The Power of Recognizing Higher Ed Faculty as Working-Class

Posted on February 21, 2022 by Working-Class Perspectives
Rutgers University AAUP Rally, April, 2021, photo by Eric Ruder

Just over 20 years ago, Michael Zweig published The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret. At that year’s How Class Works conference at SUNY Stony Brook, academics from history, political science, labor and industrial relations, and other fields debated Zweig’s use of the term “working class.” Some thought it was a throwback to the 1930s or a tip-off that someone was a Marxist. But even at a conference attended by many academics from working-class backgrounds, no one pointed out that academics are working class. Twenty years ago, academia still seemed like a middle-class or even an upper-class job, even though that had started to change in the mid 1970s.Young academics expected that if they did “all the right things,” they would get tenure and live happily ever after.

That expectation was wrong in 2002, and it’s even worse now, as this grim report shows. Nearly 75% of faculty in higher education are precarious workers, more like restaurant and hospitality workers, gig performers, contract healthcare workers, and delivery drivers than the tenured professor. They are hired on a per-class, per-semester basis. They do not control the conditions of their work. They often lack access to offices, professional development, research funds, and opportunities to collaborate with peers or vote in faculty meetings. They may be asked to take on a new course with a week or less warning. Many are told what textbooks to use and what tests to give. They are likely to have to apply for a new campus parking permit or library card every semester. But they also don’t get personal respect. They are vulnerable to management whim, favoritism, harassment, and simple forgetfulness, not to mention a complaint from a single disgruntled student who wanted a better grade.

Many contingent faculty are shocked to realize that college teaching is a working-class job. But recognizing that can be liberating. Thinking about ourselves as “working class” clarifies our understanding of our contingency by helping us identify with the 99% instead of the 1%. It can also inspire us to build alliances to improve our conditions and our industry.

First of all, it helps us appreciate and identify with our students, who are increasingly working class, and like us, probably working more than one job to make ends meet.  We see their problems as our problems and become open to talking about common solutions. In turn they can see more accurately what it takes to be an academic and live the paradox of “love the work, hate the job.”

Second, it helps us understand and appreciate graduate student’s efforts to win the right to be recognized as employees (not “apprentices” on a stipend) who rely on their jobs for living.  Graduate student organizing is one of the hottest areas in the campus labor movement – and possibly in the labor movement overall — these days, with wins coming in from unions like USW at the University of Pittsburgh, UE at University of Iowa, UAW at Harvard and the University of California and SEIU at Duke, Northwestern, Saint Louis University, and American University, just to name a few.

Third, thinking of ourselves as workers can help us understand the value of building campus labor coalitions, organizations that include not just academics but also clerical workers, the trades, transportation, custodial, food service, and technical workers. Such coalitions create power through the interdependency of all the workforces in a college or university.

Fourth, concerns about the working conditions of contingents can form a basis for solidarity with the privileged 25% who are tenured and tenure-line faculty. They usually resist this idea, but the reality of how their work has changed provides a strong argument. Over the worklives of senior faculty, colleges and universities tightened their belts, drained resources from the classroom, built arenas instead of libraries, created freestanding “foundations” that were outside faculty control, and engaged in a series of internet-based shocks like contracting out administrative functions like payroll to IT companies, putting journals on line, shifting classes to Blackboard and Moodle, experimenting with MOOCs, and much more.  At the same time, requirements for tenure-track hiring and promotion were raised, contingent faculty became the majority, and administrative and advising work for tenure-line faculty increased. Some schools hired CEOs to run institutions like businesses.  With all this, tenure-line faculty were progressively cut out of the full exercise of shared governance. All this degraded the institution of higher education, and not just for the contingent majority. These changes affect students, tenure line and contingent faculty, and staff alike.

The good news is that some are organizing for change. Higher Education Labor United (HELU), a new organization that came out of the organizing around College for All, has been endorsed by 117 locals from eight national unions and organizations. HELU uses the term “labor” broadly: its membership includes unions representing clerical, staff, and other workforces as well as faculty.  The leadership team comes from colleges and universities in 29 states. HELU aims to establish a national strategy for higher education, something that the traditional faculty unions, AAUP, NEA and AFT, were never able to cooperate to achieve.

To get this rolling, HELU is convening a free Winter Summit, February 23-27, on Zoom. The conference will feature four afternoons of workshops and several keynote presentations, all focused on three goals: coordinate the surge of higher education worker organizing across the country, develop federal policy proposals to reverse the trends that have damaged higher education over the last several decades, and support politicians who will advance a program of democratizing higher education. Members of endorsing organizations will have opportunities to participate in decision-making.

The vision guiding the young leaders of HELU is broad working-class mobilizing to address the crisis in higher education. To accomplish that, it’s time for faculty see themselves as members of the working class and stand together to fight for change.

Helena Worthen, University of Illinois

Helena Worthen is the co-author, with Joe Berry of Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Majority in Higher Education (Pluto, 2021).  She has worked and taught as a labor educator and teacher unionist in California, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.  

Posted in Class and Education, Contributors, Guest Bloggers, Labor and Community Activism | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

Studs Terkel’s Working 50 Years On

Posted on February 14, 2022 by deindustrial

As I prepared to teach my module on work this year, I realised that Studs Terkel’s book Working celebrates its fiftieth anniversary in 2022. It’s a book that both reflects and helps to explain working-class life. I first encountered it as a student, and in the passing years Working — or to give it its rarely used full title Working: People Talk About What they Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do – has shaped profoundly the way I think and teach about work.

First published in January 1972, Working is a baggy collection of over seven-hundred and sixty pages, most devoted to the reflections of ordinary Americans about their economic lives. From the Terkel archive, it’s clear that his interest in work was long standing and went well beyond the USA.

I know the book well, but in writing this piece I leafed through it again to think about the changing nature of work across that half a century. I thought it might really be showing its age — after all, fifty years is a long career. Instead, I was reminded how vital Working is. To my surprize, many of the jobs and occupations Terkel asked about in his interviews still exist: receptionists and police officers, spot welders and carpenters, factory owners to waitresses and so on.  For sure, the technology that workers use in their jobs has changed. Few of the people in the pages of Working in 1972 would have seen a computer, less likely used one. But it’s harder than you might think to see obsolescence here.

Working remains fresh because Terkel’s humanity and warmth comes through on virtually every page.  His character as well as his approach to the art of interviewing are artfully captured in his introduction. Just seventeen pages long, the essay sums up for me what is most important about work – people. As he puts it beautifully:

It’s about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying. Perhaps immortality, too, is part of the quest. To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book.

