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Jonathan Michels is a freelance journalist based in Atlanta, Georgia. Since 2011, he has reported on issues of national importance such as the struggle to remove white supremacist memorials and forced sterilization.

The Association of Alternative Newsmedia recognized his journalism in 2018 with an award in the longform category for his article about the uneasy formation of a syringe exchange in the U.S. South. Jonathan believes that for journalism to remain relevant, it must explore issues through the experiences of individuals and communities most affected.

Drawing on his experience as a frontline healthcare worker of more than 15 years, Jonathan frequently writes about the inequities of the American medical system and the need for a universal, single-payer health system.

He is a proud member of the National Writers Union's Freelance Solidarity Project, a union devoted to improving the lives of freelance digital media workers by improving their working conditions.

Selected Work

Jonathan Michels •

"It's Monday and the South is rising" documentary

North Carolina has a strong history of people fighting for social justice from Reconstruction to the civil rights movement. The most current incarnation of this struggle is the Moral Monday movement. During the summer of 2013, seasoned activists, ministers, professionals and everyday people descended upon the North Carolina state capital to protest the radical policies of a Republican-controlled legislature and thrust the Tar Heel state into the national spotlight.

North Carolina has long been
Jonathan Michels •

"Local 22: Bringing the giant down to earth" documentary

In the depths of Jim Crow, 10,000 tobacco workers demanded justice from the corporate elite.

And they won.

Community members will unveil a historic state marker on April 20, 2013 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. There will be a panel discussion at First Calvary Baptist Church in downtown Winston followed by a march to honor the interracial unionizing of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company by Local 22.

Interviews:
-Larry Little, son of R.J. Reynolds worker and professor at Winston-Salem State Unive

Will Utah Compensate Victims of Forced Sterilization?

In 2018, Dr James Tabery watched a documentary about North Carolina’s eugenics program and the fraught effort to financially compensate survivors. The film changed his life.“Seeing The State of Eugenics . . . everything crystallized for me,” said Tabery, a professor at the University of Utah’s Philosophy Department. “It was like this isn’t history or it’s not just history. These people are out there.”In fact, as many as forty-eight people may still be out there, at an average age of seventy-nine...

A New Single-Payer Effort Is Underway in Georgia

On a Sunday afternoon in April, Atlanta residents gathered at St Paul’s Episcopal Church to discuss their alarm about the American health care system and what they could do about it. Attendants ranged widely in age, but they were united in their concern over the ballooning costs of medical treatment and the increasing inadequacy of insurance coverage.Dr Belinda McIntosh, a psychiatrist at Grady Hospital and a member of Georgians for a Universal Health Program, opened the forum by taking the coll...

Daimler Truck Workers Are Strike-Ready in the Anti-Union South

Autoworkers in the South are currently engaged in a historic, high-stakes labor struggle against the multinational corporation Daimler Truck North America (DTNA). The labor contract between DTNA and seven thousand United Auto Workers (UAW) members who build the company’s heavy trucks and buses at plants in North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee is set to expire at midnight on April 26. While Daimler Truck posts multibillion-dollar profits, DTNA workers say they are beaten down by stagnant wages.

Should the deadline be extended for NC eugenics victims? | Facing South

The June 30 deadline for victims of North Carolina's eugenics program to apply for compensation is quickly approaching. As of June 1, only 518 claims were made out of an estimated 1,500 people who have been verified by the state for compensation.

"They need to get rid of this June 30 deadline," said Elizabeth Haddix, an attorney with the UNC Center for Civil Rights.

The center works with low-income African-American clients, similar to the people that North Carolina targeted for sterilization d

The UAW’s 2028 National Strike Should Center Medicare for All

Fresh off their historic labor victory against the country’s Big Three automakers, the United Auto Workers (UAW) are laying the groundwork for workers across multiple sectors to join them in a general strike on International Workers Day, May 1, 2028. UAW president Shawn Fain’s call to utilize labor power — four hundred thousand working members and six hundred thousand retirees make up the UAW alone — for the “good of the entire working class” is a major departure from business-as-usual unionism.
Shadowproof •

Citizen-Led Truth Commission Seeks Justice For Survivors Of North Carolina Torture Flights

Mohamedou Ould Slahi was shackled and blindfolded. Then the men in black stripped him naked and placed him in a diaper.

Although his eyes were covered, Slahi could hear the sound of aircraft engines whirring around him. One of the planes came to shuttle him to an United States air base in Afghanistan for interrogation.

“I was so exhausted, sick, and tired that I couldn’t walk, which compelled the escort to pull me up the steps like a dead body,” Slahi wrote in Guantánamo Diary, a firsthand acc
Triad City Beat •

Breaking the ‘wicked silence’ of eugenics in North Carolina

Until 40 years ago, the state of North Carolina forcibly sterilized poor people. The Winston-Salem Journal exposed the story that was right under everybody’s noses in 2002. Now, victims are finally getting compensation, but is history repeating itself with new policies that hurt the poor?

At one time in the United States, wealthy and powerful individuals promoted eugenics, the belief and practice of using flawed science to “purify” the human race. It fell out of fashion following the revelation

We Don’t Just Need Medicare for All — We Need a National Health System

Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) emerged thirty-five years ago amid the austerity cuts of the Reagan administration, which threatened to hollow out critical social safety-net programs like Medicaid. Rather than marshaling physician support to defend the limited (albeit lifesaving) poverty program, PNHP opted instead to pour its energies into expanding the possibilities of what health care reform could look like in the United States.

