WORK WORK WORK

WORK
WORK
WORK
Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle

MICHAEL D. YATES

MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS

New York
Copyright © 2022 by Michael D. Yates
All Rights Reserved

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available from the publisher

ISBN 978-1-58367-965-4 paper

ISBN 978-1-58367-966-1 cloth

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 Contents

Acknowledgments | 7
Preface | 9
Introduction | 12

1. Take This Job and . . . | 22

2. Labor Markets: The Neoclassical Dogma | 29
3. Work Is Hell | 44
4. The Injuries of Class | 75
5. Panopticon | 97
6. A Divided Working Class | 111
7. The Rise and Fall of the United Farm Workers | 124
8. A Working-Class Revolt? Pandemic, Depression,
and Protest in the United States | 141
9. Waging Class Struggle: From Principles to Practice | 171

Postface | 218
Notes | 221
Index | 246
As always, with all my love, to Karen Korenoski, the best
companion I ever could have asked for.
 Acknowledgments

This book owes its existence to my comrades at Monthly Review.

Through them, I have become a member of a global community of
radical intellectuals and activists. I began reading the magazine in
1969, and I submitted my first article to the editors in 1972. It was
rejected, but Paul Sweezy sent me a handwritten and sympathetic
letter explaining why it was declined. His response encouraged
me to try again, and in 1975, a book review was accepted. In the
early 1980s, I invited Paul and co-editor Harry Magdoff to visit
the college where I taught and participate in a colloquium that we
were organizing to discuss the political economy of the nation and
the industrial heartland. They both came, and we became friends.
Since that time, my connection to the magazine and Monthly
Review Press has deepened, which has allowed me to publish and
become part of something much larger than myself, an opportu-
nity I almost certainly would never have gotten otherwise.
I have the deepest gratitude to everyone who has ever been an
integral part of this revolutionary enterprise. So let me thank Paul,
Harry, Leo Huberman (whom I never met but whose books and
devotion to worker education have been a great influence), Harry
Braverman (another I never met but whose remarkable book and
8 WORK WORK WORK

directorship of the Press are inspirations), Sybil May, Al and Judy

Ruben, Hyacinth Anthonson, Martin Paddio, John Bellamy Foster,
John Mage, John Simon, Brett Clark, Susie Day, Victor Wallis,
Fred Magdoff, Intan Suwandi, Hannah Holleman, Jamil Jonna,
Claude Misukiewicz, Scott Borchert, John Antush, Camila Valle,
Rebecca Mansky, Andrew Nash, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Colin
Vandenburg.
 Preface

This book is about work in class-based modes of production, pri-

marily capitalism. Labor in other modes is discussed but mainly as
a contrast to how work is done in capitalism. It is not a philosophi-
cal study of work in the abstract, which is interesting but beyond
the scope of this book.1
What we can say here is that every society must produce at
least the necessities of life. Such requirements are not eternally
fixed; they obviously have a social component, which will vary
over time and space. If we need to produce, we have to distribute
what we make. There must be social rules for this. It could be
simply equality, with each person getting a roughly equal share. It
could be by the effort expended in production. It could be by the
amount of money, which, in turn, could be based upon effort or
property ownership.
In both production and distribution, the word “work” is bound
to crop up. However, work is subject to a variety of meanings.
Historically, that is, in societies with distinct social classes, its con-
notations are negative. Author and journalist Jeremy Seabrook
writes that:
10 WORK WORK WORK

Words indicating labour in most European languages originate

in an imagery of compulsion, torment, affliction and persecution.
The French word travail (and Spanish trabajo), like its English
equivalent, are derived from the Latin trepaliare—to torture, to
inflict suffering or agony. The word peine, meaning penalty or
punishment, also is used to signify arduous labour, something
accomplished with great effort. The German Arbeit suggests
effort, hardship and suffering; it is cognate with the Slavonic
rabota (from which English derives “robot”), a word meaning
corvée, forced or serf labour.
The English “work” has an Indo-European stem, werg-, via
Greek ergon, meaning deed or action without punitive conno-
tations; and Latin urgere, to press, bear down upon or compel.
It is cognate with Gothic wrikan, to persecute, and Old English
wrecan. Thus, in the word “work”, violence is latent, and it appears
in the form “wreak,” when we speak of wreaking havoc or ven-
geance. “Toil” derives from Old French, meaning argument or
dispute, fight and struggle.2

In these essays about work today, readers will see that I view
it just as Seabrook tells us it has been understood historically.
It is a profoundly alienating endeavor, and it must be abolished
if human beings are to thrive, and the world is not to succumb
to environmental disaster. We may have to stop using the word
“work” itself, or perhaps employ it only to describe a forgettable
past. We will always have to produce and distribute. We did this
collectively, in an egalitarian manner, for most of our time on
Earth as a natural part of life. There is no reason why we cannot
do this again, although for this to happen, every institution of
modern society will have to give way to something radically dif-
ferent. We do not have to “work,” only to produce. If this book
helps readers understand that these two words are not the same
and that the first must give way to the second, it will have served
its purpose. If further, it gets some people to ask why we cannot
all perform meaningful labor that helps us develop our capacities
PREFACE 11

as thinking, acting, social human beings, it will have been a

triumph.
— M I C H A E L D . YA T E S
OCTOBER 2021
 Introduction

T
he essays that follow are about work and those who perform
it, almost always in the employ of people richer and more
powerful than they. I got my first experience with work when
I was twelve years old. I took a large paper route, with more than
one hundred customers stretched over several miles of houses on
hilly roads. It was 1958, and my pay was $6.00 every two weeks.
I received additional money for collecting the monthly bills of
those who bought the local newspaper and two Pittsburgh dai-
lies. The U.S. minimum hourly wage in 1958 was $1.00. In two
weeks, I worked for approximately twenty-five hours, making my
hourly compensation twenty-four cents. Even as a young boy,
I found this unacceptable. Knowing that no one else could do
this route unless I trained them, I went to the newsstand whose
owners were my bosses and demanded a raise. To my surprise,
they agreed to a new wage of $9.00 every two weeks. This meant
my pay was now thirty-six cents an hour, which was still far below
the minimum wage. But it was high enough to keep me on the
job. I kept at it for five years, enduring bad weather, nasty cus-
tomers, vicious dogs, and eternally sore shoulders. It imprinted
on my mind that work was hard and not particularly rewarding,
introduction 13

and most of all, that those who hired you got more out of your
labor than you did.
Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three, there were other
jobs: night watchman at a state park, grading papers for a col-
lege teacher, selling insurance to college classmates, counseling
at a summer camp for inner-city kids, and clerical work at the
Pittsburgh Plate Glass plant where my father worked. In college
and graduate school, I took an interest in labor unions and labor
markets. However, I majored in economics, and the instruction in
labor economics focused on the choices people make when selling
their labor capacity. Prospective workers decided whether to invest
in their “human capital”—mainly education and training—so that
they would become more productive, compelling employers, as
mainstream (neoclassical) theory dictated, to grant them higher
wages. Employers were passive agents, with their choices dictated
by a single-minded desire to maximize profits. If one set of employ-
ees earned more than another, it was because they had chosen to
make the necessary human capital investments. A second choice
was the amount of work people were willing to do. Some had high
“leisure preferences” and would work less, while others had low
preferences and would work more.
Thus, the outcomes in the labor market were the result of the
free choices people made. And although there likely would be con-
siderable inequality in outcomes, this was a mirage, in that those
with higher wages had incurred costs to get them. In fact, the
economists could show that over the long run, to give one exam-
ple, a physician and a hospital orderly made exactly the same true
wage, one that factored in the difference in the costs the two work-
ers had undertaken to get their respective jobs.1 When it came to
labor unions, the economists declared that their main impact was
to interfere with the free choices of the demanders and suppliers of
labor. Unions forced wages up beyond the workers’ productivity,
compelling employers to hire fewer of them, generating socially
undesirable unemployment. Unions, therefore, harmed the very
persons they were presumed to be helping.
14 WORK WORK WORK

Two of my professors in graduate school did not subscribe to

this way of thinking. The first, an “institutional economist,” was
part of a school that believed the market was but one institution
affecting production and distribution. In his classes, we were
shown that labor unions, one of modern society’s important insti-
tutions, are critical in wage and benefit determination, and they
do many other things: threaten nonunion employers enough to
make them raise wages and benefits; reduce inequality overall
and between men and women and white and nonwhite workers;
improve workplace health and safety; help members to enforce
protective legislation; make the enactment of such laws more
likely, and give workers a voice in their workplace circumstances.
The second professor, a radical Marxist economist, explained how
profits are not a cost of production—the price that had to be paid
for the services provided by the owners of capital, as the neoclas-
sical theory argued—but the direct result of the exploitation of the
working class.
The draft enacted by the war in Vietnam ended my stint as a
full-time graduate student, but I managed by luck to get a teach-
ing job at a branch campus of the University of Pittsburgh, where
I was then taking graduate classes. It was located in Johnstown,
Pennsylvania, famous for the great flood in 1889 and home to
an important center of steel production, the Bethlehem Steel
Corporation. In 1969, the year I was hired, there were more than
12,000 steelworkers laboring in the mills. I grew up in a factory
town, and Johnstown was much like it, although considerably
bigger.
When I became a teacher, it was soon apparent that I could not
in good conscience teach what I had been taught. Of what rel-
evance could a theory based upon the self-centered choices of
autonomous individuals be to the daughters and sons of factory
workers, which many of my students were? These first-generation
college kids were on campus because of the collective actions of
their parents and grandparents, who challenged the steel compa-
nies, coal mine operators, and assorted other business bigshots to
introduction 15

form unions and win the standards of living that made sending
their children to college possible.
Among my first students were veterans of the war in Vietnam.
Not a few stalwart neoclassical economists were ardent supporters
of the carnage and mass murder at the heart of the U.S. govern-
ment’s strategy for winning the war, most notably the prominent
advisor to President Lyndon Johnson, Walt Rostow. I don’t remem-
ber who it was, perhaps Rostow, but one economist suggested that
the war was causing Vietnamese to move to the cities, which he
said led to national prosperity, and thus the carnage in the coun-
try ultimately would benefit them. Although some of the veterans
supported the war, I could not fathom teaching them that econo-
mists believed that this conflict would ultimately benefit Vietnam’s
people economically or that the political system favored by Ho Chi
Minh was an unadulterated evil.
College professors then had considerable control over the work
they did. We chose our textbooks, the methods we deployed in
the classroom, and the courses we taught and when. However, it
was impossible not to notice that there was a defined hierarchy of
authority. My yearly salary was not determined by me or through
a collective bargaining agreement. This decision was made by
my division chairman, the academic dean, and the college presi-
dent. The latter two were little different and maybe worse than the
owners of the newsstand or my father’s foremen. They made arbi-
trary decisions, and the interests of faculty members did not have
much to do with these. They had faculty allies who did some of
their dirty work for them, like attacking any teacher who had the
temerity to challenge the dean or the president at a faculty meet-
ing. All teachers had an implicit rank above the rest of the campus
workers, such as the secretaries, the custodians who cleaned the
buildings and the student dormitories, the lower-level administra-
tive staff, the cafeteria personnel, and the groundskeepers. They
labored at low pay, obeying orders and carrying out tasks large
and small.
It became evident to me that the college was primarily a
16 WORK WORK WORK

workplace, the presumed commitment to “higher learning”

notwithstanding. Low pay and heavy teaching loads were more im-
portant to our administrators than excellent teaching and research
skills. Our labor was what they wanted. And if this was the case,
then I was a worker too, doing a job, just like almost everyone else
on campus. Power ran from the top of a strict hierarchy to the
bottom. As is common everywhere, those at the pinnacle of this
pyramid were far removed from me. Their interests were not mine,
and if I came into sharp enough conflict with them, they would
exert their authority to get rid of me.
Once I conceived the campus as a workplace, I began to think
about the nature of the labor I performed. And, since I came
into contact with all the other workers at the college, I started to
observe and think about their labor as well. First, there was the
market of our labor, one among many such markets. The econo-
mists said that this market was like any other. There was a demand
for workers and a supply for them. A higher wage led to a lower
demand, while a lower wage gave rise to a higher one. By contrast,
as wages rose, people would offer more labor for sale; as wages
fell, the opposite would be the case. High wages would therefore
generate a surplus of workers. In other words, unemployment, and
then lower wages would be accepted, thus eventually eliminating
the unemployment. If wages were low, the high demand would
outstrip the low supply, and the excess demand would push wages
up, reducing the demand but increasing the supply until the short-
age ended. There was one special wage toward which pay tended,
and this was the one at which the demand and supply were equal.
This is called the “equilibrium wage.”
This never seemed clear to me. Employers facing unions usu-
ally were forced to pay higher wages. But this didn’t mean that
workers lost their jobs once their pay went up. Quite the contrary.
Many unionized companies boomed, hiring more workers at
higher wages. And for some people, labor shortages seldom meant
raises. The economists said that we could only earn more money
if we became more productive. If we did something that would
introduction 17

add more to our employer’s revenue stream than its costs, it would
be profitable to hire more of us, increase our wages, or some of
both. Education and training were our best bets to become more
productive.
Probing this line of reasoning made me ask many questions.
The college president was paid the most, but he seemed about as
unproductive in any normal sense of that word as a man could be.
The same went for the dean, a profoundly ignorant person. By con-
trast, the man and woman who cleaned the building that housed
my office were always hard at work, very productive yet earning a
pittance compared to the top administrators. I was working long
hours preparing five classes with a couple of hundred students.
But I was making less than I did as a summer employee at the glass
factory. My starting salary, in 1969, was $7,200, which was low
even then. There was an excess demand because the college’s one
economics professor had retired. The person hired to replace him
suddenly withdrew when he got a better job offer. It was August,
and the college was desperate to find someone to teach the four
classes already fully subscribed. Unfortunately, I was more desper-
ate than the college, having received three Army draft notices in
the past year. The draft almost certainly meant Vietnam. I fought
valiantly to keep out of the military, filing, with the help of an anti-
war attorney in Pittsburgh, a class action lawsuit on behalf of all
graduate students so we could keep our education deferments.
One of my teachers said I should apply for the job at the Johnstown
campus. I took his advice. In my interview, I told the dean I could
teach just about anything. Within a week, I was offered the job.
Given my dire circumstances, I accepted.
Second, there was the work itself. Once hired, what did workers
do and under what conditions? Economists had little to say about
this. The workplace was a mysterious black box that most econ-
omists simply chose to ignore. But without it, no society could
survive. Just purchasing my ability to teach was no guarantee I
would do so. And if I did, would I do so effectively? What would
“effectively” mean, and to whom?
18 WORK WORK WORK

If I just stuck to the market, how would I answer a student’s

question about a worker who was fired for no apparent reason?
The worker supplied, and the employer demanded. Wasn’t that the
end of the story? Should I just say, see your sociology professor?
My grandfather was a self-taught industrial engineer who could
be seen at the glass factory with his stopwatch timing those per-
forming the many tasks that resulted in the production of plates
of glass. His goal was to speed up the work, to produce more glass
per hour and for a given wage, helping the company make more
money. Why was he there if the market was the end of the matter?
Was there a connection between markets and that black box?
To be a good teacher, you cannot simply repeat what you were
taught, as if it is self-evident. You have to understand it so that you
can make others grasp it, and you must be able to deal with ques-
tions from students, no matter how easy you think the material is
to comprehend. Right away, in my first classes, I was struck by how
ridiculous some of the precepts of mainstream economics were
and how hidden the assumptions behind them. Students often say
that economics is either inordinately boring or that it is too dif-
ficult. By the looks on their faces as I lectured mechanically about
“supply and demand,” “equilibrium prices,” “constrained choice,”
the “production possibilities curve,” and the tradeoff between
“work and leisure,” I was both boring them and speaking gibber-
ish. Something had to be done.
By chance, one day, while roaming around the school library
after another depressing day of classes, I discovered a magazine
I had never heard of—Monthly Review. I read every article with
excitement because they were clearly written and seemed to be
aimed right at me. I found something I could use in class imme-
diately. Over the following months, I found other sources, such as
Science & Society and the journal of the recently formed Union
for Radical Political Economics (URPE), the Review of Radical
Political Economics. And during my first few years, I read several
books that profoundly shaped my outlook. The most influen-
tial were Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, Paul Sweezy’s Theory of
introduction 19

Capitalist Development, Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran’s Monopoly

Capital, and Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital.
Not only did these magazines and books revolutionize my
teaching; they also showed me how to connect the labor market
to the workplace. Two concepts sum up this relationship: surplus
value and control. Capitalism is a mode of production dominated
by capitalists, those few whose land, raw materials, buildings,
tools, and machines we need access to in order to survive. Most of
us have little choice but to sell to capitalists our capacity to work.
The power their productive property gives capitalists (property is
productive, not they) means that they can pay us a wage lower
than the value of what we produce with our labor. The difference
in money terms is profit for the owner. If, instead, we measure this
not in money terms but as the difference between the produced
output and the labor input used up in this production—with each
calculated by the work hours embedded in the goods and ser-
vices bought with the wages and the labor time embedded in the
output—we get what Marx called surplus value. This is the ultimate
source of profits, and it is what the capitalists want, in ever-larger
amounts as time passes.
Surplus value does not arise in the acts of buying and selling.
Equal values are exchanged in competitive markets, which main-
stream economists assume, but they deny that profits are a surplus,
which is how Marx defines them. Instead, they result from what
happens in the workplace. Workers produce a surplus value, and
profits are realized as money when the output is sold.2 Given that
those who toil for wages might try to raise their pay to the extent
that profits are diminished significantly, employers will obviously
seek to prevent this from happening. If we think of what work-
ers do—converting inputs into outputs—as a labor process, then
the essence of capitalist management is to control this process.
Understanding work in capitalism is then a matter of grasping how
managerial control is implemented and enforced. I call the mea-
sures taken by capitalists control mechanisms. Historically, there
have been many of these: centralization of workers in factories, the
20 WORK WORK WORK

detailed division of labor, mechanization, Taylorization, personnel

management, including systematic hiring, management-by-stress,
electronic surveillance, logistics, espionage, and blunt force,
among many others. All of these will be discussed in this book.
It is important to recognize that in every class society, there is
a war going on, a conflict between those who do the work and
those who seek to control it. So, although the underlying themes
of the essays in this book are the efforts of capital to accumulate
surplus value and control the labor process, they are also about
workers’ resistance to these efforts. And either explicit or implicit
in the essays is the belief that both capital and the working class
itself ultimately must be abolished if we are to achieve a society
free of alienation, one marked with substantive equality in all
spheres of life.
I have resisted the authority and power of employers most of
my adult life.3 However, work in capitalist society is profoundly
alienating. In the 1970s and ’80s, we at the University of Pittsburgh
failed four times to unionize the faculty. These losses, combined
with the ever-tightening control by administrators over our work,
deepened my alienation. Teaching had once been enjoyable, but
now it was not. I found myself angry all the time. A therapist told
me I should try to retire with dignity. I took his advice, and as
soon as I could withdraw money from my pension—a generous
retirement plan was the one good thing the university offered
me—without tax penalty, I did. Life has been much better outside
the degradation that is the capitalist workplace. And I only wish
every worker could escape it.
Writing this book has been a painful experience. It has brought
home all I know about work under the rule of capital. From the
factory workers I grew up with, to my mother and her neighbors
caring for homes, to my grandmother serving the rich, to my part-
ner and my daughter working in daycare, to the farm workers I
met in California, to the steelworkers in Johnstown, to the coal
miners, construction workers, and truck drivers I have known, to
the adjuncts in higher education, to my children doing hard and
introduction 21

body-destroying restaurant labor, to the many others I have only

read about—all have filled me with both sadness and anger. We
give up our lives so a few can be rich. And in the process, we split
ourselves in two, one part for work, the other for everything else.
We see those with whom we labor as competitors. We view the
tools and machines that accompany our efforts as alien objects.
Through our work and our spending, we consume ourselves and
the natural world around us. I hope that those who read what I
have written begin to think that enough is enough.
 1

Take This Job and . . .

We read stories in the print media and see shows on television

where working people say they like their jobs. The Conference
Board, a business research group, found overall job satisfaction
in 2020 at 56.9 percent, a marked increase from an all-time low
of 42.6 percent in 2010.1 In the television show Undercover Boss,
a CEO wears a disguise and gets jobs in one of the company’s
workplaces. Often, in chain restaurants or retail outlets such
as Dollar General, employees say they like their jobs. If we dig
deeper, we find that matters are not so rosy. Still, survey find-
ings do not reveal workforces boiling with rage and ready for
radical change.
When we look later in this book at the jobs done by large
numbers of people in the United States and the world, it seems
fair to take job satisfaction data with a grain of salt. It would sur-
prise me, for example, if there are many farmworkers, daycare
providers, homemakers, logistic employees, adjunct professors,
and the like questioned in the surveys. It would be astonishing
if the more than 150 million child laborers in the world were
happily employed.2 Or if the 800 million farmworkers globally
were content with their circumstances.3
take this job and . . . 23

This essay is a review of Ben Hamper’s book, Rivethead: Tales

from the Assembly Line.4 Ben was an autoworker, and what he
says about his jobs is telling, especially because there were still,
in 2021, about 4 million workers in the manufacturing, repair-
ing, and selling of vehicles in the United States alone.5 The book
also shows something of importance—that we become habitu-
ated to what we do. It comes to seem normal, part of life, and
not likely to change. So, we make the best of it, and if asked,
we say, well, it’s okay, because to say otherwise would be too
painful.

M
y father and Ben Hamper, the “rivethead” of his book’s
title, have a lot in common. Both spent good portions of
their lives as factory workers, my father in a glassworks
and Ben Hamper in an auto plant. Both became factory workers
because it was almost predetermined that they would. All their
relatives and friends were factory hands. As Ben Hamper puts
it, “Right from the outset, when the call went out for shoprats,
my ancestors responded in almost Pavlovian compliance. The
family tree practically listed right over on its side with eager men
and women grasping for that great automotive dream.” The high
pay and benefits sealed their fates. Both hoped for something
better, but deep inside, they knew that the odds were long. The
rivethead did get out, though not by choice. My father never did,
despite the correspondence school courses and the plans to open
a small store.
Hamper gives us a clear, darkly humorous picture of life on the
line, telling us things that my father told me, though not in such a
frantic and manic way. The work is hard and dangerous. “Ropes,
wires, and assorted black rubber cables drooped down and entan-
gled everything. Sparks shot out in all directions—bouncing in the
aisles, flying into the rafters, and even ricocheting off the natives’
heads. The noise level was deafening. It was like some hideous
unrelenting tape loop of trains having sex.” Not to mention the
24 WORK WORK WORK

extremes of hot and cold, lung-clogging dust, and toxic chemicals

that would prevent most workers from enjoying their retirement.
A foreman actually told my father, now disabled with emphysema
(he died four years after Hamper’s book was published), that if you
could see the dust, it would not hurt you.
The work is unimaginably boring, something that the rivethead,
at seven years old, had already discerned on a “family night” visit
to the plant to watch his dad work:

We stood there for forty minutes or so, a miniature lifetime, and

the pattern never changed. Car, windshield. Car, windshield.
Drudgery piled atop drudgery. Cigarette to cigarette. Decades
rolling through the rafters, bones turning to dust, stubborn
clocks gagging down flesh, another windshield, another ciga-
rette, wars blinking on and off, thunderstorms muttering the
alphabet, crows on power lines asleep or dead, that mechanical
octopus squirming against nothing, nothing, nothingness.

The trick is to beat the clock in any way you can. Play “rivet”
hockey. See how high you can kick packing boxes. Pretend you’re
going for the gold at the riveting Olympics. Be a practical joker.
Best of all, “double up” if you can, that is, do both your own and
your partner’s job while he rests and vice versa. When this can be
done for half the shift, each worker has four hours of freedom, to
read, sleep, head for the bars, or go home.
The work is stressful. For a long time, my father was a glass
examiner; he checked glass plates for flaws under high-intensity
lights. Four cutters, working on incentives, depended on him for
plates, and they were not happy if he was too slow. The boss was
not happy if he was too careful. He coped with the stress by taking
aspirin and smoking, several cigarettes burning simultaneously.
Hamper and his shop mates smoke dope and consume prodigious
quantities of alcohol, off and on the job. One guy runs a little busi-
ness on the line, supplying half-pints of whiskey to his mates.
The boredom of the work, its profoundly inhuman quality, is
take this job and . . . 25

what makes it stressful. The descriptions of this work were them-

selves stressful to me; you can almost feel what it does to people.
Some become zombies, like the old fellow who spends every day
sleeping upright, leaning against the wall by the door to the john,
or the man who answers “same old thing” no matter what you say
to him. Not a few crack up completely; witness the rivethead’s line
mate who blowtorches his pet mouse and then mutilates himself
to qualify for sick leave. A few workers become so habituated to
the line that they hate to leave it, like the pensioners who sat in the
park in my hometown wistfully staring at the plant gate across the
street. Ultimately, Ben Hamper himself experiences panic attacks
of such severity that he is forced to quit the factories and commit
himself to a long mental rehabilitation.
These essays give the lie to what we might call work myths.
First, workplaces are not happy places, and the bosses and the
workers do not have much in common. Whether it be in auto
plants, banks, fast-food joints, hospitals, post offices, or public
schools, work is something to be endured, for the money, period.
Surveys sometimes tell us that people are satisfied with their jobs.
But satisfied compared to what? The lack of a job? An unknown
alternative? I have been teaching union workers for years, and it
is always the same story. You get pushed around; you count for
little; your hours are long, your pay is low, and at any time, you
might get put out on the street, just like the trash. True, auto
workers made good money, bought houses, cars, and boats; went
on vacation; and sent their kids to school. Yet their work took
some of the shine from the money, and today this “good life” is
gone, lost in the tidal wave of plant closings and union-busting.
A lot of people ended up selling rabbits, humping at Taco Bell, or
peddling Amway products like the hapless victims of Flint plant
closings in Michael Moore’s great film, Roger and Me. Amazingly,
all this eludes our social scientists, who prattle on about the new
work teams and cooperative management. Ben Hamper’s worst
job was his last one in one of the modern “Japanese-style” plants.
He dubbed it “Gulag City.”
26 WORK, WORK, WORK

Second, work itself, no matter how oppressive, does not engen-

der class consciousness and solidarity. It is more likely to lead to
such poor health and mental stress that coherent thoughts and
actions are difficult. Historians David Montgomery and Jeremy
Brecher suggest that workers eagerly debated great questions
during the many mass strikes before the Second World War. Who
should run the factories? Who should lead the nation? My father
told me that after the war, his factory was alive with talk of politics.
Not so in modern Flint, where meaningful discussions are far out-
numbered by talk of booze, sex, sports, and hunting.
The consciousness that does develop is of the “us versus you”
variety. Ben Hamper and his comrades take a negative pride in
the very meaninglessness of the work they do and dislike those
who don’t or won’t or can’t stand up to it; a kind of self-hatred
turned into contempt for outsiders. My auto worker students love
to bait me, but often in a wholly negative way. Who am I to talk
about work? Who am I to criticize GM? (!) While I was in col-
lege, they were in Vietnam. Aren’t teachers overpaid? I do not
know what it is like to work the line. But I do know why economic
depressions occur, why there is so much poverty, what Keynesian
policies are, how the Federal Reserve works, why free trade agree-
ments stink, and so on, and they do not know these and a lot of
other things. Many of them believe that the media cause depres-
sions, that welfare is the root of all evils, that the trouble with
sports is that there are too many Black players, that the Japanese
are innately evil. I slog on, but there is more work to be done than
radicals might think.
Third, unions, as currently constituted, offer working people a
very partial victory. Ben Hamper says little about the United Auto
Workers; the union isn’t exactly a daily, felt presence on the shop
floor. In the old plants, the union made it hard to fire workers and
made it possible for them to resist and sometimes to defeat the
worst management abuses. But since the radicals were expelled
long ago, it has not stood for anything except higher pay and some
job security, and today it cannot deliver these. In the newer plants,
take this job and . . . 27

it is firmly in bed with the companies, pushing the labor-manage-

ment cooperation schemes that Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter in
their book Choosing Sides more accurately call “management by
stress.”6 There are hopeful rumblings among the rank and file in
the UAW and many other unions. Still, it is a sorry state of affairs
when a book like Ben Hamper’s has so little to say about what most
people consider to be one of the nation’s greatest unions.
Ben Hamper has written a “riveting” account of work, devoid
of veneer and true to life. He has done so despite alcoholism and
mental illness; no doubt writing is the one thing that kept him
alive. In the face of this achievement, it is hard to criticize. Still,
I expected something more from him. He is aware of the insan-
ity of the whole rotten work system. A mascot dubbed “Howie
Makem” prowls the factory in a cat costume to promote quality.
GM chairman Roger Smith tells his proles that they will be better
off once thousands of them are put out on the street and scores of
plants closed. Yet, he is not much aware of the world outside the
shop, outside Flint, Michigan. This is the concern of intellectu-
als like Hamper’s friend Michael Moore, not of shoprats. Hamper
admires Moore, who has encouraged him to write about his work,
but he won’t make much effort to bridge the gap of consciousness
between them. Why not?
This failure, even unwillingness, to push his class consciousness
forward when he could disappointed me. Maybe it is too painful to
do so. Maybe the unions have failed so utterly to create a working-
class ideology that would force workers to ask the right questions
and struggle toward the answers that it is no longer possible to
imagine a new world. No doubt radicals have failed workers too,
either ignoring them for the pleasures of theoretical debate or
trying to become one of them so hard that they forgot that work in
this society destroys the human spirit.
If we are ever to liberate ourselves, we must reinvent work.
Either we will convert the daily hell that is work today into some-
thing that connects us to other people and the world around us,
or we will descend further into the alienation engulfing us. Ben
28 WORK,
WORK WORK,
WORK WORK

Hamper gives us no illusions about work. It is a soul-destroying,

lethal experience. But where is the way out?
 2

Labor Markets: The Neoclassical Dogma

A central feature of the capitalist economy is the market in labor.

Unlike in precapitalist societies, in ours the capacity of human
beings to work has become a commodity like any other, bought
and sold in labor markets. Mainstream economists embrace
this fact, assuming that it is natural and has always been the
case. They never ask how such markets came to be. If they did,
it would be difficult for them to assume, as they do, that the
buyers and sellers of labor power face each other as equals in the
marketplace. They imagine that prospective workers have given
productivities, determined by the investments in their “human
capital,” mainly education and training, which they have freely
decided to make. Employers make their hiring decisions based
on comparing the money value of what the workers can add to
company revenues and the costs of hiring the workers, such as
wages and training. The laborers decide whether the wage offer
is high enough to overcome their desire for leisure time. The
market forces a match between the choices of the employers and
those of the workers. No one is exploited because each has made
a self-interested choice, and the economists assume that what-
ever happens is the consequence of perfectly rational decisions.
30 WORK WORK WORK

If everyone then ends up in a maximal position, it follows that

from society’s perspective, a social optimum is achieved.
For neoclassical (mainstream) economists, the central feature
of capitalism is markets. These are analyzed through the theory
of demand and supply by individuals seeking to maximize
profit if discussing employers or utility (subjective satisfac-
tion, well-being) if examining consumers or employees. The
full explication of market theory yields predictions, and these
can then be tested against actual outcomes. However, the neo-
classical theory gives such wondrous results that, for many
economists, no tests are needed. The good outcomes that would
result if everyone acted as the theory says they should give
us the obvious conclusion that we should organize society to
ensure that we all behave according to the theory’s precepts. I
put it this way in a book I wrote:

The notion that a social optimum can be achieved by

allowing each person to act in a self-interested manner
when making economic choices was put into a famous
maxim by Adam Smith, author of an early econom-
ics classic, The Wealth of Nations: “It is not from the
benevolence of the butcher, the brewer and the baker
that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to
their own interest.” Society as a whole benefits when
each person looks only to his and her individual gain.
We do not intend that society benefit, but that is the
result that the market gives us. The market harnesses
our “greed” and turns it into a gain for society.1

Testing seems redundant to many economists, and few men-

tion the need for it to their beginning students. The unfortunate
thing is that some on the left believe that markets are not inher-
ently destructive to social well-being. They favor what they call
“market socialism,” which will embrace markets but control
them in the people’s interest.
labor markets 31

Ben Kunkel, the writer, founder of the magazine n+1, and

author of a book on radical political economy, said in a recent
interview

So at least in theory, you could have a market economy

where everybody receives the same income. It might
not work for other reasons—because there would be,
I suppose, no incentive at all to do a better job than
someone else in terms of what you received in compen-
sation—but at least in theory, there’s no incompatibility
between an absolute equality of income, and absolute
freedom in terms of how that income’s spent.2

This chapter will make clear both the basics of mainstream eco-
nomic theory and the multiple problems that come along with
it. And it should allow readers to evaluate Ben Kunkel’s remarks
critically. The essay below is built around a commentary on a
film by Mary Filippo.3

M
ary Filippo’s 58-minute film will interest anyone who has
taken a college-level course in economics, especially those
who were baffled by the professor’s pronouncements but too
insecure or embarrassed to ask obvious questions. In 2004 Filippo
began to audit economics classes hoping that she could “learn
something about globalization”: Does it really help people in
developing countries? What are its downsides? She did not learn
these things. She says, “What I found in these courses was instead
a difficult to understand presentation of the economy through
graphic models.”
Throughout the film, she shows several purveyors of the wisdom
of the “dismal science” making statements, with a straight face and
with the discipline’s ubiquitous graphs, that seem ridiculous to any
thinking person. 4 These are offered without evidence, and when
Filippo asks for proof, they resort either to silence or subterfuge.
32 WORK WORK WORK

They draw supply-and-demand graphs and assume that what they

show is obvious. If prices are too high, competition in the market
will miraculously lower them; if prices are too low, the same force
will drive them up. In the end (whenever this might be; the econo-
mists don’t know how long it will take), prices will always wind
up at just the point at which the amount demanded equals the
amount supplied. This is presented as an ideal situation, one that
is, in effect, socially optimal. As some critics who participate in the
film note, the demand curve represents those who might desire a
product and have the money to pay for it. When this is pointed
out to Gregory Mankiw, author of an economics textbook that has
made him millions of dollars, he said that the need for cash to
make demand effective is taught in a subsequent course!
In another context, Mankiw, surely as callous and simple-minded
a man as ever obtained a PhD, says that to ask questions about
inequality, poverty, and so forth, reflects value judgments, which,
by definition, are not scientific. They are beyond the purview of
the economists but rather are the stock-in-trade of journalists, for
whom, as his words and demeanor imply, he has a low opinion. He
argues that the objectivity and value-free nature of economics is
partly due to its use of mathematics to buttress its theory, the idea
being that since mathematics is value-free, any subject that uses it
must be value-free as well.
The claim that economics is a science is one of the greatest frauds
perpetrated by the adherents of any branch of learning. A pro-
fessor who taught at the university I attended in graduate school
said without irony that economists were physicists of society. This
claim would surely have generated howls of laughter had there
been any physicists on hand when he uttered this nonsense. Real
scientists know that although the starting part of scientific investi-
gation is a hypothesis based upon certain assumptions, this is not
the end point. The logic of the assumptions is worked out, typi-
cally with mathematics, to generate the hypothesis. But then the
predictions generated in the hypothesis must be tested. Scientists
have devised many ingenious experiments to test their hypotheses.
labor markets 33

