For this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, Rebecca sat down with longtime labor journalist Steven Greenhouse. He’s someone who really needs no introduction after spending thirty-one years at the New York Times, eighteen of which he spent covering the labor beat, until 2014. He’s also the author of The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker and Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present and Future of American Labor. And these days he’s a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, where he writes about wages and working conditions, labor organizing, and other workplace issues. In a conversati ..read more

For this week’s episode, Rebecca sat down with Cara Reedy. She’s a journalist and the founder of a new organization called the Disabled Journalists Association (DJA)—which she’s spent the past two years setting up to identify the needs of disabled people in journalism and to amplify the voices of disabled journalists across the United States. It’s just getting off the ground and just launched its website this past week. (Check out discojourno.com to learn more, and if you’re a disabled journalist, check out the survey they’re running between now and October 2023 as they work to lay the foundat ..read more

Welcome to the summer/fall season of Off-Kilter! We’re excited to be back and up and running with the show after a break, just in time to mark Disability Pride Month. And to kick things off right, Rebecca sat back down with Mia Ives-Rublee, a long-time disability rights and justice activist who today serves as the director of the disability justice initiative at the Center for American Progress. They talk disability pride; what liberation means to the disability community; how Mia’s path as a transracial adoptee and competitive athlete shape her advocacy today; and lots more.   Links ..read more

As Off-Kilter’s ongoing series continues, digging into why in the famous words of Audre Lorde, “self-care is political warfare,” we’re zooming out for this next episode to explore the goal of ending poverty in the United States—and the broader work of economic and social liberation—as self-care for the larger collective organism of which we are all part. In this spirit, as Rebecca describes in this episode, she often thinks about advocates and activists for economic and social liberation as healers—healers of a collective organism that today is very sick—with one huge glaring symptom of that i ..read more

This week, Off-Kilter continues our ongoing series of conversations with social justice leaders digging into why, in the famous words of Audre Lorde, self-care is political warfare—and the role radical self-care plays in their own lives to sustain them in this work.  Our next guest in this series is Michele Evermore, a longtime leading voice fighting for America’s most marginalized workers, particularly when it comes to unemployment insurance. Michele is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and most recently served as deputy director of policy in the U.S. Department of Labor’s new Of ..read more

Wealth is a word that gets thrown around a lot, especially in economic conversations and spaces. The most basic definition is what you own minus what you owe. But as Aisha Nyandoro—CEO of Springboard to Opportunity and architect of the Magnolia Mother’s Trust—argues in her recent Tedx Talk, it’s time to redefine wealth in the United States. In her words, “for too long, we have allowed financial institutions to define wealth and the process by which we buildi it.” So for this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, Rebecca sat back down Aisha for a far-ranging conversation about how we define wealth and ..read more

For this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, with October as National Disability Employment Awareness Month, Rebecca sat down with two leaders at JP Morgan Chase (JPMC) who are at the forefront of advancing disability employment within the business and employer community: Bryan Gill, head of JP Morgan Chase’s Office of Disability Inclusion and the firm’s global head of neurodiversity, and Nan Gibson, executive director of JP Morgan Chase’s PolicyCenter. They had a far-ranging conversation about the story behind JPMC’s Office of Disability Inclusion and how it’s working to remove barriers to hiring a ..read more

According to recently released Census data, poverty among older adults increased sharply again in 2022, after reaching an all-time low just two years before. One group of older Americans who’s especially struggling is older workers in physically demanding jobs. Contrary to the popular narrative that everyone’s living longer and work is getting easier, a recent task force convened by the National Academy of Social Insurance found that more than 10 million older workers are in jobs that are physically challenging and lack the resources to secure more viable jobs or retire. These workers are disp ..read more