By Bob Hennelly

On this week’s episode of the Stuck Nation Labor RadioHour, we hear from Kelly Smith, with the New York State Poor Peoples Campaign and Rachel Dawn Davis from the New Jersey Poor Peoples Campaign about rallies on  March 2, in Albany and Trenton, as well as is dozens of other state capitals around the country as part of a mass mobilization of low-wage voters for 2024. 

With the Iowa and New Hampshire contests behind us, the narrative is fixated entirely on former President Trump and President Joe Biden. What’s missing is any discussion of the actual circumstance of the American people who have just come through a once-in-a-century mass death event that killed 1.1 million Americans leaving millions more with longterm health challenges caught in a profit-driven healthcare system that continues to fail them.

While beltway Democrats insist Biden has delivered on the economy data from the United Way and their ALICE project — that stands for Asset Limited-income constrained but employed — document that in New York State 44 percent of the population either live below poverty or struggle month to month to cover the basis. In New Jersey it’s 37 percent, yet in both states when you look even closer there are counties where a majority of the households are struggling.

For labor, our challenge is to make the 2024 campaign about the issues and challenges these families face — who, as the Rev. Dr. William Barber so often points out, add up to about 85 million potential voters — a third of the electorate historically gets left out of the political conversation that fixates  only on the “middle class.”

In the second half of our get together we  get briefed by Beverly Quinn, the president of UAW Local 8888, which represents close to 1,000 Atlantic City casino workers, about her union’s righteous battle to end smoking in New Jersey’s casinos, which will be the subject of a critical State Senate hearing in Trenton. Quinn describes how the major pushback against workplace smoke in Atlantic City is part of a growing national movement by gaming workers who don’t want to be forced to gamble their health away just to keep their job. The Local 8888 leader reflects on what the UAW’s revival under newly elected President Shawn Fain has meant to her non-auto rank and file.

Listen to the whole show below:

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