When other researchers replicate their experiments and obtain the

same results, then our confidence in these results is deepened. If
anomalies begin to appear at a future time, then scientists have to
return to the drawing board to explain them. Sometimes, entirely
new theories come into being as a consequence, as when Einstein
explained anomalies in Isaac Newton’s physics of the universe with
a new theory, that of general relativity.
Economists cannot typically perform the kind of experiments
scientists do. The social world isn’t a laboratory where the vari-
ables being examined can be controlled while the scientist records
what happens when a change is introduced. Occasionally, the
social world throws up what we might call “natural experiments”
in which, for example, two circumstances are pretty much alike
except for one variable. Then differences in social outcomes might
legitimately be thought of as the result of this one difference. When
such natural experiments are not available, other, more indirect
methods can test predictions. These must be employed with great
care to avoid circular reasoning.
Unfortunately, mainstream economists, especially when teach-
ing the classes that Mary Filippo audited, never discuss testing.
They do mention the assumption that underlies their prediction-
generating model. The key term used is “the market,” which is
assumed to be the most important social institution that econo-
mists must study. In the market, buyers and sellers of both outputs
and inputs meet. Each buyer and seller is assumed to be motivated
to act in the market, that is, to buy or sell, solely out of self-inter-
est. Each is assumed to be autonomous, disconnected from every
other market actor, and to base decisions about buying and selling
only upon an internal selfish calculus. The sellers of outputs (for
example, the owners of an automobile corporation), who are also
the buyers of inputs (such as labor), make every business deci-
sion with the sole aim of maximizing profits. The buyers of outputs
(for example, the purchasers of the automobiles), who are also
the sellers of inputs (such as labor), want only to maximize their
well-being or “utility,” as the economists put it. Suppose, then, we
34 WORK WORK WORK

trace out the logic of the self-interest assumption. In that case, we

get certain predictions, shown to beginning students through the
use of demand and supply graphs, shown repeatedly in My Mis-
Education in 3 Graphics.
Let’s look at some examples of the hypotheses we can derive
from our assumption. First, the model predicts that an increase
in the minimum wage will increase unemployment and reduce
employment. The mainstream economists in the film take this as
an article of faith, with no proof needed. One of them interviewed
by Filippo, the late George Borts, proclaims that unemployment
results from wages being too high. But because of the nefarious
actions of governments that set minimum wages and perfidious
labor unions that force employers to pay decent wages, wages
don’t fall. This professor, along with most other diehard neoclas-
sical economists, would abolish minimum wage laws and, no
doubt, unions as well. Then wages would fall, and unemploy-
ment would disappear. He says on camera that he doesn’t care
how low wages might drop, even well below a dollar an hour.
Borts has no answer to the question of how anyone could live on
such an amount. Showing that he is just as callous and obtuse as
Mankiw, he proclaims to Filippo that he finds it “bizarre” that
she wants higher minimum wages and stronger unions. Bizarre!
Think about that, coming from a person with a chaired profes-
sorship at Brown University. Pity his poor students, although
some studies indicate that those who take an economics course
become more selfish.5
The faith in the model of Mankiw and Borts notwithstanding,
there is excellent evidence, gathered by many empirically minded
economists (those who eschew orthodox theory for sophisticated
analyses of the data), that raising the minimum wage either has
no effect on employment or, in fact, increases it. Ever since David
Card, who in 2021won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics,
and Alan Krueger eviscerated the mainstream view in their book
Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum
Wage, it has become apparent that there is good reason to raise
labor markets 35

the minimum wage, even though businesses and their shills in the
economics profession think this is a bad idea.6
We know that inequality in income and wealth has grown to
record levels in the United States over the past forty years.7 Once
again, Professor Mankiw, who served as an economics advisor to
that great progressive George W. Bush—how anyone can claim
to do value-free science and work for any president is beyond
me—either appears oblivious to the fact that this is a grave social
problem or explains it away in a simplistic manner. According to
the theory, different incomes simply reflect the different “produc-
tivities” of the income recipients. There are too many things wrong
with this notion to enumerate them all here. The mainstream
model says that when markets are in equilibrium, with prices and
quantities at the point where demand and supply curves intersect,
the wage income that a worker earns equals the money value the
worker adds to the employer’s revenue from the sale of its prod-
uct. Therefore, for employees to deserve higher wages, they must
become more productive. Otherwise, an employer will suffer loss-
es if a higher wage is paid, with the consequence that workers will
have to be discharged and less product will be produced, to the
detriment of society. You might ask: How do we measure produc-
tivity? What workers produce hinges on many factors: What kind
of equipment will they have at their disposal? With which workers
will they be laboring, given that in any modern workplace, what is
produced is invariably a collective effort? How might they become
more productive?
I remember thinking about my grandmother. She once worked
for rich people in New York City. She labored day and night clean-
ing, cooking, taking care of children, ironing, and so forth. I think
she was highly productive. Her employers, on the other hand,
seemed not to do much at all. But they had lots of money, and
she had almost none. How might Mankiw explain this? They had
wealth—stocks, bonds, real estate, all of which generate income
in dividends, capital gains, interest, and rent. Was it the owner-
ship of these and the income obtained from them that made them
36 WORK WORK WORK

productive? It would seem so, according to the theory. Now, if

Grandma became still more productive, by, say, learning how to
cook a complicated meal (her superiors didn’t eat hotdogs and
potato chips for supper) while simultaneously rocking the baby to
sleep and ironing dresses, would she have been given a big raise?
I doubt it. I imagine that Mankiw would argue that her employers
were taking risks by purchasing risky, venture forms of wealth or
that they were simply being rewarded for saving money now so that
they would have higher income and wealth in the future. Suppose
that Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, went into a coma, which
would mean that his productivity would be zero. Wouldn’t he keep
right on collecting vast amounts of income, which his managers
would then convert into still more wealth? Maybe them that’s got
is them that gets, and productivity has nothing to do with it.
What is more, the theory tells us that should workers become
more productive, employers must either pay a higher wage or hire
more workers, or profits will suffer. A look at overall U.S. produc-
tivity data—basically total output divided by something like total
hours worked—indicates that for decades, productivity in the
economy has risen considerably, but wages have not, as Filippo
shows in her film. This flies in the face of the neoclassical predic-
tions, though economists seem not to have noticed.8
Let’s give the economists the benefit of the doubt and agree
that wages are productivity-dependent. Most economists would
admit that productivity cannot be measured directly. So, they
use proxies for it, the most common being education and expe-
rience. Workers with more schooling are presumed to be more
productive, although I know of no direct evidence proving this.
Heterodox economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis showed
in their book, Schooling in Capitalist America, that students are
more likely to be rewarded with good grades, and workers are
more likely to get high ratings from supervisors, not because they
are creative and knowledgeable but because they are perseverant
and identify strongly with their school or their bosses.9 However,
the economists reason that because those with more schooling
labor markets 37

have higher wages, they must be more productive. That this is cir-
cular reasoning seems not to matter. There are other explanations
of why more schooling leads to higher incomes, but these are dis-
missed because they have nothing to do with productivity. I used
to tell my students that it might well be that they will make more
money someday simply because they were willing to sit in truly
uncomfortable chairs and give back to the teacher exactly what
the teacher said for four years. It wouldn’t be because they had all
become magically more productive, though an employer, fed the
same propaganda as the students, might assume they are.10
We can combine product and input (factor) markets in another
example of the model’s predictions. Suppose that all markets are
in equilibrium; that is, demand and supply are equal in all prod-
uct and factor markets. Now, imagine that consumers would like
to have more of a particular output—say, coffee. The economists
assume people always want more and more of most things, and
economics is really the science of making choices, given that while
we want more, we may be constrained by our incomes. In this case,
imagine that there has been an increase in consumer incomes,
leading them to want more coffee. In terms of the supply and
demand graphs, this is shown as a rightward shift in the demand
graph, indicating that at every price, more will be purchased.
The price of coffee will rise, and, given that the new equilibrium
(intersection of the old supply graph and the new demand graph)
shows a greater quantity of coffee supplied, profits must increase.
Then, the economists argue that over the long run higher profits
will attract new firms to this market, shifting the supply graph to
the right as well, raising supply but also forcing prices and profits
down. In fact, the theory claims, supply will rise until profits are
reduced to zero.
Zero, you say? When filmmaker Filippo presses Professor
Mankiw on this, he says that economists don’t conceive of prof-
its as ordinary people do. Profits may appear to be zero, but this
is because what the economists think of as profit is really a cost
of production, just like wages and raw materials. The cost is an
38 WORK WORK WORK

“opportunity cost,” that is, what the capitalist gives up by going

into business in the first place. The money laid out by a business
firm could have been put into an asset with a guaranteed return,
such as a federal government bond. If, on average, such bonds yield
an interest of 3 percent, then what an accountant would count as
profit will be reduced to zero by competition. But there will still be
economic profit, namely the 3 percent. However, this isn’t really
profit but a cost of doing business.
It might seem strange to consider profit as a cost of produc-
tion. And, indeed it is. As one of the critical economists says in
the film, why would a businessperson go to all the trouble of start-
ing a business, only to find that he could have done as well over
the long run by buying that government bond? The unreality of
this truly is mindboggling. Adam Smith said in The Wealth of
Nations, published 246 years ago, that those engaged in business
never meet with one another without discussing ways to restrict
competition by implementing barriers to the entry of new firms.
This is done through monopolies (one firm controlling a market)
and oligopolies (a few firms doing the same). If such arrangements
are successful, the entire competitive theory falls to pieces because
profits will not fall, nor will prices. Mankiw tells Mary Filippo that
monopoly power is greatly exaggerated, though, not surprisingly,
he offers no proof. As you might guess, there is plenty of evidence
contrary to what he believes.11
The final part of the film covers the development of macroeco-
nomics, the study of the overall economy rather than individual
markets. The split between the analysis of particular markets
and the entire economy came about because of the failure of the
market approach to explain the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Macroeconomic theory is most associated with John Maynard
Keynes. Although the film does not make this clear, the neoclas-
sical model predicted that long-term involuntary unemployment
(a curious phrase because why would anyone needing money to
live choose to be unemployed?) is impossible in a market econ-
omy. Unemployment would put in motion a set of chain reactions,
labor markets 39

such as falling wages, prices, and interest rates, that would cause
the economy to reverse course and, over the long run, eliminate
unemployment. Keynes and others argued that this wasn’t likely
to be the case. Only if some outside force, such as the govern-
ment, consciously stimulated the demand for goods and services
through its own spending would a severe downturn come to an
end. Keynes famously quipped, in a pointed jab at the neoclassical
notion that economic problems will always disappear in the long
run, that “in the long run, we are all dead.”
In the film, the critics of the mainstream view point out that the
Keynesian position is correct. But rather than admit this, neoclas-
sical true believers have managed to incorporate Keynes’s insights
into their demand and supply analyses to eradicate what Keynes was
trying to tell them. However, the discussion of this in the film is
unsatisfactory, jumping all over the place and, I would guess, con-
fusing viewers unnecessarily. Suffice it to say that today Keynes is
not much taught, and markets have taken over the textbooks again.
Overall, the film is well done, and by letting neoclassical econo-
mists indict themselves and their ideas, it makes its points without
becoming heavy-handed. Yet, two shortcomings stick out in this
reviewer’s mind. First, most of the on-camera critics assembled by
Mary Filippo as counterpoints to Mankiw, Borts et al. do indeed
make clear just how awful mainstream economics is, as are the
textbooks students must buy to help them learn it. However, these
economists make mainly liberal, not radical, critiques. Only John
Bellamy Foster, the editor of Monthly Review and a professor at the
University of Oregon, gets to the heart of the matter: capitalism is a
system focused only on the exchange value of goods and services.
It ignores what is most important—their use value. The distinc-
tion between the two is central to Karl Marx’s profound analysis
of economics as professed back in the mid- to late-1800s, and
now, in 2022. Liberal economists, most notably Keynes, often have
sharply and intelligently opposed the standard wisdom taught by
mainstream economists, from Irving Fisher and George Stigler to
Milton Friedman and Gary Becker. But they have no real grasp
40 WORK WORK WORK

of capitalism either, and this they share with their conservative,

libertarian colleagues.
Consider Nobel Economics Prize winner and former head of
the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz. During the Occupy Wall Street
movement of 2011, he said this to the Occupiers in Manhattan:

You are right to be indignant. The fact is that the system is not
working right. It is not right that we have so many people with-
out jobs when we have so many needs that we have to fulfill. It’s
not right that we are throwing people out of their houses when
we have so many homeless people. Our financial markets have
an important role to play. They’re supposed to allocate capital,
manage risks. We are bearing the costs of their misdeeds. There’s
a system where we’ve socialized losses and privatized gains.
That’s not capitalism; that’s not a market economy. That’s a dis-
torted economy, and if we continue with that, we won’t succeed
in growing, and we won’t succeed in creating a just society.

Not long after Stiglitz spoke, I wrote this about his statement:

Almost every sentence after the first one is wrong. The sentences
about the unemployed and the homeless would be fine on their
own, but unfortunately, they follow the one that says that “the
system is not working right.” How so? It is working exactly as
capitalist systems work. They have always been marked by poles
of wealth and poverty, periods of speculative bubbles followed
by recessions or depressions, overworked employees and reserve
armies of labor, a few winners and many losers, alienating work-
places, the theft of peasant lands, despoiled environments, in a
word, the rule of capital. Losses are always socialized, and gains
are always privatized. It is impossible to create a society that is
both just and capitalist.12

Stiglitz, like Mankiw and Keynes himself, for that matter, cannot
imagine a society that is not fundamentally capitalist, and he only
labor markets 41

wants capitalism to be fairer and more just. The same can be said of
most of the liberals interviewed for the film and about such liberal
stalwarts as Paul Krugman, columnist for the New York Times and
a Nobel Economics Prize winner. Paraphrasing Karl Marx, radical
economist and late editor of Monthly Review Harry Magdoff called
these economists “prizefighters for capitalism.”13
Second, neoclassical economists have perpetrated a bold lie, a
clever trick in effect, one transparent to those who have examined
it with a radical eye but believable by those who have not. Here is
how I described the legerdemain deployed by the architects of the
economic “science”:

The main trick used by professors of economics is to draw their

pupils into a make-believe world and then convince them that
this world is a good approximation of the real world, enough
so that the world in which we live can be studied effectively by
analyzing the fantasy world. In fact, the professors also claim
that this pretend world is a good approximation not just of the
world of today but of the world of any time in human existence,
so that any society can be studied through its lens. To them the
neoclassical theory is as universal and timeless as the theories of
Einstein. They see economics as the physics of the social world.
The economists take their analysis one step further. The hypo-
thetical world of their theory is in all important respects an
ideal world, the best we could have. Therefore, any deviation
from it that we observe in the world of existence should, in the
interest of human happiness, be eliminated.
It is a curious thing to say that something should change in the
living world because it does not conform to a world which does
not . . . and could never, exist. For example, a minimum wage set
by the government interferes with the efficient operation of the
ideal world by causing a loss of employment. The neoclassical
economists then conclude that we should not have a minimum
wage in the actually existing world. Or, the economists conflate
the ideal economy of their theory with the real economy, which
42 WORK WORK WORK

is capitalism. Since the imaginary economy is good, so too is

capitalism. It is no wonder that economics has been compared
to religion. To hold such views requires a strong faith.14

One would think that if economics really were a science, then

the failure of its predictions to stand up to empirical scrutiny
would doom it as surely as the observations and mathematics of
the early physicists and astronomers laid to rest the notion that the
sun revolved around the earth. How has this not been the case? We
must understand that stating the obvious fallacies of neoclassical
economics and the manifest shortcomings of its proponents will
not weaken its hold. It will only collapse if a significant number
of students and economists ally themselves with working men
and women—those who can and must be the agents of radical
change—teaching them, writing for and with them, becoming
one of them in their workplaces. Only then is it likely that Mary
Filippo could take an economics class and learn what she wanted
to, something about globalization. Does it really help people in
developing countries? What are its downsides?

Addendum to the Review of Mary Filippo’s Film

Markets act as a veil, hiding the face of the system. They are imper-
sonal mechanisms, which allows us to use them without knowing
what is underneath. We buy goods and services and are thereby
dependent on those who produce our food, clothing, shelter, and
services of every kind. However, we simply exchange money for
them. And as the Romans said, Pecunia non olet. Money has no
smell. Employers say that they pay the market wage. If it is too
low for survival, that is no fault of the boss. We can’t be concerned
about the conditions of labor endured by those who make what
we buy. Yet, how is it imaginable that a good society can be con-
structed on the basis of markets for everything imaginable? Worse
yet, isn’t it obvious that markets benefit those who have the most
money, and there never has been and never will be a capitalist
labor markets 43

system in which money is not unevenly distributed? How would

it be possible to argue, as Ben Norton does, that markets are com-
patible with equal incomes? They are not. Nor are labor markets
consistent with unalienated lives. All markets are built around
individualistic, self-centered behavior, impersonal in its callous-
ness to what goes on behind the veil.
 3

Work Is Hell

When we sell our labor power to an employer, the latter only

gets our capacity to work, not our actual labor. The capitalist,
therefore, must convert potential labor into the effort that will
produce whatever it is the business sells. This is no easy task.
Not only must certain changes have taken place in the larger
society, such that people are compelled to sell their labor power,
but workers must feel under a compulsion to toil at the direc-
tion of a hostile force.
Before capitalism, markets in labor were either nonexistent or
of limited scope. In the feudal mode of production that preceded
the advent of capitalism in Europe, most inhabitants were peas-
ants living on feudal estates called manors, which were ruled
politically and economically by lords. There were also small
farmers and gatherer-hunters living outside the manor’s con-
fines. There was trade, but it typically was not done according to
market principles. There were also towns where various kinds
of production occurred, organized in feudal guilds, with prices
set by custom and tradition. Illustrating the difference between
feudalism and capitalism were the proscriptions laid down by
the Dominican friar and philosopher Thomas Aquinas, who
work is hell 45

developed what we might call the ideological underpinnings of

this mode of production. He said that prices had to be “just.”
They must only cover costs and not include a profit. He also
declared that charging interest on loans was to commit the sin
of usury.
Capitalism brought about the gradual destruction of the
feudal mode of production. The nobility in England, for exam-
ple, under the rule of the dominant lord, King Henry VIII
(1509–1547), gained control of the manors of the Catholic
Church, which Henry subdued in his war with the Pope over
marital matters. The king confiscated Church lands, which
comprised roughly a third of the arable land of England. For
centuries, peasants (serfs) had tilled their fields and those of
their lord, paying customary rents in both output (a portion of
their crops and livestock) and labor on the manor fields explic-
itly reserved for the lord. Part of each manor was “common
land,” reserved for grazing animals, planting crops, gathering
firewood, hunting game, and fishing. Serfs had certain custom-
ary rights, bound up in an unequal set of mutual obligations
between them and their lord. There were many holidays sanc-
tioned by the Catholic Church, whose spiritual authority helped
bind the society’s members together. Ultimately, the nobility
could and often did resort to brute force to keep serfs in line.
Once Henry took Church lands, he sold blocks of them to
merchants, who were becoming more numerous and power-
ful as trade routes reopened between Europe and the Ottoman
Empire in the East because of the holy wars known as the
Crusades. Merchants, in turn, followed by the nobles them-
selves, began to enclose their rural holdings, converting them
into sheep farms, which would yield wool for the burgeoning
market for cloth and clothing. The serfs were summarily evicted
from their customary lands, including the commons. Some
were then employed as wage laborers caring for sheep, while
some moved to the towns to seek employment there, as the
craftsmen and merchant guilds were gradually converted into
46 WORK WORK WORK

profit-seeking businesses. Others tried to get land not owned

and become yeomen farmers, while many became vagabonds
and paupers, often headed for the poorhouse, where they would
be duly punished for their poverty with forced labor. The state
formed by Henry VIII began to enact laws making use of the
common land a capital crime; a person could be hanged for cut-
ting down a tree.1
The working class was thus created through acts of expro-
priation and violence. As Marx put it, “If money comes into
the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek, capital
comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood
and dirt.”2 Workers viewed the new system with horror, seeing
it correctly as one that aimed to annihilate their culture. As his-
torian E. P. Thompson wrote:

The rise of a master-class without traditional authority

or obligations: the growing distance between master
and man: the transparency of the exploitation at the
source of their new wealth and power: the loss of
status and above all of independence for the worker,
his reduction to total dependence on the master’s
instruments of production: the partiality of the law:
the disruption of the traditional family economy: the
discipline, monotony, hours and conditions of work:
loss of leisure and amenities: the reduction of the man
to the status of an “instrument.”3

Labor markets tell us nothing about what goes on in the

workplaces of the world. Again, Marx was prescient when he
wrote these famous words:

This sphere that we are deserting, within whose

boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power
goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of
man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property
work is hell 47

and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller

of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained
only by their own free will. They contract as free
agents, and the agreement they come to is but the form
in which they give legal expression to their common
will. Equality, because each enters into relation with
the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and
they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property,
because each disposes only of what is his own. And
Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only
force that brings them together and puts them in rela-
tion with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the
private interests of each. Each looks to himself only,
and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just
because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the
pre-established harmony of things, or under the aus-
pices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to
their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in
the interest of all.
On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of
exchange of commodities, which furnishes the “Free-
trader Vulgaris” with his views and ideas, and with the
standard by which he judges a society based on capi-
tal and wages, we think we can perceive a change in
the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who
before was the money-owner, now strides in front as
capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his
labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking,
intent on business; the other, timid and holding back,
like one who is bringing his own hide to market and
has nothing to expect but—a hiding.4

If capitalism is a system built upon the exploitation of wage

labor, it is also one of expropriation, the taking without com-
pensation of something of value. People became wage workers
48 WORK WORK WORK

because their land was stolen. Businesses expropriate the

land, air, and water necessary for life, using it free of charge.
Capitalists also kidnapped Black Africans into slavery, using
their bodies to produce the sugar, tobacco, and cotton that
supercharged capitalism and helped make it a global mode of
production. Women’s bodies have also been expropriated, with
raped female slaves used to birth more slaves. Women were
expelled from precapitalist economies and compelled, in effect,
to provide costless (to capital) services that continuously repro-
duced the labor force that generated the profits necessary for
capital accumulation.

E
conomists seldom say much about work.5 They talk about the
supply of and the demand for labor, but they have little to say
about what we do as we earn our daily bread. Like most com-
mentators, they believe that modern economies will require ever
more skilled workers, highly educated, performing their tasks in
clean and quiet quarters and sharing in decision-making with
managerial facilitators.
We should disabuse ourselves of such notions. In the world
today, most workers do hard and dangerous labor, wearing out
their bodies every minute they toil, fearing the day that they will
be discarded for a new contingent of hands. Workers get a wage in
return for converting their life force into a commodity owned by
those who have bought it.
The International Labor Organization (ILO), an agency of the
United Nations, issues an annual report, formerly titled Global
Employment Trends but now called World Employment and Social
Outlook.6 The report examines unemployment, poverty employ-
ment, and vulnerable employment. The unemployed are those not
working but actively searching for a job, and the working poor are
those with positions that do not provide above a threshold amount
of money. Two thresholds are used: $1.90 per day, “extreme work-
ing poverty,” and $3.20 per day, “moderate working poverty.”7
work is hell 49

People in vulnerable employment are the self-employed—called

in the report “own-account” workers—and unpaid but working
family members in the household of the self-employed. In most
of the world, vulnerable employment is known as casual work; the
workers who do this do not have formal arrangements with an
employer, such as a labor contract with stipulated wages. Here are
some examples offered by Martha Allen Chen, an authority on the
informal economy:
Street vendors in Mexico City; pushcart vendors in New York
City; rickshaw pullers in Calcutta; jitney drivers in Manila;
garbage collectors in Bogotá; and roadside barbers in Durban.
Those who work on the streets or in the open air are the most
visible informal workers. Other informal workers are engaged
in small shops and workshops that repair bicycles and motor-
cycles; recycle scrap metal; make furniture and metal parts;
tan leather and stitch shoes; weave, dye, and print cloth; polish
diamonds and other gems; make and embroider garments; sort
and sell cloth, paper, and metal waste; and more. The least vis-
ible informal workers, the majority of them women, work from
their homes. Home-based workers are to be found around the
world. They include garment workers in Toronto, embroiderers
on the island of Madeira, shoemakers in Madrid, and assem-
blers of electronic parts in Leeds. Other categories of work that
tend to be informal in both developed and developing countries
include: casual workers in restaurants and hotels; subcontracted
janitors and security guards; day laborers in construction and
agriculture; piece-rate workers in sweatshops; and temporary
office helpers or off-site data processors.8

A man selling lottery tickets on a street corner, a woman hawk-

ing tamales in a parking lot, or a teenager offering rickshaw rides
are other examples of vulnerable employment. A child helping her
mother sell the tamales is an example of an unpaid family member
doing vulnerable work. In all countries, and especially in rich ones,
not all self-employment is vulnerable. However, in all countries,
50 WORK WORK WORK

but mostly in poor ones, the vast majority of the self-employed are
poor and vulnerable.
The ILO estimates the number of people in each of the three cat-
egories—unemployed, working poor, and vulnerably employed.
Here are the data for 2019, with some additional numbers for 2020.
The last “normal” year, that is, pre-pandemic, was 2019. COVID-
19 swept through the world after this and thoroughly disrupted
global labor markets. We don’t know how long the pandemic will
continue or even if there will ever be a return to “normal.” So, read-
ers should keep this in mind when considering the data. In any
case, pandemic or not, in much of the world precarious employ-
ment, declines in the labor force participation rate (the ratio of
the labor force to the population above a certain age) because of
workers deciding to stop looking for work, and low wages remain
the norm.

Unemployment: 188 million: 5.4 percent of a world labor force of

about 3.458 billion. In 2009, at the bottom of a deep global eco-
nomic downturn, the rate was 7.1 percent of a world labor force of
about 3.24 billion. In 2020, COVID-19 labor market dislocations
pushed the unemployment rate up to 6.5 percent. These might
seem low rates given the extreme poverty in so much of the world.
But two caveats must be considered. First, these are fully unem-
ployed persons, meaning that they have no employment but are
seeking work. In poor countries, such a state is untenable over an
extended period. No work means no income, and no income soon
enough spells death. Therefore, tens of millions of people engage in
various types of informal employment not captured by official sta-
tistics. There will always be children below the age covered by the
labor force definitions—sixteen years of age in the United States but
lower in most countries—working and thus supplementing house-
hold income. Second, we must consider hidden unemployment.
In 2019, there were 165 million workers who were “involuntarily
working part-time” and 119 million who would prefer to work but
for some personal reason were not actively seeking work; they are
work is hell 51

called “discouraged” workers in the United States. Adding these

to the official unemployment rate gives an expanded rate of 15.9
percent. Working hours fell dramatically in 2020, with the decline
for those forced to work fewer hours equivalent to a loss of 131
million jobs. The labor force participation rate (labor force divided
by working-age population) and the employment of the working-
age population both fell dramatically in 2020. The former fell by
2.1 percent, and the latter dropped by 2.7 percent, indicating an
enormous increase in discouraged workers. When work disap-
pears suddenly, with millions of employers shuttering their doors,
what is the point of searching for work?

Working Poor: Having a job is no guarantee that a person will not

live in poverty. Typically, poverty is measured using an absolute
money income. That is, using the United States as a universal yard-
stick, a number of dollars per day is chosen as a cut-off point so
that those who are poor have a daily income less than this amount,
while those above it are not poor. There are numerous flaws in
this approach: the arbitrariness of the cut-off number; the assump-
tion that relative poverty is irrelevant (income may rise above the
threshold, but a person may at the same time fall further behind
those with higher incomes); the focus upon only poor countries
(the ILO assumes zero working poor in rich countries); the inad-
equacy of the data collection; and the implicit assumption that
prices for similar products are lower in poor nations.9 The data
below should, therefore, be taken with a strong dose of skepticism.
In 2019, the ILO estimates that 234.4 million people were living
in “extreme working poverty,” earning a wage of less than $1.90 per
day, which was 7.1 percent of total employment. According to the
ILO, this was a marked decline from 1994 when the numbers were
753 million and 31.6 percent. In 2019, there were 402.3 million
living in “moderate working poverty,” earning less than $3.20 per
day, 12.2 percent of all employment. By comparison, the figures
for 1994 were 504.7 million and 21.2 percent. Even accounting
for flaws in the definitions and data collection methods, official
52 WORK WORK WORK

(ILO-calculated) working poverty is widespread. It is difficult to

imagine how a family anywhere in the world could be supported
on $96 a month ($3.20 per day times 30). According to the Food
and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, as
many as 811 million people faced hunger in 2020.10 If that $96 a
month had to be shared by four persons, that would be $24 per
person per month or less than $1.00 per day. Who could even be
fed for so little?
COVID-19 generated significant increases in working poverty.
Extreme working poverty rose by 31 million in 2020, and mod-
erate working poverty by 77 million, for 7.8 and 14.2 percent,
respectively. These are those who still had jobs. Given that so many
lost employment, the data for working poverty greatly understate
the degree of labor market—and hence, personal—distress.
Although the heterogeneity of the working class is discussed
in more detail in other chapters, note here that employment and
wages vary significantly across countries by gender, race, location
inside a nation, and other factors. Women are more likely to be
unemployed, poor, in vulnerable employment, and less educated.
The same can be said of those marginalized by race, ethnicity, and
religion.

Vulnerable employment: Of global employment, 45 percent is

own-account, including unpaid family members working with a
self-employed person. Both are defined as in vulnerable employ-
ment. In the first category, there are 1.1 billion persons, and in the
second, 360 million, for a total of 1.46 billion in precarious work-
ing circumstances, as one can easily imagine given the examples of
such employment listed above.
Informal wage workers were much more likely to lose
employment during the pandemic than were those with formal
employment contracts. The ILO has limited hard data, but where
it does, it estimates that informal employees suffered a 27 per-
cent decline in employment compared to 12 percent for formally
employed workers. For the self-employed (own-account), the
work is hell 53

losses were 20 versus 16 percent. Compounding the misery of

informal sector workers is that they seldom are eligible for any
state-sponsored employment relief.
At the pandemic’s start, my wife and I were living in Santa Fe,
New Mexico. Indigenous men and women sold jewelry on a side-
walk underneath a building overhang in its famous downtown
Plaza. Their wares were laid out on blankets, and tourists would
look them over and often make a purchase. In the Plaza, a man and
his daughter sold tamales from a pushcart. When COVID struck,
the city put in effect strictures against gatherings and ordered man-
datory quarantines. As a result, both the open-air jewelry market
and the tamale stand closed. Thus, these workers’ incomes must
have fallen sharply. Some of the jewelry sellers moved their sales
online, how successfully I could not discover. Federal government
aid for the unemployed and business owners, which was substan-
tial for a while, probably helped the Indigenous little, if at all. To
make matters worse, the pueblos where the Native Americans in
the state often live were devastated by the virus, which took the
lives of some of the jewelers.
Second, the categories of working poor and vulnerable
employment partly overlap. A self-employed person can be both
vulnerable and poor, and he or she is counted in the labor force.
However, in the statistical definition, an unpaid family member is
only vulnerable; he or she is not counted in the labor force. These
are statistical quibbles. No matter how you look at the numbers,
they are staggering indicators of what the world of work is really
like.
To these gloomy statistics should be added another: there were,
at the beginning of 2020, by ILO estimates, at least 160 million
child laborers, age five to seventeen—63 million girls and 97 mil-
lion boys—one of every ten children in the world today. The ILO
expects that another 8.9 million will be added to the total by 2022
because of the pandemic. The ILO classification of child workers
is complex, but suffice it to say that 79 million children, almost
half of these youthful toilers, are engaged in the worst forms of
54 WORK WORK WORK

such labor: drug trafficking, armed conflict, slavery, sex work, and
dangerous and debilitating occupations like construction, brick
making, and carpet making.11
It is not uncommon for working children to live in the coun-
tryside or to have been forced from their rural homes, sometimes
“leased” by their parents, and made to toil away in the cities.12 The
parents are peasants, two billion strong, and their future is increas-
ingly precarious. Their connection to the land becomes more
tenuous every year, and millions move to the cities to become citi-
zens of what Mike Davis calls the “planet of slums.”13 No amount of
economic growth will absorb them into the traditional proletariat,
much less into better classes of work.

FOR NEARLY EVERYONE in the world, work is hell. The sad

truth is that many are demeaned, worn out, injured, mentally and
physically deformed, and all too often killed on the job so that a
few can be rich. The statistics fluctuate according to the ups and
downs of capitalist economies and now, no doubt, because of the
effects of environmental catastrophe. But should prosperity some-
how miraculously return, will the world of work be transformed?
Will we begin again “slouching toward utopia,” to use the patheti-
cally inapt phrase of Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong, who
really believed that we are on the way toward a middle-class world
of high-income and satisfied workers? I can promise you that we
are not.
The devil, they say, is in the details. So, to give greater force to
the data, I have added some concrete examples, and I am sure that
readers can add many of their own.

Ÿ Consider the food-processing worker, Tarek Zia, from Bangladesh.

Rising sea levels have forced many Bangladeshis to move away
from rising seas and eroding river shores. When he was fifteen
years old, Tarek moved ninety-three miles to Dhaka, the capi-
tal, to get a job and help his family, which had lost its farm due
work is hell 55

to flooding.14 The nation is notoriously lax in protecting worker

safety. “On 24 April 2013, the collapse of the Rana Plaza build-
ing in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which housed five garment factories,
killed at least 1,132 people and injured more than 2,500. Only five
months earlier, at least 112 workers had lost their lives in another
tragic accident, trapped inside the burning Tazreen Fashions fac-
tory on the outskirts of Dhaka.”15 A month after Tarek went to
work, a fire swept through the six-story building killing him and
more than fifty of his workmates. The building had been con-
structed illegally, and there were no fire exits: this, 110 years after
the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire in Manhattan.

Ÿ Consider Mira, a child prostitute in Mumbai, at age thirteen

sent by her parents from her village in Nepal to work, they
thought, as a domestic servant. Not long ago, there were at least
20,000 child prostitutes in the city, “displayed in row after row
of zoo-like animal cages.” The numbers appear to have fallen
significantly. Accurate data are hard to come by, but there are
probably several million children sex workers in the world.
About Mira, we are told:

When Mira, a sweet-faced virgin with golden brown

skin, refused to have sex, she was dragged into a
torture chamber in a dark alley used for “breaking
in” new girls. She was locked in a narrow, window-
less room without food or water. On the fourth
day, when she had still refused to work, one of the
madam’s thugs, called a goonda, wrestled her to the
floor and banged her head against the concrete until
she passed out. When she awoke, she was naked; a
rattan cane smeared with pureed red chili peppers
had been shoved up her vagina. Later, she was raped
by the goonda. “They torture you until you say yes,”
Mira recently recounted during an interview here.
“Nobody hears your cries.”16
56 WORK WORK WORK

Ÿ Consider Irfana, a Pakistani girl sold to the owner of a brick kiln

at age six. Here is how she described her life:

My master bought, sold, and traded us like livestock,

and sometimes he shipped us great distances. The
boys were beaten frequently to make them work
long hours. The girls were often violated. My best
friend got ill after she was raped, and when she
couldn’t work, the master sold her to a friend of his
in a village a thousand kilometers away. Her family
was never told where she was sent, and they never
saw her again.17

Ÿ Consider this about Archie, from the ILO report on child labor:

Every day, Archie wakes at 5 a.m., gets dressed, has

breakfast and walks to work. There he squeezes him-
self into a narrow gap to dig blindly for gold in a
deep underground pit, often underwater, breathing
through a hose connected to a diesel-powered com-
pressor. After 10 or 12 hours of labour, he returns
home, has some dinner and goes to sleep. Archie is
11. Some of his young friends who work at the pit
haul sacks of sand and gravel weighing more than
they do, all day long.18

Ÿ Deadly labor has a long history. Consider the lacemaker Mary

Anne Walkley, immortalized by Karl Marx in Volume 1 of
Capital. Mary Anne died 146 years ago, but her story could be
told today and not just of child workers like Mira and Irfana,
but by hundreds of thousands of garment workers laboring
in sweatshops every bit as bad as Walkley’s, and not only in
Pakistan and India but right here in the United States. If you
look up from the streets of Manhattan’s Chinatown, you see the
work is hell 57

steam from hundreds of sweatshops where today’s Mary Anne

Walkleys work away their lives. Marx tells us:

In the last week of June 1863, all the London daily

papers published a paragraph with the “sensational”
heading, “Death from simple over-work.” It dealt
with the death of the milliner Mary Anne Walkley, 20
years of age, employed in a highly respectable dress-
making establishment, exploited by a lady with the
pleasant name of Elise. The old, oft-told story, was
once more recounted. The girl worked, on an aver-
age, 16½ hours, during the season often 30 hours,
without a break, whilst her failing labor power was
revived by occasional supplies of sherry, port, or
coffee. It was just now the height of the season. It is
necessary to conjure up in the twinkling of an eye
the gorgeous dresses for the noble ladies bidden to
the ball in honor of the newly imported Princess
of Wales. Mary Anne Walkley had worked without
intermission for 26½ hours, with 60 other girls, 30 in
one room, that only afforded 1/3 of the cubic feet of
air required for them. At night, they slept in pairs in
one of the stifling holes into which the bedroom was
divided by a partition of board. And this was one of
the best millinery establishments in London. Mary
Anne Walkley fell ill on the Friday, died on Sunday,
without, to the astonishment of Madame Elise,
having previously completed the work in hand.19

When Mary Anne Walkley died, London bakers often toiled,

in blistering heat, 18 hours a day. Children as young as four
were used to open and close trap doors in coal mines. Orphans
were farmed out to employers, who exploited them viciously. In
some parts of the world, nothing much has changed. Even in the
58 WORK WORK WORK

United States, children toil with their parents, picking the crops
we eat without thinking about them.

Ÿ Consider cruise ship workers. Cruise ships usually register in

countries such as Liberia and Panama to escape more burden-
some U.S. labor laws. The employees who do the most onerous
work are invariably people of color, typically from poor coun-
tries. Their pay is low, and their hours are long. If they get
severely injured on the job and need hospital care, they are often
forced to fly back to their home countries, even if better care is
available in the United States. One worker from a Caribbean
nation slipped on a kitchen floor while carrying a large pot of
hot oil. The oil severely burned his leg and foot. He was taken
out of a hospital in Anchorage, Alaska, and forced to take sev-
eral flights home. In desperation, he called his mother and
managed at a stopover in Miami to contact a lawyer his mother
knew of through a friend. The attorney managed to get him
care in Miami and then sued the shipping company. The com-
pany retaliated by contacting the immigration authorities, who
promptly deported the man.20
Cruise ship and other maritime workers suffered greatly during
the pandemic. Although cruise ship companies made every effort
to get passengers home, they didn’t do the same for their employ-
ees. Some were stuck at sea for months. In mid-September 2020,
there were an estimated 300,000 ship workers at sea, 10,000 on
cruise ships. Monotony, limited food, strict quarantines, and
no paychecks were their lot. Some committed suicide. Workers
often organized—including a hunger strike—and family mem-
bers consulted lawyers to redress their relatives’ many grievances.
The corporations that owned the cruise ships made it as difficult
as possible for them. One family, the Szallers, Vilmos and Ildiko,
faced difficulties getting answers from Carnival Cruise lines
(whose CEO Mickey Aronson is a Miami billionaire and owner
of the Miami Heat professional basketball team) after their son
Jozsef committed suicide while onboard a Carnival ship.
work is hell 59

Vilmos says communications with Carnival broke down soon

after. As the Szallers tried to organize the retrieval of their son’s
body, including determining which jurisdiction would have to
declare him legally deceased, they began to see the cruise com-
pany as having had a role in their son’s death. Its labyrinthine
corporate structure—a web of international entities designed to
lower Carnival’s tax liability—compounded their grief.21
Ÿ Consider the restaurant worker, Mr. Zheng. Just two decades
ago, in Manhattan’s Chinatown, restaurant workers often toiled
for upwards of 100 hours per week for as little as $2.00 per hour.
Here is how a reporter describes Mr. Zheng’s life:

Three years after arriving in this country from the

coastal province of Fujian [in China], Mr. Zheng,
35, is still working off a $30,000 debt to the smug-
glers who secured his passage on a series of ships.
He can devote very little of his meager busboy’s
salary to rent, so he has 11 roommates. They share
a studio bracketed by triple-tiered bunk beds, with
a narrow passage like a gangplank between them.
One bachelor household among two dozen others
in a complex of three low-rise buildings on Allen
Street, they split a rent of $650 a month, paying
about $54 each.
Like the others, Mr. Zheng keeps his scant belong-
ings in a plastic bag above his mattress, nailed beside
the herbal-medicine pouches and girlie pictures that
decorate his rectangle of a wall.22

In the United States today, restaurant workers are poorly paid,

overworked, and often mistreated by their bosses. The average
hourly wage in May 2020 for “cooks and food preparation work-
ers” was $13.02; for “fast-food workers,” it was $11.47.23 The
labor in kitchens is arduous and stressful, taking a long-term
toll on bodies, with frequent injuries.
60 WORK WORK WORK

Ÿ Consider the New York City cab driver, Koffee, an African living
in the city for thirty years. Here is an interview with him, con-
ducted by the newsletter Punching the Clock (PTC):

PTC: So what kind of hours do you drive?

