Episode 3: Tanya Wallace Gobern

In this third episode of Black Work Talk, host Steven Pitts welcomes Tanya Wallace Gobern, Executive Director of the National Black Worker Center. Tanya spoke of how growing up in Chicago shaped her passion for social justice and worker organizing. She continued to share lessons from her years of organizing Black workers especially to need to build a “joyous militancy”. We talked about the recent work of the National Black Worker Center and concluded with a discussion of Tanya’s vision for Black freedom.

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.