Terkel captures the timeless quality of the profound contradictions of work, especially a worker’s sense of loving and hating work in the same moment. This may be true of all kinds of work, but it seems especially important in working-class labour. In an interview about Working, Terkel described how a meter reader he talked to spoke about the reality and fantasy of his work. While reality demanded that he be constantly vigilant for dogs, he also fantasized about female encounters on his rounds.  As Terkel puts it, ‘it makes the day go faster’.

Studs Terkel’s ability to put his subjects at ease was legendary. I once heard a story about Terkel confronting a burglar in the process of robbing his home one night. The story goes that rather than call the cops, Studs sat the intruder down on his couch and started to interview him about his working life. I’m not sure of the veracity of the story, but I really want it to be true!   

I use Working in many ways in my teaching, most obviously in classes on work. My students warm most to Terkel’s interest in the extraordinary nature of ordinary everyday life. They recognise his ability to see through the shallowness of the dramatic, showier aspects of contemporary life and his interest in the capacity of ordinary people to live their lives. As he says in his introduction:

I realised quite early in this adventure that interviews, conventionally conducted, were meaningless. Conditioned clichés were certain to come. The question-and-answer techniques may be of some value in determining favoured detergents, toothpaste and deodorants, but not in the discovery of men and women. There were questions, of course. But they were casual in nature-at the beginning: the kind you would ask while having a drink with someone; the kind he would ask you. The talk was idiomatic rather than academic. In short, it was conversation. In time, the sluice gates of dammed up hurts and dreams were opened.

Terkel is also a model for would be interviewers.  It took me a long time to realise just what a great skill it is to be able to get people relaxed enough to talk about those ‘hurts and dreams’ — especially working-class people.  Middle-class people often seem to feel entitled to be interviewed. They believe they have something worthwhile to say or that their lives obviously matter. By contrast, I’ve lost count of the times a potential working-class person modestly deflected my request for an interview, asking ‘why do you want to talk to me? I’m just a . . . ’.

Since its publication in the early 1970s Working has constantly been in print, but has also spawned adaptations, including guides for using the book in the classroom and Working: A Graphic Adaptation by Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle. In the late 1970s, the book was the basis of a musical, and there have also been acting workshops and recently a theatre project in Washington DC staged an updated version that included references to the pandemic.

We need to think more about new forms of work, and interviews can help us do that. Gig workers and others will tell different stories than we find in Working, but at the heart of their narratives, we may also hear similarities. It’s always been important to listen to the voices of those who work.  Sometimes they reinforce our perceptions, but often they confound them in unexpected ways. Almost always, when one talks and, perhaps more importantly listens to what people have to say about their work, we learn about them and ourselves. Above all, we recognise what was at the heart of Studs Terkel’s own working life, the quest for meaning and humanity in all the people he spoke to.

Tim Strangleman, University of Kent

Posted in Issues, Tim Strangleman, Work | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

What bell hooks meant to me

Posted on January 31, 2022 by Working-Class Perspectives

In the final month of a horrible year of many tragedies and too many deaths, we lost bell hooks, a writer, scholar, and activist whose work has had a profound influence on many of us. I want to add my own small heap of roses to the scores of published obituaries and remembrances in circulation, with a personal account of what she meant to me as a working-class academic and scholar of working-class studies.

When I was a graduate student at the University of Oregon, back in the early aughts, I was expected to teach for my graduate stipend.  Like many graduate programs, this “opportunity” came with no formal training.  Without guidance, many of us just imitated our image of a know-it-all professor, teaching in a cramped didactic fashion.  But the U of O did provide an optional course called “Teaching to Transgress,” led by a radical librarian associated with its teaching effectiveness suite.  I wish I could remember their name, because this course, taught in the library basement with a misfit crew of lost graduate students from around the university, changed my life. 

Teaching to Transgress was also the title of a book written by bell hooks.  Subtitled “Education as the Practice of Freedom,” the book is a powerful intervention in standard college teaching practices.  With deep acknowledgement toward both the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (who himself passed away as I wrote this piece), hooks teaches readers how to be empathetic and capable teachers of whole human beings.  The course used this book as a guide, as our able “instructor” practiced hooks’s ideas in teaching us.   It was revelatory.  What I learned in that class, from reading hooks and practicing hooks, has made me both the teacher that I am now and the human being that I continue to strive to become.  We were encouraged to talk authentically about ourselves, to contextualize our social locations, to explore our position and experiences within what hooks termed imperialist-white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy.   

The beautiful thing about hooks is that she was profoundly intellectual and theoretically exhilarating while at the same time embracing the personal, or, better, the relational part of being human.  Indeed, she often criticized colleges for teaching students to excise the personal from their intellectual development.  “Within the educational institutions where we learn to develop and strengthen our writing and analytical skills, we also learn to think, write, and talk in a manner that shifts attention away from personal experience,” she argued in a piece about her class location. She embraced all aspects of herself – her blackness, her southernness, her working-class-ness. She taught that theories do not arise from the head, but from our bodies, our lives, our experiences with others.  Differences, of race, or of gender, or sexuality, need not divide us.  It is the system that does that.

Like many others, I responded to her on a visceral level, letting the little girl in me imagine the little girl she often recalls in her writing.  I have embraced my past, as a white girl who grew up poor, and adopted the identity of a “working-class academic” in my scholarship and my teaching practices.  Reading bell hooks made me want to be a better teacher, a better scholar, and a better human being.  She made me realize that teaching and scholarship and humanity are inextricably entwined.  In my darkest days, while serving as department chair or generally witnessing the crass power plays, ignorance, and general incompetence of university administration, I return to hooks and what I learned in that graduate seminar for comfort and sustenance, for a vision of what we mean to each other, and what we can do to nurture each other’s growth and development. 

To honor her memory and the spirit of her teaching, here are just a few of the important lessons I learned from reading Teaching to Transgress:

First, teaching is a performative act.  The classroom is a radical place of possibility.  It need not be boring or one-sided (teacher to student).   Professors are whole human beings engaged with other whole human beings. 

Second, and this is perhaps even more relevant in the Zoom era, we have bodies and faces, and communication (including teaching) happens through these bodies and faces.  I recall a lovely passage where a student waltzes with her before class (it may not be waltzing, but that is how I imagined it) to their mutual delight. 

Third, story-telling can be a powerful way of learning and communicating.  This is an insight shared with critical race theory and the legal story-telling tradition.  It is also embraced by working-class studies. 