Koffee: Twelve hours, five to five.
PTC: Do you mind working a twelve-hour shift?
Koffee: That’s how the industry, you know, they do
it. In less than twelve hours you don’t make
nothing. Sometimes you can work twelve
hours and go home with about $20 in your
pocket.
PTC: What do you do with your free time?
Koffee: Free time? I relax. With this job, after
twelve hours you can’t do nothing. It’s a
killing job. Sitting here driving for twelve
hours. You get home, you are exhausted.
You don’t want to do anything anymore. I
get home, I go to sleep. When I get up I
just have time to get something to eat.

Ÿ Consider the voice of a worker unemployed during this nation’s

first Great Depression, in the 1870s. What he says could be
said, with appropriate variations, by nearly anyone who has
experienced the brutality of long-term unemployment, from
the Dust Bowl farmers of the 1930s to the victims of the mas-
sive plant closings of the past two decades, to the miserable
jobless millions of the poorest countries of Africa, Asia, and
Latin America.

Twelve months ago, left penniless by misfortune, I

started from New York in search of employment. I
am a mechanic and am regarded as competent in
my business. During this year I have traversed sev-
enteen States and obtained in that time six weeks’
work is hell 61

work. I have faced starvation; been months at a

time without a bed when the thermometer was 30
degrees below zero. Last winter I slept in the woods,
and while honestly seeking employment I have been
two and three days without food. When, in God’s
name, I asked to keep body and soul together, I have
been repulsed as a “tramp and vagabond.”24

Ÿ Consider the farm laborers, everywhere among the lowest paid

and most overworked. Bending over the crops, in terrible heat
and cold, working alongside their children, without enough
to eat, like the coffee plantation workers who cannot afford to
buy the crop they pick. In Mexico, just south of Arizona and
California, here is what “free trade” has wrought:

In the fields, a single portable bathroom might

serve a whole crew of several hundred, with a metal
drum on wheels providing the drinking water. . . .
Toddlers wander among the seated workers, some
of them nursing on baby bottles and others, their
faces smeared with dirt, chewing on the onions. A
few sleep in the rows, or in little makeshift beds of
blankets in the vegetable bins. . . . As the morning sun
illuminates the faces of the workers, it reveals dozens
of young girls and boys. By rough count, perhaps a
quarter of the workers here are anywhere from 6 or
7 years old to 15 or 16. . . . Honorina Ruiz is 6. She
sits in front of a pile of green onions. . . . She lines up
eight or nine onions, straightening out their roots and
tails. Then she knocks the dirt off, puts a rubber band
around them and adds the bunch to those already in
the box beside her. She’s too shy to say more than her
name, but she seems proud to be able to do what her
brother Rigoberto, at 13, is very good at. . . . These are
Mexico’s forgotten children.25
62 WORK WORK WORK

There are more than 800 million farm workers in the world.
They “suffer short life expectancies, pesticide poisoning, and
state-sponsored violence whenever they attempt to organize.
Their working conditions are extraordinarily harsh, and their
prospects for decent lives nonexistent.”26 In the United States,
they have worked throughout the pandemic, sometimes in
temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Living, traveling,
and working in groups, they have risked COVID-19 infection
every day.

Ÿ Consider the workers in our packing houses preparing meat

for our tables. Before the advent of modern production tech-
nology, the very names of these workers conjure up a vision of
hell: stockhandlers, knockers, shacklers, stickers, beheaders,
hide removers, skinners, leg-breakers, foot-skinners, back-
ers, rumpers, hide-droppers, butchers, gut-snatchers, gutters,
splitters, and luggers. The work was once done by European
immigrants and African Americans. Today it is done by new
arrivals from Latin America and Asia, but though the job titles
have changed, the work is still dirty and dangerous:

Beef, pork and poultry packers have been aggres-

sively recruiting the most vulnerable of foreign
workers to relocate to the U.S. plains in exchange
for $6-an-hour jobs in the country’s most dangerous
industry. Since permanence is hardly a requirement
for these jobs, the concepts of promotion and signif-
icant salary increases have as much as disappeared.
That as many as half of these new immigrants lack
legal residence seems no obstacle to an industry now
thriving on a docile, disempowered workforce with
an astronomical turnover.
Staggering illness and injury rates—36 per 100
workers in meat—and stress caused by difficult,
repetitive work often means employment for just a
work is hell 63

few months before a worker quits or the company

forces him/her off the job. (Government safety
inspections have dropped 43 percent overall since
1994, because of budget cuts and an increasingly
pro-business slant at the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration.)27

I wrote the following as a post on Facebook, April 24, 2020. It

gives a picture of work during the pandemic at a meatpacking
plant in Greeley, Colorado: “The largest employer in Greeley,
Colorado, is the food processor JBS USA Holdings Inc. It is a
wholly owned subsidiary of JBS S.A., a Brazilian company and
the largest processor of fresh beef and pork in the world. The
plant in Greeley employs some 6,000 people, many of them
immigrants. In Greeley, nearly 40 percent of the population
(which is about 107,000) is Hispanic, meaning that many of the
workers are Hispanic as well.
“Work in a meatpacking factory can best be described as
laboring on a disassembly line, as carcasses are disassembled
as the animal moves along a mechanized line. By all accounts,
the work is intense and dangerous. Animal blood everywhere.
Knives flying, cuts omnipresent, as the line moves ever faster
and the boss demands more and more production.
“There was once a strong and radical union of packinghouse
workers, but mechanization, globalization, and business con-
solidation, along with red-baiting, damaged the union beyond
repair. Today, the much weaker and less radical United Food
and Commercial Workers (UFCW) represents workers in some
U.S. plants, including the one in Greeley. Just about any union
is better than none, but the old union, the United Packinghouse
Workers, won wages that were among the highest in the coun-
try. It also had an ingenious structure of shop stewards, who
coordinated confrontations with management across plants
nationwide. Today, wages are much lower and the union much
less militant.”28
64 WORK WORK WORK

“As essential labor, the operatives at the Greeley facility

continued to work during the pandemic. The company did
no testing, and the workers went without adequate personal
protective equipment. As could have been predicted, employ-
ees soon became infected by the virus, and then they infected
family members. Or they contracted the virus outside the plant
and then infected their co-workers. Hundreds were ill, and sev-
eral died. The situation went national when Trump and Pence
referenced it at a daily news conference. Pence promised that
tests would be quickly made available, and the company also
promised testing immediately. Not surprisingly, neither prom-
ise has been kept. A report from Contact 7 in Denver on April
22 states:

Now less than a week from the scheduled reopen-

ing of the plant, promises from the White House and
JBS management have not been kept. ‘We can only
assume the reason they stopped testing is they don’t
want the numbers to come out, it’s bad P.R.,’ said
Sylvia Martinez, a spokesperson for Latinos Unidos
of Greeley. Multiple informed sources confirmed to
Contact 7 Investigates that JBS management stopped
testing shortly after it started doing so on April 11
and well before its promise to test its 6,000 employees.
Insiders have told Contact 7 Investigates that between
40 percent and 80 percent of managers/supervisors
tested positive on the initial day of testing and those
results prompted JBS to end the testing program. ‘I
believe when it became apparent that most of the
supervisors tested positive, JBS abruptly stopped the
testing,’ said JBS union president Kim Cordova.
Sadly, the plant reopens today, April 24. The
UFCW national president, Anthony Perrone, warns
that it is not safe to reopen the meatpacking plants
that have been closed, including the one in Greeley.
work is hell 65

“Stories from the Smithfield plant in South Dakota are heart-

rending, with the same management lack of concern for the
largely immigrant workforce. BBC News reports:

But according to Smithfield employees, their union

representatives, and advocates for the immigrant
community in Sioux Falls, the outbreak that led to
the plant closure was avoidable. They allege early
requests for personal protective equipment were
ignored, that sick workers were incentivized to con-
tinue working, and that information regarding the
spread of the virus was kept from them, even when
they were at risk of exposing family and the broader
public.

“Today, governors in several states have begun opening up their

economies, and many others are itching to do so. Let what is
happening at these meatpacking plants, and many other essen-
tial workplaces, serve as a warning about what is likely to happen
if we return to business as usual. We are in the midst of a hor-
rible pandemic, and our leaders are advising tactics that will only
worsen things, sickening and killing more people. Yesterday,
Trump suggested that we could inject disinfectants to cleanse
our bodies of the virus. Maybe that will be the salvation of the
packinghouse workers and all of us.”
This quote from a New York Times Guest Essay is appropriate.
It tells us not just about meatpacking workers but about how
their deplorable working conditions affect everyone else:

This powerful connection between work life and

broader public welfare has been undeniable in the
pandemic, as workplace clusters of employees with
the coronavirus have often led to community spread.
Many meatpacking employees, for instance, were
required to work close together without adequate
66 WORK WORK WORK

protection. The result? They brought the highly con-

tagious virus home to their family, neighborhood
and community.
A study published in May in the journal Food
Policy found that the presence of a large beef-packing
facility in a county, relative to comparable counties
without such plants, increased per capita Covid-19
infection rates by 110 percent. The study estimated
that 334,000 Covid infections in the United States
were attributable to beef, pork and chicken process-
ing plants.29

Ÿ Consider Michael, who took a job as a hotel desk clerk after

thirty-two years of college teaching. He says:

I thought that at the hotel I would have the luxury

of not worrying about what I was going to do
tomorrow. But while it was true that I didn’t have to
prepare for the next day’s work, it was today’s work
that took its toll. The job was tiring; I was on my
feet all day. At the end of the day I was free, but too
exhausted to do anything. I often fell asleep soon
after opening a book, as early as seven in the eve-
ning. And on some days, especially Sunday, which
was the worst day in terms of work intensity and
customer complaints, I couldn’t sleep at all. The
computer keys I had punched all day kept going
through my head in an endless loop, and conver-
sations I had with irate guests kept bothering me.
Monday morning would arrive, and I had to be at
work at seven, and I didn’t catch up on sleep until
about Wednesday evening. Teaching might have
generated a lot of anxiety, but this was both physi-
cally and mentally debilitating. Thirty-two years of
this would be unimaginable.30
work is hell 67

Ÿ Consider the temporary clerical workers, Kimberly and Helen,

two of millions of such workers worldwide. Here is how they
describe their work:

Minimal work. Boredom. And no challenging work.

I’d much rather be fighting with a spreadsheet, trying
to figure out how to set up a spreadsheet, rather than
just entering in the numbers. A boss who treats you
like a temp and is very much, like, always checking
up on you or else totally ignoring you. Doesn’t really
remember your name. Says, “Oh, I’ll just put this here.
We’ll wait till so-and-so gets back to work with it.”
The isolation. The lack of benefits. The monotony.
The underemployment. Your resources, your skills,
your intelligence are not integrated. I mean, there’s
no change. So I guess just the hopelessness, just the
stagnation. The fact that there’s never any increase
in cerebral activity. Even when they find out more
about you, they still don’t trust you to take on more.
But the loneliness. It’s really lonely. Eating lunch by
yourself every single day. And no one ever asking
you a personal question. Like the secretaries never,
ever, ask, “Where are you from?” or “What have you
been up to?”31

Ÿ Consider adjunct professors, who now teach most of the classes

in U.S. colleges and universities. As these institutions have
become more like businesses, focusing on the bottom line, they
have slashed labor costs. Since teachers’ salaries and benefits
comprise a large share of such costs, they have hired more and
more part-time instructors, replacing the full-timers who retire,
quit, or die with adjuncts and adding adjuncts any time the
faculty expands. Adjuncts typically get paid by the course and
have limited or no benefits. Sometimes, they don’t have offices
or access to copying machines. Since the pay for a one-semester,
68 WORK WORK WORK

three-credit course might be as low as $2,000, adjuncts some-

times teach at more than one college, which often entails long
commutes. They might find that when one of their courses is
to begin in a week or so, their employer suddenly cancels it,
usually because enrollments aren’t high enough. It is especially
difficult for adjuncts to qualify for unemployment compensa-
tion during the summer months.32
During the pandemic, adjunct unemployment skyrocketed.
And now, hiring is still weak. Here is one adjunct venting about
her situation on social media:

Venting: because enrollment is down, most adjuncts

have been cut this fall. I was told I’d be one of the lucky
ones and have one four-credit hour course. But that
was just cut down to a one-credit hour recitation of
two combined sections—so they wouldn’t have to pay
me for two cr hrs. Max 49 students. That’s a little over
a thousand dollars for a semester, about $60 a week. If
I complain, well, you know: blacklisted or unheard. If
I don’t complain, I should have doormat tattooed on
my forehead. I hate no-win situations . . . obviously.
We adjuncts save them so much money, and they
won’t even spring for an extra credit hour. The union
here sucks, so that’s a nothing-helping. Feeling genu-
inely bad. Sorry to be such a downer.

Ÿ Consider the exceptional history teacher, Ira Solomon, teach-

ing in East Saint Louis, Illinois, a town extraordinary in its
poverty. This is what he tells Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage
Inequalities:

“This is not by any means the worst school in the city,”

he reports, as we are sitting in his classroom on the
first floor of the school. “But our problems are severe.
I don’t even know where to begin. I have no materials,
work is hell 69

with the exception of a single textbook given to each

child. If I bring in anything else–books or tapes or
magazines–I pay for it myself. The high school has
no VCRs. They are such a crucial tool. So many good
things run on public television. I can’t make use of
anything I see unless I can unhook my VCR and bring
it into the school. The AV equipment in the building
is so old that we are pressured not to use it. . . .
“Of 33 children who begin the history classes in
the standard track,” he says, “more than a quarter
have dropped out by spring semester . . . I have four
girls right now in my senior homeroom who are
pregnant or have just had babies. When I ask them
why this happens, I am told, ‘Well, there’s no reason
not to have a baby. There’s not much for me in public
school.’ The truth is . . . [a] diploma from a ghetto
high school doesn’t count for much in the United
States today. . . . Ah, there’s so much bitterness—
unfairness—there, you know. . . .
“Very little education in the school would be con-
sidered academic in the suburbs. Maybe 10 to 15
percent of students are in truly academic programs.
Of the 55 percent of the students who graduate, 20
percent may go to four-year colleges: something like
10 percent of any entering class. Another 10 to 20
percent may get some other kind of higher educa-
tion. An equal number join the military. . . .
“Sometimes I worry that I’m starting to burn out.
Still, I hate to miss a day. The department frequently
can’t find a substitute to come here, and my kids
don’t like me to be absent.”33

Ÿ Consider two welfare mothers, Ursula and Joy, working hard to

keep their families together but excluded from the official count
of workers and reviled by more respectable society.
70 WORK WORK WORK

URSUL A : I used to feel downcast for being on wel-

fare. It was something I felt low-rated about. It felt
degrading. They want to know who is giving you this
or who is helping to send your child to school. If I
had to stop paying the water bill this month to keep
them in school the next month, I would do that. But
that’s my business. I don’t like them prying into what
somebody may give me or who is paying something
for me.
JOY : When you are on public assistance, it’s like
you’re going to pick up someone else’s money that
you didn’t work for. You didn’t make it yourself.
When I got my first welfare check it felt odd, because
I could compare it to receiving my work check. I
knew what it was like to have both. I used to hear
people say, “Well, you are taking money from people
that work and you are not working,” It felt kind of
funny to be a person on the other side this time. This
is my first experience with welfare. Nobody in my
household had ever been on public assistance but
me. My mother worked for the government and so
did my grandmother. I was the first person that ever
needed welfare.
I don’t like the people who work in the welfare
offices. They are nasty to me. They have a bad atti-
tude. They act real snooty and they really don’t want
to do the work. They act like the money is coming
right out of their pockets. I figure, if I go in there
with a nice attitude, because I know some people are
nasty with them, too, then they will be different. But
it doesn’t help. They still are nasty.34

Ÿ Consider the following memorandum sent by a supervisor

to a group of workers in a daycare center. Remember that
these workers, all with considerable experience and many
work is hell 71

child-raising skills, are typically close to the bottom of the

wage scale:

Now, more than ever, we as a business are under

scrutiny by our clients. They will be watching us and
questioning us to reassure themselves that their chil-
dren are safe and secure in our care. Your role is to do
the best you can when it comes to customer service.
They have made a choice as to where they want their
child to be. And we need to reassure them that they
have made the proper choice. We need to give them
what they pay for every minute of the day. Parents
and children must be greeted by name when they
arrive in the morning and when they leave at the end
of the day. You need to be working with the children,
using your AM and PM lesson plans at the begin-
ning and the end of the day. You are not permitted
to sit on tables, chat with other staff people, or be
cleaning or doing anything but interacting with the
children. . . . Remember, the customer always comes
first and we always need to do what’s best for chil-
dren. . . . A pre-school classroom is a special place. It
takes a special person to make great things happen
for children. Always remember that we are tank fill-
ers for the children. And that we owe it to the little
people!35

* Consider prisoner Dino Navarrete, one of tens of thousands of

prison workers now laboring in the “prison-industrial com-
plex,” helping private businesses to make super-profits. Could
there be a more debased form of labor outside outright slav-
ery? But as a matter of fact, this is a growth industry. The
United States leads the world in the number of prisoners, now
approaching 1.5 million, and these convicts are overwhelm-
ingly people of color.
72 WORK WORK WORK

Convicted kidnapper Dino Navarrete doesn’t smile

much as he surveys the sewing machines at Soledad
Prison’s sprawling workshop. The short, stocky man
with tattoos rippling his muscled forearms earns 45
cents an hour making blue work shirts in a medium-
security prison near Monterey, California. After
deductions, he earns about $60 for an entire month
of nine-hour days.
“They put you on a machine and expect you to
put out for them,” says Navarrete. “Nobody wants to
do that. These jobs are jokes to most inmates here.”
California long ago stopped claiming that prison
labor rehabilitates inmates. Wardens just want to
keep them occupied. If prisoners refuse to work,
they are moved to disciplinary housing and lose can-
teen privileges. Most importantly, they lose “good
time” credit that reduces their sentences.
Navarrete was surprised to learn that California
has been exporting prison-made clothing to Asia. He
and the other prisoners had no idea that California,
along with Oregon, was doing exactly what the U.S.
has been lambasting China for—exporting prison-
made goods. “You might just as well call this slave
labor, then,” says Navarrete. “If they’re selling it
overseas, you know they’re making money. Where’s
the money going to? It ain’t going to us.”36

Ÿ Consider Mike Lefevre, a “common” laborer. Here is what he

said to Studs Terkel, author of the exceptional book Working:

I’m a dying breed. A laborer. Strictly muscle work . . .

pick it up, put it down. We handle between forty
and fifty thousand pounds of steel a day. I know this
is hard to believe—from four hundred pounds to
three- and four-pound pieces. It’s dying. . . .
work is hell 73

It’s hard to take pride in a bridge you’re never

gonna cross. In a door you’re never gonna open.
You’re mass-producing things and you never see the
end result. I worked for a trucker one time. And I got
this tiny satisfaction when I loaded a truck. In a steel
mill, forget it. You don’t see where nothing goes.
I got chewed out by my foreman once. He said,
“Mike, you’re a good worker but you have a bad atti-
tude.” My attitude is that I don’t get excited about my
job. I do my work but I don’t say whoopee-doo. The
day I get excited about my job is the day I go to a
head shrinker. How are you gonna get excited about
pullin’ steel? How are you gonna get excited when
you’re tired and want to sit down?
It’s not just the work. Somebody built the pyra-
mids. Somebody’s going to build something.
Pyramids, Empire State Building—these things just
don’t happen. There’s hard work behind it. I would
like to see a building, say, the Empire State, I would
like to see on one side of it a foot-wide strip from
top to bottom with the name of every bricklayer,
every electrician, with all the names. So when a guy
walked by, he could take his son and say, “See, that’s
me over there on the forty-fifth floor. I put the steel
beam in.” Picasso can point to a painting. What can
I point to? A writer can point to a book. Everybody
should have something to point to.37

Ÿ Consider finally this chorus of pained voices, again from

Working :

For the many, there is a hardly concealed discon-

tent. The blue-collar blues is no more bitterly sung
than the white-collar moan. “I’m a machine,” says
the spot welder. “I’m caged,” says the bank teller,
74 WORK WORK WORK

and echoes the hotel clerk. “I’m a mule,” says the

steelworker. “A monkey can do what I do,” says the
receptionist. “I’m less than a farm implement,” says
the migrant worker. “I’m an object,” says the high-
fashion model. Blue collar and white collar call upon
the identical phrase: “I’m a robot.” “There is nothing
to talk about,” the young accountant despairingly
enunciates. It was some time ago that John Henry
sang, “A man ain’t nothing but a man.” The hard,
unromantic fact is: he died with his hammer in his
hand, while the machine pumped on. Nonetheless,
he found immortality. He is remembered.38
 4

The Injuries of Class

Those who labor for others, especially under conditions in

which they have little influence over how the work is performed
or the quality of the product, lose part of their humanity. We are
all capable of both the conceptualization and execution of our
work; this is one of the things that defines human beings. We
have lived on Earth for at least 200,000 years. Remarkably, for
about 95 percent of that time, we survived well in small bands of
gatherers and hunters. This most successful mode of production,
lasting much longer than all successive modes combined, was
marked by (and still is in the few remaining gathering and hunt-
ing groups) the most egalitarian social relationships ever seen in
human society. It is also the best adaptation to the natural world
we have ever managed to achieve.1 In all such systems, work
is conceptualized and executed in integrated tasks. Although
there is typically a gender division of labor—though not great
inequality between men and women—the tasks performed are
not divided into subtasks (or details, as they are often called).
The tools and equipment needed for labor, such as bows, spears,
darts, bowls, baskets, yarn, ropes, cutting implements, boats,
and the like, are made from start to finish by the members of the
76 WORK WORK WORK

group. Through trial and error and conscious experimentation,

people learned much about plants and animals, how to culti-
vate and renew soil, avoid overpopulation, and become efficient
enough to have plenty of free time.
We do not know all the facts of how and why hunters and
gatherers were ultimately displaced by permanent settlements
of farmers, beginning at least 10,000 years ago. We do know that
agriculturalists worked much harder, were less healthy, were
more susceptible to diseases, and had shorter life expectan-
cies than their predecessors. However, as humans crowded into
smaller spaces, their metabolisms changed dramatically. One
effect was that birth rates rose greatly, and the world popula-
tion grew rapidly as well. Within about 4,000 years, states began
to appear, and human societies came to be marked by greater
divisions of labor and distinct social classes. Roughly speaking,
the new modes of production after gathering and hunting, such
as slavery, feudalism, and finally capitalism and socialism, have
been divided into a class of rulers (slaveowners, lords, kings,
pharaohs, emperors, caliphs, capitalists, party leaders) and a
subordinate class of workers (slaves, peasants, serfs, wage labor-
ers). The labor of the subordinate class did and does the work
that produces the output that allows the ruler class to live in
splendor. There were and are, of course, intermediate classes—
for example, professionals like doctors, bankers, stockbrokers,
lawyers, etc. Some engage in day-to-day activities that allow
rulers to extract a surplus from those who do the work.
In class societies before capitalism, labor was specialized
but still task-oriented in that workers did a variety of tasks but
performed each one from start to finish. It is common to say
that such labor is skilled. However, there are no jobs that do
not require some thought and time to do them properly. “Skill,”
then, is in an important sense a social construct, one used to
rank workers hierarchically. In any event, with capitalism, some-
thing profound happened. As soon as workers were herded into
factories (see chapter 5), employers hired supervisors to observe
the injuries of class 77

what they did as they completed their tasks. They noticed that
when task workers—those who had learned a trade requiring a
relatively long apprenticeship—had a job to fulfill, they divided
their task into simpler parts, performing each in turn as many
times as the number of finished products they had to make. In
his seminal book, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation
of Work in the Twentieth Century, Harry Braverman gave the
example of a metalsmith with an order to make a large number
of metal funnels, which can be paraphrased as follows:
Suppose the number is one hundred. The smith, invariably a
man, would first make a pattern of the funnel. Then, he would
lay out one hundred funnels on a large sheet of metal. Next, he
would cut out the one hundred funnels. Then, he would fasten
the ends. Next, he would polish the one hundred pieces and do
whatever other finishing work was necessary.
It was but a short step for capital to figure out that it would be
cheaper to have unskilled (in the sense that they had not learned
a task) workers do one of the steps repeatedly, transferring what
they had done to the next detail person. The task labor would be
minimized, and only that would be performed by the craftsman,
for example, laying out the piece to be made. This breaking up
of tasks into subtasks (details) is called the “Babbage Principle,”
after the mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage, who,
along with Scottish professor Andrew Ure, first demonstrated
its value to capitalists. Not only did it greatly cheapen produc-
tion, but it also significantly expanded the number of people
who could do any given job. Children could be employed, or
women, who had been denied entry into craft (task) work, could
now be hired to do detail work. This increase in the potential
supply of labor placed downward pressure on wages. There was
now, in Marxian language, a larger “reserve army of labor,” one
that enhanced managerial control of the workforce.
On the one hand, our capacity to transform nature opens
tremendous possibilities for building a world of both material
abundance and great personal and collective fulfillment. But
78 WORK WORK WORK

on the other hand, under conditions of capitalist control and

exploitation, our capacities can never be realized. Our work
becomes drudgery, leading to a profound sense of alienation
among those who must toil for wages. Workplaces become
cages, from which it appears that there is no escape. What is
worse, the major institutions of capitalist society conspire to
make it appear that this is simply the way life is. There is, as
former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher put it, “no
alternative.” This chapter is meant to give readers a sense of the
injuries we suffer under such a system.2

W
e live in a complex, divided society. We are separated by
wealth, income, education, housing, race, gender, ethnicity,
religion, and sexual orientation. These divisions are much
discussed; in the past decade, our major newspapers have devoted
entire series to the growing income divide. The New York Times
archives have 2,660 entries under “income inequality” between
January 1, 1977, and January 1, 2007. This figure rose to 4,260
entries between January 1, 2007, and January 1, 2014. However,
it has risen still more dramatically since then, to 9,872, between
January 1, 2014, and August 30, 2021.3 The wealth-flaunting of
today’s rich has become a topic much reported on as well. As early
as 2007, this was the subject of a Sunday New York Times Magazine
article titled “At Their Service.”4
What is seldom talked about or written about in the mainstream
media is the source of unequal income. To do so would require a
discussion most reporters and, for that matter, most economists
don’t want to have. It would have to consider the most funda-
mental division, one at the core of our economic system, namely
between a large class of working people, the working class, and a
much smaller class of owners that employs the former, the capital-
ist class. The latter are those on the top rungs of the income and
wealth ladders, whereas the former are on the bottom steps. These
two great classes make the world go round, so to speak.
the injuries of class 79

Workers and owners are connected and antagonistic to each

other in fundamental ways:

Ÿ It is through the working class’s labor that the goods and ser-
vices necessary for our survival are produced.
Ÿ It is through the ownership of society’s productive wealth—land,
machines, factories, offices—that the owning class can compel
this labor to be done. Workers must sell their capacity to work
to gain access to this productive wealth since no one can live
without using it.
Ÿ In terms of society’s “reproduction,” the relationship between
labor and capital is essential. So much of what we do presup-
poses the successful sale of labor power, and without the money
from such a sale, nothing appears to exist.
Ÿ The essence of production in capitalism is the ceaseless accumula-
tion of capital, making profits, and using such profits to increase
the capital at the owners’ disposal. Competition among capitals
both drives accumulation and is driven by it, in a relentless dance.
Ÿ However, to accumulate capital, employers must make sure that
workers cannot claim possession of all they produce. This means
that employers must strive for maximum control of the entire
production apparatus and the social forces and institutions that
might interfere with this control: for example, the state, schools,
and media. At all costs, workers must be prevented from getting
the idea that they have rights to the output they make.

The organization of capital and labor in our society has adverse

effects on working people. Before examining these, note that the
process of accumulation, beginning with the extraction of a sur-
plus from the worker’s labor, is hidden from view so that workers
do not know or are confused about what is happening to them.
The market, which embodies the forces of supply and demand,
effectively conceals what transpires in the workplace. But other
institutions operate to obscure the truth, too. One example is the
public school system and the tireless promotion of individualism
80 WORK WORK WORK

and nationalism at its core. Once these alleged virtues are internal-
ized by students, it makes it easier for capital to control the labor
process. Individualism makes it less likely that workers will collec-
tively challenge capital’s control of the labor process. Nationalism
helps capital spread from rich countries to poor ones. Teacher-
scholars Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur give a startling
example of one of the fruits of former president George W. Bush’s
“No Child Left Behind” initiative:

Today urban schools are adroitly organized around the same

principles as factory production lines. According to [Jonathan]
Kozol, “rising test scores,” “social promotion,” “outcome-based
objectives,” “time management,” “success for all,” “authentic
writing,” “accountable talk,” “active listening,” and “zero noise”
constitute part of the dominant discourse in public schools. Most
urban public schools have adopted business and market “work-
related themes” and managerial concepts that have become part
of the vocabulary used in classroom lessons and instruction.
In the “market-driven classrooms,” students “negotiate,” “sign
contracts,” and take “ownership” of their own learning. In many
classrooms, students can volunteer as the “pencil manager,” “soap
manager,” “door manager,” “line manager,” “time manager,” and
“coat room manager.” In some fourth-grade classrooms, teach-
ers record student assignments and homework using “earning
charts.” . . . Kozol writes that in the market-driven model of
public education, teachers are viewed as “floor managers” in
public schools, “whose job it is to pump some ‘added-value’ into
undervalued children.”5

Racism, sexism, imperialism, media propaganda, and repres-

sion further distort the social matrix and hide its class basis:

Ÿ Endless war magnifies and deepens nationalism and promotes

both racism and male chauvinism. Wars send workers back to
society badly damaged in mind and body.
the injuries of class 81

Ÿ Imperialism does the same thing as war and often causes it.
Ÿ Constant Orwellian propaganda by the media, think tanks,
politicians, and business leaders denies the class polarization of
capitalist society. A critical element of this misinformation cam-
paign is the mythology surrounding the “free market” economy.
Ÿ When all else fails, naked violence ultimately serves to suppress
class consciousness and sow seeds of doubt among workers who
might otherwise be inclined to mutiny against the system.

Against this background, let us look at the injuries of class. First,

consider unemployment. Separating workers from productive
wealth creates the possibility that workers will be unemployed and
unable to find a buyer for their labor power. In addition, we know
from studying the history of capitalist economies that they peri-
odically sink into recession or depression and these crises are part
of the nature of the system. In such circumstances, unemployment
rises dramatically. Furthermore, capital is constantly searching
the heavens for sunny skies (higher profits). If it finds them other
than where they now are, it shuts down one operation and opens
another. Plant contractions and closings will therefore be regular
occurrences.
What these things mean for working people is a pervasive sense
of insecurity and fear so that even what seems to be the most
stable employment will “melt into air.”6 Fear and insecurity not
uncommonly produce two responses: a kind of joyless penury
or a live-for-the-moment orientation that often takes the self-
destructive forms of debt, drinking, and the like. In a recent essay,
referring to the workers in the mining town in which I was born,
I wrote:

Mining towns in the United States were typically owned by the

mining companies, and the companies exerted a near totalitar-
ian control over the residents. They owned the houses, the only
store (the infamous “company store”), all utilities, the schools,
the library, everything. They had their own private police (the
82 WORK WORK WORK

Coal and Iron Police in Pennsylvania) sanctioned by state law.

The climate in such a town is one of perpetual insecurity and
fear, emotions compounded by the danger of the work in the
mines…. It is difficult to overstate the power of fear and poverty
in shaping how working men and women think and act. Fear of
losing a job. Fear of not finding a job. Fear of being late with bill
payments. Fear of the boss’s wrath. Fear your house might burn
down. Fear your kids will get hurt. I inherited these emotions.7

Should a person face an extended bout of unemployment or a

plant closing, the potential injuries of class multiply, as has been
amply demonstrated: suicide, homicide, heart attack, hyperten-
sion, cirrhosis of the liver, arrest, imprisonment, mental illness.8
The members of the owning class are almost always better
situated to withstand the storms of economic crisis or even unem-
ployment, so these are injuries that the system does not inflict
on them. A few years ago, Michael Gates Gill, a wealthy former
advertising executive who lost his job, was featured in the New
York Times for his book, How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son
of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else.9 Gill gets a job in
a Starbucks, and there he learns about ordinary people. By most
accounts, the book is not very good. However, the author had con-
nections, and he not only managed to get it published by a trade
press but reviewed in our premier newspaper. The chance of this
happening to “everyone else” is close to zero. The stories of job
losses are written in the litany of woes that are an everyday reality
for most people; they are anything but exotic and receive almost
no public attention.
Unemployment in our society is a constant threat to the
employed and a torment to those who cannot find work. To be
unemployed is almost to drop out of society; since to have no rela-
tion to the market is not to exist.
I add here that those who do unpaid labor, especially homemak-
ers, must certainly experience something akin to the unemployed.
Their work, which involves numerous tasks not so easy to learn,
the injuries of class 83

is devalued to such an extent that an estimate of its value is not

included in the Gross Domestic Product. The unpaid labor of poor
single women with children is considered so worthless that they
have been forced to give it up and seek wage labor, often taking
care of the children of others while theirs are attended to haphaz-
ardly or not at all.
Workers comprise the subordinate class. They usually are com-
pelled to react to decisions made by others. Dependent upon
employers, they are at the same time apprehensive of them because
employers hold the power to deny workers the life-sustaining con-
nection to the means of production. Exploitation, dependence, and
insecurity—in a system where workers are bombarded with the
message that they and they alone make the decisions that deter-
mine their circumstances—make for a toxic brew. When drunk
often enough, it creates a personality lacking in self-confidence,
afraid to take chances, easily manipulated and shamed.
The subordination of workers, combined with the market
mechanism that ratifies and reinforces it, means that capitalist
societies will display ineradicable inequalities in variables of great
importance: wealth, income, schooling, healthcare, housing, and
childcare. What is more, the market will, absent powerful coun-
tervailing forces, not only reproduce inequalities but deepen them,
as we have seen so clearly in the United States over the past fifty
years. This inequality generates its own class injuries. All else being
equal, the greater the inequality of income within a state, the higher
the mortality rate. It appears that the psychological damage done
to poor people as they contemplate the gap between themselves
and those at the top of the income distribution has an independent
effect on a wide variety of individual and social health outcomes.10
Everything we know about the correlation between health and
other social indicators, including income (a decent though not
perfect proxy for class), tells us that working people will suffer in
manifold ways.
It has been said that the only thing worse than having a job
is not having one. This may be true, but what does it say about
84 WORK WORK WORK

work? Work in capitalism is a traumatic affair. We all can con-

ceptualize what we do before we do it. When applied to work,
this capability has allowed human beings to transform the world
in profound ways. We can invent tools and machines and socially
divide our labor so that the earth’s riches can be unlocked and a
cornucopia of output produced. However, the human capacity to
both conceptualize and then act upon this is denied to workers.
Their labor power is a mere commodity, the property of their
employer. It has been subdivided, mechanized, and otherwise
controlled, such that conceptualization is reserved for those
who do management’s bidding. In addition, we know now that
the transformation of the earth has been wrought savagely and
destructively during the reign of capitalism. Capital sees the air,
land, and water as “free” resources, so it is costless for employers
to pollute them.11
Humans have changed the world as they have interacted with
the non-human parts of it. And at the same time, since we are
embedded in the world, we have, by definition, transformed our-
selves. Therefore, several hundred years of capitalism have made
us into different people than we were before its ascendancy. This
system requires a certain type of human being and a certain kind
of relationship of people to the natural world, and those who dom-
inate the workings of this system do all they can to ensure that
these requirements are met. We may think we are independent
beings and can see things objectively, but this is not true. We must
take certain actions to survive capitalism, and over time we may
become habituated to our behaviors, coming to think of them as
normal, as part of human nature. Similarly, taking a cue from pow-
erful superiors, we may also think it is natural to objectify nature,
believing it is simply there to serve our needs. In other words,
living in an alienating world will alienate us—from one another,
from the goods and services we produce, from the physical world
around us, and even from ourselves.
Perhaps some examples will clarify what I just wrote. Let me
preface these with the prescient words of Adam Smith:
the injuries of class 85

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple

operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or
very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding
or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for remov-
ing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore,
the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and
ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to [Link]
torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing
or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving
any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of
forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordi-
nary duties of private life.12

Smith’s remarks are surely exaggerated, given that every job

requires some thought. And he doesn’t grasp what happens to
the physical bodies of those who do repetitive labor. Yet, there
is some truth in what he says. I once taught classes one day a
month, in an all-day session, to automobile workers at a General
Motors plant near Pittsburgh. Two groups labored in the factory.
Some were craft workers—pattern and tool-and-die makers.
Others toiled on an assembly line. Classes with the first cohort
were always invigorating, with questions, comments, and discus-
sions throughout the day. With the second, it was an effort to get
anyone to speak. They didn’t want to be there, despite the paid
day off from work. The craft laborers did varied tasks, each of
which required much training. They often had downtime during
which they could read and talk to one another. On the assembly
line, noise and the fast pace of material meant that there was no
downtime or much chance to speak to their workmates. The dif-
ferences were striking.

