This episode I’m pleased to be speaking with Pat Garofalo. Pat is the director of state and local policy at the American Economic Liberties Project and author of ‘The Billionaire Boondoggle: How Our Politicians Let Corporations and Bigwigs Steal Our Money and Jobs.” He also writes the Boondoggle substack. We’ll be talking about a grab bag of topics including noncompete agreements and corporate subsidies. 

Contact US

Twitter: @PublicSeminar, @lmergner, @pete_sinnott

Email: [email protected]

Credits

Producer: Daniel Fermín

Music: Composed and performed by Samuel Haines. 

Artwork: Daniel Fermín

 

 

In this episode, I talk to Matteo Tiratelli about  bullshit jobs. Tiratelli recently published an article in the journal Catalyst exploring the problems and insights of David Graeber’s well known theory 

Tiratelli is a lecturer at UCL's Social Research Institute where he teaches historical and political sociology. His previous research has focussed on the ideological transformation of European socialism, the history of rioting in Britain, and the political economy of crime. He is currently starting a project examining the evolution of the British prison system over the twentieth century. He has an article just out in Political Quarterly which critiques the widely held belief that most people have moderate political opinions with a few extremists at either end. He occasionally tweets @MatteoTiratelli.

Contact US

Twitter: @PublicSeminar, @pete_sinnott

Email: [email protected]

Credits

Producer: Daniel Fermín

Music: Composed and performed by Samuel Haines. 

Artwork: Daniel Fermín

 

This episode, I talk to sociologist Jamie McCallum about his new book, Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice. We talk about working conditions and unemployment during the pandemic, labor activism, and glimpses of working class unity. 

McCallum is a professor of sociology at Middlebury College. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Mother Jones, Dissent, and Jacobin, and his last book Worked Over looked at the quantity and quality of time we spend on and off the clock. You can get in touch with him through his website: https://www.jamiekmccallum.com/. 

Contact US

Twitter: @PublicSeminar, @lmergner, @pete_sinnott

Email: [email protected]

Credits

Producer: Daniel Fermín

Music: Composed and performed by Samuel Haines. 

Artwork: Daniel Fermín

In this episode, my erstwhile cohost, Luke Mergner, and I talk to Alex Gourevitch who published a piece last year in Catalyst that levied a critique of anti-work discourse and universal basic income. We talk to Alex about what the anti-work and post-work crowd get wrong in their thinking about work and the future.

Alex is an associate professor of political science at Brown University. He is currently writing a book on the political ethics of strikes and a book on shared labor socialism. He has written for Jacobin, Dissent, and other publications.

This week a double episode, first a discussion about inflation and the labor market with Brian Callaci, chief economist at the Open Market Institute. Then an interview with political scientist David Lay Williamas about the inequality today and its place in the history of western political thought.

Brian Callaci is the Chief Economist at the Open Markets Institute, a Washington DC-based think tank focused on antimonopoly policy. He co-authored an article in Dissent in July titled “Inflation is No Excuse for Squeezing Workers.” 

David Lay WIlliams is Professor of Political Science at DePaul University and author of a forthcoming book on economic inequality in Western political thought. He wrote a recent essay in Public Seminar, “The Wall Street Journal Resurrects Mandeville.”

This episode, Pete interviews Chad Pearson about his new book, Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2022).  They talk about the use of violence to discipline workers, labor battles in the long nineteenth century, the need to study the way business owners organized nationally to fight unionization, and more. 

Chad Pearson is a labor historian primarily interested in ruling class organizations and violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has authored two books: Capital's Terrorists and Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Additionally, he is co-editor with Rosemary Feurer of Against Labor: How US Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism (University of Illinois Press, 2017). Finally, I have published essays in Counterpunch, History Compass, Jacobin, Journal of Labor and Society, Labor History, Labour/Le Travail, and Monthly Review. 

Contact US

Twitter: @PublicSeminar, @pete_sinnott

Email: [email protected]

Credits

Producer: Daniel Fermín

Music: Composed and performed by Samuel Haines. 

Artwork: Daniel Fermín

In this episode I talk to Emma Dowling about her book, The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It?  In the book, Dowling connects the recent history of privatization, austerity, and financialization to the decline in the availability and quality of care. Her book asks us to think about what care is for recipients and care workers, paid and unpaid, and how the influence of social impact investors and other forms of private finance distort and twist the fundamental human need and social function for the sake of extracting profits.   

Emma Dowling is a sociologist and political scientist and teaches at the University of Vienna. She previously held academic positions in Germany and the UK. Her research interests include political economies of unpaid work, financialisation and welfare state restructuring, work & emotions, and care and social reproduction. The Care Crisis has just come out in paperback with a new afterword on Covid-19 and care.

 

Contact US

Twitter: @PublicSeminar, @lmergner, @pete_sinnott

Email: [email protected]

Credits

Producer: Daniel Fermín

Music: Composed and performed by Samuel Haines. 

Artwork: Daniel Fermín

 

 

This episode I talk to Eve Livingston, author of Make Bosses Pay: Why We Need Unions. We discuss the need to organize unions to meet the challenges of work today and the need to build connections between unions and community organizations outside the workplace. 

Eve Livingston is a Scotland-based freelance journalist specializing in social affairs, inequalities and industrial relations. She has worked for The Guardian, The Independent, VICE and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism among many others and has appeared on TV and radio including BBC Woman's Hour and ITV News. In 2018 she was one of Young Women Scotland's 30 under 30, and in 2019 she was shortlisted for an Orwell Prize. In 2021 she published her first book, Make Bosses Pay: Why We Need Unions, about young workers and trade unions in the UK. She can be found on twitter @eve_rebecca

Contact US

Twitter: @PublicSeminar, @lmergner, @pete_sinnott

Email: [email protected]

Credits

Producer: Daniel Fermín

Music: Composed and performed by Samuel Haines. 

Artwork: Daniel Fermín

This week my erstwhile cohost and collaborator, Luke, and I have a free-flowing conversation about the Great Resignation. This was a hot topic last fall as 4.5 million Americans quit their jobs in November 2021 and 4.3 Million in August of 2021. That’s according to reports from the US Department of Labor Statistics. We discuss how varying factors drove this phenomenon in different sectors of the economy, or at least the common narratives that have been deployed to explain this for white and blue collar workers. We also discuss the impact of and the connection or lack of connection to other trends such as drives to unionize in the service, education, and care sectors. 

Contact US

Twitter: @PublicSeminar, @lmergner, @pete_sinnott

Email: [email protected]

Credits

Producer: Daniel Fermín

Music: Composed and performed by Samuel Haines. 

Artwork: Daniel Fermín

In this episode, I’m joined by Peter Linebaugh, a historian whose thinking and writing about the commons spans the entirety of a quite distinguished career. His books include The London Hanged, The Magna Carta Manifesto, Stop Thief, Red Round Globe Hot Burning, and, with Marcus Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra. His writing combines a rigorous historical understanding grounded in the archives with a deep concern for and critique of the present, a difficult balancing act to pull off. 

We talk about the commons in history and today, the meaning of industry and idleness, crime and the police, and Linebaugh’s approach to the discipline of history. 

Contact US

Twitter: @PublicSeminar, @lmergner, @pete_sinnott

Email: [email protected]

Credits

Producer: Daniel Fermín

Music: Composed and performed by Samuel Haines. 

Artwork: Daniel Fermín

What We Talked About

The commons and commoning

Christopher Hill

David Graeber and David Wengrow

Adam Smith

Policing