Deadbeat Creditors and Other Tales of Moral Hazard

Posted on October 31, 2022 by Working-Class Perspectives

Some twenty years ago, three years out of law school, my partner and I attended a friend’s wedding in New Jersey.  Both of us had racked up a lot of debt and were struggling to find permanent jobs in NYC.  I was paying more than half the money I made each month to private law lenders in interest alone, and, as what I earned was barely enough to rent an apartment, I knew something was going to have to change.  Ironically, I had chosen to go to law school because my family needed money and I wanted to help them out.  My dream had been to go to art school, but I maturely rejected that path in favor of breadwinning.  A lot of college students from the working class make similar decisions.  Little did we understand how the system was stacked against our success. 

At the wedding, a bunch of us were lamenting our tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt – trading stories about choices foreclosed, children not born, houses not purchased, dreams deferred, as the educated young from non-privileged backgrounds are wont to do.  We dreamed about debt relief and what it would be like if we could get a fresh start.  Maybe this would allow us to move someplace more congenial or find a job with a real career path.  On hearing this discussion, however, one attendee took to chastising us for trying to avoid our debts.  “Even if they told me I wouldn’t have to repay my loans, I would!” he said fiercely.  We all hung our heads, shamed.

As David Graeber has so masterfully demonstrated in Debt: The First 5000 Years, debt has long been entangled with morality and power.  An element of coercion resides in every loan made, from one with power to one in need.  Or, as Graeber puts it, “A debt is a promise corrupted by both math and violence.”  This is one of the reasons that many societies have created periods of relief, such as the “jubilee” year found in the Judeo-Christian Bible.  Every fifty years or so, all debtors were released from the bondage of their debts (which, in many cases, was actual physical bondage to lenders).  Periodic resets were necessary to ensure that the system did not become so unfair that it no longer worked.  Without these resets there is danger that those with the power to lend will abuse this power and ever more so as time goes on. 

Student borrowers have not felt relief for a very long time, indeed.  And the power of lenders, especially private lenders and companies that “service” loans made by state agencies, has grown over this period as well.  For example, the kind of bankruptcy reform pushed by George W. Bush in 2005 unreasonably took away the possibility of discharging student loans through the bankruptcy process, while making it easier for big businesses to use bankruptcy as a way of evading debts.  Johnson and Johnson, a company making billions in profits, are currently using bankruptcy to avoid paying damages to women who got cancer from using their baby powder.  Trump has filed for bankruptcy six times.  It’s not a fun process, but if you get in over your head, there is a way out.  But not for students!   Even if you do everything you can to better yourself, putting yourself through school, working as much as possible, you might still end up having your social security payments garnished to repay your student loans, as thousands of Americans do.

Bankruptcy reform also made lending to students much more lucrative for private lenders.  For several years, student borrowers, especially those without college-educated parents who could advise them, were unethically directed to private lenders who charged higher rates of interest, added unnecessary fees wherever possible, and failed to provide forbearance measures during times of unemployment or other life hardships.  A person struggling with cancer could easily see an original loan double or even triple in size as interest compounded and late fees racked up.  Something is wrong when the woman suffering ovarian cancer from asbestos in her hygiene product sees her debt triple while the company that gave her cancer gets to keep its profits and shield itself from liability through bankruptcy. 

During its heyday, before the (not-for-profit) federal direct loan program was able to gently push it aside as the primary lender to students in 2014, the giant private lender Sallie Mae made tens of billions of dollars in profits from fees and interest.  Indeed, in some years the fees were more profitable than interest.  Sallie Mae’s CEO, Alfred Lord, was regularly paid $200,000,000 every year.  As with so many “partnerships” between the public and private sector, the US government would ensure defaults, so Sallie Mae’s loans were risk-free.  That encouraged them to market aggressively, especially to to poor, first-generation, and working-class students. 

As the saying goes, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.  Sallie Mae became Navient and its business model shifted from lending to servicing, handling $237 billion worth of loans to more than six million people.  In the words of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, “The company has cheated borrowers at every stage of repayment, including servicemembers, veterans with disabilities, low-income borrowers, and seniors.”  After years of lawsuits alleging and demonstrating a host of abuses, the federal government finally “demoted” it as its primary servicer.  Navient is still in business.  In 2021 it made $370,000,000.

Those without knowledge of the astronomical profits made by lenders, the rules that stop borrowers from seeking redress, or how individual borrowing has had to replace public subsidies of higher education as state budgets shrink in the face of “tax relief” for the wealthy may judge debtors who do not repay their debts in full as immoral “deadbeats.”  They also see debt relief as an unfair boon to those “immoral” borrowers.  This is the line being peddled by most Republicans. 

If the system were fairly constructed, they would have a point.  But it’s not. The power has too long been in the hands of those who profit from others’ necessity.  We are not talking about discharging debts incurred over private jet travel, too many houses, or even stupid business practices.  Student borrowers are trying to do the right thing, make the mature decision, become breadwinners.  The fact that they have been used as the goose that lays the golden egg for investment bankers is what is morally obscene. 

Biden’s relief plan is not that great. It is a fairly small broad brush for all borrowers, even those who may not be having any problems repaying their debt, while leaving tens of thousands with unmanageable debt that will follow them into retirement and beyond. Still, it is better than nothing. And it sends an important message that we can do this differently, if we want.  True, it is not a jubilee reset, but it gives me hope we might get there eventually.  And never underestimate the power of $10,000 to rewrite a young person’s history and rekindle their dreams about what is possible for their lives.  For hundreds of thousands of working-class borrowers, this will be an individual jubilee. 

To those working-class Republicans who will benefit from this but who feel guilty about it or who talk about “refusing the relief” – stop!  This is what a responsive government does.  And understand that the Republicans’ fighting against the bill are not standing up for you or the taxpayer, but for the private companies who continue to profit out of our necessity. 

Allison L. Hurst, Oregon State University

Posted in Allison L. Hurst, Class and Education, Contributors, Issues, The Working Class and the Economy | Tagged , | 2 Comments

How Big Is the Working Class – and Why Does It Matter?

Posted on October 24, 2022 by jackmetz1

Americans without bachelor’s degrees outnumber college grads 2 to 1. But if you and most people you know and have ever known are college graduates, you might not realize that most Americans are not like you and your cohort.   As a result, you’re likely to think your class of people is much, much larger than it is.

That misunderstanding is crucial for American politics in the early 21st century.  As David Shor and others have pointed out, most political operatives and activists – and perhaps especially Democrats — are college grads who seem to assume that most voters are like them.  Likewise, most network and cable TV reporters and commentators also often seem to assume that almost everybody has been to college.  They might get the right answer on a true-or-false question if somebody asked, but nobody does.  And, thus, there is a feedback loop among the political and pundit class: they don’t realize that they are engaged in a public inter-class conversation that is code-restricted to those who have graduated from college – and maybe even only to those who have graduated from the most elite schools.

