Working People

Working People

Working People: A podcast by, for, and about the working class today (now in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network). Working People is a podcast about working-class lives in 21st-century America. In every episode, you'll hear interviews with workers from around the country, from all walks of life. We'll talk about their life stories, their jobs, politics, and families, their joys and hopes and frustrations. Overall, Working People aims to share and celebrate the diverse stories of working-class people, to remind ourselves that our stories matter, and to build a sense of shared struggle and solidarity between workers around the country.

Episodes

February 6, 2026 38 mins
Feb. 3, 2026 marked the three-year anniversary of the Norfolk Southern train derailment and chemical disaster in East Palestine, OH—one of the worst industrial disasters in US history. Over the last three years, residents have been exploited and abandoned by Norfolk Southern, the government, opportunistic politicians, sensationalist media outlets, and self-serving attorneys, but we have not forgotten them. On the three-year an...
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Hundreds of union nurses, federal workers, and local residents gathered outside the Veterans Affairs central office building in Washington, DC, on Jan. 28, to hold a vigil for Alex Pretti and all who have been killed by ICE. The vigil was one of many events organized or co-sponsored by National Nurses United, the nation's largest union and professional association of registered nurses, which has forcefully called for ICE to be...
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On Friday, Jan. 23, around 50,000 people in Minneapolis, MN, engaged in a historic mass strike and day of protest to demand an end to ICE terror and President Trump's federal siege of Minnesota. Then, on Saturday, Jan. 24, an ICE agent shot and killed Alex Pretti, volunteer ICE observer and a registered union nurse who worked for the Veterans Health Administration. In this episode, we speak with Mary C. Turner, a registered nu...
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The state of Minnesota is under siege by our own federal government, and residents—immigrant and US-born alike—are living in fear. With the deployment of over 3,000 federal agents to Minnesota in recent weeks,  this is the Trump administration's largest and most violent so-called "immigration enforcement" operation yet—and with President Trump threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota in response to protests over...
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On Monday, Nov. 24, after more than 1,100 days on strike, Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh members were cheered on by supporters at a rally in downtown Pittsburgh before returning to work at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Even though strikers have returned to work, however, many issues at the center of the strike are still in legal limbo—and their fight for a fair contract is not over. In this episode of Working People, we speak wi...
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Making ends meet in today's economy is difficult enough, but with so many societal crises affecting working people's lives on and off the shop floor—from mass layoffs to untenable costs of living, from an authoritarian federal government to AI and the climate crisis—it can feel all but impossible. What does it mean to have a union job, to be a union member, and to be part of the labor movement in these overwhelming tim...

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Four years after the first Starbucks store in the US unionized in 2021, workers across the country are still facing rampant union busting and still fighting for a first contract with the coffee giant. That is why a supermajority of unionized baristas with Starbucks Workers United recently voted to authorize an Unfair Labor Practice strike, which is set to begin on Thursday, Nov. 13, on "Red Cup Day," in over 25 cities around t...
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Life on college campuses has changed dramatically in the last 10 months. While institutions of higher education continue to reel from the Trump administration's top-down attacks and scramble to adjust, workers on campus say that their universities are simultaneously expanding their own internal repression and surveillance apparatuses to squash dissent. In this episode, we speak with a panel of graduate student workers and unio...
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In September, before the current ceasefire deal was announced, we spoke with two Palestinians in Gaza—Mohamed Abu Tawila (a former English teacher) and his nephew Abdul Rahman (a would-be college student)—about surviving 700 days of genocidal destruction at the hands of Israel's military and with the full backing of the United States. In this critical follow-up episode, we speak once again with Mohamed Abu Tawila from Gaza to get a...

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In this special crossover edition of Working People and The Marc Steiner Show, hosts Maximillian Alvarez and Marc Steiner examine how the "artificial intelligence" (AI) boom is shaping the economy and the impact it is already having—and will continue to have—on working people's lives, livelihoods, and jobs. Alvarez and Steiner speak with two members of a new mutual aid and advocacy group called Stop Gen AI, which forme...

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The federal government shutdown is now in its fourth week. Over 700,000 federal employees have been furloughed, with nearly as many continuing to work without pay, yet there are still no signs that an end to the shutdown is near. "Unlike past presidents, Mr. Trump appears to feel little urgency to strike a deal to reopen the government," Luke Broadwater writes at The New York Times. "Instead, he has used the shutdown, which began O...

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"In Texas, a socialist professor is now in the fight of his life against MAGA's New McCarthyism," scholar and author Bill V. Mullen writes in Jacobin. "Tom Alter, a labor historian and tenured professor of history at Texas State University, was fired from his job on September 10 after a far-right troll doctored a videotape of Alter speaking at a virtual Revolutionary Socialism conference. After viewing the video, university pr...
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In a stunning and massive development, tech giant Microsoft has announced that it is terminating parts of the Israeli military's access to proprietary technology that it was using to conduct mass surveillance and targeting of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. "Microsoft told Israeli officials late last week that Unit 8200, the military's elite spy agency, had violated the company's terms of service by ...

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Last week, The Real News Network published a bombshell interview with two federal whistleblowers working in the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Max spoke with Paul Osadebe and Palmer Heenan, two attorneys in HUD's Office of Fair Housing, about the "chaos" that has upended HUD under the new Trump administration, and the vulnerable Americans who are being systematically abandoned as a result...

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Federal whistleblowers are going public with an emergency message from within the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). According to their formal complaint, under President Trump's administration, "HUD leadership has already violated the law" and taken actions that "will result in legal violations, gross mismanagement, gross waste of funds, and present a specific danger to public health and safety." The complaints were...

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Current and former tech workers with the No Azure for Apartheid coalition continue to disrupt business as usual at Microsoft's global headquarters in solidarity with Palestinians facing a genocide, and in protest of Microsoft's contracts with the Israeli military to provide tech that Israel uses to surveil, kill, and retroactively justify the killing of Palestinians. In this episode of 
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Tech workers at the heart of Microsoft are waging one of the most significant and under-covered labor battles in the US right now. For the last two weeks, members of the No Azure for Apartheid coalition, including current and former tech workers at Microsoft and community allies, have been taking bold, continuing, and escalating actions to disrupt business as usual in solidarity with Palestinians fa...
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Right now, Israel's military is invading and obliterating what remains of Gaza City. After 700 days of genocidal bombing, shooting, forced starvation, and the systematic destruction of schools, hospitals, farms, refugee camps, roads, houses, and the entire infrastructure of civilian life, the Palestinians clinging to life in Gaza City are being exterminated, while others run or limp for their lives with nowhere safe to...

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Every single one of us who considers ourselves part of the labor movement has some real deep, serious, and urgent soul searching to do this Labor Day. After already falling to historically low levels of union density, public and private-sector unions are facing an extinction-level event under the new Trump administration. That is not hyperbole; that is a fact. So the real question is: What the hell are workers, unions,...

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Railroad workers are sounding the alarm about the potentially catastrophic consequences of the proposed mega-merger of two of the nation's Class 1 freight rail companies. "Union Pacific said it would buy smaller rival Norfolk Southern in an $85-billion deal to create the country's first coast-to-coast freight rail operator," Reuters reported in July. "If approved, t...
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