Biden’s Labor Initiatives and Organizers’ Challenges

Is Joe Biden, as he claims, the best friend workers have had in the White House either ever or since Franklin Delano Roosevelt?  We could debate that all day, but the President and his administration at least deserve an “A” for effort.  Recent decisions by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and proposed rule changes by the Department of Labor (DOL) certainly indicate they might see Labor Day as more than a day off for a picnic.

The Biden NLRB has been the most aggressive in a generation in pushing the letter and spirit of the National Labor Relations Act into the workplace. Recently, they voided the Trump board’s slowdown on election timetables and restored the faster track of the Obama years. They also clarified the standards for determining unfair labor practice charges for employer activity, which Trump’s board had loosened. In a surprising move, they also broke new ground by defining some individual actions as concerted activity, a change from the past standard that required at least two or more workers acting in concert.

All of that pales next to their decision in the Cemex case.  Thatdecision ordered the cement company to bargain with the Teamsters because its unfair labor practices tainted the election so severely that a fair rerun would be impossible. The ruling offers an path to union recognition without an election if a union can demonstrate majority support from the bargaining unit through a petition or union authorization cards signed voluntarily by the workers. Under the Cemex ruling, once a union asserts such a majority, employers would have two weeks to either begin the process of collective bargaining or file for an election with the NLRB. This is not a brand-new procedure, but it transfers the burden of filing for an election to the employer if they want to challenge a union’s demand for recognition.

Of course, Cemex will be appealed, so this is hardly over. In the meantime, though, it will be an option. It’s influence will be tested in a case filed by United Labor Unions against the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority (RTA). RTA withdrew recognition of a bargaining unit that they had de facto recognized for months and refused to continue bargaining on the renewal of the existing contract.

Not to be outdone, the Department of Labor also revived Obama-era efforts to increase the eligibility for overtime for salaried workers. The Obama administration recommended more than doubling the threshold salary under which companies be required to pay overtime to $50,000 a year, but that was overturned by court action. The Trump administration raised the level to about $35,500. The Biden DOL’s latest proposal would raise it to more than $55,000, which would qualify 3.5 million salaried workers for overtime after 40-hours. In an even bolder move, the new rule proposes to automatically adjust the level upward every three years. Of course, there’s a comment period, and many businesses, especially smaller enterprises are screaming. A compromise seems likely, but the level will increase. Even if DOL split the difference, $45,000 would be huge for many.

On the other hand, the federal minimum wage remains at $7.25. Businesses claim that the current standard is irrelevant, because so many workers earn more than that. But millions are still paid the minimum, and the hourly wages of millions more are set on scales that start at that level. Any proposed increase in the minimum wage would probably be dead-on-arrival in Congress, but if you want to be a labor president, you still need to make the effort.

Ultimately, we know, the only thing that really improves prospects for unionizing — and the better wages and working conditions that collective bargaining can yield — is actual organizing. But as we have seen for decades, the law can make that harder — or, we can always hope, easier. NLRB and DOL rulings provide reason to hope, and we will see if unions rise to the challenge. Will these rulings create a more even playing field for workers to join unions? Will union organizing increase?

That’s a harder question. The Amazon and Starbucks efforts that seemed so hopeful are now stalled or stunted.  “Strike Summer,” as it’s been called with victories at UPS, strikes in Hollywood, and now a revived UAW threatening auto manufacturers have reestablished unions as bulwarks against exploitation by employers.  Unions are experiencing a high-water mark in public support in most polls in the United States. It’s hard to predict the results of appeals of these NLRB decisions and the DOL’s response to comments on the overtime ruling. Within the labor movement, organizing departments have been decimated over the years, and rebuilding them will take time and resources that many may no longer have. Recent rulings don’t make things easy, but unions, activists, and workers have to organize to take advantage of any of these administration initiatives. That’s the biggest challenge — and the most important.

Wade Rathke, Acorn International

How Their Silence Diminishes Us

Dear [REDACTED],

I’ve started this letter too many times. A few weeks ago, we stood at opposite ends of a small apartment. I’m new to being part of gatherings like this, so I watched warily from the sidelines of the pong game. Your opponent messed up, and you stood a little taller and spoke a little louder: “What the fuck is wrong with you, man? What is this, a state school?” Nobody reacted to that. Nobody reacted later when you made a joke about scholarship kids. Nobody reacted again when word spread of you scrolling through our current student website to laugh at where people went for undergrad. Nobody said a thing.

Have you ever been hungry? There are different ways to starve. When the fridge is empty and your mom won’t fill it because she won’t be a “welfare abuser”—that’s starving. That’s when you learn there such a thing as being too poor. Maybe that’s the first time I felt class shame, when it was better to be hungry than to need help. I felt that way again standing across from you. Maybe I could have walked it off if the feeling stayed there, in that room, but it didn’t. I heard you in the silence of my friends, my colleagues. I heard you when I called my mom later that week to talk about my thesis, and she told me she didn’t understand why I kept working so hard. She says I’ve already proved myself. She says I came from nothing and made myself something.

I’m something because I did well enough in high school, better in community college, and really good in undergrad. I read as if the books could fill my empty stomach, and I learned how to assimilate myself into an educated middle-class. I stopped wearing flannels and camouflage, and I only mentioned my hometown as the punchline for a joke. I wanted to be someone important, not just a kid from the middle of nowhere, not nothing.

There’s a secret whispered throughout the hidden curriculum, and it’s that you must pick a side. So I burnt down my own history. As Matthew Ferrence says, people like me have a choice: we either “embody the stereotype” of the rural working class or “abdicate” our roots.  What else was I supposed to do? Now, I sometimes wonder if I chose wrong.

Maybe you won’t believe me. Maybe, to you, I’m still nothing. You apparently don’t find it relevant that we’ve landed at the same prestigious university and study in the same program. It surprises me that it was actually here, at this place I wasn’t sure I belonged, where you seem to be certain that I don’t, that I learned about working-class studies. It was the first time I identified the crossroads where I exist. Alfred Lubrano describes it as being “two people.” Sandra Dahlberg calls it a “dual existence.” Renny Christopher listens to Bruce Springsteen and wonders, if we are born to run, where do we run to? Christopher points out that “when Jefferson wrote ‘All men are created equal,’ it was not my ancestors he had in mind. And I can never get very far from that fact” (my emphasis). Look these people up. Lubrano is an award-winning journalist. Dahlberg is a professor.  Christopher is a Vice-Chancellor. Whatever you hope to be one day, they’ve already done it.

