New York Says $15 and a Union on 4/15

On April 15th Low-wage workers in NYC and more than 200 cities across the country  and more world wide held the biggest-yet day of action in their Fight for $15 campaign . What started with fast food workers in NYC on Nov. 2012 
has spread to home care and child care workers, retail, adjunct professors, and more, with ever-growing numbers of participants. and scattered reports of stores closed by the strike, at least temporarily. This organizing comes against a backdrop of stagnating wages, chronic unemployment. and 
underemployment. As many as half of workers in some low-wage industries are receiving some form of public assistance. Workers tell stories of struggling to pay rent and arrange child care, and even face sleep inequality. And the organizing is having an effect. Walmart and McDonald's and other major chains  recently announced wage increases are due to pressure from workers and in an effort to shut down further organizing. But workers participation on the April 15th actions proves that they are continuing  to organize in increasing numbers and arenas of struggle.
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Nobel Prize Economist Joseph Stiglitz on 
the Dangers of the Trans-Pacific Partnership

"The TPP proposes to freeze into a binding trade agreement many of the worst features of the worst laws in the TPP countries, making needed reforms extremely difficult if not impossible." Stiglitz highlights how this trade agreement threatens our jobs, health, communities and environment. Meanwhile, Congress is moving to "fast track" approval of the controversial TPP agreement without public hearings, no floor debate, no amendments - no civic engagement whatsoever.The stakes are too high to allow back room negotiations. If passed, the TPP would be the largest trade deal in history, covering 792 million people and about 40% of the world's economy.
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Teach the Children Well: The Battle for Public Education
featuring
Diane Ravitch, one of the foremost authorities on education in the U.S., former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education, “whistle-blower extraordinaire,” author of the best-selling The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools and other notable books on education history and policy — incisive, comprehensive looks at today’s American public school system that argue against those who claim it is broken and beyond repair; an impassioned but reasoned call to stop the privatization
movement that is draining students and funding from our public schools.
 
Governor Cuomo manipulated the state budget, holding up its passage, until it included the hugely unpopular and anti-worker
practice of pegging teachers tenure and evaluations to standardized tests grade results.  While  dropped from inclusion in the budget the Governors desire to see the proliferation of charter schools remains a mainstay on his educational agenda.  These issues have been  been heating up ever since Pres. Bush’s No Child Left Behind plan, but especially since the roll out of Race to The Top and the Common Core State Standards so Building Bridges decided to
tackle these issues with with Diane Ravitch, who infuses research,
about the recent history of education policy reform, the strategies used for fighting back against these policies, and who proposes solutions that work to create sustainable, equitable, anti-racist, democratic and meaningful public education.  Our conversation with Diane Ravitch is for anyone interested in an “insider’s look” and leading a resistance or forming an organization towards reclaiming our public schools and reclaiming the public narrative around education policy.  

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Liberato Restaurant Tries To Silence Workers
With Federal Racketeering, “RICO” Suit
with
.  Omar Taveras, former Liberato worker
.  Mahoma Lopez, Laundry Workers Center representative
.  Ria Julien, workers’ attorney

Liberato Restaurant workers joined by community supporters and
workers’ rights advocates, such as the grassroots workers’ rights
organization the Laundry Workers Center continue to exercise their
right to protest against wage and hour theft, sexual harassment and
verbal abuses, despite Liberato Restaurants’ attempts to silence them.  Liberato, in an unprecedented action has brought a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (“RICO”) lawsuit accusing the workers of extortion.  Liberato server Maggy Andres, said  “we are here today demanding what we are owed. The RICO case is an attempt to silence us, and it will not work. Liberato stole our money and we demand what we are owed by the law and better conditions in our workplace. Until that happens, we will be out here demanding justice for ourselves, our co-workers, and all exploited workers
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Remembering the Triangle Fire
with 
Sophia Henderson Holmes

Poet Sophia Henderson Holmes reads from her epic poem
commemorating the lives of those who died at the Triangle Fire.
The poem itself serves as well as a tribute to Sophia herself, who
has since passed on but has left us her stirring words and the
challenge to organize for workers' rights.
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Strike Back ! Using the Militant Tactics of Labor's Past to Reignite Unionism Today
featuring
Joe Burns

In his books Reviving the Strike and Strike Back labor Lawyer Joe Burns argues that if the American labor movement is to rise again, it will not be as a result of electing different politicians, the passage of legislation, or improved methods of union organizing. Rather, workers will need to rediscover the power of the strike. Not the ineffectual strike of today, where employees meekly sit on picket lines waiting for scabs to take their jobs, but the type of strike capable of grinding private and public sector employers to a halt often with the solidarity of community and labor alliances. This is what happened in the strike waves when private sector unionism grew exponentially in the 1930’s – 1940’s and during the 1960s and 1970s, when  teachers, sanitation workers and more than a million public employees rose up to demand collective bargaining rights in one of the greatest upsurges in labor history.

