Best Read for Labor Day 2016

Lane Windham

Best Read for Labor Day 2016: Tamara Draut's Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America (Doubleday, 2016)

Like me, are you bone weary of hearing non-stop news coverage of Donald Trump? Do you roll your eyes when the pundits “discover” the working class at election time, and then groan when you realize that by “working class” they really only mean white guys? Are you itching for an entirely different public conversation?

Tamara Draut’s Sleeping Giant offers a sharp and widely-accessible discussion about the future of America’s working class, and so brings welcome relief in this election season. Her premise is that there is a “new” working class, compared to that of thirty years ago, that is more racially and ethnically diverse, more female and more likely to work in retail and service. Pointing to the Fight for $15 and the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, Draut posits that this “sleeping giant” may be in the beginning of effecting larger social and economic change.

In a swift and conversational style, Sleeping Giant distills much of the current research on inequality, bad jobs, and precarious work, and couples it with original interviews with workers and activists. We learn, for instance, that only five of the thirty fastest-growing U.S. occupations will require a bachelor’s degree; so much for the elite’s insistence that education will be the great leveler. The chapter on the “New Indignity of Work” could serve as an undergraduate primer for perils in today’s economy such as subcontracting, just in time scheduling, franchises and the “1099” independent contractor relationship.

Unlike many in the punditry class, Draut has read her history, and we see the work of Nelson Lichtenstein, Kim Phillips-Fein, and Judith Stein woven in here as she traces how America’s working people became so economically insecure. She tackles the legacy of racial and ethnic exclusion, and correctly finds great hope in the combination of the immigrant workers’ rights, fair wage and racial justice movements of today.

Yet in Draut’s insistence that today’s is a “new” working class with a new level of activism, she ultimately may do the “sleeping giant” a disservice. First, such a framing erases the extent to which people of color and women have long struggled and organized as part of the working class, as wage workers, enslaved people, and through their neighborhoods and families. In the long arc of history, mid-twentieth century steelworkers were anything but normative. Fight for $15 activists are part of a centuries-long struggle against capitalism, and they should benefit from owning that.

Second, Draut misses the major working-class activism of the 1970s. What we are seeing today is not a “new” working class, but a continued reconfiguration of the working class that started in the 1970s and grew from changes wrought by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As these women of all backgrounds and men of color got new access to the full employment market in the 1970s, they made up a reshaped American working class that organized for more social and economic justice, including by pushing to form private sector unions. Draut covers how employers ramped up their resistance to unions in the 1970s, but somehow skips the decade’s worker’s movements that inspired the corporate resistance. When we re-write the 1970s struggles back into the story, it becomes more clear that today’s labor activists are part of a much longer movement by women and people of color to gain full access to the New Deal’s economic promise, a story that grows more even more rich with the inclusion of new immigrants since 1980.

Despite these omissions, this is a commendable and inspiring book that covers an enormous amount of material in a short space. Do yourself a favor this Labor Day: put down the Washington Post and pick up a copy of Draut’s Sleeping Giant.

Lane Windham holds a Ph.D. in U.S. History and is a fellow with Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

The Global Threat from the Right: Labor's Trans-Atlantic Conversation

The Global Threat from the Right: Labor’s Trans-Atlantic Conversation

By Lane Windham
for LaborOnline, the Labor and Working-Class History Association blog

The timing couldn’t have been more apt: a trans-Atlantic conference on the rise of the right, just days after Donald Trump became the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee.

Leaders from the labor movement in ten nations gathered to strategize in the face of the new threat from the right. That threat’s drivers are clear: a dangerous fear of immigrants coupled with an overwhelming sense of economic dislocation among working people.

But how much of today’s populist right-wing turn is truly economic, and how much is more based in xenophobia and racism? U.S. progressives have been divided on this question. The New York Times’s Paul Krugman, for instance, recently argued that Trump’s rise isn’t mainly about “economic anxiety,” but is more driven by white resentment about race. In fact, Trump’s supporters come from a broad economic spectrum; their median income is higher than that of the U.S., though lower than the Republican median income.

