Dear Power At Work Community:
Thank you. Thank you for supporting Power At Work and worker power. Thank you for your comments and your clicks. Thank you for persevering through our many trials and errors. Thank you for your involvement in the fight to bring economic justice and fairness to our society.
I would like to use the excuse of the approaching New Year to update you about Power At Work and offer some visibility into our plans for the coming months or longer.
Power At Work’s 2025: From January 1, 2025 to December 16, 2025, Power At Work was viewed 425,000 times by nearly 275,000 unique users (note: Google Analytics likely significantly underreports Power At Work’s viewership due to its own quirks and territorial battles).
A wide variety of worker-power-focused material drew this sizable audience to Power At Work. Power At Work’s offerings ranged from “blogcast” interviews with national union presidents, front-line organizers, and workers, to industry-leading coverage of artificial intelligence, workers, and worker power, to unique series like “What Could Happen Under Trump?,” the Labor Oscars, and the Labor Grammys.
Power At Work recruited dozens of labor academics, labor think-tank experts, and others to draft easily accessible posts that shared their wisdom and research, educated the Power At Work community, and translated work that might not otherwise have been known to a broad audience. We also proudly republished articles from a long list of our sibling labor journals to lift up their outstanding work.
Simply, in its third year, Power At Work continued to live up to its mission “to contribute to a discourse in the United States that emphasizes the importance of collective action and puts workers and worker power at the center of that conversation.”
Power At Work’s 2026: In 2026, Power At Work will re-focus our efforts.
Starting with Episode #17 on January 13 at 12noon ET/9AM PT, Power At Work will reenergize its popular Power Half-Hour LIVE on Power At Work’s LinkedIn page and published for posterity on Power At Work’s web site (https://poweratwork.us).
The Power Half-Hour is a livestreamed, fast-paced, bi-weekly roundtable with a rotating group of expert guests. Each episode, our panel of experts discusses the biggest labor story of the preceding two weeks and the labor story everyone should be talking about in the near future.
We’ve invited an even longer list of well-known labor experts to join our panels. We also plan to invest in spreading the word widely about the Power Half-Hour. You can help us to grow the Power Half-Hour’s audience by encouraging your network to watch these panelists and your humble host (that’s me) LIVE on Power At Work’s LinkedIn page at noon ET/9AM PT on:
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January 13 - Alex Jacquez, Groundwork Collaborative; David Madland, Center for American Progress; and Alexandra Martinez; Prism
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January 27 - Michael Sainato, The Guardian; Kate Bronfenbrenner, Cornell ILR School; Chris Garlock, Labor Heritage Foundation
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February 10 - Kim Kelly, In These Times; Michael Z. Green, Texas A&M School of Law; Dave Jamieson, Huffington Post
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February 17 - Hamilton Nolan, In These Times; Patricia Campos-Medina, The Worker Institute at Cornell ILR School; Mark Gevaart, My Labor Radio
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March 3 - Claudia Irizarry Aponte, The City; Aaron Sojourner, W.E. Upjohn Institute; Bill Samuel, former AFL-CIO Director of Advocacy
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March 17 - Steve Greenhouse, The Guardian; Benjamin Sachs, Harvard Law School; Mel Buer, Words About Work
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March 31 - Anne M. Lofaso, University of Cincinnati College of Law; Jacob Morrison, The Valley Labor Report; Lauren Gurley, The Washington Post
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April 14th - McKenna Schueler, Orlando Weekly; Ruben Garcia, University of Las Vegas Boyd School of Law; Ali Bustamante, University of New Orleans
Tell your friends, family, union siblings, co-workers, and fellow travelers to bring their questions and comments for Power Half-Hour OVERTIME, a special question-and-answer period added to the end of each new Power Half-Hour episode. We will see you there.
Providing more support to the Power Half-Hour, and the planning efforts I will discuss below, will mean that Power At Work is going to scale back other aspects of our production. We will discontinue The Weekly Download and republication of other journals’ articles. We also plan to reduce the frequency of our own original posts and blogcasts.
Power At Work’s Plans for a New and Powerful Future: Power At Work remains dedicated to helping lift the voices of trade unionists and working people across the United States. A sizable percentage of our blogcasts served precisely that purpose.
While we were able to talk to workers about the important issues in their lives on our blogcasts, the format proved to be static and our strictly limited resources did not allow us to meet workers where they are.
We are developing plans to take a different approach. Motivated by National Public Radio’s longlasting “Story Corps,” the Burnes Center is looking for ways to give workers a direct and technologically easy way to speak out in real time about the issues affecting their lives, their communities, and their unions. Right now, we are in the earliest stages of our planning and examination of technology tools, but we look forward to coming back to you in 2026 for new conversations about new strategies that will help workers to tell their stories of worker power.
In addition, Power At Work remains committed to looking for ways to support our ongoing efforts to closely examine worker power and artificial intelligence. In 2025, we began discussing a new initiative called “Workers Powering AI” with members of the philanthropic community. We remain committed to that proposal and look forward to continuing that discussion.
In conclusion, the entire Power At Work team would like to express its appreciation for your openness to keeping the discussion going around worker power narratives and alternative media. As so many of Power At Work’s posts demonstrate, we think it’s a critically important discussion and that you are a vital contributor to it.
We will end where we began: Thank You! Also, our very warmest wishes to you and those you love for a happy holiday and a joyous, empowering, and healthy New Year! We look forward to seeing you in 2026.
In solidarity,
Seth Harris