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When Words Don't Mean What They Say: 
"Right to Work" Laws are Anything but That!
featuring
. Kevin Gundlach, Pres., South Central Labor Federation, Madison, WI
. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Asst. Prof. of History, Loyola University, Co-author with Nelson Lichtenstein, The Right and Labor in America

Wisconsin is the latest State to fall victim  to the right wing anti-union juggernaut. "Right to work" laws destroy unions - that's their real purpose. "Right to work" legislation isn't driven by a groundswell of disgruntled union members chafing under union oppression, but by employers, industry associations and lobbyists.
"Right to work" laws drive down wages for everyone. We'll explore the history of right to work laws, who and what's driving this juggernaut in states across the nation and what is to be done to challenge this race to the bottom.

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The Solitary Confinement of Youth in New York - 
A Civil Rights Violation
Featuring 
Professor Alex Vitale, Member, NY Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
Alexandra Korry, Chairperson, NY Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

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A Free, Free Palestine Remains The Question
featuring 
Jeff Halper, an anthropologist, author of several books on the Israeli-Palestine conflict, lecturer about Israeli politics, and political activist who has lived in Israel since 1973. He is best known as the co-founder and Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.  He is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and the academic boycott of Israel, considering Israel to be engaged in a deliberate campaign of “Judaization” of the Palestinian territories.  He has created a new mode of Israeli peace activity based on nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience in the Occupied Territories, along with international advocacy

Jeff Halper, assess recent developments in Israel/Palestine and prospects for the future of a free, free Palestine, in what is one of the most intractable conflicts on the planet and the fulcrum for all politics in the Middle East. 

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Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica 
with
Prof. Gerald Horne

During the heyday of the U.S. and international labor movements in the 1930s & 1940s,  Ferdinand Smith, the Jamaican-born co-founder and second-in-command of the National Maritime Union, stands out as one of the most "if not the most" powerful black labor leaders in the United States.  Smith's active membership in the Communist Party, however, coupled with his bold labor radicalism & shaky immigration status, brought him under continual surveillance by U.S. authorities, especially during the red Scare in the '50s.  Smith was eventually deported to his homeland of Jamaica, where he continued his radical labor & political organizing until his death in 1961.  Horne draws on Smith's life to make insightful connections between labor radicalism & the Civil Rights Movement "demonstrating that the gains of the latter were propelled by the former & undermined by anticommunism".  Moreover, Red Seas uncovers the little-known experiences of black sailors & the contribution to the struggle for labor and civil rights, the history of the Communist Party & its black members, & the significant dimension of Jamaican labor &  political radicalism.

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The Plot to Kill Pensions and a Plan to Save Them 
Featuring
TERESA GHILARDUCCI, Prof. of Economic Policy Analysis, New School for Social Research and author of When I’m Sixty Four

A crisis is brewing for American workers' retirement, due to attack on pensions and the inadequacy of 401k accounts which were designed to replace guaranteed pensions. In response Prof. Ghilarducci is proposing a comprehensive system of reform called the Guaranteed Retirement Account 
and improvements to Social Security.

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The current struggles of public sector workers rights in Wisconsin and around the country has renewed interest in the battle to organize the Memphis City sanitation workers in 1968. This was part of the upsurge of the civil rights movement of the 1960's and also of the mass unionization

of public workers in that decade.

"Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign"
with
Michael K. Honey, Prof. of Ethnic, Gender, and Labor studies, University of Washington, Tacoma

Martin Luther King was in Memphis to add his voice to protests in support of striking sanitation workers - the civil rights movement paralleled with the struggles of organized labor. Professor Honey details the daily evolution of the 
strike and what it meant to Memphis and the larger civil-rights movement. He chronicles the events that led up to that fateful day at the Lorraine Motel, and to larger social change. Honey's analysis of King's role is particularly telling. "King," he writes, "had qualities that allowed him to lead a mass movement that joined working-class people to the middle class through the black church" until his Crucifixion."

