Gaslighting, Oligarchy, and Other Media Forecasts

Posted on February 13, 2023 by James V Catano

 “Gaslighting” was Merriam-Webster’s 2022 word of the year, a selection based on the frequency of searches in their online dictionary. The term makes good sense on cultural grounds as well, given the ongoing influence of political and economic chicanery on the US psyche. But “oligarch” was number two, and it may well prove to be the more consequential term–particularly for the working class.

Experts have long debated the reliability of language use as evidence of deep cultural beliefs, but in today’s information and media-saturated world it’s reasonable to assume that words trending in the metaverse have real analogues in—and even impacts on—cultural thinking.

So it seems natural that both gaslighting and oligarch were central to popular social consciousness in 2022, mainly due in the US to media-enacted antics of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and the like. Musk’s particular Twitter tantrums managed to unite gaslighting and oligarchy in ways heretofore seen mainly in the behavior of Gaslighter-in-Chief and oligarchic mini-me Donald J. Trump. As economist Paul Krugman recently declared “we’re clearly living in the age of the petulant oligarch.”

That linkage of childishness and oligarchic behavior can provide some dark humor, with Musk’s blurring of the line between real world and mediated world suggesting that he finds the whole process amusing. In his recent fraud trial, Musk cheekily testified that, “Just because I tweet something does not mean people believe it or will act accordingly.” 

But viewing oligarchic gaslighting as mere childishness papers over the real economic devastation wrought by extreme wealth. The fading middle class and subsequently expanding working poor, underemployed, and poverty-stricken remind us that we should take oligarchic power seriously, particularly given its ubiquity and wide-ranging enactors.

As Merriam-Webster itself notes, it is not just Musk and Bezos who are trending.  It is also Vladimir Putin, who enables and has been enabled by Russian oligarchs. The war on Ukraine has turned gaslighting into very concrete and real devastation. But the insidious behavior of the oligarchy in the region had already been dramatized by the Ukrainian television series Servant of the People–a satire that offered not merely humor but also biting discussion of current social issues.

It is commonplace to focus on Servant as a near-perfect foretelling of Volodymyr Zelensky’s real-world rise to the Ukrainian presidency, an ironic prediction of his fictional character Goloborodko’s election to the post. Clearly life does imitate art; language and media truly do mirror reality.  But the focus on Zelensky overlooks the series’ emphasis on the destructiveness of extreme wealth and power.

Oligarchs appear early and often within Servant. At first we see them in fragments — the backs of heads, partial faces, devouring mouths, and disembodied hands manipulating the action from afar. As the series develops, they are gradually revealed as specific figures.  The ensuing—and sarcastic—semi-fictional portrayal of oligarchic power and its societal damage is both prescient and more than somewhat horrifying in light of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

The tragic effects of that war offer immediate, material proof of the dangers of the unholy alliance of political demagoguery and extreme wealth, state-based gaslighting and oligarchic power.  And these dangers extend far beyond the war’s immediate victims, as economic strain and food shortages ripple outward to working and poor people world-wide.

Further, long-term damage to working classes and their interests is likely even after the war, particularly in regard to unionization.  Recent headlines — “Ukraine Corruption Scandal Stokes Longstanding Aid Concerns in U.S.” — read like an already familiar story-line from Servant’s second season.  In the fictional world, Zelensky/President Goloborodko battles oligarchs not only to end corruption, but also to satisfy investment-oriented interests such as the International Monetary Fund and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.  In Servant, Ukraine gets to tell them and their economic planners “to go to hell.”

Shifting to the real world, Patricia Cohen notes that current discussions about rebuilding a post-war Ukraine are rooted in very similar neo-liberal economic attitudes. The same European Bank for Reconstruction and Development satirized in Servant has called for “Promoting privatisation and commercialisation in the public sector to increase competitiveness and good governance,” a stance that Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-prize winning Columbia University economist, finds “just gobsmacking.” Such strategies “brought inequality, environmental degradation, and insufficient housing and medical care in the United States and other countries,” yet they are being “promoted as a model for Ukraine.”  

Unfortunately, redevelopment narratives foregrounding privatization will find ready acceptance within neo-liberal, conservative, and even centrist circles in the West.  But as Stiglitz’s comment suggests, this approach to rebuilding will likely lead to oligarchic imbalances. Privatization often fosters not sound economies but failure of governmental control and related despotism, as we’ve seen in Russia and, as Krugman implies, in the U.S. as well.

None of this is good for workers and workers’ rights, in part because these approaches often translate to union busting. While unions do come under comedic attack in Zelensky’s Servant (most notably Episode 15, Season 1), they do so within the larger argument that corruption at the top inevitably bleeds down to the worker in the street because oligarchic wealth poisons society as a whole.

A more hopeful narrative line, and one that Servant suggests, concerns social activism and involvement, communal engagement and collective action — hallmarks not of privatization but of union and community organizing. With that storyline in mind, it would be nice if 2023 or any year’s word of the year were ‘activism.’

James V. Catano

James V. Catano is producer/director of Enduring Legacy:  Louisiana’s Croatian Americans and author of Ragged Dicks:  Masculinity, Steel, and the Rhetoric of the Self-Made Man. He is Professor Emeritus of English and Screen Arts at Louisiana State University.

Posted in Class and the Media, Contributors, Issues, James V. Catano, Working-Class Politics | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Upward Mobility: Improving Conditions, Not Just Opportunities

Posted on January 30, 2023 by jackmetz1

I’m old enough now to have grandnieces and nephews, and almost all of them have lower living standards and worse working conditions than their parents.  And their parents had it worse than their grandparents.  The one exception is Carrie, who recently graduated from college and works as a medical technologist, making one of the best salaries in three generations of our extended family.  She grew up in poverty, the child of a teenage mother who was a ward and prisoner of the welfare system for the first decade of her motherhood.  Carrie and her mother worked hard to climb out of poverty, and Carrie’s success is heartening in a family that has seen so little of it.

My extended family reflects patterns of upward mobility in the US today.  Only a handful of people born in the bottom half of the income hierarchy move up, but they are often seen as evidence of the continuing promise of the American Dream.  Most people born since 1980, however, are living diminished lives compared to their parents.

This situation shows why absolute upward mobility is more important than relative upward mobility. Understanding the difference makes clear why we should focus on the conditions of people’s lives, not just their opportunities to move up a social class ladder.

Relative upward mobility is when people born into a lower income quintile rise to a higher quintile.  It has stayed roughly the same for more than 50 years.  Most people born into the top two quintiles at any point since 1970 have stayed there as adults, while fewer than 1 of 10 born into the bottom quintile, like Carrie, make it to the top 20%.  This means we’re getting no closer to equal opportunity than we were a half century ago.

