The Indypendent News Hour on WBAI-99.5 FM // 3 Oct. ‘23

First segment: Negotiators for the Writers Guild of America and the big Hollywood studios reached a tentative contract agreement that ended the screen writers’ strike after 148 days. We hear from J.T. Allen, who was a WGA strike captain at the Warner Bros. picket line near Los Angeles. Then we speak with labor historian Toni Gilpin about the historic autoworkers strike now in its third week with workers out on strike in more than 20 states. Gilpin comes from a proud UAW family and is the author of The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland. Second segment: On Sep. 24, the MTA threw those fare hikes in reverse for riders on five of its bus routes. Those routes — one in each borough — are now free for all riders. It’s a six-month pilot project to see if free fares will drive up bus ridership and increase the speed of the buses whose drivers no longer have to collect fares. We hear field reports from riders on the B60, one of the trial lines. Then we speak with State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who represents Assembly District 36 in Astoria, Queens. Last spring, he led the push in Albany to win funding for this no-fare experiment.