Haymarket Originals: Heat the Ground Up

2. Buffalo Catalysts

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 09:15:00 -0600

Welcome to Heat the Ground Up, an oral history of Starbucks Workers United. Together, we’ll follow one of the most important labor fights in a generation through the voices and perspectives of the workers who organized it from the ground up. In this second episode, we’ll dive into the issues that fueled organizing and the salting operation that gave workers at Elmwood in Buffalo a path to unionization.

This podcast is a Haymarket Originals production. Visit haymarketbooks.org to find indispensable radical books, podcasts, virtual events, and other political education resources, including Unite and Win. Subscribe and listen to the Unite and Win companion podcast here.

Please also consider joining the Haymarket book club. It’s one of the best ways to support Haymarket, and help fund projects like this one.

Our podcast host is Clarissa Redwine. You can find more of her work at strike.kitchen. This entire oral history is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License. The music was composed by Michael T. Simonelli over at the podcast production company Charts and Leisure.

1. Introducing Starbucks Workers United

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0600

Welcome to Heat the Ground Up, an oral history of Starbucks Workers United. Together, we’ll follow one of the most important labor fights in a generation through the voices and perspectives of the workers who organized it from the ground up. In this first episode, we’re joined by a handful of labor experts who will walk us through the significance of this story and some of the challenges workers were up against, setting the stage for the larger narrative.

This podcast is a Haymarket Originals production. Visit haymarketbooks.org to find indispensable radical books, podcasts, virtual events, and other political education resources, including Class Struggle Unionism, which is 20% Off online. Please also consider joining the Haymarket book club. It’s one of the best ways to support Haymarket, and help fund projects like this one.

Introducing Heat the Ground Up

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 07:45:00 -0600

What does it *feel like* to build worker power? Season two of Haymarket Originals is bringing you inside one of the most dynamic and inspiring organizing drives in the labor movement today. Heat The Ground Up is an oral history of Starbucks Workers United, voiced by the baristas who built it.

21. Coda

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 15:05:00 -0600

This “coda" is our last episode in the mainline of this series on the meaning of the CIO, and here, the whole organizing committee gets together to discuss some of the larger themes and debates that an overview of this historical sequence can inspire. We ask, “what are the lasting consequences of its defeat (if it even was one),” “what does the CIO teach us about working class politics,” and “what does it even mean to make use of this history?” And more, and more.

Thank you for listening and supporting the show. We hope that it has given you even a sliver of historical understanding that it has provided us.

Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way.

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20. Merger

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 10:05:00 -0600

Episode 20 of Fragile Juggernaut takes us from 1950 to 1955—the end of the line for the CIO. At the beginning of the story, the expulsion of the left-led unions was a recent wound, and the Cold War liberalism of figures like Walter Reuther seemed like a viable and vital project for the CIO’s future, with the landmark 1950 GM contract, the “Treaty of Detroit,” marking a new phase in how industrial unions related to management. The Korean War seemed like a proving ground for this hypothesis, and proved a brutal disappointment. By 1955, the CIO threw in the towel, merging back in to the AFL on the older federation’s terms.

To tell this story, we talk with guest Toni Gilpin, author of The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland. Toni helps us see this story from the perspective of the UAW’s left-wing rival, the Farm Equipment Workers (FE), who resisted the direction charted by Reuther in 1950—as long as they could. And with Toni, we talk about some of the long-term legacies of CIO radicalism for the civil rights movement.

This is our last narrative episode. It will be followed by one summary and reflection discussion.

Featured music: “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford

Archival audio credits:

CIO debate on the merger; Truman 1949 State of the Union; Walter Reuther on fringe benefit programs; Reuther on “Reutherism”; Truman on seizing the steel industry; Eisenhower message to the merger convention; interview with Anne Braden (1); interview with Anne Braden (2);

Buy Tramps and Trade Union Travelers, 20% off: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/985-tramps-and-trade-union-travelers

19. Backlash

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 07:00:00 -0600

Episode 19 of Fragile Juggernaut weighs up the results of the struggle for hegemony in the 1945-1946 strike wave over the next several years. While millions of workers participated in militant actions, their strikes were uncoordinated and politically isolated, opening the way for the political right to organize a backlash and recapture Congress in the midterm elections.

At the center of the agenda of the new Republican Congress: labor law reform, codified in the form of the notorious 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. We dive into the details and consequences of the law, restraining workers’ right to organize and, most significantly, driving a wedge between the left wing of the CIO and the rest of the federation.