Absolute upward mobility measures whether people earn more than their parents did.  And it has been declining for more than 50 years.  Over 90% of children born in the 1940s, for example, earned more as adults than their parents did, regardless of whether they moved up any quintiles. As real wages and family incomes increased across the board, almost everybody lived better than their parents. But only about half of those born in 1980 have family incomes greater than their parents, and it’s even worse for those born since then. 

Carrie illustrates both kinds of upward mobility, but it is what her income provides, not the quintile it puts her in, that matters the most, for her and for our society. Absolute mobility measures changes for the population at large, not just where individuals land relative to where they begin.  Rather than referencing heartening individual stories of struggle and success, absolute mobility is a dry statistic that tries to capture the macro-level whole.  Is a rising tide lifting or sinking most boats?  As the graph below shows, most of us have been sinking for quite a while, and there is nothing heartening about that.

We know all this because of heroic research conducted by Raj Chetty and his colleagues.  Chetty runs Opportunity Insights at Harvard University, a research center that “uses big data to study the science of economic opportunity: how we can give children from all backgrounds better chances of succeeding?”  After decades of researching both relative and absolute mobility, Chetty has recently published two highly influential studies that collapse the distinction, but end up focusing exclusively on the micro level where individual success might be achieved rather than on the macro where broad conditions affect almost everybody.  This is a mistake. Instead of encouraging us to look for ways to improve conditions from the bottom up and across the board, it emphasizes the narrower goal of equal opportunity.

Increasing opportunity sounds great. It aims to help more people move up into that top 20% or 40%, but there are two problems with that.  First, because relative mobility is a fixed hierarchical system, moving some people up doesn’t increase the size of the higher categories.  When one person moves up, someone else has to move down.  Conditions do not change, only who occupies which places in the income hierarchy does.  More importantly, focusing only on improving opportunities for relative upward mobility doesn’t address stagnant incomes, much less the declining incomes that the lower quintiles in the US face today. The gap between the lower and higher income quintiles may well increase, so that most people’s lives get a little or a lot more difficult year by year even as a few make it into higher income quintiles.

It isn’t just that Chetty’s analysis focuses on only one kind of mobility. He also proposes “solutions” to income inequality that don’t address the real challenges facing most Americans. He calls for local changes that would expose more poor and working-class people to affluent middle-class professionals, from whose social capital they might benefit.  Chetty would increase “economic connectedness” and reduce “friending bias” by eliminating tracking at a high school in California, redoing the architecture of a high school in Texas, and purposely mixing social classes at a Boston weightlifting gym.

Meanwhile, the wealthiest 1% among us keep piling up mostly passive income such that in 2021 their total wealth was more than double all personal income earned by all US individuals.  Instead of debating what kind of wealth tax might buy which policies to improve the conditions of almost everybody, Chetty would have us focus on feel-good local efforts to increase interactions between people of different social classes.   

The big-data research Chetty and his colleagues have done is extraordinarily rich in local detail, mapping economic connectedness and friending bias at specific zip code, high school, and college levels.  It is designed to help people take immediate local action to improve individuals’ prospects for upward mobility.  But Chetty is an especially influential voice in discussions of income and wealth inequality, and his decisive shift to an equal opportunity framework (embodied in the name of his institute) threatens to erase attention to the historical trajectory of actual conditions – a discussion that he once helped initiate.

Equal opportunity is a worthy primary goal for groups that have and continue to face discrimination and exclusion – Blacks, women, and many others.  But it is NOT the right goal for addressing income and wealth inequality, which is not about having an opportunity to have a decent life, but about having that kind of life if you simply work hard and play by the rules.  When life is getting worse from generation to generation for more than half the population, we need to focus on actual conditions, not opportunities. That means big national policies that enhance the common good and substantially improve most people’s lives, not local efforts to “better [individual] chances of succeeding.”  What’s more, we are very unlikely to improve our opportunity structure until we make actual conditions of life more equal, beginning with income.

We are a very rich country with most of our wealth piled up at the very top.  To achieve upward mobility for most of us, not just a few of us, we’re going to have to move some money around – to take relatively small amounts from the tax-advantaged rich and redistribute what will be large amounts of money to the rest of us, starting with those bottom quintiles.

Jack Metzgar

Jack Metzgar is a retired adult educator at Roosevelt University in Chicago.  A founder and past president of the Working-Class Studies Association, he is author of Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered and, more recently, Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society.

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Fair Time Legislation Is Achievable, Not Just for Rail Workers But for Everyone

Posted on January 23, 2023 by Working-Class Perspectives

Even as President Biden signed legislation imposing a contract without paid sick leave on 115,000 rail workers, he made it clear that the fight for paid leave — not just for rail workers but for everyone — wasn’t over. As he often reminds us, America is one of the few nations in the world that doesn’t have paid leave for its workers. 

But the problem goes beyond sick leave, as the rail strike last year made clear: Americans face an epidemic of long-hour, family-hostile jobs. We are overworked and over-controlled.  Workers lack such basic economic freedoms as the right to say no to overtime and the right to time off to care for themselves and those they love.  We need fair time legislation that restores these rights to all Americans.  

Achieving such a breakthrough is not an impossible dream.  But it can only happen if we build a fair time movement that links the long fight of the women’s movement to value family work with the labor movement’s equally long fight for shorter hours and more control over work time.    

I come from three generations of railroaders who risked their lives making sure goods and people got where they needed to go.  And they were proud of it. My dad started railroading in the 1930s, sorting letters in the train’s special mail car as it whizzed between small towns in Georgia.  Then he “fired” on the steam locomotive, often shoveling fuel into the coal box next to his engineer father. Finally, he moved into the driver’s seat himself. He loved his job, and he made enough money to buy a small house in downtown Atlanta.

But he also had plenty of control over when and how much he worked, thanks to something he called the “extra board,” a system of work distribution negotiated between the unions and the railroad companies. On the extra board, he could remove his name (or plug) from the board when he didn’t want to be called for a job and return it when he did. For him, it was glorious. He read as much as he wanted, studied for the bar exam and passed, and kept active in his union, his church, and his Masonic Lodge. And, of course, he could spend time with me.  When I was growing up in the 1950s, it was often my Dad who greeted me after school.  I knew he’d be there, not my grandmother, because he blew the train whistle three times as he drove past Peachtree Station near my Atlanta elementary school. 

How different is the world of the railroader now. The money may still be “good” (though it’s nothing like what the billionaire rail CEOs rake in). But what difference does it make if your job treats you as less than human, as someone whose health and life apart from work has no value? 

The situation of railroaders today is unsustainable.  The industry’s current lean-and-mean business model generates record profits for the few, but it is creating record heartache for the many.

