Building Bridges Radio: Your Community & Labor Report

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

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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

Striking Auto Workers Need and Deserve to Win Big! - 27:38  

Striking Auto Workers Need and Deserve to Win Big!
with
JR Baker, President of Power Train Engine UAW Local 774 in Tonawanda, NY
and
Mike Elk, Senior Labor Reporter and founder of Payday Report
and
Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at the University of California

Anyone who understands the need for the United States to reduce its stratospheric levels of economic inequality and to give its workers a boost into the middle class has to be rooting for the United Auto Workers (UAW) members on strike now at General Motors (GM).  The UAW union members organized a strike against GM in an effort to improve wages, reopen idled plants, add jobs and narrow the pay difference between new hires and veteran workers.  Meanwhile GM is pushing its employees to pay a greater portion of their health care costs, and to increase work force productivity and flexibility in factories.

“Striking autoworker President JR Baker said “striking is uplifting because we’re making a stand. We’re not accepting concessions from a company posting billions of dollars of profit. And because we’re all together, there’s safety in numbers. We’re standing up for ourselves in solidarity.”  The UAW union went on strike at G.M., sending nearly 50,000 members at factories across the Midwest and the South to picket lines. Strikers are hoping to make up ground lost since the UAW agreed to two-tier wages in 2007, followed by the Great Recession and the auto bailout, when GM got $50 billion from the taxpayers and even more concessions.  There are also 550 janitorial workers that do sanitation and 'non-strategic' facility work on site that are on strike as well, who haven’t seen a raise in years.  These workers top out at $15.18 an hour and are UAW members within the same local.  GM has hired third-party companies to come in and do sanitation and facility work, so there are now scabs at the work sites as well.The auto industry remains crucial to the economy, counting some 220,000 people who work to manufacture cars. According to the Alliance of Auto Manufacturers, the broader vehicle industry supports 9.9 million jobs and historically accounts for about 3 percent of gross domestic product, so you’d better bet that a win, indeed a big win for the UAW would be a shot of adrenelin for the union movement and it’s up to us to get on board that union train standing in Solidarity Forever! 


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