Labor at the Intersections

Workers are more complex than the stereotypical strongman holding a pickaxe in many labor history books. They’re whole people, with identities and concerns that go far beyond wages. And failing to center workers’ full identities, leads to an underestimation of the motivations that lead many to risk their livelihoods to organize while creating space for anti-union employers to divide the workforce. Today’s workers are proving that multinational corporations can be held to account when the labor movement as a whole—union and not-yet-union—invest in relational people-to-people activities that organize workers’ power based on their relationship to new and changing dynamics of employment in the global economy. Having the appropriate calculation of power clarifies whether workers will be successful within the current framework for collective bargaining, or if a new approach is more strategic. And when they model campaigns that operate at the intersections of workers’ identities—particularly race and gender—they have a greater success rate, raising the floor for all workers and expanding democratic practices in employment. This course will examine a set of worker campaigns where workers effectively focused at one or more intersections of their identity to improve standards.

Texts

• The Future We Needs: Building a Better Democracy in the 21^st Century, Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta
• No One Size Fits All: Worker Organization, Policy, and Movement for a New Economic Age, curated by Janice Fine
• A Racial Reckoning in Industrial Relations: Storytelling as Revolution from Within, curated by Tamara L. Lee, Sheri Davis, and Naomi R. Williams

All other readings/articles will be linked in the detailed syllabus and/or distributed in class.  Access online readings for each week on Moodle.