It’s Now or Never for Wisconsin Workers

Posted on March 10, 2011 by Erik Loomis

After more than three weeks of protest, Wisconsin Republicans finally found a way to push through their draconian labor bill stripping public workers of collective bargaining rights. Governor Scott Walker falsely claimed collective bargaining had to end for budget reasons. Everyone knew this was a lie. Walker proved us right tonight when he separated the bargaining issues from the budget because the finance bill requires a larger quorum to bring to a vote. Walker and his legislative henchmen know no boundaries in their declaration of class war upon Wisconsin workers.

Never mind the vote’s questionable legality due to laws requiring a 24-hour notice before voting on bills before a conference committee. Walker is determined to crush labor by any means necessary. If this move doesn’t work, he will resort to another deception. In any case, unions will take the law to court immediately so Walker hasn’t won yet.

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Rethinking Work: service industry labor and the face of SEIU

Posted on April 23, 2010 by Sarah Jaffe

When Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union and Barack Obama’s most frequent guest at the White House, announced last week that he was stepping down, it sent ripples across the political media, particularly the progressive side, and through organized labor.

Stern was a controversial leader, forging a split with the AFL-CIO and inspiring such animosity among parts of the labor movement that he joked to Katrina vanden Heuvel: “I would be the only labor leader nominated for Labor Secretary who labor would oppose.” Continue reading →

Rethinking Work: cooking as labor

Posted on March 9, 2010 by Sarah Jaffe

Food politics are sweeping the United States. The local food movement, the slow food movement, all of it embodied in periodic sweeping pieces from lead guru Michael Pollan, whose writing is lush and pretty enough to make you feel the sensual pleasure he takes in his food—from procuring to cooking to eating, though rarely growing/killing.

Pollan and other foodies want to return to a world where cooking isn’t just an afterthought or something we pay others to do. But too often these food evangelists forget a couple of important factors. One of them being that cooking is work. Continue reading →

Rethinking Work: art as labor

Posted on January 26, 2010 by Sarah Jaffe

In my recent piece on activism as labor, I briefly touched on the connections between art and street activism, and promised to get back to that soon. I do think that in a discussion of art as labor, we need to look at other purposes art is supposed to serve and ask if that feeds Western culture and especially the United States’s devaluing of art as vocation.

Earlier this year, the second target of FOX News pundit Glenn Beck’s modern-McCarthyist campaign against Obama staffers was Yosi Sergant, director of communications at the National Endowment for the Arts. Sergant came out of the Obama campaign and was responsible for the Shepard Fairey HOPE poster and many other collaborations with the campaign and young, hip artists. Continue reading →

Rethinking Work: sex work as labor

Posted on December 4, 2009 by Sarah Jaffe

This is the first in Sarah Jaffe’s series, Rethinking Work. See her introduction for more information.

When rethinking work and what we consider work, many jobs that come to mind. Yet few are as fraught with tension and debate as sex work. Having sex, simulating sex, or implying sex for money is denigrated, threatened, questioned by the puritan Right and supposedly radical feminists alike, and yet so often the debate misses the point entirely.

Sure, sex work isn’t a job that most people dream of having. Neither is domestic labor, working at McDonald’s, being a waitress, or even being a secretary. Yet no one feels the need to write screeds about how degrading it is to humanity, or more often women, that people are forced to do those jobs. Continue reading →

On work: the peculiar state of the U.S. labor market, and more

Posted on November 22, 2009 by Sarah Jaffe

The global economy seems to have climbed down off the ledge where it was perched for the last part of 2008 and beginning of 2009, teetering precariously on the verge of falling. Newspapers trumpet increases in productivity and GDP growth, and the banks are giving record bonuses.

Yet unemployment numbers in the United States reached 10.2 percent officially and unofficially are closer to 17 or 18 percent, it’s no longer time to talk about jobless recovery. It’s time to realize that without jobs there is no recovery.

And yet, what is a job? What does it mean, to work? The labor movement, since its inception, has many times redefined work, moving from mostly industrial workers toward service employees and other low-wage workers, organizing janitors and security guards and nurses and teachers.

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Reconcile U.S. football culture with progressive politics? Yeah, right

Posted on November 21, 2009 by Feature Writer

I’m writing from Eugene, Oregon, where I have come for my yearly reunion with college friends. Each year we meet to watch a University of Oregon football game, reliving the many games we watched in college. I love football. One of my first memories is of watching the 1979 NFC Championship game between the Los Angeles Rams and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. You can say I was raised on the sport.

But as a progressive, I’ve had a complex relationship with the game for years. As much as I love it, I have an awfully hard time overcoming football’s terrible political ramifications. In fact, it stands for nearly everything that I oppose. As a labor historian, I am sensitive to how the game exploits its players. The NCAA refuses to pay players even a pittance while they make billions of dollars off the athletes. These young men technically get a free education, but many schools devalue that educational experience and make it quite clear why these students are on scholarship. Too often coaches give athletes the message, “work too hard in school and no playing time for you.”

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Obama, online organizing, FISA and the internet’s political future

Posted on February 21, 2009 by Feature Writer

Barack Obama’s campaign for the White House got a lot of attention for its savvy Web organizing, its skill at fundraising and even just for the size of its email list—13 million names.

The backbone of that Internet organization wasn’t the daily emails, though. It was My.BarackObama.com, a social networking site with a purpose. Supporters could create an account, fill out a profile, and join local or national groups on the site. Some of those groups mobilized around a specific issue, while others organized neighborhood parties, canvassing squads, or just passed around news.

“People were using those networks to have many-to-many conversations,” Ari Melber of The Nation pointed out, and activist Jon Pincus said, “It’s as democratic as you can get online.”

Pincus knows firsthand the little-d democratic possibilities of MyBO (as it was nicknamed) organizing. He was one of the early organizers of Get FISA Right, a group on MyBO and other social networking sites like Facebook. The group formed over the summer of 2008, urging then-Senator Obama to vote against the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which included immunity for telecommunications companies that had cooperated with then-President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. Get FISA Right quickly became the number one group on MyBO, with over 23,000 members.

Obama voted for the FISA compromise bill, after opposing it on the campaign trail, but the Get FISA Right group didn’t dissolve. Instead, Pincus and other members are organizing a group to attend Senator Russ Feingold’s constituent “listening meeting” during the next congressional recess. Domestic surveillance will be part of the debate over renewing the PATRIOT Act, Pincus noted, and so pressure is key. Continue reading →