A diminished workforce is now chained to 60-hour weeks and routinely penalized for taking time off for family or medical emergencies. This system endangers the safety and health of the exhausted men and women charged with keeping our rail deliveries moving. It disrupts family life, thwarts civic participation, and makes a mockery of our commitment to democracy and shared decision-making.  

Sadly, while the railroad industry may be the current poster boy for the corporate strategy of job degradation, it is only one of many. Americans now spend more annual hours in paid work than in almost any other industrialized nation, including Japan, famous for its culture of overwork.  And with the rise of just-in-time scheduling and the continuing shift of decision-making upward, worker control over time has plummeted.

We can fix this. We have a long history of fair time movements in the US to build on.

Ending long hours was the top demand of American workers in the nineteenth century. As the labor movement argued then, shorter hours increased productivity, encouraged technological investment, and reduced worker illness and job injury. Limiting the supply of work time increased its value, and employers could afford to pay workers more.  Shorter hours also meant a fairer distribution of work.  It tackled the problem of too much work as well as too little. As AFL president Sam Gompers put it in 1887, “So long as there is one man who seeks employment and cannot obtain it, the hours of labor are too long.”

The political and social case for shorter hours was just as important as the economic. Without time for education, reflection, and civic engagement, American workers could not participate fully in the American experiment in representative democracy.  Shorter hours, the labor movement argued, would enable workers to be better citizens, better family members, and better people. 

This first great movement for shorter hours brought us the 8-hour day. In 1916, faced with the threat of a national walkout of 400,000 rail unionists, President

Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for legislation instituting the 8-hour day on the railroads. Soon after, he signed the Adamson Act, the first 8-hour federal law for nongovernmental employees.  Although ten, and even twelve, hours a day remained the norm in many unorganized workplaces into the 1930s, the 8-hour standard spread as unions gained power.   

The right to a voice in workplace governance, including setting fair work schedules and gaining time off, were at the heart of labor’s revival in the 1930s and 1940s. With close to a third of the nonagricultural workforce organized by the 1950s, unions wrested paid vacations, holidays, sick leave, and pensions from America’s major employers. In addition to shorter workweeks, they won a shorter work year and a shorter work life. Unions also institutionalized job-sharing, job registries, union hiring halls, and other mechanisms to distribute work more fairly and give workers more say over when and how much they worked.

Reform-minded women from all classes led the second great time movement. These activists, a group I call “full rights feminists,” fought for the right to family time as well as the right to a good job. That meant, among other things, jobs that paid enough to support a family, more control over where and when they worked, and state support for household and care labor. By the 1920s, they won laws in the majority of states that regulated the hours of women and children and granted state aid to single mothers. In 1938, against great odds, they pushed through the Fair Labor Standards Act, the first federal law setting wage floors and hour ceilings for men, women, and children. In 1963, John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, an initiative championed by a new generation of full rights feminists, called for federal action to establish paid maternity leave, limits on involuntary overtime, better part-time jobs, affordable child care, and state compensation for unpaid caregiving.

Today, the struggle for fair time is gaining ground.  As workers organize, they are insisting on their right to participate in deciding the rules under which they work. They are rejecting rigid, inflexible scheduling and demanding an end to the mal-distribution of work, with forced overtime for some and too few hours for others. They increasingly have the support of the public too, with Gallup reporting a whopping 71% of Americans sympathetic to unions.  Paid family and medical leave laws now exist in eleven states, and even more states offer paid sick leave. Campaigns for “fair workweek” and “fair scheduling” laws have cropped up around the country and show no sign of waning. The time movements of the past were right: fair time regimes are essential if individuals, families, and democratic societies are to flourish.  

It’s crucial to strengthen these efforts. We need an inclusive, transformative time movement – one that is powerful and far-seeing enough to insist that Congress pass not just sick leave but fair time legislation for all workers.  But we’re only going to get it when we come together as one movement.

Dorothy Sue Cobble

Dorothy Sue Cobble is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Labor Studies and History at Rutgers University. Her most recent book is For the Many: American Feminists and theGlobal Fight for Democratic Equality (Princeton, 2021).

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Loved and Lost: Working-Class People We Lost in 2022

Posted on January 16, 2023 by sarahattfield

While it might seem rather maudlin to start a new year by writing about death, the loss of favourite musicians, actors, and athletes reminds us of the pleasure they’ve given us. Some losses are especially important for working-class people, for whom entertainment is not just a source of pleasure but also of inspiration. While many notable celebrities died in 2022, a few stand out.

Football fans recently enjoyed the World Cup, a tournament that finished with a wonderful final, full of tension and glorious play. But the tournament was also mired in controversy due to its location in Qatar. Due to the extreme heat in Qatar, it had to be played in November rather than during the usual middle of the year, disrupting northern hemisphere local leagues. There were also concerns about the human rights record of Qatar and whether LGBTQI+ fans would be safe there. The event also highlighted the terrible treatment of the mostly immigrant workers employed to construct the stadiums, often in unsafe and exploitative conditions. None of this stopped the tournament, despite calls from some activists to boycott the Cup. Football fans from around the world cheered on their teams and joined in with the highs and lows of wins and defeats.

If this seems like a lack of solidarity with the ill-treated workers, it ignores the incredible power of football in working-class communities. The game is very important to many working-class people, and players can take on legendary status. This is definitely the case with Brazilian player Pelé who delighted world fans with his incredible play in the 1960s and 1970s. Pelé’s death was not only mourned in Brazil, but across the world. Football is a truly global game and often played in some of the most impoverished communities (yes, it does also attract huge amounts of money in the professional leagues which is a tension understood well by fans). Like many star footballers, Pelé grew up poor, but he didn’t forget his origins and spent much of his post-football career involved in charity and advocacy work. During his career, he was also held up as an example of Black success – an important status particularly at a time when Afro-Brazilians were fighting for racial justice. Obituaries of Pelé suggest that he remained humble and unassuming and was not tainted by his fame. Pelé may have played football a long time ago, but he continues to inspire and influence young players and fans.

Popular music has fans of all classes, but some acts have been associated with working-class fans. the UK ska band The Specials is one such band. The death of lead singer Terry Hall touched many working-class Brits. Hall grew up in the working-class town of Coventry in the west midlands of England and joined the band in the late 1970s.The Specials’ career took off in the 1980s and their music spoke to many working-class kids in the UK. One of their hit songs, ‘Ghost Town’, released in 1981, summed up perfectly the mood in Thatcher’s Britain with its references to youth being ignored by the government, the decline in places for young people to let off steam, and unemployment as well as its sinister musical tone. Hall’s dour expression when performing fit the mood of the time perfectly. As the song was released, riots were breaking out across the country as young people vented their frustration at the many injustices they faced. Many of the band’s other songs were aimed at young working-class people, those who spent all their money on booze or have kids too young, or young men heading towards a life of crime. The multi-racial band spoke to Black and white kids alike. ‘Ghost Town’ takes me back immediately to the early 1980s in Britain and the grim reality of working-class life for many under an uncaring Tory government. It still gives me shivers.

