"Fifty Years of Defending and Chronicling America's Workers"

featuring Juan González

 

Friday, December 9, 2022

3:00pm - 5:00pm E.T.

 

Join us *in-person* at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies (18th floor) in Midtown Manhattan or *virtually* via Zoom!

 

For more than half a century, Juan González has been eyewitness to countless major movements led by working people in the Americas. 

As a radical activist in the 1960s and 1970s with groups like the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization, and the African Liberation Support Committee, he urged working class unity in the fight against racial oppression and colonialism.  

As a respected journalist in mainstream media for decades, González personally covered major strikes in the U.S. and Latin America – the 1981 PATCO strike, general strikes in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico in the 1990s, the 2005 New York City transit strike, the resurrection of May Day by immigrant workers in 2006 – while also exposing the plight of maquila workers in Mexico and Central America, of U.S. workers thrown out of work by factory flight or sickened on the job by toxic chemicals. 

González played key leadership roles in some of the country’s most successful media strikes of the late 20^th century, including the 1990-91 five-month walkout at the New York Daily News, which electrified the city’s trade union movement.  

González will discuss all these events publicly for the first time, offering behind-the-scenes vignettes on key moments, and summing up the main lessons he learned – lessons a new generation of union leaders and activists could find useful in their effort to rebuild and expand organized labor.  

Join us for this exclusive public lecture and the Q&A to follow.

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Hosted by the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.

Co-sponsored by the Sidney Hillman Foundation and the 

Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY

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Click here to register.