The Future of Labor Unions and Community Coalitions

Over the last 30 years, the American labor movement has periodically gone through wrenching discussions of its failures to organize new workers and grow its membership. See, for example,  “The Changing Situation of Workers and Their Unions” (February, 1985), “New Voice for American Workers” (June, 1995), and “Change to Win” (July 2005). Almost every time, unions promise to listen to their members and allied non-governmental organizations more carefully and rethink union structures, organizing strategy, alliances, and engagement. In the past, despite the best of intentions, the results — especially in terms of membership growth — turn out to be negligible due to lukewarm leadership support, insufficient resources, and/or poor planning and execution. More importantly here, past strategic plans have left many community groups and political allies feeling betrayed by the process when the labor movement did not fully embrace their issues.

In March, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka called for yet another reevaluation because membership continues to decline and unions have lost political power and relevance. From now until the September 2013 convention, Trumka has asked the labor movement and its supporters to entertain new directions, strategies, and partnerships in the common struggle for social and economic justice. Trumka hopes this reexamination will result in a more sustainable new plan. In speaking to past initiatives and union leadership failures, Trumka says that the AFL-CIO is serious and that the time is over for leadership “bluster or head-in-the-sand insistence that everything is fine.”

But labor’s coalition partners are suspicious of the new initiative, especially community groups with working-class ties. Specifically, many feel that labor/community coalitions remain largely one-sided, primarily serving the interests of labor rather than working-class communities. For example, in the fight against the Ohio anti-union bill SB5 in 2011, community groups loaned labor groups, particularly SEIU, many of their best neighborhood organizers. Despite promises of continuity and reciprocity, SEIU brought the neighborhood organizers to Columbus just three days after the election and announced that they were no longer useful – but they should turn over all their organizing materials to the union. So ended the first experience of many neighborhood organizers with the labor movement. Later, many openly wondered how much union support they would receive for their organizing objectives, such as foreclosures, vacant housing, and human trafficking.

Community groups have to bear part of the blame for such actions. Clearly, since the destruction of ACORN by conservative groups, the rebuilding of sustainable community organization has been episodic, at best. In part, this is because of the difficulty of raising funds locally, which has led to the call for “monetizing organizing efforts.” The result is that community groups and working-class organizers have been forced to chase resources provided by labor unions and foundations, which means their campaigns often coalesce around other people’s issues. Often this has been done under the guise of “capacity building.” But, one might ask, capacity building for whom? While there is always tension around which local or national issues should receive organizing energy and resources, the net effect has been a general decline in grassroots organizing around sustainable neighborhood issues over the last few years. Regardless, community groups are undergoing their own reexamination of issues, structures, and coalitions.

As unions reconsider their futures, what should they consider? While there is no one answer, several key questions should be part of any reexamination.

First, will the organization in the future ask for participation or cooperation from its membership as it develops issues, strategies, and tactics? Participatory models stimulate and involve members in problem solving, group process, and collective action rather than just asking for support.

Second, will the relationship between labor and community groups be transformative or transactional? As Marshall Ganz has suggested, “Transformational” leadership engages followers in the risky and often exhilarating work of changing the world, work that often changes the activists themselves. Its sources are shared values that become wellsprings of the courage, creativity and hope needed to open new pathways to success. Transactional leadership, on the other hand, is about horse-trading and operating within the routine, and it is practiced to maintain, rather than change, the status quo.”

Third, will new labor and community coalitions be built on a transformative culture of organizing and education that builds skills, capacity, and sustainability among all parties rather than transactional policies and actions that are situational and episodic?

Fourth, will the new labor-community coalitions develop goals and strategies that will build capacity, or will they just develop a series of tactics? Will they be able to go beyond creative tactics that are unsustainable, unlike the Occupy Movement?

Fifth, will the new coalition be based around the values of social and economic justice and reciprocity, not just material advantage and one issue politics? That is, more attention, not just lip service, must be given to injustice, inequality, and discrimination? And will coalition efforts include more direct action and broad public protests?

Finally, will the labor movement develop a real plan to move forward, remembering that hope is not a plan and that any plan needs real resources? This means no unfunded mandates.  Substantial resources must be directed at outside organizing rather than to internal struggles, as we saw recently in California.

Obviously, the stakes are high for the labor community, as the labor movement must change if it is to remain relevant. But can it really change? There are some indications that it can. For example, the AFL-CIO leadership has recently changed its policies regarding immigration. As a result, union activists have joined with pro-immigration allies and become a force at pro-immigration events and the lobbying of Congress.

But questions remain.  Will this round of reform be episodic? Can it change at the local level? The latter will take a commitment to broad-based internal organizing that might involve more change than union leaders can endure. But it could unleash the formidable powers of a rank and file that has been beat down by concessions and anti-union attacks. But now, more than ever, they are ready to fight.

John Russo

More (Bad) Jobs: The Unexpected Consequences of the ACA

During Congressional debates over the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Republicans and business leaders warned that it would result in the loss of jobs. In fact, their first attempt at repealing the ACA was called “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.” But as it turns out, the ACA may have just the opposite effect: creating more jobs by splitting the work of the already underemployed. As a result, the growth of underemployment could be an unexpected consequence of the ACA.

The most notable example is Wal-Mart, the world’s largest private employer. After being a cheerleader for the law, Wal-Mart announced in December 2012 that it would join other employers in evading both the spirit and letter of the law. In the last year, it had already announced that part-time workers hired within the last 12 months would be subjected to an “Annual Benefits Eligibility Check” each August. Now, Forbes Magazine reports that “Employees hired after Feb. 1, 2012, who fail to average the magic 30-hours per week requiring a company to provide a healthcare benefit, will lose their healthcare benefits on the following January. Part-time workers hired after Jan. 15, 2011, but before Feb. 1, 2012, will be able to hang onto their Wal-Mart health care benefit if they work at least 24 hours a week.” Wal-Mart has insisted that it can’t afford to pay benefits, and it will avoid the ACA’s requirements by scheduling current workers for fewer hours and hiring more part-timers.

