Reinventing Solidarity

Journalist Laura Flanders speaks with Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta, the authors of The Future We Need, Organizing for a Better Democracy in the 21st Century. The book and this conversation explore the great democratizing power of collective bargaining, with potential applications even beyond the workplace in the yet mostly untried realms of housing, public safety, education, healthcare, and environmental justice, to name just a few. In this moment of national democratic peril and the upsurge in worker organizing, these bold new ideas hold both special urgency and possibility.

Commentators far and wide have been sounding the alarm for American democracy. The question of who can vote and who ends up voting is central to this democratic crisis. In a landscape of defensive battles to protect the right to vote and herculean efforts to turn out the vote, comes a new book: 100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting. Written by Miles Rapoport and E.J. Dionne, the book makes an assertive argument that voting should be mandatory in the U.S., as it already is in 26 countries around the world. With SLU’s Heather McGhee, author Miles Rapoport discusses the case for requisite voting and its likely implications.

In 2021 the pension assets of U.S. workers stood at 35 trillion dollars and amounted to fully 62 percent of all global pension assets. For almost half a century, this money has fueled the growth of the asset management sector, the likes of BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity Investments to name only a few. New Labor Forum author Benjamin Braun casts a critical eye on the investment practices of collectively bargained Taft-Hartley pension funds which have contributed so significantly to the rise of a bloated financial sector. He also discusses efforts to redirect labor’s capital to the benefit of workers and to investment in public goods projects, such as infrastructure and renewable energy.

In this episode, we turn to India’s two-millennia-old caste system that has often been compared to our own structures of racial oppression. A recent book, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, provides a sort of memoir of caste viewed through the experiences author Sujatha Gidla’s Dalit family. Speaking with New Labor Forum Editor-at-Large Kafui Attoh, Gidla says she drew motivation and courage to write this personal account by witnessing individual and collective acts of resistance of African Americans. A resident of the U.S. since age 26, Gidla completed the writing of the book while working as a New York City train conductor and member of Local 100 of the Transit Workers Union.

Nearly alone among industrialized nations, the U.S. leaves the elderly, the infirm, and their loved ones to fend for themselves in the complex tangle of what passes for a system of elder and long-term care. Our speakers describe the human toll of this for-profit system that is simultaneously unaffordable for those who need care and unsustainable for the low-wage workers who provide it. As social justice visionaries, our speakers also outline bold policy solutions currently being advanced by coalitions that are reimagining elder and long-term care.

Progressive commentators in the U.S. have long debated the primacy of race vs. class in our political and economic life, and therefore its role in organizing strategy. McGhee sees this as a false debate. The stories she tells illustrate the concrete ways in which racism and our deep economic divide go hand in hand. She argues that, at every turn, racism undermines class solidarity and makes it possible in the richest country on earth for so many people lack a living wage, a pension, access to quality healthcare, childcare, and a sustainable environment.

Less than a month into the new mayoralty in the City of New York, we assembled a panel of leading journalists to delineate Eric Adams’s vision for the city, especially as it pertains to working people. Only the second black mayor in the city’s history, Adams was also the son of a housekeeper, a graduate of the public schools, and for two decades the member of a municipal union. Our host, historian and emeritus faculty member Josh Freeman, asked the assembled reporters whether these facts are likely to impact the administration's approach to municipal labor relations, and more broadly, to governing one of the most deeply unequal cities in the nation.

The poetry of our guest, Gregory Pardlo, is some of the finest, engaged work written in the U.S. today. He brings us the striking air traffic controller, permanently replaced, selling off everything but his house, his young son outside that house speaking to snowflakes. He conjures up the glory and the grace of girls jumping Double Dutch. And he tells of an impoverished old man who asks to hold the hand of a recovering alcoholic so that together they might toss a coin into a fountain and wish for something else. And Pardlo’s work helps us imagine what that something else might be.

This episode draws on New Labor Forum’s cutting-edge Books and the Arts section edited by Samir Sonti. Here, the book in question is PORN WORK: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism, by Heather Berg. Reviewer Whitney Strub discusses with Berg her insights into work and workers in the 12 billion-dollar porn industry. Workers laboring and organizing in this industry, Berg notes, have largely been dismissed and even scorned by organized labor and the Marxist Left. I trust our listeners will find what Berg says revealing about the priorities and predispositions of porn workers, as well as failures of labor and the left to meet the challenges of 21st century capitalism.

Close attention to the qualities of working-class culture is in short supply in this era of ubiquitous distain for the working-class. This measure of respect is one of the chief contributions of Jack Metzgar’s new book, Bridging the Divide: Working-Class Culture in a Middle-Class Society. In this episode, Metzgar discusses with New Labor Forum Consulting Editor Joshua Freeman what he views as the distinct values of working-class vs. middle-class cultures. Anyone committed to a resurgent working-class and concerned about the decades-long alienation of segments of the working-class from progressive politics will find Metzgar’s observations and arguments of great interest.