We lost other notable entertainers, as well, including American country star Loretta Lynn, the daughter of a coal miner who advocated for working-class people. Her politics may have been  a mixed bag – she was a Trump supporter – but her music was loved by millions of working-class fans.

Sidney Poitier also died last year. He came from humble beginnings and had to fight to gain a place in the theatre and movie industries. The characters he played often wrestled with issues around class and race, and most of his films are now considered exemplary cinema exploring social issues of the times they were made.

In Australia, the much-loved Aboriginal singer songwriter Archie Roach died. Roach was of the Stolen Generations who were taken from their Aboriginal families at a young age and sent to live in white institutions or fostered by white families. Roach battled with addiction and homelessness, and his songs tell the stories of hardship, struggle, and survival. These are just a few of the many I could mention – too many, unfortunately.

I’ve left some out intentionally, like Queen Elizabeth II. I’ve written about the royals before, and I generally have little time for them. To me they represent the great inequalities that exist in the UK. But I know that many British working-class people were sad about her passing, and I don’t wish to disparage their genuine feelings of grief. But those I have mentioned have had more on an impact on the everyday lives of working-class people than the Queen or the royal family in general.

My intention isn’t to focus on mourning. The deaths of these working-class icons remind us of the importance of music, film, and sport in the lives of working-class people. We enjoy listening to and watching people we can relate to in some way, whether through the lyrics they sang, a character they played, or their skill on the pitch. We appreciate them even more when we know that we share a working-class background. They speak for us, but they also remind us of how talented working-class people are — and how powerful they can be when given the opportunity.

Sarah Attfield, University of Technology Sydney

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Not My President: The Rise of the Working Class and Decline of the Heroic CEO

Posted on January 9, 2023 by Christopher R Martin

In late November, Bob Iger returned to the post of chief executive officer of Disney. He had retired in 2020 after 15 years as the media megacorporation’s CEO,  where he was hailed for the company’s acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm. In the year before his retirement, Iger’s annual salary was $65.6 million, and he had an estimated net worth of $690 million.

But after the Disney board ousted his hand-picked successor last month, Iger – now 71 — was suddenly back in the job. At a Disney town hall meeting a few days later, CNBC reported that “Iger joked his wife, Willow Bay, told him he should run Disney again so that he wouldn’t run for U.S. president — something Iger has thought about in the past.” In a 2022 interview, Iger explained why he had considered a presidential run:  

I had this notion that every kid in America should grow up believing that they could be me, meaning that they could follow their dreams and achieve them, that they could start off with nothing and become something . . . and that America would provide them with opportunity, whether they were Black or white, rich or poor, suburban, urban, rural, you name it. That’s what I would have wanted for America.

Reports didn’t say how Iger’s joke was received at the Disney meeting, but the funniest thing about his story is Iger’s own overestimation of his political appeal. It’s very likely that working-class America doesn’t want him — or any other CEOs — as presidential candidates.

In the past 30 years, emerging from rising neoliberal pro-business, anti-government, and anti-worker ideologies, CEOs experienced soaring compensation and developed an equally soaring estimation of their value to society. For such big egos, a step up to the White House seemed possible, despite their complete lack of experience in public service.

Years before Iger considered plans for a presidential run, Texas businessman Ross Perot was the first of the generation to do it. As the Associated Press reported in 1992, “Perot said neither Bush nor Clinton had the boardroom experience to run the country like a business.” While he didn’t specify what that might mean, Perot ran the most successful third-party candidacies in modern times in 1992 and 1996. But he still lost. Nevertheless, since that time, many other business millionaires – both Republicans and Democrats – have campaigned on the same undefined notion. Steve Forbes tried it (1996 and 2000), and he was followed more recently by Herman Cain (2012), Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson (2016), and Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, and Andrew Yang (2020). Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz considered an independent candidacy in 2020.

Of course, I’m leaving out Donald Trump, the one business executive who ran for the presidency and actually won (2016), then lost (2020), and now is the first declared candidate for 2024.

Yet when People magazine profiled the 26 leading contenders for the White House in 2024, it didn’t include a single corporate leader. What happened?

The short answer is Trump, who has finally shown us what it means to run the government just like his business—which, incidentally, was convicted of all 17 charges of tax fraud and related felonies on Dec. 6. The Manhattan DA concluded that Trump’s business was a criminal enterprise: “We got to see the inner workings of the Trump organization: the greed, the lies, the cheating.”

The longer answer is heightened working-class consciousness. As other Working-Class Perspectives contributors have noted, we are in a momentous time for the U.S. labor movement. Public support for unions is higher than it has been in almost 50 years, labor strikes are at a 30-year peak, and workers are organizing new workplaces and industries. All this despite legal constraints and well-funded corporate anti-union campaigns.

This worker reappraisal and uprising has shaken people to their senses about corporate leaders.

The long-standing media myth depicts the “heroic CEO and entrepreneur,” savvy self-made  men (and less often women) who work smarter and harder than the rest of us.

But that myth has faded in recent years. But we have witnessed Howard Schultz, Jeff Bezos, and other CEOs spending millions of dollars to ensure that their low-paid workers will remain that way and keep them from organizing unions. We now know the utter emptiness of Starbucks’ corporate mission “to inspire and nurture the human spirit,” and that Amazon is definitely not “Earth’s best employer, and Earth’s safest place to work.”

Many people are sick of their bosses. A 2022 Pew Research Survey indicated that “low pay, a lack of opportunities for advancement and feeling disrespected” were the three top reasons people quit their jobs in 2021.

Those sound like the concerns raised by many Disney employees. Disney’s Iger has been praised by the corporate class (the New York Times fawned over him as “Hollywood’s nicest C.E.O.”),  but he doesn’t come off so well in a survey of workers. A 2018 study by the Occidental College Urban & Environmental Policy Institute and the Economic Roundtable Report titled “Working for the Mouse: A Survey of Disneyland Resort Employees” found that “more than 85% of union workers at Disneyland earn less than $15 an hour.” That may explain why so many indicated that they were struggling with homelessness and food insecurity. Workers also complained of “ever-shifting work schedules, extra-long commutes, and low wages.” One single mother who worked at the park full-time said “financially, I’ve seen several people lose homes, live in their cars, fail relationships and the list goes on, due to the lack of monies earned at the greatest place on Earth.”

A 2022 study by the Harvard Institute for the Study of Business in Global Society (BiGS) and the Edelman Trust Institute confirms a general lack of faith in business and CEOs. The survey suggests that people in the U.S. and 13 other countries believe that companies are failing nearly everyone – employees, customers, future generations, and their communities – except owners and shareholders. They would like business to play a greater role in the reduction of problems like wage inequality, climate change, prejudice, racism, and job loss due to automation.

