Review of “The Pandemic and the Working Class: How US Labor Navigated COVID-19” for H-Sci-Med-Tech
It is sometimes said that there are decades in which not much changes and years in which an entire decade’s worth of sociopolitical tumult occurs. The so-called COVID year, March 2020 until the vaccine rollout of the following year, is an example of the latter. The COVID year markedly reduced average American life expectancy, nurtured extremist politics and conspiracy-minded cynicism, frayed communities, and eroded trust in institutions.
For workers who, in the words of Nick Juravich and Steve Striffler, were briefly “elevated from disposable to ‘essential,’” the period led to an uptick in worker self-organizing, new wage demands and concessions on work-from-home flexibility, some successful union organizing, and a nearly impossible amount of worker protest to fully quantify, including “quiet” and actual quitting. “Not in nearly a century had so many people felt the failure of government and indifference of the bosses so quickly and so deeply, on a scale and with an intensity that was difficult to ignore.” Continue reading “Review of “The Pandemic and the Working Class: How US Labor Navigated COVID-19” for H-Sci-Med-Tech”
Review of Daniel J. Clark’s “Listening to Workers” for IRSH
Common to failing and fallen empires is a nostalgia for a golden age that never existed. Americans like to believe that we miss working on assembly lines in auto factories.
The fantasy that “good jobs” are inherently and automatically generated by factories, or even that unionization magically converts working on an assembly line into the kind of job that workers would want their children to aspire to, motivates much of Donald Trump’s trade war. Likewise, the mixture of domestic tax incentives and narrowly tailored tariffs that comprised his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better”, aimed to “create good jobs that give working families and the middle class a fair shot and the chance to get ahead”. Biden frequently waxed nostalgic about his 1950s’ childhood in Scranton, PA, and a work ethic instilled by his dad: “A job is a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about your place in the community”.
Continue reading “Review of Daniel J. Clark’s “Listening to Workers” for IRSH”
Making Sense of the 1950’s Teamsters
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations merged in 1955, with big talk and high hopes for organizing the remaining non-union strongholds in the nation’s economy. Three years later, they were laying off organizers on staff and settling into a routine, on the way to a long, slow decline towards a loss of power, influence and bargaining power.
In New York City, though, the newly merged federation approached new union organizing with something like messianic zeal–pioneering new union organizing in the public sector and in health care, and fighting for a labor college and statewide system of socialized medicine–at least until the fiscal crisis. Continue reading “Making Sense of the 1950’s Teamsters”
Independent Unions Can Help Break Through the Economic Crisis and Labor’s Paralysis
In a period of extreme social and economic crises, when the major labor unions have reduced their organizing programs to a fraction of what they once were and the courts stand athwart any effort to protect workers’ interests, scrappy new independent unions raise hope against hope that maybe — just maybe — workers can fight back and win. I’m writing, of course, about the early 1930s. A newly published book finds some surprising parallels between that era and our own.
An eleventh volume in the prolific Marxist labor historian Philip S. Foner’s History of the Labor Movement in the United States has just been published, after it was discovered that Foner had completed the manuscript before he died in 1994. Subtitled The Great Depression 1929–1932, the book covers a period in which the established unions of the American Federation of Labor were not conducting many organizing campaigns or strikes and had little idea how to successfully contest for power in the large mass production industries that played a dominant role in American life. Continue reading “Independent Unions Can Help Break Through the Economic Crisis and Labor’s Paralysis”