Yet the extent to which economic and racial / ethnic issues are deeply intertwined across the globe was center stage at the May 10 conference, co-sponsored by the AFL-CIO, Working America and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a non-profit German foundation.

Participants in country after country described how the rising populist right is a reaction to the neoliberal policies that were the bulwark of the right wing for the last 30 years - - policies that the left elite also often embraced. Too few political and economic elite addressed the issues of dislocation by trade, the new “precarious” work and the shifting of the entire economic relationship.

Economic anxiety feeds the anti-immigrant sentiments. As Thorben Albrecht, State Secretary of the German Labor Ministry put it, the resentment against refugees grows in part from the fact that there has not been sufficient attention paid to housing, schools and jobs, even before the massive migration waves. It was a sentiment echoed by the AFL-CIO’s Policy Director Damon Silvers: “An ambitious economic agenda… has been kept off the political playing field by the hegemony of the neo-liberal agenda.”

“Don’t blame and shame workers,” urged Luca Visentini, the Italian who is now General Secretary of the ETUC (European Trade Union Confederation). Rather, he argued that labor and the left must offer viable alternatives for tackling the systemic economic problems. It’s not enough to just be against austerity, he argued. We must understand that the people attracted to the right, especially young people, truly do not feel protected in the market.


So what is to be done?

In the immediate future, the conference participants discussed the need to have a new level of conversations with working people. Neither false promises nor moralizing will work; rather, labor must engage people on the issues that matter most to them. Karen Nussbaum, director of Working America, described talking with working people in Pennsylvania who were all over the map in their support of presidential candidates. She sees there an opening to talk with many people who may have been closed to a left-leaning message in the past.

Antonia Bance, head of Campaigns of Communications of the TUC (Trade Union Congress) in the UK, pointed with great hope to the recent election of Sadiq Khan as London’s mayor. A British Muslim, he campaigned on improving public housing and transportation, and pushing back against extremism.

Sharan Burrow, the Australian who serves as General Secretary of the ITUC (International Trade Union Confederation), offered a long-term solution: building a new “global architecture” for labor that will hold corporations accountable and will demand a new level of economic sustainability, including on issues of climate.

The May 10 conference was primarily a North America / European conversation. What might global South trade unionists have brought to the conversation on the political push from the right? Perhaps an expanded conference will be next on labor’s agenda.

Lane Windham is a post-doctoral scholar with Penn State University’s Center for Global Workers’ Rights. She has also worked as a union organizer and communicator. Her book, Knocking on Labor’s Door, is forthcoming from UNC Press in 2017.

Let Penn State Grad Students Decide on Whether to Form a Union

My latest piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Penn State's decision to enlist its faculty in resisting their graduate employees' efforts to unionize. Spoiler alert: I'm not with the administration on this one.



By Lane Windham


A directive on how to fight graduate employees’ unionization efforts was the last thing I expected Penn State University’s Graduate School to plop in my email in-box on Friday morning. Yet there it was. Under the heading of “Guidance for faculty and other supervisors of graduate student assistants,” the document clearly seeks to enlist faculty and staff in its resistance to graduate employees’ burgeoning union campaign at State College.

The Coalition of Graduate Employees at Penn State launched a union organizing drive in February, gathering on the steps of Old Main to sign union cards one chilly morning to assert their basic freedom to form a union. There are 3,500 such graduate employees who work as research and teaching assistants, helping the work of the state’s flagship university campus hum along. They grade the papers, teach the discussion groups and staff the research labs that turn out the university’s cutting-edge research.

Yet these workers receive stipends that do not cover basic living expenses and have suffered recent cutbacks in their health care coverage. They say they do not feel respected by the university and would like to have an independent voice, and so are gathering union cards in an effort to trigger a union election under the Pennsylvania Public Employee Relations Act.

