Listen: Striking Reporters! Farm Workers Under Threat! Barber on the Moral Imperative!

Democrat and Chronicle strikers call out Gannett and demand a fair contract.

Thanks for reading! If you value this reporting and would like to help keep Work-Bites on the job, please consider donating whatever you can today. Work-Bites is a completely independent 501c3 nonprofit news organization dedicated to our readers — and we need your support!

By Bob Hennelly

On this episode of the Moral Monday Labor Radio Hour, Rev. Dr. William Barber frames the 2024 moral imperative; North America’s farm workers speak out; and the News Guild fights to save local news in Rochester.

Last week, we did a live remote from New Haven Connecticut at Rev. Dr. William Barber’s Center for Public Theology and Public Policy Conference at Yale University which asked what are the moral and spiritual issues of the 2024 Presidential Election? In Part I of this week’s show, Barber answers that question.

Through the 2024 general election, in partnership with the Poor People’s Campaign, we will explore the connections between our nation’s obscene military expenditures, the climate crisis, the exploitation of labor, and the soft violence of wealth concentration and inequality, which results in poverty now being the fourth-leading cause of death in America — the wealthiest nation on earth. 

Despite the unprecedented wealth at the top of our society, we see a predatory for-profit healthcare system that’s the most expensive in the world with the poorest outcomes, especially for the one-third of the nation’s families who work but struggle each week to get by. In a cruel and unjust irony this includes the ranks of the millions of essential workers we hailed as heroes during COVID, and whose occupational deaths the power structure ignores.

In 2024, the good news and the challenge is — we know what works, because during COVID the federal government expanded the Child Tax Credit and  lifted millions of children out of poverty, only to throw them back into poverty a year later when Congress rolled it back.

The even better news is that a revived American labor union movement reminds us of the tremendous power we have when we have the courage to take collective action, as workers, as voters, to reshape our world in a fashion that uplifts and sustains the planet and everybody on it.

In this episode, we  visit with Fabiola Ortiz-Valdez, director of Organizing for Food Chain Workers Alliance  and Gabriel Allahdua, an activist based in Canada with Justice for Migrants and the author Harvesting Freedom: The Life of a Migrant Farmer in Canada. We explore how throughout North America hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants are employed by a food production system that uses their ambiguous legal status to exploit them economically, while putting the workers and their families health at risk.

In the second half of the show, we get a strike update from members of the NewsGuild CWA who are entering their second week of their strike at Rochester's Democrat and Chronicle, one of  dozens of local newspapers owned by Gannett, the conglomerate that also publishes USA Today. We will hear from reporters Justin Murphy and Gary Craig about how Gannett’s business model is helping to accelerate the demise of local newspapers, which historically have been the only effective mechanism the public can hold our government and corporations accountable. 

Listen to the whole show below: