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Call center workers employed by Maximus went on strike at four locations—in Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Virginia—this Tuesday, November 1. Maximus is a federal contractor, and during the open enrollment period workers there handle a non-stop stream of high-stakes calls from people trying to navigate the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, and Medicaid systems, but they have been pushed to their limit. As stated in a Twitter thread posted by Call Center Workers United, "We’ve been saying for years: during ACA open enrollment, we’re dealing with constant back-to-back calls. Some frustrated callers become abusive and subject us to racist and sexist slurs. We’re paid wages so low it’s nearly impossible to support a family. We’ve had enough. We’re striking for THREE SIMPLE DEMANDS: 1) $25/hr starting wage, 2) Time to breathe between calls, 3) Meaningful protection from abusive callers." In this urgent mini-cast, we talk to Tiffany Murray, a worker at the Maximus call center in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, about the conditions that have pushed her and her coworkers to hit the picket line, and about what others around the country can do to help.
Post-Production: Jules Taylor
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Less than two weeks in, Elon Musk's $44 billion purchase of Twitter is already mired in a web of controversies. The CEO of multiple underwhelming companies moved quickly to fire Twitter's board and crown himself the company's supreme authority. Mass layoffs, a half-baked plan to start a subscription service, and a witch hunt for any users who dare impersonate him have been on the top of the new Twitter king's agenda. The regime has been hit back by a class action lawsuit, spooked advertisers, and the razor-sharp commentary of a bewildered Twitterati. While some may take satisfaction in beholding the spectacle of a man entangled in his own hubris, the implications of Musk's takeover of one of the most important and centralized media platforms in existence are wide-reaching. What happens once we can no longer verify Twitter sources? Who benefits from an algorithm reconfigured to boost subscribers over regular users? How will these changes to the platform shape the ability of independent journalists to communicate to the public, and ultimately affect our politics? Tech critic Paris Marx joins Maximillian Alvarez and Mel Buer to discuss the debacle unfolding before our eyes.
Paris Marx is a Canadian technology writer whose work has been published by NBC News, CBC News, Jacobin, and Tribune, among many others. Paris is also a PhD candidate at the University of Auckland and the host of the critical technology podcast Tech Won’t Save Us.
Post-Production: Jules Taylor
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The soul of the labor movement is the fight for democracy in and outside of the workplace—and, from the shop floor to the ballot box, organizers, volunteers, and rank-and-file workers with UNITE HERE are putting everything they have into that fight. Even in the midst of a deadly pandemic that hit the service and hospitality industries especially hard, union members with UNITE HERE hit the pavement in record numbers ahead of the 2020 general elections. As Harold Meyerson notes in The American Prospect, UNITE HERE members canvassed "more precincts than any other organization on the Democratic side of the ledger that year. Talking to well over a million voters in Vegas, Reno, Phoenix, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, they played a key role in Joe Biden’s victory and in the Democrats winning control of the Senate. This year," ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, "they have even more members knocking on doors than they did two years ago." As working people face an increasingly unbearable cost-of-living crisis, as the right continues to attack abortion rights (and voting rights, and workers' rights, and LGBTQ people, and teachers, etc.), as basic human needs like healthcare, housing, and clean water are put farther out of reach for the poor and working classes, as more people give up on a political system they feel gave up on them a long time ago, the fight for a better society is happening at the grassroots level. In this special panel, recorded a week before the 2022 midterm elections, we talk with three UNITE HERE members—Maggie Acosta (Arizona), Bryan Villarreal-Vasquez (Nevada), and Sheila Silver (Pennsylvania)—about their tireless canvassing efforts in battleground states, what they're hearing from voters, and what the struggle for democracy means to them and their union.
Post-Production: Jules Taylor
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In a special panel co-hosted by The Real News and Haymarket Books, Railroad Workers United members speak about their struggle, the situation on the rails, and how you can get involved in efforts to support them.
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20 formerly incarcerated people in Florida are facing charges for exercising their right to vote in the 2020 election. In 2018, a ballot referendum in Florida passed Amendment Four, granting certain former felons the right to vote. While the victory of Amendment Four was celebrated by many, lawmakers in Florida had other plans. A law was passed through the state legislature which stipulated that former felons eligible to vote under Amendment Four could only do so if they paid all their outstanding fines and fees. This legal loophole is now being used to charge formerly incarcerated Floridians with voter fraud. Florida State Representative Anna Eskamani joins The Real News editor-in-chief Maximillian Alvarez and Rattling the Bars co-host Mansa Musa to explain what's behind this latest attack on voting rights.
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The wave of grassroots worker organizing is spreading to different industries and businesses around the country, including those that have notoriously resisted any and all unionization efforts in the past. The Home Depot, the single largest home improvement retail company in the US, is one of those businesses, and there is a union drive underway as we speak at a store in Philadelphia. As Johan Furman writes at More Perfect Union, "On Monday, September 19, workers filed a petition to organize a union among 276 workers at a Home Depot in northeast Philadelphia. If successful, the independent union would be the first at the home repair chain, the fifth-largest private employer in the U.S." We talk to Vince Quiles, who's worked at the northeast Philly store for five years and is one of the worker-organizers leading the drive to become the first unionized Home Depot location in the country.
Post-Production: Jules Taylor
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Our contemporary political discourse is rife with claims that certain forms of art, literature or thought are poisoning our culture and advancing the decay of civilization. The right has whipped itself into a frenzy over "critical race theory" bogeymans and campaigns to ban any books that contain even a passing acknowledgment of LGBTQ life. While certainly less zealous, the left can be sanctimonious and counterproductive when it comes to genres and works of fiction we deem politically pernicious—or just bad. Of course, none of this is new. Pop culture has been a terrain of political struggle for about as long as pop culture has been around. In her forthcoming book, Dangerous Fictions, Art for the End Times host Lyta Gold traces the history of these "cultural" conflicts and the deeper social fissures they belie.
Studio: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Brent Tomchik
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On Oct. 6, President Biden announced an official pardon of anyone incarcerated on federal charges of simple possession of marijuana. Biden framed his pardon in terms of correcting the historic injustices meted out against people of color by the War on Drugs, but is it enough? The pardon itself affects about 6,500 people, but does not necessarily guarantee that every one will have their records expunged. Furthermore, countless other people remain incarcerated, on probation or parole, or with criminal records for cannabis-related charges. To talk more about what else should be done, Rattling the Bars speaks with Taya Graham and Stephen Janis, co-hosts of the The Real News program Police Accountability Report. Stephen and Taya make a case for the full legalization of cannabis, which remains a federal Schedule 1 drug, pointing out that so long as cannabis laws are passed unevenly, it will be the poor and people of color who pay the price.
Read the transcript here: https://therealnews.com/its-time-to-legalize-marijuana
Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
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Journalist Oren Ziv joins The Marc Steiner Show to explain how the Israeli government is sending a message of defiance against the international community with its continued attacks on Palestinian NGOs.
Post-Production: Brent Tomchik
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Read the full transcript and show notes of this interview here: https://therealnews.com/
"On the morning of Oct. 1... almost 500 union members from three United Steel Workers (USW) locals at WestRock’s Mahrt Mill paper mill in Cottonton, Alabama, voted to reject a second contract offer from the company," Jacob Morrison recently reported for The Real News Network. "The refusal to ratify WestRock’s 'last, best, and final' offer came as a result of the company insisting on removing contract language pertaining to what the workers there call 'penalties' for long hours. Members resoundingly rejected this contract, even though it included an unheard-of $28,000 ratification bonus—increased from an already staggering offer of $20,000, which workers already rejected on Sept. 21." Workers at WestRock's Mahrt Mill paper mill have been locked out by the company since early October and say they can't be bought off with bonuses for signing a contract that will ensure they have even less time for life outside of work. In this special guest-hosted episode, Morrison speaks with Mahrt Mill workers from the picket line about the lockout and their fight to get their lives back.
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