But the expansion of underemployment resulting from the ACA is not confined to the service and retail sectors. For example, my former employer, Youngstown State University (YSU), announced in November 2012 that it would limit the hours of all non-union part-time employees, including the part-time faculty who teach about 60% of YSU’s courses. Department chairs were instructed to cut part-timers to less than 24 hours per week. To make matters worse, all part-timers must now sign a form that states they acknowledge that the employer has informed them that they are not classified as public employees so the University will not pay into a state pension for them. Of course, part-time faculty and staff are among the lowest-paid workers at YSU, and any hope they had of supporting themselves by taking on more teaching is now gone. The shift to increased reliance on part-time and adjunct faculty is old news in higher education, but actions like those taken at YSU and elsewhere are making the problem even worse.  Like part-time retail workers who scrape by through multiple jobs at different stores, part-time faculty must take on multiple teaching assignments, becoming academic nomads, always moving from one teaching assignment to another.

Some may not even have that option. A new policy in Virginia will expand academic underemployment even further by claiming that the State is the employer, not separate campuses. This means that adjunct faculty can’t cobble together courses at various state schools without breaking the part-time threshold of 29 hours per week. Adjunct faculty will have to find work outside the state system.

Once seen as paragons of moral and ethical behavior, universities have embraced the market values of the retail and service industries. No doubt, the ACA provides additional incentive to expand underemployment in the academic community, contributing to the Wal-Martization of America’s public universities.  The effect might well move in the other direction, too.  As one of my former students suggested, it’s easy to imagine commercial companies justifying their limited-hours policies by pointing out that universities are doing it.

Cutting hours and creating more precarious jobs is only one of the tools employers are using to cover the expected costs of the ACA. Some companies are allowing workers more hours but requiring them to pay higher premiums and co-pays. We’re likely to see more of this kind of cost shifting, particularly in the low-wage service and retail industries where employers are not willing to reduce hours and avoid paying penalties under ACA.  Some employers might also reduce wages to cover increased costs and avoid penalties for not providing insurance. That is, until the minimum wage is reached, which could be another incentive to cut hours.

Other companies will simply stop providing health care coverage. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the Congressional Budget Office has raised its prediction of how many people will lose employer-provided insurance from four million to seven million. The Congressional Budget Office has suggested that the ACA will cost the public more than originally expected, because more workers will be covered by the new health-care exchanges. The result will be large increases in government subsidies.

Employers’ efforts to avoid paying for health care contribute to another kind of cost shifting: from private business to taxpayers.  When companies increase the number of part-time, low-wage workers and refuse to provide health care benefits, states end out subsidizing businesses through the social safety net. For example, in 2010, the citizens of Ohio paid $64 million dollars in welfare payments to Wal-Mart employees. This will likely increase starting next year, because the ACA expands eligibility for Medicaid to anyone with income under 133% of the federal poverty level. Most Wal-Mart workers will fall under that income level.

It seems clear that many employers, especially in low-wage sectors, will do everything they can to limit workers’ hours or shift costs to workers or the public in order to avoid the requirements of the ACA. And I bet they’ll brag about how many new jobs they’ve created and how they’re contributing to economic recovery, without acknowledging the low wages and limited hours of those jobs. They’ll shift the burden to the growing working class, many of them part-time workers, who will have more insecurity, lower wages, and increased out-of-pocket health care costs.

Given the regulatory evasions, a single-payer system, like Medicare for all, would be better for both workers and taxpayers. After all, conservative business and political leaders said the ACA was first step toward universal coverage. Their evasions of the bill could make their predication come true. Let’s hope.

John Russo

Shout Working Class

Nearly 18 years ago, at the closing session of a conference on Working-Class Lives at Youngstown State University, we posed this question: if there were a Center for Working-Class Studies, what should it be doing?  We heard over 100 suggestions, ranging from “create a bibliography” to “start the revolution.”  Many of the recommendations focused on education, including a plea from a local steelworker for us to advocate for and provide a good education for working-class children like his.  Others emphasized public policy advocacy, working with unions, and helping to create spaces for working-class art and literature.

That year, a group of YSU faculty created the Center for Working-Class Studies, with modest funding from then Provost James Scanlon, who challenged us to get other faculty involved. Over the next dozen years, the CWCS organized five more conferences that laid the groundwork for the formation of the Working-Class Studies Association in 2006. We sponsored a lecture series that brought scholars, activists, and artists to Youngstown, where they spoke not only to the usual academic audiences but also to community groups, unions, and schoolchildren.  We collected oral histories with workers from the GM Lordstown plant, created an online archive of materials reflecting the many different ethnic and racial communities of the Mahoning Valley, called Steel Valley Voices, and published many articles and books about the working-class history and culture of this area.

With the generous support of the Ford Foundation, the Center was able to expand its programming.  Workshops for Ohio teachers and consultations with local schools helped bring attention to working-class history and literature into K-12 education, while an innovative “teaching on turns” project made college education accessible to steelworkers, whose constantly changing schedules made getting to traditionally-organized classes difficult.  We created a graduate certificate in Working-Class Studies and offered a focus within the MA program in American Studies at YSU.  Center members engaged journalism students at YSU in reporting on working-class people and issues.

In collaboration with the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative, we sponsored an interracial, cross-class community reading group to study mass incarceration.  With the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, we helped lead community discussions on class and race. The CWCS also created an extensive online resource collection featuring digital exhibits about working-class life, resources on working-class literature, and materials on teaching about social class as well as links to materials about labor and class from dozens of other projects, libraries, and organizations. We conducted opinion polls, helped journalists from around the world report on working-class voters and the continuing struggles of deindustrialized communities, and established this blog.

All of this might seem like bragging, but the point is simply to say that we have worked hard to make the Center for Working-Class Studies a dynamic, multidimensional project.  We’ve done some good and important work.

And now the Center is closing.  Over the past month, John and our administrative assistant, Patty LaPresta, with help from colleagues in the American Studies and History departments at YSU, have packed up the books, sorted through files, and moved dozens of photographs, posters, maps, and a/v materials to the Youngstown Historical Center for Industry and Labor.   The Center is closing because we have left YSU.  Sherry began a new position at Georgetown University in August, and John just retired.