Another scholar in this field, Allison L. Hurst writes that, even if most of us no longer believe in meritocracy (a key part of the American Dream), we still act as if it’s true. This isn’t on purpose. Even when we’re starving, we can get full on the hope that hard work will pull us into something better—even when it still leaves us hungry. Even when we know better. I thought I’d feel like I obtained the Dream once I got my associate degree. Then I thought it would come when I got my bachelor’s, and now the hope has been kicked down to my master’s. And with that degree in sight, I’ve started imagining the inevitable happiness I will feel upon earning my PhD. Success is always in the future. It’s always the thing I am reaching towards. And the further I move in that direction, the more I feel myself moving away from where I came from.

Working-class academics don’t just battle the class ceiling. As you move up, so does the floor. The ceiling does not move. You earn enough degrees until you’re smushed like a specimen under a microscope. You feel exposed, scrutinized, but you can also see in both directions—and you find that you’re not welcome to move either way. Maybe that’s what Lubrano means by limbo. That’s where I have been. It’s where I was when your terrible voice came booming in — flattened between two panes that I can’t help but feel responsible for. But then I reflect on what was not in my control.

If I could bottle up a smell for you, it would be this: mac and cheese burning on the stove, as one child cooks for another, combined with the grease on my mother when she comes home long after dark. I was the parent to my younger brother after our dad passed. Mom had to work twice as much as before, and we couldn’t afford to hire help or send us to any after-school care.  Things would have been so different for all of us if we had half the privilege you do, and we wouldn’t have taken it for granted.

Do you hear me, [REDACTED]? What did you do after school? I raised a kid. I grieved and cooked and worked and read and wrote and studied. I have been laying bricks with my bare hands for 24 years; I built the entire path I walked to get here. I didn’t deserve to hear you talk like I didn’t exist, like all the people like me didn’t exist—or if we did, we didn’t matter. I didn’t deserve to hear silence from my friends. That moment made me sad, but I’m working to turn that sadness into anger. I want to use anger like fuel, like the gasoline that stained my mom’s hands after a day working at the garage.

But even with that fuel, with these degrees, with this letter, you will still exist. So many people like you will. I can’t always be mad. The thing that scares me most after all my work is how quickly the words of some privileged jerk can erase me. You spoke me out of existence, and everyone else allowed it to happen. My colleagues let it happen. And I can never get very far from that fact.

Rin Baker

Rin Baker is a first-generation graduate student with degrees in English and Educational Studies. Her work focuses on working-class experiences in U.S. higher education, with emphasis on students with rural backgrounds. 

Representing Post-Industrial Communities in Culture

I grew up on Merseyside in the 1980s and 90s, when this region around Liverpool found itself on the extreme end of the UK’s wave of industrial decline in that period. This had a profound effect on my working-class family and community, and it shaped the way I think ever since.

Later, a period of new investment in culture and heritage in the area as a form of urban regeneration, coupled with increasing access to higher education, enabled me to work in creative fields not remotely accessible to my parents.

Yet this very access exposed me to the hollowness of some of these changes. Moving through different kinds of cultural work showed me how few working-class people worked in those sectors, except in the poorest paid service positions. It also made clear why their absence mattered. Rather than representing the experiences of working-class communities, many cultural productions treated them as ‘other’. Too often, they used and patronised the working class.

As I have written in the Journal of Class and Culture, most coverage of post-industrial communities comes from outsiders looking in. Their narratives often veer between relentlessly negative, stereotype-ridden stories and patronising ‘boosterist’ coverage, with all subtlety absent. On the rare occasions when people from such communities get to tell their own stories, they can be distorted by those who dominate and control the platforms where they appear.

My experience gave me an interest in the work of other practitioners who grew up in post-industrial communities had training which enabled them to work in creative fields, and then spent at least part of their energy drawing attention to where they came from. Many of these cultural workers have struggled to ensure their insider perspective is heard by a wider audience.

A good example is the 2021 short film Made in Doncaster by artist and writer Rachel Horne. The Guardian newspaper sent its ‘Anywhere but Westminster’ team to cover the Yorkshire city of Doncaster, and they invited Horne to be a subject of their film. Editor of a long running local zine, Doncopolitan, Horne responded with a challenge: if you want to make a film about the area, we’ll make it together. This attracted a great deal of positive attention nationally and highlighted Horne’s efforts to create a local media voice in the face of the decline of regional newspapers and radio. That decline has made journalism a more elitist trade and reduced opportunities for people living in disadvantaged regions to provide a counterpoint to skewed coverage from national outlets.

The film shows Horne’s determined efforts to feature the voices of people like her and provide visibility for the talent and creativity of the community, not just its problems. As Horne explains, solutions to those problems need to be led from within: “We’re resilient and we don’t need to be patronised. We don’t need experts coming in telling us how to fix things. We want to fix things on our own terms and that’s the way it’s going to work.”

In the film, Horne emphasizes the influence of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike: “I was born in the miners’ strike. I lived through that whole collapse. It’s not just unemployment it’s like the whole culture went and then you’ve got ten years of austerity.” That influence is also clear in Sherwood, a 2022 BBC drama series created by writer James Graham who grew up in a mining village outside Nottingham, the setting for the series. This powerful drama explores a range of themes, including how all its characters are haunted, one way or another, by the miner’s strike and the subsequent disappearance of the coal industry in the area.

One of the tragedies of my lifetime is that the damage caused by the evacuation of industry without replacement, something once contained to certain areas, has, rather than being remedied in such places, instead gone on to consume much of UK. Sherwood highlights what many in the British establishment have been trying to gloss over and forget since the 1980s. As one of its principal characters puts it, “They didn’t care about us then, the don’t care about us now, they just use us. Look at what they still call us, what we call ourselves. A former mining town. Why? Post-industrial. How the hell are we meant to move on from that when even the way we talk about ourselves is by what we aren’t anymore? How are my grandkids meant to imagine a future beyond that, eh?”The spectre of deindustrialisation haunts Britain.

No other developed country has de-industrialised to the extent that Britain has. And artists like Horne and Graham, who grew up in deindustrialised places, can help us understand what happened and what life is like in these communities now, far better than the misrepresentations projected on to them by others. 

