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50 Years of Defending and Chronicling America's Workers Featuring Juan González

New York, NY

December 09, 2022 | Friday | 3:00 pm

CUNY School of Labor & Urban Studies

25 West 43rd Street, 18th floor
New York, NY 10036 ( see map )
This event can be attended in-person at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies (18th floor) in Midtown Manhattan or virtually via Zoom.

For more than half a century, Juan González has been eyewitness to countless major battles led by working people in the Americas. As a radical activist in the 1960s and 1970s with groups like the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization, and the African Liberation Support Committee, he urged working class unity in the fight against racial oppression and colonialism.

As a respected journalist in mainstream media for decades, he personally covered major strikes in the U.S. and Latin America – the 1981 PATCO strike, general strikes in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico in the 1990s, the 2005 New York City transit strike, the resurrection of May Day by immigrant workers in 2016 – while also exposing the plight of maquila workers in Mexico and Central America, of U.S. workers thrown out of work by factory flight or sickened on the job by toxic chemicals. He even played key leadership roles in some of the country’s most successful media strikes of the late 20th century, including the 1990-91 five-month walkout at the New York Daily News, which electrified the city’s trade union movement.

González will discuss all these events publicly for the first time, offering behind-the-scenes vignettes on key moments, and summing up the main lessons he learned – lessons a new generation of union leaders and activists could find useful in their effort to rebuild and expand organized labor.

Join us for this exclusive public lecture and the Q&A to follow.

Tickets
This is a free event, available to attend in person or virtually. Register for either option via the Get Tickets link Get tickets

Juan González

Juan gonzalez democracy now
Juan González has been a professional journalist for more than 40 years and was a staff columnist at the New York Daily News from 1987 to 2016. He is a two-time recipient of the George Polk Award for commentary (1998 and 2010) and was inducted into the Deadline Club’s New York Journalism Hall of Fame in 2015. A professor of Journalism and Media...