Featured music: The OPA Shout (Pete Seeger); The Same Old Merry Go-Round (Oscar Brand); Taft-Hartley Blues (unidentified); The New Walls of Jericho (Richard Huey and Chorus); The Peekskill Story (The Weavers).

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18. Reconversion

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 09:45:00 -0600

The sudden end of World War II was met with both exultation and terror. While millions of Americans understood that the killing abroad could come to an end, the fate of the depression economy that had only been revived by wartime mobilization now hung uncertainly in the balance. The saga of demobilization and reconversion, the name for the process of converting the economy back to civilian production and the winding down of military contracts, is the subject of Episode 18 of Fragile Juggernaut: a battle between business interests and a revived CIO social democracy for hegemony over the reconversion process, fought in the backdrop of the largest strike wave in American history.

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17. War

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 13:45:00 -0600

Episode 17 of Fragile Juggernaut concerns the momentous arrival of long-dreaded events abroad that broke US politics out of its political and economic impasse during Roosevelt’s second term: Europe’s descent into fascist war.

Foreign policy dislodged the American elite from their indecision over the nature of domestic reform; dislodged President Roosevelt from his indecision over whether to run for a third term; and dislodged the leadership of the CIO from its political cul-de-sac of battling employers at the bargaining table and their own government at the ballot boxes. With Roosevelt’s third term, CIO founder John L. Lewis surrendered his presidency of the industrial union center. In the process, the drift into war dramatically transformed the relationship of the industrial union movement to electoral politics and the Democratic Party—and of union leaders to the Depression society now energized and organized around war production.

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16. The West Coast

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 12:15:00 -0600

Episode 16 is the last in our three-episode regional series, offering a view of the CIO from the West Coast. Andrew, Ben, Emma, and Tim discuss what was distinct about the economy of the West: in this underdeveloped imperial context, working-class activity followed the supply chain, from coastal ports to inland warehouses and processing centers to the fertile valleys of California. This distribution-transportation nexus became a key battleground of jurisdictional disputes with the AFL, only to be scrambled again by an influx of wartime defense spending.

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15. The South

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 09:15:00 -0600

Episode 15 of Fragile Juggernaut is the second of our trio of regional episodes, landing this time in the South. Ben, Emma, and Tim are joined by the celebrated historian Robin D.G. Kelley to discuss the patterns of Southern development, the rich organizational ecology of the region, the strategic misfires of the CIO, and the political and social bases of fascism in America.

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Bonus Episode: What the CIO Reveals About the Movement Today

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 08:30:00 -0600

This week our crew at Fragile Juggernaut is delivering our third special bonus episode. Alex, Ben, Emma, Gabe, and Tim converged at Chicago’s Socialism conference to discuss what the CIO can make us alive to in the contemporary labor movement and our conjuncture more broadly.

Our series has probed the history of the labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s–detailing its heroism, anatomizing its tragedies, confronting its limits, and rethinking the whole turbulent era of the Great Depression, World War, fascism and antifascism from the vantage point of the mass worker. But the labor movement isn’t something to be memorialized: it’s something we’re building again anew. What can we learn and better understand about the present when we come to terms with the labor movement's past?

Read Andrew Elrod’s “What Was Bidenomics” in Phenomenal World

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14. Working-Class New York

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 10:15:00 -0600

Episode 14 of Fragile Juggernaut is the first of our trio of regional episodes. It dials into New York City, the seat of the country’s largest manufacturing base, but one composed of a vast constellation of small and diverse shops; and also host to the nation’s largest port, transport system, white collar and cultural complex, and more.

With the eminent historian Joshua Freeman, Gabe and Ben talk about worker organizing outside the CIO cast–public transit workers, teachers, laundry workers and domestics–as well as what made New York City, a non-fordist city in the age of Ford, so exemplary compared to other parts of the country.

The episode features James Baldwin and Truman Capote; Irish dance halls and cruising on the piers; burial societies, Tammany Hall, and clandestine organizations; the origins of bodegas and how the mob got rackets into organized labor; the trade union origins of “Strange Fruit”; Ella Baker and Esther Cooper Jackson; the IRA and Broadway musicals; how transit workers built their union campaigning against big squeegees; the hybrid combinations of craft and industrial unionism; and the limits to workplace organization in a city defined by tremendous ethnic, religious, and neighborhood segmentation.

