Episode 23: Gene Bruskin Part 2: Building the Anti-war Movement in U.S. Labor

On the Line

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Episode 23: Gene Bruskin Part 2: Building the Anti-war Movement in U.S. Labor

On the Line

Feb 17, 2025

Transcript

Gene Bruskin, a long-time union organizer and anti-war activist joins our producer Jeff Rosenberg for part 2 of our interview, to share powerful stories of his experience building the anti-war movement within the labor movement. Gene was a founding member of U.S. Labor Against the War, an organization formed in the early 2000’s to build mass opposition from unions against the war in Iraq. He worked with Iraqi trade unionists to tour the U.S. and culminated in the first ever AFL-CIO resolution against an active U.S. war. More recently, Gene helped to found the Labor Network for Ceasefire, which would grow to a majority of the labor movement standing against the U.S. backed and funded genocide in Gaza. Listen in to hear his lessons from these experiences and outlook on how workers can fight for justice on the job and for a pro-worker foreign policy.

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Discussion about this episode

On the Line

On the Line is a network of union members and leaders who cover, analyze, and draw lessons from the struggles of workers across the country to build a fighting labor movement. Although the vast majority of workers in the U.S. remain unorganized, union popularity is at its highest since 1965. One of the key drivers of this popularity is a groundswell of interest from a new generation of young workers who are looking to the labor movement as a vehicle to fight against an increasingly bleak future. A labor movement that is content with business as usual will not realize the opportunities of this moment. Instead, we need unions that articulate not only our demands for better pay and working conditions, but can advance our broader political aspirations as a working class. Building a movement that can advance the hopes and dreams of all workers won't be achieved by creating perfect structures and processes in unions that become more marginal with each passing year. It will only be achieved by organizing at a scale and fighting with an intensity that we have not seen in decades.

This is the kind of labor movement that we need.

Our future is on the line.

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