Is Education the Answer to Economic Inequality?

One of the most common solutions offered to reverse America’ growing economic inequality is increased access to education.  President Obama may have started the trend with his call for universal, high-quality preschool, but others have joined the fray.  In March, Ronald Brownstein argued in National Journal that “Education remains critical to reversing the erosion in upward mobility that has made it harder for kids born near the bottom to reach the top in the United States than in many European nations.” On The Century Foundation’s website just last week, Benjamin Landy posted a blog entitled “To Battle Income Inequality, Focus on Educational Mobility.”   

According to Brownstein, colleges and  universities are failing to make those opportunities available, because higher education has become too expensive and doesn’t do enough to help lower-income students succeed. In their 2009 study of college completion rates, William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michael S. McPherson, Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities, showed that lower-income students were less likely to graduate than their wealthier counterparts regardless of where they went to school.

Their study also showed, however, that working-class students did better when they enrolled in more selective colleges, rather than choosing a more accessible public institution, but many working-class students choose less-selective schools.  Many don’t even apply to more elite colleges, for any number of reasons.  In a recent study, Caroline Hoxby and Sarah Turner suggest that working-class students believe, mistakenly, that it will cost less.  In fact, financial aid programs aimed at increasing economic diversity at elite schools often make such schools more affordable than public schools.  That may be increasingly true as state legislatures dramatically cut support for public higher education, making them even more expensive.

How worried should we be about that?  On the basis of justice, we should be outraged.  We should, as Hoxby and Turner suggest, push elite schools to work harder to recruit working-class students.  We should join the thousands of college students who have organized protests against cuts to public education.  And those of us who are educators should heed Mike Rose’s prescription for addressing the needs of working-class students: “If we want more students to succeed in college, then colleges have to turn full attention to teaching.”

Still, the idea that more or better college education will “solve” the problem of economic inequality is just silly.  While a college education still provides economic advantages, increasing lifetime income, achieving that benefit is harder than it used to be.  These days, getting a college degree doesn’t guarantee better middle-class job prospects, but it does often bring a lifetime of debt.  Unemployment rates for recent graduates remain high – 53% according to The Atlantic a year ago, and many have taken low-wage, hourly jobs that don’t require a college degree.  Meanwhile, student loan debt has increased to an average of $26,600.  For too many, higher education has become a trap door rather than an elevator.

I’m not suggesting that education isn’t worthwhile.  Far from it.  A good education brings many advantages, only some of which have to do with employment or income. Martha Nussbaum is just one of many scholars arguing that education has value for society. But education simply won’t address the root causes of today’s economic inequality.

First, while state legislatures and business organizations pressure public universities to focus on preparing students for jobs in specific fields, like health care or fracking, the widely-touted “skills gap” turns out to be a myth.  The American economy is not being stymied by a lack of appropriately trained workers.  Wharton School management professor Peter Cappelli suggests that we should “Blame It on the Employer.”  He suggests that employers ask themselves a few key questions starting with this zinger: “Have you tried raising wages? If you could get what you want by paying more, the problem is just that you are cheap.”

Second, even when we talk about increasing access or establishing “universal” programs, education addresses the individual, not the system.  Even at its best, education helps some working-class young people prepare to move into the middle class, an outcome that might improve the economic opportunities of those individuals but doesn’t address the broader economic structure.  A thousand well-trained nurses might earn a decent living, but they will work alongside aides, janitors, and clerical workers who don’t. Simply put, moving some people into better paying jobs doesn’t eliminate the low-wage jobs they left behind.

Moreover, we should expect to see more low-wage jobs over time, not fewer, and education won’t change that.  Indeed, as Jack Metzgar and I have both written here, multiple times, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the most growth in jobs is in those that don’t require a college degree.  Regardless of how many people get college degrees, too many jobs in the U.S. will continue to pay low-wages, offer little or no benefits, and provide almost no job security. The only difference will be that workers will have more education and, in most cases, more debt.

If we want to improve the lives of low-wage workers and their families, we need public policies that will create more jobs, increase wages (see Metzgar’s suggestion earlier this year for a law requiring productivity sharing), and protect people from the financial ravages that often accompany illness, natural disasters, and other devastating and expensive events.   But how likely do you think it is that our state or federal legislators will create such policies?

The only possibilities for change lie in activism and organizing.  And what does it take to foster resistance and build solidarity?  As our labor studies colleagues might remind us, learning about economic, political, and social processes as well as the history of activism, theories of class, and narratives of oppression and resistance can prepare people to articulate and advocate for their own interests and for the common good.

Hmm, so maybe education is the answer, after all?

Sherry Linkon

Missing Women: Watching The Makers

I watched The Makers: Women Who Make America on PBS last week with a conflicted eye.  No doubt, the documentary about the last 60 years of activism and social change on behalf of women reminded me of just how much my own life was shaped by the feminist movement.  My first act of political engagement was knocking on doors in support of Pat Schroeder’s first run for Congress.  I was twelve.  I wrote my first women’s history paper in 9^th grade, in part because I was angry that the textbook said so little about the woman suffrage movement. I learned about domestic violence, women’s health, and activism from Ms. magazine. In college, I marched to take back the night and hosted the weekly feminist collective radio show. I went to the University of Minnesota for my PhD because I wanted to study women’s history with Sara Evans.  A decade after anti-feminist women activists killed the ERA, I was trying to make sense of their views by writing a dissertation about an intelligent, independent nineteenth-century woman who opposed the idea of woman suffrage.  My dissertation committee had one “token” man.  In other words, I benefitted in specific, concrete ways from the battle for equal rights and the expanded choices it secured for women.

But the movement was also geared to women like me, as The Makers reminded me.  As a white child of a progressive, privileged household, I had the cultural and economic capital to view my life as full of opportunity.  I could be proud of my father for hiring the first female commercial airline pilot without thinking about the consequences of his regular contract negotiations with stewardesses, as we called them then.  Like many feminists of my generation, I sang along to songs about women wanting to be engineers but had no interest in that option.  I knew that all women were not the same, of course, but I didn’t think much about whether the movement that had empowered me was doing much for working-class women.