Many people will agree with these graduate employees’ choice. Others may not. Yet everyone should respect their freedom to make their own choice on a union. Everyone except Penn State, it seems.

I’m a post-doctoral scholar at Penn State, and the graduate school’s “guidance” document contains the same kind of boilerplate, union-busting language I routinely see in my historical research on anti-union companies and law firms in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, Penn State follows the typical “managing to stay nonunion” script verbatim.

The memo assures faculty members that they are free to “explain some of the known aspects of belonging to a union” such as strikes, dues and initiation fees. It encourages faculty to “inform” graduate employees that “the university does not have to honor their current arrangements” if the employees form a union. Union-avoidance lawyers typically call this bargaining from scratch. The administration urges faculty to tell graduate employees about “the competitive nature” of their stipends and benefits, and to tout the benefits they presently “enjoy.”

Of course, Penn State lawyers have made sure the university covered the legal bases. My “guidance” email makes clear that faculty should not threaten, interrogate, make promises or conduct surveillance, as these actions are illegal. Yet it also urges faculty to explain to graduate assistants “what would change with unionization versus the current state, such as currently being able to work directly with faculty mentors regarding scheduling and other matters … ” If you heard that from your faculty adviser, wouldn’t you see this as a veiled threat?

Many Penn State faculty members and staff support employees’ freedom to make their own choice on unionization, and these faculty members now have a decision to make. What will they do in reaction to the administration’s directive on graduate student unionization?

Penn State graduate employees are not alone in their efforts to form a union. Graduate employees at Temple University have a union, as do those at six of the 14 schools in the Big Ten. Thirty-two universities nationwide have graduate-employee unions. Graduate employees in many states are organizing because they know that with a collective bargaining agreement they will earn more and have a greater say in their working conditions.

Penn State alumni, parents, faculty, staff and students should urge the administration to remain neutral on graduate employees’ efforts to form a union. The university does not need to support the graduate employees’ efforts, but neither should it put up a fight. Any administration claim that it was simply trying to “inform” its faculty about the union is disingenuous, given the cookie cutter, anti-union language of its “guidance” letter. The administration might have offered faculty real advice on how to stay neutral on the union question; instead, Penn State chose the low road.

Lane Windham is a post-doctoral scholar with Penn State’s Center for Global Workers’ Rights in the School of Labor and Employment Relations. Her forthcoming book, “Knocking on Labor’s Door,” is due out from UNC Press in 2017.

Workers: Beware “Reformers” Bearing Gifts

by Lane Windham

(Below is my latest piece from The Hill's Congress Blog)

Anyone earning a paycheck these days knows good and well that the economy has changed. Call it the Uber or gig economy, call it subcontracting, call it part-time America. Even if we’ve been at the same job for 30 years, we watch nervously as our kids and their friends enter jobs in which a fair wage and employer-provided benefits are neither secure nor certain. The old laws that governed the workplace no longer seem to apply; a precarious work world is our new normal, and we’re not sure what it all means or where it’s headed.

Right-wing politicians and activists are quickly stepping into that space created by our own uncertainty, offering labor law “reforms” that purport to address the new economy. Yet people who work for a living should be wary of the giant horse that such proponents are so eager to roll through the new economy’s gates. In fact, many of these “reforms” have been around for more than 40 years, and have long been designed to shore up corporate power in the face of workers’ collective action.

On December 18 in The Hill, a former George H.W. Bush appointee to the National Labor Relations Board called for evaluating and renovating American labor law, arguing that the law is a “relic” that no longer serves. In fact, our nation’s central labor law does need multiple, urgent fixes. Part-time workers, temps, and people who work for sub-contractors find themselves excluded entirely from its protections, for example. So do the legions of “supervisors” who do little more than coordinate the assembly of hamburgers or pizzas.