Postal Workers: In 2019, in the United States, there were 525,920

postal workers. Ever since the US Postal Service (USPS) was
partially privatized, stress among those employed has risen dra-
matically. There have been constant cutbacks in employment and
86 WORK WORK WORK

extreme pressures for carriers, sorters, and clerks to work faster and
harder for less pay. Part-timers carry much of the mail now, work-
ing without full benefits and often forced to use their own vehicles.
A recent report by the Inspector General of the USPS found that
between 2009 and 2018, “non-career” (part-time and temporary)
employees rose by 54 percent.13 While they worked long hours in
2020 to deliver millions of mail ballots, former president Donald
Trump appointed a postmaster general who decommissioned mail
sorting machines around the country, probably to help Trump
stop mail balloting. But whatever the reason, this intensified an
already onerous work regimen. In 2020, postal employees deliv-
ered 1.5 billion Amazon packages alone.14
A major scandal has erupted over massive wage theft by postal
supervisors, who have been changing workers’ timecards to reduce
their actual hours worked, cheating them of wages, especially over-
time pay. Hundreds of labor arbitrations initiated by the postal
labor unions have documented thefts amounting to millions of
dollars. This criminal activity has taken place at hundreds of post
offices across the country. But while large backpay orders have
been issued, many workers have still not received the money owed
them. In some cases, out-of-arbitration or court settlements have
given employees only a fraction of the wages stolen. The supervi-
sors responsible for the robberies have largely gone unpunished,
simply ordered to submit to some more training. It is difficult to
imagine the psychological damage done to people when they have
worked and not been paid.

Nancy Campos’s back ached as she loaded more than 100

Amazon packages onto her truck. The 59-year-old grandmother,
a mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, had worked 13 days in
a row without a lunch break, and now she was delivering on the
Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to keep up with a never-ending
flow of boxes.
At the end of her shift that January day, Campos filled out her
time sheet. Then she took a picture of it—for proof.
the injuries of class 87

“I knew what was going to happen,” said Campos, who delivers

mail in Midland, Texas, “because it happens every pay period.”
Two weeks later, when she checked her paystub in the pay-
roll system, she said she was missing six hours of overtime pay.
That added up to about $201 in lost wages—a week’s worth of
groceries.15

Campos went on to say, “We are depending on that money.

When you get shorted, it’s the most horrible feeling.”16

Automobile Workers: In May 2021, there were 891,500 auto-

mobile workers (motor vehicle and parts manufacturing) in the
United States.17 Not only are they facing rapidly rising job insecu-
rity, but they are also confronted every day with a work regimen
so controlled that they must work fifty-seven of every sixty sec-
onds. What must this be like? What does it do to mind and body?
In this connection, it is instructive to recall (from chapter 1) Ben
Hamper’s book Rivethead. Hamper worked in an old plant, where
the norm was about forty-five seconds of work each minute. He
eventually got a job in a new “lean production” facility. He called
it a “gulag.” In her book, On the Line at Subaru-Isuzu, sociologist
Laurie Graham tells us about her work routine in one of these
gulags.18 Below, I have skipped some of the steps because I just
want to give readers a sense of the work. Remember as you read it
that the line is relentlessly moving while she is working:

1. Go to the car and take the token card off a wire on the front of
the car.
2. Pick up the 2 VIN [vehicle identification number] plates from
the embosser and check the plates to see that they have the
same number.
3. Insert the token card into the token card reader.
4. While waiting for the computer output, break down the key
kit for the car by pulling the 3 lock cylinders and the lock code
from the bag.
88 WORK WORK WORK

5. Copy the vehicle control number and color number onto the
appearance check sheet. . . .
8. Lift the hood and put the hood jig in place so it will hold the
hood open while installing the hood stay.
22. Rivet the large VIN plate to the left-hand center pillar.
23. Begin with step 1 on the next car.

This work is so intense that it is not possible to steal a break,

much less learn your workmate’s job so that you can double up,
then rest while she does both jobs. Within six months of the plant’s
startup, most of the workers had to wear wrist splints for incipi-
ent carpal tunnel syndrome. Necks and backs ached from bodies
twisted into unnatural positions for eight hours, or more, a day.
Supervisors recommended exercises and suggested that workers
who cannot deal with the pain are sissies.
Most of the workers in this industry are in the United Automobile
Workers union (UAW), an iconic organization that waged heroic
sit-in strikes, suffering police violence, in order to organize the plants
during the 1930s. Over the past forty years, however, the union’s
collective bargaining strategy has been one of labor-management
cooperation and concessions. This has meant plant closings, lower
real wages, constant overtime, more injuries, less new organizing,
and more nonunion competitors. For example, the UAW has not
organized plants in the South, nor could it organize the Tesla factory
when it was in California. As a result, working conditions overall
in the industry have deteriorated. As co-workers told one Tesla
worker who suffered a severe job-related injury, “There wouldn’t be
the same rules, training, and safety expectations as at other work-
places.”19 Compounding worker woes, the union has been mired in
a massive corruptions scandal, one emanating from the top of the
union hierarchy, including two former presidents.20
Some of the automobile workers I taught near Pittsburgh were
transfers from a closed plant (a couple had seen two of their work-
places close). To save money for an uncertain future, many were
working twelve-hour days, seven days a week. One man started to
the injuries of class 89

cry when he told us of three workers who had committed suicide

in the wake of the closure of his former plant.
What is true for auto workers is true for all who do this type
of labor. Speed-up, stress, and injury are the rule and not the
exception.

Clerks: There are at least 15 million clerks of all types in the

United States.21 Many years ago, I was on a television show with
former secretary of labor Robert Reich. In response to my claim
that most of the jobs being created were not all that desirable, he
said that there were plenty of good jobs available, ones in which
workers had a real say about them. (He was no doubt referring
to the “quality circles” so popular then.) One such job was that of
“clerk.” I blurted out in a loud and incredulous voice, “CLERKS!” I
suggested that perhaps Reich had never noticed the splints on the
wrists of many clerks, signs of epidemic carpal tunnel syndrome.
Since that time, I worked as a front desk clerk for a few months at
the Lake Hotel in Yellowstone National Park. I describe the experi-
ence and what I learned in my book Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate:
An Economist’s Travelogue. Clerks work long hours; they are on
their feet all day; they take regular abuse from customers. They are
exposed in full view of supervisors with no place to hide; they are
accorded no respect (think about customers on cell phones in gro-
cery lines); their pay is low; their benefits negligible. After a hard
day at the front desk, I only wanted a few drinks and a warm bed.
The stress level was extraordinary.
During the pandemic, clerks have suffered great abuse. Grocery
store employees have been harassed by customers, who have
invaded their personal space, subjected to verbal abuse, and
sometimes assaulted, with at least one who was killed by an angry
shopper. Just google “grocery store clerk assaulted” to get an idea
of what has been happening, and then try to imagine the anxiety
this has created.22

Restaurant Workers: The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported

90 WORK WORK WORK

that in May 2020, more than 11,262,850 persons were working

in “Food Preparation and Serving-Related Occupations.” Their
numbers have been growing for years.23 The pace of the work, the
pressure of it, is unbelievable. Check out the arms and legs of a
kitchen worker. They are full of cuts and burns. Substance abuse
is widespread. The British labor union Unite in 2017 surveyed
kitchen workers and found serious physical and mental health
problems among its members. As reported in Vice:

According to Unite, which published the results last week [late

April 2017], 44 percent of chefs report working between 48 and
60 hours each week, with 14 percent working in excess of 60
hours each week. Half of kitchen workers revealed that they are
regularly expected to stay after their shift had officially ended.
And when asked whether they believe that their work hours
impacted their health, 69 percent answered yes.
In addition to the physical demands of working in a kitchen,
Unite found that poor mental wellbeing is common among
chefs. As a result of working such long hours, 51 percent of chefs
suffer depression and 78 percent have had an accident or near
miss at work due to fatigue. Many chefs reported taking painkill-
ers (56 percent), alcohol (27 percent), and other stimulants (41
percent) to see them through a shift.24

This is an occupation I follow closely since family members do

such work. It would amaze me if the results of this survey were
different if done today, or if one was done in any country in the
world.

Secretaries, Administrative Assistants, and Office Support:

Employment in these occupations in May 2020 was about 20
million.25 Those working in them are poorly paid, many in sick
buildings, stuck in badly designed chairs, staring at computer
screens for hours, taking orders all day long (usually women from
men), and often heavily regimented. Necks and shoulders ache;
the injuries of class 91

headaches are many; carpal tunnel syndrome is common. These

workers, whose working conditions were satirized so skillfully on
the television series The Office, have to contend with daily degra-
dations, including all too prevalent sexual harassment.26

Security Workers: At least three million men and women now

watch over others in prisons, malls, gated communities, in places
like Iraq where U.S. troops are engaged in warfare, and on our
city streets.27 This type of work is guaranteed to be stressful and
to generate an extremely jaundiced and pejorative view of the rest
of society and an extreme, macho personality, prone to violence.
Read any account of a prisoner’s life, and you will find pervasive
cruel treatment by guards, some difficult to stomach.28

Custodial Workers: In October 2020, there were more than four

million building and grounds workers in the United States, many
of them immigrants, keeping our buildings clean and the grounds
swept and manicured.29 Often they are hired by contractors who
are themselves employed by the buildings’ owners. It has taken
monumental efforts by the Service Employees International Union
(SEIU) to organize some of these exploited workers. They must
often labor close to dangerous cleaning fluids, solvents, and chemi-
cal fertilizers. Much of the time, these workers are invisible to the
rest of the workforce. The professors where I worked seldom knew
who cleaned their offices and kept the campus grounds in good
shape. I helped these men and women form a labor union in the
early 1970s. During the campaign, they (especially the women)
faced daily threats from their supervisors. I was proud of all of
them when they voted solidly for the union.30

Medical Workers: In May 2020, more than 15 million people were

laboring in our hospitals, Urgicare centers, practitioners’ offices,
nursing homes, and individual residences.31 Except for those at
the top, including healthcare administrators and some physicians,
healthcare is a minefield of poor working conditions. Even nursing
92 WORK WORK WORK

has been degraded so much that the nursing shortage could be

nearly filled simply by returning disaffected nurses to their profes-
sion. At the request of the California Nurses Association, I spoke
one summer to nurses in four Texas cities. I heard many tales of
woe: 16-hour days, two weeks straight of 12-hour shifts, insane
patient loads, constant cost-cutting that damages patient health,
demeaning treatment by administrators, and so forth. Conditions
only worsen as one goes down the healthcare occupation ladder.
During the pandemic, the media have been awash in stories
about the extreme difficulties those on the treatment frontline
face. This headline from a Kaiser Family Foundation/Washington
Post report sums this up: “KFF/Post Survey Reveals the Serious
Mental Health Challenges Facing Frontline Health Care Workers
a Year into the COVID-19 Pandemic.”32

Gig Workers: Companies like Amazon and Uber do their business

online. Each has many direct employees; Uber has some 20,000,
while Amazon has about 1.3 million worldwide. However, both
companies hire other service providers to make deliveries and
serve as taxi drivers. The company classified all of Uber’s drivers
and deliverers as independent contractors, as are many of Amazon’s
delivery drivers. There are plenty of other companies that run their
businesses in a similar way. They are essentially platforms that can
be accessed through an app (on a smartphone) by those who pur-
chase their services. The internet and the smartphone have been
critical in their creation and success in making money. What these
businesses do is serve as matchmakers, typically between sellers
and consumers but also, and importantly, between businesses and
workers. Tech analyst Azeem Azhar gives an idea of the scope of
the matchmaking once the “gig economy” got going:

Soon, we could order taxis, takeaway food, and massages from

the comfort of our couches. TaskRabbit, now owned by furni-
ture giant Ikea, will dispatch someone to help you assemble your
the injuries of class 93

new bookcase. Talkspace will help you find a therapist. Wag will
find a walker for your dog.33

Uber has more than three million drivers it can use globally.
They register with the platform, and then customers use an app to
secure a ride. A driver is notified, picks up the rider, and goes to
the destination. Part of the fare goes to Uber, the rest plus tip to the
driver. Numerous other platforms function in the same way. The
workers are, in effect, own-account laborers, except that they do
not stand on a street corner selling tamales.
Proponents of gig labor argue that the matchmaking platforms
make markets more efficient and more socially beneficial. They
also provide employment opportunities, especially in the Global
South. However, more efficient markets simply mean greater
profitability for the owners of the platforms. They do nothing
in themselves to improve the welfare of the workers, much less
societies as a whole. If we consider gig workers, their employ-
ment is a decidedly mixed blessing. Some are happy they have
found work, especially in difficult times such as the pandemic.
However, they have numerous complaints. They are at the mercy
of consumers, who can ruin their chances of future employment
with a bad review of their work. They often are cheated out of
wages they have earned or must wait a long time to be paid. Net
pay is often not enough to live above the poverty level. Their
employment is often sporadic, and it is always “on-call,” so it is
difficult to have a normal life. Delivery drivers, especially those
on e-bikes, often have their vehicles stolen. Since most platform
laborers are classified as independent contractors, they enjoy no
labor law protections, including the right to form unions without
employer interference. They must also bear costs usually borne
by business owners, such as vehicles, insurance, uniforms, and
so forth.
Delivery gig work, whether it be of goods or people, is often
dangerous to both drivers and pedestrians:
94 WORK WORK WORK

Valdimar Gray was delivering packages for Amazon at the height

of the pre-Christmas rush when his three-ton van barreled into
an 84-year-old grandmother, crushing her diaphragm, shatter-
ing several ribs, and fracturing her skull.
“Oh my god!” screamed Gray as he leaped out of his van. It was
a bright, clear afternoon on Dec. 22, 2016, and the 29-year-old
had been at the wheel of the white Nissan since early that morn-
ing, racing to drop Amazon packages on doorsteps throughout
Chicago. He stood in anguish next to Telesfora Escamilla as she
lay dying, her blood pooling on the pavement just three blocks
from her home. After the police arrived, Gray submitted to
drug and alcohol tests, which came up clean. He would later be
charged with reckless homicide.34

Drivers fare worse than pedestrians:

So far this year [2021], nine couriers have died in the five bor-
oughs, according to delivery worker advocates. They include
Federico Zaput Palax, who was killed when his scooter collided
with a dump truck in Kensington, Brooklyn, in June, and Noe ​​
Amador Licona, who died over the weekend in Queens after
being struck by a sedan.35

The horror of food delivery work is detailed in a report by Los

Deliveristas Unidos, a worker advocacy group based in New York
City. The account begins with a memorial to the drivers killed in
2020 and 2021.36 Efficient markets, indeed!

THE TOTAL NUMBER of people performing the work listed

above, excluding gig workers for whom no official count exists,
is about 70 million, approximately 44 percent of all employment
in the United States. If significant injuries of class are experienced
by this many, in the richest country in the world, imagine what is
true for the significantly great number of workers in the Global
the injuries of class 95

South. Remember that worldwide there are over 800 million farm
laborers!
Work in capitalism takes a heavy toll. Capitalists want our
bodies, every part of them. They seek to use us until we wear out.
Then, we are tossed aside. They sap our creativity, stealing it when-
ever and however they can and turning it against us in the form of
divided and degraded labor that must be timed to the rhythm of
machinery and algorithms. Our labors bore us to death, make us
anxious, encourage us to be manipulative, alienate us in multiple
ways—from co-workers, from products, from ourselves, from the
natural world. They make us party to the production of debased
and dangerous products, subject us to arbitrary authority, make
us sick, and injure us. I remember my dad saying, when emphy-
sema (the result of too many cigarettes, too much asbestos, and
too much silica dust) destroyed his health, that he hadn’t expected
retirement to be like this. He and how many hundreds of millions
of others?
It is not the CEO and the managers who suffer depression,
hypertension, and heart attacks from being too long on the job.
Instead, it is the assembly line worker, the secretary, and the kitchen
laborer.37 Those who cannot control their work hurt the most. And
with all of these injuries of class, I haven’t even touched upon the
compound misery endured by Black workers, Hispanic workers,
women workers, gay workers, transgender workers, and workers
without proper national documents. And I have not described
some of the worst types of labor: farm labor, domestic work, labor
in recycling plants, and many others, which get truly demonic as
we move outside the rich nations and into the poor ones. It is no
wonder that people do not need much convincing to believe that
happiness lies not in the workplace but in the shopping mall.
The daily debasement heaped upon working men and women
breeds anger and rage. Often rage is turned inward and shows
itself as depression, addiction, or suicide. Frequently, it is directed
against children, spouses, lovers, or against some great mass of
“others,” like immigrants, women, radical minorities, or gay people.
96 WORK WORK WORK

But sometimes, it is correctly aimed at the class enemy and takes

the form of riots, sabotage, strikes, demonstrations, even revolu-
tion. And then the creativity bound and gagged for so long bursts
forth as people try to take control of their labor and their lives. This
is what I think of as the “miracle of class struggle.”
I am not going to end this essay with a reminder about how
important it is to keep the struggles of the past fresh in the present.
Or how it is necessary to educate the working class and essential
to build a working-class movement and not just organize workers
into unions. Nor will I say that there are hopeful signs that such a
movement can be built, or why we must always fan the flames of
dissent and revolution. You have heard all this before.
Instead, I am going to say something different. The injuries of
class are deep and long-lasting. The poor education that is the lot
of most working-class children leaves lasting scars that a picket
line will not heal. The love lost when the factory-working father
spent too much time in bars does not come back after a demon-
stration. I have been a radical, highly educated and articulate, but
the fears and anxieties of my working-class parents are like indel-
ible tattoos on my psyche. The dullness of mind and weariness of
limbs produced by assembly line, store, and office do not disap-
pear after the union comes to town. The prisoner might be freed
but the horror of the prison cell lives on.
Wilhelm Reich, the German psychoanalyst, was kicked out of
the psychoanalytic society because he was a communist. Ironically,
he was also expelled from the Communist Party because he was a
therapist who believed that the minds of working people, ravaged
by the injuries of class, would have to be healed.38 It would take
real effort to help workers regain their humanity. I think Reich was
right. We ignore the injuries of class at our peril.
 5

Panopticon

The panopticon is a disciplinary concept brought to

life in the form of a central observation tower placed
within a circle of prison cells.
From the tower, a guard can see every cell and inmate,
but the inmates can’t see into the tower. Prisoners will
never know whether or not they are being watched.
This was introduced by English philosopher Jeremy
Bentham. It was a manifestation of his belief that
power should be visible and unverifiable. Through this
seemingly constant surveillance, Bentham believed all
groups of society could be altered. Morals would be
reformed, health preserved, industry invigorated, and
so on—they were all subject to observation.1

T
hroughout this book, our emphasis has been on “control” as
one of capitalism’s two main underpinnings, the other being
“exploitation/expropriation.” In this chapter, we will exam-
ine control within the workplace. There are other sites of control:
school, religion, laws, media. These are all generally supportive of
98 WORK WORK WORK

the interests of capital, namely, the endless drive to accumulate

wealth. They all help to ensure that we behave so that the system
continues to reproduce itself.
Since workplaces are the sites where profits are extracted from
our labor, it is here that control is most critical. From capital-
ism’s birth a few hundred years ago, successive efforts by business
owners to command the labor process have given rise to what can
be called “managerial control mechanisms.”
In the early years of capitalism, people worked in their homes,
often as a family, to produce products such as cloth from the
materials and sometimes the equipment provided to them by mer-
chant-capitalists. The final goods were then returned to the owner
for a price. This “outworking” or “putting-out”—a phrase mean-
ing the raw materials were “put out” to those who wove the cloth
from the loaned wool—was abusive. Workers separated from one
another could easily be pressured to accept lower prices if the mer-
chant told them others would work for less than they demanded.2
However, outworking or putting out was subject to much uncer-
tainty. Workers might “cheat,” using less wool per unit of cloth,
keeping the unused portion for cloth that could be sold to other
merchants. The family controlled the pace of the labor, and the
employer could have no grasp of how the work was done.
Ultimately, the putting-out process was not sustainable because
too much control was in the hands of the producers. The first great
weapon instituted to lessen worker control was to herd producers
into central locations, that is, into factories. Initially, work was car-
ried on as before, with weavers and helpers, the latter often women
and children. Many of the children were leased to factory owners
by orphanages.3 Employer control was enhanced by what soon
enough became a ubiquitous factory whistle, a sound that sum-
moned people to work and signaled when they could take a break
and when the workday ended. Failure to abide by the whistle’s
command meant discipline in the form of loss of wages or dis-
missal. I remember hearing the whistle day and night at the glass
factory in my hometown. Its piercing noise was set to the clock,
panopticon 99

sounding at the shift changes: 8:00 a.m., 4:00 p.m., and midnight.
Failure to be on time could be seen on the timecards each person
had to punch when entering the enclosed spaces that were home
for the next eight hours. A minute late might cost someone an
hour’s pay.
Dictating when work started and ended was a step forward in
capital’s rationalization of production. However, centralization
soon gave rise to two radical changes in how work was done. When
workers are confined, caged if you will, they can be observed,
like pet birds. Management hired special personnel—later to be
called industrial engineers—to observe what the workers did.
Observation led to the insight that the task labor dominant in
early capitalism could be broken down into component parts, with
each one doled out to less-trained workers. When faced with a
large order, craftsmen divided their tasks into subtasks so that the
order could be filled more quickly. However, the same result could
be achieved more cheaply if the subtasks were done by those paid
much less than the craft worker. The idea was to always economize
on the wage bill to the higher-wage employees, using them only for
jobs others could not do. Thus, the detailed division of labor was
born, termed by Harry Braverman the “Babbage Principle,” after
the man who first proposed it, the inventor Charles Babbage. Now
control could be enforced by the easy substitution of one laborer
with another. Craft personnel were difficult to replace, but this was
not the case with those who performed simpler, repetitive details
of a more complex task. Furthermore, by increasing the number of
people who could do any given job, the detailed division of labor
significantly increased what Marx called the reserve army of labor.
This reserve of potential labor functioned as a brake on the power,
and hence the wages, of all employees. Both Babbage and Andrew
Ure (the other early proponent of detail work) noted that more
women and children could be employed in place of adult men
once this principle became widespread.4
Men, women, and children performing relatively repetitive, sim-
pler tasks acted as a spur to the introduction of machinery, which,
100 WORK WORK WORK

once propelled by an independent power source, offered capital a

potent means of control. The pace of work could be regulated by
mechanical means, making labor, using Marx’s famous phrase, into
“appendages to the machine.” Mechanization also sped up the deg-
radation of work, as Harry Braverman and Harvard professor of
business James Bright made clear. The latter correlated the degree
of mechanization and a composite of work complexity. He found
a strong inverse correlation between the two variables so that with
the highest degree of mechanization, almost no job knowledge
was required. Braverman, who incorporated Bright’s work into his
book Labor and Monopoly Capitalism, references an oil refinery
personnel manager who placed an upper limit on the IQ scores of
prospective machine operators, such that only those testing below
this cutoff IQ would be hired. The work was so monotonous and
routine that the employer felt that higher IQ workers would not be
as productive as those with lower ones.5
Mechanization—today robotics and artificial intelligence come
to mind—continuously eliminates jobs, which, by making work-
ers fearful of unemployment, greatly aids the employer’s ability
to control the labor process. In the wake of COVID-19, employ-
ers have become more amenable to automating their workplaces.
Machines don’t get sick, they don’t try to unionize, and they can
reduce costs. Now, with growing labor shortages, fueled in part
by an unprecedented number of workers quitting their jobs (see
chapter 8), many in the service sector might be on the chop-
ping block: “Employers seem eager to bring on the machines. A
survey last year by the nonprofit World Economic Forum found
that 43% of companies planned to reduce their workforce because
of new technology. Since the second quarter of 2020, business
investment in equipment has grown 26%, more than twice as fast
as the overall economy.”6 One type of employment that could be
adversely affected is in fast food. “Restaurants have been among
the most visible robot adopters. In late August, the salad chain
Sweetgreen announced it was buying the kitchen robotics startup
Spyce, which makes a machine that cooks vegetables and grains
panopticon 101

and spouts them into bowls.”7 Sweetgreen says that this will give
its remaining workers “more time to focus on preparing food”!8
Watch the video linked in note 8 before you take this remark at
face value. Ironically, celebrity chef Daniel Boulud is an investor in
Spyce. Machines won’t be mixing and pouring ingredients in his
restaurants, however.
Frederick Taylor, the patron saint of industrial engineers, took
what had already been done by capital in terms of control and
systematized it. He developed three principles of what he termed
“scientific management.”9 First, through close observation of the
motions involved in each task and the time it takes to do each one,
using stopwatches and cameras, the engineers could collect all the
knowledge that had been in the hands and minds of the work-
ers. The conceptualization of work would now be monopolized
by capital. Second, each task would be “rationalized,” that is, the
motions would be reorganized so that the necessary time for the
job was minimized. From the beginning, cameras were employed
by industrial engineers, and today, often unseen closed-circuit
television (CCTV) cameras are ubiquitous in workplaces and
cities and towns around the world. These allow employers to mon-
itor their hired hands no matter where they labor: offices, banks,
grocery stores, factories, warehouses, delivery, and other vehicles,
classrooms, any building, retail outlets, homes, even construction,
and road repair sites.10 There may be fifty or more CCTVs in a
large grocery store. Smartphones can be used to compel workers
to self-monitor, noting delivery times and anything else the boss
demands. For example, Amazon issues Inpax hand scanners to
monitor its drivers’ work as they deliver packages and dictate the
routes they drive.11 Algorithms and related apps can direct those
who shop for others to minimize the time they traverse a grocery
store’s aisles or make deliveries. Amazon warehouses provide an
extreme example: an algorithm dictates the flow of goods from
one aisle to another so that workers never intersect, thus minimiz-
ing contact among them. It is almost as if each worker in a space
that might employ hundreds of people is working alone.12
102 WORK WORK WORK

There were (and are) numerous standard motions, with stan-

dard times, so direct observation is often no longer needed. These
motions were named “therbligs,” after the husband-and-wife
engineering team Frank and Lillian Gilbreth (their name spelled
backwards). For example, room attendants in hotels and motels
make certain similar movements as they clean a room. Hidden
cameras can easily capture these, and then industrial engineers
can note the standard motions (removing a pillowcase, for exam-
ple) and look up the standard time for this. A total time per room
is then calculated, and, based on this, each attendant is expected to
be able to clean a certain number of rooms in a shift.
Finally, every employee would be given detailed instructions to
be followed precisely each time a task was performed. Braverman
has a telling account of what was really going on here, namely that
workers would be sped up, and those who could not keep pace
would be fired. It is well worth reading Braverman on “Schmidt,”
the man Taylor directed to load pig iron at a speed four times faster
than had been standard. If the new rate could be maintained and
wages rose by less than four times, unit labor costs would fall.13
This is simply speed-up masquerading as science. Karen and I met
a room attendant at a chain hotel in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
who told us that she was expected to clean twenty-nine rooms a
day. Ironically, in Las Vegas, Nevada, where most hotel labor is
unionized, attendants had to clean only fifteen rooms each day. In
addition, they worked in pairs to reduce the likelihood of being
sexually assaulted by customers.
Let me add here that scholars writing about work are often igno-
rant of what a job entails. Braverman tells us that famed sociologist
Daniel Bell, in his description of the labor Schmidt was perform-
ing, had not the slightest idea what a pig of iron is. Similarly, Nobel
Laureate in Economics Joseph Stiglitz seems unaware of all the
monitoring and control that employers use, all the time, on as many
employees as possible. He hypothesized that one reason for unem-
ployment is that some employers chose to pay above-equilibrium
wages—which, according to neoclassical economic theory, causes
panopticon 103

unemployment—because they could not effectively oversee those

they hired. The higher wage would keep unmonitored employees
productive. On average, workers have endured stagnant wages for
nearly fifty years, with wages badly lagging productivity increases.
So, which companies are paying these higher wages? And hasn’t
Stiglitz ever heard of Frederick Taylor and his progeny? No doubt,
he hasn’t been to many workplaces. Had he gone to those modern
automobile plants Ben Hamper called gulags or an Amazon ware-
house, hopefully he would have seen how foolish his theory is.
Taylor’s ideas have been thoroughly implemented by corporate
management worldwide; today, they are built into the design of the
products themselves. There is even “financial engineering,” with
courses of this name given in engineering schools. And like any
successful practice, it has been further developed since Taylor’s
time. The Toyota Corporation pioneered what is now called “lean
production,” termed accurately by critics “management by stress.”14
There are many aspects of this “improvement” on Taylorism:

Ÿ Systematic Hiring: Prospective employees must go through a

rigorous set of interviews and tests, presumably to see if they
qualify for the job. In truth, employers want to have a psy-
chological profile of each person to determine whether he or
she will be amenable to working in teams, if they have suffi-
cient physical strength and dexterity to perform the required
tasks, if they can work fast, or if they might vote for a union.
Today, metadata are available from various companies, and
these, along with searches of social media accounts, can yield
enormous amounts of information about employee behavior.
These can guide businesses in their hiring decisions. And once
hired, data from emails and various programs used by workers
to communicate with one another can allow employers to assess
conduct that may be inimical to corporate control.15 Incredible
amounts of information are being constantly collected about all
of us. It would be surprising if employers did not try to access as
much of this as they need to control their workforces.
104 WORK WORK WORK

Ÿ Team Production: Capitalists are aware that, contrary to the

precepts of neoclassical economics with its fetish of individual
choices, production is always done by collectivities of workers.
The Toyota Production System sought to turn this fact to its
advantage. Workers are termed “associates” and placed in small
groups responsible for some part of a production process. As in
the military, the idea is to get team members to commit to one
another in a perverse solidarity. Soldiers don’t kill for the glory
of their country but to protect their buddies. Similarly, workers
will do the same to get the job done. Corporate loyalty is encour-
aged, even by group exercises and singing before forming into
teams and getting to work.16 Teams are expected to solve prob-
lems on their own. At one plant, team members were taught to
time-study themselves and then, in effect, speed up their labors
to attain greater efficiency. Frederick Taylor would have smiled
from the grave if he could have seen this. The employees were
compelled to see themselves as objects to be manipulated and
made to function in a machine-like fashion. Some enjoyed it,
thinking they were learning a new skill.

Ÿ Cross-Training: It is often assumed that working in the modern

economy requires much knowledge and training. We have seen
in previous chapters that this is not usually the case. With lean
production, every job is Taylorized in advance of the advent of
production. This means that the expertise needed for as many
jobs as possible has been reduced to a minimum. Suppose that
in a team, someone is absent from work. The other team mem-
bers have to take up the slack, so they have been trained to do a
variety of unchanging subtasks. This is not multiskilling as we
might typically think of it. Consider the job of machinist, which
of all blue-collar occupations requires the most training. It takes
an apprenticeship lasting a few years to learn how to fashion
a machine part by making complex and high tolerance cuts in
a piece of metal. With numerically controlled machines, how-
ever, the knowledge of the machinist has been transferred to
panopticon 105

a computer program, which then controls the mechanism that

performs the cuts. To learn to operate it takes no more than a
few weeks. Imagine then how few hours are needed to learn to
do a set of routine details. The real purpose of cross-training
is to maintain high production volumes with fewer workers if
necessary.

Ÿ Just-in-Time Inventory: Firms employing modern-day Taylor-

ism contract out as much labor as possible. For example, an
automobile plant can lower its production costs in terms of
wages, machinery, and space by subcontracting the production
of steering mechanisms. A nearby plant, built for just this pur-
pose, will hire workers at a rate less than that of the central plant
where automobiles are assembled. Sometimes, this occurs with
the cooperation of the labor union, which even if it manages
to organize the subcontractor’s workers will accept wages lower
than at the assembly plant—to assemble the steering mecha-
nism. These mechanisms will be delivered “just-in-time,” that is,
only as needed by the main factory, with deliveries made several
times a day. Thus, no inventory is kept in reserve, saving space.
In some cases, it is even possible that the subcontractor can
contract out some of its work to peripheral firms at still lower
costs. Here managerial control is enhanced by the splitting of
the automobile workforce.17
The just-in-time concept can be applied to employees as well.
The reference to the scheduling program in the following quote
refers to a software program that uses an algorithm to show
businesses how to best allocate hours of work:

Today, just-in-time inventory is applied to workers

themselves. Rather than assuming the utilization of
someone for a week or even a day, scheduling is based
upon an analysis of how many total work hours are
likely to be needed during any particular hour or set
of hours during a shift. If the scheduling program
106 WORK WORK WORK

tells you that for an eight-hour shift, seven workers

are needed for the first three and the last three hours
but 10 are needed for the two-hour period around
lunch time, then you will use 10 workers only for
those two hours. Employees may be scheduled for
two-hour workdays, or “on-call” personnel may be
asked to come in.18

It has become more common for work to be subcontracted out

of a country. Global supply chains now link far-flung dependent
enterprises to a central corporation, almost always located in
the rich nations of the Global North. Firms in the Global South
that supply production parts use the various control mecha-
nisms discussed in this chapter, as do their counterparts in the
Global North. Workers in poor countries then bear the brunt
of managerial control, which is often combined with physical
violence perpetrated by public and private police. Ruthless cost
reduction is critical for managers of workplaces in the Global
South, given that competition for the business of the central
corporations is intense, as is the work intensity itself.19

Ÿ Kaizen: This is a Japanese word meaning “constant improve-

ment.” In lean production, productivity is relentlessly pressured
upward. Kaizen can be best understood in connection with
team production, cross-training, and just-in-time inventory.
First, production is stressed. An assembly line’s speed might
be increased, a team member might be eliminated, or a short-
age of needed material might suddenly appear. The stress will
be great enough that a production bottleneck will eventually
become apparent. This will force a warning signal to appear.
There might be a system of lights along a line, with green mean-
ing all is well, yellow showing that there is a problem, and red
signaling a complete breakdown. Stress will continue until the
lights turn yellow. A manager will run to the team and insist
that the workers find a solution to get the lights green again. At
panopticon 107

one plant, the warning light was accompanied by the playing

of “Mary had a little lamb” over and over. Workers will have to
move faster, do a missing person’s subtask, or somehow find
materials. Woe to them if the line has to be shut down, even
though companies say that employees have the power to shut
down the line if they see a safety hazard or possible destruc-
tion of equipment. What makes kaizen so insidious is that it
is never-ending. It is simply a continuous work-intensification
scheme camouflaged as something more benign, namely that
workers are empowered by it.

Lean production is integral to most kinds of employment, from

factories to offices to colleges and universities. In tech industries,
it is hidden by perquisites that make it appear that where you work
is like a home. Free catered meals, gyms, massage tables, games
made being at work enjoyable. But they also kept people at work
for long hours. The internet kept them on call all day and night as
well. In higher education, lean production has taken the form of
minimizing the number of tenure-stream faculty by hiring part-
time adjunct teachers, who now teach the majority of classes.
(Once granted tenure, professors have permanent employment
and can be discharged only for cause. An exception might be if
the college faced financial distress.) Adjuncts are utilized “just-in-
time,” often not knowing if they will have classes to teach until just
before a semester begins. If enrollments aren’t high enough, the
course is canceled. Faculty are required to provide a detailed sum-
mary of their productivity every year, which amounts to a time
study of themselves. The universal use of internet-based commu-
nication programs has meant that lectures, syllabi, and notes must
be placed online, becoming the employer’s property. Professors are
on-call with students and administrators, with barrages of emails
coming in every day. Matters have only worsened with pandemic-
induced distance learning.
All the managerial control mechanisms generate stress for work-
ers. Kaizen ruins bodies (which include our minds). Alienation is
108 WORK WORK WORK

the result, brutal and widespread. Imagine spending your day work-
ing at an Amazon warehouse, a panopticon if ever there was one:

[Darryl Richardson] complained about the fast, unrelenting

pace of work and about seeing co-workers terminated for falling
behind Amazon’s production quotas. As a picker, Richardson
takes merchandise out of large metal bins that robots carry to
his workstation, and he then hurries to put the items in various
totes that a conveyor belt takes to packing. Nearby video moni-
tors tell him what to do minute after minute. His quota is to pick
315 items an hour, five items a minute: toilet paper and toys,
baby food and books destined for Amazon customers. “You’re
running at a consistent, fast pace,” Richardson said. “You ain’t
got time to look around. You get treated like a number. You don’t
get treated like a person. They work you like a robot.”20

Owner Jeff Bezos is aware of the toll this work takes on the
workers’ limbs. But rather than change the insane work regimen,
his solution illustrates just how indifferent capital is to what the
labor process has become. He says, “We’re developing new auto-
mated staffing schedules that use sophisticated algorithms to rotate
employees among jobs that use different muscle-tendon groups to
decrease repetitive motion and help protect employees from MSD
[musculoskeletal disorders] risks. This new technology is central
to a job rotation program that we’re rolling out throughout 2021.”
It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at this, especially given
that in this same article he also says his goal is to make Amazon
“Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work.”21
The managerial control methods discussed so far are integral to
the workplace. However, capital also uses consumers to enhance its
control. As corporate methods have become the rule in higher edu-
cation, students are considered consumers. Management encourages
them to think of their professors as simply purveyors of a product
they purchase, no different in principle than a fast-food sandwich
or something ordered from Amazon. They are given the right to
panopticon 109

evaluate their teachers, and the latter are expected to encourage this.
Student evaluations then become part of the employer’s arsenal of
control devices. Poor evaluations can spell the end of a teacher’s
career, especially those whose employment is precarious to begin
with, such as adjuncts and untenured full-time teachers. There are
also websites not run by the colleges, such as RateMyProfessors, that
serve the same function.
Given that evaluations are anonymous, students are free to
say anything. This generates fear among the teachers, and this
fear helps control how they teach and what they profess. Those
hostile to higher education, believing it to be dominated by left-
wing ideologues, are on the lookout for anything that smacks of
heterodox thinking. They will encourage students to spy on their
professors, give them bad ratings, and urge that they be dismissed.
For workers who provide services, customer comment platforms
such as Yelp are ubiquitous. Consumers are urged to evaluate the
competence of automobile mechanics, waiters, hotel clerks, retail
employees, delivery drivers, Uber drivers, medical practitioners,
and many others. Employers can then use these ratings to dis-
cipline and thus control their workers. Political scientist Joshua
Sperber calls this constant monitoring a “digital panopticon.”22
Workers are always being watched, and they never know what will
result in a negative customer review.
The managerial control mechanisms discussed in this chapter
do not form an exhaustive list, and it is essential to understand that
underlying them is always the threat of force. Some workers might
be fired or demoted to teach others that they must submit to the
employer’s power. Private detectives and electronic snooping can
be used to get useful information about the private lives of employ-
ees. If a union comes on the scene, workers can be convinced to
spy on it and report back to management.23 Workplaces are always
embedded in larger social structures, which usually work to
strengthen managerial control. There are thousands of examples
of police and military forces breaking strikes, often with ample
violence. The laws, including labor statutes, protect the rights of
110 WORK WORK WORK

property owners above all others, with various labor boards and
courts interpreting the laws in ways favorable to capital. Rarely do
media offer robust and unyielding support to workers, which is
not surprising since typically these are capitalist enterprises. In the
United States, the Constitution might protect public employees
against the depredations of their employers, but for private-sector
workers, this is rarely the case.24
Managerial control aims to create a labor process in which the
one active element, human labor power, is as limited as possible in
its ability to interfere with capital accumulation. Businesses want
the same predictability that can be expected from machines. If
X-amount of labor power is hired, then Y-amount of output will
be produced. This formula implies that workers must be conceived
as machine-like parts that are combined with other, inanimate
entities to yield the product. How could this be anything but alien-
ating? It is profoundly anti-human. It is not just that employers
exploit labor. Rather, they consume workers, and in the process,
deaden them. And when no more can be taken by capital, shells
of human beings are simply disposed of, and fresh new ones put
to work.
 6

A Divided Working Class

A
book about work cannot ignore what have always been fun-
damental divisions within the working class. These vary from
country to country. In every nation, there is a gender divide,
with men more likely than women to hold positions on the upper
rungs of the job ladder. Race and ethnicity are the other major
splits among those who labor. Black labor in the United States,
for example, has always been valued much less than white, as has
that of Hispanic workers. The same is true throughout the Western
Hemisphere and in much of Europe as well. There are other
critical divisions, such as religion. Under the neofascist Modi gov-
ernment, Muslims are being persecuted in India, while Hindus
have been elevated to the pinnacles of power and status. There are,
of course, splits within each racial, ethnic, gender, and religious
group. However, in this chapter, the focus will be on the broad dif-
ferences, emphasizing racial, ethnic, and gender disparities.1

Race

The United States is the paradigmatic country for racial divi-

sions in the working class. What is true there is ipso facto true,
112 WORK WORK WORK

to some degree at least, everywhere there is a racial hierarchy.