For the past two decades, Ruy Teixeira and a handful of other progressive Democratic analysts have been banging their heads against this wall, trying to convince Dems to pay more attention to working-class whites, defined as whites without bachelor’s degrees, and now raising alarms about the erosion of Black and Hispanic working-class voters as well.  Teixeira’s latest effort on the coming mid-term elections shows how the political class shapes issues based on unconscious or semi-conscious class bias: focusing on abortion, Trump’s corruption, gun control, and January 6th – issues top of mind among the college-educated – to the exclusion of economic issues, including inflation and its effects on real wages, that matter most to working-class voters of all colors.

I sympathize with Teixeira’s frustration with the class tilt of Democratic Party professionals and most of the media, but I think he presents too uniform a view of the party, one that may be accurate in the D.C. – New York corridor but much less so across the country.  President Biden has repeatedly emphasized working-class issues, for example, as have several Democratic Congressional candidates, like Tim Ryan in Ohio. 

But the party can’t ignore issues like abortion and Trumpian corruption for both principled reasons and because it is a cross-class, multi-racial coalition that cannot work without all of its parts.

Democratic data firm Catalist makes the challenge clear: Democrats are still a mostly working-class party, as 58% of Biden voters, all colors, did not have bachelor’s degrees.  But the other 42% of the coalition did, and Democrats cannot ignore either group’s interests. The picture gets more complicated when we factor in race.  Catalist groups Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and “Others” together as people of color (POC), and they made up 39% of the Biden coalition.

Many politically informed people would be surprised to see that the white working class made up such a large proportion of the Biden Democratic coalition.  Since 62% of that demographic voted for Trump, how could they also make up nearly a third of Democratic voters? The answer is that working-class whites are a very large group – 44% of all voters in 2020.  So large that while they are about a third of Dem voters, they are also nearly 60% of all Trump voters.  It would be political malfeasance to ignore or walk away from this big a group of voters.

Nor can the Party ignore people of color, especially those without college degrees. Black and Hispanic voters are disproportionately working class, so they share many of the economic interests of the white working class – as well as some cultural and religious proclivities.  When our educated middle class publicly talk about politics among themselves, most people of color, like most whites, are missing in that conversation.  The assumption that secular, cosmopolitan, aspirational values are the only ones that matter grates on some of people in the multi-racial working class, but for others it nurtures cynicism and political indifference – a potentially dangerous political stew where what looks like apathy can quickly turn to rage.

So instead of one intractable problem – class bias among the political and communications elites – I see two.  Democrats need to resist that class bias within their own ranks and at the same time find ways to speak to both working-class needs and values and professional class interests, and without ignoring their own and voters’ interests as women, people of color, and more.  Teixeira is right that anchoring the party in working-class needs and values can unify the varied parts of the Democratic coalition, but only so long as the party also makes room for more middle-class priorities, like abortion and climate change.  I think this is what President Biden has been trying to do – in his (sometimes lame) “from the middle out” rhetoric, but more importantly, in the substantive proposals of his Bernie-influenced Build Back Better plan with its emphasis on industrial policy and the care economy.

To reduce their class biases, our highly educated, allegedly data-conscious political class should memorize a few basic facts:  

  • The working class as conventionally defined by education, and also in a number of different ways around occupation, is a substantial majority of the population, a majority of voters, and a majority of Democratic voters.
  • Roughly 40% of them are people of color, and they have been much more likely than the non-Hispanic-white part of the working class to support Democrats.  
  • The large grab bag of progressive economic proposals that Democrats sometimes shy away from talking about in their campaigns – many of which were in Biden’s original legislative agenda, much of which came very close to passing – help the working class of all races. While people of color benefit disproportionately from these programs, most of those who benefit from higher wages, affordable child and health care, and other policies are white and working class.  This is the rocky road to unifying working-class voters across race.  We need to stay on it and keep at it.
  • Finally, it’s worth remembering that many college-educated people are also struggling financially.  Managers and professionals in the US have median incomes of $77k and $71k, respectively. At least half of them are likely living paycheck to paycheck and would greatly benefit from a progressive economic agenda.

In the end, we all have class interests that shape the way we look at and live in the world, what we prioritize and what we neglect.  But within that shaping process, there’s a lot of room for rational self-consciousness to help us reconcile our interests with what others see as the common good.  You’d think the highly educated would be especially good at this, and they can be. They might just need to get out more among the hoi polloi.

Jack Metzgar

Jack Metzgar is a retired adult educator from Roosevelt University in Chicago, a founder and past president of the Working-Class Studies Association, and author of Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society (Cornell, 2021).

Posted in Class at the Intersections, Contributors, Issues, Jack Metzgar, Working-Class Politics | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Democracy Is on the Ballot

Posted on October 17, 2022 by Working-Class Perspectives

“Democracy is on the ballot” must be the most ubiquitous phrase in political speechmaking and commentary during this election season.  One can scarcely go a day without hearing it or reading it multiple times.  It is a phrase repeatedly invoked by President Biden, by virtually event Democratic candidate for office, by union leaders like Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, by anti-Trump Republicans like Evan McMullen, and by conservative intellectuals like William Kristol.  Even the nonpartisan League of Women Voters agrees that “Democracy is on the Ballot This Year.”

In another time, such rhetoric might have seemed overblown, the product of partisans trying to whip their vote before a crucial election.  But in this tumultuous time, the phrase seems perfectly appropriate.  Rarely has the future of democracy seemed to hang so much in the balance.  In addition to the November election, the continuing repercussions of the January 6 coup attempt make the threat clear. The House committee should soon issue a final report, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and four of his comrades are now on trial for sedition, and new revelations continue to emerge.

Meanwhile, according to FiveThirtyEight, 60 percent of U.S. voters will have the opportunity to vote for an election denier this fall.  Indeed, most Republican candidates still refuse to accept the results of the 2020 election. Unfortunately, the threat is not confined to our most conservative regions.  To the contrary, a recent Brookings study shows, states fielding the largest numbers of election deniers are the crucial swing states of Pennsylvania (with 37 deniers), Arizona (31), Michigan (24), and Wisconsin (21), states that could determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.  The Brookings report suggests that 199 of the 345 election deniers on the ballot in November stand a strong chance of winning, including 14 candidates for the statewide and 131 candidates for Congress. 

Fortunately, whether democracy survives this time of peril will not depend only on what happens when the votes are counted on November 8, as important as those results will be. Electoral democracy can also be strengthened by another form of democracy that is also on ballots this fall: union elections and strike votes.  In those exercises of the democratic voice, we are currently witnessing a renaissance of majority rule. 

According to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), there were 58 percent more petitions for union elections during the first three quarters of 2022 than there were by this time last year. Baristas have been leading the way.  Starbucks Workers United, the SEIU affiliate leading many organizing campaigns, has managed to turn the badly broken NLRB system on its head.  They have shown not only that organizers can win union elections. They can also use the process of fighting for them to build a democratic spirit.  Since their first union victory, when workers at the Elmwood Avenue Starbucks in Buffalo, NY, voted to unionize on December 9, 2021, a wave of Starbucks organizing has swept across the country. As of October 12, workers chose union representation in 233 of 280 stores where election results have been declared final by the NLRB, with a total of 3,359 baristas voting for union representation and only 1,320 voting against.