But the real reason the CWCS is closing is not that we left YSU.  It’s that YSU left us. The administration at YSU was not willing to provide continued funding.  Had they been willing to create one position to replace our two positions, we could have hired a creative, activist academic organizer to continue this work.  They chose not to do that.  Some have suggested that our visibility as faculty union leaders and political activists may have contributed to that decision.  The official version is simply that the resources are not available.

We appreciate all of the kind words and support you’ve provided over the years, and we know that many of you share our sadness and anger at the Center’s demise. We hope you will also share our commitment to continuing to work with and for the working class.  As Jack Metzgar wrote in the fall newsletter of the Working-Class Studies Association, the Center may be gone, but Working-Class Studies is not.  Here’s what will continue.

First, we will continue to publish this blog, offering commentary on working-class lives, culture, and politics.  Since we began in 2008, the blog has received almost 300,000 page views, and it gets about 30,000 hits each week.  Last year, it was read by people in more than 100 countries.  It’s been listed as a Washington Post staff pick, cited in dozens of other blogs, and reblogged by the United Steelworkers, Portside, and others.  The most widely read piece, an early blog on “Stereotyping the Working Class,” has almost 18,000 hits – many more readers than anything we’ve ever published in an academic journal.  Put simply, people are listening, and we hope they will continue to do so.

Second, the endowment fund originally created through donations from many colleagues and supporters, as well as our own contributions, will now become the CWCS Legacy Fund.  It will provide continuing support for exhibits, research, and other projects on the working class at Youngstown State University and projects of the Working-Class Studies Association.  This ongoing work, most of it based in YSU’s Center for Urban and Regional Studies and the Youngstown Historical Center for Industry and Labor, will ensure that students, scholars, and organizers have the resources to keep asking critical questions about the issues facing workers and their families in the Mahoning Valley.  If you’d like to contribute, you may do so by downloading and sending in this form.

Third, the Working-Class Studies Association has already taken on much of the work started at the Center.  The WCSA organizes annual conferences, publishes a newsletter, and starting in January, a new WCSA website will become home to many of the online resources we created at YSU.  If you’re not already a member, we urge you to join and become active. Better yet, organize a session for the WCSA conference this June in Madison, reaching out to colleagues who haven’t previously participated.  The deadline for proposals is January 14.

Finally, the most important thing any of us can do to ensure that Working-Class Studies continues is exactly what Joe Hill told us decades ago:  don’t mourn, organize.  Teams of faculty and local activists around the U.S. and beyond have the potential to create many more centers for working-class studies.  Begin with small steps.  If you’re a student or academic, invite a guest speaker to campus, or just show a film, and announce the event widely.  Get the names and contact information of everyone who attends, and get a discussion going about shared interests and possibilities. If you’re an artist or writer, follow the lead of folks like John Crawford and Larry Smith and organize anthologies or magazines to help make working-class voices heard – and send a link to your work to the editors of the WCSA website, so we can list it.  If you’re an activist or organizer, advocate for attention to class as part of local, regional, and national debates about policy.

And whoever you are, whatever you do, follow the advice of former Youngstown steelworker John Barbero, who explained that after the mills closed, he made it a point to keep “shouting Youngstown.”  Now it’s our turn.  Shout working class.

John Russo and Sherry Linkon

The New Precariat and Electoral Politics

During the Presidential campaign, Americans have heard endless discussions about unemployment. But neither candidate has said much, at least not directly, about precarious employment or about the new precariat – that growing group (some would even say the growing class) of workers in temporary, part-time, and/or contingent work that often doesn’t pay a living wage.

Who is the precariat? According to Guy Standing, the author of The Precariat: the New Dangerous Class, all of us could be.  For now, the precariat involves largely women, the young, the disabled, retirees forced back to work, former prisoners, and migrants. It also includes large numbers of formerly middle-class professionals, skilled and semi-skilled people who have been displaced by economic change. While each of these groups has gotten some attention, Standing argues that as a group, the precariat is still “a class in the making,” united by an overwhelming sense of insecurity and vulnerability.

The growth of the precariat has its roots in globalization and technological change, which flooded flexible labor markets and advanced international divisions of labor.  These conditions coincided with changes in government regulation, corporate restructuring, reduced access to and distribution of social programs, and the creation of coercive social policies such as workfare, mass incarceration, and means testing.

Historically, precarious employment was associated with the informal economy.  But with economic changes in the last several decades, informality has moved beyond traditional practices of black market exchanges or services such as day care or tutoring. As workers have been displaced from the formal economy, many are turning to consulting, internships, and subcontracting to find contingent and intermittent work. In general, more and more people are involved in unregulated work characterized by irregular employment, short job ladders, substandard wages and working conditions, and increased stigmatization. During the current economic crisis, with declining standards of living and loss of public assistance, the new precariat – like the old precariat — survives by working longer hours, holding multiple jobs, and when possible relying on the kindness and generosity of friends and family.

While the growth of the precariat creates real social and economic challenges for workers in the informal economy, in places like Youngstown, where the cost of living is low, some mostly younger adults are making a virtue of the situation. As cultural anthropologist Hannah Woodroofe has argued, Youngstown is becoming home to increasing numbers of highly individualistic, anti-materialistic, entrepreneurial adults with episodic employment in largely deregulated work environments. While some define themselves as entrepreneurs, many also see their rejection of materialism as providing a measure of freedom and dignity that challenged capitalist and “older parental” values surrounding work.

Their economic conditions are anemic and often do not reflect their education and experience (many have college and even graduate degrees). They don’t earn much and have little savings, health care, or pension benefits. Their work experiences and the difficulties they’ve had in finding jobs in the formal economy have reduced their expectations about the future.  They have internalized their economic insecurity, and their personal lives tend to mirror their work lives, with contingent and episodic relationships and living situations. Many embrace sustainability and green values, starting urban farms or homesteading in abandoned houses.  Others are part of a contingent creative class, doing freelance work in the arts, web development, and education, but because of the precarity of their work, they don’t make the kinds of stabilizing contributions to the local economy that Richard Florida predicted.  Some just want to be left alone, comfortable with their inexpensive lifestyles.