Featured music: “I Ain’t Got Nobody” by Count Basie; “It's Better With A Union Man” by Pins and Needles Orchestra; “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday; “The Boys of the Lough” by Michael Coleman; “Talking Sailor” by Woody Guthrie; “One Big Union for Two” by the Pins and Needles Orchestra; “New York Town” by Woody Guthrie.

Archival audio credits: Esther Cooper Jackson discusses domestic work research; Mike Quill debates Rep. Fred Hartley on ABC news; longshoreman and sailor Stan Weir describes conservatizing effects of the racket on the docks.

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13. Impasse: 1937-1939

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 14:30:00 -0600

Episode 13 of Fragile Juggernaut surveys the impasse of the Second New Deal with the historian Ahmed White, when the newfound power of working-class organization in mass production confronted the counterattack of property and established social hierarchy.

During 1937, the “Little Steel” Strike, the “Roosevelt Recession,” and the political dilemmas of union power in the two-party system challenged the growth of the CIO and began to change its character. In prior chronological episodes, the movement of mass worker organizing has gone from strength to strength, culminating in the effervescence of sitdown strikes amongst very different kinds of workers and the landslide political victories of 1936.

But within the year, capital responds with a strike of its own–producing the Roosevelt recession–which leads state agents to turn toward repression of the labor movement rather than conciliation, FDR to reshuffle the basis of his coalition, and workers to find themselves without the leverage that they had possessed a few months earlier. The CIO responds to these new circumstances with new strategies. Some redouble their commitments to FDR’s coalition, while others begin seeking autonomy from its confines. The left, however, vacillates, becoming the prime victim to this new moment in the history of the CIO—unable to cohere or politically articulate a new wave of wildcat strikes that take off.

Featured music: “Ballad of Harry Bridges” by the Almanac Singers; “CIO song” by Aunt Molly Jackson; “No More Mourning” by John L. Handcox; “Alabama Trio Mill Blues” by Ralph Willis.

Archival audio credits: labor organizer Boris Ross from the "Documenting Social History: Chicago's Elderly Speak"; interview with Chicago activist Mollie West; Gaumont British Newsreel on Little Steel Strike; organizer and Congressman John Brenard.

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12. White Collar

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 17:15:00 -0600

Episode 12 of Fragile Juggernaut turns the lens on the situation and activity of white-collar, professional, and creative workers in the 1930s and 1940s. Together with guests Nikil Saval (state senator from Pennsylvania and author of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace) and Shannan Clark (historian at Montclair State University and author of The Making of the American Creative Class: New York’s Culture Workers and Twentieth-Century Consumer Capitalism), Alex and Gabe dig in on a few key sectors: office workers, journalists, academics and scientists, and workers in the culture industries—art, film, radio, theater, and publishing. How did the labor movement and the left conceptualize these kinds of workers and what role they might play? What was the relationship between their organization and struggle, on one hand, and the content and function of their work, on the other?

Sonically, this episode is a bit of a concept album, interspersed with excerpts from Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 musical play The Cradle Will Rock (actually a higher-quality 1964 recording). Inspired stylistically by the plays of Bertolt Brecht and institutionally sponsored by the WPA (until it panicked and backed out), The Cradle Will Rock is set in Steeltown, USA: a sex worker is thrown in jail after refusing a cop free service. There, she meets academics, artists, and journalists who have been arrested in a police mix-up at a steelworkers’ rally, which they were monitoring as members of the anti-union Liberty Committee of steel baron Mr. Mister. While these anti-union professionals and creatives wait for Mr. Mister to come clear things up and bail them out, they explain how he recruited them to the Liberty Committee. Also with them in jail is steelworkers’ leader Larry Forman, who warns them that the cozy “cradle” where they sit will soon fall.

A correction: Gabe says in the episode that the Disney strike was in 1940. In fact, it was in May 1941.

Featured music (besides The Cradle Will Rock): “Teacher’s Blues” by Pete Seeger.

Archival audio credits: “I Want to Be a Secretary,” Coronet Instructional Films (1941); Dan Mahoney Oral History, San Francisco State Labor Archives and Research Center; Oppenheimer (2023); “WPA Helping Theaters All Black Production of Macbeth”; Isom Moseley oral history, Federal Writers Project (1941); Dumbo (1941).

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11. Who Gets the Bird? Communists and the CIO

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 12:30:00 -0600

Episode 11 of Fragile Juggernaut concerns the Communist Party and its complex role in the creation of the CIO. Andrew and Ben trace the strategic zigzags of America’s far-left, recount their pioneering role in organizing drives, and measure the Party’s own accounts of its politics against the often ambiguous, even contradictory realities of its practice.

