Getting Unruly on May Day: Education Workers, Labor Power, and the Fight Ahead

No work.

[explosion] No school.

[explosion] No shopping.

[explosion] There's gonna be rallies, protests, labor actions, work in the community.

And, you know, the question I think really is, what does it take to build the kind of power that can actually meet this political moment? You know, we've been tackling this in a bunch of different ways.

Maybe you heard last week's episode about how South Korean, uh, labor trade unions really contributed to that movement to get martial law rescinded and to, uh, hold that president accountable.

But we're going at it a different way today, right? Because we got May Day coming up, and May Day is not just really about one day, right? It's about the fact that on that day, we can expose all kinds of important contradictions and realities, right? We can reveal what is really going on, and it's a chance to build relationships, organization, courage, trust, and the ability for us to act together when the stakes get high, right? And that really is the center of today's episode.

So first, I'm gonna be talking with three major labor leaders.

Todd Wolfson is president of the AAUP and a national vice president of AFT.

I don't know if y'all saw the article in The New York Times, but AAUP, which by the way, I, uh, full disclosure, I'm on the National Council of AAUP.

You know what I'm saying? [cheering] [air horn] One of the fastest growing labor organizations, and, uh, just a lot of insight and wisdom coming from Todd.

And we have Jessica Tang, who's president of AFT Massachusetts and former president of the Boston Teachers Union, and just a really powerful leader.

Um, and so you're gonna hear from Jessica.

And we got Carl Rosen, who recently retired as general president of UE, which is the, um-United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America.

So these are labor leaders who just have, like, really, I think, you know, they just have been in the trenches, like, in it and have won, you know, battles, and they really understand what it takes in a way that's n-not abstract at all.

And we're starting with higher education and public education because AAUP and AFT have just released a new platform that really pushes back against the right-wing attack on education by offering a positive, broad vision of what higher education can become, right? 'Cause we're not just trying to defend or get back to normal.

We're trying to transform this sector into what it ultimately needs to be, right? And for us, that means free public higher education and an end to student debt.

It means secure jobs, including our contingent faculty and all the faculty who have these, like, you know, weird, tricky contracts.

It involves, of course, a commitment to academic freedom.

We gotta be able to teach the truth.

So they wanna cancel people's ability to talk about history, to talk about race, gender, and all this.

We not with that.

Democratic governance and, of course, fully funded public institutions, and that includes funding, you know, our healthcare and science and all these things we need that have been cut.

And I think this, this fight is really important.

You gotta read the document that just lays out the pillars of this, and we're gonna discuss it in this, in this talk.