In IndianaEpisode 169:
It’s easy to get dragged into a negative head space if you do any kind of politics or movement building work—it’s hard out there and too often we have a tendency to focus on the really bad stuff, like “the planet is burning up and imploding” or a few people own more wealth in the world than hundreds of millions of people.
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But, truth is—we’ve had a lot of victories that have shifted the conversation. And it’s important to talk about those victories because it reminds us that...
2020-02-1900 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 168: Pay Up For Family Leave; Ashcraft Aims For NYC Incumbent Take-DownEpisode 168:
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Hypocrisy is pretty much a given when you are in politics. I’ve pointed out the particular hypocrisy of all those flag-waving politicians who shout a full-throated “I support our men and women in uniform” but, then, cut benefits for vets and cut funds for the VA.
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Today, I hone in on another hypocrisy: politicians who wax eloquently about the importance of families but refuse to advance paid family leave, a benefit enjoyed by tens of millions of people in other advanced economies. Just d...
2020-02-1200 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 167: They Died For Your Chicken Dinner; Populist Roars Across MontanaEpisode 167:
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It’s pretty likely that when you cut into a nice juicy roast chicken at home or in a restaurant a worker in some poultry processing plant was injured cutting up that chicken into commercial pieces. And in some cases, it’s even worse: in January, two workers in poultry plants were killed in the space of a little over a week. I talk about their deaths and the brutal working conditions in poultry plants with national safety and health expert Debbie Berkowitz.
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Then...
2020-02-0500 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 166: Ohio, Missouri, Oregon—Progressive Candidates Abound!Episode 166:
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With the Iowa caucuses just a few days away, I thought this would be a good time to devote the entire episode to progressive candidates who I’ve been talking to over the course of a number of weeks, with many more to come throughout the year. Today, you’ll hear from three women candidates—two are running for Congress—Morgan Harper in Ohio and Kathy Ellis in Missouri—and one, Paige Kreisman, who is running for a state house seat in Oregon.
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-- Jonatha...
2020-01-2900 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 165: Care Workers Spotlight Global Inequality; NAFTA 2.0 Passes—Good or Bad?Episode 165:
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“Economic inequality is out of control. In 2019, the world’s billionaires, only 2,153 people, had more wealth than 4.6 billion people.” Those two sentences lead off Oxfam’s annual look at inequality. This year, Oxfam looks at unpaid and underpaid care work and the global inequality crisis. I speak with Paul O’Brien, Vice President of Policy and Advocacy at Oxfam America about the in-depth report that is startling and bracing, and reminds us of the vast chasm dividing the very rich from the rest of us.
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2020-01-2200 min
Working Life PodcastEp. 164: Death At Work: The Numbers Skyrocket; Hoadley Looks To Dethrone Incumbent in Michigan.Episode 164:
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Most people, when they walk out the door to go to work, don’t think, “damn, I’m going to get killed today or seriously ill with a chronic disease”. Yes, if you work in a mine or on a construction site, you are more aware of the dangers. But, most people just assume work is a safe place and they will come home. Well, it’s getting more dangerous at work—the death rate has spiked to the highest point in a decade. And that’s the cheery topic of my first segme...
2020-01-1500 min
Working Life PodcastEp 163: The Tax Robbery Was Worse Than You Imagined; A Progressive For The Texas U.S. Senate SeatEpisode 163:
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The GOP Tax Robbery Bill, the tax cuts that shoveled hundreds of billions of dollars into the hands of the very rich and corporations, was built on a complex set of lies. And, now with the close of 2019 and the numbers in on a full year of corporate 2018 tax returns, we have the numbers to prove it. It’s worse than you imagine—not only did hundreds of corporations pay a piddling amount of money to no taxes at all, but the Treasury Department, run by banker-to-the-elites Steven Mnuchin, created regulations and...