Eighteen years in Working-Class Studies has changed that perspective, and while I appreciated much of the documentary, I was also keenly aware of what was missing. The stories of key battles and strategies, video clips from protests, and even the interviews with women who were put off by feminism all resonated for me.  I was glad to see at least a few stories about working-class women and women of color – a couple of examples of women who sued for workplace rights (including flight attendants), a coal miner’s tale of fighting sexual harassment, Barbara Smith’s explanation of the goals of the Kitchen Table Press.  Yet the film’s primary narrative about women and work, especially, involved the gains women had made in professional jobs – establishing a construction business, becoming a dot-com CEO, working as a television producer – and, ultimately, the struggles white middle-class women face in balancing work and family.

While The Makers does include comments by several women of color and acknowledges the movement’s difficulties with recognizing or advocating for issues facing women who were not white or middle class, it also replicates the movement’s tendency to focus on the needs of women whose goals and expectations reflect their race and class privileges.  Like the women’s movement itself, the film largely ignores the concerns of working-class women. When traditional types of women’s work are mentioned, as in a reference to the growth of the typing pool in the 1950s, the implication is that service work was a temporary way-station, not the type of work that most women still do – perhaps not with typewriters but with computerized cash registers or blood pressure cuffs.  The solution to a telephone operator’s low pay, the film suggests, was not to organize and advocate for better pay for that job but to fight to get a few women access to higher-paying jobs that had been reserved for men. As Karen Nussbaum, founder of 9 to 5, the National Association of Working Women, notes near the end of the film, the women’s movement should have focused “more on the economic issues of working people.  It should have been about creating an alternative that worked for most women, and that alternative would have included child care, it would have included community services, it would have included after school care where your kids could get cared for by adults.  None of that happened, and I think that’s the great failure of the women’s movement.”  As Nussbaum’s comment suggests, the problem with The Makers may not be the filmmakers’ view but the real history of the women’s movement.

On the other hand, the film leaves out many examples of activism by working-class women and women of color.  Where was Angela Davis, who offered a radical vision that linked race, class, and gender?  Or bell hooks? How about Roseanne Barr, whose hit show started in the same year as Murphy Brown, a show the film celebrates, but provided a funny, realistic, and very political look at ordinary life in a working-class family?  How do we talk about the fight for women’s rights without recognizing the efforts of 9 to 5 or any other labor union  that advocates for the rights of women in the workplace – not just the right to a seat in the boardroom but the right to better working conditions in all jobs?

The Makers reminds us of how much our expectations for and assumptions about women have changed since the 1950s.  It also highlights the threats to women’s rights and opportunities, including the danger that if younger women take those rights for granted, we could well have to fight all over again.  It’s an inspiring film, and the history matters.  It’s also an important reminder that both the movement and the media need to pay more attention to working-class women.  As narrator Meryl Streep acknowledges, “As long as so many women are falling through the cracks, some argue, the feminist revolution will remain unfinished.”

Sherry Linkon

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 Changing Working Class

In the old progressive narrative of American culture, everyone would do better over time. The son of a miner with an 8^th grade education would graduate from high school, and even if he got an industrial job, stronger unions and general prosperity would mean that he worked fewer hours than his father and earned enough to buy a small house.  His daughter would go to college and get a job as a nurse or a teacher, and her kids might keep moving up by attending a better college and getting a better  job. And surrounding the generations of this one imaginary family would be most other families, so that over time, the whole country would experience increasing prosperity and higher social status.  Maybe everyone wasn’t going to make it to the middle class, but most people would get there.  (Of course, there’s a troubling counterpart to this narrative that blames those who didn’t become middle class for failing, but that’s another story.)

But something, actually many things, went wrong over the past few decades.  I’ve written before about the growth of income inequality, citing Timothy Noah’s analysis that describes it as a long-term trend with multiple contributing factors.  Perhaps because of income inequality, surveys suggest that Americans no longer expect their families to keep moving on up.  So despite the expectation that we would all become middle class, the working-class is not simply a majority, it is a growing majority.   That’s true according to the analyses of academics like Michael Zweig, who describes most Americans as working class on the basis of the limited power they have in the workplace. In the 2011 edition of his book America’s Working Class Majority, Zweig finds  that 63% of Americans are working class, up from 62% in the original 2000 book.  It’s also true in terms of how people identify themselves.  While the General Social Survey for decades has  shown that over 40% of Americans identify themselves as working class, the 2010 version of the survey, which the GSS reruns every few years, show that 46.8% now identify as working class, the highest percentage since the early 80s.

The working class is also changing.  The term used to call to mind blue-collar unionized workers with no college education, but today’s working class not only works in a wide range of jobs, but many have at least some college.  These days, many people with college degrees settle for jobs that don’t require the credential, and others whose jobs do require degrees have lost the professional autonomy that, according to Zweig, defines middle-class jobs.  Indeed, one of the reasons Zweig sees the working class growing is because so many teachers and nurses are now, on the basis of the limited control they have over their own labor, working class.  Many people go to college because it seems like the most promising path to economic security, but that promise fades when they can’t find jobs and are burdened by loans.  Combine that with an economic crisis and long-term shifts in employment that leave increasing numbers with precarious work, as John Russo noted recently, and it’s clear not only that more people belong to the working class but that the working class itself is becoming more educated and less-steadily-employed.

There’s another likely change in the American working class, one that reflects the broader shift in racial demographics.  The Congressional Research Service documents a slight decline in the percentage of Americans who self-identify as white, a slight increase in those who self-identify as Black, and more significant increases in those who identify themselves as Asian or Hispanic, and its study projects these trends to continue over time. Even if we looked only at population numbers, the working class – which was never really “all white” — is almost certainly becoming even more diverse.