Just how big is the new precariat? It’s difficult to measure, but the Federal Reserve Board of Cleveland suggests that the ‘Great Recession’ has resulted in increases in self-employment, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 35 million people work part time.  While the data on how many people have precarious employment is far from definitive, the precariat clearly seems to be large and growing.

That suggests that the new precariat could have a significant impact on the election. Most of them don’t believe that the government or other institutions can do much to ameliorate their situation.  Many consider themselves to be small business people. As Arun Gupta and Michelle Fawcett have suggested, “Republicans have turned small business into a catch-all group the way ‘working class’ once served that function for the left.” That suggests that the precariat may be persuaded by campaign rhetoric about taxes and economic development.  On the other hand, many see themselves as anti-capitalist, committed to green values and social justice. So will they vote like those who share their educational backgrounds, who are more likely to be politically independent and have socially progressive leanings, thus revealing themselves to be the fallen faction of the middle class?  Or do they, like much of the old white working class, vote on the basis of economic aspiration?  Or does the precariat now include so many Americans, from diverse backgrounds and in varied situations, that their political views can’t be easily predicted?  In 2012 in states like Ohio, the new precariat could determine the presidential election and America’s future.

John Russo, Center for Working-Class Studies

Voting on the American Dream

In between the Republican and Democratic conventions, I was asked to review an article concerning the attitudes of displaced workers toward their plight. The study suggested that cultural narratives shape the social and political consciousness of those suffering economic distress in both positive and negative ways.  The article made me think about the convention speeches and the impact that they may have on working- and middle-class listeners whose lives have been disrupted by the Great Recession. How might they use the words and cultural narratives suggested in the convention speeches?

The New York Times actually tracked how often the Republicans and Democrats used certain words at their conventions. Other than the names of the presidential candidates, God, and taxes, the most common terms at both conventions were work, jobs, families, opportunity, economy, and success. All of these terms are closely associated with the American Dream, which was also mentioned frequently.

The frequent use of these words is to be expected, given that the American Dream has been the most dominant aspirational and cultural narrative in our county. Among other things, the American Dream suggests that through hard work and education individuals could improve their standard of living and that improvement would continue for each successive generation.  But that narrative has become contested because of declining socio-economic conditions and downward class mobility. A question now being heard, as noted in an NPR story last spring, is whether the American Dream is still viable, or has it become a nightmare?

To answer that, it helps to consider the political uses of the American Dream.  Political economists have suggested that it has served hegemonic purposes, allowing small but powerful groups to exercise political power with high levels of popular consent. In the case of the American Dream, they suggest, elites have used this powerful narrative to create a social and political consciousness that would not threaten the privileged.  For example, some elites argue that success is the product individual effort and not government or collective support.  A recent example appeared in the Republican convention, which emphasized the claim that “We  Built It” in response to President Obama’s suggestion that businesses don’t build the roads and infrastructure that allow their enterprises to succeed.

But what happens when the American Dream becomes discredited?  Does it lose its ability to shape political consciousness? As the Occupy Movement has shown, the American Dream has been betrayed, and today the story of America is characterized by injustice, inequality, and unfairness.  But that movement created what’s called a counter-hegomonic narrative, a story that made clear that the Dream is no longer attainable.  A narrative emphasizing the betrayal of the American Dream could play a powerful role in shaping social and political attitudes and in deciding the election this year, as the study I mentioned earlier suggested.

Of course, candidates still insist on citing the American Dream in their speeches.  But while some people still find hope in that narrative, others recognize that their own situation reveals the Dream’s contradictions. So what will be the dominant influence?  Hope?  Or a change in the way we think about the American Dream?

I suspect that people will look more critically at the limitations of the American Dream narrative than they have in most previous elections. A recent Pew Research study shows that Americans increasingly define themselves as lower class. The greatest shifts occurred among adults under 30, especially whites and Hispanics and those without a college degree (whom pollsters often consider working-class), though many who have college degrees also identified as lower class.  The pattern holds across political affiliations, among Democrats, Republicans, and independents. More important, those who identified as lower class also supported the idea that hard work doesn’t guarantee success, and they expressed little optimism for the future.

Given that, politicians would do well to go beyond embracing the American Dream and instead identify clear strategies for renewing its viability.  Unfortunately, neither party has been able to suggest anything except increased education,  and they offer few concrete plans to help more people attain that.  Most of the time, the best they can do is make oblique references to raising the standard living and improving trade and manufacturing policies.  Despite their fervent statements of faith in the American Dream, what we’re hearing is mostly aspirational political rhetoric.  And many Americans just aren’t buying it anymore.

That skepticism might, eventually, provide the foundation for broader discontent, which could take many forms.  As Election Day gets closer, perhaps the biggest threat to both parties, but especially the Democrats, is apathy and resignation from voters who no longer believe in the American Dream.

John Russo, Center for Working-Class Studies

Talking with the Press about the Working Class

Over the last three months, I have done interviews with and provided assistance to dozens of national and international reporters about various working-class issues, including the American Dream, manufacturing, education, the recession, displaced workers, local and international trade, and, of course, white working-class voting patterns.  A few weeks ago, George Packer, staff reporter for The New Yorker, was a visiting scholar at the Center for Working-Class Studies, doing research on book project, and he spoke as part of our annual lecture series. So, obviously, I have been thinking a lot about journalists and reporting on the working class.

Packer titled his lecture, Do Journalist Care About the Working Class? His response was basically, “No!” He argued that the American public is more concerned about celebrity and success stories that often reinforce the American Dream.  While job loss affects people of all classes these days, readers seem more interested in stories about hedge fund managers losing half their fortune than in profiles of manufacturing or service workers losing their jobs.  In part, these attitudes reflect the confusion most Americans have about class.   When asked the open-ended question, “what class do you belong to,” most Americans say they are middle class.  But if given four options — lower, working, middle, and upper class — about 45% choose working class, and about the same percentage identify themselves as middle class.