2020-01-0800 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 162: The Minimum Wage Divides The County In Half; Eastman Takes Another Shot in NebraskaEpisode 162:
As the New Year beckons, there’s good news and bad news on wages. The good news is something I’ve been able to talk about for the past few years at the end of each year—come January 1st, a whole lot of people are going to see their paychecks increase because of some state and local minimum wage hikes that go into effect. Which shows why movements matter—in this case, the Fight for 15. The bad news: we are quickly becoming a country divided in half when it comes to minimum wages standards. That’s on tap here in ou...
2019-12-2500 min
Working Life PodcastEp 161: ICE-Company Cover Up Of Workplace Deaths in NOLA?; Two More Progressives For CongressEpisode 161:
Shut your damn mouth or be deported. That’s basically the upshot of what happened to Delmer Joel Ramirez Palma, who wanted to tell the truth about the collapse of the under-construction Hard Rock Hotel in New Orleans but, two days after he was hurt in the disaster, Joel found himself dragged off by ICE into detention and, then, deported back to Honduras after living in New Orleans for 18 years. I’ll be talking in today’s episode to Mary Yanik, senior staff attorney with the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice, about this abuse of workers to set th...
2019-12-1800 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 160: Bakery Workers Unite!; Two Progressives Eye Congressional Republican SeatsEpisode 160:
I love the bosses who wring their hands when workers try to unionize, the ones who say, “don’t you love us? Aren’t we good to you”? That isn’t the point. Everyone needs a union so workers together don’t ever have to rely on just good feelings from employers. Which is what I talk about with Cameron Coleman, a bakery worker at Grand Central Bakery who is a key organizer in a unionizing campaign which comes to a head tomorrow with a vote.
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I also chat with two progressive...
2019-12-1100 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 159: Beating the WTO Beast Twenty Years After Seattle; A Progressive Runs in IllinoisEpisode 159:
Twenty years ago, thousands of environmentalists, union leaders and members, and lots of other progressive forces swept through the streets of Seattle to confront the global corporate beast known as the World Trade Organization, the WTO. They were met by the Seattle police force, buttressed by all sorts of other police and security operations, who tear gassed, pepper sprayed, assaulted and arrested people who were simply trying to exercise their free speech rights. Today, I am going to revisit that mass uprising with Lori Wallach, the director of Global Trade Watch. I also talk to a young progressive Democrat...
2019-12-0400 min
Working Life PodcastEp 158: A Union For Politicians’ Staffers; A Progressive Looks To Retire A Corp Dem; Amazon Kills!Episode 158:
Hypocrisy probably makes it into the top three characteristics, alas, of the vast majority of politicians. That isn’t a reason not to participate in the electoral process but it’s just one of those cautionary, red lights to keep an eye out for. To wit: all those politicians who eloquently talk about the importance of unions—mostly that talk comes when a politician wants a union endorsement or a check—but they get very weird when their own staffers try to unionize. So that’s what makes the unionizing effort among staffers at the New York City City Council so...
2019-11-2700 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 157: Deval Patrick Destroyed Peoples’ Jobs; The $1.5 Trillion Haul From A Tax on Wall StreetEpisode 157:
Deval Patrick has become very, very rich since leaving the post of Massachusetts governor. That’s what happens when you become a managing director of Bain Capital, one of the behemoths in the private equity industry. Patrick became rich working for a company—being a managing director of a company—that has screwed thousands of workers, especially 30,000 workers for Toys R Us who don’t have a job today because Bain Capital, with Patrick in the leadership, drove that company into liquidation. I talk about Bain Capital’s role in the demise of Toys R Us with Jim Baker, executive...
2019-11-2000 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 156: The False Gods of Economic Growth; Brianna Wu Looks To Take Down A Corporate DemocratEpisode 156:
Anyone remember that TV advertisement that Merrill Lynch used to have, with the big bull trotting along a beach? I’m reincarnating that bull today for a pretty simple discussion: what is economic progress and how do we have economic growth without destroying the planet? Evelyn Astor, an economic and social policy advisor at the International Trade Union Confederation, joins me to talk about better ideas to measure what a healthy economy looks like for regular people, not just investors and billionaires.
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Then, Brianna Wu stops by with an update on he...
