Abstract
On this Labor Day, there is plenty of good and bad news for working-class people and the union movement. The bad news comes from the Oval Office, the Supreme Court, the Congress, and the corporate boards they serve, and includes the slew of appalling high court rulings made before the 2018 summer recess upholding the travel ban, punting on partisan gerrymandering, and assaulting public-sector unions. The good news has come from the grassroots and entails large numbers of women raising their voices against pervasive workplace sexual harassment, striking red-state teachers and their community allies winning raises and funding increases for schools, young tech-workers taking on the titans of Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley and joining unions by the thousands, the outpouring of outrage that forced the Trump administration to rescind its policy of separating migrant children from their families, and the diverse crop of progressive candidates challenging incumbents in all regions of the country.
It is too early to draw conclusions about the strength and scope of these grassroots insurgencies. The November elections, likely the most consequential midterms in decades, will provide a clearer indication of the power of these insurrections. In this issue, we offer a number of articles that examine the resistance. We open with a piece by social analyst Judith Levine, who surveys the working-class #MeToo movement. She assesses the options—from the courts to unions to consciousness raising—available to blue-collar, service, and care workers as they confront widespread workplace sexual harassment.
Two bold proposals presented here argue that real legislative change is possible. Larry Cohen envisions a new national system of collective bargaining, modeled on the sectoral bargaining that sets industry-wide wages and working conditions for workers from Norway to South Africa. Shaun Richman makes the case for the draft bill by Rep. Keith Ellison—as of this writing not yet introduced—that would end our “at will” employment regime and force employers to prove that terminations are related to work performance. Richman suggests that “Right to Your Job” legislation stands a fair chance of passing in a number of municipal and state legislatures, and therefore should become a policy priority for organized labor and its allies. Because the National Labor Relations Act has been so severely weakened, Charlotte Garden encourages labor to organize outside of the law and find innovative ways to respond to the needs of the increasing number of gig workers, “independent contractors,” and others not covered by the law. And Jay Youngdahl describes the conditions that have led to the dramatic decline in pensions, and weighs in on debates regarding how to ensure their viability and keep pension funds from investing in products that undermine the needs of workers and working-class communities.
Across the Atlantic, Jeremy Corbyn has risen from the ashes of the Tony Blair Labour Party. Once a marginal figure, held in contempt by Party elites, Corbyn now heads a shadow cabinet that may well become the next government. Hilary Wainwright examines the social upheavals of post-Brexit Britain to understand the broad support for Corbyn and his Manifesto, which includes pledges to raise the minimum wage, scrap student tuition fees, and (re)nationalize telecommunications, transport, energy, and water.
Here in the United States, a constellation of mainly unelected centers of power, which some refer to as the “deep state,” bars the way to insurgencies like Corbyn’s grassroots Momentum movement. Jacob Silverman probes the origins of the deep state in the National Security Act of 1947, chronicles its imperial mission abroad, and maps the division of labor between its foreign and domestic policy apparatchiks. Donald Trump denounces the deep state, but peoples his administration with generals, CIA mandarins, and hedge-fund operators. This should put to rest the tendency to see in these deep state institutions, long the bete noire of the left, a guarantor of civil liberties.
And first among countries able to count on the support of the deep state is, of course, Israel, despite that nation’s sustained human rights violations against the people who once inhabited the land it controls. Here, Andrew Ross tallies the immense labor contribution of Palestinians, particularly through the ongoing construction work to erect and expand the superstructure of Israel. Given not only the role of Palestinian labor in building the Israeli state but also the fact that it has been a compulsory and hyper-exploited labor force, Ross finds a strong case for labor-based reparations to Palestinians. Ross proposes that Palestinian labor contributions ought to provide a rationale for full citizenship rights, and perhaps other claims as well, should a multicultural integrated Israeli state ultimately emerge.
A founding member of Welfare Warriors, Patricia Gowens, who was interviewed by Kressent Pottenger for our “Working-Class Voices” column, discusses the stigma she and other activists overcame to make the case for their rights as single mothers to receive essential financial support to care for their families. Our columnists follow up on issues developed in the feature articles, beginning with Sarah Jaffe’s “Under the Radar,” which draws attention to a number of lesser known struggles, including actions taken by St. Paul, Minnesota teachers. On the eve of a strike deadline, those teachers and their community-based allies pulled off a major victory, managing to win raises, school lunch guarantees, and less punitive disciplinary procedures for students. Mariya Strauss follows the “Roots of Rebellion” to Baltimore, where students and community groups, rather than the Baltimore Teachers Union, have taken the lead in protesting the gross underfunding and hyper-segregation of the Baltimore public school system. In “Organized Money,” Max Fraser catalogues the expansion of non-compete agreements that companies such as Jiffy Lube, Burger King, and H&R Block forced low-wage workers to sign. These no-poaching clauses, which bar workers from taking jobs at competing companies, asserts Fraser, keep wages low, lock workers in dead-end jobs, and amount to a modern day form of indentured servitude. And in “Earth to Labor,” Sean Sweeney disabuses trade unionists and activists of the notion that subsidizing renewables is the best way to ensure the end of our dependence on fossil fuels. Questioning subsidies, he explains, is not the same as questioning the importance of renewable energy.
In our Books and the Arts section, Rina Agarwala reviews Undervalued Dissent: Informal Workers’ Politics in India by Manjusha Nair, which compares a successful movement by informal workers in the mining industry in the 1970s to that of a decades-long, and continuing, struggle among informal workers in the steel industry. Keona Ervin reviews Class, Race and Marxism by David Roediger, a collection of essays that uses Marxist theory and practice as well as Roediger’s own experience in labor organizing to show how race and class are inextricably linked, providing fresh thinking on a question that has gained new intensity in the United States. And we are pleased to include a review by Jay Youngdahl of a recent film, “The Florida Project,” directed by Sean Baker. We end with an exquisite poem, “The Ghosts of Ludlow, 1914-2014,” by Rigoberto González, author of several poetry books, including most recently Unpeopled Eden, winner of a Lambda Literary Award.