Episode 16: Linda Burnham

In this episode of Black Work Talk’s Season Two, Steven Pitts launches the power-building mini-series with his co-host, Lauren Jacobs.  Steven and Lauren talk with Linda Burnham – long-time social justice organizer, writer, and theoretician. Linda is co-editor of a phenomenal book entitled: Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections – a collection of essays and interviews about the on-the-ground efforts that mobilized voters in 2020 across the United States. Linda has a nuanced understanding of power, history, and the path forward to a better world and we talked about the complex path to building more power in this country. Linda stressed that elections are not the only arena where we build and contest for power, but it is an important one and she helped us understand how we can successfully build electoral majorities and build the thick relationships with working people that allow for successful action beyond elections.  To read more about the book Linda co-edited, see Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins .

Om Podcasten

Black Work Talk is a show that elevates the voices of Black labor, workers, leaders, activists, and intellectuals in discussions on the connections between race, labor, capitalism and culture in the struggle for progressive governing power. On season three of Black Work Talk, new hosts Bianca Cunningham and Jamala Rogers explore the impact of 2023’s strike wave in conversations with rank and file workers from unions that have fought or are still fighting for better, more equitable contracts in 2023; including the UAW, Teamsters, Writers Guild of America and more. Where did the energy for this wave of labor movements come from, what does it mean for black workers, and where does it go from here? They also open the conversation by calling in the 90% of American workers who have yet to organize in their workplace with an ongoing accessible and educational series on the process of organizing and filing to start a union from scratch.