The racial diversity of the working class is also likely increasing because of patterns in education and income.  While Blacks are more likely to get some college than are whites, whites earn more bachelor and advanced degrees, and whites with BAs earn about $10,000 a year more than Blacks with similar degrees.  Hispanics are less likely to either go to college or earn a degree than either Blacks or Whites, though when they do, they earn more than Blacks.  Beyond reminding us that racial differences still matter in education and earnings, these figures suggest that Hispanics and Blacks may be more likely than whites to remain in the working class even if they go to college.

Diversity isn’t only about race, of course.  A number of sources, including the Public Religion Research Institute, suggest that working-class political attitudes differ by gender, by region, by religion, and by situation, among other things.  They note, for example, that the white working class was at least somewhat divided along gender lines in this year’s election and that white Protestants were more likely to support Romney than were white Catholics. Their survey also found that voters who had been on food stamps were more likely to support Obama in this election, while those who had not received such assistance were more likely to support Romney.

So what does all of this add up to?  On the one hand, if the working class is growing, it ought to have more clout, as voters and as activists.  We may well be seeing a difference in elections, but there’s a big difference between people leaning just enough toward the Democrats to re-elect Obama and having a strong or coherent political voice.  The gap between functioning as an electoral block and developing a working-class consciousness that would fire coherent activism may be even larger. While the Occupy Movement stood up (and sometimes laid down) for economic justice, it’s unclear what role working-class people or working-class perspectives played in that movement.

The diversity of the working class, in all forms, may present a challenge to working-class organizing.  This has always been the case, of course, and the history of the labor movement reminds us of how difficult it can be to create unity among a diverse working class.  Today’s workplaces no longer provide as many opportunities for workers to come together or recognize their shared interests, and in a tight economy, working-class people sometimes see each other as the competition.  Given those challenges and the way working-class perspectives are also always shaped by race, gender, religion, and place, it’s hard to imagine a widespread, sustained working-class movement for economic and social change, even though it is so clearly needed.

On the other hand, social movements are not the only agents of change. Simply paying attention to the way the working class is changing and growing makes a difference, since it requires us to think about how social class is not a fixed structure but one that responds to other social and economic changes.  That matters for academics but also for civic life.  Being aware of the growing presence and diversity of the working class might make the media, educators, policy-makers, and yes, even politicians, more attentive to the importance of including working-class perspectives in public discourse and policymaking.

Sherry Linkon

Can Working-Class Women Have It All?

This past summer, Anne-Marie Slaughter generated a tsunami of commentary with her Atlantic cover story about “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.”  According to the magazine’s editors, the article broke records for online readers, Facebook likes, and comments, and it inspired response articles in a number of other publications.  Building on that success, the magazine is running another potentially controversial piece on women’s lives this month, Hanna Rosin’s argument that the “hook-up culture” on college campuses is empowering women.

Both writers acknowledge, in different ways, that when they say “women,” they really mean white middle-class straight women.  Slaughter states directly that she was “writing for my demographic—highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place. We may not have choices about whether to do paid work, as dual incomes have become indispensable. But we have choices about the type and tempo of the work we do. We are the women who could be leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership ranks.”  I appreciate Slaughter making this point; too often, when people write about “women,” they don’t acknowledge class differences.

Yet I also can’t help imagining the potentially productive conversation between a woman from Slaughter’s “demographic” and a working-class woman about strategies for achieving work-life balance.  After all, working-class women have always worked, often in jobs that don’t have clear time and space boundaries (home-based piecework, taking in boarders, child care), and the tension between doing your job and caring for your family is one they’ve navigated for generations.

Rosin ackowledges working-class women more directly in her piece, citing a study by Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton that examined the views of hooking up by college women from different class backgrounds.  They showed that going to college reflects “a classed self-development imperative that discourages relationships but makes hooking up appealing.”  In other words, Rosin suggests, women choose casual sex over committed relationships in order to preserve their ability to, as one young woman put it, “maintain the lifestyle that I’ve grown up with.” Rosin mentions that the working-class women in the study found the hook-up culture “alienating,” but in order to “succeed” in the eyes of their peers, they had to adapt to it.  Those who didn’t were seen as “the dorm tragedies.”  

She also notes, again briefly (perhaps because it doesn’t fit the narrative of her article), that the working-class women “felt trapped between the choice of marrying the disastrous hometown guy who never gets off the couch, and will steal their credit card – or joining a sexual culture that made them uncomfortable.” In her view, it seems, marrying a working-class man is an inherently bad, even foolish choice.  The only other option she can imagine – or the only one that fits her claim that hooking up reflects women’s increasing power — is embracing the hook-up culture.  Obviously, there’s plenty of open space and many options between those two extremes, including the possibility that an educated woman from a working-class background could construct a fulfilling relationship with an uneducated man with whom she shares a home culture.

Having glibly exaggerated the tensions working-class women might feel with the “classed self-development imperative” of higher education, Rosin blithely treats the Yale business-school students she interviewed as representative of most college women.  In truth, they may be more deeply invested than most college students in the individualistic culture of personal advancement that scholars such as Barbara Jensen have associated with the middle class. So while I give Rosin credit for acknowledging the possibility of class differences among college women, her efforts reflect exactly the kinds of stereotyping and blind spots that Jack Metzgar wrote about here a few weeks ago.

 Slaughter overtly excludes working-class women, while Rosin addresses their perspectives in highly problematic ways.  Nevertheless, these two pieces suggest an interesting question: what would it mean for a working-class woman to “have it all”?

Given the differences in values between the working class and the middle class (see Jensen’s new book Reading Classes for a good overview, or click here for an earlier version of her analysis), we can probably begin by speculating that “having it all” for a working-class woman would not be about professional success.   More likely, it would be about finding the balance between hours at work and hours at home, keeping a job and a steady income while being there for her kids — pretty much the same challenge that professional women face. 

So what’s the difference?  Choice, for a start. Privileged women are more likely to have the option to stay at home.  Many also have the financial stability and social capital to work fewer hours, to travel less for their jobs, or to choose a job that is more flexible.  Some earn enough to be able to hire help. One reason we don’t hear much about working-class women debating whether they can have it all is that they have few options.  Most have to work at least one job, and they do forms of work that allow them little if any control over their shifts or working conditions.  Many probably have some choice of which job to do, but many do not.  They do the work that is available, under the conditions that exist, and they do the best they can with their families.  So there’s nothing to debate.  

