Songwriters in a Fiat factory. Miners in the local music studio. Workers on the radio and musicians on the picket line. Music can carry a strike from one factory to the next or bring it into living rooms across the globe. Strike While the Needle is Hot: A Discography of Worker’s Revolt documents the creative use of recorded audio—from historical labor songs to picket line field recordings, to new songs with lyrics explaining strike tactics. Join the authors along with labor journalists and educators for a special celebration of the books release for organizers as they explore how some of the biggest swings musicians, workers, and supporters have co-created a popular culture of resistance.
In this celebration participants will hear samples from these strike records, learn about record collecting for labor and working-class education, gain insight into the production and circulation of these records by unions and workers’ organizations, and discuss ways to incorporate labor-art, music, and ephemera in labor organizing and education as to inspire and engage the next generation, and all generations, of labor leaders and workers as we build a new international labor movement. This event draws on the presenters’ decades of experiences as working artists and archivists, labor educators and researchers, and working-class organizers.
Kennedy Block is an archivist of contemporary struggles and a member of Interference Archive in Brooklyn, where they spread the good word to people of all ages and political persuasion.
Alexandra “Al” Bradbury is editor of Labor Notes. She’s also an occasional singer-songwriter and a member of AFM Local 1000, the traveling musician’s union. Al is the 2024 recipient of the Labor Heritage Foundation’s Joe Hill Award.
Josh MacPhee is a founding member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative (Justseeds.org) and Interference Archive, a public collection of cultural materials produced by social movements (InterferenceArchive.org). He is the author of An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels, co-editor of Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture, and organizer of the Celebrate People’s History poster series. He regularly works with community, social justice organizations, and unions building agit-prop and consulting on cultural strategy.
Robert Ovetz writes about the politics of the global workers movement, work, and the crisis of capitalism. He is a senior lecturer in political science and the Master of Public Administration program at San José State University. Robert is the author of When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921 (Haymarket Books, 2019), We the Elite: Why the U.S. Constitution Serves the Few (Pluto Press, 2022), and the forthcoming book Rebels for the System: NGOs, Capitalism and the Labor Movement (Haymarket Press, 2026). He is coeditor of Real World Labor, Fourth Edition (Dollars & Sense, 2024) along with Kevin Van Meter, Ben Beckett, Kari Lydersen, and the Dollars & Sense Collective His writings can be found at
sjsu.academia.edu/RobertOvetzPhD.
Kevin Van Meter is a union organizer, labor educator, and author. Van Meter is the author of Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible (IAS/AK Press, 2017) and is currently writing his next book Reading Struggles: Working-Class Self-Activity from Detroit to Turin and Back Again (AK Press). He is coeditor of Real World Labor, Fourth Edition (Dollars & Sense, 2024) along with Robert Ovetz, Ben Beckett, Kari Lydersen, and the Dollars & Sense Collective.