Packer also points out that hard-nosed, urban, ethnic, and street-smart reporters like Jimmy Breslin, Mike Royko, or Mike Barnacle, many of whom had working-class roots, have been replaced by metro journalists, most with college degrees, who identify themselves as professionals and spend most of their time with people like themselves. Packer quotes Pulitizer Prize winning columnist, Connie Schultz, who has noted that, especially in big cities, reporters have increasingly become privileged by their professional education, social connections, and access to internships and have become a “self-perpetuating” class. As a result, journalists don’t have contacts among the working class or much sense of working-class life and culture. Add to this unsympathetic editors who are more interested in selling upscale readership to advertisers, and journalists these days have natural hesitancy to pursue working-class stories. Put differently, as I heard as a panelist at a Society of Professional Journalists Conference say, there is a high degree of self-censorship among journalists themselves.

In the end, Packer suggested that the recession and the centrality of white working-class voting in electoral politics have made the working class more interesting to some newspapers. I can attest to that, but if my recent interviews are any indication, reporters are generally confused about who is working class, and they don’t understand the political and economic views of the working class.

Most journalists covering electoral politics define the working class as those without a college education. That definition is widely used, not only by reporters but also by some scholars and political analysts, in part because it’s easy to measure. I caution reporters that if they use this definition, then the working class seems to be shrinking as more people attend college.  While some commentators have suggested that this shift makes the working class less important politically, I argue that this is simply a statistical shift.  These days, many working-class people have at least some college education, and the working class continues to matter in American politics. In part because of that, I try to help journalists understand why class is not just a matter of education.  It also has to do with occupation, income, wealth, and – among the hardest aspects to measure – culture.

At the same time, I remind reporters that class is not the only identity that might affect how people view political candidates and issues.  For example, white working-class men might well view economic and policy issues differently from white working-class women or black working-class men. I also try to help journalists understand that the working-class varies politically by region and state, in part because other issues, like race and types of employment, shape working-class cultures.  When we add religious affiliations and social values, things become even more complicated, but that’s the point.  I want to encourage reporters to get beyond their assumptions and stereotypes when they write about working-class voters and issues.

Journalists often ask me to explain why the working class supports Republicans, a pattern that seems to go against their own economic interests. It’s true that a majority of white working-class voters has only supported a Democrat in a presidential election once in the last 50 years, voting for Johnson in 1964, so this isn’t a new phenomenon.  We can’t even tie it to the so-called “Reagan Democrats” of the 1980s. A number of historians and political scientists have studied this trend, but rather than focus on theories about why the working class votes for Republicans, I point out that the trend is shifting. White working-class support for Republicans has been dropping in the northeast, the Great Lakes region, and the far west, and it will probably drop further  — because of Republican policy formulations.  For example, Republicans want to cut the deficit by slashing entitlements, but many working-class voters believe that such cuts would have a disproportionate impact on them.  While the Republicans put down the Occupy movement, many in the working class, both conservatives and liberals, support its economic and social populism and agree with its claims about injustice, unfairness, and inequality.

Packer is right, both that today’s journalists don’t really understand the working class and that the economy and the election mean that reporters will have to cover the working class anyway.   One of the goals of the Center for Working-Class Studies is to help journalists do a better job of telling working-class stories.  I think we’ve had some influence, largely because we take the time to do more than answer a few questions.  We meet with reporters, help them make contact with other sources, take them around Youngstown, and discuss what they hear from area workers and what the statistics about employment, class identity, and political perspectives really mean.

We all complain about and critique media coverage of class issues.  If we want the media to do a better job, more of us need to be willing to talk with journalists. When the phone rings and reporter asks you to comment on how the recession is affecting the working class, or why white working-class people support certain candidates, or how working-class students will be affected by interest rates on college loans, don’t duck.  Take the time to not only answer the question but also, when necessary, challenge the reporter’s assumptions and help him or her understand the working class more fully.  Think of it as teachable moment.

John Russo, Center for Working-Class Studies

Right-To-Work Laws and Working-Class Voters: Another Teachable Moment

As a professor, I am always interested in teachable moments. When it became apparent in late 2010 that Ohio Governor John Kasich planned to introduce legislation depriving public sector workers of basic bargaining rights, I told reporters that it was a teachable moment about the role of public sector workers. After all, they were the ones who made all other work possible.

Both organized labor and community groups quickly embraced the idea that Ohio Senate Bill 5 could be a teachable moment.  They launched a hugely successful campaign to put a referendum on the bill, Issue 2, on the November ballot, and then led the fight to persuade voters to oppose the issue and overturn the bill.  Kasich’s attack and the forceful response to it may make it possible for Obama to win Ohio in 2012,  despite economic conditions and 2010 election results that would seem to prime the state to swing to the right this time.

Another teachable moment has arrived now that Republicans have introduced Right-to-Work legislation in New Hampshire and passed it in Indiana.  Similar legislation may be on the way in Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio. Such moves may well undermine the historic white working-class support of Republicans, and that could bode well for Obama’s re-election.

RTW legislation differs from past Republican attacks on unions. As labor historian Joseph McCartin has recently chronicled, while courting union endorsements and union voters, Republicans have pursued strategies that, over the last 30 years, have quietly undermined administrative agencies and government policies that facilitated the formation of unions.  The result has been the erosion and marginalization of organized labor and its ability to raise wages, improve workplace safety and health, and advance representative democracy not only in the workplace but in the body politic.

The current RTW legislation is a direct attack on organized labor and its ability to represent the economic and political interests of both the rank and file and those non-union workers whose wages and benefits are enhanced by employers to avoid unionization. No doubt, the role of unions in building and rebuilding economic security and the middle class, advancing workplace rights, and promoting political democracy will be a central part of the curriculum for this teachable moment.

All the current Republican candidates have refused opportunities to speak to union leaders.  Instead, they have signed on to the anti-labor agenda, including RTW legislation, proposed by conservative corporations, business groups, and donors.  Together with their other economic proposals, they have established a Republican brand that embraces and even celebrates a distorted sense of morality and inequality of income, wealth, and power.

