Belabored Podcast #17: Fast Food Nation

Belabored Podcast #17: Fast Food Nation

This week on Belabored: a closer look at the historic fast food strikes in seven cities and an exploration of the relationship between funding sources and internal democracy in alt-labor. Plus college athletes, graduate student employees, and sobering survey data.


Subscribe to the Belabored RSS feed here. Subscribe and rate on iTunes here. Tweet at @dissentmag with #belabored to share your thoughts, or join the conversation on Facebook. Belabored is produced by Natasha Lewis.

On the 17th episode of Dissent’s Belabored podcast, Sarah and Josh consider this week’s historic seven city fast food strikes. Is this campaign’s strategy–partnering unions and community groups, mounting one-day strikes, and attacking the entire industry at once–paying off? What comes next? How will this all end? Then they explore a related question: what’s the relationship between funding sources and internal democracy for campaigns organizing workers who don’t pay union dues? And in this week’s opening news round-up, they tackle college athletes, graduate student employees, sobering survey data, and who’s afraid of alt-labor.

Links for those following along at home:

Fast food strike reporting from Sarah and Josh

Josh on “Who Should Fund Alt-Labor?”

Sarah on minimum wage protests

AP: “80 percent of U.S. adults face near-poverty, unemployment” during life

Micah Uetricht: “Big Business Aims to Crush Worker Centers”

Josh on Jack Lew’s union-busting at NYU

Travis Waldron on student athletes and pay

Sarah on on the Laundry Workers Center 

Sarah on McDonald’s and payroll debit cards 

Stories we wish we’d written:

Susie Cagle, “The Dark Side of Start-Up City,” Grist

George Black, “The Untold Story of Rana Plaza,” On Earth