Labor Express Radio is a weekly labor news and current affairs radio program that broadcasts every Monday morning on WLUW, a formerly-independent community radio station in Chicago which has recently reverted to its original status as the radio station for Loyola University in Chicago. It is Chicago's only English-language radio program devoted to issues related to the labor movement (Radio Chamba, also on WLUW covers the labor movement in its Spanish-language broadcast) and one of only a handful of such programs around the country. Labor Express has covered local, national and international labor news for almost a decade and a half, since its first broadcast in 1993. It is a totally volunteer-produced and self-funded project. The program is a production of the Committee for Labor Access, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, which oversees both Labor Express and Labor Beat, a Public-access television labor cable TV program which broadcasts in Chicago and Rockford, Illinois and St. Louis, Missouri. The program is affiliated with IBEW Local 1220 which represents radio and TV broadcast engineers in Chicago, but the views expressed on the show are solely that of its producers. WCFL and the history of labor radio in Chicago Chicago has always been a leading center of the labor movement in the United States. The events of the “Haymarket Affair” in 1886 are recognized worldwide as seminal to the modern working class movement. Chicago has more union locals with the number designation 1 (usually meaning the first) than any other city in the country – a testament to the number of national and international unions who owe their early formative history to the city. Likewise, Chicago has long been a pioneer in the field of labor movement communications – especially radio. John Fitzpatrick, President of the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) from 1905 until his death in 1946, and Edward Nockels, secretary of the CFL from 1903 until his death in 1937, were labor movement visionaries who recognized the potential that radio offered to communicate the message of organized labor to a mass audience. Their advocacy in favor of a station independent of the influence of “big business”, lead to the creation of WCFL, “Chicago’s Voice of Labor”, the first and only labor-owned radio station in the country. According to historian Nathan Godfried, who wrote a history of WCFL, the station served the trade union movement by devoting considerable time to labor focused programs