Dr. Joe Wilson and Larry Hamm, founder of the People's Organization for Progress, recap May Day's dynamic American rebirth even as SCOTUS demolishes the 1965 Voting Rights Act and Louisiana delays a primary that was already underway.
State Republican legislators below the Mason-Dixon line race to erase districts currently represented by Black Democrats to restore the unapologetic white supremacy of Jim Crow that SCOTUS has greenlighted by championing partisanship over representative democracy.
Meanwhile, the Trump junta's anti-union tactics that stripped a million federal workers of their collective bargaining rights are being replicated at St. John's University, in Queens, New York, where the cleric that runs the college is seeking to break the faculty union that's been in place since 1970.
Bob spoke with Chris Denny, professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies and president of the Faculty Association AAUP American Association of University Professors. He was joined by Sophie Bell, professor of Core Studies, rhetoric, American literature, and race, ethnicity, and culture.
Denny and Bell trace the Catholic Church's embrace of the union movement going back to Pope Leo XIII, who in 1891 issued his landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum that affirms the right of working people to form unions as the most effective means to uphold the dignity of work and a living wage that can support a family.
That support for the trade union movement has been more recently reaffirmed by Pope Francis and his successor Pope Leo XIV.
According to the Chief Leader, the St. John's faculty unions "filed charges with the Public Employees Relations Board April 13, two months after university leadership alerted the union covering over 1,100 faculty members that it was no longer recognized."
Now, Denny and Bell are looking for grassroots support and appear to be getting it as they battle to preserve their unions that are such an integral part of the university’s success story.
In the second hour, Bob spoke with UFT President Micheal Mulgrew who explained why the nation's public school teachers were front and center at local May Day events in all 50 states asserting that both democracy and public education were both under attack by the Trump administration.
Mulgrew laid out his union’s Albany agenda that includes ending the Cuomo era pension rollbacks that reduced benefits for newer hires creating the kind of tiered workforce imposed historically on the UAW and US Post Office workforces in a generation of givebacks. Also key to the union is ensuring New York City gets the state foundational aid needed to help cover the real costs of educating the 100,000 estimated public school students who experience homelessness sometime during the school year.
We closed with a candid conversation from Jonathan Smith, who last year was elected to lead the 200,000 member national American Postal Workers Union after leading the New York Metro APWU since 2012.
Smith flagged the ongoing threat from corrupt privatization schemes to quality universal mail service to rural, suburban and urban communities as required in the US Constitution.
The APWU leader sounded the alarm about an unconstitutional executive order signed by President Trump last month to have the US Post Office take charge of voting by mail including denying prospective voters ballots if they are not on a federally approved voter list.
“If implemented, the executive order would inject chaos into our elections, block eligible American citizens from voting, undermine voter privacy, and expose election officials and others to criminal prosecution simply for doing their jobs,” according to the Brennan Center, an independent, nonpartisan law and policy organization that works to reform, revitalize, and defend our country’s systems of democracy and justice.
