On Strike, Six Months & Counting: Spectrum Cable workers headed from the picket line crossing the Brooklyn Bridges to a massive Rally in Foley Square drawing thousands of supporters from the labor and community movements for social change. They built support  amongst the public for their fight for a fair contract and to save their union, amidst a media whiteout of their historic labor struggle!  
with
IBEW Local 3 strikers and supporters

Some 1,800 members of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 3 have been on strike at Spectrum/Time Warner Cable in New York and New Jersey since March 28, more than six months ago. Since then, only a fraction of the workforce has crossed picket lines, but the company is trying hard to keep up normal operations by using scabs and subcontractors to break the strike and the workers' union..

Spectrum is part of Charter Communications, the second largest cable provider in the U.S. and a telecommunications giant, providing services to roughly 25 million customers in 41 states, two and a half million of which reside in New York. The CEO, Tom Rutledge, who made $98.5 million last year met with Donald Trump in the White House earlier this year, and the company is touted by Trump as a job creator investing in its U.S. workforce. Meanwhile Rutledge’s Charter Communications has hung its workers out to dry:
 
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Knocking on Labor’s Door
Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide
with
Lane Windham, author, Knocking on Labor’s Door; Associate
Director of Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for
Labor and the Working Poor and co-director of WILL Empower (Women Innovating Labor Leadership)

The power of unions in workers’ lives and in the American political system has declined dramatically since the 1970s. In recent years, many have argued that the crisis took root when unions stopped reaching out to workers and workers turned away from unions. But Lane Windham tells a different story. Highlighting the integral, often-overlooked contributions of women, people of color, young workers, and southerners, Windham reveals how in the 1970s workers combined old working-class tools--like unions and labor
law--with legislative gains from the civil and women’s rights movements to help shore up their prospects.


Through close-up studies of workers' campaigns in shipbuilding, textiles, retail, and service, Windham overturns widely held myths about labor’s decline, showing instead how employers united to manipulate weak labor law and quash a new wave of worker organizing.  Recounting how employees attempted to unionize against overwhelming odds, Knocking on Labor's Door dramatically refashions the narrative of working-class struggle during a crucial decade and shakes up current debates about labor's future.

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Puerto Rico: Trapped Amidst the Perilous Winds of Colonialism and Hurricanes

with
Nelson Denis, a former New York State assemblyman, is the author of “War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America’s Colony” and joins us now as we examine Puerto Rico between a rock and a hard place: between
colonialism and hurricanes.
and 

David Galarza, Puerto Rican Independence and labor activist

Puerto Rico is no stranger to crisis. Before Maria’s rampage through the archipelago, Puerto Rico was already in the midst of one of the most devastating financial and socio-political crises in its recent history, with an unaudited $74 billion debt under its belt, $49 billion in pension obligations, and several decades’ worth of illegal bond issuances and trading related to its status as an overly-advertised tax haven. Neoliberal policies such as draconian budget cuts and extreme austerity measures had already been rendered life in Puerto Rico quite precarious. And the whole thing was being overseen and managed simultaneously by Governor Rosselló, an

unelected and antidemocratic Fiscal Control Board, and judge Laura Taylor Swain, all of whom were going back and forth on the country’s fiscal management and debt restructuring processes.  Now, first Irma’s and then Maria’s passing and aftermath have once again brought to light Puerto Rico’s primordial conundrum: colonialism.  Nelson Denis and David Galarza discuss the humanitarian crisis that is exploding in Puerto Rico, the consequences of the Jones Act and “the junta” and how nullification of the Jones Act, cancellation of the multi-billion dollar debt and the implementation of environmentally conscious sustainability planning are imperative for Puerto Rico to rebuild for its native inhabitants. 

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