The gloss has worn off the CEO. People would like businesses to do better, but they don’t trust that they will – and that is especially true for low and middle-income workers, who recognize how they are harmed by corporate practices. It’s no wonder people don’t want their country run like a business.

Christopher R. Martin, University of Northern Iowa

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Accompanying Staughton

Posted on December 30, 2022 by steeltownusa

Since his death last month, Staughton Lynd has been lionized in the national media as an icon of radicalism. Labor historians, leftist scholars, and long-time comrades have recalled his anti-war efforts, his writing about worker activism and radical history, and his direct involvement in multiple fights for justice. While the stories of these remembrances reflect many of Staughton’s accomplishments, I don’t think he would appreciate being singled out as a progressive hero any more than Archbishop Oscar Romero would have liked knowing that he had become a saint. For both men, the heart of their commitment was, more than anything else, belief in accompaniment.

Accompaniment has roots in the Catholic Liberation Theology that guided the work of Romero and other Central American priests and activists. It equally guided Lynd. In his 2012 book, Accompanying: Pathways to Social Change, Lynd quotes Dr. Paul Farmer, founder of Partners in Health, explaining the core idea: “I’ll go with you and support you on your journey wherever it leads. I’ll keep you company and share your fate for a while.” Accompaniment involves being as patient and present as those sitting quietly together in a Quaker meeting house, but, as Lynd makes clear, it is also a tool of activism and a stance of solidarity, standing with someone in a battle that is not your own, helping them to keep fighting. 

I had many opportunities to see how Staughton accompanied others. We first met in 1980, when I became coordinator of the Labor Studies program at Youngstown State University and moved my family to a city that was reeling from major steel mill shutdowns. Staughton and I knew of each other’s involvement in anti-war activism, he for leading protests and a trip to North Vietnam that ended his academic career, me for my first wife’s court battle when she was fired from her teaching job for refusing to say the pledge of allegiance. When we moved to Youngstown, Staughton and Alice, his wife, were the first people to invite us to dinner, and we began a decades-long conversation about social movements, labor unions, and community organizing.

I first witnessed him accompanying those fighting for justice when I served on the board of Northeast Ohio Legal Services, where he worked as a lawyer. The Legal Services Board provided Staughton a measure of cover in representing steelworkers fighting against shutdowns – at least until the Reagan Administration clamped down on legal services agencies for operating outside the mission of providing civil legal assistance to low income persons. But Reagan policies wouldn’t stop Staughton from standing alongside the workers. Together with steelworkers like Ed Mann, I saw the power of accompanying as we crisscrossed the Midwest to tell the Youngstown story — to Shout Youngstown, as another local steelworker, Ed Barbero, put it. We urged workers, unions, and communities to organize for the next phase of industrial and economic restructuring.

Organized labor didn’t always support these efforts, so Staughton and others formed the Workers Solidarity Club (WSC), a group of committed Youngstown unionists and others who wanted to stand with them. Our purpose was simple: accompany individuals and small groups of unionists as they fought for labor rights. Many of those battles were with corporations, but sometimes workers had to fight their own unions over failures to protect their rights through the grievance procedure. Workers also pushed back when union wage standards where threatened by appeals to worker ownership and cooperatives.

These efforts often involved unannounced picketing in support of workers, which put us in conflict with labor and political leaders who preferred a less confrontational approach. But in a way, we were also supporting them, as many would tell me later. We had provided “breathing room” to negotiate improvement in working conditions and worker treatment.  A decade later, some steelworker staffers apologized for not joining the fights when the union was still strong.

Lynd’s writing, much of it with Alice, was also a form of accompaniment, because, like the efforts of the WSC, it kept workers at the center. Labor historians didn’t always appreciate Lynd’s focus on the rank and file and worker activism. While his book, The Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, together with Howard Zinn’s Peoples History of the United States, both published in 1980, laid a foundation for progressive thinkers, by the 1990s, some argued that Lynd’s methodology and conclusions were too influenced by his own activism. For others, the close link between analysis and activism was the greatest strength of Lynd’s work.

In addition to labor issues, Staughton and Alice also became involved in prison reform. They interviewed prisoners who had taken control of the Lucasville prison to protest their living conditions and treatment. By the end of an 11-day siege in 1993, one guard and eleven prisoners were dead, but officials had agreed to the protestors’ demands, including a promise of fair treatment in any subsequent administrative or criminal proceedings.  The state didn’t follow through on that commitment, and Lynd met with the five men identified as the leaders of the uprising, a story he chronicled in Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising. Staughton also stood with prison workers, though. A few years later, he and the SWC helped to organize corrections officers at a new facility in Youngstown, creating the first private prison union in America.

Staughton was a complicated man, committed to dialogue but also at times dogmatic about his approach to social change and labor history. For example, he questioned the value of my work in building an academic field focused on studying working-class life, culture, history, and politics. He thought we should focus more on worker justice and activism, not education and culture. Yet he accompanied me and my academic colleagues, attending and sometimes helping us plan events at Working-Class Studies Conferences. Every now and then, he would stop by the Center for Working-Class Studies just to check in what we were doing. Eventually, he acknowledged that our approach had some value. At the last Working-Class Studies conference that he attended, he used the film The Green Mile as part of a talk about prison reform. In middle of the presentation, he stopped and turned to me and said, “See John, you can teach an old dog new tricks.” This reflects the essence of accompaniment: to listen, talk with, respect, and support others.

Staughton Lynd’s work deserves all the appreciation its various eulogists have offered in recent weeks. He inspired, taught, and encouraged many scholars and activists over the years. But in addition to the lessons we take from him about the nature of radicalism, the power of solidarity unionism, or the injustice of the prison system, we should also hold on to Staughton’s model of accompaniment. We should honor his memory by regularly asking ourselves the question that begins meetings of the Workers Solidarity Club:  Who am I accompanying?

John Russo, Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and Working Poor at Georgetown University

This piece will also appear in the January issue of Social Policy: Organizing for Social and Economic Justice.

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A Working-Class Christmas Story Christmas

Posted on December 19, 2022 by knewman4

If you have an extra 10 million dollars lying around, little Ralphie Parker’s house from A Christmas Story (1983), is for sale. The iconic mustard colored house, located on the outskirts of Cleveland, is currently owned by Brian Jones, a superfan of the film. Over the last twenty years, Jones has turned the fictional Parker homestead into a museum, hotel, and gift shop complex devoted to A Christmas Story. It’s a highly rated attraction that draws more than one million tourists per year!

