Elk Talks Organizing in West Virginia on FAIR’s CounterSpin

FAIR's Janine Jackson on FAIR TV.

CounterSpin ran a special Labor Day episode on Friday that included a 2012 interview with Payday Report Senior Labor Reporter Mike Elk. The program is produced by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and broadcast on over 130 noncommercial radio stations across the nation. Elk discussed how intellectuals and even people sympathetic to labor can cover working-class people like himself in patronizing ways.

Elk concluded the half-hour show in remarks that begin at the 23:45 mark. Also in the episode were Restaurant Opportunity Center co-founder Saru Jayarman, Aviva Chomsky, the author of Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal, syndicated columnist Holly Sklar, Worker Rights Consortium Executive Director Scott Nova, and West Virginia lawyer Bruce Stanley, who sued former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship in several high profile cases.

Check out the show here and the full 2012 interview in which Elk also talked about the Crystal Sugar Lockout in Minneapolis.

If you have a few minutes, fill out our Southern labor media survey so that we know about the undercovered stories in the South that our readers want us to cover.  Also, be sure to check out Payday Folk Labor Ombudsman J.P. Wright’s special Labor Day song.

Finally, if you want to help us meet our goal of 20 new dues-paying readers in September, sign up to donate here. With 3 new dues payers already this month, we are 15% of our way to our goal. But like your local public radio station, we’d rather you not wait until the last moment to give.

Happy Labor Day!

About the Author

Mike Elk
Mike Elk is an Emmy-nominated labor reporter and alumni of the Guardian. In addition to filing nearly 2,000 stories from 46 states, Elk traveled with Lula from Sáo Bernando do Campos all the way to the Oval Office in the White House. Credited by the Washington Post for being the first reporter to track the strike wave systematically, Elk started Payday Report using his NLRB settlement from being illegally fired for union organizing in 2015. He lives in his hometown of Pittsburgh and works frequently in Rio de Janeiro, where he attended college at PUC-Rio. He speaks both Portuguese and Pittsburghese fluently. His email is [email protected]

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