About Us
On the Line is a media and education project that analyzes, reports on, and draws lessons from the struggles of workers across the country to build a fighting labor movement. Although the vast majority of workers in the U.S. remain unorganized, union popularity is at its highest since 1965. One of the key drivers of this popularity is a groundswell of interest from a new generation of young workers who are looking to the labor movement as a vehicle to fight against an increasingly bleak future.
A labor movement that is content with business as usual will not realize the opportunities of this moment. Instead, we need unions that articulate not only our demands for better pay and working conditions, but can advance our broader political aspirations as a working class. Building a movement that can advance the hopes and dreams of all workers won't be achieved by creating perfect structures and processes in unions that become more marginal with each passing year. It will only be achieved by organizing at a scale and fighting with an intensity that we have not seen in decades. A labor movement that wages fights with this intensity can become a school that teaches workers about the nature of society and gives us the confidence and training to transform it entirely.
This is the kind of labor movement that we need.
Our future is on the line.
Meet the Team
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Husayn Karimi
Podcast Co-Host
Husayn Karimi is a labor journalist and organizer. He cut his teeth in the student movement before working in external organizing for UE and then SEIU, helping workers form new unions in higher education.
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Rachel Domond
Podcast Co-Host
Rachel Domond is a Boston-based communications specialist rooted in community organizing against racism, police brutality and gentrification. She has a wide range of experience in the labor movement, from working as a UFCW member as a teenager, to organizing on the job at a non-profit, to eventually working in digital media and communications at CWA. As an artist and writer, Rachel has an ongoing commitment to highlighting the power of working class people to change their own lives.
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Maddie Dery
Communications
Maddie Dery is a Boston-based staff organizer with MIT GSU-UE and labor editor. She began in the struggle for women’s liberation, as a staff writer for Breaking the Chains, the only feminist socialist magazine in the US. She was a leader in the abortion rights movement post Dobbs decision and is passionate about the intersection between women’s issues and worker issues.
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Jeff Rosenberg
Podcast Producer
Jeff Rosenberg is a Boston-based staff organizer with MIT GSU-UE, and lead organizer with new organizing efforts in Higher Education and Biotech in the area. He began as an anti-war student organizer. Now, he focuses on building worker-led organizing drives to take our power back from the bosses. Jeff has also co-led worker-leader organizing schools across sectors in the Boston labor movement, growing and connecting the city-wide labor movement.
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Jimmy Day
Video Editor
Jimmy Day cut his professional teeth in set lighting growing up around Boston and later worked his way into science education TV production for institutions such as the Smithsonian, MIT, and PBS. While working for a PBS station, Jimmy experienced the effects of a union-busting law firm hired by management to frighten its workers from starting a union. Since then, Jimmy has been creating and distributing video segments to expose union-busting tactics and help energize workers about their strength in solidarity.
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Nathalie Hrizi
Frequent Contributor
Nathalie Hrizi is a public school educator in San Francisco who currently serves as the Vice President of Substitutes for United Educators of San Francisco. Hrizi has been an active site leader in UESF for the past 17 years. She also serves as the editor of Breaking the Chains, a socialist and feminist magazine. She is often involved, along with her two kids, in community, antiwar and antiracist struggles in the area.
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Mike Kramer
Frequent Contributor
Mike Kramer has been working to build a fighting labor movement for over 20 years. He has served in roles ranging from rank and file member to staff organizer to elected union leader and has organized with workers in many industries. He currently serves as the Executive Vice President of UNITE HERE Local 26, where he has led major organizing campaigns and strikes in the service sector.