Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor

  • About Us
  • Our Work
  • Events
  • Working-Class Perspectives
  • Giving Back to KI

October 11, 2018 by Kalmanovitz Initiative Leave a Comment

WCP: Is the Fever Breaking? Ground Zero Youngstown

Before the election, KI visiting scholar John Russo dubbed Youngstown, Ohio as “ground zero” for Trump’s appeals to white working-class voters. Two years later, Russo explores whether the Trump fever is starting to break in the area. In Working-Class Perspectives, he tracks how a slumping local economy, trade policy, and the politics of resentment are shaping political views in this long-time Democratic stronghold.

Two years ago, I described the Youngstown area as “crossover ground zero” for Donald Trump and the politics of resentment in working-class and rust belt communities. In local rallies during the 2016 campaign and since he took office, Trump has repeatedly promised an economic renaissance and immigration reform. These issues resonated with local voters.

His success in Youngstown might seem surprising, since Mahoning and Trumbull Counties usually vote by large margins for Democratic Presidential candidates. In 2012, 63.5% of Mahoning County voters supported for Obama, even more than in 2008. But in the 2016 Republican primary, more than 6000 Mahoning County Democrats switched parties, and another 20,000 people who had not been registered voters signed up to vote. Clinton won the Presidential race here by less than 1%, and Trump won in Trumbull County.

When I returned to Youngstown this summer, I wondered whether Trump’s support remained strong. In this highly nationalistic working-class community, the first thing I saw driving into the city were American flags were plastered wall-to-wall on overpasses. No wonder Trump made a “rare Presidential visit” in July 2017 to boost his flagging support and renew his appeal to “Make America Great Again.”

But as the summer went on, I sensed an undercurrent of uneasiness, especially among the area’s much-touted swing voters. While Trump crows about what a “great job” he’s doing, some of his supporters wonder whether local residents will benefit from the tax cuts. The national debt climbs to over one trillion dollars, and rising health care costs and gas prices have eroded any financial gains for most Americans. Yes, unemployment rates have fallen, but underemployment, low wages, reduced pensions, low property values, and increasing precarity in the Mahoning Valley have made it hard to believe in Trump’s economic happy talk. And talk among some in Congress about cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits to offset the deficit is adding to the local anxiety.

The local economic picture clearly does not offer many signs of hope. The GM Lordstown plant has eliminated two shifts, cutting 3000 jobs since Trump took office. According to recently retired UAW Local Vice President Tim O’Hara, about 40% of union members voted for Trump in 2016.  Dave Green, the current union President, has appealed to GM and President Trump to help bring a new car to the plant that currently builds the Chevy Cruze, but Trump has remained silent, and GM will not make a commitment. In fact, the company responded to the President’s trade policy by announcing that it will build a new car at its Ramos, Mexico plant, which also builds the Cruze. The local paper, The Vindicator, offered a blunt “reality check: Donald Trump is not going to intervene to save one of the leading employers in the Mahoning Valley.”

Yet Trump’s trade policy still appeals to many local voters. Youngstowners have long blamed the loss of its steel industry on unfair trade, and many here still support the protectionist ideas of Trump’s Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, and local free trade critics like Democrats Sherrod Brown and Tim Ryan. But local steel producers and fabricators have indicated that instead of expanding their labor force here, they may downsize or move facilities to Mexico because of Trump’s trade policies, so more local workers can expect to lose good-paying jobs. As Trump supporter and local steelworker Michael Lang said in an interview with Reuters, “I voted for Trump because I thought he’d straighten things out, not do something like this.”

Few of the  retail, public sector, and healthcare workers I’ve spoken with admitted they had supported Trump. Those who did were evasive and seemed uncomfortable talking about him. It seems likely that workers in these jobs are anxious about the continuing budget cuts, loss of local state funding and government assistance, and more recently the closing one of the two local hospitals, which displaced 400 nurses and other staff. Service workers who supported Trump may be starting to understand the limits of the politics of resentment.