Fourth, we should create the kind of world we want in our classrooms.  We need not recreate the authoritarianism, the racism, the sexism, we experience in other areas of our lives.  This is why I discourage my students from calling me “Dr.” Hurst, and why I wrote an open access textbook for sociological theory that retranslated classical thinkers in a more accessible way and using gender-neutral language (where it did not distort original meanings).  This is what hooks does, making her books welcoming and accessible. She purposely eschews footnotes and show-off citations. It’s also why she did not capitalize her name. 

Fifth, commit to authenticity and embrace the value of claiming our identities in an educational context.  hooks modeled this in all of her work, letting her readers know who she was (black woman from the working class whose educational trajectory has been successful), where she came from (rural South), what motivated her (passion for justice), and where she has stumbled (I’ll let readers discover those themselves). 

Sixth, use theory as a way “to challenge the status quo.” This is how I teach theory to undergraduates, not as something oppressive and confusing, but as something that can help them stand up for themselves and their communities.  Or, as Bourdieu phrased it, as “a martial art, a means of self-defense — you use it to defend yourself, without having the right to use it for unfair attacks.”

And, finally, have a deep compassion for others and commitment to love as a political project.  I see this in all of her work, but I feel it most personally when she talks of her family and her quest for belonging – a very common working-class academic story.  In Teaching to Transgress, she writes about her move to college, “I was desperately trying to discover the place of my belonging.  I was desperately trying to find my way home.”  I can understand how one can love one’s parents fiercely, be protective of them, remain ardently loyal to their world, and yet not ever feel “truly connected to these strange people, to these familial folks who could not only fail to grasp my worldview but who just simply did not want to hear it.”  I suspect a lot of us can feel the import of this passage.

Rereading Teaching to Transgress at her passing, I was struck again by her generosity of spirit.  It is always gratifying when our idols live up to our visions of them.  In the second chapter, hooks addresses the backlash to the movement to embrace cultural diversity in higher education.  Written almost thirty years ago, this section is striking for its (sadly) continuing relevance. In words that still feel fresh, she teaches us that “in all cultural revolutions there are periods of chaos and confusion, times when mistakes are made.  If we fear mistakes, doing things wrongly, constantly evaluating ourselves, we will never make the academy a cultural diverse place.”  We all stumble, but we can all pick ourselves up and learn.  Even Paulo Freire had a “phallocentric blind spot,” acknowledged hooks.

We are living in dangerous and deeply troubling times.  A period of chaos and confusion, when mistakes multiply before our eyes, and the center no longer seems to hold.  I would not argue against anyone who fears the future, who sees only a very long night ahead of imperialist-white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy.  But that is even more reason to reread hooks, to remind ourselves of the world we want to create, and the political promise of love.  There can be no love without justice.  But neither can there be justice without love. 

Allison L. Hurst, Oregon State University

Posted in Allison L. Hurst, Class and Education, Class at the Intersections, Contributors, Issues | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Working-Class Scholars and Activists Bringing Change

Posted on January 24, 2022 by sarahattfield

At the beginning of 2021, I asked whether life for working-class people would get any better now that everyone understood that working-class people keep societies running. I wasn’t very optimistic about bosses or governments doing much to stem job insecurity or to increase wages and improve conditions, and that pessimism was well-founded. But I also looked forward to more workers organising and taking stands against injustice and unfair conditions, and this certainly did happen, with workers around the world flexing their industrial muscle.

Along with increased collective and industrial action, class is being recognised as a system that creates and reinforces inequality. Working-class people get shut out of certain professional industries and face barriers in some, such as the media and higher education.

What is creating this increasing understanding of how class works? A lot of it is due to the groundwork of scholars and activists involved in working-class studies. Academic and activist work is gaining exposure in the media, and direct references to class and to being working-class are appearing in Australia, the UK, and the US (and I’m sure in other places too, but these are the places I have access to).

Scholars and activists who have a deep understanding of working-class life are fuelling this interest. Working-class background students have been highlighting classism in universities. Students from Durham University in the North of England revealed that their working-class accents had been mocked, and they had faced insults regarding their working-class families. The media accounts brought to light these kinds of bullying and discrimination, and that empowered working-class students to create their own support and advocacy groups, such as the Durham Working Class Students Association.

Academics from working-class backgrounds have also been researching and writing about the barriers they’ve faced while trying to establish academic careers. While it is now quite well understood that academics from all backgrounds face precarity in an increasingly casualised workforce, and that work intensification in higher education has been rampant and mostly unchecked now for years, working-class academics face additional challenges. Dr. Teresa Crew’s papers and book based on her research into life for working-class academics in the UK describes the many ‘micro-aggressions’ experienced. As Crew explains, these ‘hostile encounters’ leave working-class academics feeling insecure, inadequate, and less intellectual than their middle-class counterparts. Such encounters occur because middle-class colleagues have preconceived ideas of what it means to be working class. They focus on working-class colleagues’ ‘deficiencies’ in cultural capital but ignore the additional benefits, knowledge, and experience that working-class people bring to the institution.  

This interest in working-class academics isn’t new. A number of excellent books and articles have explored these issues and experiences, but most have focused on US academics. Crew is one of the few that examines the UK sector. A 2015 book, Bread and Roses: Voices of Australian Academics from the Working Class, also demonstrates how class intersects with other forms of identity.

The growing interest in class and in working-class life has also led to a number of events organised by academics, writers, artists, and activists outside of the US. In 2019, the Working-Class Studies Association annual conference was held in the UK, its first gathering outside of the US. This sparked interest in other meetings, including a Irish working-class studies conference. In 2020 and 2021, International Working-Class Academics conferences were hosted by a team of (mostly) British academics, and in 2021, British author Natasha Carthew ran a festival for working-class writers.

Can all this actually have an impact on the lives of working-class people? I think so. Academic work gets translated into media articles and social media posts, and these can shift opinions, put pressure on those in power, and lead to change. We have seen this in initiatives from some large companies to target people from working-class backgrounds in their recruitment strategies. And we see it in the recognition that the media are dominated by middle-class people (and in the UK, by privately-educated people). Efforts to counter the lack of working-class people in various sectors can lead to more working-class people being employed in organisations that can change working-class life for the better.

That includes higher education. If working-class people have opportunities for education, then they have more chance of access to the industries and sectors that directly impact on working-class life. To help working-class students succeed, universities should hire more working-class academics, who understand the issues these students face. That, in turn, would prepare more working-class people for careers as writers, and that might encourage publishers and media producers to take on more working-class stories. It’s empowering for working-class people to see themselves represented in books, on TV, in movies, and in the media. Such images also help challenge and change stereotypes when done well.

