Urgent: Stop WLUW from taking Labor Express off the air!

Chicago's only English language labor-oriented radio show, Labor Express, has been on WLUW-FM for some twenty years, but has now been suddenly told by the station (owned by Loyola University) that it will be off the air as of May 1. This is also the case for several other community-oriented shows at the station (88.7 FM, and streamed at www.wluw.org), though we do not speak for them as to whether they are organizing any protest of WLUW's decision.


Giving only ten days' notice, without even a meeting to discuss the situation or to explore alternative solutions, is a pretty shabby way to treat a radio program which has run for two decades.


In an email to Jerry Mead-Lucero, producer of Labor Express, WLUW's Station Manager Sam Israel explained that the reason was to make the station "centered on the student and college music scene".


Labor Express has always offered to provide training on covering local labor/progressive news to Loyola student interns. Labor Express Radio and other community programs not only offered internships, but have conducted internships in the past. It offered to help recruit more students to the station without sacrificing community programming. Despite their claims, WLUW has had trouble staffing the station fully with students and has as a result often run on automation instead. Indeed, May is the worst time for this change as students go on break in May. In all likelihood over the Summer the station will be on automation much of the time.


Labor Express, an hour long program airing and live-streaming Sunday nights at 8 pm, has been an indispensable source of detailed news and analysis of every important and often ignored labor story, affecting such unions as CTU, SEIU, AFSCME, National Nurses United, Teamsters, AFT, UE, NEA, Campus Clerical Workers (AFT), United Steelworkers, IWW, and non-union organizations such as Arise Chicago, Fight for 15, and ROC Chicago.


Fighting for community access on the airwaves is an important fight. We can't complain about corporate domination of media if we are not willing to defend community access to media when we have the chance. We are not asking for anything radical. Just a postponement and a meeting.