Clearly, neither Trump’s campaign promises nor his policies are making Youngstown great again. The question is, will the community’s continuing economic struggles lead people to turn against Trump and the Republicans? Or bring them back to the Democrats? NPR reporter Asma Khalid, who has tracked Trump’s support in Youngstown for the past two years, is uncertain. Among the “disillusioned” Democrats she spoke with, some still support Trump, though they also  plan vote for Democrats like Brown and Ryan this November.

Mahoning County Democratic Chairperson David Betras also doubts whether the Trump fever has broken in Youngstown. The best he can say is that “the temperature is going down.” His advice to Democrats: follow the lead of Brown and Ryan — stress concrete economic programs, healthcare, education, and building trust. A focus on the economy, Betras believes, will win out, even as Trump and the Republicans try to distract voters with often-racist cultural divides, like whether NFL players should be allowed to kneel.

Yet many in Youngstown are fed-up with both parties. When I asked retired small businessman, Democrat, and Trump enthusiast Sam Carely who he supports in 2018, his response reflects a distinct lack of enthusiasm: “I am not sure if I will vote. But if I do I would probably vote for a Democrat — if I could find a reason.” Carely is tired of interparty fighting, and he is not alone. Many would prefer to vote for Democrats, but they are desperate for an economic plan that isn’t just campaign rhetoric.  For them, as for many voters around the country, the Trump fever will only break when Democrats give them something to believe in.

Read the post in its entirety and other WCP posts on our website.

The Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-19 academic years, John Russo, and English Professor and Director of the American Studies Program at Georgetown University, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors. Last year, the blog published 43 posts that were read over 131,000 times by readers in 178 countries. The blog is cited by journalists from around the world, and discussed in courses in high schools and colleges worldwide.

Filed Under: Visiting Scholars Tagged With: John Russo, Sherry Linkon, WCP, Working-Class Perspectives

September 27, 2018 by Kalmanovitz Initiative Leave a Comment

WCP: Working-Class Politics and The Foremen Problem

“White working-class voters” are usually treated as a single, monolithic group, but that ignores some important differences in this category. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Allison L. Hurst analyzes how foremen, who consider themselves as middle-class, are more likely to vote Republican than other workers.
How might working-class people’s class identifications and loyalties affect their political choices?  We all know that there are workers who identify with the working class, who work in solidarity with their fellow workers, who seek to advance their interests as a class, while others identify with the boss and  seek to advance their interests on their own.  Traditionally, foremen (and they are more often men than women so I am keeping the archaic nomenclature), who stand in a contradictory location betwixt workers and owners, have embraced bossism, a term I am coining here to mean identification with the boss through disciplining of other workers.   They are like Fer, the sadistic prisoner in Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, who takes the side of the camp guards and is trying to rise to the position of engineer at the construction site.  Or like “Yock,” the evil foreman who Jack Metzgar describes as getting into interminable duels with his father and other workers on the line in Striking Steel.  Like prison guards, they work for the master. They are trained in cruelty and rewarded for being hard on everyone else, including those who look like them but especially those who don’t.  I am sure there are many good and kind forepersons out there, but most enterprises that run on fear and intimidation need the unkind kind.  Anyone knowledgeable in history knows that capitalism thrives when it keeps workers in line.

Is it possible that the candidate who promised tax cuts for the wealthy and strong discipline for the unruly appealed particularly well to foremen and supervisors among the working class?  Could workers who vote Republican be, well, tools of the master?  And so I turned to the General Social Survey (GSS) to see if there was something going on with this. And I found some interesting patterns.

But first, let’s consider the white working-class’s supposed swerve to the right during the Reagan era.  Many did turn away from the Democratic Party in the 1980s, but only to a point.  Where most used to vote Democratic pretty regularly, they are now about evenly split, including many independents. Equally important, the move to the Republican Party was greatest among the group of workers I call Builders (mostly construction trades), a category that includes a pretty high proportion of foremen.

GSS data from elections over the past 50 years shows that people in working-class jobs who identify as middle class are more likely to vote Republican than similarly situated working-class people who identify as working class or lower class.   (GSS doesn’t include data from 2016, but I extrapolated the percentages based on information from American National Election Studies.)