Increased understanding of class helps everyone. A working-class background (in its many forms) brings valuable knowledge and skills to any institution, workplace, or organisation. So, while I don’t expect the current crop of bosses and politicians to do much to improve the lives of working-class people, I am hopeful that the wave of interest in class and the growing confidence of working-class students, academics, union members, activists, and community leaders will bring us closer to equity and social justice.

Sarah Attfield, University of Technology Sydney

Posted in Class and Education, Contributors, Issues, Sarah Attfield, Understanding Class | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Sidney Poitier: Nobody You Can Boss Around

Posted on January 17, 2022 by knewman4

In the 10 days since we learned of Sidney Poitier’s death there have been hundreds of tributes to Poitier—an undeniable icon. Most of these tributes have focused on Poitier’s brilliant acting, for which he received innumerable awards, as well as his advocacy for Civil Rights. As CNN notes, for example, in 1963 Poitier joined Harry Belafonte on a dangerous mission to fund Civil Rights work in Mississippi.

Many tributes also acknowledge Poitier’s humble beginnings. The youngest of seven, Poitier grew up in the Bahamas, without electricity and running water. His parents were tomato farmers who traveled to Miami by boat in order to sell their produce. On one of those trips, Poitier’s mother was pregnant with him and gave birth while on the job in Miami, making him a US citizen.

In 1937, when Poitier was 15 years old, his parents sent him to the United States to live (and work) with extended family. While in Florida, Poitier was nearly killed by racists more than once. He tried living in New York City, but he hated the cold so much that he lied about his age to join the army. But then he was so miserable in the army that he faked a mental disorder to get out—perhaps his first acting job? Returning to New York, Poitier worked as a dishwasher, a butcher’s assistant, a drugstore clerk, a construction worker, a porter, and a longshoreman.

In the tributes following his death, Poitier’s story has been continually recounted as a rags-to-riches tale. He is imagined as leaping from Cat Island, in the Bahamas, to the height of Hollywood fame in the 1960s. And indeed, some of his most memorable roles featured Poitier as a smooth talking professional in a tailored suit. Think of the charismatic, confrontational teacher in To Sir With Love (1967), or the almost too-perfect doctor in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), or the brilliant, smoldering, big-city homicide detective, Virgil Tibbs, who helps a Southern sheriff solve a murder case, in The Heat of the Night (1967). This version of Poitier’s on-screen persona was enormously appealing to white, middle class audiences, and the box office boffo of these three films made him the highest grossing film star of any race in 1968.

But Poitier also played a number of working-class characters throughout his career, roles in which he was more likely to wear a simple white t-shirt or a short-sleeved dress shirt. A quick look at some of these “white t-shirt” roles will reveal, that, while it is undeniable that Poitier was a race man, he was also proud of his working-class and immigrant roots. He also told his own story in a way that emphasized his working-class values.

Poitier decided to become an actor in 1945 when he noticed that an ad on the theatrical page in the newspaper said “Actors Wanted,” the same phrasing that appeared on the opposite page: “Dishwashers Wanted” and “Elevator Operators Wanted.” Poitier thought, “Well I’ve been trying this dishwashing thing, I might as well see what this other thing is about.” He answered an ad placed by the American Negro Theater (ANT) company—a progressive effort started in 1940. There he auditioned for Frederick O’Neal, a legend within the black theater community. But Poitier bungled his audition—he couldn’t read very well, and he had a strong Bahamian accent. O’Neal threw Poitier out and told him to get a job as a dishwasher. Poitier’s resolved hardened; he decided to become an actor to show O’Neal “that he was wrong about me.”

Poitier improved his reading with the help of an older Jewish waiter at the restaurant where he worked, and he practiced locution by mimicking the television and the radio. He auditioned again at ANT, and was rejected again. Finally, he asked the receptionist at ANT if he could work as a janitor. She agreed, and, at long last, Poitier was on his way to becoming an actor. How ironic that Poitier, whom white audiences later found to be so polished and cultured, began his career in the theater as a backstage janitor.

Within a decade, Poitier had starred in several ANT stage productions and two feature films. In Blackboard Jungle (1955), Poitier had his first white t-shirt role as a juvenile delinquent who listens to rock-and-roll and smokes cigarettes. Television writer Robert Alan Aurthur was so impressed by Poitier in Blackboard Jungle that he pitched a drama starring Poitier for NBC’s Philco Television Playhouse.

The result—the last teleplay ever made by Playhouse—was A Man is Ten Feel Tall (1955), in which Poitier played a cheerful dock loading supervisor, Tommy Tyler, who befriends (and, ultimately, sacrifices himself for), a shy and somewhat pathetic white army drop out, Alex Nordman. In 1957, it was made into a feature film, The Edge of the City. Poitier’s dock-loading Tommy was ridiculously upbeat, but he was no “Uncle Tom.” He stood up to his boss, Charlie. In the television version, Tommy tells his mentee, Alex, that he and his boss openly disagreed: “[W]e hold different opinions on a lot of things, old Charlie and I do. You know, like unions.”

In 1963, Sidney Poitier became the first African-American to win an Academy Award for best actor, for Lilies of the Field. Poitier played Homer Smith, a good-natured handyman cruising around Arizona who stumbles on a colony of East German nuns when his car breaks down. The film is mostly a comedy, as Homer and the nuns overcome linguistic and cultural barriers to build a chapel in the desert. Still, Homer stands up for himself, telling Sister Maria, “I’m nobody you can boss around.”

Last weekend, as the Poitier tributes flowed out, Sherrilyn Ifill, head the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, wondered why so few mentioned Poitier’s transformative role as Walter Lee Younger, a chauffeur with ambition, in Lorraine Hansberry’s brilliant play/screenplay, Raisin in the Sun(1961). Ifill linked her Tweet to the speech that Walter gives at the end of the film. In this scene, Walter has decided to accept a large cash offer from a representative of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, Mr. Lindner. Lindner is trying to keep his neighborhood “whites only.” But as Walter begins to speak, he realizes that his family has a right to move into their new house, and that it would be wrong to accept Lindner’s money.

This scene is such a powerful statement about what the Youngers deserve—as African Americans, but, also, as working-class Americans. Walter Lee Younger references the fact that he is a chauffeur, and that his wife and his mother work as domestics in other people’s kitchens. Poitier’s voice starts to crack as he says, “my father was a laborer aaaaalllll of his life,” and it is easy to imagine that Poitier was conjuring a vision his own father, the tomato farmer.