Plus Taylor Rogers, a past Pres. of the Memphis Sanitation Workers Union talks about the 1968 Strike which was Dr. King's last struggle and a selection from King's speech at a strike rally.

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The Real Deal: A Green State of the NYS State Message 
  
Howie Hawkins, the recent Green Party candidate for NY Governor, responds to Governor Cuomo’s proposed budget and State of the State address.  Hawkins will also discuss the recent arrest of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and the culture of corruption that dominates the state Capitol.  In addition to the need for ethics reform, Hawkins will discuss Cuomo’s education agenda and attacks on teachers; energy; taxes and fiscal relief for local governments, minimum wage and poverty.

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350,000 Member Strong Union Leader at Forefront of Organizing United Front Against South Africa’s Class Inequalities and “Colonialism of a Special Type”
with 
Irvin Jim, Secretary General, National Union of Metal Workers South Africa (“NUMSA”) 


           “NUMSA, in line with the Freedom Charter demands, has demanded that nationalization of the Reserve Bank, mines, land, strategic and monopoly industries without compensation must take place with speed, if we are to avoid sliding into anarchy and violence as a result of the cruel impact of the continuing Colonialism of a Special Type which breeds poverty, unemployment and extreme inequalities in South Africa today…,” NUMSA General Secretary Irvin Jim  

Jim talks about NUMSA’s advocacy for its members interests against the corporateocracy and the exciting developments with the  Preparatory Assembly of the United Front in South Africa, a possible forerunner of the formation of a workers party, socialist in its orientation, with an eye on 2016 local government elections. NUMSA leadership has criticized the ruling majority party, the African National Congress for failing to take responsibility for South Africa’s growing inequality and the fact that infrastructure, education, water resources and health systems remain unfairly distributed across the societies of South Africa.  

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Greece’s Syriza Party: The Antidote to Europe’s Austerity Disease
with
Kostis Karpozilos, Dept. of History, Columbia University
and
Eric Poulos, Greek-American activist

Greece's parliament has failed to elect a president, which means it must hold a new election a little over two years since the last, which will take  place Jan. 25, with the prospect of a victory for the Syriza party, a political party formed of a coalition of hundreds of left groups, which has emerged as the country's second largest political party.   An upsurge of support for Syriza flows from the economic       turmoil in bankrupt Greece, which received emergency loans from the Troika: The European Union (EU), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – and under the terms of the bailout loans the Greek government has cut back on its public spending, which had propped up much of its economy.  Greece now has an unemployment rate that has surpassed 27 percent, with youth unemployment hovering at around 60 percent, and hundreds of thousands of Greeks have been forced to migrate abroad to survive.  The social state is in shambles, and the government is in the process of selling off key state industries, public lands and utilities.  Kostis Karpozilos , the leading light of a nonsectarian left-wing Greek web site, was interestingly a featured commentator in a recent movie on the 100th anniversary of the Ludlow massacre and the writer and commentator in a movie about the history of Greek American radicals and Eric Poulos, Greek-American activist joins us to talk about the destruction of the Greek economy, the Eurozone and alternative examples of economic development, with an eye towards the Greek anti-austerity Syriza party winning the upcoming general election

Plus
An update with Alexis Tsipras, leader of the left-wing Syriza party in an interview with ch 4 reporter Paul Mason. Tspiras says he wants to renegotiate the Greek bailout and might even be prepared to pull the country out of the eurozone if push comes to shove - so usual terms of politics may not apply.

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Rejuvenating the Workers’ Movement – The Road Forward
featuring 
Prof. 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.   He is currently a professor of sociology, cultural studies, and urban education at the CUNY Graduate Center and has written dozens of books on the U.S. working class. His recent book is The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Workers’ Movement

Prof. Aronowitz reminds us that the use of strikes and other militant strategies was what built the labor movement, and how they are essential to revitalizing the faltering, organized labor organizations.  The strategies and tactics to rekindle 
the growth of the workers’ movements are based in workers banding together across workplaces, across occupations and building bridges from the workplace to linking with community-based  struggles for housing, education, health-care and for human rights and against all forms of discrimination.   
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Workers Demand N.Y.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Enforce Law
featuring 
National Mobilization Against Sweatshops (NMASS)

Yes, the minimum wage went up in N.Y.S. to $8.75/h, but that’s not enough to live on says NMASS and furthermore, too many of N.Y.S’s workers will see no change in Governor Cuomo’s DOL failure to enforce the labor laws. NMASS took their complaints to the DOL and is  threatening to sue  Cuomo and the DOL to enforce minimum wage laws and to process wage theft claims timely.