Jones may have timed the sale of the house to coincide with A Christmas Story Christmas (2022), a sequel to the original film, which debuted on HBO Max in November. The sequel was co-written by Peter Billingsley, the actor who played Ralphie in the original. To save money, the film was made in Bulgaria! Now 51, Billingsley plays a grown-up Ralph who is trying to publish his first sci-fi novel, mourn the death of his father, comfort his mother, and give his wife and kids a decent Christmas. After the “old man” dies, Ralph brings his family to Hohman, Indiana, where he grew up, about an hour south of Chicago, circa 1973.

A Christmas Story Christmas has me thinking about some of the rules of the American Christmas Movie, and, especially, what kinds of stories we tell ourselves at Christmas about love, money, capitalism, and class.

Rule #1: American Christmas movies are big business based largely on repeats, spin-offs, and merchandise. A Christmas Story, according to Vanity Fair, started as a “low budget fluke.” It cost a paltry 3.3 million in 1983 and made nearly 20 million at the box office, but it was quickly forgotten. It became a sleeper hit when, in the 1990s, TNT and then TBS started running it as a Christmas Eve marathon. Today the Christmas Story universe is holiday gold for everyone who has a piece of the action. A stage production currently running in Pittsburgh is sold out. You can buy a full sized leg lamp, leg lamp Halloween costumes, leg lamp cookie cutters, and a statue of Flick with his tongue stuck on a pole. There is even merchandise related to this year’s sequel—a Blatz beer Christmas star. Fan love, and fan labor, are crucial to the meta-popularity of A Christmas Story, which you can see on this incredible Facebook page started by A Christmas Story actors.

Rule #2: In Christmas movies, we were all once working class – and we are still struggling financially. Set in 1940, A Christmas Story lovingly imagines a time when the typical American family had an icebox instead of a refrigerator, a monotonous nightly meal of red cabbage and meatloaf, a furnace that never worked properly, a car that frequently broke down, and a kitchen in which the family took most of its meals. In the sequel, we’re in the 1970s, and everyone is just barely getting by. Ralph’s boyhood friend Flick owns the Hohman town bar, and it’s full of working stiffs hiding from their families. His pal Schwartz is so hopelessly in debt to Flick that he must risk his life on a dangerous sledding dare in order to pay it off. Ralph’s broke status is self-imposed; he’s quit his job for a year to try to make it as a novelist. He has to break into Flick’s bar to get the Blatz Beer star for the top of his family’s Christmas tree, and his car is such a jalopy that the trunk won’t close and someone steals all the family’s Christmas presents.

While Christmas movies often begin with the struggles of being working class, they often end by reminding us that love matters more than stuff. In the original A Christmas Story, when Ralphie finally gets the Red Ryder BB gun, he nearly shoots his eye out — as everyone told him he would. The film ends with Ralph’s mom and dad enjoying a tender moment, happy even after the Bumpus hounds ruined Christmas dinner and Ralphie broke his glasses—a difficult item to replace for a family like theirs in 1940. As they watch the snow fall, the Christmas carol “Silent Night” plays in the background.

A Christmas Story and its sequel are mostly not sentimental—Santa and the elves are jerks, Ralphie and his dad are cursing fools, little brother Randy is weird and gross, and Ralph’s mom doesn’t stand up for herself in her marriage. But in this moment, we believe in this couple and in this family.  All seems right with the world.

Rule #3: The American Christmas Movie rejects consumerism. The wealthiest characters in these filmsusually have the least access to love and happiness. In Elf, when Walter Hobbs has to meet with his boss on Christmas Eve, he realizes that the true meaning of Christmas is embodied by his son, Buddy, a bizarro Christ figure if ever there was one. For working-class characters, Christmas movies insist that focusing too much on presents is a problem – as we see Ralphie and his family don’t have a lot of stuff, and as a result, they have more love.

But love and stuff also come together in Christmas movies. In A Christmas Story Christmas, after the presents are stolen, Ralph’s old man saves the day from beyond the grave: before he died, he had purchased and wrapped Christmas presents for everyone and hidden them in the basement. As that plot line suggests, Christmas is “really” about love, but gifts can be a manifestation of love and connection.

For one season, for one, silent night, American capitalism lies to us about what it values. Sandwiched between ads on television or for sale on the latest streaming platform, the American Christmas Movie promises us that love matters more than money, that cruel bosses are bad but also lonely, that family togetherness is more important than the perfect dinner — and that BB guns cause actual harm. The Christmas Movie business might exploit our desire to believe all this, but we do – and we should.

As a radical activist who also loves Christmas, this can be a confusing time of year. I don’t love economic exploitation, but I do love Christmas. I love Christmas movies, too. They work to sell me stuff and ideology, but they also critique commercialism and exploitation. See what subversive messages you can find in a holiday classic. I triple dog dare you!

Kathy M. Newman, Carnegie Mellon University

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Meeting Labor’s Moment

Posted on December 5, 2022 by Working-Class Perspectives

In my thirty years in the labor movement, I’ve never seen a moment quite like this one. We’re living through a pivotal moment for America’s working class and for the future of U.S. labor, but it’s more than that. This is a major shift in the social and economic order.  

In order to see the path forward, we have to consider what’s different from the system we’ve operated in for the last 40 years. The last time we saw such a shift began in the 1970s, when markets-are-always-right thinking eclipsed New Deal ideas that prioritized checks and balances on capital. 

Now market-centric neoliberal thinking is weakening.  The pandemic is key. There’s far more public awareness about how poorly workers have been treated, and this has driven up public support for unionism. A full 71 percent approve of unions, according to recent Gallup polling, which is the highest level since 1965. Gen Z is the most pro-union generation alive, according to a new analysis by the Center for American Progress.  Gen Zers are more supportive of unions than were Boomers, GenXers or Millennials at the same age.  

Yet the shift we’re living through together actually started before the pandemic with the Great Recession of 2008-09 when new, diverse movements began to challenge the status quo. The Occupy Movement of 2011 united people under the banner of “We are the 99%.”  The Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, the #metoo movement in 2017, and the Day Without an Immigrant in 2017 all laid bare the hollow promise of a neoliberal system in which “equity” merely meant equal access to the market, not fundamental reform. 

Even before the pandemic, labor activity increased to new levels. There were more people on strike in 2018 and 2019—half a million a year—than in any year in the previous thirty.  The #RedforEd strikes brought out teachers in a host of conservative-leaning states, and unlike in the 1970s and 1980s, they enjoyed enormous public support for their walkouts.  Fight for $15 effectively raised minimum wages in many cities and states.

People no longer believe the “Washington consensus” that prioritized unfettered corporate access to global markets, no matter the cost to workers and communities. Our lived reality has revealed the false promises of neoliberalism. Wildfires, floods and heat waves all make us see the climate crisis and the need for structural reform. Workers are pushing back against the kinds of bad jobs that have become the norm over the last 40 years. 