Several recent books have demonstrated with unique power that
the nation’s development into a global economic juggernaut owed
everything to the brutal and murderous exploitation of Black slave
labor.2 And as the long history, right to the present day, of police
and vigilante violence against Black people has shown with great
clarity, the racial chasm lives on. A few Black men and women
have climbed into the 1 percent, and a sizable African American
middle class now exists. But by every measure of social well-being,
Black Americans fare much worse than their white counterparts.
Just as for the economic, political, and social distance between
capitalists and workers, so too a differential exists between Black
and white people, for these same interconnected components of
daily life continue because of the way our system is structured.
In Inequality and Power: The Economics of Class, economist
Eric Schutz suggests that as we make individual decisions, we, at
the same time, make “social choices.”3 These choices structure the
larger society, which in turn conditions our individual decisions.
Our political system is a case in point. U.S. prosperity was founded
on slavery, the dominant mode of production in the southern
states and tightly integrated into northern capitalism. The slave
trade, the production of essential commodities, especially cotton,
the textile industry, shipping, construction, agricultural imple-
ments, banking, finance, and many other economic activities were
intimately tied to, indeed dependent on, slavery.
The slave economy was supported by a constellation of laws and
enforced by violence that maintained the entire oppressive system.
Who enacted these laws? That is, were the “social choices” that
allowed, defended, and maintained slavery made by everyone
equally, or were the choices of some weighted more heavily than
those of others? No rational person could argue in 1789, the year
the U.S. Constitution was enacted, that political equality existed in
the United States. Slaves had no political power, and even among
those who were not slaves, women could not vote, and, in many
states, whites had to own property to cast a ballot. Black people
a divided working class 113

in the North were nominally free but subject to extreme race and
class discrimination. In short, politics was dominated by white,
male property owners who shaped the government decisively to
serve their interests, including by maintaining and reproducing
the institution of slavery. By the time slavery ended, income and
wealth inequalities had reached the point that white male power
was thoroughly entrenched and difficult to unseat. What this white
male elite wrought was equally hard to change. Slavery ended, but
the institutional setting in which it flourished did not.
Consider the conditions of Black America at the end of the
Civil War and especially after the end of Reconstruction in 1877.
Enslaved people were freed but given no property, not even small
plots of land so that they could feed their families. Without wealth
or income, they had to fend for themselves. Federal soldiers pro-
tected them to a degree, but when the troops left after the 1876
presidential election, they fell victim once again to their white
masters, who regained control of southern state governments
and passed the Jim Crow laws that created a system of apartheid
that dominated the South for nearly one hundred years. These
states gave full sanction to white vigilantism, which stood ready
to murder Black people who refused to succumb to white rule.
White mobs were lynching Black persons well into the 1960s.
Through new laws that criminalized everyday activities, the white
rulers of the South filled the prisons with Black workers. They
then contracted them out to white business owners, creating what
a Public Broadcasting System documentary called “slavery by
another name.”4
If a group of people begins life with little income and no wealth,
they are not likely to fare well economically. Modern research on
economic mobility teaches us that it is not nearly as great in the
land of opportunity as most people think. What matters most is
how well-off your parents are, mainly how much wealth they have.
The children of poor parents are much less likely to end up rich
than those whose parents are rich. Perhaps as much as 60 per-
cent of the parents’ income advantage is passed along to their
114 WORK WORK WORK

children.5 So, a person’s great-great-grandparents’ wealth confers

an advantage upon them today. By the same token, the poverty
of your great-great-grandparents will haunt you now. Compound
this intergenerational income and wealth effect with the impact
of slavery and the “social choices” that whites made, nearly all of
which created a society in which former slaves and their descen-
dants were marginalized and barely considered human. Here is
how I put it in something I once wrote:

Imagine my own great-great-grandfather and suppose he had

been a Black slave in Mississippi. He would have been denied
education, had his family destroyed, been worked nearly to death,
suffered severe privation during the Civil War, and been consid-
ered less than human. Then in 1865 he would have been “freed,”
to fend for himself and whatever family he had. No job, no land,
no schools, no nothing. For twelve short years, he might have
had some protection provided by the federal government against
the murderous rage of white southerners. But in 1877 even that
ended, and afterward he would have been confronted with the full
force of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. What chance would his
children have had? How likely would they have been to catch up
with their white overlords? Isn’t zero the most likely probability?
His grandchildren might have migrated north, but again with no
wealth and not much schooling. His great-grandchildren would
have lived through the Great Depression. How much property
would they have been likely to accumulate? Finally, through the
heroic struggle of my ancestors and my own generation, I would
have seen the victories of the civil rights movement, the desegre-
gation of the schools, the end of lynchings, and the opening up of
a few decent jobs. I might have been an auto worker in Detroit for
a dozen years, but then in the 1970s everything would have come
crashing down again.6

Let us look at some data that shows that Black workers fare sig-
nificantly worse than their white counterparts:
a divided working class 115

Ÿ Income: In 1947, the median Black family income was 51.1 per-
cent of white family income. In 2017, it was 59.1 percent. After
the heroic struggles of the civil rights movement and the enact-
ment of numerous civil rights laws, this seems a small gain,
and the 2017 ratio is lower than that of 1969, when it was 61.3
percent.7
Ÿ Wealth: In 2016, the median net worth (all assets, including
homes, minus all debts) of Black households (not necessarily a
family) was $12,920, 9 percent of that of whites, for whom it was
$143,600.8
Ÿ Wages and jobs: Black workers earn less than their white coun-
terparts; Black men, for example, earn less than three-quarters
the wages of white men. The black-white earnings disparity is
present at every level of schooling. This is partly because Black
people, no matter their level of schooling, are overrepresented in
jobs with relatively low wages and underrepresented in higher-
paying jobs. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,
in 2019, of all those employed in management, professional,
and related occupations, the highest-paying major occupation
group, 79 percent were white, compared to 9.6 percent of Black
workers.

Another part of the reason for the relatively low wages of Black
people is that they earn less money within the same occupations.
A summary of data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics
shows that “in 2010, median usual weekly earnings of white
people ($1,273) working full time in management, professional,
and related occupations (the highest-paying major occupation
group) were well above the earnings of…Black men ($957) in the
same occupation group.” The numbers were $932 for white women
and $812 for Black women.
Racial wage discrepancies exist in every occupational category.
If instead of specific occupations, we look just at low-wage work,
we find similar racial disparities. Of all jobs held by whites in the
United States in 2013, 22.5 percent paid a wage that, for full-time,
116 WORK WORK WORK

year-round work, would put a family of four below the poverty

level of income. But for jobs held by Black workers, this figure
was 35.7 percent. I could not find more recent data for jobs and
poverty income using a family of four for the poverty threshold.
However, if we use a threshold based on actual family size, we still
get a rate much higher for Black than for white jobholders.9
Black workers are much more likely to be poor and suffer unem-
ployment than are whites. In 2018, the poverty rate for whites was
8.1 percent; for Black people, it was 20.8 percent. The percentage
of Black people living at less than one-half of the poverty level was
9.4 percent; for non-Hispanic whites, it was 3.9 percent.10 The same
is true for unemployment, with Blacks typically showing double
the rate of whites. These are further signs that the Black working
class fares worse than does the white working class.
What is true for Black employees is also the lot of many ethnic
minorities. In the U.S. West, for example, Hispanic workers are
vastly overrepresented as motel and hotel room attendants, lawn
care workers, kitchen laborers, farmworkers, packing house
employees, and most other poorly paid jobs. There are numer-
ous ethnic groups globally, and there are clear differences in how
ethnic groups fare. Han Chinese discriminate against Uighurs.
Indigenous people everywhere are treated as second-class citizens,
unworthy of the dignity others expect as a matter of course. Kurds
face mistreatment from Arabs and Iranians. The same can be said
for nationality. Palestinians suffer horrible abuse at the hands of
Israelis. Germans mistreat Turkish guest workers. Haitians are
urged and sometimes compelled to leave the Dominican Republic.
Mexican immigrants in the United States often toil as farm laborers
for subsistence wages. The inferior position of these subordinate
groups is often built into a nation’s institutional structure, trans-
lating into long-term inferior economic and social outcomes for
those who must endure it.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought inequalities within the
working class into sharp focus. Those with higher incomes were
much more likely to work from home. Others were not so fortunate.
a divided working class 117

Several months into the pandemic, stories about “frontline work-

ers” filled the media.
By May 2020, 41.2 percent of frontline workers were people of
color. These employees are overrepresented in low-wage occupa-
tions such as building cleaning services, childcare, social services,
bus drivers, transit workers, and warehouse laborers. This is also
true for “most of the top 10 occupations in Trucking, Warehouse,
and Postal Service; most of the top 10 occupations in Building
Cleaning Services; all of the top 10 occupations in Health Care,
except registered nurses, physicians, managers, and secretaries
and administrative; four of the top 10 occupations in Child Care
and Social Services (child care workers, personal care aides, social
workers, and nursing assistants).”11 There are large numbers of
immigrants in these jobs and in groceries, home healthcare, jani-
torial services, and domestic labor (maids and housekeepers, for
example). Most of these workers have no or limited benefits, and
many have childcare responsibilities.

Gender

For a social system to survive, women must give birth to children

and nurture them. For children to become adults, they must be
cared for by their parents, other adults, and the larger society. One
way that societies can be described is by the degree of patriarchy.
For most of our time on earth, we produced and distributed life’s
necessities without a rigid hierarchy, in gathering and hunting
bands. Classes did not exist, and egalitarian relations of produc-
tion prevailed. Patriarchy, though not nonexistent, was mild by
comparison with what followed. In precapitalist class societies,
patriarchy was more pronounced. However, women were an inte-
gral part of production. The bodies of women who were enslaved
in colonial societies were expropriated by white male slaveowners,
raped and used for breeding an increasing supply of their human
chattel. Yet women were at the center of enslaved families and
worked side-by-side with men in the fields. In feudal society, as
118 WORK WORK WORK

in all peasant communities, women and men jointly produced the

household needs and the goods that had to be transferred as rent
to their lords. To an outside observer, these arrangements would
be transparent.
Matters changed dramatically with capitalism. Before the advent
of factories, production was still a family enterprise, carried on
in the artisan’s home. Once factory production began, employ-
ers began to employ women and children, which wore down the
bodies of the new factory hands and disrupted families, making it
nearly impossible to maintain social life. As philosopher and social
scientist Nancy Fraser tells us, in analyzing the changes wrought
by capitalism:

One is the epistemic shift from production to social reproduc-

tion—the forms of provisioning, caregiving and interaction
that produce and maintain social bonds. Variously called “care,”
“affective labour,” or “subjectivation,” this activity forms capi-
talism’s human subjects, sustaining them as embodied natural
beings, while also constituting them as social beings, forming
their habitus and the socio-ethical substance, or Sittlichkeit, in
which they move. Central here is the work of socializing the
young, building communities, producing and reproducing the
shared meanings, affective dispositions and horizons of value
that underpin social cooperation. In capitalist societies much,
though not all, of this activity goes on outside the market, in
households, neighbourhoods and a host of public institutions,
including schools and childcare centres; and much of it, though
not all, does not take the form of wage labour. Yet social-repro-
ductive activity is absolutely necessary to the existence of waged
work, the accumulation of surplus value and the functioning of
capitalism as such. Wage labour could not exist in the absence of
housework, child-raising, schooling, affective care and a host of
other activities which help to produce new generations of work-
ers and replenish existing ones, as well as to maintain social bonds
and shared understandings. Much like “original accumulation,”
a divided working class 119

therefore, social reproduction is an indispensable background

condition for the possibility of capitalist production.12

In the early factory system, women and children were so severely

exploited that the labor supply faced diminution. Along with social
protest, the shrinking workforce eventually led to laws limiting
child labor and the kinds of work women could do. A sharp separa-
tion took shape between production and social reproduction, with
men the family’s primary breadwinners and women relegated to
overseers of the household. What the women did was essential to
the production of wage laborers; without it, capital accumulation
was impossible. Yet, they became increasingly invisible. In effect,
capital had expropriated their labor, obtaining it free of charge,
lowering production costs. With this split came an ethos that pro-
fessed the naturalness of women’s subordination to men. Religious
ideologues pronounced this the will of God, and laws sanctioned it.
Women typically could not own property or vote.
Women, especially those who were poor, never stopped work-
ing for wages. However, they faced considerable labor market
discrimination and hostility from male co-workers. They were
subject to sexual abuse as well. Men too often believed that wom-
en’s place was in the home, bearing and raising children. The
critical social reproduction labor women performed, whether they
worked for wages or not, was debased and degraded, even as it was
expropriated by capital. Women not in the labor force also became
members of the reserve army of labor, drawn into the labor force
when needed and expelled when not. It is interesting to read pro-
paganda glorifying the role of women during the Second World
War. The heroic image of Rosie the Riveter portrayed women as
strong and capable of doing work that had previously been the
province of men. But when the war ended, they were expelled from
the workforce and expected to resume their role as homemakers.13
As with the Black and ethnic components of the working class,
women are much more likely to occupy low-wage and inferior-sta-
tus jobs. Women wage earners are still concentrated in the service
120 WORK WORK WORK

sector (with nearly 1.7 billion service workers worldwide), where

wages are lower than in industry and the professions.14 They earn
less than men even in the same or similar jobs. A recent United
Nations study found that “once in the paid labor force, women
everywhere find themselves earning less than men for the same
types of work; engaging more frequently in unskilled, low-wage
labor; or spending less time in income-generating work and more
time in unpaid caregiving work at home.”15 Women are also less
likely to be literate than men, do more reproductive labor than
men, whether in the labor force or not, are less likely than men
to have access to healthcare, suffer many more sexual assaults in
their homes and workplaces, more often than not lack maternity
leave, and are discouraged in school from studying mathematics
and science.16
The pandemic has laid bare the precarious position of working-
class women. Many of the world’s “own-account” (see chapter 3)
laborers and their unpaid family members are women. They were
devastated by the loss of employment, and they received little help
from governments. In the United States, the massive layoffs at
the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak hit women particularly
hard. Monitoring online schooling for children while doing their
jobs and caring for the household has taken a considerable toll on
women’s health and overall well-being. In a summary of a report
by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), BLS econ-
omist Eleni X. Karageorge tells us:

First, the crisis has battered industry sectors in which women’s

employment is more concentrated—restaurants and other retail
establishments, hospitality, and health care. This was not the
case in past recessions, which tended to hurt male-dominated
industry sectors like manufacturing and construction more than
other industries. In past recessions, men have faced greater risk
of unemployment than women, partly because of the gender
composition of different sectors of the economy. A larger frac-
tion of employed men (46 percent) than employed women
a divided working class 121

(24 percent) work in construction; manufacturing; and trade,

transportation, and utilities. These are considered highly cycli-
cal sectors that typically suffer during “normal” recessions. On
the other hand, 40 percent of all working women are employed
in government and in health and education services compared
with just 20 percent of working men.
Second, the coronavirus shutdowns have closed schools and
daycare centers around the country, keeping kids at home and
making it even harder for parents (especially mothers who tend
to provide the majority of childcare) to keep working. Childcare
poses an additional challenge to working mothers during the
pandemic.
Working women are also at a greater disadvantage compared
with working men in the current crisis because fewer women
have jobs that allow them to telecommute: 22 percent of female
workers compared with 28 percent of male workers. According
to the researchers’ analysis of data from the American Time Use
Survey from 2017 and 2018, single parents will face the greatest
challenge. Only 20 percent of single parents reported being able
to telecommute compared with 40 percent of married people
with children. In two-parent households where only one parent
works in the labor market, the stay-at-home parent, usually
the mother, is likely to assume primary childcare duties during
coronavirus-related school closures. However, in 44 percent of
married couples with children, both spouses work full-time.
Among these couples, mothers provide about 60 percent of
childcare. Men perform 7.2 hours of childcare per week versus
10.3 hours for women.17

The multiple divisions within the working class show no signs

of disappearing. Whatever has been done to end them has not
worked. Both racism and patriarchy have seen a resurgence over
the past few decades. They appear to have lives of their own, con-
nected to but partially independent of class oppression. An analysis
of necessary class struggle can be found in chapters 8 and 9, but in
122 WORK WORK WORK

this chapter we can say what won’t work. Some on the left—a sig-
nificant fraction of the Democratic Socialists in the United States,
social democratic politicians like Bernie Sanders, some scholars,
and various left-wing sects—have argued that race- and gender-
conscious remedies, such as affirmative action, are bound to be
divisive and should be abandoned in favor of class-based relief.
For example, suppose it is argued that anyone serious about racial
disparities should campaign to abolish our prison system, given
that prisons are a key component of discriminatory social struc-
tures. However, those who focus single-mindedly on class have
argued that “abolish the prison system” would be an unpopular
plank in a radical movement’s platform. It would likely alienate
whites and quite a few Black people, so better to fight for some-
thing like full employment through a public jobs program. This
approach would have a broad appeal, and though it is race neutral,
it would have a more significant impact on Black workers since
they have much higher unemployment rates. A similar logic can
be applied to national health insurance or low-cost public hous-
ing. The idea is to fight for things that unite the working class.
However, this strategy of supposedly unifying the working
class by purely economic means is inadequate. If it is true that the
social choices made in the past have created racist and patriarchal
structures, and if these have yet to be eradicated, it is necessary to
confront these structures directly. If we had a full-employment jobs
program, how would it eliminate the gap between Black and white
wages and those between men and women, unless at the same time
it is aimed disproportionately at Black workers and women? If we
do not aim to guarantee that Black people and women become
leaders in our movements, then how will a full-employment pro-
gram or national healthcare or public housing be implemented so
that they do not disproportionately benefit white men, who, after
all, hold most leadership positions in movements, both radical and
not? Even if we were to make every element of the criminal justice
system nondiscriminatory, how could we make sure that the enor-
mous number of Black people enmeshed in this system now will
a divided working class 123

be able to extricate themselves from it and become full and equal

citizens unless we have race-specific programs to help them?
Given the extent and depth of white privilege, racial issues
should be addressed and attacked head-on. There is no easy way
out. The working class will never be unified unless we confront the
institutional racism that surrounds us now. Unity requires restitu-
tion for past and present damages, and nothing less will do. Racial
and patriarchal attitudes are once again hardening, and from an
already unenlightened base, and the optimism felt by those who
wanted a racially- and gender-equal society has long ago vanished.
 7

The Rise and Fall of the United Farm Workers

Previous chapters present a bleak picture of what it means to

be a wage laborer. It might appear that managerial control is so
tight and its effects on workers so harmful that resistance is not
possible. However, capital’s power is never absolute. The work-
ing class has always been rife with resistance. At the beginning
of the capitalist system, the assault on traditional ways of life
was so stark that craft laborers reacted to the attack on their
culture with revolts, sometimes violent, as with the Luddites in
England. Under the leadership of the mythical General Ludd,
weavers destroyed power looms and the factories in which they
were located. Organized riots were not uncommon in towns
and cities.1
Once capital began to implement its workplace regime, it also
created conditions that its employees could turn to their advan-
tage. People do not see themselves as robotic and machine-like.
They have consciousness and can think through what is happen-
ing to them. Humans have always resisted authority, whether it
be that of the slaveowner or the feudal lord. We have lived most
of our time on earth, more than 95 percent of it, in a produc-
tion and distribution system—gathering and hunting—without
the rise and fall of the united farm workers 125

direct authority. We resisted all attempts to control us, and this

long history has managed to live on.
Once herded into factories, workers came face-to-face with
one another. They began to see themselves in others, realizing
that they were in similar circumstances. It was a short step to
grasp that as individuals they were powerless, but together they
were not. Similarly, the detailed division of labor had the same
effect, as did machinery, especially the system of connected
machines we call an assembly line. It is challenging to maintain
a sense of personal power or difference when you are doing the
identical detail labor as everyone else. Capital, in effect, creates a
working class as it accumulates capital. It thereby opens the pos-
sibility of this class becoming not just an agglomeration of labor
but a conscious and organized collective acting in opposition to
the will of their employers.
One of the universal forms of opposition is the labor union.2
Unions attempt to improve the wages, hours, and conditions
of their members. They also act politically to do the same and
sometimes struggle on behalf of all workers, becoming a labor
movement. Organizing people into a union and building a
movement are not easy tasks, and they often fail. However, the
very effort to change things also changes the workers. Frederick
Engels wrote:

The working classes, in this agitation, found a mighty

means to get acquainted with each other, to come to
a knowledge of their social position and interests, to
organize themselves and to know their strength. The
working man, who has passed through such an agita-
tion, is no longer the same as he was before; and the
whole working class, after passing through it, is a
hundred times stronger, more enlightened, and better
organized than it was at the outset.3

Although this is true, capitalism is a hegemonic system. It will

126 WORK WORK WORK

always respond to every conflict with labor so that its power is

restored. It will infiltrate every corner of the earth and every
part of our lives. Labor unions, their leaders, and the members
will be no exception.

DURING THE WINTER and spring of 1977, I worked for the

United Farm Workers Union (UFW) in Keene, California, a
tiny, barely populated “census designated place” in the foothills
of the Tehachapi Mountains. On a narrow road not far past
the Keene Café was La Paz, the union’s headquarters. I lived in
a small room at La Paz, in what had once been a sanatorium
for tuberculosis patients. I had a variety of jobs: researching
the growers who owned the farms where the UFW’s members
labored; testifying in two critical legal cases brought under the
1975 California Agricultural Labor Relations Act; writing a
collective bargaining manual for the union’s negotiators; con-
structing a piece-rate wage proposal for workers in Oxnard,
California; and doing whatever else union president César
Chávez asked me to do.4
The UFW is a famous labor union. César Chávez is an almost
mythical figure, with more than 125 roads, highways, clinics,
schools at all levels, libraries, parks, and monuments named
after him. The union organized thousands of farm laborers,
mainly in the 1960s,’70s, and ’80s. It did this in the face of police
and grower brutality, an often violent confrontation with a rival
union, the Teamsters, which employers heavily supported, and
a migrant and therefore difficult to unionize labor force. In its
patient and relentless efforts, the UFW utilized, with remark-
able success, legendary boycotts of key agricultural products
like grapes and lettuce, strikes, pickets, hunger strikes by the
charismatic Chavez, and an enormous cadre of volunteers, sup-
porters, and union members. Given the abysmal conditions
under which farmworkers toiled in the fields, their isolation in
labor camps that were difficult for organizers to access, their
poor health (life expectancy was less than fifty years of age), and
the rise and fall of the united farm workers 127

a long history of heroic but failed efforts to form a viable union,

what the UFW achieved was amazing.
The union brought a sea change in the working conditions of
some of the nation’s most exploited workers. No longer could
workers be routinely harassed and fired; no longer could they
be denied water and toilets in the fields; no longer could they
be forced to use the physically debilitating short-handled hoe;
no longer could labor contractors cheat them; no longer would
they have no paid holidays or vacations; no longer would they
be denied medical care because now they had access to union-
built health clinics; and so much more. In the early 1980s, lettuce
harvesting crew members were earning the 2021 equivalent of
more than $60 an hour.5
If ever a union gave hope for the rebuilding and expansion of
the U.S. labor movement, it was the UFW. If farmworkers could
build a strong and enduring union, defeating the rulers of the
most powerful industry in the richest state in the country, then
which workers could not be unionized?6 The union seemed to
epitomize what class struggle is all about. Chavez even appeared
poised to begin developing a movement, one to which unions
could belong, one that would seek to radically change society
itself.
Sadly, right when the union was at its peak, it unraveled. Most
commentators have blamed outside forces, especially the right-
ward shift in state and national politics. Few wanted to point a
critical finger at César Chávez and his leadership, along with
that of some of his closest allies in the union, such as Delores
Huerta. However, the union’s demise—it has lost most of its
membership and is no longer a force to be reckoned with by
employers—was caused mainly by what went on inside the
union. This chapter, which reviews a book by Miriam Pawel,
with added commentary by this writer, may help readers see
how difficult it is to construct a class-struggle union that seeks
to end both exploitation and managerial control, much less
build a radical movement.7
128 WORK WORK WORK

A
fter reading The Union of Their Dreams, Miriam Pawel’s excep-
tional account of the rise and fall of the United Farm Workers
Union, I reread an article I wrote for The Nation in November
1977. In “A Union Is Not a Movement,” I leveled harsh criticism
at the UFW and its famous leader, César Chávez. In response, the
union’s chief counsel, Jerry Cohen, one of the major characters in
Pawel’s book, threatened suit against the magazine. At the time,
I was upset, thinking maybe I should have been more careful in
what I said. However, as Pawel’s book makes clear, I need not have
been concerned since everything I said was true. And then some.
Nearly every book written about the UFW has placed César
Chávez front and center, and most of them have portrayed him
as a cross between Gandhi and Jesus Christ.8 Chavez appeared on
the scene, say these books, and everything changed. He did what
no one had ever managed: he built a strong union of the poor-
est of the poor—migrant farmworkers. Pawel’s book has the great
virtue of not making Chavez its main protagonist. Instead, she
effectively uses the journalistic technique of telling the story of
the UFW through the eyes of several key participants—none of
them Chavez—in the struggle to build the union. He is, as he must
be, always present in the book. But, by focusing on the lives and
actions of others, Pawel both demythologizes César Chávez and
shows that he was but one of many talented and dedicated people
who made UFW history.
The book’s eight protagonists are Eliseo Medina, the Mexican-
born farmworker who became a brilliant organizer and all-round
union mastermind; Chris Hartmire, Chavez stalwart, Protestant
minister, and head of the California Migrant Ministry, which
he converted into an arm of the UFW; Ellen Eggers, who joined
the union boycott crusade, became a UFW attorney, and later an
advocate for death row inmates; Gretchen Laue, who joined the
boycott in Boston more or less by accident and went on to become
a union organizer; the aforementioned Jerry Cohen, who, while
learning on the fly, became one of the best labor lawyers in the
United States, developing the many innovative legal tactics that
the rise and fall of the united farm workers 129

helped build the UFW; Sandy Nathan, Cohen’s right-hand man

and a resourceful lawyer and negotiator in his own right; and
rank-and-file farmworkers Sabino Lopez and Mario Bustamante,
whose rise and fall inside the UFW illustrate as well as anything
the mixed legacy of César Chávez.
Pawel conducted extensive interviews with these eight key
sources and many others as well. She uses their words and her con-
siderable research in both primary and secondary sources: letters,
memoranda, notes, court files, newspaper stories, and diaries as
well as six hundred hours of tapes of meetings, rallies, and inter-
views recorded between 1969 and 1980. From this material she
weaves an exciting and original investigation into the spectacu-
lar growth and inglorious collapse of the union that was once the
hope of the U.S. labor movement and that provided a formative
experience for thousands of workers and hundreds of volunteers.
I speak from experience: I worked as a volunteer for the UFW in
the winter and spring of 1977, and I was profoundly influenced by
what I witnessed there and the people I met.
What is most important about this book is that it puts people
integral to the union’s historical trajectory on record so that what
they tell us can be compared to what has stood so far as the pri-
mary record: that of César Chávez. Instead of hearing only from
him and those who have remained uncritically loyal to him, like
the famed firebrand Delores Huerta, longtime Chavez secretary
Mark Grossman, and current union president and Cesar’s son-
in-law Arturo Rodríquez (who stepped down in 2018 and was
replaced by Teresa Romero, the first Latina and immigrant woman
president of a U.S. national union), we hear the voices of men
and women who have complex, nuanced views of the union and
Chavez’s role in it. Thus, Pawel gives us a more complete picture
of the UFW. Whether Pawel intends it, she also gives plenty of
ammunition to those of us whose attitude toward Chavez is, on
balance, negative.
The first part of the book vividly captures the remarkable and
exciting story of the rise of the UFW, from its beginnings in grape
130 WORK WORK WORK

strikes, nationwide boycotts, the activation of thousands of ideal-

istic and passionate lay and religious volunteers, the sweetheart
contracts signed by the growers with the Teamsters, beatings,
jailings, Cesar’s fasts and marches, and the recruitment and
astounding development of one of the best labor legal staffs in
the country, to the passage of the California Agricultural Labor
Relations Act in 1975, the most protective labor law for farm-
workers in the country. This section of the book brought back the
excitement and moral certainty I felt when I first learned of and
began participating in the farmworkers’ struggle for justice in the
fields. Pawel captures the impact of the UFW’s epic efforts on so
many of us when she writes of the young Eliseo Medina joining
the union in 1965, amid the first grape strike:

The shy teenager from Zacatecas with a shock of dark hair tended
to deliberate carefully before acting. Once he made a decision,
Eliseo embraced the path with focused enthusiasm and a big,
contagious grin. He went home after the meeting at the church
and cracked open his piggy bank. He didn’t know what a contract
was, but he counted out ten dollars and fifty cents. The next day,
he drove to the headquarters at 102 Albany Street, handed three
months’ dues to Helen Chavez, and joined her husband’s union.

And Ellen Eggers, a few years later, when she decides to commit
herself to the union:

Ellen called her mother and sobbed as she explained the

importance of the union’s struggle and why she had to stay.
Ten years from now, she reasoned, she would not remember
whether she went back to see her nephew and her boyfriend.
But she would always remember if she left when the movement
needed her to stay.

In the early chapters, Pawel throws out hints of the troubles to

come, and she doesn’t hesitate to suggest that they were rooted
the rise and fall of the united farm workers 131

in the personality and politics of César Chávez. There are signs

that Chavez would brook no opposition, that he was often petty
and vindictive, and that he did not believe the words of Eugene
Debs: “I do not want to rise above the working class; I want to
rise with them.” Chavez’s attitude toward the workers he led is
reflected in a famous statement, quoted many times, almost always
with approval: “I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the
strongest act of humanness, is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a
totally nonviolent struggle for justice. To be truly alive is to suffer
for others. God help us to be truly alive!”
He would suffer for the farmworkers, and by doing this, he
would be alive. But what would happen if the workers saw things
differently, if they wanted, not a Christ figure to lead them, but to
lead the union themselves? What if, rather than eternally suffer-
ing, they wanted better lives, here and now? Once, in a community
meeting at La Paz, the union’s headquarters in the desert mountains
east of Bakersfield, California, not accidentally a place far removed
from where most farm laborers lived and worked, Chavez told us
that a union supporter wanted to donate some washing machines
for the union volunteers. Cesar said that he wasn’t sure he should
accept the gift because we probably wouldn’t take care of them.
We protested vigorously, telling him that we had to find a way up
the mountain to Tehachapi to do laundry and that many volun-
teers didn’t have money for this. Cesar scoffed and said this was
all “chickenshit” and that he didn’t do his laundry anyway, so he
didn’t care. His remarks elicited a loud chorus of boos for the sexist
remark. He responded with narrowed eyes and said, “I work eigh-
teen fucking hours a day for the union. Which of you can say the
same?” He loved playing the martyr, and he used this to gain and
keep power. Not that, with his numerous fasts and forced marches,
he didn’t actually suffer. But Jesus’ suffering ended in death. Cesar
kept living and could use his suffering over and over to silence his
critics.
The tone changes dramatically in the second part of the book.
Although the new Labor Relations law was slow to get off the
132 WORK WORK WORK

ground, eventually it worked to the UFW’s advantage, and the

union soon had thousands of new members. The law also suc-
ceeded in driving the Teamsters from the fields. When the growers
were able to stall legislative funding for administration of the law
by the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, Chavez decided to
organize a massive campaign to put a ballot initiative before voters
that would make Board funding part of the state’s constitution.
Money would never again be subject to the vagaries of Sacramento
politics. Unfortunately, the UFW campaign was badly flawed, and
it was easily defeated. Pawel suggests, and her sources imply, that
the union would have been better served by devoting time and
resources to winning union representation elections and secur-
ing collective bargaining agreements. Behind the scenes, however,
Chavez had other fish to fry.
Most accounts of UFW history speculate that something hap-
pened to Chavez after the lost initiative, and he somehow went off
the deep end. Indeed, bizarre and ugly things began to happen.
He hatched a scheme with Chris Hartmire to start a new religious
order, whose farmworkers and volunteer initiates would live by
communal farming. He deepened his friendship with Charles
Dederich, who had made his once successful drug rehabilitation
organization, Synanon, into a cult. Dederich employed a tech-
nique he called “The Game” to break down the addicts’ fragile
personalities so that they could be more accessible to the forces of
social control, particularly his control.
Chavez began taking his inner circle to Synanon for training,
and he made “The Game” a centerpiece of union activities. After
the lost initiative campaign, Chavez had begun to purge some
key personnel, charging them with disloyalty, complicity with
the growers, and communism. Then, at an infamous community
meeting at La Paz, Game participants led a frenzied psychologi-
cal attack on several volunteers, who were summarily kicked out
of the union. After one volunteer protested vigorously during this
“Monday Night Massacre,” the union called the police and had
him arrested and forcibly removed from the property. Several
the rise and fall of the united farm workers 133

resignations followed (a year and a half later, Eliseo Medina, the

one person who might have challenged Chavez’s leadership, left
the union). From this point on, The Game would be a major
weapon Chavez and his loyalists would use to consolidate power.
Most of the union’s staff remained loyal to Chavez, and most
participated in The Game, despite misgivings. They failed to see
what was happening or did not care, believing that the cause
was more important than the purges or that Chavez had inside
information, and those forced out of the union deserved it. Some
actively participated in the carnage. Others felt that as long as the
purges did not interfere with what they were doing, they did not
matter. Nearly all the staff would suffer the same fate as those who
resigned or were kicked out of the union in what Chris Hartmire
called Cesar’s “cultural revolution.”
The next few years saw the union becoming ever more dysfunc-
tional, as Chavez repeatedly balked at any efforts to build a real
union. On the surface, there were skirmishes between Chavez and
staffers: Chavez and Medina; Chavez and Marshall Ganz, perhaps
the union’s best organizer; Chavez and Gilbert Padilla, one of the
union’s founders and with Chavez from the beginning; Chavez and
Jerry Cohen and the legal staff; Chavez and Filipino farmworker
leader Philip Vera Cruz.
There were various bones of contention: The Game; the fact that
the attorneys and a couple of doctors received salaries and no one
else did; Cesar’s insistence that everyone live at La Paz; the disor-
ganization of the union and Chavez’s use of various management
“gurus” to put the union house in order; Chavez’s irrational nit-
picking over the spending of small sums of money; his refusal to
allow negotiators to sign off on collective bargaining agreements;
his disinterest in the nuts and bolts of a labor union and his drift-
ing from one idealistic movement-building scheme to another; his
constant threats to resign if he didn’t get his way. Buried beneath
the surface, however, was the root difficulty: Chavez could not
abide the idea, much less the reality, that the farmworkers them-
selves could and should run the union.
134 WORK WORK WORK

Pawel unearths plenty of evidence of Chavez’s disdain, distrust,

even dislike of the rank and file for whom he had presumably
built his movement. In many unions, talented workers get elected
to local union office. From there, they can actively participate in
national union affairs and sometimes get elected or appointed to
higher union office. This was impossible in the UFW because there
were never any local unions. Chavez made all appointments to
the staff and tightly controlled those who sat on the UFW board.
The union’s constitution gave staff persons due process rights, but
Chavez always ignored these. Few staffers were former farmwork-
ers; most were Anglos, including the attorneys. I believe that this
was intentional. It prevented the formation of power bases that
might challenge Chavez. The only Anglo who might have success-
fully challenged Chavez was Marshall Ganz, and he chose not to
do so, at least not openly.
Chavez regularly told farmworker leaders one thing and staff
and the board another. In late 1976, with the union on the verge of
power in the fields, Medina and others were excited about newly
formed ranch committees of workers they hoped would eventually
become the centers of the union. Chavez always gave lip service
to worker empowerment, but he backed away when push came to
shove. At a conference that Medina could not attend, Chavez said,
regarding workers: “The newer they are in terms of immigrants,
the more money means to them.” He argued that they didn’t
understand sacrifice and would have to be educated before they
could assume power.
Pawel tells us that these comments were edited out of the con-
ference minutes, as were these telling words: “You don’t want
farmworkers managing the union right now. With the attitude
they have on money, it would be a total goddam disaster, it would
be chaotic. Unless they’re taught the other life, it wouldn’t work.”
During the purges in 1977, Chavez said about his members: “Every
time we look at them, they want more money. Like pigs, you know.
Here we’re slaving, and we’re starving and the goddam workers
don’t give a shit about anything because we don’t train them, you
the rise and fall of the united farm workers 135

know, we don’t teach them anything.” Or tell them anything either.