That’s the standard thinking, right?  But it might not reflect the whole story.  In her 2011 book, For the Family? How Class and Gender Shape Women’s Work, Sarah Damaske argues that while working-class women cite financial need as their reason for working, they are also motivated by the satisfaction they find at work. Working-class women, Damaske suggests, feel pressure to claim that they work in order to fulfill the needs of their families.  Work may be a source of pride and identity for working-class people, but for women, especially, family roles are even more powerful.  Yet in Damaske’s interviews, working-class women also described their jobs as providing intrinsic motivation.  One woman says that it’s her job that “makes me want to get up and go somewhere.” She and others found work meaningful and enjoyable, just like their middle-class sisters.

For professional-class women, the opposite social pressure may well be in play.  They feel pressured to achieve as much as possible in their careers.  For them, choosing the less-demanding job, or worse, choosing to stay at home, feels like a decision that must be defended, while working-class women feel they must justify working.

Working-class and middle-class women are also likely to have different expectations about family life.  In her research for Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, Annette Lareau found clear differences in how middle-class and working-class families approached raising children. The middle-class version emphasized intentional, organized child development aimed at individual achievement, while the working-class model is less ambitious, built around a vision of more spontaneous, organic development.  The middle-class version is also more labor-intensive for parents, requiring constant juggling of children’s schedules of lessons, soccer games, and other activities.  No wonder professional women struggle to balance work and family.  Even with less flexibility and power in their jobs, working-class women may be able to fit work life and home life together more smoothly, because family life involves fewer activities and less pressure for performance.

As this comparison suggests, talking about “having it all” is never simple.  But this much is: gender is classed.  That’s old news in Working-Class Studies, but it’s a lesson all those pundits talking about women have yet to understand.

Sherry Linkon

The Whiteness of Working-Class Studies

Later this week, scholars, artists, and activists from around the world will gather at SUNY Stony Brook for the How Class Works conference, organized by Michael Zweig and his colleagues at the Center for Study of Working Class Life.  We’re a diverse group, coming from about a dozen countries and a variety of academic fields and organizations.  Over the course of a few days, sociologists will talk with poets, graduate students will hang out with senior scholars, and community and labor organizers will discuss strategy with political scientists and literary scholars.  This combination of diversity and informal interaction creates an engaging, friendly, and lively atmosphere, and it keeps people coming back to working-class studies conferences year after year.

But with the exception of a significant group of international scholars from Turkey, Africa, and China, most of those at the conference will be white.  Several times over the course of the conference, people will suggest that, as a community, we should be concerned, maybe even ashamed, about our lack of racial diversity.  If we were really committed to social justice, the commentators may seem to imply, if we were sufficiently self-critical and open and inclusive, our interdisciplinary field would be much more multicultural.

But it isn’t.  And that isn’t about a lack of commitment, intellectual engagement, or organizing effort.  From the beginning, working-class studies has been deeply involved in critical discussions of both the diversity of the working class (or as our British colleagues perhaps more accurately put it, the working classes) and the theoretical and political intersections among class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. New working-class studies scholars have not generally suggested that class matters more than race.  Rather, we argue that class deserves focused attention within the context of broader discussions of inequality, difference, and culture.  The founding program in working-class studies, the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University, got its start as part of a national project on diversity in higher education sponsored by the American Association of Colleges and Universities.  In 1995, when we applied to that program, we asked whether “the working class would be invited to the diversity banquet.”  As the program organizers told us, we were the only people raising questions about class in the context of multiculturalism.

That emphasis remains a key element of working-class studies.  It’s been the primary theme of several conferences, and a significant proportion of the presentations each year focus on variations of the theme.  At this year’s conference, for example, about 20% of the paper titles explicitly reference race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality, and more than 25% more address class in non-U.S. national contexts, including papers on the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, as well as Europe.  A few more papers consider the latest addition to critical discussions of diversity: religion.  Of course, many of those who will speak about the intersection of class and race are white.  Indeed, one of the strengths of working-class studies is that it has encouraged so many white scholars to apply class as a critical concept in looking at issues of race and ethnicity.

And yes, a number of conference presenters will discuss issues facing the white working class.   Working-class studies is concerned that many, some would even say the majority, of whites have been exploited and excluded from so-called “mainstream” culture, marginalized as “white trash,” and stereotyped as racist and reactionary.  At best, the white working class has been elided into the more privileged white middle class, who benefit from more political, economic, and cultural capital.  As my colleagues and I suggested 17 years ago, the white working class has an important place in discussions and activism related to diversity.

None of which is to say that we should stop thinking about the whiteness of working-class studies as a problem. A more racially-diverse working-class studies could help to deepen and complicate our conversations about how class works.  Over the past 17 years, we have pursued a variety of strategies to reach out to colleagues of color: sending the call for papers to organizations that focus on ethnic studies, attempting to collaborate with such groups, organizing conferences around the theme of intersections, inviting keynote speakers whose activism or research focuses on race, and through personal contacts. The international participation in this year’s conference offers evidence that such efforts can bring more diversity to the movement.

Yet almost two decades of outreach have made working-class studies only slightly less white.  Why is it so hard?  Part of the problem must rest in the history of race and class relations in the U.S. (and in other countries), as the elite have repeatedly pitted working-class whites and blacks against each other (Michelle Alexander provides a useful overview of this in The New Jim Crow).  And part of it probably reflects the way some leftist scholars have argued that class should subsume race and gender, advocating for a class-based solidarity.  These twin histories might well make some scholars of color uncertain about whether working-class studies is the place for them.