If we look only at white working-class men, who may be especially prone to bossism, we find even greater differences, not just between those who voted Republican and those who voted Democrat, but also those who did not vote at all.  White working-class men are (a) more likely to vote Republican if they identify as middle class and (b) less likely to vote at all if they identify as working-class, lower-class, or poor.  These are men in the same job categories.

(ANES) data from the primaries lets us factor in income. Among workers whose household incomes fell below $75,000, those who identified as middle class were twice as likely to have voted for Trump in the primaries and half as likely to have voted for Sanders.

Why might some people regard themselves as middle class and others as working class?  Some say that people just don’t understand class in the US, so “most” people identify as middle class.  But this is a condescending simplification.  Class is not merely an objective social position, defined by occupation and power, but also something relational whose contestation can take the form of identification.  In other words, by claiming middle-classness, workers can identify with the winning side against other workers.  And, vice versa: by claiming working-classness, workers can align themselves with the collective struggle against the bosses.  This is not simply a matter of class consciousness, but of where one wants to align oneself.

I found some evidence of this in earlier GSS data on workers’ identification with the industries they worked for and whether they disciplined other workers or took part in other tasks of worker control (such as scheduling).  In all those cases, I found a strong correlation between these elements of bossism and voting Republican.  Identifying with the boss and identifying as middle class appear to have a multiplier effect on voting Republican as well.  For example, 71% of MC-identified White Working-Class men reported disciplining other workers, and 80% of such men agreed with the statement that they work more than their fellow workers.

Today many see workers (especially white men) embracing candidates and policies that seem to have little to do with working-class solidarity. Workers are no longer automatic votes for the Democratic Party.  The more privileged classes don’t always vote Republican (indeed, highly-educated professionals are now the backbone of the Democratic Party).  Instead of boss and workers, the divisions today may appear to reflect cultural rather than economic divides: Red State/Blue State, old/young, racist/globalist, Christian Fundamentalist/everyone else.

But the data I presented here suggests that class still matters. We just have been paying too little attention to the importance of class realignment and allegiance.  Within all classes, those who earn more, particularly as a reward of supporting and enforcing the system, are more likely to vote Republican.  Working-class foremen, thinking that they are better than the workers they police, embrace the Republican Party’s mean-spirited Trumpism, as do the very rich, who are jealous of their privileges and threatened by the highly educated.  In every class, Trump draws from those who believe in a game of winners and losers rather than a world of justice and solidarity.   The sad thing is that, as our workplaces get meaner, the mean-spirited will have even more people to draw from.

Most Americans are working class, but as I have argued previously,  they do not all share the same experiences, values, or beliefs.  And they do not all share the same politics.  We cannot hope for justice to emerge out of a beaten-down isolated working class, and the decline of unions means we have lost one of the great training grounds for working-class solidarity.  Revolutions have only been successful when workers come together to recognize their shared interests and common enemies.  We will need the foremen on our side, too.  So we have a lot of organizing to do.

Read the post in its entirety and other WCP posts on our website.

The Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-19 academic years, John Russo, and English Professor and Director of the American Studies Program at Georgetown University, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors. Last year, the blog published 43 posts that were read over 131,000 times by readers in 178 countries. The blog is cited by journalists from around the world, and discussed in courses in high schools and colleges worldwide.

Filed Under: Visiting Scholars Tagged With: Allison L Hurst, Electoral Politics, John Russo, Sherry Linkon, WCP, White Working Class, Working-Class Perspectives

September 11, 2018 by Kalmanovitz Initiative Leave a Comment

WCP: Middle-Class Influence vs. Working-Class Character


Children start learning the culture of their social class early on, and those lessons shape not only their own behavior and opportunities but also the way others respond to them. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Jack Metzgar reviews Jessica Calarco’s book on how middle-class children learn to negotiate for better opportunities, while working-class children are taught to be deferential.

“Jesse” is one of a cohort of 80 students sociologist Jessica Calarco observed from the 3rd through the 5th grades and then revisited in middle school for her new book, Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School.  Calarco also interviewed the students’ parents. Her research reveals that middle-class children practice “strategies of influence” in school because their parents prioritize academic success, while working-class kids generally follow “strategies of deference” because their parents care more about developing long-term character.

