Workers and those aligned with the fight for labor rights now have a new information and organizational tool. The Pacifica Network website has launched its Labor Portal.
Designed through the input of those who produce labor programming for Pacifica sister and affiliate stations, its purpose is three-fold:
- to provide information about the struggles and successes of working people across the country and around the world
- to connect listeners with available labor programming; and
- to facilitate the exchange of ideas and the coordination of resources among program producers.
The portal will bring you labor news—local, national, and international—and will allow you to listen to the labor programming regularly scheduled on Pacifica’s sister and affiliate stations, as well as find federal labor posters for your business. The portal will also host a forum opened to registered users that will support the efforts of program producers who stand with workers in their local communities and in national and international movements for recognition and economic fair-play.
The creation of this portal is a “next step” in Pacifica’s long tradition of faithful labor reporting. Long-time listeners have heard documentaries on the 1934 dockworkers strike that began with the shooting of two union men by the San Francisco police and on early endeavors to organize New York City’s mills “when labor was a dirty word.” Past programs have brought audiences commentary by union officers and civil rights workers from the segregated South of the 1960’s and coverage of the struggles of California farm workers as they organized the grape strike of the 1970’s.
In the 1980’s, examining the labor movement in the aftermath of the 1980 election, Pacifica asked progressive activists Kim Fellner and Michael Linfield, “Is there life after Reagan?” and, in further answer, broadcast the words of Delores Huerta, co-founder and vice-president of the United Farmworkers, who “talked union” in the Reagan age. And, for the last two decades, Pacifica’s programming has followed the growing anti-corporate globalization movement; the ever-necessary emphasis on women’s work and gender bias; and the labor movements of countries around the world: Cuba, Great Britain, France, Peru, Mexico. In tribute to this legacy, the portal will also feature audio links to historic broadcasts selected from the Pacifica Radio Archives.
This new work is just beginning. We launch this Labor Portal with great hope that, emerging from decades in which labor has been vilified, from decades in which private and public unions have suffered, a growing swell of attention and organization can reaffirm labor’s rightful place as the center of economic recovery and a thriving people.