But it may also be that working-class studies has too little to offer to those whose  work focuses on race, who may find similar ideas and similar camaraderie in critical race theory (CRT).  For me, working-class studies provides important ways of thinking about structural inequality, cultural difference, and shared identity and experience. For contemporary scholars of race, the same core can be found within CRT.  Consider, for example, this excerpt from a definition of CRT from the UCLA School of Public Policy:

Intersectionality within CRT points to the multidimensionality of oppressions and recognizes that race alone cannot account for disempowerment. “Intersectionality means the examination of race, sex, class, national origin, and sexual orientation, and how their combination plays out in various settings.” This is an important tenet in pointing out that CRT is critical of the many oppressions facing people of color and does not allow for a one–dimensional approach of the complexities of our world.

Narratives or counterstories, as mentioned before, contribute to the centrality of the experiences of people of color. These stories challenge the story of white supremacy and continue to give a voice to those that have been silenced by white supremacy.

Substitute class for the references to race in this passage, and the result would sound very much like some core ideas in working-class studies, which wrestles with the “many oppressions” facing the working class and which strives to make working-class narratives available because they challenge the class-based social hierarchy.

New working-class studies and critical race theory share some significant intellectual DNA.   The key to making the link may not be to bemoan the lack of racial diversity at the working-class studies conference but rather to actively seek out opportunities for in-depth conversation across these two fields.  We have much in common, and we have much to learn from each other.

Sherry Linkon, Center for Working-Class Studies

Why College Costs Are Rising, and What Not To Do About It

When Rick Santorum called President Obama a “snob” for urging every American to get at least some college education, the comment drew lots of media attention.  But Santorum’s quip is a sideshow.  The center stage of the political debate over higher education has to do with costs and accountability, and the challenges to colleges and universities are coming from all sides.  Conservatives lament the leftist ideological influence of college professors – an old, old claim that’s easy to either ignore or refute.  Obama’s proposal for cutting federal funding to universities that don’t control costs has more troubling and complicated implications, especially for working-class schools and students.

Those who work with working- and poverty-class students see the effects of rising college costs every day.  I heard it just last week from students in one of my classes, complaining about the difficulty of balancing 30-plus hours a week of physically- and psychologically-exhausting food service work with the reading load of an English major.  When I made my usual speech about slowing down, how they don’t have to hurry toward graduation and would get more out of their education if they took fewer courses each term, they gave me a quick lesson in financial aid: loans and grants often require full-time enrollment, and the college prices tuition in a way that saves them money if they load up on courses.  That explains the phantom students on my class lists, people who register and never attend class, just because they have to fill their schedules.  Given the choice between loans and a better GPA, they take the money and the Fs.

Rather than taking funding away, perhaps the Department of Education course revise the policies for financial aid to encourage students to attend part-time, removing the incentive to take more classes than they can handle at one time?  Maybe universities could price tuition in a way that reflected the realities of working students’ lives? The system seems to be set up to ensure that students will fail, instead of creating the conditions for success.

However, cutting funds to schools if they fail to keep costs down seems counterproductive.  If costs are rising, doesn’t it seem like we should focus on finding ways to make it more affordable to more people? For example, we could significantly expand policies and programs (like Pell Grants) that help make higher education possible for working-class students.  That seems like a no-brainer, and it would be if only we were having a serious conversation about why college costs are going up.  Yes, as the Daily Kos noted after Santorum’s “what a snob” speech, one problem is the decline in state funding, which is real and significant.  But colleges have seen the operating costs increase for a variety of reasons, some of which may help students, while others deserve real scrutiny.

One contributing factor is the campus building boom of the last decade.  Even when, as with new athletic and wellness facilities here at Youngstown State, the construction of new buildings is paid for by state capital investments or special fundraising efforts, new facilities require on-going staffing, equipment, maintenance, and utility costs.  University leaders claim that successful recruiting requires fancy new dorms and fitness centers, but I have to wonder whether temporary enrollment growth balances out with the permanent costs of keeping those buildings heated, cleaned, and so on.

Some believe that the culprit in rising costs is faculty salaries.  Just yesterday, in a Washington Post opinion piece, David Levy repeated the canard that faculty are incredibly overpaid because our middle-class salaries buy only a few hours of teaching time per week. When I testified before an Ohio Senate committee about the state’s anti-union bill in 2011, one of the senators explained that he supported the bill, which would have banned collective bargaining for faculty, because he was concerned about the cost of college.  Isn’t it true, he insisted, that the cost of college is going up because of the incredibly lucrative salaries of faculty?

It’s easy to scoff at such claims, and while both Levy and the State Senator are clearly wrong, it is true that faculty salaries have increased over time. The numbers can look dramatic, so we make an easy target.  When I started at YSU 22 years ago, Assistant Professors came in at $28,000 a year.  My new colleagues now begin with salaries a little more than $50,000 a year.  On the surface, it seems like faculty are making out like proverbial bandits, but of course, $28,000 in 1990 calculates as about $48,000 in 2012 dollars. So we’re still among the lowest-paid public university faculty in the state. And like many of our colleagues at public universities, we’re actually losing ground, not only because of inflation but also because, under pressure from conservative politicians and proposals like Ohio Senate Bill 5, we now pay significantly more towards health care and pensions.  During negotiations here last summer, we calculated that changes in how we pay for health care would cost the typical faculty member around $5000 a year.

If anyone were really concerned about personnel costs, they’d look at administrators and staff. While the pattern has leveled off in recent years, the Chronicle of Higher Education notes that for the first decade of this century, college administrators saw their salaries increase at a rate of about 4% annually.  And not only do administrators cost more – look at the incredible growth in university presidents’ salaries – there are now more of them.  As Benjamin Ginsburg explains in The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the Administrative University (Oxford UP, 2011), the ranks of administrators and staff have grown much faster than the faculty – 85% for administrators and 240% for staff, compared with 51% growth in the number of faculty between 1975 and 2005. In fact, many universities are cutting back on faculty, relying increasingly on part-time and limited-term faculty, who cost less. Some, like YSU, are also cutting lower-paid staff.  YSU has cut clerical and maintenance positions, slowing down a wide range of support services that have a direct effect on students’ experiences. If state and federal leaders want to see college costs cut, perhaps they should ask schools to justify the size of their administrative staff.  How many Vice Presidents does a University need?  How many Associate Provosts?  Faculty and students are doing more with less these days, while over in the administration building, they seem to be doing less with more.

