Building Bridges Radio: Your Community & Labor Report

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

WHO WE ARE

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

Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith & Radical Black Sailors in the United States & Jamaica  

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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Teresa Ghilarducci: The Plot to Kill Pensions and a Plan to Save Them - 27:02  

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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Dr. King and the Memphis City Sanitation Workers Strike - 27:57  

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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A Green State of the NYS State Message vs. A Culture of Corruption -27:41  

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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