The Heartland Labor Forum is Kansas City’s only program about the workplace. It’s radio that talks back to the boss! Whether you’re a union member or your workplace isn’t organized, Heartland Labor Forum (HLF) has stories for you, guaranteed to inspire, educate, or enrage you. HLF is produced by a diverse group of working people. We have been agitating for the rights of working people on the KKFI airwaves since 1989.
Find out about labor struggles and strikes, organizing in Kansas City, global sweatshops, and how the economy is working from the point of view of working people. Listen to our monthly features: Know Your Rights, Safety First, Remember Our Struggle, and Washington Window on Workers. Heartland Labor Forum has won the International Labor Communications Association first prize for radio several times. We are members of the Labor Radio Podcast Network #laborradiopod. Other media have plenty of business news of, by, and for the 1%; HLF is for the rest of us.
Find our schedule of upcoming shows and our archive at www.heartlandlaborforum.org.
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Judy Ancel – Heartland Labor Forum founder, labor educator, globa
l solidarity activist and daily dog walker. She coordinates the show.
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Shawn Saving – Scientist, musician, labor activist.
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Ariana Eakle – IBEW Local 124 journeyperson electrician, singer and Wobbly. Also does the monthly feature Remember Our Struggle
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Tom Gebken – Vice President of CWA Local 6360, Labor activist, Community advocate and all around good guy!
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Christina Hendricks – Young inner-city social studies teacher and union activist.
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Cris Mann – Retired special ed teacher, member AFT Local 691. She dreams of the day when the Pentagon budget will be redirected to our schools and teachers.
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Michael Savwoir – Photographer, active TDUer, social and civil rights activist, retirement income security advocate, senior citizen!
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Tino Scalici – Award-Winning Labor Journalist, Egomaniac, Assembly Line Worker.
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Jen Zaman Dream of an engineer.
DJ/presenter, music/art lover, proud wife and fur-mom, and aunt to a French teen.
Feature Editors
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Mary Erio hosts the monthly Safety First feature. W
orkplace safety advocate, engineer and butterfly garden enthusiast
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Angie Williams Angie Williams does our “Know Your Rights” segment. She is an attorney in Kansas City focusing on complex family immigration and removal defense and criminal defense. She is an activist for immigrant rights and immigration reform. Angie has written extensively on the subject as well as testified against unconstitutional state based immigration laws in both the Kansas and Missouri Legislature.
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Mark Gruenberg is on once a month with Washington Window on Workers. He is a full-time labor journalist with PAI-Press Associates Inc. which provides news to unions and labor publications.
Upcoming Episodes
February 25, 2021 Local, News & Public Affairs, Podcast
Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver on the State of Congress & Reversing New Agricultural Policies in India
There’s a lot going on in Congress. This week, the Heartland Labor Forum asks Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver where it’s all going. Then, tens of thousands of Indian farmers driving tractors and on foot have converged on New Delhi to reverse new agricultural policies. UMKC economist Sirisha Naidu explains why.
Read MoreRecent Episodes
February 18, 2021 Local, News & Public Affairs, Podcast
What’s Cookin’ In the Kansas & Missouri Legislatures?
Find out what’s cookin’ in the Missouri and Kansas legislatures. Missouri Representative Wes Rogers and Kansas Senator Tom Holland will provide a menu of good bills and bad affecting working people, Medicaid expansion, and other issues.
ListenFebruary 11, 2021 Local, News & Public Affairs, Podcast
The Biden Administration’s New Labor Secretary & Policies On Latin America and Migration
The not-yet-confirmed new Secretary of Labor, Marty Walsh, will be the first in decades to actually come from organized labor. What could that mean for America's workers?. . . And, as the new Biden administration begins to undo Trump’s anti-asylum policies, new Caravans of migrants are already coming from Central America. Why do they come? What changes would let them be able to stay home? And will Biden’s new policies make any difference?
ListenFebruary 4, 2021 Local, News & Public Affairs, Podcast
Isn’t It Time for Paid Leave?
One would think that during a pandemic workers who stock the grocery shelves, cook our take-out orders, and process our meat would at least get paid sick leave to get well or care for a sick family member. But most don’t, and many come to work sick. Isn’t it time workers had paid leave? They just passed it in Colorado. Why not here?
ListenJanuary 28, 2021 Local, News & Public Affairs, Podcast
Mike Stout: The Homestead Steel Mill: The Final 10 Years & Love & Solidarity, the Amazing Life of Rev. James Lawson
Steelworker Mike Stout chronicles the closing of the famous Homestead Steel Mill in a new book which is a manual for fighting plant closings. Martin Luther King called the Reverend James Lawson “The leading theorist and strategist of a non-violent world” Lawson called himself “a Jesus-oriented activist.” Historian Michael Honey made a film called Love and Solidarity: about Lawson’s Search for Workers Rights.
ListenJanuary 21, 2021 Local, News & Public Affairs, Podcast
Thomas Frank and his new book: The People No: A History of Anti-Populism
Kansas City native Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas, has a new book about American populism and the long trail of elites who hate it. It’s called The People. . .NO! A Brief History of Anti-populism. Find out why pundits called Donald Trump a populist and why he’s nothing of the kind.
ListenJanuary 14, 2021 Local, News & Public Affairs, Podcast
Working Class History Podcast & Milan, MO’s Rural Workers Community Alliance
This week, we’ll hear untold stories of working class people who changed history. Then, we’ll find out who is making history in Milan, Missouri, where the Rural Community Workers Alliance is organizing and defending the immigrant workers who process pork for Smithfield.
ListenJanuary 7, 2021 Local, News & Public Affairs, Podcast
Nurses & Techs Still Fighting COVID
Exhausted hospital and healthcare workers continue to be in the front lines fighting COVID-19. This week, join healthcare workers and Tim Sheard, a nurse turned mystery novelist, as they attempt to find out what solidarity has to do with defeating COVID.
ListenDecember 31, 2020 Local, News & Public Affairs, Podcast
New Year’s Eve: Looking Back/Looking Forward
Our volunteer producers are picking short clips of our favorite interviews to air as we bid good riddance to the hardest year for working people since 1933. Workers contended with eternal shifts in hospitals and nursing homes, pervasive fear of Covid, mass unemployment, eviction. Yet many made lemonade by organizing, writing postcards to voters, phone banking and demonstrating against killer police. Tune in Thursday for a review of 2020 at work and a look at what’s to come.
ListenDecember 24, 2020 Local, News & Public Affairs, Podcast
The Truth About Santa’s Workshop
It’s almost Christmas Eve, and Santa is loading the sled with toys. But, hark! The elves are on strike and will tell all on the Heartland Labor Forum about what really goes on in Santa’s workshop. Tune in to find out the naughty and nice about toy makers. And that’s not all: we’ll celebrate labor with some great holiday song parodies.
ListenDecember 17, 2020 Local, News & Public Affairs, Podcast
How Did the PO Do in the Election & COVID Slams Youth & Women Workers
After all the alarm about votes lost in the mail, we’ll ask Andy Tuttle, Kansas State President of the union of Letter Carriers, if all the votes got delivered and what’s the next crisis for the US Postal Service. Then - it’s been widely reported that women workers are big losers in the COVID catastrophe. We’ll find out how bad it is, and how hard it will be to recapture lost jobs and careers from Nicole Bateman of the Brookings Institution.
Listen