Did Communists merely supply the shock troops for someone else’s political ambitions, or did they put their stamp on the CIO, in ways that were durable and lasting? Did their practice of unionism conform to the mainstream of the labor movement, or did it contain the germs of another kind of CIO? What, ultimately, did the CIO do to the Communist Party? We discuss this and more amongst our co-hosts, and with our special guest, the historical sociologist Judith Stepan-Norris, co-author of Left Out and Talking Union (our interview begins around 1:25:00).

Featured music: “The Bourgeois Blues” by Lead Belly; “The United Front” by New Singers; “Our Line's Been Changed Again” by Joe Glazer; “Internationale” by New Singers)

Archival audio credits: Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists (1983)

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Read Gabriel Winant on the Popular Front in The London Review of Books: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n15/gabriel-winant/we-can-breathe

Bonus Episode: Interlude

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 09:15:00 -0600

This week our crew at Fragile Juggernaut is delivering our second special bonus-episode: while we are on a brief summer hiatus, Andrew and Ben sum up the first half of our mini-series, drawing together the core themes of our show so far and discussing where we’ll go in the second half.

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Bonus Episode: Know Your Enemy

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 10:30:00 -0600

This week our crew at Fragile Juggernaut is delivering our first special bonus episode. Tim and Ben talk with Sam-Adler Bell—an excellent writer and one-half of the brilliant Know Your Enemy podcast—about our series.

Appearing on Know Your Enemy gave us a chance to explore a new dimension of our project: to think about the CIO not only as a moment when new social forces on the left converge or spring into action, but also as a cauldron for conservatives and reactionaries—a pre-history of the modern conservative movement—some of which would continue to dominate the American political scene for generations. The episode also was an occasion to return to some core themes: an account of the American working class as internally stratified, riven with internal struggles, and shot through with competing strategies and interests. In particular, we talk plenty about the political right within the labor movement, and the vaciliations of what some might call the “middle class,” whose zigzags so often stamp the outcomes of open political contests.

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10. Left, Right, and Center

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 10:30:00 -0600

Episode 10 of Fragile Juggernaut surveys the wide range of workers who united–and sometimes fought each other–under the banner of the CIO. We begin in the slaughterhouse, with special guest Rick Halpern explaining how the United Packinghouse Workers of America (PWOC/UPWA) brought together black and white workers despite segregation inside and outside the workplace. Then, the hosts discuss two of the largest CIO unions: the United Steel Workers (USWA/SWOC) and the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (UE). These two unions are often thought of, respectively, as emblematic of the “right” and “left” wings of the CIO. But what does that mean? And why did these two unions develop the way they did?

Featured music: “The Cloakmaker’s Union” (Joe Glazer); “Killing Floor” (Howlin’ Wolf); “Hard Times Killing Floor” (Skip James); “Odpocivam v Americkej pode/I Lie in the American Land” (written by Andrew Kovaly, performed by Vivien Richman); “Spirit of Phil Murray” (Sterling Jubilee Singers).

Archival audio credits: UPWA oral histories recorded and generously provided by Rick Halpern; Deadline for Action (UE, 1946); James Matles Retirement Speech via UE History; oral histories of James Downey, Tom Girdler, Jr., and Harold Ruttenberg via AAPB.

Buy Rick Halpern's Down on the Killing Floor Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904-54: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p066337

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9. Smash Fascism

Fri, 17 May 2024 14:45:00 -0600

Episode 9 of Fragile Juggernaut is the first of a series of thematic episodes, in which we pause our chronological narrative to survey key issues shaping the world of the CIO. In this episode, we turn our view on the escalating confrontation between fascism and anti-fascism. Was there an American fascism? Where did it come from and what did it look like? How did it relate to the labor movement? And what was the meaning of the Popular Front, the broad left coalition against fascism?

Featured music: “All You Fascists Bound to Lose” (Billy Bragg, originally Woody Guthrie); “La Crisis Actual” (Los Cancioneros Alegres); “Ballad for Americans” (Paul Robeson); “Ballad of October 16” (The Almanac Singers); “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave” (The Almanac Singers)

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8. The Spirit of 1936

Thu, 02 May 2024 09:45:00 -0600

Episode 8 of Fragile Juggernaut places us back in the critical juncture of 1936: the final year of Roosevelt’s first term in office. What were FDR’s re-election prospects as workers’ insurgencies erupted from below and as capital waited in vain for the courts to demolish the Wagner Act? What did this juncture mean for the CIO and its relationship to electoral politics? Episode 8 dives into these questions and surveys the evolving links between the CIO, leftwing intellectuals in the Roosevelt administration, and the Democratic Party. Featuring special guest Samir Sonti, an assistant professor at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.

Featured music: Franklin D. Roosevelt's Back Again (The New Lost City Ramblers); Old Age Pension Check (The New Lost City Ramblers); Farmer-Labor Train (Woody Guthrie); Tell Me Why You Like Roosevelt (McKinley Peebles)

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7. Sit Down!

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0600

Episode seven of Fragile Juggernaut dramatizes the Sit Down strikes that built the UAW: why they proved to be powerful, what effect they had on the labor movement, and the truly global spread of the strike tactic. The fight in Flint and Cleveland, Kansas City and Atlanta, provides an occasion to talk both about the global organization of production and highly contingent efforts to root out spies, covering both the architectonics of capital and street battles barely won against advancing cops. These stories are where structural analysis meets the heist movie.

We want to flag two small factual mistakes on this episode: at one point Gabe refers to the federal CIO locals where he means federal AFL locals; elsewhere, Ben says Fisher Body a few times when he means the Chevy plant.

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6. Passing Laws, Breaking Jaws: The Wagner Act and the Founding of the CIO

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 12:30:00 -0600

Episode six of Fragile Juggernaut pivots to high politics and institutional history: chronicling the passage of the Wagner Act, debating its significance, and recounting the raucous AFL convention in Atlantic City where the CIO was born. Featuring special guest Eric Blanc.

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5. The Strikes That Broke Through

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 12:00:00 -0600

Episode five of Fragile Juggernaut is a dramatic retelling of the nearly-revolutionary strikes of 1934, in Toledo and San Francisco, in Minneapolis and across America’s textile belt: moments that dramatize the powerful interaction between radical militant minorities on the shop floor and mass working class struggles. Frustrated by the passivity of “the National Run Around” of FDR’s first years in office, workers took up “self-help” in the form of fighting unionism. Their violently fought strikes would go on to produce a new “social warrant” for working class self-activity in the years to come.

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4. Rupture

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 05:00:00 -0600

Episode four of Fragile Juggernaut surveys the panorama of social life transfigured by the first three years of the Great Depression. By examining the sharp and persisting business downturn as a crisis of social reproduction—in which the conditions for working people to reproduce themselves appeared to permanently subside—Tim, Ben, Emma, and Andrew discuss how challenges of survival transformed into struggles defending working-class life.

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3. The Lean Years

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0600

Episode three of Fragile Juggernaut explores the transformations within the working class brought about by World War I and its decade-long aftermath. A growing political alliance between the AF of L and Woodrow Wilson’s Democratic Party profoundly altered the labor movement of the Progressive Era, growing its size and militancy amid the rising prices of the war boom, culminating in the combustive strike-year of 1919. But in the corporate reaction and federal repression that followed, labor unions shed a third of their combined membership and entered the assembly-line era divided and dwindling in power. This society the Great War bequeathed was, as its contemporaries argued, unbalanced. The 1920s “return to normalcy” intensified, rather than counteracted, this lack of balance—swinging toward the struggles within organized labor that would elicit the CIO.

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2. Socialism in its Work Clothes

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0600

Episode two of Fragile Juggernaut picks up with the labor movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. How did workers organize themselves amidst shifts in the structure of the economy, from the acceleration of proletarianization to the rise of corporate capitalism, and what opposition did they confront?

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1. Why the American Working Class Is Different

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 05:00:00 -0600

Welcome to episode one of Fragile Juggernaut, the first project from Haymarket Originals! In episode one, we introduce our “organizing committee” of six rotating hosts and our goals for this collective project of inquiry into the history of the U.S. workers’ movement.

We then tackle a key historical question: what was the American working class? We begin the story of the CIO in the nineteenth century in order to identify the different groups—immigrants, farmers, artisans, enslaved workers—who comprised the “raw materials” of an inchoate working class. Following their varied paths into wage work, and their relationship to the politics that resulted in the Civil War, the episode ends with the rise of industrial corporations, most notably the railroads, and the political compromise that ended Reconstruction—with a national uprising of workers in 1877. That mass action anticipates what’s to come for the emerging labor movement.

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