Amazon workers are also raising the flag of workplace democracy.  Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse voted to unionize in April, and other sites should hold union votes soon.  Workers at warehouse ALB1 in Albany are voting  in another NLRB supervised election this month, and their colleagues at  the ONT8 distribution center in Moreno Valley, amid the nation’s densest concentration of warehouses, the Inland Empire, recently filed an election petition.

These union fights have seen their own version of election deniers and manipulators.  The NLRB rules that Amazon violated the rules during the first union vote at the company’s Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse in April 2021, forcing a second election at the plant in March 2022 (which the union lost). Amazon fought to overturn the JFK9 vote in April, but the NLRB rejected that move after five months of appeals and legal wrangling. 

Starbucks has also run afoul of labor law by intimidating its workers.  In September NLRB’s regional staff filed a 19-page complaint against some of the company’s Pittsburgh-area stores for engaging in a “myriad of threats” against the union’s local organizers.  When Starbucks was unable to discourage union sentiment, it followed the lead of Trump’s army of election deniers and attacked the electoral process. In an August 15 letter to the NLRB, it accused the agency of pro-union bias and sought a nationwide pause in mail-in union votes. 

Unionization votes aren’t the only expressions of majority rule that workers have been exercising in recent months.  In September a threatened rail strike mobilized Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh into holding marathon negotiating sessions with rail companies and unions.  Yet early indications are that workers may reject the tentative agreement brokered in those sessions.  The Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees, the nation’s third-largest rail union, announced on October 11 that its members voted down the agreement by a margin of 6,646 to 5,100.  Other rail union members may well follow suit in votes over the coming weeks. 

And rail workers aren’t the only ones holding strike votes.  Within recent days strike votes have been taken by Temple University Nurses; Orange County Teamsters; the University of Washington Library’s union; University of Minnesota service workers; public health system doctors in San Jose; and Milwaukee bus drivers.  In all cases, strikes were authorized by overwhelming margins.           

Amid a national crisis of electoral democracy, these grassroots fights for workplace democracy offer hope. And they are beginning to have an impact on our politics.  This summer, the California legislature passed a bill to allow farmworkers to cast mail-in ballots in union elections.  Governor Gavin Newsom, who clearly hopes one day to occupy the Oval Office, initially indicated that he would veto the act, keeping his state’s powerful and wealthy growers happy.  But his position proved hard to sustain in a country where “democracy is on the ballot.”  President Biden was quicker than Newsom to realize the implication of the farmworkers’ bill and spoke out on behalf of its enactment. “The least we owe them is an easier path to make a free and fair choice to organize a union,” Biden said. “Government should work to remove —  not erect —  barriers to workers organizing.”  Feeling the heat, Newsom reversed course on September 28 and signed the bill. 

Whether fighting to unionize or exercising the right to accept or reject collective bargaining agreements, the workers involved in all of these struggles are nurturing democracy where we most need it.  For our history suggests that if we are to save our political democracy, we must begin by establishing a secure beachhead for democracy in the workplace. The words of the crusading Progressive-era labor lawyer Frank P. Walsh are as true now as when he spoke them in 1918.  “Political democracy is an illusion,” Walsh said then, “unless builded upon and guaranteed by a free and virile Industrial Democracy.” 

Whatever the outcome of the election on November 8, we need not wait until 2024 to put democracy on the ballot again.  We need to prepare for 2024 by putting it on the ballot every day in the workplaces around this country. 

Joseph A. McCartin

Joseph A. McCartin is Professor of History and Executive Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor & the Working Poor at Georgetown University.     

Posted in Contributors, Issues, Joseph A. McCartin, Labor and Community Activism, Working-Class Politics | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Working 9 to 5: Class Diversity and Clerical Organizing

Posted on October 3, 2022 by Working-Class Perspectives

“Get your 9 to 5 newsletter! Get your 9 to 5!”

The early 1970s was a time of profound economic transformation. Women from across the class spectrum were flooding into the workforce by the millions. I was one of them.  At the age of 22, I was among ten women standing outside Boston’s subway stops handing out the first issue of a new newsletter aimed at women office workers.  Our goal was to shake things up in the banks, insurance companies, law firms, and universities that dominated the city’s economy.  We were young and green, but we sensed that we were on to something big.

In my new book, Working 9 to 5: A women’s movement, a labor union, and the iconic movie, I describe how in building our organization we developed strategies and tactics to help women from across the class spectrum to feel welcome.   

Early on, we recognized that to build an organization that spoke to the clerical workforce as a whole, we’d need to appeal to women from a range of class backgrounds.  Meeting that goal strengthened our message and broadened our outreach. Class diversity turned out to be a key to our success.

As was true throughout US society, the concept of class in the office workforce was slippery, and people tended not to talk about it explicitly. Even so, women working in the “pink collar ghetto” of the office fell into two rough groups.  

One large group came from the city’s famous white ethnic neighborhoods. For women from these communities, compared to a factory or domestic job, working in an office felt like a step up. Dressing up, having your own desk in a clean, safe place, working side by side with managers and other professionals – these were some of the elements that made an office job seem like a route to rising up.  What was disappointing – indeed, shocking – was the pay, which turned out to be lower than factory wages. 

Another large group came to offices with college degrees, expecting to land professional jobs. They were angry to find themselves stuck at the bottom of the job ladder with no way up.

Yet no matter our origins or sense of class identity, to a remarkable degree, as we found ourselves sitting side by side, we looked at one another and felt united – as women. Joining together and moving forward together was a thrilling experience.

Not that most of us considered ourselves to be part of the women’s liberation movement.  Many rejected the label “feminist.” Nonetheless, we’d all been influenced by the ideas of the women’s movement and the civil rights movement.

The 9 to 5 organization pressed for fair job policies at banks across the country. 

Equal pay had been the first rallying cry of the women’s movement, and now that cry began to be passed from secretary to file clerk, cubicle to cubicle. We fumed over the disrespect we were experiencing, too. As one woman put it, “they call us girls until the day we retire without pension.” We were angry at being treated as a nothing more than a set of ten typing fingers.  

As we built our organization, we strove to make sure our organization was welcoming to office workers from all parts of the class spectrum.

  • We emphasized that office jobs and office workers were worthy of respect.  Our focus was not on helping women to get out of such jobs, but on improving life in the typing pool itself.  We agitated for workplace policies – job descriptions, job posting, job training – that would benefit everyone. 
  • We recognized that most women office workers – especially those from lower-income families – couldn’t afford to lose their jobs, so we created safe ways to make change.  We wrote a Bill of Rights for Women Office Workers. We ran Bad Boss Contests. We pressured government agencies — easier targets for many women than their own bosses. 
  • We made sure that our public face reflected the workforce.  Class markers, of course, were everywhere – in how people spoke, how they dressed, where they’d grown up and where they lived now, what they aspired to and where their sympathies lay. We took care to ensure that our spokeswomen, leaders, and staff represented a range of class — and later racial — identities.

Things began to change. Before long, we were taking on the corporate titans coast to coast and winning millions of dollars in back pay and raises, as well as improvements in working conditions.

Our movement inspired Jane Fonda’s 1980 hit comedy, 9 to 5, in which three brave clerical workers join together to transform their workplace — and ran the place far better than the boss ever had.  The movie was a huge hit and helped us promote our ideas nationwide.   

Unionizing could be a major route to worker power, but few office workers were union members.  We wanted that to change. In 1981, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) granted us a charter to organize nationwide. We called our union District 925. Our organizing techniques and our bargaining strategies drew on the ad-hoc organizing we’d been doing, giving our union the same “Raises and Roses” character as the 9 to 5 organization.  

While we had no trouble finding people who wanted to organize, like other unions in the 1980’s and beyond, we encountered fierce resistance from employers. That pushback took a steep toll. Employers used delays, threats, and other tactics – both legal and illegal – to make it fiendishly difficult to win a contract. Nonetheless, we organized thousands of women and helped spawn a new generation of female leadership in the labor movement.

Multi-class organizing among working women back then achieved a lot. What were once seen as individual, private issues became matters of policy.  Pregnancy discrimination is now illegal. Sexual harassment is illegal.  We no longer have “help wanted male” and “help wanted female” ads in the newspapers.  Managerial jobs have opened up for college-educated women (though career ladders for those on the bottom rungs are still woefully scarce). More bosses get their own coffee.

Of course, much remains to be done. Being a worker in today’s economy can be harder than it was fifty years ago. In the gig economy, it can take a patchwork of two or three jobs to make ends meet. Too many workers suffer from strict computerized monitoring, unpredictable schedules, and paltry benefits.

The good news today is the upsurge of union organizing among retail workers, restaurant workers, warehouse workers, and grad students.  Just like in the 1970’s, these organizing efforts bring together workers from varied class backgrounds and different class identities.  Now, as then, that very diversity may turn out to be a key element in a new era of worker power.  

Ellen Cassedy

Ellen Cassedy was a co-founder of 9 to 5, the national association of working women. She is the author of Working 9 to 5: A women’s movement, a labor union, and the iconic movie (Chicago Review Press, September 6, 2022, foreword by Jane Fonda).  For educator discount: mroth@chicagoreviewpress.com. To reach Ellen Cassedy: www.ellencassedy.com. 

Posted in Class at the Intersections, Contributors, Guest Bloggers, Issues, Labor and Community Activism, Work | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Marilyn and Elvis: Dead Labor in the Age of Streaming

Posted on September 19, 2022 by knewman4

When Marilyn Monroe was cast as a spunky cannery worker in Clash by Night (1952), she took “an all-night bus to Monterey to observe cannery workers and to practice being working class.” As biographer Lois Banner noted, she was even offered a job, cutting off the heads of sardines. But Marilyn was already familiar with factory work. During the war, she worked at the Radio Plane Munitions factory, assembling drones and painting cloth fuselages with a toxic lacquer, a job that she later called “the hardest work I’d ever done.” In less than a decade she had gone from the airplane factory, to the dream factory, and, for a few hours, to the sardine factory.

While this particular episode is not featured in Netflix’s forthcoming Blonde, a daring adaption of Joyce Carol Oates’s fictionalized account of Marilyn’s life, the film reminds us that the star who epitomized Hollywood glamour had a broken childhood. Marilyn never knew her father, and from a young age she bounced between foster care, orphanages, and the homes of extended family members. Blonde director Andrew Dominik explains that the film is about “how a childhood trauma shapes an adult who’s split between a public and a private self.”

Blonde isn’t the only biopic out this year that traces the working-class roots of a major star. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, now streaming on HBO Max, draws on the director’s interviews with Elvis’s childhood friends, who remembered playing with Elvis among the shacks and revival tents in the poorest, Blackest neighborhoods in Tupelo, Mississippi. Elvis also lingers on the singer’s short career as a super cool looking truck driver.

It’s intriguing that two biopics of the 20th century’s most famous—and most working-class—superstars have appeared in 2022. Why? Do they reflect increased interest in workers as baristas, Amazon workers, teachers, railway workers, and many others are on the march? Perhaps. In addition, these films remind us that Marilyn and Elvis were progressives. Marilyn was a left-wing intellectual who, as one writer has pointed out, was more often photographed reading a book than posing naked. When she married Arthur Miller in 1956, FBI agents were concerned that Marilyn was “drifting into the Communist orbit.” In 1962, an FBI report described Marilyn’s views as “very positively and concisely leftist.”

Elvis was also progressive, especially when it came to race and civil rights. He was friends with B.B. King and other Black musicians who frequented Beale Street. Elvis was devastated by the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, as the Luhrmann film suggests. And, according Nancy Isenberg, author of White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Elvis supported President Johnson’s civil rights efforts.

It mattered that Elvis and Marilyn were working class. Elvis had a deep knowledge of folk, country, and rhythm and blues music because he had spent his life on the other side of the tracks, where poor whites and Blacks intermingled. This knowledge shaped the originality, and the popularity, of his sound. Likewise, Marilyn had a humility and a frankness that were key to her popularity. When it was discovered that Marilyn had posed nude early in her career, Marilyn weathered the scandal without incident. When she was asked why she did it, she replied simply that “I was broke and needed the money.”

But there’s another and rather ironic way to read these films: Marilyn and Elvis are generating revenue—surplus value—for a struggling entertainment industry. In July, 2022, for the first time, streaming outperformed cable television, accounting for 34.8% of viewing compared with 34.4% for cable and 21.6% for broadcast television. Yet Netflix, one of the pioneers of streaming, lost nearly a million subscribers in the first quarter of 2022. The platform is counting on Blonde to bring viewers back. HBO Max is also getting new subscribers from streaming Elvis (which aired September 2).

Put simply, these streaming companies are using Elvis and Marilyn, two 20th century working-class icons, to up their coolness quotient, increase their subscriber base, and make money. In a strange way, Marilyn and Elvis fit Marx’s definition of “dead labor.” So much capital swirls around them; their images, stories, and tragedies are easy money, endless clickbait, infinite profit.

Exploitation shaped both of their careers, as the biopics acknowledge. While Colonel Tom Parker states in Elvis that the King died from the intensity of love he felt for, and from, his audience, the film also suggests that it was Parker himself who killed Elvis by exploiting and abusing him for the entirety of his career. Blonde offers a similar argument, suggesting that Marilyn’s audience, and, especially, the men who desired her, caused her death. And as David Rooney writes, the film continues that exploitation: “This is a work of such wild excesses and questionable cruelty that it leaves you wondering how many more times . . . are we going to keep torturing, degrading, and killing this abused woman.”