It’s worth noting that some of the cost increases are worthwhile, because they contribute to students’ learning. Many campuses have expanded programs aimed at helping the increased numbers of working-class students coming to college, many of whom are succeeding because of peer support, tutoring, and other programs.  Addressing the needs of working-class students also requires other costs.  For example, while wealthier students bring their own computers to campus, working-class institutions have to provide access to technology, another piece of the learning puzzle that generates on-going costs, especially as faculty develop smarter ways of using digital pedagogies.   As government bodies push for cost cutting, they need to recognize that difference between expenses that help students and those that don’t.

Obama’s policy has good intentions, and it seems designed to appeal to families that are struggling to pay for college. Unfortunately, it’s too broad-brushed to consider the complexity of college costs, and it may well contribute to widespread misunderstandings about colleges as non-productive institutions that focus more on increasing their profits – as if public universities were ever money-making operations! — than on educating students.

Worse, the policy may not work in ways that really help working-class students.  Many schools will respond as YSU has: by cutting support staff, replacing full-time faculty with temporary and part-time instructors, blaming faculty for increased costs rather than acknowledging the costs associated with new facilities or extra administrators, and generally undermining the quality of education for the all students, especially those who are working all those extra hours now and taking on long-term debt for their futures in order to be here.

Sherry Linkon, Center for Working-Class Studies

Beyond Stereotypes: What Makes a Good Representation of the Working Class?

The working class is everywhere these days – in the dozens of reality TV shows about work, in media analysis of the Republican race for the presidential nomination, and in recent reports on economic inequality.  While the Occupy movement isn’t necessarily about the working class, and there are real divides within the 99%, the movement has helped change the meaning of the term “class warfare,” making it harder for conservatives to use it to denigrate any effort to talk about economic justice.  Given recent history, the presence of the working class in public discourse shouldn’t surprise us.

The increase in attention is real and significant.  A check of three news databases – Lexis/Nexis, Newspaper Source, and Newsbank – suggests that the number of stories that include the phrase “working class” has more than tripled over the last two decades.  A Newsbank search of articles in news magazines, for example, found 212 articles mentioning the working class in 1991 and 1992, but a search for 2010 and 2011 listed 778.  Newspaper Source, which searches newspapers, news wires, transcripts, and magazines, tracked an increase from 117 items in 1991-92 to 5774 in 2010-2011.  These numbers may not provide an exact count of what’s happened. Earlier articles may not have been entered into these online databases, which were just getting started in 1991, and the number of news outlets has grown with digital media.  But even given those issues, it seems as if the American media are talking about the working class much more now than they were 20 years ago.

Is it merely coincidence that the first working-class studies conference was held here at Youngstown State 20 years ago?  Several colleagues have suggested that new working-class studies has helped draw attention to the working class. Within this field, scholars, artists, and activists who share a concern about the working class have often noted that American media tend to either ignore or stereotype the working class.  Well, they’re certainly not ignoring the working class these days, so we seem to have made progress.  But have we gotten beyond the stereotypes?

Of course not.  If nothing else, reality TV shows like Hillbilly Handfishin’ and Moonshiners suggest that at least one old-style working-class stereotype – the redneck, white country boy – is alive and well.  So, too, is the idea of the white blue-collar factory worker, a down-to-earth guy who’s proud of the work he does and enjoys a cold one at the end of the day. And then there are all the reporters and commentators analyzing whether Mitt Romney can attract enough white working-class voters to win the Republican nomination over the supposedly more working-class Rick Santorum, a discussion that explains Santorum’s appeal by noting his coal miner grandfather, his traditional values, and his ordinary guy persona.

On the other hand, some recent public discourse about the working class suggests that some of the ideas that we’ve been discussing at working-class studies conferences for the past two decades are being heard beyond academic walls.  Consider, for example, Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.  No doubt, Murray’s argument that the white working class is in decline because it lacks morality and self-discipline is troubling, and a number of critics have already pointed out the problems with this analysis, especially his habit of assigning to culture social changes that are rooted in economics.  Yet we can’t accuse him of mere stereotyping.  Two recent reports by one of the best reporters on working-class issues, Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times, corroborate two of Murray’s main claims:  that the working-class lags far behind the middle and upper class on educational attainment and that single motherhood is increasingly common for women without college degrees.  Part of what makes Tavernise’s reports so good is that, unlike Murray, she identifies economic reasons for these cultural patterns, rather than suggesting that they reflect moral or intellectual weaknesses.

And yet, Murray’s approach suggests that he understands a key idea of working-class studies: like Barbara Jensen, Jack Metzgar, and others, he views class not solely in terms of economic position but also as a matter of culture.  I wish he’d paid more attention to the idea that working-class culture has some real strengths, such as the strong family and community ties that Jensen identifies, but I’m still pleased that his book has gotten people thinking about class in more cultural terms.  Murray also defines the working class not by income but by a combination of education and occupation, an approach that at least in part reflects the complex understanding of class in new working-class studies.

The working-class value of fostering communal ties rather than focusing on individual achievement was a core theme of Chrysler’s much-discussed “Halftime in America” ad.  Clint Eastwood’s gravelly voice speaks in terms of “we” and “us,” and he reminds us that because the people of Detroit “all pulled together,” the auto industry there has recovered.

Both that ad and another GE ad also challenge the whiteness of so much of public discourse about the working class.  Chrysler shows images of white, black, Asian, Hispanic, and other American people, some looking gravely at the camera, others working, dropping kids off at school, driving a car.  GE shows workers at a Kentucky appliance factory, men and women, white and black, talking about why their jobs matter.