Graham, Horne, and I were able to attend university, where we honed our abilities to probe into and communicate about such things, drawing on direct experiences. The expansion in higher education from the 1960s to the 2000s gave us increased access to power to ask difficult questions and express the complex truths of our experiences and our communities. But such access, especially in the arts and humanities, is now contracting in the UK. In particular at the universities with the highest proportion of working-class students. Like us, young people from such communities today not only have limited local employment options, but they also have fewer educational opportunities.

Both Made in Doncaster and Sherwood contain hope for the potential of working-class cultures and communities in post-industrial areas. That hope comes from the resilience of people in such communities despite everything thrown at them.  It’s a hope though mixed with an ambiguity and a degree of cynicism that comes from having seen so little change for the better at a fundamental level over several decades. If we want anything to improve in future, voices like these must be heard more widely.

Kenn Taylor

Kenn Taylor is a producer, writer and lecturer whose work has a particular focus on the intersection between culture, community, class and place. He presented a version of this piece at the Transnationalizing Deindustrialization Studies: Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time (DePOT) 2022 Conference, Bochum, Germany, August 17-20, 2022.

Making Sense of Working-Class Work

Forty years ago this July, I left school to start my first career as a railway worker. At sixteen and with few if any qualifications, I was lucky to find a good job which was fully unionised.  As the union rep tossed a bunch of membership forms at us on that first day, he told us “It’s a closed shop, brothers, you have to join”.  

Now, that era appears like the land that time forgot.  The obsolescence of my experience is especially clear when I read about my students’ working lives. I’ve written before about how I encourage students in my sociology of work course to write papers reflecting on and analysing their own work experiences.

But what struck me even more in this year’s papers was students’ resignation in response to poor working conditions. Post-Covid, many students work at call centre companies, but instead of working in a centralised factory-like setting, many now work out of the bedrooms of their student dorms.  They relate sitting cross legged on their beds, juggling multiple devices and fielding calls from frustrated and often abusive customers.

Last year, a number of women wrote about sexual abuse at work, which I took as a positive side effect of the #metoo movement. My students described being propositioned for sex in retail jobs and being sexually harassed by co-workers, managers, and supervisors. Some described instances of rape. Their essays took on an almost cathartic role, and several students wrote that they had never told anyone about their experiences until they wrote it down for the assignment. This year’s essays were less overtly harrowing, although female students wrote about the casual sexism and racism they have to face on a near daily basis — the pat on the bottom by a customer ordering food at a restaurant or being ogled in service work. 

Poor working conditions are also a theme in a rash of essays about working in the gig economy for pizza delivery firms or various fast-food outlets. One male student related practical struggles that made it difficult to gain work or do this kind of job.  When his car needed repairs, he couldn’t earn any money for a week. He wrote movingly of the way kids opened the door to ‘Pizzaman’, the superhero delivering the eagerly awaited treats. Hearing the receding squeals of joy as he walked away after a delivery made him smile. But he also encountered abuse, as when a customer yelled at him after having to wait two hours for food on a Friday evening. The precarity and injustice of his job was even more obvious in the story he told of his car being hit in the pizza parlour parking lot at the end of a shift one night. The repairs cost him far more than the wages he had just earnt.

Across work stories from my working-class students, I see striking similarities. Many have to do basic service and retail work for minimum wage.  They routinely have to passively accept the aggressive backlash of those they serve and poor treatment from their supervisors.

But I think there is a bigger issue here, one we should not ignore:  passive acceptance of the poor nature of work. My generation would have expected better. Another generational change also matters here: universities were once free to all, but my students often work near full time to pay for school.  Theirs is a double passive acceptance.

My students’ belief that this is ‘as good as it gets’ is what disturbs me most, in part because it reflects a highly individualised account of working life.  These young people feel isolated and powerless to effect change. For them, individualism isn’t about selfishness, or about a sense of individual choice or agency. No, for them, individualism means social isolation. And that, in turn, means that they have no sense of collective endeavour. They don’t believe that common action could improve things in the workplace.

I’d like to think that as my students graduate and go on the ‘proper’ labour market, things may change, but their views reflect the findings of research about work. A quarter of a century ago US sociologist Richard Sennett wrote in his Corrosion of Character that workers were losing the social links that embedded them in their work and communities.  Instead, he wrote, ‘fugitive’ relationships were coming to dominate the workplace under what he called the ‘new capitalism’. More recently, American Studies professor Carrie Lane’s book A Company of One describes white-collar insecurity, where laid off software workers no longer blamed government, their former employers, or the economy for their situation. They saw losing their jobs as normal and dusted down their CVs, reached out to their social networks, and sought to rebuild their individual capital.

Yet I see hope in recent worker activism. Over the last year, the UK has seen a wave of public sector strikes as a result of the cost-of-living crisis after thirteen years of real terms pay cuts.  Such activism suggests that just as collectivism can fade from view, it might also come back into fashion. We shouldn’t expect a simple return to the working conditions of the long boom after the second world war, but if workers come together to resist the difficulties my students have identified, they can fashion new standards and a new version of working-class agency.  That’s the student essay I want to see!

Tim Strangleman, University of Kent

Time Is Not On Our Side

Time is suddenly news.  How little we have, how much we want, and what we do with it for work or whatever.  Is this good news for workers?  Maybe for some, but probably just the same ol’, same ol’ for most of us.

Take “remote work” for example.  Speculation is rampant about whether the pandemic firmly established different work patterns in the current economy that would provide more flexibility, and therefore more control for workers over their time.  What the pandemic did establish is that for the vast population of contemporary workers in the service sector little was remote and much was at risk and rigid.  Manufacturing jobs have declined over the last fifty years while service work exploded, but those workers were still chained to the rhythm of their machines and the employers’ work schedules in intimate, rather than remote ways.

For employers, “time is money” with little change in the old dictum.  Even as the New York Times Magazine examined the contradictions over controlling work time by celebrating remote workers, these arguments were undercut as they looked at the erosion of time in the future of work and the expanding world of gigs and apps as bosses.  The real story of the future of work continues to be employer power, and they are not lining up in favor of more worker control of their time and work.  Bosses in the main want workers back in the office where they can be seen and supervised.  They aren’t alone.  Investors are already seeing remote work become so dominant for office-based workers that it could implode the commercial real estate market, making empty floors standard in skyscrapers, and crippling investors, especially among regional and smaller banks.