In middle school Jesse lost a homework packet and simply accepted a “0” grade when the assignment was due.  Several weeks later his mother found the packet and made Jesse complete it.  When Jesse turned it in, his teacher “firmly, and a bit incredulously” returned the packet ungraded, saying: “It’s a little too late for that now.  I mean, that [assignment] was like a month ago.”  Here’s how Calarco describes Jesse’s reaction:

“Jesse does not look up.  He nods slowly, but he keeps his shoulders hunched forward and his head low.  As Ms. Cartwright heads back to her desk, Jesse glances up at me, his face and shoulders heavy with resignation.  He murmurs quietly, almost sadly: ‘It wasn’t to get a better grade.  It was to make me a better person.’”

Jesse later explained to Calarco that his mother had told him to complete the late assignment not to improve his grade but because it was the right thing to do – “to work hard and take responsibility for his actions.”

Jesse is from a working-class family, and Calarco recounts in heart-breaking detail how the working-class kids she observed are disadvantaged in grade school by their inability and unwillingness to push teachers to give them more time on a test, help them with answers, and allow them to turn in homework late. Middle-class kids, on the other hand, often treat teachers’ instructions as but opening statements in a game of negotiating that these kids become amazingly good at as early as the 4th grade.

According to Calarco, middle-class kids are taught to question and negotiate with the authority of their teachers, who are there to serve and help them. They learn that children should ask for help and seek  special accommodations when they need them.  Working-class kids, conversely, are taught to defer to teachers, to do what they’re told, and not to burden teachers with unnecessary questions but to work out their problems on their own.

Calarco argues that it is not only teachers’ own middle-class predispositions that disadvantage working-class students (a “hidden curriculum” noted by other scholars like Annette Lareau), but middle-class kids’ own crafty agency, and their knowledge that they can count on their parents to intervene if necessary, that makes it nearly impossible for teachers to give the same time and attention to working- as to middle-class kids.  In Calarco’s observation, teachers are often frustrated with the demands middle-class kids make on them and appreciative of the working-class kids’ deference and respect.  But the middle-class students are so confident, persistent, and often humorously, good-heartedly creative in seeking attention that as a practical matter, teachers have to give them more time just to get through their day.  This dynamic is further aided by working-class kids’ commitment to not being a bother to teachers and to working out things on their own, and many of them see what the middle-class kids are doing as undignified begging at best or even cheating, which they disdain ever doing.   At a Working-Class Studies conference where she presented some of this research, I asked Calarco whether the working-class kids’ disdain for middle-class negotiating might be based in a commitment to personal integrity.  She said, “Oh, for sure, though nobody used those words, of course.”

As for remedies, Calarco argues against both teaching working-class kids to negotiate better or urging middle-class parents to restrain from teaching their children strategies of influence.  Rather, she advocates for teachers and schools to enforce sharper boundaries against negotiating the special deals middle-class kids are so good at bargaining for and to stick to those boundaries when parents complain and threaten to go to the school board.

I found her arguments for that approach sensible and cogent, but as with many remedies for addressing our growing inequalities, it puts too much responsibility on only one of our institutions and on teachers, whom Calarco so vividly shows want to treat all their students equally and often work ingeniously if unsuccessfully to do so.  I wish Calarco had pulled back a bit to a larger frame that built on one of her most insightful paragraphs:

“All the parents . . . regardless of class or mobility, wanted to support their children’s academic success.  At the same time, parents worried that too much support could undermine their children’s development of good character (i.e., respect, responsibility, and work ethic).  Middle-class and working-class parents alike struggled with how to balance those seemingly competing priorities.  Ultimately, middle-class parents prioritized good grades, and working-class parents prioritized good character.  Both groups, however, made those choices with reservations.”