Of course, these ads still draw on a fairly narrow, traditional definition of the working class — the industrial worker.  I’d like to see the media develop better strategies to show us the majority of today’s working class – the janitors, retail clerks, home health care workers, and so on.  For too many people, “working class” still brings to mind a factory worker, not a cashier, and that contributes to continued misunderstanding not only of who the working class is but of what issues matter to the working class.  But then I’m reminded of the question someone once asked after I introduced myself as the co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies:  do we still have a working class in America?  What she meant, I think, is that all the blue-collar jobs had disappeared.  But while most working-class jobs these days are in the service sector, there’s some value to remembering that factory jobs still exist and still matter.

We’ve spent so much time talking about how the media gets it wrong.  Maybe we also need to talk about what it means to get it right. Clearly, we’ve made gains in the quantity of media attention to the working class. But how are we doing on quality? What do you think makes a good representation of the working class?

Sherry Linkon, Center for Working-Class Studies

The Class Politics of Mass Incarceration

Across the United States today, communities are commemorating the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  While many of those observations recount the history of King’s inspiration and leadership in the civil rights movement, many will – like the one here in Youngstown – urge us to be inspired by King’s legacy to fight the continuing problems of poverty and inequality.  Some of that discussion will focus on race, but much of it will, rightly, recognize that race and class often work together.

I spent many hours thinking about that confluence this past summer and fall, as part of a community book group reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The strongest theme in our discussions was the persistence of racism.  Across different races, ages, professional backgrounds, and personal histories, we shared a deep frustration that decades of conversation, activism, policy-making, and education had not eradicated racism.  Instead, we agreed, as Alexander argues, it had become more indirect and therefore even harder to fight.

Alexander traces how the war on drugs established and legalized discriminatory practices that have permanently disenfranchised and economically marginalized tens of thousands of African-Americans, mostly men. According to Alexander, more black men are in prison today than were enslaved in 1850.  They are targeted, mistreated by the “justice” system, sent to jail in disproportionate numbers, and legally discriminated against when they are released. She explains that it’s now practically impossible to appeal or challenge this discrimination, because the standard of proof is intentional, conscious behavior, and in a world where we’ve all learned that colorblindness is the ideal, most people are convinced that they are not racist.

Her critique of the war on drugs and the mass incarceration of black men is convincing in itself, and the book is well worth reading.  (For a quick take, you can listen to my interview with Alexander on Lincoln Avenue). But as someone who studies social class, I’ve also been thinking about why the problems Alexander lays out are issues of economic justice as well as racial justice.

Both Alexander and Heather Ann Thompson, a historian who has been studying mass incarceration through the lens of the Attica uprising, point out that the war on drugs took aim at African Americans because Republicans were trying to garner support from southern white Democrats, including many in the working class.  Going back as far as the Nixon administration, but especially under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, conservatives used racial imagery to foster a culture of fear and blame, defining African-Americans as criminals (think Willie Horton) and setting more stringent sentencing guidelines for crack than for powder cocaine. As both Alexander and Thompson point out, urban areas and especially African Americans were targeted in the war on drugs even though clear evidence showed that they were not the ones most involved in drug trafficking. Sadly, this strategy worked politically in part because it tapped into the same white working-class racial resentments that Nixon had successfully leveraged in his presidential campaigns.

Though some white working-class voters thought they were protecting their interests by supporting the war on drugs, the effect was quite the opposite.  Thompson argues that the mass incarceration of blacks contributed to the decline of the labor movement over the past four decades.  She writes, “prisons have long been some of the most exploitative workplaces in America, and thus, the fate of American workers and the history of the American justice system are inexorably linked.” As incarceration rates rose, regulations limiting the use of prison labor were overturned in many states, allowing companies to hire prisoners for far less the minimum wage.  So not only were prisoners exploited as workers, but jobs that might have yielded something close to a living wage in the community were moved into prisons.  As Thompson claims, “There was clear evidence that free-world wages had been cut and jobs had been eliminated as a result of prison labor.”

The expansion of prisons did create some jobs, especially for white workers in the largely rural areas where the new prisons were built.  Of course, those jobs were usually not unionized, nor did they pay well.  In Youngstown, the escape of six prisoners from a medium-security Corrections Corporation of America prison on the edge of the city was tied, in part, to the low wages paid to guards, who were easily bribed to look the other way as a hole was cut in the fence.  When guards at that prison organized a union, CCA temporarily shut it down.  Certainly, the Youngstown story shows that the prison economy does not, in the long run, yield significant numbers of good jobs.

Of course, mass incarceration has the most direct, dramatic impact on economic conditions in African-American working-class communities. Blacks have the highest poverty rates in the U.S. – 27.4%, compared with 9.9% for whites, according to 2010 data from the Institute for Research on Poverty. High rates of imprisonment among African-American men, often for relatively minor offenses that would yield little or no prison time for whites, don’t just undercut household economies while someone is in prison.  Being convicted of a felony creates long-term economic marginalization. Once labeled as a felon, an individual’s chances for employment of any kind are severely limited.  Nor do most ex-convicts qualify for any form of public assistance, and in many cases, they cannot even return to their families, because public housing bans residents with criminal records. Alexander notes that with so few economic options, becoming more involved in the drug trade becomes the only reasonable option for many ex-convicts – an option that makes them vulnerable to a return to prison or a violent death.

As many in working-class studies have argued, though, class is not only a matter of economics.  The working class has historically developed and relied upon strong communal ties that help individuals and families get through hard times and that create the conditions for collective action for social and economic change.  Perhaps the most moving part of Alexander’s book is her discussion of how individuals, families, and communities struggle to deal with the shame of imprisonment.  Families don’t speak openly about their relatives who are in prison, she writes, and those who have been in jail often break ties with old friends and relatives. Alexander writes that the stigma associated with criminality “has turned the black community against itself, destroyed networks of mutual support, and created a silence about the new caste system among many of the people most affected by it.”