2019-11-1300 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 155: Euro Corporate Evil Trolls The U.S. South; Kim Williams Has Blue Dog Dem On The RunIKEA, Volkswagen, Nestle and Airbus are pretty different companies but all of them have a two-faced corporate Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that explains a lot about the oppression workers face in the U.S. South. Across the pond, all those companies have a pretty reasonable posture towards unions and workers trying to unionize. But just let them come hunting over in the U.S. South to do business and, bingo, they turn into your garden variety, vicious, union busting, corporate pigs. Cathy Feingold, the AFL-CIO’s international director, talks with me about an amazing new report tracing the European co...
2019-11-0600 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 154: Two Tales of Wall Street Vultures; A Progressive Takes On Another Corporate Democrat.Episode 154:
The Gordon Gekko boast in the fictional movie “Wall Street” that “Greed is Good” is really an organizing principle for the financial vultures who rob the country day after day. Today, you will hear two tales of greed and robbery by hedge fund and private equity vultures.
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First, it’s Paul Singer, the CEO of a hedge fund called Elliott Management, who has a net worth of $3.5 billion, is a political buddy of the Koch brothers and is a funder of climate change deniers. As Beth Allen, the communications director of the Commun...
2019-10-3000 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 152: The Dark Side of Whole Foods; Bowman Looking To Unseat Corporate DemocratEpisode 152:
The running joke about Whole Foods is its nickname: Whole Paycheck. But there’s a far darker side to the touchy-feely, organic feel of Whole Foods than the higher prices—the exploitation of workers everywhere along its supply chains where workers labor in slave-like conditions, and are abused day after day, especially women workers. Oxfam is out with a devastating report on Whole Foods—and I talk with an Oxfam expert about what the report found.
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Then, among the politicians no one would miss, ever, on the political scene is Eliot Engel...
2019-10-1600 min
Working Life PodcastEp 151: Private Equity Vultures Are Running A Multi-Billion Dollar Medical Billing ScamEpisode 151:
I would never have said it before today but it turns out health insurance companies aren’t the most evil players in the healthcare industry. Don’t freak out—health insurance companies are bad, and they are bankrupting millions of people, and the country. But it turns out even worse than the health insurers are some big mega private equity vultures who are gobbling up big pieces of medical services and socking millions of people with surprise medical bills—and I’m going to go in depth on this story, which is not being covered anywhere else, with Eileen Appelbaum...
2019-10-0900 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 150: Chicago Teachers Gearing Up For the Picket Line; What’s the Matter With Ohio?Episode 150:
Teachers are on the ramparts again. This time in Chicago where the members of the Chicago Teachers Union are gearing up for a possible strike if they can’t get a decent contract to improve wages, win a hard cap on class size and increase staffing. To talk more about the struggle for a good contract, I’m joined by Andrea Parker, an English teacher and union vice president, and Robin Blake Boose, a first grade teacher.
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I, then, take a look at what’s up in Ohio: You would think that p...
2019-10-0200 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 149: Fred Meyer Boycott Is On!; California Clips The Wings Of The UBER-Corporate MentalityEpisode 149:
A few weeks ago, I talked about the vast pay discrimination against women who work for supermarket chain Fred Meyer: 2/3 of women are paid $3.70 less than men doing essentially the same job. The union representing the workers—UFCW Local 555—is in hard, brass knuckles bargaining with Fred Meyer to end this. But in the meantime, just this past Sunday, because of the company’s recalcitrance, the union has called for a boycott of all Fred Meyer stores. I talk about the gender pay discrimination and the boycott with Jeff Anderson, the secretary treasurer of Local 555.
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2019-09-2500 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 148: Bangladesh Garment Workers Horrors Redux; Closing The Capital Gains Highway RobberyEpisode 148:
Take your shirt off. Or your pants. Almost certainly those garments and others were made in a faraway country, by people making pennies who work in horrendous conditions. I think we all know that when we are told to think about it—but we don’t think about it on a daily basis. I talk with Sonia Mistry of the Solidarity Center about the squalid, dangerous conditions in Bangladesh faced by garment workers—and a fire that recently made thousands homeless.