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The State, Racism & Matters of Black Life
Featuring 
GLEN FORD, executive editor, Black Agenda Report. Ford has been a journalist and political activist – a provider of "information for liberation," as he puts it for over 40 years. Ford created the first syndicated Black radio news magazine, Black World Report, the first syndicated Black news interview program on commercial TV, America’s Black Forum. Ford has served as a White House, Capitol Hill and State Department correspondent and Washington 
Bureau Chief, for Mutual Black Network, was national political columnist for Encore American and Worldwide News. Ford was a founding member of the Washington Association of Black Journalists and a member of the executive committee of the National Alliance of Third World Journalists.
and
TIM WISE, is one of the country’s leading anti-racist writers and activists who lecturers on issues of comparative racism, race and education and racism in the labor market. Wise is the author of six books, including Dear White America: 
Letter to a New Minority. His new book is The Culture of Cruelty: How America’s Elite Demonize the Poor, Valorize the Rich and Jeopardize the Future.

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Congress Lets Big Banks Resume Risky Trades  Rolling Back Financial Reforms Enacted To Prevent Another Financial Crisis
Featuring
Timothy A. Canova Professor of Law and Public Finance, Shepard Broad Law Center, Nova Southeastern University


The big banks attached a measure to must-pass Congressional spending legislation which halts a restriction on the kinds of risky derivatives trading that blew up the US economy in 2007. It allows the banksters to gamble not only with other people’s money but with taxpayer guarantees for their losses. This is only the  beginning of  their planned roll back of financial reforms passed to prevent another financial crisis. Liberal democrats responded by calling for the breaking up the “too big to fail” banks, but is this really enough? Do we need to nationalize banks?           

Plus
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders' Senate speech railed against the big banks' Congressional maneuver easing restrictions on risky derivatives trading and called for breaking up the "too big to fail" big banks. 

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New Yorkers Carry The Torch Lit By The Flames of Ferguson Protests: Rising Up Against Racist Policing!  
featuring 
The families of victims of police murder who tell their stories, expressing our feelings at New Yorkers historic march
plus 
commentary from Dr. William Barber, founder Moral Mondays & North Carolina Chair, NAACP 

Hundreds of thousands, “we the people” across the country, led by families of victims of police murder, Black and Brown youth most vulnerable to racist policing, and a really diverse group of supporters marched against the governmental 
policies, their implementation and the internalized racist attitudes at the heart of the license to kill people of color!  Amidst the anguish felt by the participants over the most recent deaths of people of color, at the hands of  the police the crowds gave promise to pulling together, nationally in a sustained effort to confront racist police policies that give police “the license to kill” Black and Brown!  
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Nationwide, Across Industries, Low-Wage Workers STRIKE, also Calling for Justice for Victims of Police Murder!

Fast-food workers are on the move and they've sparked other low-wage workers to strike for their just deserts.  Fast-food employees in 190 cities, went on strike and they were joined by convenience, dollar store, airport service workers, and home care workers. Low-wage workers across the country are forging bonds and rising up in a mass movement for economic justice.  The workers, on strike for higher wages, better working conditions and to unionize also raised their hands high, chanting "Hands Up, Don't Shoot," "I Can't Breath, I Can't Breath," to show their support for victims of racist police murders.

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Sparked by Police Impunity for Racist Killings, New Yorkers Chanting "Hand Up Don't Shoot" and "I Can't Breathe" with Mock Coffins Held Aloft Take It To The Streets!

Thousands of New Yorkers took to the streets, expressing their anguish over racist police killings of people of color and their anger over police officers Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown and Daniel Pantaleo for the choke-hold strangulation of Eric Garner and their impunity from prosecution. Building Bridges brings you the sounds of protest - from the "die ins" to the blockades of travel arteries all over this city - listen to the stories of family members, thirsting for "justice" for loved ones killed, as a result of racist 
police policies and practices and hear from the broad array of New Yorkers, we the people who are prepared to challenge them.

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