Coming soon to Nashville air waves: Radio Dignidad 104.1 FM!

Dignidad Obrera at the 2015 Concert for Fair Food. In the months ahead, the Nashville worker center will be launching their own worker-led radio station. — Dignidad Obrera at the 2013 March for Rights, Respect and Fair Food. In the months ahead, the Nashville worker center will be launching their own worker-led radio station.

The spirit of the CIW’s Radio Conciencia spreads across the South, as workers launch Workers’ Dignity Radio in Nashville…

And you can help!

For five years now, one of the CIW’s strongest allies in the Southeast has been Workers’ Dignity / Dignidad Obrera, a Nashville workers’ center. Made up of hundreds of low-wage workers in the cleaning, construction, restaurant, landscaping, meatpacking, and other industries, Workers’ Dignity organizes on the job and in Middle Tennessee’s working-class neighborhoods to end the worst workplace abuses and build a multiracial worker-led movement for economic justice in the mid-South.

Each year since 2009, Workers’ Dignity has hosted farmworkers from Immokalee for presentations, tours, exchanges, and strategy meetings to support and build the campaign for fair food in Tennessee, leading to dozens of marches and delegations at Publix stores and Wendy’s locations in Tennessee – including the Amazing Race for Farmworker Justice this April, which rattled Publix so much that they banned dialogue between customers and local managers and hired security to patrol all 30 Publix locations in Middle Tennessee.

And each spring for the last five years, Nashville workers have taken off time from their jobs to travel to Florida and march alongside the CIW in our massive mobilizations, bringing back fresh movement-building ideas to Tennessee.

One of those ideas, inspired by Immokalee’s Radio Conciencia, was worker-powered community radio. Two years ago, Workers’ Dignity began envisioning a worker-owned and worker-run radio station, the first of its kind in Tennessee history. And this week, after two years of preparation, Nashville workers are unveiling WDYO “Radio Dignidad”, which will begin broadcasting on 104.1 FM in the spring of 2016.

CIW's Leonel Perez at the control board of CIW's 12-year-old low-power FM radio station, Radio Conciencia. — CIW’s Leonel Perez at the control board of CIW’s 12-year-old low-power FM radio station, *Radio Conciencia.*

Now, Workers’ Dignity members are reaching out to allies across the South and the country to help them get the equipment and build out a radio studio onto their new worker organizing center in the heart of Southeast Nashville!

Check out their campaign page here to read more about the project and learn how you can support the growth of worker-run media in the South — and make sure to sign up to join the the Thunderclap on Twitter!