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Then, I enter into the land of “anti-deferral accounting”—that just rolls o...
2019-09-1800 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 147: Temp Work Is All The Rage; Coal Miners & The Green New DealEpisode 147: Once upon a time, if you got a job that lasted a long time, you’d be a permanent worker, maybe after a short probationary period. Not so much anymore with the plague forcing people to take “temp” jobs—the kind of job that is increasing in the past few years, outpacing full-time permanent work, and also spreading a lot more to so-called “blue collar” jobs. I explore this with Laura Padin, senior staff attorney with the National Employment Law Project and author of a new important report called “Lasting Solutions for America’s Temporary Workers”.
Support the podcast here: www.patreon...
2019-09-1100 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 146: Union Embraces Bernie & Green New Deal; Social Security Attacked—Again!Episode 146:
Back in the first half of the 20th Century, there was a big vibrant union, the United Electrical Workers, the UE. It had 100,000s of members—until the McCarthy era anti-communist hysteria swept the country, triggering eviscerating attacks against the UE by the government, companies and other labor unions.
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Today, the union is still one of the most progressive unions in the nation. I talk with the union’s president, Peter Knowlton about its recent decision to endorse Bernie Sanders for president and declare strong support for a Green New Deal.
Supp...
2019-09-0400 min
Working Life PodcastEp 145: Hell, No, You Won't Take My Pension; The Sleazy Corporate Attack On City and Town BudgetsEpisode 145:
We are taught as kids to keep your word. If you promised not to do something bad or your promised to do something good, we learned you have to keep your promise otherwise people pretty quickly don’t trust you. Which explains why most people just don’t trust politicians—like politicians who are supposed to be your allies and who promised thousands of people they would get a decent pension and, then, vote to take it away.
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And, so, "see you in court" is the cry we begin with. Stacy Chambe...
2019-08-2800 min
Working Life PodcastEp 144: Wal-Mart Guns In Teachers’ Sights; Boeing Breaks Labor Law; Nurses Fight Retaliation FiringsEpisode 144:
Sometimes CEOs and the economic elites do stuff that is so transparently absurd that it sort of makes me laugh. Add to that list the letter, “A statement on the purpose of a corporation”, released this past week by the Business Roundtable, signed by a couple of hundred CEOs, promising to be, well, nice to us—better wages, better treatment, better community efforts, all done with the help of the glorious free market. I could go down that list and point to, one after the other, all the horrendous policies those CEOs make happen—not to mention the huge riches t...
2019-08-2100 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 143: Kill More Hogs, Hurt More Workers; Your Server’s Higher Wage Won’t HurtEpisode 143: Working on in a hog processing plant is one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet—and it’s about to get a whole lot worse, evoking “The Jungle” of the early 20th Century. In a classic profits-over-people move, a new regulation is about to hit which would eliminate any speed restrictions on how fast hog carcasses come hurtling down the assembly line. As it is about to become law—more than a year after I first talked about the topic in a May 2018 episode—I bring back Debbie Berkowitz, director of the worker safety and health program at the Natio...
2019-08-1400 min
Working Life PodcastEp 142: How Would Warren’s Wealth Tax Work?; Nepalese Women Fight For Equal Pay in ConstructionEpisode 142: Elizabeth Warren’s proposal for a wealth tax in the country is a potential game-changer. It would apply only to households with a net worth of $50 million or more—roughly the wealthiest 75,000 households, or the top 0.1%. those super rich would pay an annual 2% tax on every dollar of net worth above $50 million and a 3% tax on every dollar of net worth above $1 billion. I dig into the idea of a wealth tax with David Gamage, a professor of law at Indiana University and a tax law expert who has just written the first draft of an article called, “Five Key Re...