Yet the erosion of the neoliberal order isn’t a guaranteed win for workers. Rather, the shift has helped spark a global political backlash, including the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the UK’s Brexit, and other right-wing, populist fronts that threaten the advance of democratic ideals.  Though Democrats squeaked out the Senate in this most recent election, ultra right-wing voices remained a potent force. 

The post-neoliberal world could move in a direction that is neo-authoritarian and that is fundamentally elitist and anti-democratic.  Or it could be a turn to a communitarian, multiracial democracy that is based in the common good.  In order for labor to help ensure that the second option prevails, we must help forge a new order that lifts all working people.  

New Deal-era labor law and collective bargaining can be part of the solution, but they are not sufficient to handle today’s challenges alone. That’s in part because employers have so irreparably broken the U.S. system for forming unions that it is extremely difficult for workers to jump over all the hurdles it takes to win a union and enter into a collective bargaining agreement. Too many working people are getting left behind, and that leaves lots of room for anger and hatred to prevail.  

Consider that America’s workplaces remain among the least democratic spaces in the developed world.  The only protection for workers in these undemocratic spaces is that hard-to-get union contract.  Worker organizations can lean into this moment by leading the fight to democratize all the nation’s workplaces, unionized or not. 

What would happen if the labor movement fought for just cause employment for all workers, for example? The US remains the only nation in Western world where private sector workers can be fired without just cause. People think they have a right to their job, but in fact they do not, unless they have a labor contract.  Some workers are challenging at-will employment. Parking lot workers in Philadelphia won the right to fight unfair firings when the city council adopted a just cause law for their sector in 2019. New York City approved similar protections for fast-food employees in 2020, provisions that were recently upheld in Federal Court. These wins could be replicated in other cities and sectors.  

It could be time to think about how to bring democracy to all workers in other ways, such as beginning to push for workers’ councils, like in Germany. What about increased rights for union representation on the job even when the union does not yet represent a majority of the workers? We can envision a new system that offers workers many doors to enter many kinds of worker organizations.  

A strong and vibrant labor movement of 2040 will look very different from a strong and vibrant labor movement of 1940.  We need new laws, new structures, and new approaches in order to help direct the nation toward a broad-based economic and social equity, as the nation finally pivots away from neoliberalism.  Labor has young people on its side and the public’s good will.  We can seize this new moment, but only if we meet it on its own terms.   

Lane Windham

Lane Windham, Ph.D., is the Associate Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University and author of Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide. She is also co-director of WILL Empower.

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Which Side Are You On? Four Facts and Two Promising Prescriptions for Dampening Inflation

Posted on November 28, 2022 by Working-Class Perspectives

As mine owners and their goons terrorized striking miners and their families during the Harlan County Coal wars in 1931, Florence Reece penned the iconic labor song, “Which Side Are You On.” It pleads for unity and collective resistance. As one verse puts it, “they say in Harlan County there are no neutrals there.” 

I recalled these lyrics while listening to a cable channel business report contending that “skyrocketing worker wages” are driving up prices and inflation. That is balderdash. Workers’ incomes aren’t rising significantly, nor are wage increases causing inflation to accelerate. For some policymakers and commenters, claims like the cable report justify jacking interest rates ever higher and accepting the rising likelihood of a recession, protecting the interests of those with high income and wealth. They would sail onward unmolested, but workers would lose jobs and income.  The little power workers gained recently to win better wages and working conditions would sharply diminish.  Raising interest rates to cause a recession to control inflation is choosing sides against workers and their communities.

Wages are not skyrocketing, nor are they a primary cause of inflation.  As economist Milton Friedman explained succinctly, “inflation is too much money chasing too few goods.” Pandemic-related supply chain woes and geopolitical instability made some goods scarce, and that exacerbated rising prices across many commodities. But if there really is “too much money,” who has it? It certainly is not workers. To understand what’s really going on, we need to remember 4 facts.

Fact 1: Workers’ incomes are barely keeping even with the cost of living.  Between September in 2019 and 2022, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose by 7.5% on an annual average basis. Wages are up too, but not enough to fully offset inflation. After crushing job losses and soaring unemployment early in the pandemic, the job market tightened as COVID eased. Many workers won modest wage gains while others jumped to new and better jobs.  Despite those trends, wages are barely keeping up with inflation.

As chart 1 shows, the cost of living has risen just about as much as median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers. In fact, workers did better against inflation prior to the pandemic.  Between 2013-2019, median weekly earnings grew ahead of inflation.

The people commonly bearing the burdens of low-wage work are women and/or Black and Latinx.   Black and Latina women would barely make $40,000 a year if they were paid the median usual earnings for 52 weeks per year (an optimistic assumption). That may be above poverty level, however, it is only about half of the “living wage” in many states and cities for a family with two children and one wage earner.

The data is clear. Modestly rising workers’ pay is not driving inflation.  That is not where “too much money” lies.   

Fact 2: Rich households have the resources to “bid up” prices.  Because too many jobs pay at or near poverty, most workers’ families are not the source of the “excess demand” that may push inflation. Rather, they navigate inflation by tightening their budgets and focusing on essentials, not frills.  Many lack savings to cover an unexpected $400 emergency bill.  They are not prepared to weather inflation, and a likely recession will just make things worse. 

As charts 3 and 4 make clear, the income of the rich is rising faster than the cost of living. The bottom two fifths of the household income distribution achieved at best modest gains before the pandemic, and they lagged badly behind in the past two years. The top fifth enjoyed robust pre-pandemic gains and garnered even larger increases in the past two years.  Further, America’s uber-rich top billionaires thrived extraordinarily through the pandemic and recovery. Their cumulative wealth jumped a whopping 58% or +$1.71 trillion according to inequality.org’s analysis of Forbes data. That’s who is responsible for the “too much money chasing too few goods” that drives inflation.

Fact 3: Corporate profits are driving inflation more than labor costs. The Economic Policy Institute’s Josh Bliven’s analysis (Chart 5) shows labor factor costs are a minor contributor to inflation. The biggest culprit, corporate profits, contribute seven times more.

Fact 4: Another recession will harm millions of workers and communities. Some may never fully recover. After the recent Federal Reserve interest rate increases, Chair Jerome Powell noted that the likelihood of a recession was growing and the possibility that inflation could be controlled without one was declining. While inflation is harmful to many, a severe or sustained recession will inflict great pain on millions of working people and their families.  The burden is heavier still for white women and Black and Latinx people regardless of gender who are too typically last hired, first fired, and paid less than white male counterparts.

The recent midterm elections will likely lead to pitched battles over the direction of country, including federal economic policies. Now is the time to set the workers’ agenda for the Lame Duck interval before Democrats lose their narrow control of federal policy levers. We need to set some boundaries for negotiations with the Republican House for the two years ahead.  