Single-Payer Champion Abdul El-Sayed Is Running for Senate

I was in medical school when the ACA passed, and I was so grateful that we had an American president that was willing to jump on this issue. But as it got negotiated, I realized that the broader promise of health care in America as we were reading about the history of the unmet promise of health care — during the Truman years, and then again during the LBJ years, and then again under the leadership of folks like Ted Kennedy, and then under the Obama administration — we still have yet to make goo...

A New Doctors’ Union in the South Is a Model for Health Care Organizing

Each day on his commute to the clinic, Dr Crister Brady traverses the rolling farmland of Eastern North Carolina, gliding past the neon-green tobacco fields where many of his patients live and work. Brady’s clinic, the Prospect Hill Community Health Center, is one of ten federally qualified health centers operated by Piedmont Health Services Inc. The nonprofit provides comprehensive primary care services to patients who are uninsured or who receive coverage from Medicaid and Medicare.
The Intercept •

HCA Healthcare Is Using Coronavirus to Union Bust Nurses

corporation in America, HCA Healthcare, is using the coronavirus pandemic to delay and undermine a union election for 1,600 nurses in North Carolina. After nurses filed in March to hold an election, HCA Healthcare petitioned the National Labor Relations Board, or the NLRB, to delay the vote because of the pandemic. In the meantime, it hired professional union busters costing $400 an hour to conduct meetings inside Mission Hospital in Asheville, urging nurses to oppose joining a union. And while

The Spin Doctors

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Draft cards weren’t the only cards set on fire during the 1960s. Back then, at least one young medical student also burned their membership card in the powerful physicians’ organization that some had nicknamed the “American Murder Association.” While the Vietnam War ended long ago, people are still fighting for the physical and financial health of the US public — and the body count conti
in-these-times •

Southern Workers Unite Around Medicare for All: “A Tremendous Liberation From Your Boss”

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A line of cars rolls up to the government center of the largest city in a state tied with neighbor South Carolina for least unionized in the country. Members of the Southern Workers Assembly (SWA) emerge from the cars and join a picket line of Charlotte city workers. They hoist a banner declaring ​“The City Works Because We Do” and chant ​“What do we want? Medicare for All! When do we want it? Now!”

“Having Medicare for All is a tremendous liberation from your boss,” says Ed B
Scalawag •

Harm reduction is compassion, harm reduction is love: Louise's story –

Beginning in the 1980s as a response to widespread drug abuse and to the AIDS epidemic, harm reduction tactics promoted public health by preventing diseases from spreading through shared needles. Harm reduction advocates drew inspiration from civil and human rights movements and the tactics of AIDS activist groups such as ACT UP. Many AIDS activists worked in the streets of cities like New York to promote syringe exchange access—trading dirty needles for clean ones—and agitating against the abst
Scalawag •

'The most violently exploited group in America'

"A voice locked up is not a voice unheard!"

As the snowbirds arrived in Florida along with the mild January breezes, a small uprising of laborers who work under lock and key stopped production and made demands. This coordinated struggle was carried out by members of one of the most violently exploited groups in America: incarcerated workers.

In 2018, inmates at 17 Florida prisons launched the labor strike, calling themselves "Operation PUSH", to demand higher wages and the reintroduction of pa
Triad City Beat •

Occupy Winston-Salem: Three years later

For the men and women in suits and ties leaving the annual meeting of the Chamber of Commerce, the scene was anything but business as usual. Protesters with signs and banners chanted boisterously from across the street. Several passersby joined in the ruckus.

This was Fifth Street in Winston-Salem and it was just one of many actions that residents organized since they stood together as an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement three years ago in October 2011.

The movement was born when th

“To Keep Not Only Patients but Ourselves Safe, We Have to Unionize”

Right now, nurses in North Carolina are mailing in their ballots in what could be one of the most consequential elections of their lives — and it isn’t the 2020 presidential election. After a five-month delay under the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), more than 1,700 nurses at Mission Health hospital in Asheville will finally decide if they want to form a union with National Nurses United. The election results will be announced by the NLRB on September 16.

HCA Healthcare is one of the wea
Scalawag •

If you've never shot drugs, you ain't got a clue: Steve's story –

[I got the name "Gator"] from school. When you're young and you do stupid stuff, that's what I did. They said, "You're tough like a gator." It just stuck with me over the years.

I'm 67 years old. I shot drugs and did all that stupid stuff we did back in the day. This all started when I was up in college in Richmond. I didn't last long up there and moved back home. Then I went to UNCG [the University of North Carolina at Greensboro] and stayed there for a little while. But that didn't last long.
Scalawag •

‘Prisoners' organizations were thought to be dangerous.’: Conversations with organizers of the North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union –

"People were afraid of prisoners' organizations. People had Attica on their mind. Prisoners' organizations were thought to be dangerous.": Interview with Chuck Eppinette of the North Carolina Prisoners' Labor Union

Earlier this year, Florida prison inmates took part in a statewide labor strike to protest forced labor that they view as a modern form of slavery. The strike was just the latest action in a growing movement to organize inmates and for some, to abolish the prison system altogether. I
Scalawag •

Unions are needed everywhere—especially prisons

In early 2018, Florida prison inmates took part in a statewide labor strike to protest forced labor that they view as a modern form of slavery. The strike was just the latest action in a growing movement to organize inmates and for some, to abolish the prison system altogether. In order to maintain the pressure, incarcerated workers announced another wave of strike actions that took place on August 21, 2018.

Inmate organizing has a powerful precedent. During the early 1970s, the prisoners' unio
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