Reinventing Solidarity

Throughout much of U.S. history, anti-trust movements – joined by farmers, laborers, abolitionists, and small businesspeople – were a force to be reckoned with in American politics. Then, in the late 1970s, anti-monopoly fervor subsided and remained dormant for the next 40 years. The tides have now begun to change, with the appointment of leading anti-trust experts in to the Biden administration, and a growing number of labor and grassroots organizers once again taking aim at monopoly power. This history and the present urgency of anti-trust organizing is the subject of episode 22 of Reinventing Solidarity.

This episode airs as COP26, the 2021 U.N. Climate Change Conference, gets underway in Glasgow, Scotland. Our guest, Roz Foyer, General Secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress, notes that this year’s Conference takes place during a time of growing awareness of market-driven forces’ failure to deliver the scale of energy transition that scientists agree is necessary to sustain life on this planet. She and Sean Sweeney also observe that people across the world have witnessed the necessity of large-scale government action to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Both realities have given rise to worldwide calls for a similar, Global Public Goods approach to climate change. Roz suggests the shape such an approach might take as she discusses on-the-ground challenges in Scotland regarding public transportation, retrofitting, and other sectors crucial to climate change.

Samir Sonti interviews Sandy Jacoby, author of Labor in the Age of Finance: Pensions, Politics, and Corporations from Deindustrialization to Dodd-Frank. Jacoby’s book and this conversation offer insights into some of the strategic choices organized labor has made since the 1990s in the face of burgeoning corporate power and its own diminished membership rates. With union density in the private sector hovering around 6 percent and a labor law regime that enables employers to resist unionization, many unions have sought other forms of leverage. Those strategies have focused on both legislative reform, Dodd Frank for example, and union pension shareholder activism. In both realms, Jacoby argues, organized labor’s tactics have elevated shareholder influence within corporate governance and exacerbated the financialization of the economy.

On September 17th, 2011, approximately a thousand people massed in lower Manhattan at the towering edifices of the “Vatican of capitalism.” This movement, known as Occupy Wall Street, called attention to the obscene inequality and devastation of 21st century capitalism on full display in the wake of the fiscal meltdown. Already by that October, in cities around the world, millions had occupied their own symbolic Wall Streets. Although the encampment in Zuccotti Park was relatively short lived, many have argued that this protest movement changed the language and perhaps the focus of our politics, making “the 99%” part of the lingua franca. On the tenth anniversary of Occupy, this episode offers an assessment of the movement’s long-term impact according to four Occupy activists.

In the first episode of the 2021-22 season, Paula Finn holds a conversation with Ruth Milkman and Stephanie Luce assessing the U.S. labor movement’s current strength as relates to union density, or the percentage of workers represented by unions. The basis for their discussion is Milkman’s and Luce’s recent State of the Unions Report, which compares national union density trends to those in New York State and New York City. This year’s study sheds important light on the impact of COVID-19 on employment rates, revealing some surprising, disparate effects of the pandemic nation-wide vs. in New York, on female vs. male workers, and on union members vs. non-union workers.

This episode features a debate regarding the role of race vs. class in efforts to advance a Social Democratic politics. It draws on a panel which was part of a day-long conference held in April 2021 considering Joshua B. Freeman’s landmark book, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II. Longtime social justice activist Deepak Bhargava and historian Touré Reed concur that race and class identity is, as Deepak put it, “the axis on which the Social Democratic project will turn.” They part ways, however, on whether organizing that springs from and emphasizes racial oppression can propel a movement to achieve economic justice in the 21st century U.S.

Discussing three important articles from the spring 2021 issue, New Labor Forum columnist Sean Sweeney hosts a conversation with Sinead Mercier and Dominic Brown on the role of publicly owned energy in halting the climate crisis. Mercier offers as a model the Republic of Ireland’s creation in the 1920s of the fantastically successful state owned and operated Electricity Supply Board; Brown describes advancements made in post-Apartheid South Africa to dramatically expand public access to the state-owned energy system, presently curtailed by measures to privatize the country’s utility; and Sweeney asserts the importance of the AMLO government’s efforts to guard the sovereignty of publicly owned energy in Mexico, arguing that this lays a vital foundation for a transition to renewables.

New Labor Forum Books and Arts Editor Samir Sonti hosts a conversation with Gabriel Winant, author of the recent book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. Examining the vast expansion of the health care sector of our economy over the past half-century, Winant traces its development to a combination of factors, including deindustrialization, union decline, an aging population, and a shredded social safety net. It is this historical process, Winant argues, that ushered in a burgeoning low-wage health care workforce disproportionately represented by women and people of color , who have become both essential and disposable, a contradiction made blatantly clear by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Across the political spectrum, there’s a widely held view that the decades-long increase in immigration to the U.S. has put U.S. workers in competition with new immigrants for scarce jobs and has led to depressed wages and working conditions. Ruth Milkman’s important and timely new book, Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat, upends this notion, arguing that it gets cause and effect wrong. Instead, she contends that immigrants have tended to fill jobs already badly degraded, thanks largely to deregulation and de-unionization. In an interview with Samir Sonti, she speaks about the particular industries in which this trend has played out, as well as the political implications of failing to properly understand the role that immigrant workers play in the U.S. economy.

This episode features New Labor Forum columnist Sarah Jaffe in conversation with New Labor Forum Consulting Editor, Ruth Milkman. They discuss Jaffe’s new book, "Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone", which examines a trend among today’s employers to rely, or even insist upon, workers’ emotional dedication to their jobs, the proverbial labor of love. From the school teacher to the non-profit worker and the un-paid intern, Jaffe argues that living up to this expectation exacts a heavy toll.