By Bob Hennelly

On this special Election Day edition of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour we take a look at the latest COVID data and give a shout out to the NewsGuild CWA for their one-day-strike against Gannett. The corporation owns over 200 newspapers and has refused to bargain in good faith while it lays off hundreds of reporters and pays its CEO several million dollars.

We also talk with former Congressman Max Rose (D-11) about his fight to reclaim the House seat representing Staten Island and portions of Brooklyn from Rep. Nicole Malliotakis who voted against the certification of President Biden in the midst of the Jan. 6 Insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Rose discusses his work with unions to head off a Trump-era initiative to downsize the nation’s Veterans Administration healthcare system that was so essential to rural and urban communities during the pandemic. 

In part two of the show, it’s time to vote like our lives depended on it! We hear from Ryan Delgado, the New York State AFL-CIO chief of staff and political director, on why the stakes are so high in these mid-terms for the union movement and essential workers and their families who paid such a heavy price during COVID. Delgado also offers practical advice on how to make sure you get to vote even if your name has been dropped from the voting rolls or shifted to another district as a consequence of redistricting. 

Finally, labor historian and union consultant Joe Wilson discusses how corporate control and consolidation of the news media and the demise of local journalism feeds into the rise of authoritarianism and white supremacy as manifested by the Trump MAGA movement. 

Wilson charts the recent radical roll back of reproductive rights for women by the Trump stacked Supreme Court as a clear sign of  our nation’s troubling trajectory on the eve of the midterms.