They knew nothing about The Game or the internal struggles in
their union.
Perhaps nothing better illustrates Chavez and his closest allies’
disdain toward farmworkers than an event at La Paz in 1979, when
volunteers were teaching English to farmworkers. Ironically, the
legal staff and the workers were celebrating significant victories
in the lettuce strikes. Chavez had been invited to join the festivi-
ties, but he stayed at La Paz. Here is how Pawel describes what
happened:

A few days later, a different celebration took place at La Paz.

Farmworkers graduated from an English class. . . . The proud
students put on a slide show for their families, the La Paz com-
munity, and most of the union officers. The slides ended with a
familiar refrain, the same message that Eliseo had delivered at a
boycott conference in almost the same spot less than eight years
earlier: The union is not César Chávez. The union is not La Paz.
The union is the workers.
Graduates and guests, board members and union leaders
trooped down to the communal kitchen for a celebratory lunch.
They had barely sat down when Delores Huerta rose and began
to grill the teachers. She demanded to know who had suggested
such subversive thoughts. Someone must have put the workers
up to voicing such disloyalty, and she wanted a confession. The
meal ended before it had begun. Two teachers were fired later
that day.
The union is the workers had been their campaign slogan,
the essence of the UFW’s appeal as the union waged war against
the Teamsters and piled up election victories. But that was four
years earlier and another era. The union was César Chávez, and
to suggest otherwise was treason.

When I read this, I thought that the many groups that have hon-
ored Huerta should be ashamed.
136 WORK WORK WORK

Despite myriad problems, the UFW continued to organize,

get contracts, win legal victories, and strike. Then, at the end of
1978, events commenced that finally destroyed the union, bring-
ing Chavez’s refusal to countenance worker control into the open.
Thirty collective bargaining agreements expired, most of them
involving lettuce companies, the heart and soul of California agri-
culture. Union farmworker leaders from various ranches came to
La Paz to plot strategy for what promised to be an epic struggle to
negotiate new contracts. Ten workers were elected to a negotiat-
ing committee, which would bargain with all the companies as a
group. Ultimately, a strike vote was called, and a strike fund was
authorized.
The great lettuce strike began on January 19, 1979. It spread and
stopped production. Chavez sabotaged it every step of the way.
He accused Ganz of inciting violence. He dismantled the UFW’s
legal department. When the strikers began to build power among
themselves that could have expanded the strike and achieved stun-
ning victories, Chavez said the strike couldn’t be won and that only
a boycott could succeed. When—as a direct result of the strike and
workers’ newly developed power—Jerry Cohen finally won con-
tracts from many of the growers, Chavez sulked at La Paz. The new
agreements provided company-paid ranch union representatives,
similar to shop stewards in a local union of factory workers. These
paid union reps were a credible threat to Chavez’s power and,
while Chavez again praised the workers poised to run the union,
he also plotted to destroy them.
The final fifty pages of the book make for depressing reading.
Chavez used every dirty trick in the book to defeat the worker
leaders. He slandered them. He sent goons, including his crimi-
nal cousin, Manuel Chavez, to threaten and beat them. The union
may even have engineered the automobile accident of farmworker
leader Cleofas Guzman that left him paralyzed. When it appeared
that a worker-dominated slate opposed to him might win seats
on the board, Chavez wrote new rules for the union conven-
tion. He fired the paid reps who challenged him, including Mario
the rise and fall of the united farm workers 137

Bustamante and Sabino Lopez and had them drummed out of the
union. His goons picketed places where Sabino and Mario got
employment.
A look at the UFW today gives us an accurate picture of the
legacy of César Chávez. Before writing her book, Miriam Pawel
wrote an exceptional series of articles for the Los Angeles Times
that exposed the union as not only irrelevant to the lives of farm-
workers, a mere handful of them still members, but also as what
might charitably be called a quasi-racket. She discusses this in the
book, but the Times essays give more detail. The union was then
run by Cesar’s son-in-law, Arturo Rodríquez (now retired), who
comes in for rough treatment by Pawel’s informants, including
Eliseo Medina. Perhaps the word that best describes Rodríquez
is incompetent; indeed, he showed none of the abilities of any
of the great UFW organizers. He did appear to have a talent for
overseeing, along with Cesar’s son Paul and other family mem-
bers and assorted scoundrels, an empire—begun by Chavez
himself—of housing developments, radio stations, consulting
enterprises, mass-mailing fundraising campaigns, and marketing
schemes (UFW paraphernalia, Chavez mementos, and the like).
Meanwhile, pension and health funds were awash in cash, but pre-
cious few workers got any benefits. In a labor movement notorious
for corruption and shortchanging the membership, the United
Farm Workers secured a place on the union wall of infamy.
Miriam Pawel does not claim that The Union of Their Dreams
is a definitive account of the United Farm Workers. We do not
get much insight into the formation of Chavez’s personality and
worldview. We do not learn enough about the history of the farm-
worker labor movement. Filipino workers played a key role here,
and Chavez’s complex relationship with them gets little attention,
even though it could be argued that he usurped the nascent union
they had built. The roles of clergy, community activist and political
theorist Saul Alinsky, the AFL-CIO, the left-led unions, anti-com-
munism, and much else gets insufficient attention. I believe that
when scholars dig into all of this, they will find that there is more
138 WORK WORK WORK

continuity in Chavez’s history and philosophy than previously

understood. His conception of building a movement in a modern
capitalist society was remarkably flawed.9
But, as Pawel herself says, many more books will have to be
written before the whole story has been told. Luckily for us, she
has shown the way. Hers is the most honest book yet written about
the UFW. For anyone interested in this iconic union, this is indis-
pensable reading.

Postscript

It might be easy to think of UFW members as simply Hispanic,

given that Spanish was the lingua franca of the union. This would
be to miss essential differences within the membership. Chavez’s
main base of support was among members of Mexican heritage
but born in the United States, often referred to as Chicanos and
Chicanas. However, many farm laborers were born in Mexico.
They often were undocumented, though not always. There is no
doubt that Chavez was somewhat distrustful of this group. They
were often militant, having had union experiences in Mexico,
where left-wing political views were common within the working
class. They also might not have been nearly as religious as Cesar
and not overly impressed with hunger strikes and his exhortations
to make Christ-like sacrifices for the workers. They were keen
to control their own lives, and that meant having some power
within the union. The earliest union successes were among grape
workers, and those were more likely to be Chicanos, Chicanas.
The later lettuce campaigns were more likely to be dominated by
Mexican workers.
Chavez was hostile to undocumented immigrants, arguing that
they were used as strikebreakers, undermining the union. This led
to an unsavory relationship with the U.S. Immigration authorities.
Fernando Gapasin, an exceptional labor organizer and a nephew
of Philip Vera Cruz, a Filipino who helped lead Filipino farmwork-
ers in union efforts years before the UFW existed and was later
the rise and fall of the united farm workers 139

purged by Cesar, describes one of his first organizing campaigns,

under the banner of the UFW:

In 1974, I helped organize a strike of Mexican mushroom

workers [the employer’s name is Steak Mate] in Morgan Hill,
a rural town, just south of San Jose. For two months, workers
and community supporters walked the picket lines. Without
telling us organizers, La Paz (UFW headquarters) called in
the Immigration and Naturalization Service, la migra, on
our strike. César Chávez thought sin papeles (undocumented
workers) were scabbing. In fact, because of the strong com-
munity support, our strike participation was 100 percent—no
one crossed our line. Half of our strikers did not have papers.
We were alerted about the raid from a local congressman’s
office. We saved our people from it. The company did bring
in African-American workers recruited from Oakland to
break the strike. They rolled up with buses equipped with cow
catchers. We formed a human barricade and blocked them.
The scab contractor, Angie Davis, vowed to return with “hard
heads” that would bust us up. With the help of our United Auto
Workers (UAW) friends, the next day we mobilized one thou-
sand people from the surrounding working-class communities
to stop the scabs. Violence erupted when the buses tried to run
us over. We stood firm, with dozens of us going to jail. The San
Jose Mercury called it the “Battle at Steakmate.” Steakmate got
an injunction that limited our picket lines, but we continued to
picket. The UFW ended the strike after four months, alleging
violence and needing organizers for building the Agricultural
Labor Relations Board and lobbying work in Sacramento. Our
strike became a boycott of Purina products. The memory of
the courage of the workers and community supporters stand-
ing together was branded into the souls of workers in Morgan
Hill and, two years later, they organized again; this time they
won. I learned that when a community cares about workers,
they can win.10
140 WORK WORK WORK

One of the most shameful aspects of UFW history was the intim-
idation campaign waged in the mid-1970s by the union against
undocumented immigrants along the U.S.-Mexican border. It was
called the “wet line.”11 Not only did UFW field offices turn in sev-
eral thousand undocumented entrants into the United States to
immigration authorities, but the union also engaged in vigilante
actions along the border. Historian and former farmworker Frank
Bardacke says,

Men wearing armbands saying “UFW Border Patrol” hunted

illegals. For about three months, from late September to early
1975, anywhere from 35 to 300 people were employed on what
the union called the “wet line.” They lived in a string of twelve
to seventeen large army surplus tents, set up within fifty yards of
the border in a line stretching east of the small town of San Luis,
Arizona. They were paid $10 a day plus expenses. They oper-
ated mostly at night, using dune buggies, cars, vans, and small
trucks to chase people down. During the day, they also had a
small plane to track people from the air.12

It is difficult to know how much violence was directed at the

“illegals,” but some certainly was. Chavez justified the wet line by
saying that the illegals were scabs or taking the jobs of legal immi-
grants and U.S. citizens. But the truth is that he harbored ill will
toward immigrants from Mexico. By this time, Mexicans made up
a significant faction of all farmworkers in the West and a growing
faction of union members. They were a threat to Chavez’s power,
and therefore their potential for future strength in the union had
to be weakened.
We see from the UFW that building a union that pushes the
class struggle forward in ways that challenge the power of capital
is a difficult and problematic endeavor. If radical democracy is not
central to the union’s primary principles and structure, then capi-
tal will reassert its domination sooner or later.
 8

A Working-Class Revolt? Pandemic, Depression, and

Protest in the United States

Karl Marx said, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted

the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”1 Yes, but
how do we do this? Radicals believe that the working class,
broadly conceived, must be the agent of change. If we agree that
the rule of capital must end, given that it is the labor of an ever-
expanding working class that is central to its power, then what
other entity could destroy its dominion? And if capitalism is
the apotheosis of class society, then no future class societies are
possible. Therefore, if the working class does destroy the rule of
capital, it will either restore it at some point or move in a radi-
cally democratic and substantively egalitarian direction.
If we look at matters globally, peasants, who still comprise an
enormous share of the world’s population, must be added to the
working class.2 However, the question of “how” remains. It was
thought by many in the Marxist tradition that it would be in the
advanced capitalist countries that radical transformation would
begin because this is where the system’s contradictions were
sharpest and easiest to exploit and where the consciousness of
142 WORK WORK WORK

workers was highest. This proved not to be the case. Yet, this
has not stopped leftists in the Global North from continuing the
struggle for socialism on their home grounds.
Much has been made of the remarkable rise of the Democratic
Socialists of America (DSA) in the United States. For many,
they are now the voice of the left. Their social democratic poli-
tics are not much different from those in Europe. I described
DSA’s worldview this way:

There is no chance for a radically new system of produc-

tion and distribution in the short term, and certainly
not through a revolutionary upheaval. Only a long-
term peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism
is possible. Such an evolution is to be achieved through
electoral politics. Given the stranglehold of the two-
party system in the United States, those who hope for
socialism must work within the more liberal of these,
the Democratic Party, actively supporting and ulti-
mately getting elected to Congress and the presidency
what certain DSA luminaries call “class-struggle social
democrats.” These stalwarts of radical transformation
will, when their numbers are sufficient, have a strong
popular mandate to use the state to gradually disman-
tle the power of the wealthy and the corporations they
control and replace them with worker- and commu-
nity-owned cooperatives. Meanwhile, the government
will enact legislation, financed by sharply progressive
taxes on both income and wealth combined with cen-
tral bank injections into the public treasury of newly
printed money, that provides a safety net for every citi-
zen against the many slings and arrows of modern life.
Medicare for All, free public college schooling, massive
livable public housing, an ambitious carbon-reducing
and public-employment-generating Green New Deal,
job retraining, and greatly expanded and cheap public
a working-class revolt? 143

transportation will make us happier, more productive,

and freer to pursue our interests.
As the success of social democracy become appar-
ent and part of our normal expectations, it will become
possible to slowly move toward full socialism, with
the withering away of both private ownership of the
means of production and the state itself. I haven’t
seen any details on this, but one could imagine that
the hierarchical structure of workplaces will gradu-
ally give way to a much more horizontal structure
of power. Internationally, similar social democra-
cies will together engage in mutually beneficial trade,
with global governance agencies that peacefully solve
problems in what will continue to be a globally inter-
dependent world.3

The DSA’s political position strikes me as pathetically uto-

pian. One outcome of this worldview is the ceaseless pursuit of
“hopeful signs” of impending radical change. Every election of a
self-described democratic socialist, every strike, every organiz-
ing campaign, every protest in the streets becomes a harbinger
of a deeper understanding of capitalism and a greater willing-
ness to push society to the left.
Most recently, employers have been forced to raise wages due
to a perceived labor shortage. It certainly is remarkable that the
pandemic has led many workers to reexamine what they do
for a living and decide to make changes. Articles in the media
have highlighted workers in various occupations quitting their
jobs. During April, May, and June 2021, 11.5 million people
quit their jobs. Another 8,4 million quit in July and August.
High quit rates continued through the rest of 2021. These are
unprecedented numbers: “A survey of over 30,000 workers
conducted by Microsoft found that 41 percent are considering
quitting; that number jumps to 54 percent when Gen-Z is con-
sidered alone. Gallup found that 48 percent of employees are
144 WORK WORK WORK

actively searching for new opportunities. The business website

Inc. reported that 38 percent of those they surveyed planned
to make a change in the next six months.”4 In fall 2021, several
large strikes were taking place, and others were pending.5 What
to make of this is unclear, but the social democrats will be quick
to draw unwarranted conclusions.
The following essay offers both a clearer and more radical
perspective within which to view such developments.6

I
n 2018 and 2019, leftist writers, organizers, and pundits were
exclaiming that U.S. workers were on the move, striking even in
the “red” states that had voted for Donald Trump. Claims were
made that the presidential campaigns for Bernie Sanders and the
rapid growth of the DSA were primarily responsible for this rise in
militancy by long-suffering laborers, who had seen their economic
circumstances deteriorate for decades. Left-wing journalists inter-
viewed striking teachers and automobile workers, reporting on a
new mood of combativeness. After years of slumber, perhaps the
working class was awakening.7
Besides the anecdotal evidence, the optimists pointed to an
increase in major strikes. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)
defines a major strike as involving at least one thousand workers.
In 2017, there were only seven of these, the second-lowest number
since records were first kept in 1947.8 In 2018, however, there were
twenty, with a hefty 2,815,400 lost “person days” of labor resulting
(this measure combines the number of strikers and the duration
of the strike). There were major strikes by public school teachers,
healthcare providers, and social assistance workers, such as those
providing childcare and home health aid. Teachers struck in states
where there was no enabling collective bargaining legislation that
compels employers to bargain in good faith over wages, hours, and
terms and conditions of employment. In addition, many of the
strikers were not union members. More remarkable was that these
were statewide strikes in unexpected places: Arizona, Oklahoma,
a working-class revolt? 145

West Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina. These walkouts won

state-mandated improvements in wages and conditions.
The trend in labor strife continued in 2019, with twenty-five
major stoppages and 3,224,300 lost person days of work. Two
strikes stood out: one by Chicago public school teachers and sup-
port staff and another by auto workers at General Motors. In the
first, 25,000 teachers and 7,500 support staff, represented by the
Chicago Teachers Union and the Service Employees International
Union (SEIU), walked off the job on October 17 and stayed out
for fourteen days. They won better wages, benefits, and condi-
tions, and the Chicago Teachers Union laid the groundwork for
future community outreach programs such as living quarters for
homeless students. The second strike involved 49,000 General
Motors employees and lasted nearly six weeks. The resulting con-
tract increased wages, included promises by the company to invest
more capital in the United States, and partially abated the many-
tiered wage structure in which workers with similar experience
earn vastly different wages and benefits.
What about 2020? We do not know if this trend would have
continued to pick up steam had the nation not been struck by a
global pandemic. As of late July 2020, about 150,000 people had
died in the United States (by the end of 2021, it was more than
800,000). The economy had experienced a never-before-seen col-
lapse of employment and production. Some 50 million previously
employed persons filed for unemployment compensation over
three months.9 Given how restrictive the compensation system
has become, with smaller and smaller fractions of the unemployed
able to qualify for benefits, the actual amount of labor market inse-
curity was greater than even these incredible numbers suggest. In
April, the official BLS unemployment rate was 14.7 percent, but
because of a classification error, 7.5 million were not counted as
unemployed.10 Had they been counted, the rate would have been
19.3 percent. And if we include those involuntarily working part-
time and those who have simply stopped looking for work, the
extent of labor market insecurity was more than 25 percent. The
146 WORK WORK WORK

rate fell slightly in May and June 2020, but the actual amount of
labor market insecurity was still over 20 percent.
Yet, if tens of millions were unemployed, most in the labor force
were working. The U.S. labor force contained nearly 160 million
people. Over the three months of April, May, and June 2020, more
than 130 million were employed each month. It is not easy for
the unemployed to organize, although they participated in rent
strikes, fought to secure public funds, and took to the streets
against police violence. But what about the still working? Those
working faced not only long hours and, for the most part, inad-
equate pay but also dire health risks. Whether in healthcare, farm
fields and labor camps, food delivery, grocery stores, food banks,
FedEx and UPS trucks, post offices and postal delivery vehicles,
buses, subways, trains, airplanes, boats, warehouses, or construc-
tion sites, those who labor risked their lives to work, with many
becoming sick and dying.11
It should be stressed that concerning unemployment, employ-
ment, and the pandemic proper, Black, Indigenous, people of
color (BIPOC), and women suffered disproportionately. Black,
Indigenous, and Latinx people have died from COVID-19 at much
higher rates than whites. More than 40 percent of frontline work-
ers are BIPOC. As in every month, the unemployment rates for
Black and Latinx workers have been higher than for whites during
the pandemic. Some have called the economic depression a “she-
cession” because women have been its primary victims.12
Despite or maybe because of what they were facing, workers
protested and struck. There were strikes and threatened strikes
at Amazon warehouses, a Barnes and Noble warehouse, Whole
Foods, automobile plants, food delivery services like Instacart,
transit companies, restaurants, sanitation companies, farms, and
food processing plants. The website Payday Report tracked more
than eight hundred wildcat strikes between March and early July
2020. The strikes varied in size, demands, and duration—though
most were short. Apple shed laborers, who sort and pack fruit
in Washington’s Yakima Valley, struck in early and mid-May to
a working-class revolt? 147

compel their employer to provide them with safe working con-

ditions and $2 an hour extra in hazard pay.13 Strikes took place
at meatpacking plants across the country. Sanitation workers in
southern Louisiana, who pick up trash in New Orleans, walked
out in early May, demanding a living wage of $25 an hour, hazard
pay, and protective equipment.14
Similarly courageous demands were made by striking workers
in Pittsburgh in mid-March. The Guardian reported that “fast-food
workers with the Fight for $15 and a union campaign have orga-
nized one-day strikes and protests in California, Illinois, Florida,
Missouri and Tennessee through the pandemic.” Clothing plant
workers making protective face masks in Selma, Alabama, struck
on April 23 after two co-workers tested positive for COVID-19.15
Besides strikes, there were also pressure campaigns, ongo-
ing public efforts, and pickets mounted by diverse workers. The
Chicago Teachers Union and a teachers’ union caucus in New York
City—the Movement of Rank-and-File Educators—pressured
mayors to close schools, ultimately helping force public officials
to act after delays that ultimately led to sickness and death. Nurses
and their unions picketed as did sanitation and transportation
employees. They demanded social distancing measures and per-
sonal protective equipment. Medical workers went public, risking
employer censure, noting the many health hazards they face that
management had not adequately addressed. On May Day 2020,
graduate student workers across the country launched a campaign
to pressure universities to protect them during the pandemic
by providing them with better pay, rent subsidies, a free year of
tuition, and some guarantee of future employment.16 Truck driv-
ers in several states organized convoys protesting sharp drops in
mileage rates.17
Where a good local union exists, employers can be forced to
protect workers, as has sometimes happened during the COVID-
19 crisis. Two food processing plants located close to one another
illustrate this in Washington state. One, a French fry potato pro-
cessor in Pasco, is a Teamsters plant.
148 WORK WORK WORK

Even before any workers at the union-represented Lamb Weston

french fry plant in Pasco, Wash., were diagnosed with COVID-
19, the Teamsters union representing more than 550 workers at
the plant insisted that management take steps to protect workers
from the deadly virus. When a worker at the plant was even-
tually diagnosed with COVID-19 in late March, the plant was
immediately closed and the workers were sent home—with
pay—for two weeks as the plant was disinfected. After that,
additional measures were taken by management and the union
to protect workers.

The nonunion plant fifteen miles away, a Tyson beef-processing

facility, could not have been more different.

The Tyson plant has become Washington state’s biggest hotspot

for the COVID-19 outbreak. The Tri-City Herald reported
Wednesday that there are 101 confirmed cases linked to the
plant. Tragically, one of the infected employees, 60-year-old J.
Guadalupe Olivera Mendoza, has died. But as of this writing,
unlike other meat-processing plants that have been shut down
across the country, the Tyson plant in Wallula remains open for
business and reportedly continues to operate near full capacity.18

Three members of the Electrical Workers union, one of the few

radical labor organizations in the United States, spoke to the need
to educate and help workers during this unprecedented crisis:

Our union, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of

America (UE), has called on all workers, both our members and
nonunion workers, to stand up and fight. We have created online
resources to help nonunion workers take action to win safe work-
places. We have published a special issue of UE Steward on how
to organize members around COVID-19 issues in the workplace.
Alongside the Democratic Socialists of America we are launch-
ing a joint effort called the Emergency Workplace Organizing
a working-class revolt? 149

Committee, which will provide organizing and logistical support

to workers who are ready to take on their boss. Our members,
both in organized shops and in workplaces where we have orga-
nizing campaigns, are winning concessions from their employers
through militant and creative tactics.19

A Long Way to Go

Although the above offers us considerable hope about the U.S.

labor movement, it must be understood that the wave of strikes
and other labor actions represent progress only because they arose
from a very low base. According to the BLS, union density (the per-
centage of wage and salary workers in labor unions) in the United
States in 2019 was 10.3 percent, or about 14.6 million workers. In
2018, the BLS estimated that union density was 10.5 percent, with
about the same number of workers. In 2017, the year before the
much-vaunted rise in labor militancy, it was slightly higher than
in either succeeding year.
The methodology now used by the BLS allows comparisons
back to 1983. In that year, union density was 20.1 percent, with
three million more members than today. Though density estimates
before this are not directly comparable, the consensus estimate
for 1955, the year the AFL and CIO merged, was more than 30
percent.
If we look at the breakdown in densities by private versus public
sector workers, we see that density in the private sector in 2019
was 6.2 percent, lower than the 6.4 percent for 2018. Both numbers
are almost certainly less than a comparable number one hundred
years ago. Given that in 1955 almost all union members were in
the private sector, these numbers represent a decline in density of
at least 24 percentage points. That translates into a decline of 79
percent! What has prevented union density from falling still more
steeply has been the relatively high fraction of union members in
city, state, and federal government employment—33 percent in
2019, a bit lower than it was in 2018, when it was 33.9 percent.
150 WORK WORK WORK

The union density figures would seem to indicate a weak labor

movement, especially in private employment. However, this is not
necessarily the case. In France, a small percentage of the workforce
is unionized. Yet, French workers historically have been militant,
willing to engage in mass strikes and protests whenever their
interests have been threatened by employers or the government.
The yellow vests (gilets jaunes) movement in France, which lasted
for over a year, gives another example, one not even directly con-
nected to the labor movement. However, nothing like this can be
said of the United States, at least not yet.
We have already looked at major strikes for 2017, 2018, and
2019. If we take a long-term view, what happened in 2018 and
2019, though heartening, pales compared to what has taken place
in the past. For example, between 1990 and 2001, the average
number of major strikes was thirty-five, with a high of forty-five
in 1994 and a low of seventeen in 1999. In terms of workdays lost
to major strikes, in only one of these twelve years was the number
lower than in either 2018 or 2019. If we go further back in time,
we see just how small the current numbers are. Between 1947 and
1982, the number of major strikes was never lower than 145, with
a high of 470 in 1952. For days lost, the number was never lower
than 16,908,400, with a high of 60,850,000 in 1959. The percentage
that these numbers represent of all workdays hit a high of 43 per-
cent in 1950. And at no time was this percent less than seven times
what it was in 2018 and 2019. Even considering the many wildcat
strikes since the pandemic began, these pale in comparison to the
similar strikes in the 1970s when rank-and-file workers revolted
against their employers and sometimes against their unions. In
just two years, 1974 and 1975, there were nine thousand strikes,
almost all wildcats, in the nation’s coalfields.20
Several factors provide context for the recent uptick in labor
struggles. First, many U.S. unions never abandoned their disas-
trous embrace of labor-management cooperation, throwing
solidarity and, for some, their own histories out the window.
Instead, they partnered with management to raise productivity
a working-class revolt? 151

in a race to help companies, even individual plants, make more

money. Second, corruption is rife in the labor movement. There
is the soft corruption of obscenely high salaries and perks for top
officers. There is the harder corruption of disdain for the rank and
file and the violent efforts to suppress the rise of new leaders and
rank-and-file movements to make their unions democratic. And
there is the blatant corruption of theft and extortion. I once had a
student in a class that was part of the University of Massachusetts-
Amherst’s Union Leadership Academy, who worked for the SEIU.
He was found guilty of stealing tens of thousands of dollars from
a local union of poorly paid workers and sent to prison. When he
was released, an SEIU local hired him to be their lead organizer!
Right now (in 2020), the once-iconic United Auto Workers union
(UAW) is awash in corruption at the highest level, with former
national presidents either indicted or facing indictment. Several
officials have already been sentenced to prison.21 Third, the labor
movement has never fully addressed the systemic racism and
patriarchy of its organizations. Given the changing demography of
the country and the BIPOC- and women-led rebellions, this does
not offer much hope for the future of the labor movement as it is
presently constituted.22
Finally, there is a more subtle matter, but of utmost importance.
Today’s big unions, some of which waged heroic struggles in the
past to the benefit of millions of workers and their families (mine
among them), have no interest in workers’ control of production,
aimed at producing use values. They have a great deal of money and
property that could be put to good use along these lines. Unions in
the past have built working-class housing developments, hospitals
(the famous miners’ hospitals, for example), vacation resorts for
members, even schools for workers. Why not do this now with
farms, processing plants, grocery stores, clean vehicles for public
transit, high-quality and inexpensive housing, and much more?
It seems that unions (the UAW, for example), other than being
regularly mired in corruption, are as dedicated to the reproduc-
tion of wage labor as are the unions of cops and prison guards to
152 WORK WORK WORK

the reproduction of a criminal class. How could those who direct

labor organizations have just stood by while a Trump appointee
dismissed workers as “human capital” and claimed that they were
dying to get back to work? Well, what kind of work? Work that is
mostly unfit for human beings? Or work that we direct ourselves,
producing for society and not for the wealthy?
The actions of teachers and others who struck in 2018 and 2019
are indeed commendable. But a close look at the UAW contract
agreement that ended the General Motors strike shows that it still
left much to be desired.23 Organized teachers who struck made
substantial gains, but the unorganized teachers who struck and
did achieve some victories have no way to bind state governments
without unionization and collective bargaining agreements. And,
with the pandemic, states have closed schools, and their budgets
have been stretched. How likely is it that these teachers will be able
to consolidate what they have won?

Unions, Trump, and COVID-19

A union means greater safety for workers with respect to the

virus. And, as we have noted, the UE has been providing its mem-
bers with useful information and active support for locals facing
recalcitrant employers. The union also has offered such aid to all
workers through their website. In contrast, the carpenters’ union,
whose members are still working on construction sites, has done
little to protect them. In fact, its West Coast magazine, sent to all
member carpenters in this region, did not have a single article on
COVID-19 in a recent issue.24 This union, along with others in
construction, cozied up to Donald Trump, whose administration
could hardly have been more anti-labor, with those extraordinarily
hostile to the working class holding cabinet and top admin-
istration agency posts. As an essay by the Center for American
Progress explained, Trump and company denied overtime pay
to more than eight million employees, undermined wage theft
enforcement, gave billions in federal contracts to corporations that
a working-class revolt? 153

violate wage laws, undermined and understaffed the Department

of Labor, denied workers access to the courts, made it more dif-
ficult for workers to unionize and easier for employers to get rid
of them, imposed trade agreements that hurt workers, threatened
worker retirement savings, revoked employee civil rights protec-
tions, sought to allow employers to discriminate against gay and
transgender workers, helped block persons with disabilities from
working, sanctioned worker exposure to dangerous chemicals and
hazardous conditions, and weakened Occupational Safety and
Health Administration enforcement.25 Before becoming president,
Trump worked closely with mobbed-up New York City unions,
especially in the construction industry.
Yet, despite Trump’s history, a significant number of union mem-
bers voted for him. As I put it not long after Trump was elected:

According to the local union president, 30 to 40 percent of the

600 workers at the Momentive chemical plant in Waterford,
NY, recently engaged in a bitter strike and, represented by the
progressive and fiercely anti-Trump Communication Workers
of America, chose Trump. Nationwide, according to an AFL-
CIO [American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial
Organizations] exit poll, 37 percent of union members voted for
Trump. . . .
One would think that with such an anti-worker president, the
U.S. labor movement would be primed to do all in its power to
mobilize union members to resist, much as millions of people
have protested Trump since the day he took office. But such has
not been the case. The leaders of the country’s building trades
unions met with Trump in the White House. These worthies
were lavish in their praise for him, presumably keen on the pos-
sibility of new construction employment rebuilding the nation’s
infrastructure, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the wall along
the border with Mexico. Perhaps they saw Trump as a kindred
spirit, given that like them, he has had no qualms about being
in bed with mobsters nor with organizations with long histories
154 WORK WORK WORK

of racism and sexism. They practice a “me first, last, and always”
business unionism just as Trump practices a similar kind of
business. Solidarity is not in their vocabularies.
More troubling still was the meeting AFL-CIO president
Richard Trumka had with Trump in New York City a week before
his inauguration. Afterward, Trumka said that he and Trump
had “a very honest and productive conversation.” This after the
union chief had sharply and vigorously condemned Trump
for his anti-unionism and much else. How is it that as millions
were protesting a man very likely to be the worst president since
James Buchanan, the country’s top union official was meeting
with him? Shouldn’t he have been leading the protests? Trumka
stooped even lower when more recently he lavished praise on
Trump for the president’s first address before Congress.26

Then, as the federal government failed beyond measure to con-

front a deadly pandemic, as Trump committed acts of omission
that killed people every day, as he forced meatpacking workers back
to the killing floor (literally), as he showed blatant contempt for
the working class, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka became a
member of “the White House’s Great American Economic Revival
Industry Groups, which were announced Tuesday as part of the
president’s efforts to ‘open’ back up parts of the U.S. economy.” But
not to worry, he voiced various concerns about the needs of work-
ers, as Trump supposedly listened intently, with industry leaders
and Trumka all on the same page. This was the supposed leader of
organized labor (Trumka died in August 2021).27

The Black Lives Matter Uprisings and Organized Labor

Coming on top of the pandemic and economic breakdown was

the brutal racist murder of George Floyd, a Black man, at the
hands of Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020. Massive protests
erupted throughout the United States. The AFL-CIO and many
national unions issued statements in support of the rebellions
a working-class revolt? 155

and in opposition to systemic racism. No doubt, plenty of union

members participated in the uprising. Union transit workers in
Minneapolis and New York City, in a show of direct solidarity,
refused to transport those arrested to police stations in their buses.
The Minnesota AFL-CIO called for the resignation of Minneapolis
police union president Bob Kroll, a notorious white supremacist.
Several local unions actively took part in protests; the teachers’
union successfully urged that the school district end its contract
with the city police; and another local urged its Black members to
take bereavement leave, leading the employer to allow all mem-
bers to take sixteen hours of such leave.28 Over the course of the
first months of this uprising, numerous quick strikes took place.
On Juneteenth, Payday Report noted that longshoremen would go
on strike at twenty-nine ports across the West Coast. The UAW
planned to stop production on all assembly lines for eight minutes
and forty-six seconds to honor George Floyd:

The strikes come as workers have walked off the job at over
500 employers in the last 3 weeks alone. The Washington State
General Strike saw workers go on wildcat strikes at over 250
locations across the state according to our Strike Tracking Map.
The #ShutDownStem strikes last week also saw scientists go on
strike at 109 locations across the U.S.
If the size of these strikes last week is any indication,
Juneteenth will likely be the largest day of strikes in more than
a generation.29

Before this stoppage, Gulf and East Coast dockworkers closed

ports in honor of George Floyd’s funeral. “‘All operations stopped,
the terminals were shut down, no machines were working, trucks
were backed up for miles along the interstate because we weren’t
moving anything on the terminal,’ said Ken Riley, a Black dock-
worker and President of ILA Local 1422.”30
But how deep was labor’s embrace of the protests against sys-
temic racism and police violence? Despite the support for the
156 WORK WORK WORK

uprisings from unions and their members, the AFL-CIO and

national union leaders have been hesitant to condemn police
unions. A good argument can be made that police should not be
permitted membership in labor unions. Their role historically has
always been to support business owners and private property in
general. They have been repeatedly employed to break strikes, jail
picketers and strikers, and they have used violence as a standard
suppression technique. Examples abound: the Great Upheaval of
1877, the Haymarket Massacre of 1886, the Homestead strike of
1892, the Pullman strike in 1894, the Memorial Day Massacre of
1937, and thousands of other labor disputes, large and small.31
Yet, both the AFL-CIO itself and national unions have chartered
police union locals. What is more, police unions routinely negoti-
ate collective bargaining agreements that make it nearly impossible
to severely discipline cops who maim or kill working people, espe-
cially Black people and people of color. Town and city government
officials are typically in league with the police unions, receiving
large donations from them and usually serving the same rich con-
stituents. The Center for Public Integrity sought comments from
top union leaders concerning police violence and police unions.
Its reporter wrote:

None were willing to talk about police unions. Trumka, of the

AFL-CIO, was too busy to chat. The president of the United
Food and Commercial Workers Union couldn’t fit a call into
his schedule. Teamsters President James Hoffa declined to
comment.
Silence from the Service Employees International Union,
the American Federation of State, County and Municipal
Employees, United Auto Workers, Communication Workers of
America, Unite Here and the American Federation of Teachers.
Labor leaders briefly talked about police unions in response to
a reporter’s question Wednesday. They seemed uncomfortable.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation
of Teachers, said no union contracts should shield employee
a working-class revolt? 157

misconduct, but that focusing on collective bargaining is a “false

choice.”
In the wake of the police murder of Michael Brown in
Ferguson, Missouri, Trumka made this remarkable statement:
“Lesley McSpadden, Michael Brown’s mother who works in a
grocery store, is our sister, an AFL-CIO union member, and
Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Michael Brown, is a union
member, too, and he is our brother.”32

The AFL-CIO did little to embrace, much less lead, the numer-
ous wildcat walkouts spurred by the death of George Floyd and
rampant police violence against people of color. It should be noted
that during the protests in Washington, DC, AFL-CIO headquar-
ters were torched and vandalized by Black Lives Matter protesters,
perhaps because the labor federation refused to distance itself
from police unions.33

The Triple Crisis Has Made Society’s

Fault Lines Transparent

I am not the first person to say that a crisis reveals the fault lines in
a society. This triple crisis is unprecedented. COVID-19 is wreak-
ing havoc on our health and killing us in large numbers, bringing
with it the most massive and steep economic collapse in U.S. his-
tory. Then, there was the murder of George Floyd and the resulting
global protests. Anyone can see that capitalism, facing no real
opposition in decades, has reverted to its default position: only
profit rules us, and those with money will beat down those with
none, without mercy or remorse.
The results have been predictable:

1. Steadily and now sharply rising inequality in every facet of

life: income; wealth; healthcare; education; moderately com-
fortable retirement; working conditions; education; housing;
access to public amenities like parks, playgrounds, culture;
158 WORK WORK WORK

police and fire protection; legal assistance; clean water and air;
hope itself—all are obscenely maldistributed. Those at the top
have much, those at the bottom little, and those in the middle
are sinking.
2. The privatization of everything, with almost every goods- or
service-providing entity run on a strict profit-making basis.
We need but do not get good healthcare, good education, and
most other necessities unless we can pay. The vaunted capital-
ist economy cannot feed its people, but it can feed the stock
market.
3. Most jobs are not worth doing. And those that are necessary
are all too often poorly paid and fraught with danger. Both
kinds of work occur in ultra-hierarchical settings where
employers deploy constant speedup and the most sophisti-
cated surveillance techniques, not just at work but with big
data collection that predicts employee behavior.
4. Racism and patriarchy are inherent to capitalism. Untrammeled
violence against Black people, people of color, and women
continue unabated, and the neofascist Trump administration
normalized this to an extent not seen in a long time.34

The three crises have made these outcomes clearer than ever
before. It is not difficult to imagine that, with COVID-19, mass
unemployment, and a widespread social uprising that engulfed
the country, millions of people are now witnessing the disinte-
gration of the “normal.” We have watched hospitals fill up while
doctors, nurses, and other health workers lack the most basic
equipment. Emergency room waiting lines have spilled out onto
the streets. Beds have been in short supply. And we have learned
that hospitals operate on the same just-in-time inventory practice
as automobile companies, except that now this practice means
death. The horror of life in nursing homes could not be more obvi-
ous, as the virus has ripped through them, killing residents by the
thousands, deaths that were in no way inevitable. If it is not now
evident that the U.S. healthcare system is broken and in need of
a working-class revolt? 159

a radical overhaul, it never will be. And if COVID-19 testing has

been made free of charge, why should treatment itself not be free?
In fact, why should we pay for any medical, dental, and eye care?
Shouldn’t these be paid for through general and progressive taxa-
tion? Wasn’t healthcare meant to be an inalienable human right?
Shouldn’t it be able to meet our basic human needs?
With respect to the economic debacle and the government’s
response, is it not apparent that nearly all workers are subject
to immediate discharge, that nearly everyone’s situation is pre-
carious, that dangerous insecurity can raise its ugly head in a
heartbeat? Can’t we now see that no production can occur without
workers, and no profits can be made? Didn’t Trump’s order that
meatpacking plants be reopened, knowing full well that workers
would get sick and some would die, as they already had, tell us
just what is important? Who cannot now know that those who
care for us and make life possible, mainly women and people of
color, are the poorest paid—or not paid at all in the case of house-
hold labor—and least appreciated? While those whose positions
are best remunerated and most secure, and who have typically
been able to work from home during the pandemic, are always
given special consideration and heaped with praise? What does it
mean that the Trump administration, as well as top corporate and
even university officials, wanted kids back in school so that money
could be made, illness and death be damned? Why should we sac-
rifice our health and lives to keep the economy going?
The revolt against police violence and systemic racism finally
opened more white eyes than usual to what Black people in par-
ticular and BIPOC in general have always known. Poverty, disease,
and death stalk their communities, and this has nothing to do with
their “lifestyles” but with a sordid history of exclusion. What is
more, the rebellion is intimately tied to the pandemic and the eco-
nomic breakdown—the kind of connection that would usually
be hidden but is now out in the open, the subject of mainstream
newscasts and media reports. Inequality is connected to the eco-
nomic downturn and the pandemic itself: women have been hit
160 WORK WORK WORK

harder than men; whites have suffered less than people of color;
the poorer the workers, the less likely they can work from home;
the least healthy jobs are done by Black and Latinx workers; many
employees have collected more money through unemployment
compensation and the temporary $600 per week federal supple-
ment than they were paid for working; the pandemic has had
grossly uneven impacts, varying directly according to income
and wealth, type of employment, skin color, housing quality, with
each of these further correlated with the likelihood of underlying
conditions. The protests were direct outcomes of systemic racism,
which is itself a product of the economic and political history of
the United States. No doubt, too, that the duration and breadth of
the rebellion were heightened by the pandemic and the dire state
of the economy.

Will the U.S. Labor Movement Respond?

Will the U.S. labor movement transform itself and confront these
fault lines and help build a new society? Those now laboring might
continue to confront their bosses. They may find creative ways to
communicate with one another, sharing information and tactics.
When the pandemic weakens sufficiently or when more people
are compelled to return to work, workers may see their employ-
ers in a new light. Those not now working might make demands
on employers as a condition of returning to work, especially those
whose wages have been kept intact by employers bailed out by the
government. Those whose unemployment compensation and sup-
plemental federally funded income have kept them afloat might
resist returning to the same old work routine for a pay cut. Some
workers may even see that their bosses are not really needed and
that their workplaces could be organized in entirely different ways.
Workers may now realize that landlords, banks, and bill collec-
tors do nothing deserving of repayment. Those at the bottom may
say to those at the top, “I want a good life too, and I will take what
you have to get one.” Those who have been most severely exploited
a working-class revolt? 161

and considered least human might say, “No more, ever.” They and
their allies might conclude that the police as we know them, along
with the prison system, must be abolished and that racism and
patriarchy must be attacked directly, forcefully, and constantly.
The abject failure of the healthcare system, the political econ-
omy, really every major institution once taken for granted as
one that could help us through hard times may force people to
conclude that just about everything must be reorganized, made
to serve the social interest. Access to doctors, dentists, optom-
etrists, hospitals, and medications should all be matters of basic
need, available without charge and paid for out of the public trea-
sury, itself financed by sharply progressive taxes on income and
wealth. The same may go for housing and schooling at all levels.
Employment might be seen as a vital human interest as well, with
public works projects the rule and not the exception, with no
more privatization of essential public services. Where possible,
socially necessary production, from trash collection to schooling,
may come to be seen as necessitating, like public safety, control
by communities or by a combination of worker and community
governance.
As it becomes a matter of common knowledge that coronavi-
ruses are a consequence of rapid environmental collapse caused
directly by the lust for profits endemic to the capitalist mode of
production, perhaps more will see the need for decent employment
as an imperative to reduce unnecessary production, consump-
tion, and to radically redistribute what is necessary. And to realize
that, regarding necessary goods and services, food is most critical.
We cannot continue to employ industrial agriculture to feed us.
Instead, as has already begun in earnest, local, organic food pro-
duction, controlled democratically, must replace the current food
regime. Surely, the pandemic has shown that there will be future
disruptions and shortages in what is most needed: food, water,
clean air, healthy soil.
Should all these maybes become realities, will the U.S. labor
movement, as it currently exists, do the right thing, both cham-
162 WORK WORK WORK

pioning and leading the various movements now building on the

ground? The answer is undoubtedly no. What we need is radical
change, and the AFL-CIO and all but a few unions are the enemies
of such change. Capitalism is a hegemonic system, and it brings
forth the people and institutions it needs. Unions are no exception.
Prolific writer, scholar, and political activist Mike Davis signals
that a sense of rage is boiling over. For this rage to take a left-
ist and profoundly radical direction, masses of people will have
to force the issue. New organizations must be built. Old ones can
become part of them, but their structures need to be fundamen-
tally altered, and they must be subordinate to that which is new.
What does this mean concretely? Historically, workers have
engaged in direct mass actions, formed labor unions, and built
working-class political parties. These will remain the necessary
forms of struggle. Let us look at each in turn.
The earliest labor rebellions were direct actions. After unsuccess-
fully petitioning Parliament, the Luddites formed an underground
army and began to destroy workshops and machinery. In urban
areas where capitalism had gained a foothold, workers rioted
against employers and the wealthy, again to force a redress of their
grievances. When traditional bread prices were no longer hon-
ored, bakeries were ransacked, and bread was simply taken. Many
direct actions have been taken by workers and peasants, from
blockading highways to land confiscations. The global uprising
after the police murder of Floyd was likewise immediate and con-
frontational, with some destruction of business property, stopping
interstate highway traffic, burning police precincts, and the like.
Direct action is often characterized, even on the left, as wanton
rioting, without rhyme or reason. This is never the case. There
are always leaders and at least some planning, especially once
the fuse of rebellion has been lit. In Brazil, the Landless Workers’
Movement has as its motto, “Occupy, Resist, Produce.” Occupy
unutilized land, typically stolen from peasants and the poor in
the first place. Then resist with force, if necessary, attempts by
the powerful to take the land back. Then, begin to produce on
a working-class revolt? 163

the land, distributing the product among the direct laborers and
the community in an egalitarian manner. Cooperation Jackson
has implemented a similar strategy in Jackson, Mississippi. The
Black Panther Party provides a comparable model. In the late
1960s and during the ’70s, they initiated a remarkable number of
community-based programs, providing services that poor people
could not get in the marketplace, including “the Free Breakfast for
Children Program, liberation schools, free health clinics, the Free
Food Distribution Program, the Free Clothing Program, child
development centers, the Free Shoe Program, the Free Busing to
Prison Program, the Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation,
free housing cooperatives, the Free Pest Control Program, the
Free Plumbing and Maintenance Program, renter’s assistance,
legal aid, the Seniors Escorts Program, and the Free Ambulance
Program.”35 Out of such efforts, people learn to care for them-
selves and one another, gaining confidence that the system does its
best to undermine. Nothing could be more important in an era of
the dismantling of public services critical to life and the growing
privatization of what had been either common or peasant land.
A labor movement must embrace such direct confrontations
with capital and be an integral part of them. However, additional
structures are necessary. Labor unions must be constructed anew,
with forms that fit the modern world. Organizations that are radi-
cally democratic, created from the ground up, will be essential.
For traditional unions, representing a particular category of work-
ers, an excellent model is the Building Laborers Federation in
Australia. Led by Jack Mundey and a group of radicals, a union
of mainly poor immigrant workers, dominated by gangsters and
corrupt officials, was transformed from the bottom up into a
militant, class-conscious union concerned with more than work-
place issues. During the 1970s, the union employed mass flying
pickets to shut down building sites, thwarting the boom in urban
high-rise construction. These strikes allowed the workers to make
enormous gains in pay, benefits, training, and dignity.
At the same time, the Building Laborers Federation “experi-
164 WORK WORK WORK

mented with the ideas of workers’ control, occupying construction

sites, electing their own foremen, staging sit-ins and ‘working in’ in
response to lockouts, poor safety conditions and sackings.” These
tactics were used to bring women and Aboriginal people into the
union and onto the jobs. The union used bilingual organizers and
had its literature and meeting proceedings translated into the
languages of its European immigrant members. It brought to the
membership the idea of “green bans” on ugly and environmentally
destructive building projects, winning approval for refusal to work
on such sites. Mass meetings and democratic assent were required
for all union actions. Remarkably, given the time (1973), the union
also implemented the “pink ban,” refusing to do construction work
at a university that had expelled a gay student.36
A few U.S. unions are worth emulating, such as the Chicago
Teachers Union, the United Electrical Workers, and the National
Union of Healthcare Workers. These unions have strong principles,
are embedded in communities, have larger than workplace con-
cerns, and are willing to use direct means to challenge employer
power. The old United Packinghouse Workers, led by radicals,
not only forced employers to equalize Black and white wages and
conditions, but its members also compelled local businesses and
landlords to integrate their premises. A network of shop stewards
across all the plants and firms the union had organized coordi-
nated wildcat strikes and direct confrontations with the bosses
whenever serious grievances arose, even where there were con-
tractual limitations on strikes.37
Traditional unions may not be ideal for many workers. For them,
geographically centered unions might be better suited to their
needs. For example, there are worker centers located throughout the
United States. The Chinese Staff and Workers Association in New
York City deals mainly with restaurant and garment shop laborers
in the city. It takes up their wage and long hours grievances, filing
lawsuits and labor law violation suits against employers. It demands
that workers actively participate in their disputes and that they, in
turn, come to the aid of others who are similarly aggrieved. In this
a working-class revolt? 165

way, the organization builds a sense of solidarity and community

among its members.38
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida is another
worker center, struggling, often successfully, to improve the work-
ing and living conditions of its largely immigrant farm laborers. It
has engineered national boycotts against major fast-food chains,
to force them to sign an agreement through which they pay grow-
ers more for tomatoes and guarantee that the workers get some of
the extra farm revenue. It has also fought against human traffick-
ing and assaults against women workers. Again, as with the unions
discussed above, these centers are deeply embedded in communi-
ties with concerns they share and address.39 Another possibility is
the workers assembly, which has multiple working-class organiza-
tions, including labor unions, and in which regular mass meetings
are called so that issues pertaining to the class struggle can be dealt
with democratically, and strategies and tactics can be developed
and implemented.40
The third type of working-class entity is the political party.
Through these, the working class tries to exert power at the
nation-state level and, in some cases, across national borders.
Most such parties today are social democratic, and they attempt to
win some control over the state and what it does through elections.
They originally aimed at control of the state as part of a transition
from capitalism to socialism. In some cases, revolutionary strug-
gle seized state power, as in Russia, China, Vietnam, and Cuba.
Now, however, most labor parties are reformist, aimed at better-
ing the conditions of workers through universal programs such
as government-sponsored or controlled healthcare. Unfortunately,
the gains made by these parties have been steadily eroded as capi-
tal went on the offensive with the advent of neoliberalism:

Social democracy in Western Europe took shape under special

historical circumstances: the strong communist movements,
allied with the Soviet Union, existing in most European nations
after World War II; the rapid economic growth that followed the
166 WORK WORK WORK

massive rebuilding that took place after the war, aided by US aid
and US exports; the need of European capital to cooperate with
and make concessions to non-communist labor unions, if only
to co-opt any future radicalization; and the strict capital controls
and fixed currency exchange rates that facilitated national devel-
opment. We live in an altogether different world today, one in
which capital and the state are in a symbiotic relationship to dis-
mantle social democracy, privatize social services, destroy labor
unions and ensure capital’s ability to do what it desires in every
corner of the earth and every part of our lives.41

What is more, for all the good social democratic parties have
done, they never challenged the lopsided distribution of wealth,
which meant that no matter how many social welfare programs
were implemented, power remained firmly in the hands of capi-
tal. As economist Michael Roberts points out, wealth is nearly as
unequally distributed in each of the Scandinavian countries, the
quintessential social democratic states, as it is in the United States.42
Labor parties, like unions, will have to be reconstructed. New
parties must be built, democratic, with clear radical principles,
leading the working class (and a worker-peasant alliance in much
of the Global South) as a whole. Such parties must pressure exist-
ing states to satisfy the needs of the class and build the capacities
of workers and peasants to gain control of their lives and start to
build alternative structures of production and distribution. There
are many possible models, from the local assembly-commune-
national party schema in Venezuela to the scaling outward and
upward of the Richmond Progressive Alliance in Richmond,
California, or Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi, to the
Maoist parties in Nepal and rural India.43
Whether direct action, labor organization, or political efforts,
it is critical to have an educational component. We all need to
learn in cooperative settings without hierarchies. As historian
Peter Linebaugh writes, “Communal values must be taught, and
renewed, continuously.”44 Every member of every direct-action
a working-class revolt? 167

group, labor organization, or political entity must agree as a con-

dition of membership to take part in regular, structured education.
One-day classes, short courses, summer schools, semesters—all
are possible and necessary. History, political economy, cultural
studies, law, agriculture, ecology, and many other subjects can
prepare people to think critically and act decisively, pursuing a
tactical goal or a long-term structural change.45
In the United States, every educational enterprise should make
special efforts to address racism, patriarchy, and imperialism.
These have been part and parcel of capitalism from its inception.
They are also sources of conflict and contention in every working-
class organization. Unless they are confronted in open discussion,
a unified working class will remain a pipe dream. The uprisings
over police violence and systemic racism have for the first time
convinced a majority of white people in the United States of a
reality many have long denied. Once one form of oppression is
admitted, others can be more effectively challenged.
The pathetic response of the U.S. government to the pandemic
calls for comparisons with many other countries. Education could
challenge popular support for the mindless nationalism and
disdain for the rest of the world that has been one of the most
dominant set of blinders for the U.S. population, making us oblivi-
ous and uncaring about the havoc our country has wreaked upon
the rest of the world. The economic fallout from the pandemic
has landed more heavily on women and the lockdowns and wide-
spread unemployment have brought home the crucial role women
play in reproducing the social system. This is undoubtedly an
opportunity to challenge patriarchy in the same way that it has
been an opportunity to challenge racism.

Personal Responsibility

It is fitting to end this essay with the question of personal respon-

sibility. What can each of us do to build a radical labor movement?
What we can do will depend in large part on our circumstances
168 WORK WORK WORK

and skills. Some of us can educate, explaining the world in which

we live clearly and in language that does not look at the working
class from the outside, examining and analyzing it, but as part of
it, teaching while we learn in dialogue with others. The left and the
unions have done a miserable job of this. Worker education is a
dead letter in almost all labor unions. There are a few decent pro-
grams in colleges and universities. And recently, an independent
program has begun in Minneapolis-St. Paul, modeled after the old
Brookwood Labor College.46 However, much of the U.S. working
class is sorely lacking in accessible educational resources on the
nature of capitalist society. There is no reason why we cannot help
to make such resources available.
In our places of employment, we can organize, not just those like
us but all of the workers in our workplaces. We can learn how our
employers function and how the goods or services we make are pro-
duced and sold from beginning to end. We can look for vulnerable
points and strategize how to take advantage of these. We can try to
form unions, especially independent organizations unless there is
a good, existing union. We can educate ourselves about labor and
safety and health laws, civil rights laws, unemployment compensa-
tion rules, and anything else that might be of value to the workers,
including ourselves. Even in small groups, we can legally make
demands of our bosses, and we can even engage in collective acts of
solidarity to protect aggrieved individuals and groups.
We can, wherever possible, begin to think about and then build
our networks of production and distribution as is being done now
in Jackson, Mississippi.
We can be politically active. The triple crisis has opened new
possibilities for fundamental change, and we had better take
advantage of them. We may not have much of a future if we do not.

Postscript

BLS data on union membership, union density, and major strikes

are now available for 2020. These should be read with caution
a working-class revolt? 169

because of the pandemic’s impact on employment. The large

decline in the number of people working, compared to 2019, with
nonunion workers overrepresented in this decline, has increased
union density. At the same time, there has been a significant drop
in total union membership. Union density in 2020 was 10.8 per-
cent, an increase of half a percentage point over 2019. Yet, 2020
also saw a decline in union membership of 321,000. Both the pri-
vate and the public sectors saw union density increases, but this
was for the same reason, a significant loss of employment. There
were only eight major strikes in 2020, the third-lowest since 1947.
Health and education accounted for 75 percent of the 27,000 work-
ers idled by these strikes. There were 965,700 workdays lost in the
strikes, down significantly from 2019, accounting for a minus-
cule fraction of total workdays. Against these rather depressing
numbers, there were a great many short stoppages, as employees
continued to contest low wages and substandard and often dan-
gerous working conditions.

Payday Report has now recorded its 1,400th strike since we began
tracking strikes at the beginning of the pandemic in March of
2020 with the latest strike coming from Topeka, Kansas, where
over 500 Frito-Lay workers went on strike this Monday.
The strike movement is now picking up momentum as the
“Retail Worker Rebellion” grows.
In recent weeks, we have seen a huge spike in strikes as videos
of retail workers walking off the job go viral on platforms like
Tik Tok, encouraging workers at other locations to post similar
videos when they decided to walk off. In April alone, a record
649,000 retail workers quit their jobs as they are demanding
more from their employers.
On the Fourth of July weekend, we saw nearly a dozen walk-
offs. In Ohio, Del Taco workers walked off the job, stating they
“will not work for a company that does not care.” Lifeguards in
Maine walked off the job after a lifeguard captain was demoted
for asking for pay raises. Dill Pickle workers walked off the job
170 WORK WORK WORK

in Chicago, with worker Kevin Taylor saying, “At the end of the
day, it’s standing up for what’s right.”
Now, more than 2,000 Kroger workers voted to strike in
Arkansas.47

Combined with the unprecedented number of people quitting

their jobs, with a resultant widespread labor shortage, circum-
stances are now favorable for renewed class struggle. Yet, as will be
argued in the next chapter, much needs to be done if the working
class is to fulfill its destiny as the agent for radical transformation.
 9

Waging Class Struggle: From Principles to Practice

It is difficult to be optimistic about the likelihood of a radi-

cal, working-class led transformation of society. In the United
States, the Black Lives Matter protests have waned, and although
workers are quitting jobs by the millions and short strikes are
everywhere, no labor movement is on the horizon. COVID-19
continues to kill people, yet millions seem to believe it is all a
hoax. Politics continues to be a spectacle of misinformation and
incompetence. The right is rising in many countries and has
seized power in India, Hungary, and the Philippines, to name
only the most frightening examples. Most disheartening are the
global environmental catastrophes, which continue unabated,
destroying the bases of human life itself. Social scientist James
C. Scott suggests that humans are the most invasive of all ani-
mals and plants.1 He has a point.
Pessimism doesn’t allow us to capitulate. Life cannot go on
the way it has. Radical change is not utopian; it is necessary. No
liberal or social democratic program has any chance of avoid-
ing our annihilation. Piecemeal efforts are useless unless they
generate more comprehensive actions. Unfortunately, this has
never been the case, and there is no reason to believe that it
172 WORK WORK WORK

will be going forward. In this final chapter, I have developed a

comprehensive plan of attack for workers and their allies, not in
the sense of specific tactics but in more general strategic terms.
It is essential to view class struggle in the broadest pos-
sible way. First, the protagonists in the war against capital
are not just wage workers, the unemployed, those who have
dropped out of the labor force for economic reasons, and all
those laboring in the informal economy, whether in the sale of
goods or services or as unpaid family members helping in such
sales. They are also the women (and some men) who perform
the unpaid labor that allows this system to reproduce itself.
My mother, for example, not only gave birth to me, but she
also cooked, cleaned, taught me how to behave in a socially
appropriate manner, and did all of the things that allowed me
to become a wage laborer. She was as much a member of the
working class as my father or myself. The same is true for my
partner, who did these for our children.
Second, there are those outside the wage-labor economy,
namely the more than two billion peasant farmers globally
and the much smaller group of indigenous gatherers and hunt-
ers. Workers must ally with these peoples because they suffer
similar kinds of exploitation and expropriation, and their aims
cannot be fulfilled in capitalism. In India, hundreds of thou-
sands of farmers have been protesting government-imposed
legislation hostile to the livelihoods of those who till the land.
Large, semi-permanent encampments have been established
outside Delhi. They achieved a great victory in December 2012
when the government agreed to rescind the laws. Tens of mil-
lions of wage workers conducted a 24-hour strike in November
2020 in support of the farmers. This is a good example of the
need for worker/peasant alliances. It will be impossible for the
working class to ignore a couple of billion people who could be
vital in any revolutionary movement.2
waging class struggle 173

C
apitalism is a system of stark individualism.3 For the capital-
ist system to reproduce itself, for its outcomes to become its
suppositions, people must behave in a self-interested way.
Mainstream economists assume that every social actor is an auton-
omous maximizer—an “I”—of something—profits or individual
satisfaction from consuming and supplying labor. They spread this
view to millions of students in nearly every introductory econom-
ics class taught in universities. As noted in chapter 2, there is some
evidence suggesting that economics professors and students are
less compassionate than others who have neither taught nor taken
economics classes.4 The primary institutions of capitalist society
work in concert to inculcate the “I” in everyone, with the corol-
lary that the social—a “We”—is detrimental to human welfare. It
doesn’t matter why we take self-centered actions; desire or fear
serve equally well in terms of the needs of the dominant class, the
imperative being the accumulation of capital.
For capitalism to end, the “I” must be suppressed, and the “We”
must come to the fore. This statement would sound strange to
the gatherers and hunters who inhabited the earth for almost all
human existence. They had no word for “I” and saw no difference
between themselves and the natural world around them. Their
lives hinged on cooperation and sharing, and their rituals and
institutions helped ensure that these were maintained. For them,
the earth was a commons, the property of all. They managed their
existence in ways harmonious with nature and kept the earth’s
metabolism in balance with their own. They were the original We.
Gatherers and hunters still exist in small numbers, hounded out
of their isolated redoubts and forced to adapt to the modern world.
Some have adapted; many have died. But the reality and idea of
the commons lived on, and the We was often stronger than the I.
Historian Peter Linebaugh tells us, “Scarcely a society has existed
on the face of the earth which has not had at its heart the com-
mons; the commodity with its individualism and privatization was
174 WORK WORK WORK

strictly confined to the margins of the community where severe

regulations punished violators.”5 Before the capitalist factory and
machinery enclosed workers in walled spaces and a mechanism
determined the pace of their work, before the land was made into
private property, egalitarian, sharing relationships dominated
much of human life. Everywhere, peasants had customary rights
to use common lands for everything from gathering firewood to
gleaning after harvest. Farmers periodically redivided plots of land
to ensure that each family had land of roughly equal crop yields.
As late as 1688, one-quarter of the total area of England and Wales
was common land.6
Even in early capitalist workplaces, craft workers had the right to
keep excess materials. In shipbuilding, the workmen had the right
to keep scrap lumber. Certainly, the slaves whose labor made the
great acceleration of capital accumulation in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries possible had memories of their commons in
Africa, of the “We” that dominated their lives. It was surely this
that inspired their collective revolts again their “masters.” The
notion that the earth belonged to all was a staple of religion. “The
Franciscans say juri divino omni sunt communia, or by divine law
all things are common.”7
What the exploitation and expropriation central to capitalism
meant historically was a war, waged by law and violence, against
common ownership and customary group rights. The “I” was
never natural and therefore had to be imposed. If the working
class is to radically change the world, it must wage its war against
the I and for the We, learning about and building on the struggles
of the past.

What Does Changing the World Mean?

To transform the world, we first must have at least a general idea

of the world we want to inhabit, and second, we need to know how
to bring such a place into existence. We can start by stating that if
capitalism is the source of the multiple woes facing the working
waging class struggle 175

class and its peasant comrades-in-arms, then what we desire is the

antithesis of capitalist society. This would mean the end of:

Ÿ Private ownership of the means of production, including land.

Ÿ Production for profit.
Ÿ The obsession with endless economic growth.
Ÿ The exploitation of wage labor.
Ÿ The expropriation of peasant land, urban and rural common
spaces, the labor and bodies of women, Black bodies, and all
forms of patriarchy and racism.
Ÿ The private plunder of the natural world.
Ÿ Imperialism.
Ÿ The pro-capitalist role of all institutions and mechanisms that
reproduce society, from family to state and from education and
media to the legal system.

To put matters bluntly, the rule of capital must be terminated.

Because everything that must end is central to the unceasing
accumulation of capital, it is impossible to abolish any of these
within the confines of this system. There can be some lessening
of exploitation and expropriation, won through various forms
of struggle. Wage laborers can win safer workplaces; civil rights
laws can improve the lives of women and people of color; impe-
rial wars can sometimes be averted, or poor nations can win a
bit of economic independence. Peasants can at least temporarily
deny capital their land; a few decent politicians might win office;
schools might improve some, and media might occasionally serve
the public. But none of this subverts the ultimate power of the
capitalist class, namely its monopoly of ownership of the world’s
productive property.
However, if we accept that capitalism must be superseded, it
is fair to ask with what. The answer many on the left give is that
we should not be designing the details of a future society. We will
develop these as we attempt to change the world, seeing what
works and what does not in practice. Perhaps so, but can we not at
176 WORK WORK WORK

least state in general but stirring terms what we seek? At a mini-

mum, wouldn’t the following demands be essential?

Ÿ A sustainable environment. What we appropriate from nature

must be restored. We are headed for multiple environmen-
tal catastrophes threatening human existence. There will be
no world for the working class to change if this isn’t done. All
economic decisions should be made with a sustainable environ-
ment a central determining factor.
Ÿ A planned economy. The anarchy of the marketplace should be
replaced by conscious planning of what is produced. Periodic
economic crises and unconscionable inequality are the direct
results of reliance on the market. These are neither desirable nor
necessary. Corporations plan, so why can’t society do the same?
Ÿ Socialization of as much consumption as possible, especially
transportation and childcare. Living arrangements could be more
collective as well. Not only will this save resources, but it will
also socialize us in ways supportive of feelings of belonging and
happiness. We are social animals not meant to live isolated lives
surrounded by unnecessary privately owned consumer goods.
Ÿ Democratic worker-community control of workplaces, with, to
the extent possible, the elimination of the detailed division of
labor and with machinery built and introduced with social use-
fulness as the guiding principle.
Ÿ Public ownership of all social reproduction institutions, from
schools to media. The same should be the case for as much
production as possible. In many cases, cooperatives run by
workers and communities should be responsible for production
and distribution decisions. Local supply is especially impor-
tant for food, both in terms of transportation expenses and a
healthy environment. It will be much easier to return nutrients
to the soil organically when food is grown close to where it is
consumed.
Ÿ A radically egalitarian society, with equality in all spheres of
life—between men and women, among all racial and ethnic
waging class struggle 177

groups, among all people irrespective of their gender identity or

sexual preference, among and within every country concerning
work, geography, and access to all social services and amenities.

The working class must be against a society built upon individu-

alism and the rule of the many by the few. No social system with
inequality of power and multiple hierarchies affecting most of life
can be liberating, if liberation means living unalienated lives, lives
in which we are not artificially and intentionally separated from
one another, from what we produce, from our natures as think-
ing, purposive beings, and from the natural world. By contrast, the
working class must be for whatever is social, collective, sharing,
and unalienating.

The Multiple Terrains of Struggle

There are many arenas of class struggle. In each, there are both
matters to fight against and to fight for. Any list must be somewhat
arbitrary, but the following areas would seem essential.

A Statement of Principles and Commitments

Every organization and movement should have a statement of the

principles and commitments that underlie them. These can be
general declarations, or they can take the form of demands. For
example, suppose it is higher education that is being contested. In
that case, a declaration could be “Free higher education is a right,”
and demands could be “Make adjunct teachers full-time profes-
sors” and “Abolish student debt.” Organized Black Americans
might demand some form of reparations for the depredations of
slavery. A specific call could be an end to the racist U.S. bail bond
system.8 Poor women might insist on the abolition of workfare and
publicly financed family allowances. “Land to the tiller,” used by
the Chinese revolutionaries, still resonates today in places where
peasant land is being expropriated. Those organizing protests and
178 WORK WORK WORK

those joining an organization can make formal commitments. “I

will never cross a picket line” in a union strike setting is an obvious
pledge. In anti-imperial efforts, “I will not join the military” starkly
proclaims that a person will not participate in the violence, includ-
ing murder, that always grounds the subjugation of the people of
another country by the aggressor nation.
If there is a primary organization, such as a political party,
the principles would take on a more general, but encompassing,
character. In the United States, for example, a set of transitional
demands, that is, those aimed at applying pressure to capital and
which could, if put into practice, pave the way for a transition to
socialism, might include:

• Much shorter working hours.

• Early and secure retirement.
• Free universal healthcare.
• An end to the link between work and income.
• An end to all corporate subsidies.
• The immediate termination of all forms of discrimination.
• Bans on fracking and other profit-driven environmental
despoliations.
• An end to the war on terror as well as closings of U.S. military
bases in other countries.
• The abolition of the prison system.
• Free schooling at all levels.
• Open borders combined with the termination of U.S. financial
support for oppressive governments.
• Community-based policing.
• Transfer of abandoned buildings and land to communities and
groups that will put them to socially useful purposes.9

Every proclamation of principles must contain firm com-

mitments to ending patriarchy and racism. These exist as such
significant cleavages within the working class that they can never
be ignored.
waging class struggle 179

Statements and commitments are rare today, but that makes

them all the more important. People naturally gravitate toward
organizations and leaders that have standards from which they do
not deviate. Former U.S. president Barack Obama said, when he
was a candidate, that he would put on walking shoes and join strik-
ing picketers. But he never did. He often said one thing and then
did the opposite. Mao Zedong said that land would go to the peas-
ants who worked it, and that is what was done. Who do you think
has, to this day, more committed admirers? Karl Marx stuck to his
fundamental principles no matter the consequences. His analyses
changed as he learned more about how societies functioned. But
he never changed his mind about the nature of capitalism, and he
devoted his life to destroying capital’s power. No wonder he is held
in the highest esteem by tens of millions of people.

Radical Education

In discussing “commoning”—the act of doing things in common,

such as working in a community garden or caring for a forest
that is used by an indigenous group of peasants in India—Peter
Linebaugh says, “Communal values must be taught, and renewed,
continuously.”10 Parents, churches, civic organizations, and the
like might try to inculcate such values in the children and mem-
bers; when people engage in collective struggles, they learn them.
However, it takes more than this to make collective ways of think-
ing an integral part of our lives, providing, in effect, a compass
that gives us direction. Radical, critical, and continued education
is needed. It will not only help to put our lives and actions into
context, but it will also give us a better understanding of what
needs to be done in the future. Through it, we can learn to analyze
our individual histories, to, in effect, examine and pass judgments
on ourselves.
There are many elements in radical education. First, there must
be a relationship of mutual respect between teacher and student.
That is, both must feel part of a larger project, the liberation of
180 WORK WORK WORK

humanity from the shackles of capitalism. While the teachers

have specialized knowledge, they learn from their students in a
give-and-take process of democratic discussion. If education isn’t
egalitarian, how can we expect anything else to be? Second, those
who teach must, whatever the venue, direct the conversation
toward the nature of the system. A science teacher can ask, what
influences the questions asked of science? How is science funded?
Is what a scientist does value-free? Then, pose a question such as,
why is so little government funding given to researchers who want
to know the possible consequences of genetically modified organ-
isms? In social sciences, one could ask how likely it would be for a
scholar to earn a PhD if the thesis subject is “How can a guerrilla
army best defeat the U.S. armed forces in [Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria,
Haiti, take your pick]?”
In labor education, the question “What is capitalism?” is para-
mount. The teacher must try to show that this system rests on a
bedrock of exploitation and expropriation. Even if a class is about
a practical matter, such as labor law or organizing a union, the
nature of society is critical to explaining what the law is and why
unions are necessary. In all organizations, whether they are fighting
for a cleaner environment, better housing, lower rents, converting
abandoned urban land to community gardens, ending the theft of
peasant lands, socialized healthcare, ending racism and patriarchy,
or the termination of wars and imperialism, capitalism must be
central to the teaching and learning. It might seem that teaching
the nature of capitalism is a daunting task, but peasants have been
taught the rudiments of the three volumes of Karl Marx’s magnum
opus, Capital. Nothing is impossible.
Third, every entity seeking radical change must have an educa-
tion component integral to its operation. Labor unions and peasant
organizations need to set aside time and resources for this. Most
unions in the United States have little or no member education,
much less radical education. This is one reason why the rank and file
are alienated from the leadership. Not a few union officers fear an
educated membership, which might decide to replace them. Political
waging class struggle 181

parties and formations, Occupy Wall Street types of actions, anti-

war organizations, anti-racist and anti-patriarchy movements need
education efforts as well, permanent if possible. Planning actions,
carrying them out, assessing successes and failures—all are vital
subjects of education for members and participants.
Fourth, radical education is about making connections. One
organization’s projects are connected to those of every other group;
each person’s life is part of a larger whole.

For example, any efforts to end “clopening” [employers schedul-

ing workers to close a workplace, often a restaurant, late at night
and then open the shop early the next morning] could be tied
directly to the need for shorter hours and more free time, which,
in turn, could allow us to pose the question of why employers
have the power to determine how we labor and with what inten-
sity. Irregular and stressful shift work could even be connected
to U.S. imperialism, which helps global corporations dispossess
peasants in poor countries, forcing them unwillingly to migrate
to rich nations where they intensify labor market competition
and increase capital’s power. . . . [Also,] whatever relatively small
or local changes we fight for should always be connected to
larger and more global principles. Suppose that a coalition of
progressive organizations seeks to end city tax subsidies to the
builders of luxury condominiums. Why not tie this endeavor to
demands for quality, low-rent public housing, the considerable
destruction of which is caused by the luxury consumption of the
wealthy, and our commitment to limit our own discretionary
consumption?11

Racism, patriarchy, and imperialism are all connected to exploi-

tation and expropriations, as is climate change. Radical education,
by showing why this is so, can help to ignite the class conscious-
ness necessary to change the world.
Fifth, whatever the setting, start with the lives, the daily experi-
ences, of the students. Education scholar and teacher Ira Shor:
182 WORK WORK WORK

begins a writing class with community college students by

examining the chairs on which they are sitting. He first has them
carefully describe the chairs, forcing them to look at them care-
fully and slowly. However, the description is just the beginning;
through discussion and more writing, Shor and his students
discover the chair’s origin within the economy and the cultural
assumptions behind its production (e.g., why it’s so uncomfort-
able!). Ultimately, the students, mostly through their own efforts,
are able to divest the chair of its commodity fetishism by totally
understanding it in relation to the society which produced it.
The complete exercise not only demystifies the chair itself, but
gives a striking experimental demonstration of how to analyze
capitalism and of the dialectical method of understanding one’s
own environment.12

Labor educator and Monthly Review co-founder Leo Huberman

gives a striking example of radical and critical teaching. He asks
his worker-students a series of simple questions about their lives
as working men and women. Where do you work? Why do you
work? Does the man who owns the factory work alongside you?
Have you ever seen the stockholders of the corporation working in
the plant? But you all agreed you had to work to live; now you tell
me there are some people who live without working. How come?
Then there are two groups of people in our society. One group, to
which you belong, lives by…? And the other group to which your
employer belongs lives by…? The questions continue until the
teacher and the students see that profits are unearned and come at
the expense of the sweat and tears of those who perform the labor.
It’s a brilliant exercise, eliciting from the students the most basic
elements of their work lives and generating a lively discussion of
what they might do about it.13
Sixth, radical educators should teach so that some of the stu-
dents will themselves take what they have learned and teach it to
others. The goal is to create organic intellectuals, that is, people
from the working class who become capable of spreading the word
waging class struggle 183

the way Leo Huberman did. Some of the prisoners I once taught
took my lecture diagrams, which I had copied and distributed, to
their cellblocks, where they used them to teach fellow inmates.
Similarly, union members can teach their brothers and sisters, as
some whom I taught did. Not only does this greatly increase the
number of teachers, but it also breaks down the hierarchy between
instructors and pupils.