Poitier stood for the dignity of race, but also for the dignity of labor. He was proud of his working-class upbringing and he saw acting as a job. He wrote about his early life and his working-class entry into the world of acting with considerable pride and specificity. In addition, Poitier’s working-class characters demanded respect from their employers, and, in turn from their audiences. In more ways than one, Poitier taught us that he was nobody to be bossed around.

Kathy M. Newman, Carnegie Mellon University

Posted in Class and the Media, Class at the Intersections, Contributors, Issues, Kathy M. Newman | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments



Posted on January 3, 2022 by Working-Class Perspectives

Pandemic Cuts: Deepening the Higher Ed Divide

American mythology promises upward mobility, and college can provide an important first step up the class ladder. With the rise of the “knowledge economy” and the decline of industrial jobs and unions, some insisted that education is the answer to economic displacement. If you can’t earn a stable, living wage as a steelworker, go to college and become a nurse or a computer programmer. And if you didn’t make that choice, it’s your own fault that you’re struggling. After all, college was affordable, accessible, and varied. You could commute to campus, take evening classes, cover tuition with loans and grants, and work part-time or even full-time while you completed the degree that would transform your life.

Of course, higher ed doesn’t quite live up to this vision, especially in recent decades. Rising tuition, largely due to drastic declines in public funding for higher education, has made college less affordable, while precarious employment and uncertain job hours make juggling work and school difficult. The Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice has documented many of the economic obstacles students face today, especially food insecurity and homelessness.

The pandemic has exacerbated these challenges, as enrollment figures make clear. Data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows a 14.8% drop at community colleges, and a 10.8% decline at private for-profit schools. While the 4% decline at four-year public schools was less dramatic, it’s easy to imagine why students would have quit school during the pandemic. Many weren’t interested in online classes, or they didn’t have the necessary equipment, internet bandwidth, or digital experience. Others couldn’t afford tuition because of lost income.  For many, family responsibilities got in the way. About a third of college students provide care to family members, either children or elders, and the combination of health concerns and the lack of child care or home health care likely drove many students away. Those problems will get worse now that the Child Tax Credit is ending. These declines could well limit people’s earning power and employment opportunities down the line, undermining the economic well-being of millions of working-class Americans. 

Declining enrollment doesn’t only affect those who leave college. It changes what colleges and universities offer to those who remain. Dozens of campuses across the country have cut programs and fired faculty over the last two years. A list compiled by the office of the President of Eastern Michigan University, in part to buttress its announcements of staff cuts, includes several dozen examples from between April, 2020 to July, 2021. More cuts have been announced in the last six months. Some were temporary, such as short-term furloughs or stopped contributions to retirement accounts. Elsewhere, programs have been closed, salaries decreased, and vacancies left unfilled.

Last February, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that 650,000 faculty and staff had lost their jobs, and the tally is probably much higher now. Just this fall, Youngstown State University, where Working-Class Studies and Working-Class Perspectives began, “sunsetted” 26 programs and retrenched 9 tenure-line faculty. That included two endowed chairs who led programs in Islamic Studies and Judaic and Holocaust Studies. Their retrenchment drew protests from the community groups that funded their positions  and the American Historical Association. These cuts follow voluntary retirements of 24 faculty as part of an incentive program the previous year and non-renewal of contracts for others who were not yet tenured. More cuts are expected this spring, including in non-tenure line positions.  Of course, YSU isn’t alone. The University of Vermont cut 25 programs, William Paterson University plans to lay off 100 faculty, and a number of universities have reorganized departments and schools.

While the pandemic caused real trouble for higher ed budgets, which rely not only on tuition but also on room and board and per student state funding calculations, these cuts reflect more than just budget woes. Rather, just as in some commercial businesses, as John Russo noted here a few weeks ago, the pandemic has provided an opportunity for institutional leaders to take actions they could only get away with by citing austerity, efficiency, and restructuring. As an academic and activist, I am, of course, concerned about what this means for tenure and academic freedom, but I am even more concerned about what it means for students.

While some private institutions have tightened their budgets, most program and faculty cuts have been at public institutions, where poor and working-class students are most likely to go to school. That has real economic consequences for those students. The Center for Education and the Workforce (CEW) reports that someone with a bachelor’s degree can expect to earn 84% more than someone with just a high school diploma. That matters.

But the CEW also encourages poor and working-class students to choose majors based on future income. Those who study humanities, education, and psychology will earn less than students who pursue some other fields. That view may explain why retrenchment has hit the arts and humanities especially hard. At YSU, most of the programs cut and all of the tenured faculty losing their jobs are in the arts and humanities.

It’s not necessarily wrong to recognize or even emphasize the economic value of a college degree. However, as Tim Francisco wrote here a few years ago, this “classist paradigm” ignores the value of fields that “might just provide the ‘skills’ students need to become leaders in an interconnected, increasingly complex, global economy.” Such cuts won’t only affect students who might have chosen to major in these areas. Business and STEM majors will also miss out as general education class sizes increase and some of the best faculty are fired, choose to retire or take other jobs, or simply slog through in the face of pay cuts, anxiety, and lousy morale.

The injustice of this becomes even clearer when we compare what is happening at places like YSU with the effect of the pandemic on more privileged institutions. As college enrollment dropped at most places, highly selective institutions attracted 2.2% more students. These schools also had the resources to provide more support for their faculty. At Georgetown, where I now work, a hiring freeze has been partially lifted, retirement contributions have resumed, and early and mid-career tenure-line faculty are being offered extra research leave and tenure-clock pauses to make up for pandemic disruptions to scholarly productivity. As poor and working-class students and the faculty and staff who teach and support them struggle to persevere amid a continuing pandemic, academic opportunity for the elite is being preserved.

It’s not news that higher education mirrors, perpetuates, and even exacerbates inequality. Nor is education the only sector that has seen inequities deepen during the pandemic. But if we believe that, despite its contradictions and challenges, education matters for poor and working-class people, then we need to defend the programs and faculty who provide it. To use the rationales that YSU claims have driven its decisions, decimating universities in the name of “efficiency” makes education less “effective.”

