Equal Time Radio

Mari Cordes, FNHP union leader, Jim Fouts, a CCTA bus driver, and Stauch Blaise, a Workers Center volunteer, discuss the vital issues of work with dignity and the right to healthcare being addressed by this May Day's Health and Dignity March, Rally and day of action. Many people in Vermont are struggling to meet their fundamental needs and fulfill their human rights, such as healthcare, education, livable wages, for bias-free policing, and paid sick days. Over the past year, we have seen these needs and rights come under attack.

VSEA Judicial Unit Chairperson Margaret Crowley and Union Representative Brian Morse explain the past sacrifices this group of workers has made to bring down costs (never-ending furlough days), and discuss how bargaining was done in the past. Now VSEA's Judicial Unit members are engaged in a member driven contract campaign for a fair contract.

Labor activist/intellectuals Kim Moody, author of In Solidarity: Essays on Working-Class Organization and Strategy in the United States and a founder of Labor Notes, and Sheila Cohen, author of Ramparts of Resistance: Why Workers Lost Their Power, and How to Get It Back and Notoriously Militant: The Story of a Union Branch discuss

Anja Rudiger, of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, works with the Healthcare is a Human Right campaign which in 2011 succeeded in getting a groundbreaking law passed: Act 48, which commits Vermont to creating a healthcare system providing healthcare as a public good and ensuring everyone can get the healthcare they need, when they need it.

Robert Pollin, Co-director of the The Political Economy Research Institute and Professor of Economics at UMass Amherst and author of recent studies including