2019-08-0700 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 139: The Corporate Sneak Attack Against Workers In The States; Amazon’s Tax Dodging Culture.Episode 139: I have to tip my cap to the conservative, anti-worker right-wing. That whole gang has been far more focused, in a laser-like way, on seizing power in places where it can matter a lot—the local and state political arenas. Progressives, until recently, just didn’t focus enough on state capitols and local races—letting the right wing dominate state legislatures and local city governments. And that’s meant really bad things for workers to the tune of billions of dollars in lost wages—as we will hear today from Laura Huizer, senior staff attorney of the National Employment Law Projec...
2019-07-1700 min
Working Life PodcastEp 138: EPA Workers Attacked!; Why Do People Become Refugees?; Mexico’s Labor Laws: Getting Better?Episode 138: Wait, didn’t we just talk last week about the attacks on government workers? Well, a week doesn’t go by when another attack against people, who keep our society working, is launched by this administration—this time it’s the workers at the Environmental Protection Agency. AFGE Local 1236 Bethany Dreyfus joins me to give us the lowdown on the draconian rules imposed just days ago. I can’t add to the descriptions of the daily despicable conditions faced by migrants and refugees at the southern border. Instead, what I wanted to do today is go the root of what broug...
2019-07-1000 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 137: The Conspiracies to Rob Workers—at the VA and in Hollywood.Episode 137: If you look hard enough, you can find conspiracies to defraud workers in every corner of the economy—and those conspiracies are usually dressed up as something entirely different. Take the people who work for the VA—there is a conspiracy to crush their union and cut wages, all dressed by in the cloak of “efficiency through privatization”. I talk with American Federation of Government Employees leaders Marilyn Park and Eric Gerken about the Orwellian-named “Mission Act”, which will cripple the VA, hurt the quality of care Vets receive and undermine the union. And in the glittering world of Hollywood, t...
2019-07-0300 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 136: Dump Citibank For The Post Office; Stopping Violence & Harassment At WorkEpisode 136: It seems so simple—post offices are everywhere, often literally on Main Streets in towns all across the country. Everyone knows where the post office is. So, why not turn post offices into hubs of financial transactions for people, from pay check cashing, which could be a first step, and then on to remittances of money to families around the globe and even installing Postal Service ATMs? You can boil down this down to a simple question: who would you rather give your business to, Citibank or the Post Office? I take up this idea with Mark Dimondstein, president of...
2019-06-2600 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 135: Secrets of The Fed; NAFTA Intrigue; Minimum Wage RobberyIt’s an action-packed, let’s-catch-the-thieves-in-the-act episode. The Federal Reserve Board’s Open Market Committee just wrapped up its two-day secret June meeting without triggering a new cut in interests rates—and what does that mean? I unravel the state of play at the Fed—and ask the question why shouldn’t we change the basic structure of the Fed—with Dean Baker, Fed-watcher extraordinaire and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Intrigue is also swirling around the renegotiation of NAFTA 2.0 so Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch who knows the entire inside story and state-of-play...
2019-06-1900 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 134: Presidential and California Progressive Politics—Bernie! & Tulsi + Cory…Episode 134: As you may recall from last week’s episode, I was at the California Democratic State Party convention recently. I continue bringing you the speeches of the presidential candidates who spoke—this week it’s Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard and Cory Booker. To give those speeches some context, I chat with Karen Bernal, the outgoing chair of the California state party progressive caucus. We look back at the past few years—and try to be honest about progressive victories and defeats, and the long road ahead to shaking loose the elements of the establishment who stand in the way of progr...
2019-06-1200 min
Working Life PodcastEp 133: Elizabeth Warren Speaks!; Tefere Talks Union & AFL-CIO Politics; Tax Ideas For The People!Episode 133:
I just returned from the great city of San Francisco which hosted the state Democratic Party Convention. And in my audio bag are most of the speeches of the Democratic presidential candidates who gave their pitches to the delegates—California, with a much earlier primary than usual, will potentially have a decisive say about who will be the eventual Democratic nominee. This week, Elizabeth Warren starts off a mini-series of the speeches, which I will bring to you in the coming weeks. Warren gave, in my opinion, the sharpest, most focused, clear policy and philosophical speech of them all.
Th...
2019-06-0500 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 132: Murder, Violence and Robbery—Gifts From the Free MarketEpisode 132: Murder, violence and robbery—it sounds like a list for a plot of The Wire. But, no, it’s just another standard operating procedure for the free market system—in which people are murdered in Colombia thanks to so-called “free trade”, workers are beat up and sometimes killed at McDonald’s because the company doesn’t care about its workers beyond the bottom line so leaves workers exposed to threats to their lives and, lastly, public sector employees have the money they have saved for retirement, sometimes over many decades, taken from them mainly because some greedy Wall Street lowlifes crash...
2019-05-2900 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 128: Walking The Stop & Shop Picket Line; A Pilot’s View of The 737 MaxEpisode 128: Another day, another profitable corporation trying to skim more dough from the pockets of workers. Thousands of workers are striking Stop & Shop in the Northeast—I’m joined by Julie Sabo, one of those workers and a 38-year veteran of the company. Then, a top official of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), First Officer James Belton, chats with me about the 737 Max and the crucial role the pilots and their union play in airline safety. Our Robber Baron of the week is the CEO of the parent company of Stop & Shop.
-- Jonathan Tasini
Follow me on Twitter @jona...
2019-04-1700 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 127: Sacramento and Florida Teacher Uprisings!Episode 127: Everyone measures the morality or immorality of society based on different criteria. For some, it’s the huge numbers of people who pay outrageous amounts for prescription drugs or just go bankrupt because of health care costs. For others, it’s racism permeating our economic and social fabric or the permanent war economy the country has had for generations, wasting trillions of dollars on behalf of the military-industrial complex. Today, I hone in on the immorality of how the country, mainly its right-wing politicians, treats teachers. And we’re going to dig into that with a look at two new te...
2019-04-1000 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 113: The Tax Bill Scam—An Anniversary Look Back; Fighting in States For Worker PowerEpisode 113: The least surprising thing I might say is: the GOP Tax bill last year was an utter scam. We knew it. But, now we have a full year to look back at the lies and the realities of the tax cuts—where has all that money gone? I discuss all this with Richard Phillips, senior policy analyst at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy. I, then, pick apart a great report on what can be done to win workers’ rights at the state level. That’s a discussion with Paul Sonn, state policy director of the National Employment Law Ce...
2018-12-1900 min
Working Life PodcastEp 111: Amazon Attacks Workers; Patents & Copyrights=Corp Big Bucks; The GOP Racist Tax CutsEpisode 111: I circle back on the bad deal made by politicians in New York and Virginia with Amazon, honing in specifically on the vicious anti-unionism Amazon pursues—and, despite the hallucinating by the NYC mayor that somehow bringing Amazon to NYC will magically turn it into a fuzzy pro union company, I talk with Dave Mertz of the RWDSU about the global path littered with Amazon’s attacks against unions and against workers. Dean Baker, frequent guest and senior economist of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, talks with me about the real profit centers for corporations—control over patent...
2018-12-0500 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 110: NAFTA 2.0—What’s The Bottom Line?Episode 110: Join me in choking on the following three words: Trump was right. When he criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a bad deal during the 2016 campaign, he was telling a truth that resonated for many working people—even though, of course, Trump, who defrauded thousands of people who worked for him and would pile lie after lie about workers and unions, was certainly not going to blow up NAFTA on behalf of working people.
But, there is now a draft of NAFTA 2.0. In this episode, I dig deep into what it says and means. Most of th...
2018-11-2800 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 109: Amazon Robbery Redux—The Bad, Bad and The Really BadEpisode 109: I’m a dog with a bone. I take on Amazon for the second straight week for its utter highway robbery, with the willing participation of politicians, of the people of New York and Virginia. Greg Leroy, executive director of Good Jobs First, kicks off our episode with a deep dive into the lies about what this deal will cost and, surprise, it’s a whole lot more than Amazon and its political allies are saying. I, then, talk to Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union, who phones in from London where he is atte...
2018-11-2100 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 108: Amazon Bigfoots NY and VA—We Follow Up A Ground-Breaking February StoryEpisode 108: This week, Amazon announced which two communities, thanks to willing political cowards, it will fleece in return for siting its new HQ. I expand on the ground-breaking Amazon episode Working Life did in February with three segments on the financial, tax and community implications of the marauding corporation’s breathtaking campaign to extort billions. The Robber Baron of the week is, of course, Jeff Bezos.
-- Jonathan Tasini
Follow me on Twitter @jonathantasini
Sign up for The Working Life Podcast at: www.workinglife.org
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/jonathan.tasini.3
2018-11-1400 min
Working Life PodcastEp 105: Uber/Lyft Drivers Race-To-Bottom; Sales Taxes Rob The Poor; Wellstone RememberedEpisode 105: Thousands of drivers in the app-driven ride service business, principally those who work for Uber and Lyft, just can’t make ends meet—and the whole scramble has created a race-to-the-bottom in which companies impoverish the very people who bring in the cash (sound familiar?). To get an insight into the plight of such drivers, I speak with Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the National Taxi Workers Alliance, and economist James Parrott from The New School. Heard the conservative rhetoric about no-income tax states being the easy street place to live? It’s the big lie—because state and local sa...
2018-10-2400 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 76: Oklahoma Uprising, Secrets of the NY Fed, Colorado Progressive On the MarchEpisode 76: Now it's the turn of teachers in Oklahoma to rise up. Jonathan chats with Alicia Priest, the president of the Oklahoma Education Association, and Jennifer Thornton, a third grade teacher in Tulsa, after the state's teachers walked off the job to push for higher pay so they don't have to go to a food pantry to feed their families. Jonathan, then, discusses with EPI's John Bivens how unemployment is tied to a too-secret search for the new head of the Federal Reserve Board of New York, one of the most powerful jobs in the system. Lastly, Jonathan visits with...
2018-04-0400 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 32: Upbeat Stuff…Wage Theft, Election Theft, CEO Theft, War CrimesIt's an action-packed podcast. Jonathan looks at the daily stealing of workers' wages, to the tune of billions of dollars—right in time for an annual deep-dive to look at a big hike in CEO pay in 2016. There is also breaking news on what could be another chapter in Democratic Party insider shenanigans—was there fraud in the recent California Democratic state party elections? Jonathan also pauses to comment on Memorial Day—a day when the nation forgets that leaders like Henry Kissinger ignited the wars that killed so many people, committing war crimes along the way.
Jonathan Tasini
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2017-05-3100 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 9: Trump's "Draining Swamp" Is Filling Up With CrocsEpisode 9: In the long list of fraudulent claims by "Tiny Hands" Trump is the notion that he would "drain the swamp" in Washington—Jonathan turns to Elizabeth Warren for a brilliant obliteration of that fantasy. Jonathan checks back in on the race for chair of the Democratic National Committee—you'll get to hear from progressive Keith Ellison, the leading candidate for the post. Jonathan also jumps across the pond to chat with Steve Turner, a union leader from the UK and Ireland (okay, our travel budget is still at zero so Steve and Jonathan met up in Washington, D.C.). Wrap...
2016-12-2100 min
Working Life PodcastEpisode 1: Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!Bernie Sanders rocked the nation and triggered a political revolution. He talks exclusively to Jonathan Tasini about his journey, Trump, the Democratic Party, fighting the corrupt system, and the next wave of the revolution.
2016-10-2500 min
Listen To The Full Audiobook Everyone Is Talking About — So Ground-Breaking!The Essential Bernie Sanders and His Vision for America by Jonathan TasiniPlease visithttps://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/2/audible/40434to listen full audiobooks.
Title: The Essential Bernie Sanders and His Vision for America
Author: Jonathan Tasini
Narrator: Tom Parks
Format: mp3
Length: 4 hrs and 41 mins
Release date: 09-08-15
Ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars, 162 ratings
Genres: Corporate & Public Finance
Publisher's Summary:
2015-09-084h 41