Yet John Raudabaugh addresses none of these shortcomings. Rather, he focuses on the so-called “Employee Rights Act,” legislation sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) that eerily mirrors elements of “The Employee Bill of Rights Act” of 1977. Decades ago, conservative Republicans like Hatch pushed this anti-union legislation that included a prohibition on employees and employers coming to their own agreement about a union, for example, absent a government-sponsored election. That’s a provision that has popped up yet again in Hatch’s “new” proposed law, and it could be particularly onerous to today’s workers who need all the flexible tools they can get to help them renegotiate their relationships with their employers. Extremists like Hatch have been at this game a long time. A young Orrin Hatch was the driving force in 1978 behind the 19-day Senate filibuster that blocked that decade’s common-sense labor reforms - - reforms that would have strengthened workers’ ability to organize and bargain in those crucial years when our economy first started to globalize.

Raudabaugh also laments the National Labor Relations Board’s recent efforts to make labor law serve today’s workplaces, such as by holding franchises more accountable as employers or allowing smaller units of workers to form unions at big workplaces. Both laudable fixes give would give workers more bargaining power, and that’s what right-wing ideologues fear the most.

The U.S.’s central 21st-century workplace challenge is to build new rules that match the economy’s latest iteration, yet that do not put all of the uncertainty on to working people’s backs. Our nation is currently having a much-needed debate about just how to do that. Labor leaders, Silicon Valley start-ups and foundations have all been jumping into the fray, offering ideas to give workers more portable benefits, to reclassify on-demand workers, or for a $15 national minimum wage. These proposals are neither perfect nor comprehensive, but they are a good start. They deserve a central place in the presidential campaigns, for instance.

What America’s workers do not need, however, is a warmed-over, 40-year-old right-wing agenda that is meant to gut workers’ unions. Enough of that. It’s time to move on, and build a 21st economy that works for everyone.

Lane Windham, Ph.D., is a labor and working-class historian and post-doctoral scholar with The Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Global Workers’ Rights.

Why Labor Law Should Stop Leaning So Hard on the Wagner Act

Lane Windham

Here's my latest post, originally titled "Take a Load Off, Wagner."  It's about how our society expects labor law to do far too much for citizens' social welfare.  In honor of the 80th anniversary of Wagner's signing on July 5, 1935:

Why Labor Law Should Stop Leaning So Hard on the Wagner Act

Make 2016 About Minimum Wage Ballot Initiatives

2014 Election Analysis:

Make 2016 About Minimum Wage Ballot Initiatives

Lane Windham

Democrats and progressives can take one key lesson away from the 2014 Republicans’ rout: Americans want a raise, and will vote for minimum wage ballot initiatives even in red-leaning states. Minimum wage increases passed in Arkansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and Alaska - - even as voters in each of these states also elected a Republican senator.

A whopping 67 percent of Alaskans voted to increase the minimum wage to $9.75 by 2016 - - yes, that’s Sarah Palin’s state. Voters in the Deep South’s Arkansas voted 65 percent for a minimum wage increase, and in Nebraska 59 percent of voters chose to up the minimum.

What’s going on here? After all, Democrats support a minimum wage. President Obama has been pushing for a $10.10 minimum. So why are voters turning down the candidates who support a raise, while voting for the raise itself?

People are still struggling economically – not only in the U.S., but around the world. They need their elected leaders to have big, bold plans for shared prosperity in an age in which new economic structures mean fewer jobs and more inequality. As Harold Meyerson writes in some of the most insightful election analysis out there, the Democrats find themselves in the same quandary as center left parties throughout the world. They are “parties that purport to be the economic advocates of the middle and working classes, but preside over abysmal economies with no clear sense of how to make them better.” We need a new social compact, and tinkering around the edges won’t do it.

It turns out that when the gods who run elections gave voters a chance to vote for good economic policy, they grabbed that chance. Voters essentially went underneath political parties who they perceive as not serving their economic needs.

So let’s give voters even more opportunities to vote for a minimum wage. Let’s make 2016 the year of the minimum wage ballot initiative. (After all, there is now virtually no chance of Congress raising it on a federal level any time soon.) A nationwide push for minimum wage ballot initiatives will not only give working people a much-needed raise, but will serve to bring out the young people, people of color and working-class voters the Democrats will need to win office. If Democrats offer a more robust economic plan, many of those ballot voters may stick with the party.