In their own time, Elvis and Marilyn generated tremendous value for a rapidly expanding culture industry. In ways that are both wonderous and grotesque, they continue to generate value—for the teams that produced Elvis and Blonde and for the platforms that stream them. Ironically, perhaps, because Marilyn and Elvis were not born to wealth and privilege, they never mastered the industries that they were helping to create. They enjoyed some short-term benefits from their fame, but they lost control over their own images, and, to some degree, of themselves. They existed for the profit of others. A tragic, working-class ending for both.

Kathy M. Newman, Carnegie Mellon University

Posted in Class and the Media, Contributors, Issues, Kathy M. Newman | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Essential Workers Take Action

Posted on September 5, 2022 by Working-Class Perspectives

During the pandemic, the working class that had been invisible to many suddenly became “essential.” In some cities, people came on their balconies in their homes to applaud these workers whose jobs in food service, to health care, transportation, and other fields now seemed both necessary and perilous.  They kept working, often because they had no choice.  Though the virus in its many variants continues to rage, many people have decided that it’s over. They want to return to “normal,” whatever that might be.  What does that mean for the suddenly critical working class? Did becoming “essential” change anything for them?  and their new found recognition as suddenly critical?  What now?  What changed, if anything?

 One change seems to be in what workers will put up with.  We see some evidence of this in the stirring of worker organizing in this “movement moment”: Starbucks election victories, Amazon workers rising, organizing efforts in co-ops like REI and among gamers, adjuncts, and many more. Do workers now have enough visibility to win these battles? Or are these small uprisings inspiring but isolated? Are they exceptions or signs of a coming rule?

 Part of the answer may lie in the rising resistance among some less visible workers. The Workers Organizing Support Center, a project of ACORN International and the United Labor Unions, has been talking to the workers behind the counters of dollar stores around the country.  Dollar stores are ubiquitous in urban lower-income neighborhoods and rural areas. If Amazon is the “everything store,” dollar stores are the “everywhere stores.”

 Dollar General has more than 18,000 outlets and the jointly owned Family Dollar and Dollar Tree operate another 15,000.  In fact, these stores are so common that some cities treat them like nuisances, limiting the number in certain areas and distance between stores as they do with liquor stores and payday lending outlets. 

Yet dollar stores are also often the oases in food deserts, and communities and the government are pushing them to offer more fresh fruit and vegetables.  Dollar General claims that 2000 of its stores now offer some fresh items, and that more are coming.  A recent experimental rollout added ten stores to the fresh alternatives program in Little Rock, Arkansas, where they are also opening a new, giant distribution warehouse.  

Given this, surely we should see the more than over 100,000 workers across these chains as among the most vital essential workers.  Yet the stories we’re hearing from workers who have recently organized Dollar Store Workers United (DSWU) make clear that the business model for these stores views workers as expendable and exploitable.

WISN News, Milwaukee, 2021

Dollar stores start workers at the federal minimum wage, which has not risen in years despite plenty of discussion and activism, or the state minimum wage, if they are lucky to work where that minimum is higher. Workers also start out working far less than a full schedule as well.  One new Family Dollar hire told us that he hardly worked a dozen hours a week, including two one-hour opening shifts.  The company might call it training, but that’s a euphemism for sure.  But the stories we’ve heard go beyond poverty-level wages and ridiculously skimpy hours, conditions workers knew that when they hired on.  Once on the job, workers encounter short staffing, little security even in high-crime areas, bad scheduling, store infestations of rats and other cleanliness issues, air-conditioning breakdowns, and inept to non-existent maintenance are constant complaints.  Reading the Facebook pages that DSWU workers and leaders have created is an experience with doom scrolling in a fresh hell.  A post might sound unbelievable, but a dozen comments from other workers confirm even the worst stories.

The situation isn’t much better for dollar store managers. They make just a few dollars more than what is mandated by new Department of Labor Wage and Hour guidelines for exempt workers.  At around $684 per week, someone working 40-hours per week, 52 weeks per year would earn just $34216.  But most managers routinely work 60, 80, and even 100-hour weeks.  The companies blame this on labor shortages, but low pay and high hours are so embedded in the business model that their claims are hard to believe.  Some store managers are preparing a class action to sue for overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act, so there’s some hope in the by and by.

Many dollar store workers are talking about taking action right now, either walking out or demonstrating in front of their stores.  DSWU has identified as many as 50 stores where workers are planning protests. Obviously, that’s just a start, but it’s encouraging that this is happening all around the country, in cities and towns large (Tampa, Florida), medium (Midvale, Utah 33000), and small (Pulaski, Tennessee 8000). 

Their actions probably won’t be on the front pages like Starbucks, Amazon, or REI, but dollar store workers are saying they won’t take this anymore. If Dollar Store Workers United continues to gain traction and momentum, they may prove that being essential doesn’t give employers a license to exploit. Rather, essential workers deserve a living wage as well as  respect and dignity on the job.  If they make progress, the movement moment will be heard across the country.

Wade Rathke, ACORN International

Posted in Contributors, Issues, Labor and Community Activism, The Working Class and the Economy, Wade Rathke, Work | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The Bear and the Contradictions of Work

Posted on August 29, 2022 by Working-Class Perspectives

Hulu’s series The Bear, oddly labeled as a comedy, takes viewers inside a hectic, crowded, struggling Chicago sandwich shop that Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen Wright) inherited from his brother, Michael, who committed suicide. The store is a chaotic mess and deep in debt, but Michael’s best friend Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and most of the long-time staffers want to keep his “system” in place. Carmy left his career as a James Beard award-winning high-end chef to try to fix things, and one of his first acts is to hire a young professionally-trained chef, Sydney (Ayo Edibri) as sous chef. The Chicago setting (city of big shoulders, hog-butcher to the world), the shop’s identification as home of the “Original Beef of Chicagoland,” and the gritty, sweaty, noisy work make for a clearly working-class story. The series has drawn acclaim for its writing, performances, and depiction of food service work.  Restaurant workers have chimed in on Twitter and in comments on reviews to highlight how well The Bear captures life in the kitchen.

An old, struggling restaurant is an ideal setting for a series about work, and it proves useful for exploring how work has – and has not – changed and how workers feel about their jobs. It captures aspects of both the industrial economy that was long typical of working-class jobs and the service economy that has become dominant in the last few decades. While much has been made of the differences between the two modes, The Bear makes clear that they have much in common. Stress, noise, regimentation and surveillance, physical dangers, and economic precarity make kitchen labor a lot like a factory work.

In a New York Times Magazine essay, Carina Chocano describes the series as a commentary on the problems of many forms of contemporary work – long hours, overwhelming stress, conflicts over control, economic precarity. What we see in the shop reflects the state of an economy where everyone is “in survival mode all the time.” 

For Chocano, The Bear demonstrates that “The notion that hustle will eventually pay off is an insidious pipe dream.” That dream drives the gig economy, freelancing, and entrepreneurship, but their promises are often false. The Bear highlights that tension through flashbacks showing the demeaning surveillance that Carmy encountered in elite restaurants and the contrast between Syndey’s vision of being her own boss and the challenges of running an independent catering business. Both still have nightmares about those experiences.

The tension between workers’ desire to control their labor and the efficiency of hierarchical structure, another pattern that cuts across industrial and service work, is a central theme in the series. To fix the mess of Michael’s system, Carmy assigns Sydney to implement a “brigade,” a rigidly-defined set of roles and rules that make the crowded, stressful kitchen operate something like an assembly line. Each worker has a specific responsibility, and the lines of authority are strictly enforced. Whether the brigade represents a speed up or just unwelcome regimentation, long-time workers resist. Like automobile workers at the GM Lordstown plant in the 1970s, line cooks express their disdain through sabotage – though in this they target each other rather than the shop itself. 

For Sophie Gilbert, writing about The Bear in The Atlantic, the brigade highlights “the ways in which men and male-dominated cultures are set up to fail.” She views it as a form of toxic masculinity, like boardrooms and criminal gangs. Such hierarchical structures, she writes, “poison” these sites “from within.”  Yet in the series, the brigade helps the shop run more smoothly. Gender is involved here, not because of the men’s struggles but because it is a young Black woman who makes the brigade work.

Yet the brigade can’t save the sandwich shop, because it faces bigger problems than chaotic operations or personal conflicts. The building that houses the restaurant is deteriorating, equipment keeps breaking down, the neighborhood is gentrifying, the pandemic disrupted business.  As Chocano puts it, “The system has failed. The place is unfixable.”

Yet the workers refuse to give in, and that is what makes this series so compelling and timely. In this period of the “great resignation” and “quiet quitting,” when so many workers seem to have decided that their jobs are not fulfilling or worth the money, The Bear depicts a crew of workers deeply commited to “this shitty old restaurant,” as Eater reviewer Amy McCarthy describes it. Why? It isn’t that they believe their hustle will bring them great success. The characters seem to understand from the beginning that their best hope, one that is probably out of reach, is to get out of debt and keep the place open.

The answers are visible from the first episode. In between trying to raise enough money to keep the place open for another day and arguing with the staff, Carmy makes his first batch of Italian beef. As he offers tastes to the staff, we see their pleasure at how good it is. That matters to them. They might resist Carmy’s changes and resent Syndey’s presence and authority, but they care about the work itself. That’s why Sydney and the pastry chef both invest extra time to try to create new dishes. Chocano notes that Carmy “can’t spare time” to pay attention, but all three characters – and most of their co-workers – recognize the value of the effort. That their efforts can’t compete with the challenges of just getting through each stressful shift doesn’t erase the underlying engagement with work that is not just hard but often seemingly impossible.

Workers are also committed to each other, and to Michael’s memory. For all the conflict that work generates, one of its most important benefits is human connection. The first episode highlights this, too. We see the solidarity of the long-time staff in their resistance to the arrival of Carmy and Syndey but also in their interactions with each other. We hear it in the way they talk to each other. Reviewers have commented on the yelling and insults that the crew throws around, hearing this as part of the stress and conflict of the kitchen. But trash talk can also be an expression of love among working-class men. To make sure middle-class viewers don’t miss the affection and belonging embedded in all the yelling, episode one includes a scene where the crew gathers for family meal and, perhaps in lieu of grace, do a light-hearted version of the Thanksgiving table ritual. While Richie says he’s grateful for the writer Phillip K. Dick, and the pastry chef expresses appreciation that Richie didn’t put on his usual smelly cologne that morning, line cook Tina (in a great performance by Liza Colón-Zayas) confesses, a little embarrassed, that she is grateful “for all you mofos.” The others tease her for this, but the affection among them is clear.

As all this suggests, reviewers like Chocano and Gilbert are right to see The Bear as a reflection of contemporary work cultures. But as workers express their discontent in multiple ways these days, it’s worth noting that The Bear also helps us see both the struggles that make work difficult and the commitments that make it meaningful. If we want to understand why work matters, and what workers might be longing for, we have to recognize both sides of this contradictory balance sheet.

Sherry Linkon and John Russo, Georgetown University

Posted in Class and the Media, Contributors, Issues, John Russo, Sherry Linkon, Work | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Working-class Academics in Poland: Translating working-class studies into the post-communist context

Posted on August 22, 2022 by Working-Class Perspectives

When I encountered Western working-class studies for the first time, I was a little bit confused. Being born in Poland a few years before the democratic change of 1989, I was raised to value Western culture over so-called “relics of socialism.” At school, on TV, and in everyday conversations, objects or ideas with socialist connotations – architecture, cartoons, social policies – were believed to be worse than their Western counterparts. The notion of “social class” was no exception. Commonly derided as unfashionable or an invention of the communist times, it did not just seem real.

Of course, my view changed when I started to be interested in social sciences. I started noticing a paradox: class explains so much, but it is widely rejected. That tension came back when, as a mid-career sociologist, I started to explore upward-mobility among university lecturers. While many American, British, and French papers analyzed class inequalities in academia, the topic didn’t resonate with Polish academics. No one here would dare to use the term “working-class studies.” However, inspired by many foreign authors (including some regular contributors to this blog), I started to explore this topic in Poland. Ironically, my interest in social class in academic settings resulted from reading Western texts that, according to popular anti-socialist discourse, should not be class-oriented at all.

Translating working-class studies into the post-communist context poses some particular challenges because of fundamental differences between Poland and the countries where theories of class experience were coined. What makes Poland and other post-communist countries unique is their history. First, many academic elites from these countries left for Western Europe and North American after the two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the anti-Semitic purges of 1968. At the same time, Polish society has peasant roots, and post-war affirmative action aimed (with varying effects) to help the children of workers and peasants gain access to higher education. While education gave them access to cultural capital, economic inequalities remained, in part because salaries for academics are so much lower than in the private sector. The transition to the market economy had enabled some entrepreneurs to get rich very quickly, but it also resulted in severe poverty of many victims of privatization and de-industrialization. But even as social divisions deepened, they were not discussed in the mono-ethnic Polish society, and the country’s conservative political orientation was built on the idea that there exists one, undivided model of “real Polishness.”

Indeed, decades of state socialism resulted in a common belief that social class was “invented during the communist period,” making it irrelevant after 1989, while young capitalism led to the conviction that the “lazy” poor are to blame for their plight. Ironically, these beliefs coexist with empirical evidence of a “class ceiling” in higher education and academic careers. Only a few years ago, studies focused on the People’s history of Poland started to attract more interest, but the social research on the experiences of working-class academics remains an uncharted territory. Similarly, programs supporting working-class or first-generation academics simply do not exist in Poland.