Sherry Linkon, Georgetown University

Posted in Understanding Class | 4 Comments

The Pandemic as an Employment Shell Game

Posted on December 20, 2021 by steeltownusa

I have always been skeptical of the use of labor statistics. In 2009, I began to write in Working-Class Perspectives about the de facto unemployment rate, because official reports on the unemployment rate in Youngstown left out much of the story. Drawing on traditional Bureau of Labor Statistics data as well as comparative studies from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, I looked beyond how many people were looking for work to add figures for how many were underemployed, discouraged, or unable to work because of disability. I also factored in those in government support programs or in prison.  Using these figures, I showed that Youngstown’s unemployment rate was not 7.2%, as officially reported, but over 25%. I followed up later with stories that considered the de facto unemployment rate nationally, especially during the Great Recession. My approach was picked up by others, including Christopher Martin, who wrote about it here earlier this year, and the Wall Street Journal.  

Recent discussions of employment make me skeptical again. The New York Times reported that 4.3 million people quit their jobs in August, while 10 millions jobs went unfilled that month.  Reports on the lower than expected return to work as the pandemic recedes have described it as a Great Resignation or the Great Reshuffle. Media stories have highlighted an increase in early retirements and “sick outs,” some, perhaps ironically, focused on resistance to vaccine mandates. The service, hospitality, leisure, government, and manufacturing sectors have been especially hard hit. Like the Wall Street Journal, many have been left wondering “Where Did All the Workers Go?” 

Commentators explain these patterns in several ways: apprehension about returning to the workplace as the pandemic continues; difficulty in finding affordable childcare and eldercare; reconsidering the centrality of work and work/home life; increased government assistance; supply chain shortages. Many of the discussions argue that the change primarily reflects the personal choices of workers (agency), especially those in working-class occupations and industries.

While these stories sometimes quote managers whining about not being able to find enough workers, they often ignore how businesses have contributed to this shift. Some companies used the pandemic to implement or expedite planned workplace reductions. For example, the pandemic led some businesses to increase capital spending on technologies and automation that displaced employees and closed or moved worksites. Increased use of self-service kiosks and QR codes, Zoom meetings, and various forms of artificial intelligence have reduced the need for workers. Others found that the possibility of remote work allowed them to close offices or relocate outside of traditional work centers.

The pandemic and the use of just in time production has contributed to uneven inventories and supply chain disruptions.  In some cases, supply chains disruptions have resulted in downsizing even as the intensity of work increased. With fewer workers, the remaining employees sometimes have no work and sometimes have too much. Of course, this is being touted as a gain for business efficiency and flexibility. While wages have increased for some, a recent study from the Economic Policy Institute shows that wage inequities have worsened. Most people these days are working harder and faster — and often with less job security. Given the new conditions, some workers are choosing to quit and seek employment elsewhere.

Other employers are taking advantage of the pandemic to increase their use of independent contractors. So-called “gig work,” long associated with Uber and Lyft, is being used by corporations to lower costs for wages, benefits, and overhead. This contingent work model means that companies can fire workers at any time. Many independent and freelance workers have also been forced to sign non-compete contracts, which limits their ability to pursue other jobs while they hope for their next assignment.  

One final employment scheme is having people work off-the-books. Often associated with home and childcare, it is increasingly used by more traditional and non-competitive employers to avoid paying federal and state income taxes and other state mandated costs such as unemployment insurance, Medicare, social security, and workers compensation. While not necessarily illegal, off-the-books work also allows employers to hire – and often to exploit — undocumented workers.  

All of this amounts to an employment shell game, where the reasons why people are quitting or missing from the workforce can be hard to track. Does the explanation lie under the shell of corporate decision-making? Or is it due to new technologies? Reorganization? Increased inequality? Or worker dissatisfaction? And how much can we attribute changes in employment to worker agency.

What gets lost in this game is how trends that seem to have started with the pandemic actually reflect longer-term decisions by employers, all for the benefit of their bottom lines. Reports that focus on workers’ individual choices hide an important reality: corporations don’t want to take the fall for economic problems, but they are benefiting from new workplace practices. The employment shell game lets them off the hook.

John Russo, Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor

Posted in Contributors, Issues, John Russo, The Working Class and the Economy | 6 Comments

Work is a Real Life Squid Game for the Global Precariat

Posted on December 13, 2021 by knewman4

I’m assuming you’ve heard of Squid Game, but have you also heard that Squid Game is the most watched television show in Netflix history, inspiring 1.65 billion hours of viewing in its first month? This week we learned that Squid Game was the most Tweeted about TV show of 2021 and the most searched for on Google.

And since it’s getting close to Christmas, you should know that there is still time to get your Squid Game holiday greeting cards, your Squid Game children’s game pack, your Squid Game ornaments, and, because, why not, your Squid Game ugly Christmas sweater.

Critics have suggested many reasons for Squid Game’s global popularity. Some say that because  American Millennials and Gen Z have grown up on the stateless internet, they are more receptive to “K-dramas” (Korean dramas). Others point out that Squid Game capitalizes on the current popularity of games in all forms, including competitive reality shows, board games, escape rooms, and, of course, video games.

For a show on one of capitalism’s most successful streaming platforms, Netflix, Squid Game has also produced a surprising amount of public discussion about capitalism. Some have argued the Squid Game is pretty harsh on capitalism. As the show’s writer and director, Hwang Dong-hyuk, has said, “I do believe that the overall global economic order is unequal and that around 90% of the people believe that it’s unfair. During the pandemic, poorer countries can’t get their people vaccinated. They’re contracting viruses on the streets and even dying. So I did try to convey a message about modern capitalism.”

Weirdly, another camp has claimed that, by putting everyone in uniforms and by creating a game that has some similarities to a totalitarian state, Squid Game is actually an attack on communism.

Squid Game is certainly critical of capitalism, but it’s even more interesting for how it depicts violent class conflict in real life workplaces. Squid Game’s main protagonist, Seong Gi-Hun, is an auto worker who has been out of work for more than a decade. In the series’ fifth episode he has a flashback to a scene of police beating men with billy clubs in clouds of tear gas. During Gi-Hun’s vision, a friend who has been struck on the head calls out Gi-Hun’s name, desperate for help.

Gi-Hun’s flashback is based on a police raid of striking workers during a South Korean automotive strike of 2009, in the city of Pyeongtaek. In the events leading up to this strike, the auto company Ssangyong was sold to a Chinese auto company, and its most popular SUV was pirated for the Chinese auto industry. Headed for receivership, Ssangyong announced it would lay-off more than 40% of its workforce. In response, the South Korean auto workers union, the Korean Metal Workers Union (KMWU), occupied the Ssangyong factory for 77 days.

After this long occupation, police were called in, resulting in violent clashes between the police and the workers. As The New York Times reported, “police commandos rappelled from helicopters as workers hurled firebombs. Hundreds were injured. By Wednesday, the police had overrun most of the facility and cornered 500 workers in a paint shop filled with flammable liquids.”