She doesn’t spell out the reservations, maybe because they’re pretty obvious.  As Jesse’s story suggests, he just wanted to be “a better person,” not to be too much of a bother, and for sure not a beggar or a cheater.  He could do with some negotiating skills, and with some more willingness to speak up for himself so he can be treated more fairly.  But no matter what he does, he’ll never catch up to the increasingly manipulative influencing skills the middle-class kids are developing – partly, and importantly, because neither he nor his parents want him to.  By prioritizing good character, however, he is gradually undermining his academic competitiveness and eventually his competitiveness in a bifurcated labor market that increasingly has only low-wage and high-wage jobs that track education levels.  His parents may sense that, and thus their reservations.  Middle-class parents’ reservations are likely based on the same perception – that if their kids have to sacrifice a little character and integrity to achieve academic success, it will be worth it in the long run because it will improve their chances of getting one of those increasingly rare jobs with good wages and conditions.  But is this really what middle-class parents want: Finagling, transactional grade-hounds constantly seeking competitive advantage so they can find a career, not just a job, a career that may value those same finagling, manipulative transactional skills they’re honing in school?

I doubt that is what any parent wants, but those are the pressures being put on us by the increasing distance between good jobs and bad jobs based on educational attainment.  Parents should not have to prioritize between good grades and good character.  We need to attack our growing inequalities with higher wages and better conditions for all the bad jobs that do much of the work we all depend upon.  In the long run, even most winners can’t really win in a winner-take-all society.

Read the post in its entirety and other WCP posts on our website.

The Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-19 academic years, John Russo, and English Professor and Director of the American Studies Program at Georgetown University, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors. Last year, the blog published 43 posts that were read over 131,000 times by readers in 178 countries. The blog is cited by journalists from around the world, and discussed in courses in high schools and colleges worldwide.

Filed Under: Visiting Scholars Tagged With: Education, Jack Metzgar, Jessica Calarco, John Russo, Parenting, Public Education, Sherry Linkon, Teachers, WCP, Working-Class Perspectives

September 6, 2018 by Kalmanovitz Initiative Leave a Comment

WCP: Labor’s Day, More or Less?

The U.S. labor movement is facing bitter legal and political attacks. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective Wade Rathke asserts that the talk of unions dying off is greatly exaggerated. Rathke points to a surge of worker-led organizing across the country and the ability of unions in other parts of the world to thrive in even harder circumstances than the ones set by Janus.

The cover of Harper’s Magazine’s Labor Day issue for September 2018 asks “Is This the End of American Unions?”  The magazine doesn’t answer the question, but I will: “of course not!”

First, we shouldn’t assume that Janus dooms unions. Few other countries have representation fees for either the public sector workforce or the private sector workforce, yet they have labor unions.  French unions don’t have such provisions.  Nor do Australians. Unions in the United Kingdom lost union shop provisions for all workers under Margaret Thatcher.  Very few unions around the world — from India to Argentina to Brazil to South Africa to the European Union — even have “exclusive” representation.  Yet, all have unions and even labor movements of various shapes and sizes, strengths and weaknesses.

I asked organizers with the largest British unions (Unite, Unison, and the GMB) about how they responded when Thatcher ended their union dues regime.  As they all explained, they decided that instead of fighting to reinstate the old rules, which the public saw as internal and esoteric, it would be smarter to have their members fight for more rights and benefits on the job.  In fact, the GMB organizing director detailed a plan to move the whole union away from even payroll deductions to standing orders, or what we would call bank drafts, so that no one could stop the union.

Some American unions have also thrived by shifting the focus to building worker activism. Rand Wilson, now chief of staff of SEIU 888 and formerly a Teamsters strategist during the great United Parcel Service strike twenty years ago, suggested in Harpers article that the Janus decision may generate “a more activist base” in unions.  That’s how SEIU Healthcare Illinois-Indiana-Missouri-Kansas (formerly United Labor Unions 880 and more recently SEIU 880) survived after losing the ability to collect agency fees in Illinois after the adverse Supreme Court decision in Harris v. Quinn. The impact was serious financially, but not substantive organizationally. Keith Kelleher, the founder, chief architect, head organizer, and recent president of the local union, always made sure that more than 50% of its rolls were full members, and the union beefed up the program even more in anticipation of the decision.  In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Kelleher detailed the strategy and almost thumbed his nose at the efforts to derail the union.  That success rested on decades of organizing through active engagement of members and leaders in every aspect of the union’s program. Is there any mystery why this is the largest single local union in the Midwest, despite only being founded less than 40 years ago?