Alexander closes The New Jim Crow with a call to action: we need a new civil rights movement, she writes, bringing together people of all races and classes, who will fight against mass incarceration on the basis of human rights and justice.  Such a movement will not succeed, she argues, if it involves only African Americans, nor can it succeed if whites and others are encouraged to participate solely on the basis of their self-interest.  Just as with the marches and voter registration drives across the South in the 1950s and 60s, the efforts we commemorate with this week’s MLK holiday, people of conscience must come together to fight injustice simply because it’s wrong.

Sherry Linkon, Center for Working-Class Studies

Fighting for More than A Contract

While Wisconsin drew most of the national media attention as the home front of the battle over collective bargaining for public sector workers, what’s happening in Ohio is every bit as significant and interesting.  Ignoring weeks of protests in the state capitol and around the state, and despite divisions within the Ohio Republican delegations, the Ohio legislature passed Senate Bill 5 in March.  The bill would place tight limits on collective bargaining for most public employees, and it would ban it entirely for college professors (using the language from the Yeshiva Decision that defines us as managers). By June, almost a million people had signed petitions to put the measure on the ballot in November, giving voters the opportunity to overturn the bill – something we can do in Ohio that isn’t an option in Wisconsin.

The petition drive involved unions across the state, as well as community and religious organizations, while local chambers of commerce, businesses, and even the state’s university presidents either overtly advocated for SB5 or insisted on “remaining neutral” and thus passively embraced it .  Those same divisions are playing out as the campaign heats up heading toward November.

For public sector unions, this has been a tough time.  No one wants to make organized labor or collective bargaining look bad right now.  The Ohio Education Association, for example, has encouraged its locals to settle on contracts, no matter how bad, early in the game, and many have complied.

Here at Youngstown State University, we’re living with the political ramifications of this bill right now.  The faculty union, an OEA affiliate, first accepted the recommendations of an external fact finder,   which included small pay raises, a large  increase in our health care costs, and a small cut in pay for teaching summer courses.  We said yes, agreeing to accept what amounted to major concessions, but the Board of Trustees rejected the fact-finder’s report, demanding even greater “shared sacrifice” from the faculty.  Their counterproposal asked for cuts of up to $7500 in a single year for some, though their public statements insisted that most faculty would lose less than $1000.  Much of that loss comes in summer pay, which affects only faculty, not administrators or other staff.  So much for “shared sacrifice.”

Clearly, the upcoming referendum on SB5 has created an especially difficult context for unions.  Some have speculated that the Board of Trustees (most of whom were appointed by Republican governors) is playing hard ball at the request, advice, or encouragement of the Governor or other Republican leaders who hope that a strike by YSU faculty will illustrate the need for this bill. Others are encouraging the faculty to give in to avoid generating public resentment that could lead to a bad outcome in November.  No doubt, every public sector worker in Ohio, Wisconsin, New Jersey, and other states with similar laws must be feeling the pressure to make organized labor look good.  But should  we make every concession we’re asked for, in order to show that unions are reasonable and willing to do our part to balance state and local budgets?  If we do that, aren’t we also willingly contributing to the loss of power for workers and for unions?

Some organizers of the campaign to overturn SB5 have encouraged us to avoid making trouble, but I would argue that the situation at YSU offers a great illustration of why collective bargaining is so important.  What’s happening here illustrates just how bad SB5 and similar bills will be for public sector workers.  If we were not allowed to bargain, the administration would have imposed much bigger cuts.  YSU faculty are already the second-lowest paid in Ohio, and under SB5 we’d be solidly at the bottom, with no recourse whatsoever.

At the same time, we illustrate that collective bargaining works, not only for workers but for employers.  After all, our negotiations have already been built around concessions, not demands for increased salaries.  Further, in exercising our labor rights – by going to fact finding, by holding democratic votes on the proposals, by authorizing a strike and ultimately deciding not to strike, by filing unfair labor practices – we are working through a process that protects us even as it limits some of what we can do.  To my mind, we make a great poster child for public sector bargaining.

For an academic activist who is also deeply engaged in teaching, this has been an especially difficult time.  On the one hand, I’m ready to push this fight as hard as I can, because what happens here matters not only for us but for public workers across the state.  On the other hand, the threat of a strike – and that remains a possibility – creates real difficulties for students.  The University administration has already shown that it is willing to put our students at risk in its effort to force even greater concessions from the faculty.  A week before classes were due to start, YSU announced that it was putting a hold on financial aid, claiming that they could not say with confidence when school would start because the faculty had filed a strike notice.  They had never done this before, despite strike authorizations in previous rounds of negotiations or during an actual strike in 2005.  While assuring students of the administration’s concern, YSU had prepared alternative schedules and a website full of information, and they had sent threatening messages to members of other campus unions insisting that they were required to cross the picket lines.  The faculty union refused to play along, and after voting down the administration’s “last best offer,” we decided not to strike.  Instead, we are back in the classroom, working under the provisions of the old contract and trying to continue negotiations.

Some students responded exactly as the administration must have hoped: blaming the faculty and creating a facebook page that included many statements by students vowing to vote in support of SB5 because of this.  But others were not reeled in.  Instead, they organized.  They created a facebook page, YSU Students for Faculty (which now has almost 900 members), but they also held protests, conducted a letter-writing campaign, and challenged the University administration to treat its workers fairly.  They analyzed the administration’s actions and communications, and they have used a wide range of tools, from social media to filing public records requests to showing up and trying to ask questions at a Board of Trustees press conference last week.  They are also working with the campaign against SB5.

As the students have made clear, this is a case where politics are not entirely local.  What happens here may well affect the statewide vote in November, and of course, I hope it will make clear to anyone who’s unsure about the issue that unions are our best, maybe even our only, tool to protect the rights of workers.  But while the dispute at YSU and the debate over SB5 are inherently political, they also serve as learning opportunities.  The discussion among the students — and even on local talk radio — has encompassed why people should vote to overturn SB5, what’s happening to workers and universities across the country, the sad state of the American dream, and the real purpose of a college degree.  Those conversations remind us that the fate of public sector workers – educators, clerical workers, safety officers, health care workers – is not just about our income or benefits.  It’s about the public good.

Sherry Linkon, Center for Working-Class Studies