Listen: Labor Needs a 50 State Organizing Strategy

Strength in numbers. SEIU members rally together. Photo courtesy of SEIU

By Bob Hennelly

On this episode of the Moral Monday Labor Radio Hour with Rev. Dr. William Barber and Bob Hennelly, we are live from SEIU Convention in Philadelphia talking with  George Gresham, president of 1199SEIU, America’s largest healthcare union, about his union’s deep ties to the civil rights movement and how it’s continued to grow even in the south which has historically resistant to the union moment.

Dr. Barber and Gresham explain why 2024 requires a mass mobilization of the nation’s 85 million low-wage voters and the importance of the march and mobilization by the Poor Peoples Campaign  in Washington, DC on June 29.

Dr. Everett Kelley, president of the AFGE, the nation’s largest federal worker union, also joins the conversation and discusses a recent collective bargaining agreement with the TSA uplifting 40,000 aviation security workers. Kelley describes his union’s bold 50 state organizing strategy.

In the second half of the show, we hear from organizer Germaine Evans, a DoorDash gig worker with the  Union of Southern Service Workers and from Ani Halasz, executive director of Long Island Jobs with Justice which is doing so much to support Starbucks workers who are now in the early stages of negotiations with the retail giant.

Listen to the entire show below: