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Steven Pitts

3 articles and 37 podcasts

Steven Pitts is a long-time labor strategist. For 19 years, Steven led the UC Berkeley Labor Center, where he focused on a wide range of issues facing Black workers. He is a co-founder of the National Black Worker Center. Prior to joining the Labor Center, he taught economics for 15 years at the Houston Community College, and worked in a machine shop where he was active in the United Steelworkers of America. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Houston in 1994.

Contributions from Steven Pitts

Will Jones: How Labor Built the March on Washington

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his fourth episode of Black Work Talk’s Season Two, co-hosts Steven Pitts and Bill Fletcher talk with Will Jones. Will is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. His particular emphasis is understanding the relationship between race and class in the United States during the 20th Century. His 2013 book, “The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights,” examined the role of Black labor leaders in the 1963 March on Washington and was the basis for our conversation.
Black Work Talk by Convergence

Rob Baril: Health workers say ‘take your knee off our necks’

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In this first episode of Black Work Talk’s Season Two, co-hosts Steven Pitts and Bill Fletcher talk with Rob Baril.  Rob is the president of SEIU 1199NE, a union of health care workers in Connecticut and Rhode Island. Rob talked about how members of SEIU 1199NE have been fighting state officials in Connecticut for better working conditions during the pandemic. 
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Michael Dawson: Breaking down the neoliberal racial order

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In this sixteenth episode of Black Work Talk, our guest is Michael Dawson. Michael is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he has written extensively about the intertwined nature of Black politics and Left politics. Currently, he co-leads the Race and Capitalism Project that seeks to understand how the racial and capitalist systems of domination interact. And all of this work is grounded in his years of labor and community activism.