Listen: Postcards From Alabama…Making Union History in Montgomery

UAW members at Daimler Truck turned out in record numbers to ratify their historic new contract by 94.5% of the vote. Photo courtesy of the UAW.

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By Bob Hennelly

The Republican Party will hold its national convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin July 15 through 18. A month later, August 19 to 22, the Democratic Party will convene in Chicago. So far, the 2024 Presidential campaign has been entirely about President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump—two elderly white guys.

What’s not being discussed is the deteriorating circumstances of America’s 85 million low-wealth and low-wage voters and their children. What we don’t hear outside of the Biden/Trump horse race is how our profit-driven healthcare system has helped to make poverty the fourth-leading cause of death in America. That’s ahead of homicides—and works out to 800 additional deaths every day that are preventable and avoidable.

Amidst all this unnecessary human misery, the U.S. is spending close to a trillion dollars of borrowed money  annually on a military budget that proliferates death and destruction around the world, while also accelerating the climate crisis.

At the same time, we have had a generation of working families lose ground as wealth concentration and income inequality have reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age.

Nevertheless, we are also witnessing a 21st century labor movement revival with working people claiming their power through collective action. It’s no accident that the union movement has historically found the greatest resistance in the same Southern states that were willing to go to war to preserve institutionalized slavery—a system that lives on in the form of low wages and no benefits for the tens of millions whose work we call essential.

In this edition of the Moral Monday Labor Radio Hour, we’ll have our weekly update from Rev. Dr. William Barber on why he’s got the UAW’s back in Montgomery.

We speak with Jennifer Harris, Senior Health Policy Advisor with Alabama Arise, about just how tough the POST-COVID cutbacks of things like the Expanded Child Tax Credit and Medicaid have hit Alabama’s working families.

We also get an update from  Erin Bates from the United Mine Workers of America who talks about the union’s almost two-year strike against Warrior Met Coal Mines in Alabama. Bates is joined by Pam Garrison, an organizer with the West Virginia Poor People’s Campaign, who's helping to put together the Poor People’s Campaign March and Low-Wage Workers Assembly slated for Washington, D.C. on June 29.

Listen to the entire show below: