How Union Organizing Fights the Boss w/ union organizer Daisy Pitkin

April 29, 2022Posted inLabor
We’re in the midst of a new era of momentum and militancy around labor organizing. We’re seeing headline grabbing organizing campaigns at Starbucks and Amazon shifting the political landscape. But beyond Starbucks and Amazon, union organizing has been spreading to sectors across the country.     
In our latest episode, we talk with labor organizer and writer Daisy Pitkin about her new book “On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union.” We talk about her work organizing a series of factory laundromats in Phoenix, AZ in the early 2000s. Pitkin worked with immigrant women working in the terrible conditions to organize a union. Most notably, she worked with a woman named Alma, who Pitkin describes as “the gutsiest worker leader I’ve ever met.”  
This was all done despite a vicious corporate backlash in the reddest of red states.   
Currently, Pitkin is organizing Starbucks workers in the Rust Belt. We discuss the Starbucks campaign and the future of labor organizing.   

Corporate America’s Mass Exodus from Russia w/ Pratap Chatterjee

March 24, 2022Posted inForeign Policy, Materialism and Economics

A mass of western companies are exiting Russia over the war in Ukraine.  This has included some major corporate heavyweights, including McDonald’s, Starbucks, Nike, Netflix, Apple, Visa, Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Exxon, major western law firms and most major film distributors.

Listen in: https://apple.co/3qy13ud

Jeffry Sonnenfeld at the Yale School of Management compared it to the boycott of apartheid era South Africa. We’ve talked on past shows about the role that multinationals have played in the political economy. But have they developed a new conscience?

In our latest, we talk with investigative journalist and Executive Director of CorpWatch Pratap Chatterjee (@pchatterjee) about the latest round of corporate activism. We talk about who benefits, who’s being hurt and whether it’s having enough of an impact on Russia.