Most unions would concede that we have lost control over hours.  Even as the National Labor Relations Act guarantees union bargaining rights for workers over “hours, wages, and terms and conditions of employment,” the move to reduce work hours – and enable more hours for “what we will” — has been stalled for almost a century.  We can quibble over the schedule, but actually winning differences in the length of shifts is virtually impossible.  Over the last fifty years, promoters of technology and automation have claimed that these innovations will save us time while also increasing productivity, but some workers have lost jobs and others have been asked to work more, for lower wages, despite productivity growth.  As a primary example, as amazing as the development of computers has been, they have hardly been a labor-saving device.

Jenny Odell’s recent book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, offers a more useful look at time from the bottom up than contemporary boosters of the “promises” of technology. She makes no bones about the truth: “capital only ‘frees time in order to appropriate it for itself.’ In other words, the goal of capitalism is not free time but economic growth.”  She cautions that we should not be lured into a false peace about time and work because “in comparison to those other forms of ‘screwing the nine to five’—worker organizing, legislation, and mutual aid—the allure of the productivity gospel is supposed to be that you don’t need anyone but yourself to achieve freedom.” We know that’s wrong. Nonetheless, the marketing is powerful and seductive.

For example, take two other common issues around work and time: “burnout” and “self-care.”  Odell argues that “burnout has ever been solely about not having enough hours in the day. What first appears to be a wish for more time may turn out to be just one part of a simple, yet vast, desire for autonomy, meaning, and purpose.”  If we see self-care as “stealing little moments in which we can prioritize the self,” she writes, we set up a “zero-sum game” with different interests competing for our time. She’s also clear that when it comes to work, when one person wins, someone else loses. She argues that,

This phenomenon, in which one adapts her temporal rhythms to those of something or someone else, is called entrainment, and it often plays out on an uneven field of relationships that reflects hierarchies of gender, race, class, and ability. How much someone’s time is valued is not measured simply by a wage, but by who does what kind of work and whose temporality has to line up with whose, whether that means rushing or waiting or both. Keeping this field in sight is all the more important amid exhortations to “slow down” for which one person’s slowing down requires someone else to speed up.

Jenny Odell is hardly the “be all and end all” in a debate about work and time.  She’s an artist not an organizer, union leader, or even an academic, but she has a better baloney-detector than a lot of the HR and corporate flaks, pundits, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms telling us that we can all wave our wands and control time, work, and wages. 

Time is a problem, and technology and artificial intelligence can’t solve it. There’s no app for that. We can puzzle it out at home alone, but as Odell suggests, that just pits us against ourselves. The only way we can get time to work for us is through organization and collective action.  It’s about time for that.

Wade Rathke, ACORN International

Class Ceilings

Most of us have stopped believing in the myth of the meritocracy. The myth promises that the ablest or most intelligent or hardest working get ahead of the rest.  Most everyone realizes this is not true, yet we continue to act as if it is. We tell our children to stay in school so they can move up, not down, the class ladder.  A specific version of that myth is the idea that “anyone can be President” in the United States regardless of accidents of birth like color of skin, geography, or gender.  Children are often reminded that Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin, as if anyone born in a trailer in Appalachia or an East Los Angeles barrio or public housing in Detroit can follow his route. Such stories imply that those who don’t move up are to blame for failing to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” 

The insidious myth of meritocracy belies increasingly insane levels of inequality in the US that prevent even younger generations born into the middle class from achieving “the American Dream,” if by that we mean stable housing, secure employment, and the opportunity to do as well or better than one’s parents.  Yet we still believe that if you go to the right schools and do well, you can actually pull ahead, no matter where you were born or what you look like.  You probably know someone born into poverty who is doing relatively well today – maybe even yourself. But doing better isn’t necessarily actual class advancement.  A slew of studies in recent years document the persistence of inequities that keep working-class people from achieving economic and social parity with their peers, even when similarly educated or occupied. 

One massive study in the UK found that even when those from working-class backgrounds land prestigious jobs, they earn, on average, 16% less than colleagues from privileged backgrounds.  Sociologists Daniel Laurison and Sam Friedman coined the term the class ceiling to describe this phenomenon. Drawing on 175 interviews with individuals from four relatively elite occupations – television, accountancy, architecture, and acting – they uncovered a complex system of barriers to class advancement.  Working-class people lack access to the social networks that give some employees an edge over others. They may not be familiar with “the rules of the game” and other cultural expectations. And of course, they also face outright discrimination based on accents and other instances of overt classism.  Yet some occupations are less classist than others, which provides some hope that we could, if we had the will, reduce or eliminate many of these barriers. 

Political scientist Nic Carnes has identified a similar class gap in political representation. In The Cash Ceiling,he argues that many from working-class backgrounds would be qualified to run for office. Indeed, there are more working-class Americans than middle-class Americans, and there are no educational or occupational requirements for becoming a politician.  Furthermore, working-class candidates do just as well as other candidates — when they run.  The problem, Carnes finds, is that they can’t run because of practical burdens like taking time off from work, but they are also passed over by political and civic leaders who prefer middle-class candidates.  Here again, social networks matter. 

My own research demonstrated similar obstacles for low-income, first-generation, working-class college students.  Even when they get into selective colleges and do well academically, they fare less well than their more privileged peers.  I argued that colleges often amplify pre-existing advantages, rather than ameliorate them.  Among many other factors, who you know matters in getting first (and subsequent) jobs, and working-class students simply do not have the same access to social networks as many of their peers.

Recently, the American Sociological Association’s Taskforce on First Generation and Working Class Persons in Sociology concluded a five year internal study of class discrimination and class impacts within the discipline.  The Taskforce’s Survey of ASA members showed significant classed outcomes influenced by compounding effects along the career path.  Sociologists from working-class backgrounds are less likely to hold long-term tenure track positions in top programs, in part because they didn’t attend “top tier” graduate programs, which in turn reflects that they didn’t go to elite undergraduate schools. And class absolutely affects that initial choice.  All along the way, class works in both obvious and subtle ways to limit advancement for persons of working-class origin.

Along with my fellow researchers José Muñoz and Elizabeth M. Lee, I have been interviewing graduate students and faculty in sociology who either grew up poor or working-class or were the first in their families to go to college.  The interviews reveal some obvious and subtle ways that class ceilings get imposed.  One of the striking findings so far is that many of us walk away from privilege and achievement for the opportunity to work in more familiar surroundings.  We’ve heard people say that they were just “more comfortable” working at the local regional college where the student body looks more like them and where they can “make a difference” in students’ lives.  Meanwhile, some who do work in more privileged private institutions or renowned flagship research-centered universities encounter a lot of classism and often resort to “hiding” a big part of their identities. 

