Building Bridges Radio: Your Community & Labor Report

Produced and Hosted by Mimi Rosenberg & Ken Nash over WBAI,99.5FM in the NYC Metro Area

WHO WE ARE

WORKERS OF THE WORLD TUNE IN! Introducing "Building Bridges: Your Community & Labor Report"

Our beat is the labor front, broadly defined, both geographically and conceptually. We examine the world of work and workers on the job as well as where they live. We examine the issues that affect their everyday lives, with a particular sensitivity towards human rights abuses, environmental concerns and the U.S. drive for global domination. We record their global struggles and provide analysis of their efforts to empower themselves and transform society to provide greater democratic, human, social, political and economic rights. Each program consists of feature stories, generally interviews, within a historical context, often accompanied by sound from demonstrations, rallies or conferences, and complemented and enhanced by poetry and instrumental or vocal -- people's culture.

Over the years Building Bridges has produced a weekly one hour program, Mondays from 7-8 PM EST, covering local, national and international labor and community issues over radio WBAI-Pacifica 99.5 FM in New York. We also produce half hour version, Building Bridges National, which is distribtued to over 40 broadcast and internet radio stations.


For more information you can contact us at knash@igc.org
In Struggle Mimi Rosenberg & Ken Nash

SOS, Save Our Planet: The Peoples Climate March and Beyond - 28:25  

SOS, Save Our Planet: The Peoples Climate March and Beyond 
with
Christian Parenti, professor of sustainable development at the 
School for International Training, Graduate Institute. He is a 
contributing editor to the Nation and the author of four books, 
the most recent being Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence 
and
Mary Sweeters, Greenpeace Arctic Campaigner and Coordinator in the Global Climate March. She has spent the last seven years at Greenpeace organizing numerous communities around climate change. She participated in an action hanging a giant banner on Mt. Rushmore to call out Pres. Obama to take action on climate change and especially  to raise awareness of the meltdown of the Arctic ice caps and the dangers of Arctic oil drilling. 

The massive Peoples Climate March is a turning point in the  
demand for an economy that works for people and the planet; a 
world safe from the ravages of climate change; a world with good 
jobs, clean air and water, and healthy communities, we’ll dialogue 
with Christian Parenti and youth activist Mary Sweeters who has 
helped build support for the march and beyond  to incorporate an 
environmental justice agenda in all of our endeavors.  To change 
everything, we need everybody!  

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Building Bridges: Fast Food Workers Protests from Ferguson to NYC -28:20  

Hundreds Arrested as Fast Food Workers Strike 
for Living Wage and Unionization
featuring
Jeanina Jenkins - a McDonalds Worker in Ferguson, Mo. who 
joined the NYC protests  and was active in protesting the police 
killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO

Thousands of fast food workers across 150 U.S. cities walked off the job recently and nearly 500 of them willfully committed civil disobedience as part of their protest and were arrested. In NYC 34 fast food workers were arrested. Protesting fast food workers have insisted that they were willing to do “whatever it takes” in order to earn union recognition and a higher wage. The NYC fast-food workers were also joined by over 20 St. Louis area fast-food workers, including many from Ferguson, who were among the first in the country to join the Fight for $15, and have been on strike as 
many as six times. Jeanina Jenkins, a McDonald’s employee in Ferguson, said “I’m willing to do whatever it takes because I’m barely surviving on the $7.97/hr. I make at McDonald’s. After everything that’s happened here in my community during the last month, I know that if I don’t stand up and fight for what I believe in, for what’s right, that nobody else will and nothing will 
ever change.”

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Stanley Aronowitz- Toward a New Workers' Movement - 27:11  

The Death and Life of American Labor:
Toward a New Workers’ Movement
with
Stanley Aronowitz  In the 1950s, Aronowitz was a factory metalworker. In the ’50s and ’60s, he directed organizing with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers. In 1963,he coordinated labor participation for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Ten years later, the publication of his book False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness was a land-mark in the study of the U.S. working-class and workers’ movements.

Union membership in the United States has fallen below 11 percent, the lowest rate since before the New Deal. Labor activist and scholar of the American labor movement Stanley Aronowitz argues that the movement as we have known it for the last 100 years is effectively dead. And he explains how this death has been a long time coming—the organizing and political principles adopted by U.S. unions at mid-century have taken a terrible toll.

In his new book The Death and Life of American Labor, Aronowitz draws on this long personal history, reflecting on his continuing involvement in labor organizing,  with groups such as the Professional Staff Congress of the City University. He brings a historian’s understanding of American workers’ struggles in taking the long view of the labor movement. Then, n a survey of current initiatives, strikes, organizations, and allies, Aronowitz analyzes the possibilities of labor’s rebirth, and sets out a program for a new, broad, radical workers’ movement.

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Building Bridges: Food Manufactur​ing Workers Struggle; Rev. Barber - Fast Food Wages? Bad Fruit - 27:41  

Feeding New York: 
Food Manufacturing Workers Struggle Against Raw Deal
with 
.  Daniel Gross, Ex. Dir., Brandworkers
.  Richard Merino, Member, Brandworkers
.  Manuel Estevez, Member, Brandworkers

Food production industry workers prepare and deliver food across the city.  With $5 billion in annual sales, New York City’s food manufacturing industry is slated to become a major economic driver in the coming years. Now,a new report, “Feeding New York”details workers' experiences in the city's growing food manufacturing industry, from the perspective of those employed in it. It exposes pervasive wage theft, discrimination, 
********
Fast Food Wages? Bad Fruit! 
with 
Rev. William J. Barber, III

As fast food workers rallied, marched and struck all over the country recently, NAACP President William Barber III, joined workers in Raleigh NC to help communicate the message that their low wages, the fruit of their own labor, is bad fruit

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