Many hold up the Culinary Workers (UNITE HERE Local 226) as the strongest single local union in the country.  When I visited some years ago, I was amazed at their full service, all-in approach to building the union.  Yet Nevada is and always has been a right-to-work red state.   Does anyone think the 60,000 private sector membership of this union reflects anything other than full engagement with workers?

Workers and their unions have risen phoenix-like over and over.  In the last thirty years, more than a half-million informal workers in home health care and home child care have won coverage under union agreements in some of the largest organizing victories since the 30’s and 40’s. In the same period of decline, we have seen a historic victory at JP Stevens Mills, the grape boycott of the United Farm Workers, and the remarkable growth of all public sector unions.  The living wage movement and the Fight for Fifteen have moved workers forward despite extreme opposition at the highest levels of government and amid rising inequality.  Earlier this year, teachers in the deep red states of West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and North Carolina broke out of their classrooms and into the streets, inspiring millions over wages but also, importantly, over classroom conditions and school funding.

As these cases demonstrate, it isn’t the law that empowers workers and their unions. It’s workers themselves. When labor grows, the law tends to support it. When unions are in retreat, the law also weakens, because it can — sometimes faster than we might wish. Action follows reaction, back and forth, but the combustion and boiling heat of struggle by workers is indomitable. If unions are going to survive Janus intact, they must have a base of engaged members. What was passive, must become active. Unions that are unable – or unwilling – to activate their membership will either wither or merge. But the ones that persist will be stronger and more able to face the future.

We should also pay attention a lesson from the more than one-hundred “living wage” campaigns that ACORN and Local 100 United Labor Unions ran in coalition with other unions and community groups: we can win if we take the issue to the public rather than defining it solely in terms of worker versus boss, union versus company.  That’s because winning isn’t just about a specific vote. In our first forays in Houston and Denver, back in 1995, we lost by 2 to 1 in both cities. But we won overwhelmingly in working-class black, brown, and white precincts, and we consolidated a strong base, building power even while losing.  Our opposition sometimes helped. In Houston, the anti-campaign developed a patronizing “good idea, bad tactic” measure, conceding us the high ground.  In Denver, a class-based effort financed by hotels and restaurants took the low ground, crystalizing the issue for the future.  And we learned from these battles. When we set the living wage number lower to offset the job loss arguments, we won in New Orleans – and then in cities across the country.

We see similar elements in the recent struggles – and victories –by teachers, who were often ahead of their unions in engaging the public, just as the Chicago teachers did so effectively several years ago.  In Missouri, unions won with an initiative to overturn legislation passed by the conservative Republican majority and signed by the Republican governor because they went directly to the people to argue for the merits and fairness of their proposition. Such battles can be risky, but the teachers dared to struggle, and their victory offers a lesson to us all about taking our issues to the people.

If our unions are to survive the legal and political attacks ahead of us, we have to build labor-community coalitions like this everywhere.  This can’t be tactical and transactional.  It has to be permanently strategic and transformative.  The times will never be good for us, but our own work can bend the times in a better direction for our success.  We cannot win on the battlefield laid out for us by corporations and employers.  We have to create our own field where we can even the odds. That requires the full engagement of workers and the public in our fights.

Read the post in its entirety and other WCP posts on our website.

The Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-18 academic years, John Russo, and English Professor and Director of the American Studies Program at Georgetown University, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors. Last year, the blog published 43 posts that were read over 131,000 times by readers in 178 countries. The blog is cited by journalists from around the world, and discussed in courses in high schools and colleges worldwide.