At this point, you might wonder why you should care about whether highly educated successful people from the working class work in R1s or local colleges.  There are a couple of good reasons why you should.  First, much of the most influential research is produced at those “top” institutions, which confer professional access and power along with funding and attention.  If people of working-class origin aren’t involved in that work, academic knowledge about working-class people in general will always be incomplete and sometimes just wrong. We’ve seen how that worked with knowledge about gender, race, and sexuality. Recent history reminds us that the academic gaze on the working class has a tendency to exoticize its object.

Second, making the class ceiling visible can help put the final lie to the myth of meritocracy and enable us to create a new narrative about how America works and a better vision on how we want it to work. We could create a world where everyone can earn a decent wage for an honest day’s work, enough to raise a family find a place to live, and make a good life.

It is time to confront the core problem of the myth of meritocracy: it embraces a hierarchical system that distributes a decent living to a favored few and insists that others deserve to be left behind. Michael Young, the British sociologist who coined the term, warned us about the dangers of true meritocracies decades ago.  Inevitably, he cautioned, they would devolve into caste systems, where those born into educated families would reap the rewards of their parents’ and grandparents’ access to power while everyone else would be blamed for their impoverished lives.  Eventually, those at the bottom would rise up out of righteous anger and envy and topple the whole structure. 

That couldn’t actually happen, could it?

Allison L. Hurst, Oregon State University

Working Ourselves to Death: Why Increasing the Retirement Age is Bad

Photo by Florian Pépellin, protest march against the 2023 pension reform, taking place on Saturday Feb. 11, 2023, in Chambéry, Savoie, France

In France for the past three months, a million or more people have filled the streets of cities across the country in daily rolling protests and strikes opposing the national pension reform proposed by French president Emmanuel Macron. The plan would raise the age of eligibility for a government pension – in effect, the minimum retirement age — from 62 to 64. Although nearly two-thirds of the French people oppose this change and the French parliament did not have the votes to approve it, Macron unilaterally pushed it through. He claimed it was needed to respond to people living longer and the French government’s debt. Macron later narrowly avoided a no-confidence vote in the National Assembly, but protests continued by angry citizens.

In a story about a protest in the city of Metz, in northeastern France, not far from the German  border, the French daily newspaper Le Monde quoted two workers from a nearby power plant run by the giant French electrical utility EDF. One explained why he was protesting: “I’ve been on shift work there for 31 years, so I’m pretty fed up.” Another said that “We work all year round in noise, heat, with risks from chemicals and radiation. We won’t let our best years of retirement be stolen.”

Debates over how much a person works for wages are not new. In the United States, the National Labor Union called for an eight-hour workday starting in 1866. It wasn’t until 1940 that an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act gave us the 40-hour work week standard. Of course, there remains consistent pressure from employers to work longer days and longer weeks, although some employers and workers are floating the idea of a four-day work week.

How much work goes into a day or week is one question about work. But perhaps an even greater — and more existential — question is how much work goes into a lifetime? For the French (who seem to love existential questions), the answer found on many protest signs has been “64 years. It’s a No.”

For many Americans, 64 seems like a perfectly fine answer. After all, when the U.S. raised its age for full Social Security benefits from 65 to 67 in 1983, there were no protests to mark the occasion. The rationale for the change was similar to France’s: the Social Security fund was projected to run low on money in the coming decades.

Perhaps people didn’t protest because the 1983 law phased in the two-year increase over 22 years. The people affected most were in their 20s and likely weren’t paying attention. Forty years later,  those born in 1960 or after – the oldest of whom today are in their early 60s — are stuck with 67 as the age at which they can collect full social security benefits. If they retire earlier, say at 62, they’d receive only 70% of the full benefit. At 65, retirees get just 86.7% of the benefits they’d be eligible for if they kept working for two more years.

This all may sound very logical – as people live longer, they can work longer and hold off on receiving Social Security benefits they’ve paid into their whole working lives. But as the French protestors understand, working-class people often can’t stay on the job that long. And even if they could, they would have fewer years after their working lives to enjoy retirement.

People may live longer now, compared to decades ago, but it shouldn’t necessarily invite years of more work. A French study from 2021 found that postponing the retirement age results in more frequent and longer sick leave for older workers, “due to the gradual deterioration in the health status of workers at the end of their careers,” Le Monde reported.

It isn’t just the physical demands of many working-class jobs. It’s a class issue we can see if we look at the senior citizen country club set. As an extensive study by the Brookings Institution shows, “income is a strong predictor of life expectancy.”

The study explains the income effect in more detail, noting that “For example, 40-year-old men with incomes in the bottom 1 percent have an expected age at death of 72 years, while those with incomes in the top 1 percent have an expected age at death of 87 years—15 years longer.” The pattern plays out for women, as well.

Working-class people are likelier to live shorter lives, and many have started working full-time earlier than their middle-class counterparts, so they work more years before reaching age 67 and receiving full benefits. Worse, they may need to continue working even after that to survive, since Social Security alone often isn’t sufficient. Meanwhile, wealthier people may start their work lives later and have more years to draw upon Social Security.

Like most U.S. institutions, though, the Social Security Administration ignores economic class structures. Its Life Expectancy Calculator will give you the “average number of additional years a person can expect to live,” but it sidesteps measures of socioeconomic class. It only vaguely acknowledges that “estimates of additional life expectancy do not take into account a wide number of factors such as current health, lifestyle, and family history that could increase or decrease life expectancy.”

Yet other government data make clear that class does matter — even more than “lifestyle.” One key class-based factor is access to work-based retirement plans. Wealthier Americans are significantly more likely than working-class people to have defined pension plans to supplement their retirement income. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 88% of workers earning the highest 25 percent of income had access to such plans, compared with only 42% of the lowest-paid workers.

Unlike the French, Americans aren’t taking to the streets to fight for a better retirement. But labor unions have done so. 91% of union workers have access to a retirement plan versus 65% of nonunion workers. Of course, we all know that union membership is far lower today than it was a few decades ago, helped by federal and state laws that have made organizing and bargaining harder.