The Polish case also illustrates how social class is experienced in a peripheral academic system  where academics encounter unfavourable working conditions. Yet the Polish education system is also more egalitarian than Western systems. Poland has few super-expensive private schools, and many public schools offer good quality education. Similarly, the best Polish universities are public and most of their academic programs are free. Moreover, even the most selective universities, such as the University of Warsaw, or AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow, offer some  programs with extremely high acceptance rates, so there is no Polish equivalent of École Normale Supérieure or Oxford. In addition, Poland’s many  non-public universities (219 among 349 universities in Poland) make it easier for first-generation academics to attend college, because they usually offer relatively low tuition and very high acceptance rates. These conditions make upward mobility through education less strenuous in Poland than in the UK, US, or France. But it is also far from straightforward or easy.

Academics from working-class families in Poland experience many of the same challenges as their Western peers. Interviews with these academics as well as their parents (who represent the culture of origin), and new friends (who reflect the cultural destination) suggest that upward mobility in academia is associated with recognition of poverty as a structural barrier, a sense of unfulfilled dreams, physical and psychological violence, class-related timidity, difficult relations with parents and partners, subjectively experienced deficits of social and cultural capital, disenchantment with academia, and precarious status within academia. We’ve also found instances of class neurosis, working-class stigma, breakaway guilt, and impostorism.

As in other countries, though, working-class academics identified some key strengths, including the ability to deal with difficulties and to contest taken-for-granted knowledge and customs, pride and wisdom stemming from previous life experiences, and unique working-class pedagogy.

All of this will sound familiar to working-class academics from Western Europe and North America, yet we also found some differences. Polish professors from working-class backgrounds described how  restrictive gender and religious norms hampered their  educational careers at various stages. For example, some had to resist their  parents’ expectation that they would join a religious order. Our research also identified the influence of non-human factors, such as local public libraries, on the lives and interests of many of those we interviewed. Language is also a crucial form of cultural capital, as  Pierre Bourdieu has argued, but unlike in places where a working-class accent would be a barrier, in Poland the marker of distinction – and a precondition for a successful academic career – is knowledge of foreign languages.

As our research suggests, then, while some class experiences are shared across cultural contexts, others are deeply rooted in local culture. To experience social class during an educational career means something completely different in the US, France, Poland, or Nigeria. In the US, the cost of education can cause painful class experiences for working-class students, cost is not a problem in East Europe, where the best universities offer their programs for free. Other challenges matter more in the Polish context, like the inability to express oneself in English, which has become the language of global research. Middle-class children here learn it in private language schools or from native-speaking tutors, but working-class students must learn English on their own. In addition, even East European professors who secure stable academic jobs can’t count on good salaries. The basic monthly salary of a full professor is roughly $1400, which is well below most highly skilled positions in the country. Working-class assistant or associate professors can never join the middle-class in terms of their income.

For all the varied forms that inequality and exclusion take worldwide, social class is one of the most significant determinants of an academic career. If we want to understand class as a real disadvantaging factor, not just an ideological and obsolete concept, we need to expand our studies of the experiences of working-class academics worldwide.

Kamil Łuczaj, University of Information Technology and Management (UITM), Rzeszow, Poland

Kamil Łuczaj is a sociologist specializing in higher education and working-class studies. He holds a PhD from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. He has been a visiting academic at the University of New Mexico, the Slovak Academy of Sciences, and the University of Cambridge as well as Research Associate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research expertise encompasses qualitative interviewing and ethnographic research.

Posted in Class and Education, Contributors, Guest Bloggers, Issues | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Chums or Comrades: Working-Class Perspectives after Johnson

Posted on July 25, 2022 by deindustrial

While Boris Johnson may have lost his premiership in recent weeks, a fascinating and profoundly depressing new book by Financial Times journalist Simon Kuper reminds us of why the story behind the rise to power of Johnson and his circle matters. In Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK, Kuper relates how Johnson and many in his cabinet started forming themselves into a powerful political caste while they were attending Oxford University in the 1980s. I attended my access course at Ruskin College Oxford in 1988, the year that Kuper and many of the key actors in his book ‘went up’ to Oxford as freshers, but while I met some of them, I was only dimly aware of what they were up to. Chums shows how this group of already privileged, largely privately educated and mainly male undergraduates were carefully building a network on the strong bonds of the private school system. They made connections with ministers in the Thatcher government and started preparing for future careers in right-of-centre think tanks which would ultimately allow them to become Conservative MPs a decade or so later. Reading Chums made clear that I wasn’t witnessing irrelevant student politics. These were deadly serious preparations for power.

Kuper’s view of this group reflects his position as both insider and outsider. Although he is a world-class journalist working on one of the best global papers, his origins are solidly middle-class, and he enjoyed a very good state schooling.  As a writer, he looks in on the already sedimented social relationships rooted in a narrow slice of private schools that feed into Oxford. Kuper recalls going to interview David Cameron in 2010, before he became Prime Minister. Both men had attended the same university, and both had gained good degrees, yet Cameron effortlessly made clear their class difference:

The moment the fleshy-faced, expensively dressed David Cameron walked into the poky meeting room at Westminster, I looked up at him and he looked down at me, and we each clocked at a glance, as only Britons can: “He’s upper-class!” “He is middle-class!”. Cameron opened with an ice-breaker: “For the FT, is it? Is it How to Spend It?”. How to Spend It is the FT’s monthly luxury magazine, aimed at investment bankers and their spouses.  I was not a regular reader.  As I began to explain confusedly that I was actually writing for the main paper, Cameron interrupted. “I’m only joking”, he chortled. “My wife works for the Smythson’s. they’re always trying to get into How to Spend It. It’s like ‘the place to be’ if you are a luxury goods business”.

Kuper’s description captures an Etonian’s uncanny ability to soften entitlement with charm, and it is just one instance of class privilege that he includes in Chums. The book portrays a caste of people who just know they are born to rule. They embody such a sense of entitlement that they have naturalised it in their day-to-day encounters and in their approach to national politics. 

But Chums doesn’t just reveal the elitism of the elite. It shows how class relations are like a game of Tic-tac-toe.  Working-class people start off in such a position of inferiority that no matter how bright they are or how hard they work, they cannot win the game. For them to gain power, economically or politically, seems almost hopeless. The only way to do it requires sustained investment in preserving privilege that privately educated kids get pretty much from the get-go. It’s easy to come away from this book with a sense of despair.

But I do see some unexpected reasons for hope in the UK lately as union leaders have spoken out in a series of industrial disputes created by the cost-of-living crisis. Rail Maritime & Transport (RMT) General secretary Mike Lynch’s media appearances have developed something of a cult following.  Nadine Houghton of the GMB union has also gained attention speaking on behalf of baggage handlers at Heathrow who are seeking to have their pay restored to pre-Covid pandemic levels after British Airways cut it by 10% in 2020. Both have offered sound economic, social, and moral arguments. Even better, they use the language of class unapologetically. Their surefooted dealings with hostile media and conservative politicians show them to be confident, highly articulate advocates who are on top of their briefs – unlike the almost completely ignorant middle-class commentariat.  Along with effective public speakers, unions are also gaining support because ordinary people get the class dynamics at work when elites in the media and politics attempt to set ‘union barons’ against ‘normal people’. Books like Kuper’s help create that awareness.