Filed Under: Bargaining for the Common Good, Visiting Scholars Tagged With: ACORN, Bargaining for the Common Good, Fight for 15, John Russo, Sherry Linkon, Teachers, Wade Rathke, WCP, Working-Class Perspectives

August 21, 2018 by Kalmanovitz Initiative Leave a Comment

Academics, Organizers, and Activists Gather to Address Bank Worker Organizing

IMG_2763

On Thursday, July 19, the Kalmanovitz Initiative co-hosted a luncheon entitled Regulating from Below, which highlighted the role Bank Workers can have in Bargaining for the Common Good

On Thursday, July 19, the AFL-CIO, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the CWA, the Committee for Better Banks, Rutgers’ Center for Innovation in Worker Organization, and the Kalmanovitz Initiative hosted a discussion on the importance of organizing bank workers. The event featured introductory remarks from the KI’s Director Joseph McCartin and Sara Burke from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, followed by an overview of Bargaining for the Common Good presented by KI fellow Stephen Lerner and Lisa Donner from Americans for Financial Reform and a panel discussion featuring organizers, bank employees, and union staff members who have been deeply engaged in this work.

Stephen Lerner, Lisa Donner, and Joseph McCartin all highlighted how the campaign to organize bank workers is a quintessential example of unions responding with offensive action in the wake of the Janus decision and Bargaining for the Common Good. Instead of going on the defensive, unions can tackle seemingly impossible targets like Wells Fargo and other financial giants to earn just working conditions for their employees and protect community members from predatory financial practices. All three speakers emphasized how organized bank workers can fight for working conditions and compensation systems that don’t force them to enact predatory sales practices against consumers, thereby reducing the burden large financial institutions can place on working communities.

All five members of the panel emphasized the importance and difficulty of organizing bank workers in an age of increasing financialization and inequality. Meggan Halvorson, an employee at Wells Fargo, spoke about how “the compensation system is not good for employees or consumers.” Reflecting on her experiences as an employee, she discussed how she “started suffering from severe anxiety and migraines” when she started working there. When she informed her therapist, “she sighed and said most of her clients work there too. The problem is systemic.” Shanon Bade and Arnise Porter, organizers with the Committee for Better Banks, discussed the scare tactics used by banks to discourage employees from unionizing and reiterated how their compensation system is used to “create animosity between employees and undermine solidarity.”

Molly McGrath, a growth strategies researcher for the AFL-CIO, commented on the innovative strategy behind the idea of “regulating from below,” and compared financial practices in the U.S. to those in countries where bank workers are organized, noting that these countries have notable reductions in inequality and predatory banking abuses. Graham Steele, a financial regulation expert, discussed how policymakers and regulators have failed to address underlying issues since the 2008 financial crisis: “Policymakers throw their hands in the air about how to measure ‘bank culture’ and oversee these practices. There’s a simple solution: talk to the workers who are on the ground experiencing these issues first hand.” Brandon Rees, Deputy Director of the AFL-CIO’s Office of Investment, offered hope by sharing some of the progress that has been made in organizing bank workers: “Employees under the NLRA have the right to challenge their working conditions, including the compensation structure that exploit both workers and consumers, without being retaliated against. Educating bank workers about this right has been enormously empowering in challenging the injustices we see at financial institutions like Wells Fargo.”

A recent article in The American Prospect provides more information on how Bank Workers can fight against their employers toxic practices, and Market Watch covered a sister event held in New York City.

Below are a handful of the pictures taken throughout the event by Alex Taliadoros and Julian Brunner

Filed Under: Bargaining for the Common Good, Events Tagged With: AFL-CIO, Bargaining for the Common Good, Bargaining from Below, BCG, CIWO, Committee for Better Banks, CWA

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • …
  • 80
  • Next Page »

Stay In Touch

Sign up to receive monthly email updates from us.

Twitter

Tweets by @GeorgetownKILWP

Latest News

  • WCP: Working-Class Precarity: An Education January 22, 2019
  • WCP: Time to Make a Deal on the Federal Minimum Wage January 14, 2019
  • WCP: Blaming Workers Again January 7, 2019
  • WCP: The Global Working Class Fights Back December 19, 2018
  • WCP: Trouble in Paradise December 10, 2018

News by Topic

Archives

Contact

209 Maguire Hall
Georgetown University
37th and O Streets NW
Washington, DC 20057
202.687.2293

About

Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor develops creative ideas and practical solutions for working people that are grounded in a commitment to justice, democracy, and the common good.
Learn more

Contact

209 Maguire Hall
Georgetown University
37th and O Streets NW
Washington, DC 20057
202.687.2293

Copyright © 2019 · Executive Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in