But as Governors Kasich and Walker have found out, “as you sow so shall you reap.”  The fight against RTW proposals and their supporters will be particularly fierce in the battleground states, especially the Rust Belt swing states of Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and Minnesota.  Political analysts Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin consider those states crucial to Democratic chances in 2012. In addition, RTW initiatives have now put projected GOP states with relatively small labor movements, such as New Hampshire and Indiana, into play for 2012.

If RTW legislation inspires union members to support Obama in November, their family members are likely to follow suit. In New Hampshire & Indiana, about 10% of voters belong to unions, but union households make up about 20% of voters. This is smaller than in the Rust Belt battlegrounds, where 26% to 34% of voters belong to union households, but that 20% may still make a difference. Further, the effect of the anti-union push could also cross state borders by galvanizing labor and community activists from safe Democratic States into neighboring states in the 2012 election.  Supporters in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and even Washington State organized phone banks to support the fight against the Indiana RTW bill.

Republicans also forget that their attacks on unions can turn off long-time Republican voters.  In Ohio, the demonization of teachers as part of Issue 2 moved many Republican educators toward the Democrats.  Educators are now the single most unionized group of workers in the U.S., and many continue to react strongly to conservative attacks, both in states where they are being targeted and across the country.

Further, while conservatives may hope to undermine union political influence with RTW initiatives, they don’t understand the continuing power of unions to mobilize workers.  Kasich’s attack on public sector workers was overturned last year not because so many dollars flowed from unions into the Issue 2 campaign, though enough money was raised that We Are Ohio, the union-based organization that led the fight, is still spending the millions it has left.  What really mattered was the person-to-person, door-to-door effort.  Organizing, it turns out, still works.

All of this has not gone unnoticed by moderate Republicans, and many now believe that the party should not have taken this route.  Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam have argued that the Republicans missed multiple opportunities to garner greater working-class and union support by crafting policies that, while socially conservative, would embrace “limited government pragmatism” that met the needs and aspirations of working people. They see many Republicans as having confused being “pro-market with being pro-business,” and failing to make a distinction between policies that “foster dependency and those that foster independence and upward mobility.”  Rather than directly attacking the very existence of union, they encourage the development of new forms of unionism that are better suited for the new economy and enhance employment opportunities and economic advancement.

Importantly, the Republicans seem to have confused anti-labor policy with real economic policy. Rather than pursue the kinds of moderate revisions suggested by Douthat and Salam, Republican leaders, cheered on by conservative corporate donors and lobbyists, have launched an attack on labor unions that may well lead to the reelection of President Obama and further weaken an already divided Republican Party.  Consequently Republicans, especially Michigan Governor Rick Synder and Governor Kasich, are not publically supporting initiatives by conservative groups, such as the effort by Ohioans for Workplace Freedom to put a RTW referendum on ballots this November. In the current conservative political environment, their silence is deafening.

John Russo, Center for Working-Class Studies

A Dispatch from the Poorest City in America

Back in November, the Brookings Institution reported that Youngstown has the highest rates of concentrated poverty of any city in the U.S. The report shocked some city officials and local boosters who had been promoting an exaggerated story of Youngstown’s “renaissance” over the last seven years.

They had long bragged about the Youngstown 2010 Plan, which argued that Youngstown could thrive as a smaller city.  The plan called for rezoning, neighborhood stabilization, making the city more attractive to business, and downtown redevelopment.  It drew positive national attention to a community that has been an icon of urban decay ever since the steel mills began closing in the late 70s.  In 2005, the Ohio chapter of the American Planning Association awarded Youngstown its outstanding community planning award. In December 2006, the New York Times Magazine listed the 2010 Plan as one of the 74 best ideas in America in the 6^th Annual Year in Ideas awards, and the American Planning Association gave it an Excellence Award for Public Outreach in 2007.

Youngstown has succeeded in revitalizing its downtown and becoming more attractive to business – so much so that it has been named one of the best cities in the country to start a business. The city has been profiled in Inc., Entrepreneur, and the Wall Street Journal. The Youngstown Business Incubator has generated a modest number of high-tech jobs downtown, new restaurants and shops have opened, and several developers are renovating old office buildings into apartments.

But despite these signs of progress and growth, we were troubled by the response of city leaders to the Brookings report.  The director of Youngstown’s Community Development Agency said he was “stunned” by the report and found it “hard to believe we’d be classified as the poorest in the nation.”

Perhaps he needs to get out of downtown.  As the Brookings Institution’s report makes clear, the situation in Youngstown’s neighborhoods looks nothing like what’s happening downtown.  According to Brookings, 49.7% of Youngstown residents live in neighborhoods with a poverty rate of at least 40%.  The Ohio Department of Development reports that 32.1% of Youngstown residents live in poverty, and between 1999 and 2009, the poverty rate for the broader metro area increased from 12.5% to 16.7%.

Given the effects of the Great Recession, the rate of poverty here is almost certainly even higher today.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the area lost 20,000 jobs between 2007 and 2010.  In other words, the Mahoning Valley lost as many jobs in that period as in any three years during the late 70s and early 80s as the mills were closing.  Worse, 20,000 jobs today represent a larger proportion of the area’s workforce, which has shrunk over the past three decades.

The Brookings Institution report came as no surprise to most Youngstown residents, who see every day how little has been done to alleviate unemployment and ongoing social problems, evident in high rates of crime, poverty, housing vacancy, and blight.  While the city, with aid from the Youngstown Warren Regional Chamber of Commerce and state economic development funds, has attracted new businesses to downtown and cut a deal with a French corporation to expand one of the remaining local steel mills, it has done little to address the problems in the city’s neighborhoods.  Demolition of abandoned property has increased, although at a rate that struggles to keep up with new vacancies resulting from the recession and foreclosure crisis. The city also working on a new zoning plan, but the bulk of the work of neighborhood development has fallen to volunteers and community organizations.  They have been increasingly vocal in their frustrations with what many see as the city’s inertia when it comes to developing neighborhoods other than downtown.