Similarly, decades of assaults on public and private pension plans have left about 47% of men and 50% of women ages 55 to 66 with zero retirement savings. Another 11% of men and 13% of women have less than $25,000 in retirement savings. While some people continue full or part-time work because they enjoy the activity or the social setting, millions simply can’t afford to stop working.

That helps explain why we are seeing more older people in the U.S. labor force. In 2001, people 65 and older constituted just 3.1% of the workforce. By 2021 it was 6.6%, and the BLS projects it to be 9.1% by 2031. Labor force participation for people 65 and over with no disability has continued to grow since 1996, peaking at 26% in 2020, dropping off some due to Covid, and now climbing again to reach 23.6%. So if you think you’ve seen more retirement-age people serving your food, ringing up your purchases, or answering business phones, you are correct.

Businesses also like having more older people in the workforce. A contributor to Forbes essentially argued that they are a fearful population ready to exploit: “Many of them are scared and wondering how they will match an ever-smaller looking income with ever-growing consumer prices.”

We should expect more proposals to raise the retirement age in the future. Some Republicans have already called for raising the Social Security retirement age to 70 for people born in 1978 or after. But that’s not the only way to address the Social Security fund’s solvency. An alternative solution would reverse the policy that enables a growing percentage of high-level income to evade Social Security taxes.

Raising the retirement age isn’t just about having the “best years of retirement be stolen,” as French protesters have warned. It’s about fairness, too, and not putting years more of the nation’s labor burden on the working class. Next time the government moves to raise the retirement age, we should follow the French example to protest and proclaim, “It’s a No.”

Christopher R. Martin, University of Northern Iowa

Governor DeWine: It’s Never Too Late to Do the Right Thing for Ohio’s Workers

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, the time is always right to do the right thing. In a case where formerly unemployed Ohioans are seeking the reinstatement of pandemic benefits, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has the opportunity to prove he can tell time.

Two years ago, DeWine terminated two Federal programs that would have provided 900 million dollars of enhanced unemployment compensation to workers affected by the pandemic. His callous, politically motivated decision needlessly heaped financial hardship on hundreds of thousands of Ohioans already devastated by COVID.

A lawsuit filed in July, 2021 challenged DeWine’s decision. The governor could have done the right thing then, but instead, over the past 20 months, he and Ohio Attorney General David Yost fought and lost multiple times — first in Common Pleas Court, then in the Tenth District Court of Appeals, and finally in the Ohio Supreme Court. Now the case is back in front of the trial judge who said back in 2021 that he would have ordered the state to accept the benefits but could not because DeWine and Yost had lodged an appeal with the Ohio Supreme Court.

How much longer will DeWine and Yost use the judicial system to wage war against the people they were elected to serve? I have no idea. I do, however, have a suggestion. Instead of wasting lots of time and taxpayer dollars plotting their next legal maneuver, they should devote a few hours to reading the thousands of messages posted on the DannLaw Facebook page by Ohioans who have been hurt by DeWine’s steadfast refusal to do the right thing.

Those messages make two things clear. First, his argument that cutting off the payments would discourage people from working was ludicrous. Many of the messages were written by distraught men and women who had never filed for unemployment in their lives and wanted desperately to return to work. They couldn’t because their companies or their jobs had been consumed by COVID. Those messages show how badly the economy was still struggling when DeWine cutoff the supplemental benefits. According to a study released by the Congressional Research Service, in July of 2021 the labor participation rate was below pre-pandemic levels, unemployment was higher, and aggregate employment remained 5.4 million jobs below pre-recession levels. That’s not exactly what anyone would call an environment rich in employment opportunities.

The messages also show that people are still suffering. Consider this: when COVID-19 hit 69% of Americans had $1,000 or less in savings and 45% had none at all. And while unemployment benefits helped millions weather the storm, many families spent what little savings they had but still fell behind on mortgage, auto loan, and credit card payments. They are now awash in debt that could be at least partially paid by the supplemental benefits the state refuses to disperse.

Combine that with high inflation and the end of several other pandemic assistance programs, including increased SNAP benefits, expanded Medicaid eligibility, rental assistance, mortgage forbearance, and universal free lunch programs, and it’s easy to understand why so many people tell us that they are on the brink of financial disaster.

Here is a sample of the heartrending comments I read every day:

This whole situation has made us seriously start talking about moving our family out of the state, because God forbid anything like Covid ever happens again, I can’t trust my state to take care of its people or put citizens above politics. An absolute shame.

I know people are getting more and more frustrated, believe me, my home is the next thing I’ll be losing because $4 an hour serving is just not pulling the money I need to catch up after losing my $20 an hour job because of Covid.

DeWine had no business taking this money away from the unemployed. I was one of them through no choice of my own. The first time in 45 years I ever filed for unemployment benefits. I appreciate all the efforts to get this money back to those that earned it.

Why does he [DeWine]hurt those that are truly in need?? What kind of man does that to people?? Normal functioning people do NOT go around destroying & hurting others I just need a little help. Not a handout. I don’t understand people who have so much and are in power & can make a positive difference in other lives refuse to do it. 

Ironically, as my firm battles to force DeWine to accept the available Federal funds, a subcommittee created by the General Assembly has been charged with ensuring that the funds remaining from $26 billion of Federal pandemic relief funding — money the state gladly pocketed — is used, as subcommittee co-chair Republican Jamie Callendar put it, in ways “consistent with the legislature’s will.” Anyone who knows anything about the GOP-dominated House and Senate knows that means the $7 billion left of those funds will be headed into the pockets of big business while Ohio working families face financial devastation.

Dr. King famously observed that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” With the stroke of a pen, Governor DeWine can bend that arc and improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The choice is, as it always has been, his.

Marc Dann

Marc Dann served as Attorney General of the State of Ohio and now leads DannLaw, which specializes in protecting consumers from various forms of predatory financing. He is also a founding partner of Advocate Attorneys.

Labor Spring 2023: Making Campuses Platforms for Labor Renewal

Everywhere you look this spring, you’ll find evidence that campuses are becoming sites of labor organizing and struggle.  In recent months, faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago staged recently a successful week-long strike, adjunct faculty at the New School won a three-week strike, 50,000 graduate assistants staged a six-week strike across the entire University of California system, staff at American University struck, and undergraduate workers at a growing number of campuses have begun organizing unions and, in some places, even preparing to strike.   And this is just a small sampling of what has been afoot.  

