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Surprisingly we settled on nearly all good news stories this week, so if you’re looking for some positivity, this one’s for you. After an update on the ongoing national strike movement, we discuss the school strike in LA. 60,000 workers shutting down the second largest city in the country’s schools and making big wins that will help the whole community. Also this week, two more Trader Joe’s locations joined the union movement, one on each coast. Indian farmers have made more wins at the state level after more impressive protests. The RMT reached a deal with Network Rail after 9 months of strikes and made big wins the Tories claimed were impossible. Finally, Starbucks workers demonstrated their organization and resolve by shutting down 100 stores across the country and released their national contract demands.

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Graduate student workers have been organizing in droves across the country, fighting back against abysmal wages and impossible working conditions. Recently, the workers at Temple University won a hard fought strike that lasted over a month.  While we have covered many graduate worker strikes on the show, the level of repression unleashed by the university administration to try and crush the strike was truly unprecedented, which only made the new contract the workers won even more impressive. We’re so excited this week to be joined by Alex Paparella, a PhD student and strike captain with TUGSA, to discuss their strike, their new contract, and the state of labor organizing in academia.

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HL Worker Support Fund –  https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/sued-for-union-organizing

News just refuses to stay confined to one week periods, so this episode of Work Stoppage is mostly follow ups. We bracket the episode with good news, starting out congratulating the grad student workers of the University of Chicago on their landslide union win. Next we discuss the flagrant retaliation against the brand new union by the bosses at TCGPlayer. In France, Macron has moved to ram his pension reform through by decree, and now only the working class can force him to back down by taking matters into their own hands. We also follow up with the UAW elections, where the Curry team refuses to concede. Violence has broken out on the picket lines at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as two workers were sent to the hospital after being attacked by scabs. A new report shows how the companies using rampant child labor have managed to get some  of their funding from public pension funds. Workers at Caterpillar signed a major new 6 year contract, we break down the bottom line. Finally, workers at Bandcamp have formed a union to preserve working conditions at the one company that actually pays artists for their work.

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Follow the pod at instagram.com/workstoppage, @WorkStoppagePod on Twitter,  John @facebookvillain, and Lina @solidaritybee

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The rail systems of the western world seem to be collapsing all at once. As the railroad workers have been telling us here in the US for years, capitalist ownership of the railroads has hollowed out the safety of the networks and left them in a dangerous condition. We saw this illustrated all too clearly in Greece, where a recent tragic collision between a passenger train and a freight train left over 50 people dead. We decided to sit down and discuss the recent upsurge in rail workers fighting back against decades of negligence. We discuss the ways the disaster in East Palestine, the 6 month long rolling strikes by rail workers in the UK, and the massive country wide mass strikes organized in Greece in the aftermath of this most recent tragedy are connected, and how our organizing should respond. 

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After some discussion of how refreshing seeing union leaders refuse to take shit from politicians is, this week’s episode of Work Stoppage starts by continuing our look into the expansion of child labor in the US, this time in Arkansas. Next we discuss the mass strike in France to fight against the attack on workers by the neoliberal Macron regime. We also do very quick follow ups on the status of the strike at Temple University and the UAW elections. Faculty at Rutgers voted overwhelmingly last week to authorize what would be the first strike in the schools history. Meanwhile, Duke is trying a novel strategy against the grad student union drive there: claiming grad students aren’t workers and shouldn’t be allowed to unionize anywhere. Democrats in Michigan repealed right to work last week, which is good! But they also refused to allow teachers to strike, which is very bad! Workers across the country continue to face wage theft in the form of being misclassified as “managers” in order to use a loophole to avoid paying overtime. Workers at TCGPlayer became the first unionized employees at eBay this week, despite the company’s union busting. Finally, we discuss the disgusting attack on municipal union retirees in New York City, with workers being stripped of the healthcare they earned after decades of public service.