A major local foundation helped establish two thriving non-profit groups, one focused on community organizing and political activism and another on economic development in the city’s neighborhoods.  Energetic, committed organizers from the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative have helped develop more than a dozen new neighborhood associations, and those groups have funneled their energies into issues such as access to healthy food, the quality of housing, human trafficking, voter registration, and other political issues that resonate both locally and nationally.  The MVOC played a key role in founding a statewide group, the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, which is starting to leverage neighborhood-level work across the state into effective political action.

The Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation takes a different approach, focusing its attention on economic issues in targeted neighborhoods.  Working with the neighborhood association in one of the city’s struggling areas, the YNDC developed an urban farm, invested in improving housing stock, mobilized an array of residents and volunteers in a range of community projects, and rehabilitated homes that are then marketed to low-income residents through an affordable housing program.

These efforts are inspiring, but while they are improving the quality of life in Youngstown’s neighborhoods and empowering residents to take action on their own behalf, they do not address the root problem: the lack of good jobs in the city.  That presents a challenge to city government and the regional chamber.  They need to focus their energies on creating jobs in the city, jobs that suit a population with relatively low levels of education, are accessible via public transportation, and pay a living wage. Most of the new jobs in the Valley are being created on the edge of the metropolitan area, in places that city residents can’t get to without reliable private transportation – one of the resources many lack.

Of course, job creation never comes easy. Industries that promise hundreds of new jobs too often either don’t deliver or bring new problems.  Both seem to be playing out in the latest economic development “opportunity” in the Mahoning Valley: hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of the  Marcellus shale.  While the shale industry has already brought some jobs to the area, it also seems to have brought real problems.  On New Year’s Eve, Youngstown experienced a 4.0 magnitude earthquake that seems to be related to a wastewater injection well, and experts are divided on whether fracking threatens the safety of local water.  15 years ago, Youngstown leaders claimed that private prisons would be the answer to the city’s economic woes, but the Corrections Corporation of America created relatively few jobs and a number of local problems, including deepening the city’s image as a crime center.  We hope that local and state officials will be more cautious about fracking.

The Mahoning Valley needs a broad, diversified approach to economic development and serious efforts to strengthen the city’s neighborhoods. Without secure, well-paid jobs, without stable neighborhoods, and in the absence of any political vision to address these issues, urban redevelopment can never truly succeed.

John Russo,  Center for Working-Class Studies

James Rhodes, University of Manchester

How Obama Can Win Ohio

Note: This week’s blog is a repost of John Russo’s column from Friday’s Opinionator blog at the New York Times.

The decisive referendum vote to repeal the bill that would limit collective bargaining by public sector unions has changed the political landscape in Ohio. Tuesday’s vote on Senate Bill 5 could and should be a harbinger for the 2012 presidential election. By mounting a direct assault on public sector workers and the unions who represent them, Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio may have done more to help Barack Obama win re-election than anything Obama’s political team is likely to do over the next 12 months.

With Ohio’s continuing high unemployment rate (9.1%!, just like the rest of the U.S), it had seemed unlikely that President Obama could win Ohio, and without Ohio, he’d have difficulty getting re-elected. The same factors make re-election a challenge for Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democratic and one of the most pro-labor members of the Senate. But Kasich, the Republicans in the Ohio legislature and outside conservative financers and think tanks like the Buckeye Institute, may have done Obama and Brown a big favor.

Karl Rove described Senate Bill 5 as a much “more extensive reform” to public sector unions than was enacted in Wisconsin, in part because the Ohio version included firefighters and police officers. While the protests in Columbus were smaller and received less national attention than those in Madison, unions and community groups in Ohio organized a ballot initiative with 10,000 volunteers circulating petitions in all 88 counties. Over 1.3 million Ohioans — more than five times the number required to put the initiative on the ballot — signed the petitions.

Despite a large influx of money from conservative organizations like Citizens United, Freedom Works, and Restoring America, Ohio voters repealed Senate Bill 5 by an overwhelming 22 point margin — 39% yes, 61% no (a no vote was pro-union). Democrats and independents voted overwhelmingly against the measure, and, if pre-election polls are correct, 30% of Ohio Republicans also voted to reject Senate Bill 5.

This should be good news for Obama. While Ohio is notorious for swinging back and forth between supporting Republicans and Democrats, its 18 electoral votes are especially important for Republican candidates. It’s almost impossible for a Republican to win the presidential election without Ohio, and that means winning significant support among union household voters.

According to CNN exit polls from the last few elections, union household voters remain a strong presence in Ohio, even after more than three decades of de-industrialization. Twenty-eight percent of Ohio voters come from union households, compared with 23 percent nationally. In 2008, they underperformed for Obama, who won 56 percent of their votes in Ohio versus 59 percent from union households across the country. No similar data exists for the 2010 midterm election, but many labor leaders admit that Kasich beat the Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, in part because voters from community groups and union households either voted Republican or stayed home (essentially giving half a vote to Kasich).

If union households in Ohio lost their enthusiasm for Democratic candidates in recent years, Kasich’s actions, together with the national Republicans’ just-say-no politics and kill-Medicare initiatives (like the Paul Ryan budget), have made the Democrats look a lot better than they did in 2010.

It all comes down to math. In 2008, 2,933,388 Ohioans voted (or 51.5%) for Obama, 258,897 more than McCain won. If union households maintain their proportion of the electorate, and if just 1 percent more of them vote for Democrats, they can add 15,700 votes to the Democratic vote and subtract the same number from the Republicans – a swing of more than 31,000 votes. If Ohio’s union household voters increase their support for Democrats by 3 percent – that is, if they match the national average for union household voters – they would generate 47,100 additional votes for Obama, a swing of 94,200 votes. That alone could give the president Ohio’s electoral votes.

But because of Senate Bill 5, we might reasonably expect an even larger shift. A recent Quinnipiac poll suggests that the anger generated by the anti-union bill and the organizing fostered by the effort to overturn it has 70 percent of union household voters planning to support Obama and the Democrats in 2012. That translates into an increase of 219,829 votes for Obama, a swing of almost 440,000 votes. Put differently, a mobilized Ohio labor movement with 742,000 members, including many teachers, police officers, and firefighters who have often voted Republican, will be more likely to vote for Democrats in 2012.