Now, just as the labor question is bubbling to the surface on campuses across the country, a movement is emerging to connect that energy across multiple campuses: Labor Spring.  At this writing more than 60 campuses in 30 states and the District of Columbia are hosting teach-ins and related educational and organizing events under this banner.  On February 28, the AAUP chapter at Rutgers University held a rally that included Chris Smalls of the Amazon Labor Union; Sara Nelson, of the Association of Flight Attendants; and Rutgers faculty, graduate assistants, and students, educating the campus in advance of a strike vote for the AAUP chapter, whose members have been working without a contract for over a year.  On March 1, Georgetown University students held a teach-in on the conditions face by food service and maintenance workers there. On March 3, the non-tenure track professors of Howard University joined with their allies to host a panel featuring long-time race and economic justice advocate Bill Fletcher, Jr.  The Duke Graduate Student Union was featured in an event at Duke University Law School on March 7. 

Similar events will unfold non-stop in coming weeks.  United Students Against Sweatshops will lead a teach-in at the University of Maryland on March 14 in which students will engage in a mock collective bargaining session.  Georgetown Law is hosting one on March 20 featuring Starbucks workers and leaders such as Erica Smiley of Jobs with Justice, Sara Steffens of the Communications Workers of America, Elissa McBride of AFSCME, and the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, Jennifer Abruzzo.  Many other events are still being planned. The Labor Spring website has a complete list of participating campuses and their events. 

These events are reviving the teach-in tradition that was forged in the 1960s by civil rights, students’ rights, and anti-war activists.  In some ways, the Labor Spring teach-ins can be seen as a reprise of labor teach-ins that were held in 1996, following reformer John Sweeney’s election to the presidency of the AFL-CIO.  Sweeney, who won the first contested election in the labor federation’s history, made it a priority to heal the lingering divisions that had developed between unions and student activists in the era of the Vietnam War. In the summer of 1996 Sweeney’s AFL-CIO launched Union Summer, an effort patterned after the rights movement’s 1964 Freedom Summer, appealing to young people to get a taste of labor organizing. That fall, a series of labor teach-ins were held at Columbia University, the University of Virginia, and eight other campuses that built on Union Summer’s appeal.  The New York Times likened the Columbia teach-in to a rock concert. As Steve Fraser and Josh Freeman, two of the organizers of that Columbia event, recently recalled, those teach-ins helped overcome the by then decades long estrangement that had developed between organized labor and the left.

The 1996 labor teach-ins planted important seeds. They led to the formation of Scholars, Artists and Writers for Worker Justice (SAWSJ), which in turn helped create the Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA) in 1998. The teach-ins also helped propel organizing efforts by graduate assistants in the University of California system, paving the way for a system-wide strike in December 1998 which led to the union’s successful election of graduate assistants at UCLA, Berkeley, and six other UC campuses in 1999.  It also contributed to the formation of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), the Worker Rights Consortium, and even the 1999 Battle of Seattle, that brought together the “Teamsters and turtles” alliance of labor, environmentalist, and anti-corporate-globalization movement against the World Trade Organization. 

Unfortunately, the labor revival that began to coalesce at that time was short-lived.  The Supreme Court’s December 12, 2000, decision handing the presidency to Republican George W. Bush followed nine months later by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, threw these nascent efforts into disarray.  The crash of 2008, the Great Recession, and most recently, the COVID pandemic made it difficult for the movement to recapture the energy that has been coalescing among labor and young people in the late 1990s.  

Now, however, abundant evidence suggests that the obstacles that had delayed a resurgence of campus-based labor activism are giving way.  Just how much present conditions favor the revival of campus-based labor activism is demonstrated by the breadth of support for Labor Spring. 

While the 1996 labor teach-ins focused on a small group of mostly elite campuses, the teach-ins taking place this spring are happening on a broad cross-section of campuses across the nation.  Geographically, Labor Spring will take place on dozens of public and private campuses from Massachusetts to Hawaii.  Teach-ins will occur in states of varying political character, from the union-dense blue states like New York and California to anti-union red state bastions such as Idaho and Alabama.  Public institutions both large and small, from the University of Michiganto New York’s Dutchess Community College, will host events.  So will small liberal arts schools like the College of the Holy Cross and HBCUs like Tuskegee University.  A range of law schools — including the City University of New York, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford—will host events.  So will Vanderbilt Divinity School and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

That such widespread interest in labor is coming to such a broad spectrum of campuses at precisely the moment when so many who work on campuses—including undergraduates— are beginning to identify as workers and recognize the value of organizing is a potentially momentous development. Higher education constitutes one of the “commanding heights” of our present day economy.  In many places campuses serve as “anchor institutions” in their communities: their practices broadly influence local labor markets for good or ill. They can act as engines of economic development, job creation, social mobility, and inclusivity. Yet they can also exacerbate the worst tendencies of 21^st century capitalism: they saddle students with ballooning debt, they contract out an increasing number of services to lower-waged workers, they rely increasingly on the precarious labor of adjunct instructors, and they are too often ruled by boards of trustees and regents who have benefitted the most from the trends of financialization, tax evasion by the wealthy, and surging inequality that are weakening higher education overall. 

If Labor Spring can coalesce and magnify the interest in labor organization that we’ve been witnessing both on and adjacent to campuses over recent months, then we are bound to see an exciting year of organizing ahead.

Joseph A. McCartin. Georgetown University

Joseph A. McCartin is professor of history and executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.  His most recent book, co-edited with Luis Aguiar, is Purple Power: The History and Global Impact of SEIU.

Why Veterans in Labor Should Not Be Ignored

Even in the era of identity politics, one category of identity has largely been ignored: what UK journalist Joe Glenton calls “veteranhood.”19 million former soldiers — most of them working class — share a strong sense of personal identity as vets, but the media usually notices them only when they are involved in right-wing militias, white supremacist groups, and other MAGA-land formations. Some have noted their over-representation in U.S. law enforcement, which does reinforce  militarized policing, along with the better known Pentagon-to-police equipment pipeline.

Largely ignored is the positive role veterans from working-class backgrounds have played in key labor and political struggles since the mid-20^th century.  In the heyday of industrial unionism in the 1950s and ‘60s, tens of thousands of World War II veterans could be found on the front-lines of labor struggles in auto, steel, electrical equipment manufacturing, mining, trucking, and the telephone industry.  Today, about 1.3 million former service members work in union jobs, and women and people of color make up the fastest growing cohorts in these ranks.