Finally, the workers surrendered. Although they didn’t win many of their demands, they did keep the factory open. They were greeted as heroes with “banners and…labor songs as they stepped off the buses” after leaving the factory.


In another flashback, we learn of the pre-Squid Game troubles faced by Ali Abdul, a Pakastani immigrant who used to work in a sheet metal factory. We see him march into the metal shop and demand months of back pay owed to him. When Ali confronts his boss, he tells him that the work has ruined his fingers and that he has no medical insurance.

The boss, who is surfing the web when Ali confronts him, whines and complains that he doesn’t have the money to pay Ali. Ali looks down and sees an envelope stuffed with cash on the desk. Ali and his boss begin to struggle over the money. The struggle takes them to the shop floor, at which point Ali pushes his boss into one of the rolling machines, and his boss’s fingers are crushed in a graphic scene. Ali runs away with the money.

These two flashbacks in Squid Game suggest that for the global precariat the world outside the game is as dangerous as the world inside of it. The flashback to the auto strike shows the violent force of the police who can be called in on behalf of the factory owners. The scene with Ali shows that owners can get away with wage theft without consequence and how repetitive work damages workers’ bodies. Ironically, perhaps, in Ali’s story, it is the boss whose fingers are crushed in the roller. But a quick scan of recent work accidents shows that across the globe it is ordinary workers who get their hands caught in rollers every year.

Ali’s flashback also points to real problems with immigrant labor and inequality in South Korea. About a third of South Korea’s more than three-quarters of a million foreign workers have temporary (E-9) visas, making them more vulnerable to workplace abuse. And, according to The Korea Herald, over the last year, “migrant workers have reported more than $128.5 million in unpaid wages.”

While Squid Game may have earned its massive global audience with its stylized sets, haunting music, thrilling plot twists, and choreographed violence, in a move unexpected for such a popular series, Squid Game also explicitly calls out the owner-sponsored violence that continually endangers the global working class. The violence within the world of Squid Game is fictional, but the workplace violence experienced by Gi-Hun and Ali is perfectly real.

Squid Game has become wildly popular against the backdrop of a surging labor movement in US—and a corresponding backlash from employers. Last week baristas at a Starbucks in Buffalo became the first workers in that company to vote for a union, but only after Starbuck’s appeal to stop the vote count was denied. Columbia university grad students are currently on strike, and have been threatened with being replaced. Striking Kellogg workers are being replaced, though a young pro-union hacker has tried to disrupt that process by creating a bot that sends fake resumes to the Kellogg site 24 hours a day. None of these conflicts has erupted in violence—yet—but the threat of employer-sponsored violence is always there.

Squid Game is a vivid reminder that the life for the global working class can be brutal indeed. We can enjoy the Squid Game Christmas swag, and, believe me, I do. But when it comes to its depictions of the global precariat, Squid Game is not playing around.

Kathy M. Newman, Carnegie Mellon University

Posted in Class and the Media, Contributors, Issues, Kathy M. Newman, Work | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Who Wants to Be Rich? Working-Class People Would Like Their Share

Posted on December 6, 2021 by sarahattfield

A recent crop of TV shows — Maid, Succession, Squid Game — have demonstrated that being rich doesn’t lead to happiness. Family, friendship, and other aspects of life are more important. If the world of the rich is filled with misery and loneliness, these shows seem to ask, then why not stay poor and happy?

Representations of unhappy rich people aren’t new. Think about the rich villains in soap operas like Dallas and Dynasty in the US, or on a less super-rich scale, but very wealthy compared to everyone else, the ‘big house’ owners and the factory bosses in UK soaps such as Emmerdale and Coronation Street, and even the boss of Lassiter’s Hotel in Australian soap Neighbours. All mean, all unhappy. We also see rich people with murderous urges and terrible secrets in British crime shows such as Midsomer Murders and hapless and down on their luck types in sitcoms like Schitt’s Creek, who struggle with downward mobility but eventually realise that there is more to life than money.

In the Netflix drama Maid, the central character, Alex, cleans the houses of rich people. The show is based on a memoir by Stephanie Land who worked as a cleaner to put herself through college and wrote about the people she cleaned for. While the adaptation doesn’t focus so much on the actual cleaning or the clients, one does feature. Regina is a lawyer who lives in a stunning house with water views, but who is thoroughly miserable. Her husband leaves her, and she is lonely and alone with a new baby. Her sadness makes her unpleasant,  and initially she treats Alex poorly. But the two eventually form a friendship, and Alex helps her settle into parenthood and provides a sympathetic ear. Yet while Alex accepts Regina’s help when she needs legal representation, she does not want the emptiness of Regina’s existence.

The HBO family saga Succession is another portrayal of unhappy rich people. Its dysfunctional family are constantly scheming over who has control of the family empire. No one trusts each other, nor are they enjoying life despite their wealth. Even the aesthetic of the show is designed to make being a billionaire seem unappealing, with rather cold and unhomely sets.

The Korean horror show Squid Game mostly focuses on its poor and desperate contestants as they compete in deadly games to try to win a huge cash prize. But it becomes clear that rich people behind the scenes have set up the games to bring some excitement to their lives. The identity of the game’s creator is not revealed until the end of the series, but it clearly suggests that money is corrupting. The rich turn to brutality to amuse themselves, but poor people (as represented by the main character Seong Gi-hun) have the upper moral hand.

Do these shows lead audiences to feel sorry for the rich characters? Maybe not so much in Squid Game due to its brutality (although it might still be possible, due to the twist that means all is not as it seems and sympathies might have grown unwittingly). Some viewers might feel sorry for Succession’s Roy family as the offspring of media magnate Logan Roy appear starved of any parental affection. Maid does invite us to pity Regina.

What is the effect of such depictions? Do stories about unfulfilled rich people encourage working-class audiences to feel relieved that they don’t have to suffer the miseries that come with too much money?

While money might not necessarily guarantee happiness, many working-class people would say that it sure does help. It’s hard to enjoy life when money is tight, and financial hardship causes tensions within households. Not knowing if the rent can be paid, or how the car will get repaired, or whether the kids can have new shoes means a constant sense of worry and dread that undermines health and general wellbeing. And research shows links between poverty and depression – something that many who have experienced poverty would attest to. These series may make wealth look like a source of misery, but many working-class people would love some financial security.

