In our very first episode, host Chris Garlock is joined by labor historians Joe McCartin (Georgetown University) and Leon Fink (University of Illinois Chicago, emeritus) for a wide-ranging conversation about key moments in labor history—and what they still tell us today.
We start with Black Tuesday (Oct. 29, 1929) and the Great Depression, tracing how economic crashes repeatedly set back unions—until the New Deal era helped spark a powerful resurgence in industrial organizing. From there, we jump to the Reagan years, as Attorney General Ed Meese urges employers to spy on workers in the name of the “war on drugs,” and the panel connects workplace surveillance to the broader rollback of union power in the 1980s.
Next, we look back to Philadelphia’s 1835 general strike for the 10-hour day, exploring early craft organizing, the meaning of “general strike,” and how fights over time, wages, and control still shape work today.
We close with Eugene V. Debs, who won nearly a million votes for president in 1920 while imprisoned for opposing World War I—using his story to reflect on socialism, war dissent, and the long arc of labor politics into the present.
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