Independent Press for Working People and a Free Palestine

I’d also like to thank the entire In These Times community: our tireless staff, many of whom worked all this weekend; our contributors; our writers and artists. And I want to thank our subscribers and those who kick in a few dollars every month or every year to help collectively keep this institution going.

My name is Alex Han and I am very proud to serve as the executive director of In These Times. We were founded in 1976, and we’re an independent nonprofit magazine that is dedicated to advancing democracy and economic justice, to informing movements for a more humane world, to provide an accessible forum for debate about the policies that will shape our future.

I came to this work not as a journalist or an editor. But I’m a veteran of 20 years in the American labor movement. My work as an organizer, and as an elected union leader, is really what brought me here. For real democracy to exist, working people need to be able to tell their own stories. They need to be able to talk about their own struggles. They need to be able to talk about their own lives.

A central theme that runs through the past 48 years of the magazine, and hopefully will continue for the next 48 at least, is our coverage of workers and their movements for change. You see that with Luis Feliz Leon on immigrant workers fighting back at Tyson plants in Iowa, Bryce Covert on the real cost and the lives that are affected by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Kim Kelly on the resurgence of black lung in coal country — which has led to a real change from the Mine Safety and Health Administration to start tightening rules around silica — and Joseph Bullington on the gentrification of the mountain West.

Those stories begin to tell a much bigger story about work in the United States. They really start to unmask the complex and varied ways that workers everywhere are under attack. And hopefully, they start to mark out the ways workers can organize themselves to fight back.

Media with independence is always going to struggle to find ways to finance itself. But right now, as corporate media goes through its continual rounds of consolidation, cuts and layoffs, independent media is more important than ever, with all the challenges that go with creating it. While we’re telling these stories, we really need to collaborate together through efforts like those here at the Park Center and by others to build a real independent media ecosystem that can help us to tell these important stories.

I spent time over the weekend in a gathering of more than 4,500 union members talking together about ways they can improve their work and their unions. We were together when the results came in from Chattanooga, Tenn., when thousands of workers, across racial lines and divisions, finally, on their third try, won a union at the Volkswagen plant.

And it’s moments like this that really give us hope, and mark out the possibilities for the future.