This gives Obama the opportunity to score a big victory in Ohio, but that won’t happen solely on the basis of Senate Bill 5. The president must offer a positive economic vision and a program for economic change. The American Jobs Act – even if it must be pushed through piecemeal — is a good start, as are the president’s recent actions on mortgages and student loans.

Such positions will also help Senator Brown’s chances of re-election, but in 2012, in Ohio at least, the usual pattern of members of Congress benefiting from presidential coattails could be reversed. Brown’s solid support for organized labor, community groups and those who have been most hurt by the continuing economic crisis — positions that resonate with the millions of Ohio voters who overturned Senate Bill 5 — may help Obama more than anything Obama has done will help Brown.

None of this is guaranteed, of course. In order for the battle over Senate Bill 5 to influence the 2012 election, those who have organized so effectively to defend unions must continue to work together. Unions will have to keep educating members and reach out to those outside of the labor movement. They will also have to work closely with community and neighborhood groups like the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, which played a pivotal role in community organizing around Senate Bill 5.

None of that will be easy. Competing interests within and between organized labor and community organizations make the coalition very fragile. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. is relatively weak in Ohio, and some tensions exist between public and private sector unions. Meanwhile, Ohio Republicans are threatening to put parts of Senate Bill 5 through in a series of smaller bills next year. Without solidarity across labor organizations, the coalition that fought so well against one big bill could fracture. It may be that other issues won’t have the unifying effect of Senate Bill 5. After all, the same voters who overturned that bill approved a constitutional amendment barring the implementation of the individual insurance mandate of the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act.

But if the organizers of the campaign against Senate Bill 5 can hold together and if the Obama campaign can tap into the anger and solidarity of that fight, Tuesday’s vote could turn out to be the turning point in the 2012 election.

 

John Russo, Center for Working-Class Studies

The Creative Class Joins the Working-Class

How is the so-called creative class faring in the ongoing economic crisis?  In three books published in the first decade of this century, Richard Florida argued that America’s future lay in metropolitan regions with a high density of “sexually diverse,” cultural, professional, and high-tech workers whose creativity would attract capital and spur future economic development. Recently, in articles in magazines like Salon.com and The Atlantic, critics have been debating whether the creative class is undergoing the same economic transformations as the working class.

 Undaunted by the economic crisis and the subsequent, continuing jobless recovery, Florida continues to suggest that the answer to post-industrialization lies in the continued migration of the so-called creative class to a few cosmopolitan urban areas. The transformation in economic geography would produce winners and losers both individually and regionally based on the ability of communities to develop and attract human capital. His Martin Prosperity Institute has contributed to a report ranking nations on the basis of their investment in innovation and technology.  Of course, all of this reflects Florida’s neo-liberal view that such changes are part of the “natural economic order,” and he has consistently attempted to normalize the new emerging economic order.

But despite Florida’s claims, the creative class is not necessarily winning in the current economy.  Like industrial workers before them, they are being affected by the past 30 years of neo-liberal economic reforms characterized by deregulation, marketization, and liberal trade policy that yielded significant corporate profits from the subcontracting, outsourcing, and the casualization of work in unskilled and semi-skilled industries. As the past decade has made clear, corporations and governments have used those same strategies to make employment for skilled workers, including those in the “knowledge industries,” increasingly precarious.

This has been aided by a different model and language of work, drawn from the so-called “creative industries” — those areas where employees, often in the arts and more recently higher education, were willing to give up stable employment in hierarchical organizations and embraced – or at least accepted – contingent employment involving self-directed, entrepreneurial, and cognitive labor. Florida provided much of the language and rationale for that shift, and his ideas had an significant impact on public discussions of economic development and urban renewal. Further, his view had great currency with the growing ranks of mobile, privileged, educated workers who were willing to embrace the high-risk/high reward employment/worker model.

But Florida had relatively little to say about the real working lives of members of the creative class and the changing organization of work produced by the changes he predicted. In fact, as Scott Timberg argues in Salon.com, the new creative class now shares the same working conditions as many on the other end of the labor market, especially those in the service sector that makes up the majority of today’s working class.  These conditions include uncertainty, temporary or intermittent employment, working in multiple jobs, and accepting jobs for which they are overqualified.  Creative workers, like many in the working class, are isolated from protective legal employment laws and are less likely to have benefits such health insurance, retirement plans, or paid sick leave. Put differently, young educated people, so popularly identified with the creative class, are suffering the same conditions as working and middle class families and could become what Business Week reporter Peter Coy has called a Lost Generation.

As work has eroded and become more episodic, not only does the creative class share the economic conditions of the working class, that group also now shares the working-class’s sense of alienation from American politics and antagonism toward the economic elite who have gained so much ground over the last decade. You need to look no further than the growth of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement.  On the streets of New York and in cities around the country, you see highly educated  young adults joining with displaced working- and middle-class people who believe the American Dream has become nightmare. They have been joined by public and private union members including 300 airline pilots marching in full dress uniform. All are rallying around their shared position as part of the 99% of Americans – a loose coalition much larger and more diverse than any single class.

What brings them together is a politics of resentment that is fueled by growing understanding and anger over the increasing economic inequality in the U.S.  While OWS has focused on Wall Street and government plutocrats, it is expanding and multiplying like an amoeba, in different directions politically and geographically. The issues driving people to occupy not only Wall Street but Public Square in Cleveland and a public park in Kansas City and a dozen other locations are not identical.  Each local group works independently, and they are focusing on issues ranging from the economy and war to agricultural and environmental policy,

As Kathy Newman said in Working-Class Perspectives last week, one of the great things about the OWS movement is its inclusivity. This should not be unexpected. Like the many middle class Americans, the creative class now shares the employment and economic conditions of working people and has shed their sense of difference and superiority over the working class. They now understand that despite the façade of self-direction and creativity, their economic position is every bit as uncertain and unfair as that of many retail, food service, and health care workers.  Just where this new amoeboid politics of resentment goes is anybody’s guess. But we can hope that it will become even more directed at those who are responsible for shaping the current national and global economic conditions that has now engaged and enraged so many people.

John Russo, Center for Working-Class Studies