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Follow the pod at instagram.com/workstoppage, @WorkStoppagePod on Twitter,  John @facebookvillain, and Lina @solidaritybee

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Now, at first glance you may be wondering why your favorite communist labor podcast is doing an episode on two animated kids movies. But that’s why we encourage you to take another look at these two classic examples of Marxist cinema. With wholesome messages of working class unity, struggle against oppression, and never trusting Americans, these two films are examples of how complex ideas can be presented simply. 

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Labor never stops, and neither do we, it’s another episode of Work Stoppage. We start off with a quick congratulations to the workers at REI in Cleveland who won their union election last week.  We then discuss the results of the UAW election runoff, where the presidential vote remains too close to call. We check in on the situation in Sri Lanka, where the government is trying to sell out the country to the IMF and workers aren’t having it. New horrors continue to come out of the rail disaster in East Palestine, this time we learn that Norfolk Southern execs received bonuses specifically for making trains less safe. Recent revelations of child labor at companies like Hyundai and Packers Sanitation have prompted major media investigations into the practice and found it to be rampant across the country. Laborers in Portland struck last week after their employer, owned by French giant Saint Gobain, tried to force them to work 13 twelve-hour shifts in two weeks. The grad student organizing wave continues to explode, we check in on drives at Minnesota, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Duke. Finally, we discuss the recent major legal ruling against Starbucks’ illegal union busting campaign.

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This week we were honored to be joined by Luna Oi to educate us on how the trade union system works in Vietnam. We’ve talked about union struggles all over the world, from the US and UK to South Africa, to South Korea and many countries in Latin America. But this is the first time we have been able to speak with someone who has experienced the labor movement in a socialist country. We discuss the history of the labor movement in Vietnam, the relationship between unions and the government, the protections afforded all workers under Vietnamese labor law, how strikes work (and boy do they work!) in a socialist system, and the many rights and benefits that workers in Vietnam have won over the years. It was very inspiring to hear about the incredible progress workers have made since the victory of their revolution and we are so excited to share this conversation with all our listeners.

Check out Luna’s channel, where she has tons of incredible videos on socialism, Vietnamese history, the global class struggle, and even delicious Vietnamese food! Luna can be found on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@Lunaoi.  You can also check out her work on Means TV, and follow her on Twitter at @LunaOi_VN

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A quick update on the Temple grad workers strike, which continues after they voted down the administration’s last contract offer, gets us started this week. We also discuss the awful history of worker treatment and the way companies like Rich Products use drug tests to keep working from reporting injuries. A restaurant owner in Ohio was recently caught more or less enslaving his workforce. Mental health workers in Hawaii recently ended a 6 month strike, fighting Kaiser Permanente’s policy of intentional understaffing. English language voice actors in the anime dubbing industry face an uphill battle for union recognition against Crunchyroll’s near total monopoly. UK junior doctors have joined the mass workers movement, declaring their intention to strike over wages so low they can’t afford to eat. Amazon workers at the company’s air hub in Inland Empire have kept up the fight for a union, and won some important short term victories. Lastly, we get in some discussion of the UAW election as the union finally raised its strike pay to $500 a week, after reversing an earlier vote at last year’s convention that would have done the same.

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If you’re not a patron you can get the full episode by visiting patreon.com/workstoppage and support us with $5 a month.

As a coda to our recent series on allegations of corruption and mob involvement in the Teamsters, with a special focus on the career of Jimmy Hoffa, we decided that we couldn’t skip out on some of the media portrayals of Hoffa’s story. First we check out Danny Devito’s 1992 biopic, Hoffa, starring Jack Nicholson. Then we discuss Martin Scorsese’s recent 3.5 hour megafilm, The Irishman. For both films, we discuss the ways they track with the real story of Hoffa’s life and disappearance, and the ways they diverge from reality. We compare and contrast the portrayals of Hoffa by Nicholson and Al Pacino, and the two films’ different visions of the union leader. While we do provide a summary of each film before we discuss it, we definitely recommend checking out the recent Hoffa series in order to get all the background before diving into this one.

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Follow the pod at instagram.com/workstoppage, @WorkStoppagePod on Twitter,  John @facebookvillain, and Lina @solidaritybee

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