Maid does the best job of making this clear. For Alex, poverty is definitely not better than being rich. It isn’t just that Regina is a sad and lonely wealthy person, suggesting that Alex would not be more content if she had Regina’s lifestyle. We also see that Alex’s happiness improves when she has somewhere decent to live and some money in her pocket. What Alex needs is some financial security to allow her to achieve her aspirations (to go to college) and to be safe. Maid demonstrates that poverty is bad, being aspirational is good, and poor people need not be envious of the rich.

Shows like this might remind working-class people that owning a media empire or living in a massive country estate isn’t the secret to happiness. But trying to convince viewers that being wealthy only brings misery deflects criticism of the super-rich. It hides the reality that wealth is being hoarded by a small number of people. If wealth was properly distributed then these extremes would not exist. It’s common to hear people say that they’d rather be poor and happy than rich and miserable. But it doesn’t have to be one or the other.

Sarah Attfield, University of Technology Sydney

Posted in Class and the Media, Contributors, Issues, Sarah Attfield | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Building Back Better?

Posted on November 29, 2021 by Working-Class Perspectives

As we await U.S. Senate action on President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, it is worth reflecting on what the past few tumultuous months have meant for U.S. workers.  Much has happened in the short time since the summer drew to a close.  Collective and individual actions have worked together to create new leverage for both organized and unorganized workers that didn’t exist six months ago.  Workers are expressing higher levels of discontent than we have seen in years.  And the federal government has taken a more pro-worker and even pro-union stance than most living Americans have ever seen before.

To begin with, an unprecedented number of workers have quit their jobs in what we have taken to calling the “Great Resignation.”  A record 4.3 million workers quit their jobs in August, according to the aptly named JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary) survey.  Many economists predicted that number would decline in September as children returned to in-person school, relieving working parents from the difficult balancing act they had maintained during the pandemic, when managing online schooling forced many, especially women, to leave their jobs.  Instead, workers broke the record again in September as 4.4 million quit.  The unprecedented willingness of workers to say “Take This Job and Shove It,” as the old David Alan Coe song put it, has produced something rare in U.S. history: a worker-created labor shortage that has hit sectors that offer low wages (like fast food) and terrible working conditions (as in trucking) especially hard.  Plenty of people who could flip burgers or who hold trucking licenses are choosing not to.

John Deere employees picket outside John Deere Davenport Works Thursday, Oct. 14, 2021, in Davenport, Iowa. Over 10,000 John Deere employees began their strike at 11:59 a.m. Wednesday. (Meg McLaughlinQuad City Times via AP)

Workers’ increasing willingness to quit bad jobs has in turn strengthened the hands of unionized workers, who have decided to take advantage of this moment to stage walkouts.  A spate of strikes at John Deere, Nabisco, Kellogg’s, and Alabama’s Warrior Met coal company, among others, led observers to coin a new portmanteau — “Striketober.”  The last U.S. strike surge happened in 2018, when more workers went on strike than in any year since the mid-1980s.  But that surge was driven almost entirely by public sector workers. Almost 80% of strikers in 2018 were teachers, #RedforEd strikers in West Virginia, Arizona, and other states, or the “Bargaining for the Common Good” strikes led by the big teachers’ unions in LA and Chicago.  Private sector workers sat out the 2018 strike wave.  Since Ronald Reagan famously broke the 1981 air traffic controllers strike, the strike rate among private sector workers has continuously declined.  In 2020, there were only eight major work stoppages in the US (down from a postwar high of 470 in 1952)—and only two of those involved the private sector. 

While the recent “strike wave” is tiny in comparison to past instances of worker militancy, it reveals a growing discontent among workers that may just begin to rouse unions out of the defensive crouch they have been in recent years.  John Deere strikers twice rejected tentative agreements between their union, the United Auto Workers, and management before finally agreeing to a contract that included an immediate 10% wage hike.  After rejecting a tentative agreement with their university after a monthlong strike in the spring, members of the Columbia University graduate workers union walked out again on November 3.  Perhaps most significantly of all, the 1.4 million-member Teamsters union recently chose new leadership.  By an overwhelming 2-1 margin, Sean O’Brien and Fred Zuckerman defeated Steve Vairma and Ron Herrera for the Teamster’s top offices after running a campaign that criticized the leadership of outgoing president James Hoffa as too business-friendly. 

But the change isn’t just happening among workers. The federal government has taken some remarkably pro-worker actions lately compared to those of administrations of either party over the past half-century. In successive weeks in October, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack visited a John Deere picket line in Iowa, and Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh joined Kellogg’s strikers in Pennsylvania.  For decades before this, even putatively pro-union cabinet members embraced neutrality during strikes, as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, Alexis Herman, did during the 1997 UPS strike, when she demanded that “everyone involved must show greater flexibility and willingness to compromise.”

The Biden administration’s efforts haven’t been merely symbolic, though.  On November 5, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued a sweeping temporary emergency standard meant to protect workers from exposure to COVID-19.  Unlike other OSHA standards, it covers only employers of at least 100 workers. While many private employers have required vaccines, this policy allows workers to opt for testing instead. Although it is currently being challenged in the courts, it constitutes the boldest single workplace safety intervention in U.S. history.

And then there is the Build Back Better (BBB) initiative itself.  To be sure, the version passed by the House fell short of the grandest hopes of Sen. Bernie Sanders other advocates, yet both media coverage and inept Democratic messaging have unfortunately obscured the magnitude of the House’s accomplishment.  The $2.2 trillion ten-year package includes unprecedentedly generous support for child care, paid leave, and new health benefits, important investments in a just transition toward an eventually carbon-neutral economy, and place-based investments in working-class communities that have suffered most during recent decades.

The fate of BBB now rests in the hands of the nation’s least democratic elected body, where a single Democratic party holdout can sink or dramatically weaken the bill and the filibuster gives Republican senators — elected by only 43.5 percent of the nation’s population — the power to veto any law that cannot be put through reconciliation.  That’s what happened to the desperately needed Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, suggesting that the BBB might well fare poorly in the Senate, especially as its opponents raise alarms about the recent spike in inflation. 

Yet the events of recent months suggest that the problems of working people, which have moved increasingly to center stage in our political discourse over the recent months, will not soon recede — no matter what happens to BBB. That workers, both individually and collectively, have begun expressing their hopes and demands for a better future has the potential to be even more important than a landmark bill like BBB in this troubled time.

Joseph A. McCartin, Georgetown University

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

Posted in Issues, Joseph A. McCartin, Labor and Community Activism, The Working Class and the Economy, Work | 5 Comments