On this week’s episode of Talking Radical Radio, Alex Diceanu, a trade unionist and a community organizer in Hamilton, Ontario, talks about his work with Steel City Solidarity. Rather than depending on bureaucratic mechanisms or government action, SCS mobilizes people to take direct action against employers, landlords, loan organizations, and others who treat working people unjustly. They have been particularly active in using direct action to challenge cases of wage theft. He suggests that this model — which draws on the work of a similar organization in Seattle, Washington, as well as on the longstanding example of the direct action casework by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty in Toronto — might be one useful way to work against the long-term decline of the conventional labour movement and against the tendency for activist circles to remain isolated in what he describes as “protest politics.”
[audio:http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/309377458-scott-neigh-talking-radical-trr-ep-1-mar-82013-challenging-wage-theft-with-direct-action.mp3]To learn more about Steel City Solidarity, you can visit their Facebook page here.
Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada through in-depth interviews that concentrate not on current events or the crisis of the moment, but on giving people involved in a broad range of social change work a chance to take a longer view as they talk about what they do, how they do it, and why they do it. To learn more about the show in general, click here.
To find out about ways to listen to the show, click here, and to go to Talking Radical Radio’s page on Rabble.ca, click here. To learn more about suggesting grassroots groups and organizations for future shows, click here. For details on the show’s theme music, click here.
Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Sudbury, Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.
