Archive: John Russo
-
WCP: COVID-19 Is a Perfect Storm for Women Workers
Women have long held the most precarious jobs, made less money than men, and done most of the paid and unpaid caregiving. As Lane Windham writes in this week’s Working-Class Perspectives, the coronavirus exacerbates these inequalities. While men appear to have a greater chance of dying from COVID-19, the underlying condition of gender inequality makes women particularly vulnerable to economic disaster in the months and years to come.
Category: Uncategorized
-
WCP: The Crime of the Century: Remembering Sacco and Vanzetti 100 Years Later
April 15th marks the 100th anniversary of the crime that propelled Italian immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti into the international media spotlight. As Michele Fazio writes in this week’s Working-Class Perspectives (new window), while their story is not widely commemorated in the U.S., it reflects tensions around class, race, and politics that still reverberate in today’s discussions of politics, protest, and how we remember and teach about activism and social justice.
Category: Uncategorized
-
WCP: The Challenges of Organizing “Gig” Workers
When we think about organizing precarious “gig” workers, the task seems biblical. The workers may be ready, or not, but the spirit and the flesh are weak. We all bemoan the rise of gig workers. Low pay, few hours, no benefits are some of them, worsened by the uncertainty of a position where you can only work to deliver something being demanded by consumers at a premium you are powerless to control.
Category: Visiting Scholars
-
Notre Dame Cathedral and Questions from a Worker Who Reads (after Bertolt Brecht)
Public reaction to the Notre Dame Cathedral fire raises several questions in the mind of this week’s contributor to Working Class Perspectives, Sarah Attfield, regarding the biases present in reporting, public sympathy, and colonizers’ mentality. Left out of the telling of Notre Dame’s history are the workers who laid its stones hundreds of years ago, all while looking to the workers who must soon lay stones for the Cathedral again.
Categories: Uncategorized, Visiting Scholars
-
WCP: Class(room) Warfare
While the college admissions scandal has drawn plenty of media attention in recent weeks, few were truly surprised to learn that wealthy parents were using their money and influence to help their children get into elite colleges. In this week’s Working Class Perspectives, Kathy M. Newman analyzes the real surprise among the coverage: mainstream news commentary’s emphasis on class. Newman argues that this reporting reflects a broader shift toward greater attention to class and inequality in American culture.
Category: Visiting Scholars
-
WCP: Will Democrats Reach Rural Workers in 2020?
The slew of Democrats running for President in 2020 have already begun talking with Iowa voters, whose early caucus choices will help shape the primary elections. Candidates should have learned from 2016 how important it is not to ignore “flyover country,” but to win, they have to do more than just show up. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Chris Martin suggests some policy proposals that candidates ought to consider if they want to reach Midwestern voters.
Category: Visiting Scholars
-
WCP: Who Speaks for Us?
Whether it’s Representative Mark Meadows’s decision to have Lynne Patton stand behind him as “evidence” that President Trump is not racist or the media’s embrace of J.D. Vance’s version of Appalachian culture as the key to understanding white working-class voters, political discourse often anoints a single individual to represent a whole social group.
Category: Visiting Scholars
-
WCP: Bargaining for the Common Good Comes of Age
The week-long strike by the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) in January 2019 marked the most significant struggle yet in a movement by teachers and other public-sector workers called Bargaining for the Common Good.
Categories: Bargaining for the Common Good, Visiting Scholars
-
WCP: Jobs and Medicare for All
The idea of Medicare for All is gaining attention and support in American politics — so much that it’s now getting careful analysis of its benefits and costs. In Working-Class Perspectives this week, Jack Metzgar considers the most significant cost: jobs for workers in health care and the insurance industry. A better health plan, he argues, must be accompanied by a just transition policy for workers.
Category: Visiting Scholars
-
WCP: Class and the Dignity of Work
In January, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown kicked off his “Dignity of Work” tour through states that will play key roles in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Category: Visiting Scholars