This could be a really important time for the revival in centre left politics in the UK, if only the Labour Party would get on board.  Unfortunately, the Labour Party doesn’t seem certain that supporting the cause of working people will win them votes, though shadow cabinet member David Lammy was criticised for not supporting workers at Heathrow. He made a rapid ‘U’ turn hours later.  Labour wants to be seen as above industrial disputes, but the likes of Lynch and Houghton have shown that being prepared to explain and defend workers can gain both support and, potentially, votes.  

As depressing as it can be to read Chums, it’s worth remembering that the Oxford experience Kuper describes is over three decades old. As he notes, recruitment is more diverse now, and expectations on undergraduates are higher than in his day. Things may well be changing. Instead of fighting on a field chosen by the rich and powerful, the progressive working-class seems to be setting out a popular agenda that even Labour can support.

Tim Strangleman, University of Kent

Posted in Contributors, Issues, Tim Strangleman, Working-Class Politics | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Media War in Ukraine: Class and Gender

Posted on July 11, 2022 by Working-Class Perspectives

Like all physical conflicts, the current war in Ukraine is also an ongoing war of narratives, in this case one making heavy use of visual imagery.  As they have played out, the threads of these narratives have a telling sequence of their own, revealing the tragic arc of most wars as they confront the ultimate—and ultimately gendered and classed—victims of modern warfare:  women, children, the elderly, the poor and working classes.

War narratives do not open with such storylines of course, and this conflict is no different.  Before the first shot was fired, the West provided satellite images of Russian’s early military buildup along Russian and Belarussian borders.  It was an interesting strategy, a visual foretelling that put Russia in a defensive position from the first, establishing a story-line that made its military moves seem predictable and almost robotic, a product of earlier Soviet mismanagement.

Without dismissing in the least the admirable resilience and capabilities of the outnumbered and outgunned Ukrainian forces, it is important to recognize a key motif in this storyline that is part of Western mythos: individualism over collectivity.  In this narrative thread, the unified front displayed by Ukrainian forces is not entirely overlooked.  Rather, stress is laid on the failure of Russia’s military to properly delegate authority, a theme long-stressed in Western narratives opposed to collectivity in general.

On the heels of that media opening, another key thread has been built, one allied with an ethos of individualism as embodied in a regular aspect of most narrative: key characters.  Not surprisingly, the most significant characterizations to date are of the war’s primary protagonist/antagonist figures:  Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin.  As the war’s central hero/villain figures (no matter which side the story is told from) they embody key class and gender distinctions, but with an ironic yet important reversal in storylines. 

Shirtless white man (Vladimir Putin) sitting on a brown horse in front of a rocky hillside

Putin’s early public persona has shifted over time as he has morphed from shirtless romance hero to suited executive, a role more in keeping with both his age and his current role. The infamous pre-war photo of germaphobe Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron, separated by a 20-foot-long table, only enunciates Putin’s splendid isolation. The setting, which hearkens back not to a socialist state but to Tsarist excess and luxury, underscores his current persona.

Two white men (Vladimir Putin and Emmanuel Macron) dressed in dark suits seated at opposite ends of a long white table.

As was made clear from the viral vignette of his dressing-down of the Head of Russian Intelligence, Putin now embodies the role of an ironically Western, Apprentice-like corporate executive and member of a masculinist elite—albeit one with nuclear weapons and a penchant for murdering his opponents. 

Contrast Putin’s autocratic put-down with the now-famous selfie video of Zelensky and his cabinet refusing to leave downtown Kyiv.  In occupying the foreground of this informal video Zelensky is not attempting to establish his singularity or dominance.  Rather he is one among equals, visually embodying group cohesion.

At the same time, Zelensky’s visual placement among this band of brothers is augmented by his delivery of what are admittedly formal but nevertheless powerful lines.  As his fixed, hand-held phone captures the small group, Zelensky quietly repeats “tut/tyt”: “here,” “here,” “here” while he names each individual cabinet member, thus solidifying the group’s physical and metaphorical placement together and among the inhabitants of Kyiv.

This video from the first days of the war was a key moment in establishing the ensuing narratives, a strategic rhetorical move equal to the military’s decisive maneuver to deny Russia use of Kyiv’s airport by destroying its runways.  These storylines quickly countered the prevailing expectation of a rapid and thorough conquest of Ukraine by Russia.

The impact of Zelensky’s video on the overall narrative within the West was not lost on the Ukrainian administration.  On the 100th day to the war, Zelensky issued a direct reprise of the first video, again emphasizing not individualism but a unified collective front opposing oligarchic power and using these videos to bolster morale and unite the population as a whole. 

Five white men dressed in dark parkas and hats carrying another white man on a stretcher in front of a brick building with all its windows missing and several bare trees, smoke rising in the background.

At the same time, the changing nature of the conflict has forced the basic storylines to follow two new major threads—the ongoing carnage in Ukraine and the wider devastations to come—which also shift the focus to the war’s real impact. The most horrific details remain images emerging from Ukraine that show the impact of Russia’s use of the non-combatant warfare they tested in Syria (much as the Nazi’s tested their pre-WWII warfare in Spain). They are systematically reducing Eastern Ukraine’s economic structure to rubble and erasing what population is left, mostly people who most lack the capacity to evacuate:  the old, sick, poor and working classes.  In the words of an American military official, the Russians “just bomb the hell out of people, . . .  trying to break the will or the spirit of the Ukrainian people by just leveling large sections or entire towns.”

The devastation of this war will not be told solely through images of destruction, because Putin’s attacks are not all so visible.  Having failed to overcome Ukraine in one quick ‘special military action,’ Putin and the oligarchs who support him have chosen to follow the Western lead and widen the material war in Ukraine into an economic battle with Europe and the West as a whole.  Oil and food are the weapons in this narrative, with the West scrambling to offset the losses incurred through boycotts and Russian blockades.

As the United Nation’s International Labor Organization reported as early as May 1, the war’s impact will be visited on those least capable of creating alternatives to their situation:  namely those with the least social and economic power.  In the dry language of the report, the war “will have a negative impact on incomes and poverty, especially among the poor who rely on wages as their main income source. . . .  Some countries [will] face not only higher prices, but also real shortages, particularly in grain. . . . [T]he World Food Programme estimates that an additional 47 million people are at risk of acute hunger in 2022 on top of a baseline of 267 million people.”

Whatever images and narratives of the war we see, it is clear that the primary victims will be those at the bottom of the economic ladder.  That is horrifyingly visible in the immediate deaths and destruction in Ukraine itself.  Over time, it will be similarly visible in world-wide images of unemployment, hunger, sickness, and unnecessary death among those least able to resist global economic forces.

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, Class at the Intersections, Contributors, Issues, James V. Catano | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment