Carol Pier, Human Rights Watch senior labor rights and trade researcher

Gay Seidman, University of Wisconsin Professor of Sociology

Julia Perkins, Coalition of Immokalee Workers

Elana Guiney, Political Coordinator, Oregon AFL-CIO

Steve Witte, United Farm Workers

Michael B., Carpenters 24/7, and Hilary, IBEW Local 48, Cross-Trade Solidarity

Sean Benjamin, freelance journalist, UNITE HERE Local 2

Bhairavi Desai, New York Taxi Workers’ Alliance
Kevin Pest, Portland Public Schools Custodian, SEIU Local 503

Patrick Nolen and Julio Vasquez, Sisters of the Road Civic Action Group

North Carolina sanitation worker, U.S. Social Forum

Kent Wong, UCLA Center for Labor Education and Research

Gary Brodowicz and Julia Getchell, Portland State University Chapter, American Association of University Professors

Brooke Jacobson, Portland State University Faculty Association, American Federation of Teachers

Jim Lardner, Co-author, Up to Our Eyeballs: How Shady Lenders and Failed Economic Policies Are Drowning Americans in Debt

Jill Friedberg, Filmmaker, Un Poquito de TantaVerdad (A Little Bit of So Much Truth)

LC Hansen, President, National Association of Letter Carriers,
Branch 82

Jeremy Bishop, Executive Director, Pride At Work

Sabrina Gogol, bicyclist, activist, radical, and AFSCME
member

Stephen Boykewich, Media Director, New Orleans Workers’
Center for Racial Justice 

Franklin Torrence, Allen Bradley, Glenna Swinford, &
Robert Whiteside, Bargaining Committee members, UAW Local 3520 (“the
Freightliner Five”)

Salma Mirza, University of North Carolina, and Prairie
Wolfe, University of Montana, student activists

Nik Theodore, Director of the Center for Urban Economic Development, University of Illinois

Arthur Stamoulis, Director, Oregon Fair Trade Campaign

Barbara Dudley, Professor of Political Science, Portland State University

David, Tony Hulk, & Roger Moore, Street Roots vendors

Israel Bayer, Director, Street Roots

Romeo Sosa, Executive Director, VOZ Workers’ Rights Education Project

Susan Quinn, Author of Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a cast of thousands made high art out of desperate times

Adrienne Suffin, SEIU Local 1000

Scott Moore, Defend Oregon

Barbara Byrd, Secretary-Treasurer, Oregon AFL-CIO

Misty Cumbie, Portland Restaurant Workers’ Association

An interview with Jana K. Lipman, Author, Guantanamo: A Working-Class History Between Empire and Revolution.   Guantánamo has become a symbol of what has gone wrong in the War on Terror. Yet Guantánamo is more than a U.S. naval base and prison in Cuba, it is a town, and our military occupation there has required more than soldiers and sailors--it has required workers. This revealing history of the women and men who worked on the U.S.

Jeff Tyrrel, member of Teamsters Local 81 and striking dockworker of Oak Harbor Freight Lines

Nelson Lichtenstein, Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara (excerpt from Jenka Soderberg's interview)

And songs from the Seattle Labor Chorus's new CD, Ring It In! Songs of Peace and Justice for the Holiday Season

Gary Brodowicz, Past President, and Michele Gamburd, Vice President for Collective Bargaining, Portland State University Chapter, American Association of University Professors

Hildegard Hoeller, part-time guide, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, organizing with UAW 2110

Radical scholars of political economy George Caffentzis & Silvia Federici of the Midnight Notes Collective join us live in-studio.  How are the economic crisis and bailouts a response to class struggle?  What does capital hope to achieve with this crisis?  How does the crisis hit people doing care work?  What kinds of resistance will be most effective now? Thirty vital minutes!

What kind of election counts every non-vote as a "No" vote?  A union election for airline or railroad workers under the Railway Labor Act.   As Delta and Northwest merge to form the world's largest airline, a combined unit of twenty-one thousand flight attendants find their chance at union representation hangs upon a wildly skewed process overseen by a little-known board.  Simone Cerasa, the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut State Chair of the Delta Association of Flight Attendants, CWA, joined us to lay out some key issues and challenges of organizing under the RLA, and how a new appointment by President Obama to the National Mediation Board could make all the difference.

Tonight's show is about long, hard struggles.  In the first half, David Ayala joins us to trace the decades of brave organizing by working people in El Salvador to achieve this year's FMLN's presidential victory.  

And in the second half, Jeff Tyrrell returns with the latest on the workers at Oak Harbor Freight Lines, now engaged in their own long, difficult struggle for a fair contract.   For more information on the Teamsters' Oak Harbor struggle visit: www.oakharborteamsters.com

Why isn't the stimulus solving the economic crisis for working families?  Why is Wall Street so anxious to reassure us that things are looking up again?  Should working people be worried about deficit spending?  And what simple policy change could eliminate Social Security's funding problem?

Tonight’s show features two stories close to home that affect the livelihoods of many Portlanders.

"How could you cut a Bureau in half?" Massive job cuts at the City of Portland

 “We are in the middle of a whirlwind of struggle and opportunities for fundamental change abound; it’s just a question of how we use them.”

Eyptian Portlander Ahmad Raslan lays out the crescendo of events that brought eight million people into the streets and toppled the Mubarak regime last week:

"The working-class people in many many cities, for the last three days, they started going on strikes.  There was a threat of civil disobedience across the entire Egypt.  And I think that's what made the military at the end tell the president 'We can't afford this.  If working-class people start getting into this from a strike perspective and from a civil disobedience perspective, then we have to end it.' And they ended it."