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

Herb Boyd's Black Detroit: A People's History of Self-Determination - 27:55  

Black Detroit: A People's History of Self-Determination
with

Herb Boyd, journalist, educator, author, and activist. His articles appear regularly in the New York Amsterdam News. He teaches Black studies at the City College of New York and the College of New Rochelle.

Herb Boyd excites and stimulates us with his inspiring, illuminating book that will interest students of urban history and the Black experience. 

Detroit was surely the capital of 20th-century African-America, as native son Herb Boyd recounts, this centrality dates back to the American Revolution but became pronounced at the time of the Civil War, when Detroit went from being an important station along the Underground Railroad to become an important source of abolitionism, industrialism, and sheer manpower for the war effort—including Black soldiers bound for the Union ranks.

As the author notes, however, the ascendancy of Black Detroit did not mean an end to racial tension; though he grew up on a block with Italian, Irish, and Jewish families, “our blackness was for our neighbors an object of derision and insult.” Boyd celebrates the rising-above that accompanied this ethnic contest, the grit and determination that put Berry Gordy’s Motown on the map, lifted the members of the Supremes and the Miracles from the projects, and ushered in a second black literary renaissance through the pens of Gwendolyn Brooks and Nikki Giovanni. As he reminds his readers, immigrants and exiles rom other regions and countries did their parts to shape Black Detroit: Malcolm X lived there before moving to New York and taking a leading part in the radical wing of the civil rights movement, while Rosa Parks moved there from the South in 1957. “Parks’s commitment to fight Jim Crow—North or
South —was unrelenting,” writes the author. Though the city has fallen victim since to outmigration, its population having fallen from 1.8 million in 1950 to about 670,000 today, Boyd writes confidently that the city’s African-American population will be central to its revival, concluding, “I’m proud to be a Detroiter.”
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US and Israeli Collaboration Policing Resistance Movements; Boycott Israel and Go to Jail? - 28:56  

Deadly Exchanges:
Policing Resistance Movements, and US and Israeli Collaboration
with

Eran Efrati, executive director of RAIA (Researching the American-Israeli Alliance), an investigative researcher into the Israeli military.  He formerly served as the chief researcher of Breaking the Silence, where he collected testimonies from hundreds of IDF soldiers about their activities. He has worked with the ICC and participated in both independent and UN investigations into Israeli military operations. Currently, his research is focused on international military and police partnerships between the United States and Israel.

Eran Efrati discusses the international relationships between the Israeli Military and the policing/security agencies throughout the United States. We will outline  shared tactics, weapons and policies that are enacted in a war against indigenous and oppressed people in Palestine, several countries in Africa and across the United States. 
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Boycott Israel, Go to Jail? 
with
Aaron Matte, The Real News

A bipartisan Senate bill would make boycotting Israel punishable by up to 20 years in prison. But a new pushback from groups including the ACLU could help stop the ‘draconian’ measure, says Josh Ruebner of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights

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Uber’s Race to the Bottom - 25:51  

Uber’s Race to the Bottom
with
Bhairavi Desai, NYTWA Bhairavi Desai, NYTWA Executive Director 


A NYS Administrative Law Judge upheld that Uber was the employer of former drivers, all members of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, who won unemployment insurance claims in NYS. This ruling sets the stage for other lawsuits in cases involving Uber’s assertion that its drivers are independent contractors. This comes close after Uber’s loss in a massive wage theft lawsuit filed by NYTWA and massive driver resistance to Uber imposed fare cuts. Uber’s race to the bottom extends to all taxi workers by
its flooding the streets with drivers so that making a living entails countless hours on the road. But Uber’s race to the bottom also extends to its business model which many observers contend is not sustainable in light of its continuing financial losses. And now Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was forced to resign by its  investors in a scandal exposing a workplace culture of sexual harassment at Uber.
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How Seattle Uber Drivers Won the Right to Unionize
with
Jessica Descarieux, the Real News Network
Teamsters' Leonard Smith explains how drivers pushed for a bill that 
grants them collective bargaining power for higher wages since some full-time drivers only earn $3 an hour

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