Veterans at a CWA Common Defense Organizing weekend institute

Veterans are, according to the AFL-CIO, more likely to join a union than non-veterans. In a half dozen states, 25% or more of working veterans belong to unions. Vermont AFL-CIO President David Van Deusen sees veterans as “an underutilized resource for the labor movement,” particularly in high-profile organizing campaigns. No one, he believes, is better positioned to “expose the hypocrisy and duplicity of ‘veteran-friendly’ firms like Amazon and Walmart, who wrap themselves in the flag, while violating the rights of working-class Americans who served in uniform and the many who did not.” 

That’s why former SEIU organizer Jane McAlevey recommends that unions today learn from the example of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the post-war era. . CIO organizers understood that former soldiers have “strategic value” in strike-related PR campaigns. Veterans also have “experience with discipline, military formation, and overcoming fear and adversity,” all very useful on militant picket-lines.

Tony Mazzocchi was a good example. After World War II,  he became a catalyst for change within the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW) and the broader labor movement for five decades. A survivor of the Battle of the Bulge, Mazzocchi spearheaded labor’s fight for the 1972 Occupational Safety and Health Act, which now provides workplace protections for 130 million Americans.  During his storied career, Mazzocchi also campaigned for civil rights, nuclear disarmament, labor-based environmentalism, and single-payer health care.

Mazzocchi also helped found the Labor Party in the 1990s and popularize the demand that public higher education should be free for all. He was inspired by the liberating experience of veterans from his generation, who were able to attend college as a result of the original GI Bill, which he regarded as “one of the most revolutionary pieces of legislation in the 20th century.” According to his biographer  Les Leopold, Mazzocchi believed that an all-inclusive 21st-century version of the GI Bill could plant the “seeds of the good life” for millions of poor and working-class Americans today.

Today’s veterans continue to fight to make college accessible for more people. For example, Will Fischer, who served in Iraq as a Marine before becoming director of the afl-cio Union Veterans’ Council, was able “to graduate from college and do so without the yoke of student debt.” Fischer favors universalizing such benefits. He’d like  all student debt canceled and public higher education, including vocational schools, made tuition-free. As Fischer  sees it, this would free lower-income young people from having to choose between “putting on a uniform and participating in never-ending U.S. wars or taking on crushing debt.”

Vets have also worked within organized labor to create and promote targeted job opportunities.  Fischer’s successor at the Veterans Council is Will Attig, a member of UA Local 160, Plumbers and Pipefitters in southern Illinois,  He helps fellow Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans find building trades jobs through the  Helmets to Hardhats program.  Attig also introduced the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the IBEW to Common Defense, a post 9/11 veterans group, which has helped train members of CWA’s “Veterans for Social Change” network. Unveiled three years ago by CWA President Chris Shelton, a former telephone worker who served in the Air Force, this program seeks to “develop and organize a broad base of union activists who are veterans and/or currently serving in the military.”

As CWA notes, veterans, active-duty service members, and military families “are constantly exploited by politicians and others who seek to loot our economy, attack our communities, and divide our nation with racism and bigotry so they can consolidate more power amongst themselves.” CWA hopes to counter this on-going right-wing threat by encouraging veterans in its own ranks to engage in grassroots campaigns with community allies.

That includes working with veterans fighting privatization in two of the federal agencies that employ many former soldiers, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which serves nine million patients in the nation’s largest public healthcare system, and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), which delivers mail to 163 million homes and businesses. Both have long been the target of corporate-backed efforts to reduce their staff, downsize their operations, and outsource their functions to politically connected private firms. 

During the Trump Administration, right-wing political appointees at the VA launched a major assault on the workplace rights of 300,000 workers represented by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), National Nurses United (NNU), and other unions. A White House advisory panel on the future of the Post Office called for the elimination of collective bargaining to help pave the way for privatization and job cuts that would affect more than 100,000 veterans.  

Like privatization foes at the VA, the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) and the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) have tried to counter-out-sourcing threats through a grassroots campaign which declares “The US Mail Not for Sale!” As part of their collective resistance  to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Trump appointee still on the job under Joe Biden, postal unions and their allies are fighting for better utilization of public infrastructure, rather than its dismantling and sale to the highest bidder. And among the leaders of that effort is a former Marine, Keith Combs, president of  a Detroit-based APWU local with 1,500 members.

One-fifth of the postal workers threatened  by privatization efforts are Black, like many who belong to Combs’ local For them and other participants in these  labor-community campaigns,  multiple identities come into play in their labor activism. NNU member Mildred Manning-Joy is a VA nurse in Durham, N.C. and, like one-third of the VA’s care-giving workforce, a veteran herself. She’s also the mother of a VA patient. Multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq left her son with “the invisible scars of his time in combat.” Last spring, Manning-Joy was among the many unionized VA care-givers around the country who enlisted patients and their families, veterans’ groups, and other labor organizations in a successful fight to block President Joe Biden’s proposed closing of many VA facilities.

Similarly, 38-year old Iraq war veteran Adam Pelletier transitioned from the Marine Corps to public sector union jobs—becoming a shop steward, AFGE local president, and then labor council leader in Troy, N.Y. After using the GI bill to finish college, Pelletier joined the Social Security Administration, where he and his co-workers assisted retired and disabled Americans who depend on federal benefits. Meanwhile, as a VA patient himself, he was active in AFGE’s campaign to “Save The VA” from would-be privatizers.

In upstate NY, Pelletier has  confronted members of Congress who favor VA out-sourcing and has become a valued advisor to the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute, a Bay Area-based research group that works closely with AFGE and Veterans for Peace (which Pelletier has joined, along with  Democratic Socialists of America).

“Congress continually votes to outsource VA services, pushing people into more expensive and less effective care,” Pelletier said, in a message to fellow Labor Council members last year. “They do this instead of adequately funding the VA and looking at it as the model by which we could all, someday, enjoy universal health care. We must mobilize to stop this!”

Just as Tony Mazzocchi was a key builder of late-20^th century alliances between labor, peace, environmental, and healthcare reform groups, younger post-9/11 veterans like those profiled above are following in his footsteps, by forging similar connections to broader social movements. Their example shows that progressives should recognize the important role that former soldiers can play as a working class counter-weight to right-wing “veteranhood” and its malign discontents.

Steve Early

Steve Early has been active in the Communications Workers of America since 1980 and is the co-author (with Suzanne Gordon and Jasper Craven) of Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs from Duke University Press. He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com