Some states, like North Carolina, don’t allow statewide ballot initiatives. There, both houses must vote by a super majority to refer a constitutional amendment. So, go local. Cities like Raleigh and Greensboro both can pass their own referendums - - and both are cities with the sorts of voters Democrats need to turn out.

Democrats still need a big economic vision, and minimum wage ballot initiatives aren’t a full platform. Yet such initiatives do seem to be a tool that America’s voters will support - - even those who are seeing red.

Caution: Making a Living While Black

Lane Windham

After the events of Ferguson, I was inspired to write a Labor Day piece about the deep-seated economic divide. It ran in the Baltimore Sun today. The piece is below:

Caution: Making a Living While Black

Though we’ve narrowed the racial divide since the days of segregation, the economic divide between whites and blacks has been remarkably persistent for the last 40 years. We live in a nation in which if you’re black, you likely earn less, have less wealth and are less likely to hold a job than someone who is white. This Labor Day, let’s take a moment to reflect on the dangers of trying to make a living while black in the United States.

We should be shocked by the fact that the unemployment gap between African-Americans and whites is virtually unchanged from that of 40 years ago. If you’re black, you’re still twice as likely as a white person to be unemployed, virtually the same gap as in 1972, according to government statistics. In Baltimore, you’re even a bit worse off, according to a recent study by the National Urban League; the black unemployment rate of 15 percent there is more than double the white rate of 6 percent.

Once employed, working while black is risky behavior. African-American workers are likely to earn less than whites -- black weekly wages are 78 percent of white wages. This affects not only black workers, of course, but entire families. The median family income for America’s black workers is 60 percent of white workers, and in Baltimore, it’s only 54 percent. The wealth gap is even worse. White families tend to have a more forgiving financial cushion to protect them in tough times. They’re more likely to own their homes, for instance, and to have ample savings. The recent recession hit black families hard. Before the recession, in 2007, whites had 4.3 times as much wealth as blacks. By 2010, the white wealth advantage grew to six times that of African-Americans.

There has been progress. A larger percentage of the nation’s well-paid professionals are African-American -- 7.4 percent, up from 5.7 percent in 1990. Still, African-Americans are over-represented in the nation’s worst jobs. Far too many black workers struggle to cobble together a series of low-wage, precarious service jobs in order to make ends meet.

We do have tools that can address our nation’s persistent racial economic divide. First, we can recognize that we need a new social contract for the 21st century, one offering a more secure safety net for workers in the kinds of part-time, low-wage jobs that workers of color are more likely to hold. For instance, we should consider building a more robust federal retirement system and child care reimbursements which workers can access across jobs. In addition, we can build a more rational system to handle unemployment. Most of the Western nations with whom the U.S. competes economically have a federal unemployment system. We have a patched-together state system which covers less than half of the nation’s unemployed, a deficit that disproportionately affects black workers and their families. Finally, we can restore all workers’ freedom to form unions. A union contract helps black workers narrow the racial divide. A black worker with a union made 27 percent more per hour than black workers who weren’t in unions, according the government statistics for 2008 through 2013.

”What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. asked Memphis strikers and labor supporters in 1968, days before his death. Baltimore was among the first segregated cities in the nation to desegregate public accommodations, opening up lunch counters and restrooms in March of 1960. Yet today, too many of the city’s -- and the nation’s -- African-Americans still lag behind economically. King knew that racism and violence take many forms, and are found in far more places than the end of a gun. This Labor Day - - especially as we begin to parse the full meaning of the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri - - we should carefully consider how to remedy the injury inflicted by our nation’s unremitting racial economic divide.

Lane Windham is a PhD candidate in U.S. history at the University of Maryland. Contact her at lanewindham@gmail.com or @LaneWindham.

You can view the story on the Sun's website by clicking here: Caution: Making a Living While Black