What should we do to choose the worker side?

Adopt fairer taxes. To tackle inflation, let’s adjust taxes not just interest rates. Tax strategies can help ensure that the sacrifices entailed in controlling inflation are more equitably shared. Higher tax rates at the top rungs and a new wealth tax could dampen their spending and investment. Excess corporate profits are adding to inflation, too. In Europe, excess profit taxes have already been proposed. A parallel proposal could draw from the proposed Ending Corporate Greed Act.    These tax changes could prompt those at the pinnacle of the economic pyramid to cinch their belts for a change, but that’s only fair. We should not expect the poor, near poor, and working class to carry a larger burden of the inflation fight. Added public revenues could also reduce the federal deficit.  That helps because a rising federal deficit increases expectations of higher inflation ahead and may erode confidence in the US dollar.

Ensure an adequate safety net.  Our country should act on the difficult lessons learned through the pandemic’s hard times and earlier recessions.  We must prepare now to help workers and families in or near poverty through the coming crises. Let’s fix unemployment insurance, which failed too many in the pandemic recession. That should include investing in and modernizing the states’ capability to administer the payment system.  We should also raise minimum benefit levels and again extend payments to gig workers and others who are often ineligible.  The larger, refundable child tax credit should also be restored and extended.   And it’s long past time to hike the federal minimum wage – stalled at a paltry $7.25/hour since 2009!  These approaches may support some consumption, but they will soften the blows on lower income families and dramatically cut child poverty. Spending to help families out of poverty or financial ruin is no more inflationary than tax breaks for businesses and investors or spending on defense contractors.  And it is critically important to protect the safety and well-being of our society.

Now is the time to set an agenda that will not exacerbate poverty or class, gender, and racial inequalities.  Let’s not again pick “heads we win, tails you lose” options that impoverish working families while favoring corporations and wealthy investors. We must instead join together on behalf of the many not just the wealthy few.  

Mark G. Popovich

Mark G Popovich is the Director of the Good Companies Good Jobs Initiative at the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program.  The views expressed are his own.  The author deeply appreciates the informative discussions about these issues with Maureen Conway, and thanks Sherry Linkon for her assist in shaping and editing the post.

Posted in Contributors, Guest Bloggers, Issues, The Working Class and the Economy, Understanding Class | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Waving the Red Away: Working-Class Mobilization

Posted on November 14, 2022 by wcp2019

By all historical measures, a week after the 2022 midterms, Republicans should have been partying on superyachts their own tide had lifted. But the big story is the failure of the red tidal wave to wash out the Democratic party. What held back the widely anticipated Republican deluge?

Few commentators have noted one possible answer: the unrelenting work of union activists in key swing states. For all we’ve heard about new waves of labor organizing, union-based political activism has been under the radar during the campaign season and largely overlooked in mainstream post-election analysis. UNITE HERE, the union of hotel employees, is a key example. In 2020, activists talked to over a million voters in Las Vegas, Reno, Phoenix, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. They led with bread and butter issues, and then pivoted to a discussion about the candidates.  Harold Myerson argues that door-to-door canvassers made a difference with swing voters.

Two years later, UNITE HERE reports that 1,200 canvassers knocked on 2.7 million doors in the “largest field operation in the country.” On its website, UNITE HERE states that “We decided to throw down in the 2022 midterms because we knew the stakes were too high. We had no choice but to invest our ground game in critically close swing states where we had recent success in securing wins for Democrats — Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.” The state-by-state members are impressive. In Nevada, canvassers knocked on 1,000,000 doors; in Arizona, 750,000 doors; in Pennsylvania, 950,000 doors; and in Georgia: 17,000 doors knocked. The Georgia canvassing operation is prepared to expand leading up to the run-off for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Raphael Warnock.

Pennsylvania is particularly interesting given the open seat created when Senator Pat Toomey (R) decided not to seek re-election. Into the fray stepped Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman (D) and television personality and doctor  Mehmet Oz (R). Fetterman’s campaign to flip this seat to the Democrats was centered on promises to increase jobs, support American manufacturing and unions, and raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. In his victory speech after defeating Oz, Fetterman said “This race is for the future of every community all across Pennsylvania, for every small town or person that ever felt left behind, for every job that has ever been lost, for every factory that was ever closed, for every person that works hard but never got to ever get ahead.”

It is tempting to think that Fetterman’s economic populism was persuasive on its own. However, UNITE HERE’s Philadelphia “Workers to the Front” organizing effort aimed to motivate potential voters to support Fetterman. Many of the union’s  7000 hotel, gaming, and food service workers were out knocking on doors to education and mobilize voters. As a union that is mostly women and people of color, their political program is centered on organizing working-class people to lead in their workplaces and communities year-round. However, during election season, the skills already gained in advocating for coworkers are then transferred into their neighborhoods to get out the vote.

The Workers to the Front campaign demonstrates what is possible when working people organize to protect themselves rather than being led by the Party, though, as Meyerson writes, that might also help save the Democratic Party.  And it seems this time, it was very good for the Democrats. But as labor unions have learned in the decades since their organizational apex in the early 1950s, they gain strength when they focus on what is best for them instead of operating as an appendage of the party. That is, labor unions should be leading the Democrats instead of taking instructions from the party or the fundraising arm. UNITE HERE’s secretary-treasurer Gwen Mills rightly notes that the infrastructure of regular voter contact “built the Democratic Party and we need to rebuild it.”

UNITE HERE’S organizing model calls for the canvassers to talk about issues first and candidates afterward. The workers featured on the Philly UNITE HERE website speak plainly and directly about their own lives – from their very own working class perspectives. Frederick Hollis, a Local 274 laundry attendant at the Sheraton Downtown in Philadelphia, loves “knockin’ these doors, just trying to make a change, that’s what I want to do for the generation behind me, my daughter’s generation.” Aicha Tahirou, a housekeeper at the Warwick Hotel in Philadelphia, explains that “I’m out there knocking on doors because as a Black woman, immigrant, African coming to this country, I have to fight for what is right. I didn’t have a voice where I came from. So having a voice here, being able to talk to people, change their mind about voting, is powerful to me.”

In politics, determining cause and effect is always a guessing game, but that doesn’t stop pollsters, political scientists, and journalists from trying to explain what’s already happened — much less trying to predict what will come next. Union canvassers like those organized by UNITE HERE may not be solely responsible for Fetterman’s victory, but he may not have won without them.

Will the power of union activists’ example in Pennsylvania and elsewhere convince their allies on the left to keep day-to-day economic issues and on-the-ground democracy at the forefront? Can unions lead the Democratic Party to not just fight for the future of democracy but actually try to shape it?

Ken Estey, Brooklyn College

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