Agriculture, Peasants, Farmworkers, and the Environment

A radically changed world cannot come to exist if the environ-

ment is wrecked beyond repair and if there is not enough food
to eat. Capitalist agriculture is large-scale, machine- and chem-
ical-intensive, overloaded with pesticides, and destructive of the
quality of air, water, and land. Billions of pounds of pesticides are
used every year worldwide, most of which end up in the air, soil,
and water.14 Our industrial agriculture is based upon extensive use
of fossil fuels, and a great deal of land is used to produce crops
not for human consumption but for animal feed and biofuels.
Agriculture contributes considerably to global warming. “In 2007,
the U.S. food system, from farm to table, used 16 percent of all of
the country’s energy.”15 This energy derives from fossil fuels, the
main contributor to global warming. In terms of energy expended
in production and energy generated by the crops, it is incredibly
inefficient, even compared to food production in gathering and
hunting societies. “It now takes more energy to produce food than
we obtain from eating it: every calorie of food energy requires 10
calories of fossil energy.”16 Most of the vegetables, fruits, meats,
and fish that are agriculture’s end products are heavily processed
before being consumed, which means that they are stripped of
nutrients and adulterated with thousands of additives, from color-
ing to sweeteners.
Modern agriculture gives the world an enormous amount of
food, but its distribution is as unequal as are income and wealth.
The well-off have a high daily caloric intake, whereas the poor are
184 WORK WORK WORK

food-deprived. Estimates of the number of hungry people world-

wide vary, ranging from about 850 million to more than two billion
people.17 At the same time, peasants and small farmers often live
on the edge of calamity or cannot eke out a living. They are being
driven from their farms by land-grabbing capitalists, aided by gov-
ernments and international financial organizations like the World
Bank and International Monetary Fund. Land has become a valu-
able commodity, and speculators, including hedge fund managers,
have been on a buying spree in the Global South. The result is
either industrial farming or idle land, as owners wait for prices to
rise. The sale of the land has frequently been preceded by violence
and death.18 A report from the International Land Coalition states:

Today, it is estimated that there are approximately 608 million

farms in the world, and most are still family farms. However,
the largest 1% of farms operate more than 70% of the world’s
farmland and are integrated into the corporate food system,
while over 80% are smallholdings of less than two hectares that
are generally excluded from global food chains. Although pat-
terns vary significantly from region to region, since 1980 in
all regions land concentration has either been increasing sig-
nificantly (North America, Europe, Asia and the Pacific) or a
decreasing trend has been reversed (Africa and Latin America).
In most low‑income countries, we see an increasing number of
farms in combination with smaller and smaller farm sizes, while
in higher-income countries large farms are getting bigger.19

The 866 million farm workers, many former or current peas-

ants, suffer short life expectancies, pesticide poisoning, and
state-sponsored violence whenever they attempt to organize. Their
working conditions are extraordinarily harsh, and their prospects
for decent lives are nonexistent.
Agriculture is organized now on a factory model, with enor-
mous operational scale, subcontractors, maximum production
control and uniformity, with little concern for either the quality of
waging class struggle 185

the food or the health of workers and the earth. Cattle, hogs, and
chickens are raised in grotesquely inhumane conditions, overfed
with food laced with growth supplements so that they reach matu-
rity as quickly as possible. They are sent to market in an unhealthy
state more often than consumers imagine.20
A radical change of the world requires that agriculture be revo-
lutionized, away from giant “factories in the fields” that poison and
overheat the environment, leave so many hungry, and maximally
exploit and expropriate the working class. Such change is a pri-
mary necessity because if the earth is ruined and humanity cannot
be adequately fed, then there is no hope at all. Fortunately, we do
know how to organize a food system that avoids what is happen-
ing now.
Peasants, small farmers, and farmworkers have the skills and
experience to produce food in an earth-sustaining, productive,
and collective manner. They are already doing this and organiz-
ing against industrial agriculture and for smaller-scale, more local,
and ecologically nourishing food production and distribution.
The working class must support such endeavors and engage in
them wherever possible. Worker-peasant alliances will be needed
in the Global South and even in the Global North. Following are
some examples.
Most wage workers live in or near cities, the consequence of
the “metabolic rift” that Marx and others have analyzed. One
way to heal this rift is to produce food in urban areas, on aban-
doned land, in community gardens, on rooftops, on balconies and
porches, and in vertical farms. Cuba provides the best example
of this approach.21 After the 1990–91 demise of the Soviet Union,
which had provided Cuba with its oil, the country embarked upon
an ambitious farming plan without fossil fuels and mechanization.
Research had been done and some experience gained before this,
but now the nation embraced organic, non-mechanized farming
wholeheartedly. Special attention was given to urban areas, most
notably Havana, where various types of small-scale organic agri-
culture were employed. The result is a network of plots and farms
186 WORK WORK WORK

inside the city, producing fresh vegetables and fruits, supplying

seeds, creating thousands of jobs, generating income, and provid-
ing markets for agricultural inputs made elsewhere in the country.
Some units are privately owned; others are organized as cooper-
atives. Food is consumed directly by the producers, sold in markets
(selling to tourists provides foreign exchange for imports), or sold
at state-mandated low prices to schools, hospitals, and other social
entities. Education, training, and management are both central-
ized and decentralized, the motto being, “Produce while learning,
teach while producing, and learn while teaching.” Cuba has a well-
educated, learn-by-doing population that is used to engaging in
collective efforts. Many persons are knowledgeable about agroeco-
logical science and methods, with experts willing to learn from
those who have long practiced traditional farming. The expectation
is that production will satisfy needs and not the capital accumula-
tion imperative of capitalist economies. Hardships imposed by the
harsh sanctions placed upon the island by the United States have
hardened Cubans against adversity.22 Remarkably, they have man-
aged to build urban agriculture that now can satisfy the fresh fruit
and vegetable needs of a city with two million inhabitants. It is not
miraculous, but it shows that capitalist industrial agriculture is not
a human imperative. There are alternatives.
Urban agriculture is not unique to Cuba. It is found in many
cities, including some in the United States. In Detroit, abandoned
land has been converted to food production, organized collec-
tively by community activists:

The Oakland Avenue Farmers’ Market in Detroit’s North End

is one of those small-but-mighty neighborhood markets that
accomplishes a lot with a little. Each Saturday, it offers fresh
fruit, vegetables, and other healthy foods in a historically low-
income and black neighborhood where such options aren’t
readily available. Just as important is its contribution to the
neighborhood’s economy. Most of the profits generated since it
launched in 2009 fund the adjacent Oakland Avenue Farm. That
waging class struggle 187

operation provides 13 full- and part-time time jobs that pay a

living wage—also rare in the North End—in addition to teach-
ing residents to grow and cook their own food. So supporting
the Oakland Market is a small contribution to the neighbor-
hood’s economy.23

As in Cuba, women have been at the forefront of urban farm-

ing in Detroit, as have people of color. There are more than one
thousand community gardens in the city, part of a movement
spearheaded by the late radical philosopher and activist Grace Lee
Boggs, who

sees urban gardening as the beginning of a major shift in the

way we feed ourselves as well as a way to connect generations in
a widely inclusive movement. . . .
“There’s a group on the east side called Feed ’Em Freedom
Growers; if you don’t have food you can’t be free. Detroit has
over 1,000 community gardens. Urban agriculture started very
simply with some African-American women seeing some vacant
lots. That’s how big changes take place, with small changes.
Important changes always start from the bottom up. We think
they come from the top, or start with millions of people. No, they
start when some people respond to the historical context and do
what needs to be done. That’s how revolution takes place.”24

Vertical farms are another way to produce food in cities:

No. 212 Rome Street, in Newark, New Jersey, used to be the

address of Grammer, Dempsey & Hudson, a steel-supply com-
pany. It was like a lumberyard for steel, which it bought in bulk
from distant mills and distributed in smaller amounts, mostly to
customers within a hundred-mile radius of Newark. It sold off
its assets in 2008 and later shut down. In 2015, a new indoor-
agriculture company called AeroFarms leased the property. It
had the rusting corrugated-steel exterior torn down and a new
188 WORK WORK WORK

building erected on the old frame. Then it filled nearly seventy

thousand square feet of floor space with what is called a vertical
farm. The building’s ceiling allowed for grow tables to be stacked
twelve layers tall, to a height of thirty-six feet, in rows eighty feet
long. The vertical farm grows kale, bok choi, watercress, arugula,
red-leaf lettuce, mizuna, and other baby salad greens.25

The technology of vertical farming is relatively simple, but the

care of the plants is complicated and requires sophisticated knowl-
edge of biology and electronic communication. However, these
things can be mastered; a small-scale version of a vertical farm
has been installed in a Newark elementary school, where staff and
students keep it up and running.26
The advantages of urban farming are many. It provides food
for local consumption, and it generates some employment. From
it can come backward and forward linkages. Farms need inputs,
some of which might be supplied locally. They can also be con-
nected to farmers’ markets, grocery stores, schools, hospitals, and
prisons. Worker cooperatives could run the markets, schools, and
stores. Through such activity, the working class learns forms of
collective self-help, gaining confidence in its capacity to organize
production. What is more, the “We” is central and is reinforced
continually. Moreover, urban agriculture gets workers closer to
nature, and with a better grasp of nature’s metabolism they are
more likely to heed the warnings of ecological doom.
In both the Global North and the Global South, numerous small
farmers and peasants have embraced agroecological farming,
using practices thousands of years old and modern science-based
techniques. There are many and varied ways to farm agroeco-
logically, but the goal is to create a balance between humans and
nature, constantly replenishing the earth with the nutrients neces-
sary for the continuous production of food. Some of the ways to
do this include abandoning chemical fertilizers by using legumes
to fix nitrogen in the soil; using natural pest controls; limiting till-
ing of the soil; planting a variety of mutually supporting fruits and
waging class struggle 189

vegetables and avoiding monocropping; mixing crops with animal

husbandry, with manure from the animals used for the plants; using
drip irrigation in dry climates and water-capturing techniques;
creating mosaic landscapes in which farm and non-farm habitats
such as forests, streams, and wetlands are interspersed to increase
biodiversity; controlling water runoff and erosion through, among
other things, planting of cover crops; and many others. Such farm-
ing shows considerable productivity gains.27 When combined with
cooperation and collective production, social consciousness can
change sharply.28
Like every radical change, altering the way food is produced
and distributed meets with resistance from capital. Class struggle
around agriculture is widespread. In the Amazon River Basin,
peasants have been fighting against the construction of massive
dams, which destroy traditional common areas and farm fields,
with accompanying environmental damage both downstream and
upstream from the dams.29 Maoist political parties and their mili-
tary wings have organized Indian forest dwellers to contest land
grabs. At various times over the past fifty years, guerrillas have
secured control over indigenous territories and helped to build
cooperative agriculture, following the process begun by Mao’s Red
Army in China.30
In Brazil, a Landless Workers Movement (MST are its
Portuguese initials) has been in operation since the early 1980s.
Now, with more than one million members, MST has orchestrated
the seizure of unoccupied and unproductive lands throughout
the country. Peasants are settled—several hundred thousand to
date—on these parcels, food is grown, and a network of schools,
cooperatives, and credit unions is established. “The movement
has ratified over 2,000 settlements, settling over 370,000 families
with an estimated 80,000 more awaiting settlement, established a
network of approximately 2,000 primary and secondary schools,
partnered with 13 public universities, 160 rural cooperatives, 4
credit unions, and started food processing plants, and retail out-
lets.”31 The MST’s slogan is “Occupy, Resist, Produce,” a wonderful
190 WORK WORK WORK

summary of the need to combine protest with collective self-help

that satisfies people’s material needs.32
In the farmworker town of Immokalee, Florida, the Coalition
of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a community-based labor group,
has forced some of the nation’s largest tomato-buying fast-food
chains to pay a premium for tomatoes picked by its members. This
money then goes to the workers. Aided by a national network of
“churches, students, and consumer activists,” the CIW organized
boycotts of the restaurants, which helped win concessions from
the chains, who then sign on to the CIW’s Fair Food Program. The
program offers worker-to-worker education sessions, a worker-
triggered complaint resolution mechanism, and health and safety
committees on every participating farm. The group also investi-
gates, publicizes, and aids the prosecution of slavery rings that
supply workers to unscrupulous growers.33
Workers and peasants everywhere have an obligation to support
these struggles and all like them, with publicity, mutual assistance,
and funds when possible. Whatever improvements peasants,
farmers, and farmworkers make in their lives, the healthier the
earth is. And the more livable rural areas are, the more they will
attract new residents, including the return of peasants from the
degrading urban slums that are now their homes. As this happens,
the metabolic rift that separated people from the land in the first
place can begin to heal.

Labor Unions

Labor unions have been a principal response by workers to capi-

tal’s exploitation. They are necessary defense agents, and as long as
capitalism exists, they will form. In chapters 7 and 8, we saw how
unions could improve wage laborers’ lives—and critiqued their
shortcomings. What might unions do to attack the power of the
class enemy more directly?
If unions mirror corporations in their structures, which all too
many do, there isn’t much hope that they will confront capital.
waging class struggle 191

And this is even more so if they have entered a compact with

employers that views the two sides as cooperators interested pri-
marily in the profitability of the owners’ businesses. This strategy
has failed, the proof being in the deteriorating working conditions
and life circumstances of union members and the sharp drop
in union densities during the period in which partnership has
marked most labor movements worldwide. First and foremost,
labor unions must become democratic, run by the membership,
and they must abandon labor-management cooperation schemes.
Since it is unlikely that current leaders will seek to do either of
these things, the only way forward is to get rid of the leadership.
In the United States, a perusal of the magazine Labor Notes shows
that there have been frequent attempts by rank-and-file activists
to take control of their unions and put them on a democratic and
militant path. A few have been successful, but most have not.
Undoubtedly, the fear of such insurgencies has made some unions
willing to mobilize members and take on the companies with
strikes, picketing, and boycotts. But reform has proved a daunting
task, similar to efforts by political advocates in the United States
to move the Democratic Party to the left. Those in power seldom
want to relinquish control, and they will be as ruthless as neces-
sary to beat back rivals.34
Still, labor rebellions have been successful. In the United States,
corrupt criminal leadership was defeated in both the Teamsters
and the United Mine Workers, for example. Though the rank-
and-file victors were subsequently defeated or weakened, neither
union is as awful as it once was.35 In addition, sometimes revolt
has taken the form of a new union, one that breaks away from the
parent organization. Or, if a group of workers has no representa-
tion, and no existing union is willing to help them organize, they
might establish an independent union. Again in the United States,
an example of the former is the National Union of Healthcare
Workers (NUHW). Tired of the Service Employees International
Union’s (SEIU) top-down management, its embrace of labor-
management cooperation and sweetheart deals with employers,
192 WORK WORK WORK

its frequent impositions of trusteeships (the national union takes

over the running of a local union) on recalcitrant locals with
rebellious and independent leaders, and outright corruption, the
NUHW broke away from SEIU in 2009.
Before asking what a democratic union looks like and should
do, it is proper to say that there are existing unions that work dem-
ocratically. In the United States, the best example is the United
Electrical Workers. This independent labor union has the distinc-
tion of being kicked out of both the AFL and the CIO. Its national
office and locals rest on the will of the members. It does not make
deals with employers, and it has never been tainted with corrup-
tion. Officer salaries and expenses are strictly controlled, and its
constitution is a model of democratic principles that the union
has adhered to through good times and bad.36 Other U.S. unions
have served their members well, too. The same is true in Europe
and many other countries, as in the Australian union led by Jack
Mundey, discussed in chapter 8. The overall trajectory, however,
has been toward bureaucratic, undemocratic structures and
increasingly unwarranted faith in labor-capital compromise.37
Democracy means more than voting. The structure of the union
must be democratic. There should be direct ballot casting by all
the members for any office, as opposed to convention delegates,
usually chosen by the leadership, voting for those same leaders, as
is common in many U.S. unions. Term limits for officers are essen-
tial. No advantage should be proffered to incumbents seeking
reelection. Strict limits should be placed on union officers’ salaries,
and a careful open audit of expenses should be routine. The rank
and file should participate in all union activities, from planning for
negotiations, setting demands, strike preparation, and striking and
picketing. Union meetings should be open to all members, espe-
cially those with responsibilities at home (almost always women),
and thus should be held at convenient times. Meeting discussions
should be open, and criticisms should be welcomed and debated.
Particular attention should be paid, in all aspects of the union,
to the concerns and needs of racial and ethnic minorities and
waging class struggle 193

LGBTQ members. Retirees should be encouraged to take part in

all union actions.
If a rank-and-file uprising is successful, a breakaway union is
founded, or an independent union is created, with democracy as a
goal, it is still necessary to ask: Democracy for what? What are the
principles and goals of the organization? The NUHW lists these as
its core beliefs:

Ÿ A strong union is led by its members.

Ÿ Worker power is the foundation of a just society.
Ÿ Quality patient care requires that caregivers have a voice in their
workplaces and are protected from retaliation.
Ÿ Healthcare is a human right.38

This is a good preliminary set of principles. But more needs to

be said and done. First, education must be a priority. Compulsory
classes should greet new members, teaching them about the union’s
history and labor movement. And regular short courses, summer
schools, and longer learning experiences should be made avail-
able, with at least some courses required to maintain membership.
In these classes, the construction of a broader array of principles
and aspirations can be developed. Several come to mind:

Ÿ An examination of racism and patriarchy. The objectives would

be ending discrimination in the union, building greater solidar-
ity, compelling the employer to behave in a nondiscriminatory
manner, and leading the union to play a positive role in combat-
ing these divisions in the community and society.
Ÿ A study of imperialism and militarism. For unions in the
Global North, the purpose of such study would be to build an
understanding of the role of their governments and employ-
ers in subjugating the peoples of the Global South and the past
complicity of unions in this. A radical labor movement cannot
become a reality unless it is adamantly opposed to imperial
wars, arms production and sales, the infiltration of the military
194 WORK WORK WORK

into local economies and daily life, the patriotism of flags and
national anthems, and the mantra that we must all support
the troops. In the Global North, nationalism is a disease that
impedes the global working-class solidarity essential for human
liberation. Unfortunately, it is so deeply embedded in the insti-
tutional structure of capitalist society that the task of eliminating
it is formidable. Yet, if the effort isn’t made, there is no hope of
the working class changing the world. The angle of vision on
these subjects will be different in the Global South, although the
ruling classes there often act in lockstep with those in the Global
North.
Ÿ A serious discussion of the multiple environmental crises we
face. If these aren’t working-class issues, what are? In both
Egypt and Syria, extreme drought, following years of austerity
economic policies, growing inequality, and public corruption
triggered revolts by workers and peasants during the Arab
Spring in December 2010.39

This last point merits more detail. These events are surely
harbingers of things to come. Furthermore, global warming is
a workplace issue. Ecology professor and writer Andreas Malm
writes:

Physical labour makes the body warm. If it takes place under

the sun or inside facilities without advanced air-conditioning
systems, excessively high temperatures will make the sweat flow
more profusely and the bodily powers sag, until the worker suf-
fers heat exhaustion or worse. This will not be an ordeal for the
average software developer or financial adviser. But for people
who pick vegetables, build skyscrapers, pave roads, drive buses,
sew clothes in poorly ventilated factories or mend cars in slum
workshops, it already is; and the bulk of exceptionally hot work-
ing days are now anthropogenic in nature. With every little rise
in average temperatures on Earth, thermal conditions in millions
of workplaces around the world shift further, primarily in the
waging class struggle 195

tropical and subtropical regions where the majority of the work-

ing population—some four billion people—live their days. For
every degree, a greater chunk of output will be lost, estimated to
reach more than a third of total production after four degrees: in
this heat, workers simply cannot keep up the same pace.40

Given the magnitude of impending disasters, labor must make

the environment a central concern. This means opposing all cor-
porate and public actions that exacerbate global warming, the
poisoning of air, soil, water, and species extinction, among others.
When construction unions lobby for ruinous shale oil pipelines, as
happened in the United States, other unions must speak out and
condemn such self-serving deeds.
As democratic unions strengthen and their principles and goals
become more class-conscious, they will naturally ally with like-
minded unions and sociopolitical bodies. In this way, a labor
movement worthy of the name can begin and grow, one concerned
with the entirety of the working class, including those potential
workers in what Marx called the “reserve army of labor” and in
the informal sector.
A union’s most important immediate concern is with its mem-
bers’ welfare, and here the question of “democracy for what?” can
take concrete form. Labor-management cooperation should be
immediately and permanently rejected, replaced by an adversarial
relationship that makes no concessions to management. Instead,
the union makes demands that challenge capital’s control of the
workplace. Higher wages are always on the table, but shorter
hours, more paid time off, full parental leave for both parents (for
at least a few months), a safe and nontoxic work environment,
active union participation in decisions related to both technology
and work intensity, an unrestricted right to strike over any issue, a
shortened grievance resolution procedure (with rank-and-file par-
ticipation at all levels), the right not to cross picket lines while on
employer-related business, and high monetary penalties for plant
closures and relocations.
196 WORK WORK WORK

Whatever makes laboring less alienated and weakens capital’s

control should be vigorously and relentlessly pursued. Unions
should never allow the employer to play one plant off against
another, much less cooperate in this, as the United Auto Workers
has done.41 Strong protections for women and racial and ethnic
minorities should be part of every contract. When a union faces a
multi-plant employer or more than one employer, it should orga-
nize coordinated communications and tactics among the officers
on the shop floor, office, or store. Solidarity must be more than a
word, and an injury to any worker should anger every sister and
brother.
Although democracy, principles, and radical goals are necessary
everywhere, unions in the Global South encounter some particu-
lar choices and difficulties. There, wage laborers need to consider
the needs and actions of peasants. In Brazil, for example, unions
felt they should lead the way on land reform issues. “Many in
large Brazilian labor unions believed the fight for agrarian reform
should take place within union ranks—but unions didn’t accept
landless farmers as members.”42 Even if one were to argue that this
was shortsighted, it still didn’t preclude active union support for
what the farmers and peasants were doing. In India, labor unions
have failed to offer full-throated support for the Maoist rebel-
lions in the countryside.43 A worker-peasant alliance is essential
for the working class to change the world, and until wage laborers
embrace it, such change will not happen.
In many countries, attempts to unionize put workers at risk
of arrest, imprisonment, or death. In Colombia, murders of
labor activists have been routine. “Anti-union violence has been
endemic to Colombia for decades, with roughly 3,000 organizers
killed by assassins and paramilitaries over the last quarter-century
[roughly 1989 to 2014]. . . . In fact, more than half of all mur-
ders for union-organizing activity worldwide take place here. But
as murder numbers have dropped in recent years, the nature of
the violence is changing, and there’s evidence to suggest that the
Colombian state is complicit in the repression.”44 In China, the
waging class struggle 197

state allows only official unions, which are not independent agents
of the working class. Attempts to confront global corporations
like Walmart with their own unions put employees in the govern-
ment’s crosshairs. Arrests and jail sentences are common. In such
onerous conditions, labor must often operate in secrecy, under-
ground, and try to take actions in such large numbers that the state
finds it hard to suppress. Strict media censorship further hampers
the working class. Despite these barriers, workers still rebel, often
with mass demonstrations and militancy. Sometimes, they win
demands made on the companies and even secure concessions
from the government.
It is essential to understand that workers and peasants have con-
tinued to organize and act despite weaknesses, a lack of democracy,
the long-term strategy of cooperation with employers, nation-
alism, racism, and patriarchy. Today, in France, Greece, Spain,
Portugal, Italy, China, India, Algeria, Indonesia, South Africa,
nearly everywhere in the world, there have been strikes and dem-
onstrations; land, building, and factory occupations; sabotage, and
open warfare. These show signs of intensifying as capitalism suf-
fers recurring crises and shows itself as unable to satisfy the most
basic needs of billions of human beings. There is undoubtedly a
base for the construction of a new world.
There are also union-like groups that take up the cause of the
working class. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and
the Chinese Staff and Workers Association, discussed above, are
examples. Both are “worker centers,” of which there are many in
the United States. Workers’ centers are community-based orga-
nizations, some independent and some affiliated with the official
labor movement. Many take up immigrant issues, while others
function as de facto unions. Labor activist Elly Leary, in an essay
about the CIW, argues:

Non-union working-class organizations dealing with worker

issues have a central place in the labor movement. Generally
smaller in size than many union locals, workers’ centers have
198 WORK WORK WORK

the flexibility to experiment with different methods of engaging

workers and training leaders. Furthermore, given the right’s suc-
cess in creating an anti-union climate (by popularizing the view
that unions are obsolete), centers can appeal to broad sections
of the working class that unions may have a difficult time reach-
ing. Anti-union laws and recent decisions by courts and the
National Labor Relations Board have narrowed how unions can
fight and what they can win. If we add to this the frustrating dis-
cussion currently going on in the trade union movement about
its future, workers’ centers seem to hold great promise. But we
shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. If our move-
ment were to rely exclusively on workers’ centers to organize the
working class for fundamental social change, we would find that
there aren’t enough centuries to build at this pace. Nonetheless,
workers’ centers are an essential basis for struggle.45

Cooperation between unions and worker centers could be a strat-

egy to rebuild labor movements. Suppose that in every large and
medium-size town a worker center was opened for restaurant labor.
Any cook, dishwasher, or server could join from any place that pre-
pared food. The center would be a space where workers could meet
one another and discuss common problems at work and home. The
center could provide education, useful materials, and advice for
dealing with employers. It could spearhead organizing drives at par-
ticular establishments, or, if there were enough members, sponsor
employer-wide unionization. Language study could be provided for
those, and there might be many, who are not literate in the country’s
language. Similar centers could be built for other occupations and
establishments. Mutual support could be a prerequisite for joining
a center. Regional and national coordinating bodies might naturally
follow from the successes of local centers.

Labor and Politics

What has been said about unions can be applied equally to

waging class struggle 199

labor’s political path, so just a few points can be made here.

First, substantive equality must prevail in political entities, just
as it must in labor unions. Social democratic parties will have
to be replaced by democratic working-class parties. Here, too,
democracy is more than voting. Those in the party must run it.
It must have radical principles and have radical goals. It must be
built from the ground up, with those at the top responsible to
those at the bottom. Perhaps the course followed in Venezuela
(discussed below) is a good model. Local assemblies seize the
political initiative, and then the assemblies begin to consolidate
in larger geographical areas, culminating in a national party.
These could then ally themselves with similar parties in other
countries. At each level, the forming groups would commit to a
set of principles.
Second, working-class political parties can contend for state
power, but in most cases this isn’t likely to result in electoral vic-
tory. Education could then be the modus operandi of the party.
In any case, radical pressure on the existing state should always
be exerted. If special circumstances allow electoral victory, radi-
cal goals should be enunciated, and movement toward achieving
them should begin immediately. The collective power of the
working class should be the weapon employed to do this—mass
demonstrations and strikes, for example. The military must be
challenged, and most of its officers must be demobilized. There
could be cases in which a party has a military wing, in parts of
the Global South, for example. Then revolutionary warfare can
be considered, as in Nepal in the early part of this century or in
the Indian countryside, where it has been happening over the past
several decades.
Another model for working-class politics is the Richmond
Progressive Alliance (RPA), a labor-community coalition in the
U.S. city of Richmond, California. The RPA functions year-round
as a political entity, with a dues-paying, diverse base and a multi-
issue agenda, but it actively runs candidates for local office. Since
2004, its nominees have won many offices, including mayor. It
200 WORK WORK WORK

operates on a democratic basis, and it has regularly debated and

found ways to maintain and increase both the diversity of its
membership and the breadth and depth of its program. It works
with community groups and local labor unions to address issues
of great concern to the working class. The RPA and the local gov-
ernment, over which its victorious candidates have considerable
influence, have fought for rent control, pollution abatement at
the large Chevron oil refinery, against police brutality, and for a
community-based model of policing, against the harassment of
immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),
and many other issues. The RPA also has taken stances on national
and international matters, such as demanding an end to the block-
ade of Cuba by the U.S. government.
The RPA does not take corporate money, nor do its office seekers.
It is also independent of the Democratic Party. One of its leaders,
longtime union activist Mike Parker, suggests that the Richmond
model could be applied to many towns and cities. He notes that
although local politics cannot solve many critical problems, what
people learn fighting for the betterment of the places they live in
usually translates into concern for such matters and a greater will-
ingness to speak out and organize around them. Consciousness, in
other words, stems from action, and study and education inform
what people are willing to do.46 Were RPA organizations to form in
many places, they could coalesce into regional and national politi-
cal bodies.
Third, there is no reason for a working-class political project to
exist unless its aim is to defeat capital. Demands should be radical
and principled, and they should be adhered to. Tactical com-
promise might sometimes be necessary, but this can never be a
strategy. We know that coping with a rapidly warming planet and
many other environmental catastrophes will be central to all poli-
tics. A labor party, therefore, must address ecological questions
directly and forcefully. Ecologist Andreas Malm offers ten policies
that could be implemented to begin the mitigation of ongoing eco-
logical destruction:
waging class struggle 201

1. Enforce a complete moratorium on all new facilities for

extracting coal, oil, or natural gas.
2. Close down all power plants running on such fuels.
3. Draw 100 percent of electricity from non-fossil sources, pri-
marily wind and solar.
4. Terminate the expansion of air, sea, and road travel; convert
road and sea travel to electricity and wind; ration remaining
air travel to ensure a fair distribution until it can be completely
replaced with other means of transport.
5. Expand mass transit systems on all scales, from subways to
intercontinental high-speed trains.
6. Limit the shipping and flying of food and systematically pro-
mote local supplies.
7. End the burning of tropical forests and initiate massive pro-
grams for reforestation.
8. Refurbish old buildings with insulation and require all new
ones to generate their own zero-carbon power.
9. Dismantle the meat industry and move human protein
requirements toward vegetable sources.
10. Pour public investment into the development and diffusion of
the most efficient and sustainable renewable energy technolo-
gies, as well as technologies for carbon dioxide removal.47

No doubt, these policies will seem utopian to many people. But

they are necessary, Malm points out, just to get us started on the
road to a sustainable environment. Surely a radical working-class
party, especially in the Global North, which is responsible for most
of the devastation, should be expected to make such demands cen-
tral to its work.
Fourth, labor parties can support and partly fund the mutual aid
efforts workers and peasants initiate. Some of these are described
below in the subsection “Direct Action.” Worker education
schools, cooperatives, community gardens, and daycare centers,
for example, should be supported by these parties, and attacks on
them should be countered politically.
202 WORK WORK WORK

Racism and Patriarchy

These terrains of class struggle must be attacked in every organi-

zation and in each attempt by workers and peasants to challenge
capital and build alternatives. Whatever fights racism and patriar-
chy challenges the central features of the system: exploitation and
expropriation. How can workers be organized if there are racial and
gender tensions among those seeking representation by a union?
How can a guerrilla war be won unless women are full participants?
How can a workplace be egalitarian if homes are not? What good is
a left-wing party if its leaders assault women with impunity?
It is an unworthy argument that race and gender are mere iden-
tities, whereas class is a social relationship. Writer and political
analyst Richard Seymour puts it well when he says:

To me, it’s straightforward. Class is a social relationship that is

structured by race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and a whole
range of other determinations. Race is the modality in which
millions of people inhabit their class experience. Their “iden-
tity politics” will often be the precise way in which they fight a
class struggle. Black Lives Matter, a struggle against the racial-
ized violence of the capitalist state, is an example of that, and it
is of benefit to the whole working class if it succeeds. Now, what
would be implied if we socialists were to write off such a move-
ment, which has already had such an impact culturally? Surely
it would be that at best we are purists who are incapable of intel-
ligent political intervention in real-life situations, at worst that
we subscribe to some spurious “color-blind” politics.
What is more, “identity” is never as straightforward as a label.
It is a process, “identification.” To identify myself is to identify
myself with others, to say who I am like, who I have interests in
common with. Some identifications are potentially more expan-
sive, more universal, than others. The identity of a black woman
prisoner is more conducive to solidarity and radical change than
that of a white Republican congressman.48
waging class struggle 203

It is also wrong to claim that though race and gender are impor-
tant, class is more so, and everything else must wait upon its
resolution. This strategy is guaranteed never to face racism and
patriarchy directly. It is true, for example, that if a U.S. union wins
a fixed-dollar wage increase for all of the members of one of its
bargaining units, Black workers and women will gain the most in
percentage terms because they have been the lowest paid. But what
does this do to change the culture of a union that has had a history
of racism and patriarchy? It would do nothing to make the union’s
leadership less white and male or make white workers less racist
and men less sexist in their behavior. Black workers had to take the
Steelworkers’ union to court to end the structural racism embed-
ded in its negotiated seniority system.49
Nor will wage gains prevent a union from being less attentive
to the grievances of Black and women workers. The same argu-
ments apply to lesbian, gay, and trangsgender workers. During the
late 1960s, Black automobile workers in Detroit formed the Dodge
Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), which later expanded
into a more encompassing movement, the League of Revolutionary
Black Workers. Black workers conducted wildcat strikes, but they
also targeted their union, United Auto Workers (UAW), which
had a stellar reputation as a supporter of the civil rights movement
and was considered one of the most progressive labor unions in
the nation. However, its commitment to Black members left much
to be desired. Few within the UAW’s leadership were Black, and
the union did little to compel the companies not to discriminate
against Black workers. DRUM and other Revolutionary Union
Movement offshoots picketed UAW headquarters and began
to agitate for a radical redress of Black grievances in the larger
community.50
There have been left-wing movements worldwide for at least
150 years, yet racial and gender hierarchies are still with us. Just
how powerful they are can be seen in those countries that have had
socialist revolutions. In the USSR, there was a sense of gender and
sexual liberation afoot after the 1917 revolution.51 Led in part by
204 WORK WORK WORK

the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollantai, a radical reconceptualization

of sexuality and gender started to emerge in the new society. Laws
were enacted that decriminalized homosexuality, gave full social
rights to those living together without marriage, freed women
from legal servitude to their husbands, socialized childcare, made
divorce routine, legalized abortion, and pioneered a new set of
social welfare services provided by the state. Kollantai argued, cor-
rectly, “for the necessity of carrying out ideological struggle over
the structure of gender and sexual relations simultaneously with
the social and economic struggles.” For her, these were class issues,
which would seem obvious since it had been women workers and
peasants, who by force or their numbers and economically infe-
rior social position, were most adversely affected by the regressive
gender relations of Russian societies before 1917.
Nothing like the Russian Revolution had ever happened in any
country in the world. Yet, by the late 1920s and early 1930s, Joseph
Stalin had taken control of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet
state. What Kollantai had fought for was reversed and abandoned.
Women continued to make gains on the economic front; the coun-
try needed their labor. Within a few decades, women dominated
such formerly male job preserves as medicine and engineering.
But these advances have been reversed with the demise of the
Soviet Union and the resurrection of the reactionary Orthodox
Church.
Few countries have made more remarkable strides in combat-
ing structural racism than Cuba. Since the revolutionary forces
gained control of the country in 1959, laws have been enacted
ending all forms of racial discrimination. Efforts have been made
to incorporate Black Cubans fully and equally into all elements
of society, including the Communist Party and the govern-
ment. Cuba’s leading scholar of race, political economist Esteban
Morales Domínguez, states: “Cuba is the only country in the world
in which Blacks and mestizos have the state and the government
as their ally. If there had not been a revolution, Blacks would have
had to make one in order to reach the level that more than a few
waging class struggle 205

of us have achieved.”52 He adds: “... we can argue that the black

and mulatto population on the island is the most educated and
healthy group of African descendants in this hemisphere and that
no other country has done so much to eliminate racial injustice
and discrimination as has Cuba.”53 Cuban military forces in south-
ern Africa were critical to defeating apartheid in South Africa and
colonialism in Angola.
Yet, the ellipsis I placed at the beginning of the last quote hides
the words that begin it: “In spite of the racism that still exists in
Cuban society . . .” After the Special Period that commenced with
the end of the Soviet Union, which brought with it a focus on for-
eign tourism as a means to obtain foreign exchange, Black Cubans
have faced discrimination and inequality. Those suffering most
were Afro-Cubans. Cuba is still working hard to address problems
of race. But if racial disparities exist there, nearly sixty years after
the Revolution, and in a society willing to deal with them directly,
then we can see how important it is to confront racism in all work-
ing-class struggles.
Ending racial and gender hierarchies is difficult, to say the least.
Think of India’s complex caste system, which combines enormous
economic and social injustices that seem remarkably immune to
solution.54 There are concrete things that might be done regarding
patriarchy and race. First, women and racial and ethnic groups
have built hundreds of organizations and movements to liberate
themselves. All workers and peasants should support these, but
those who are white men must honor their independence and
the leadership of those within them. Showing solidarity with
oppressed groups is, as David Roediger argues, a more difficult
task than we might imagine.55 Capital creates differences within
labor, and these get embedded in the system as a whole. So, forging
alliances among groups with different identities is extremely dif-
ficult. Humility and a willingness to thrash out differences might
go a long way toward building a unified working-class movement.
Second, in all labor unions and political parties, caucuses
of women, racial and ethnic minorities, and those who are gay,
206 WORK WORK WORK

lesbian, and transgender ahould be encouraged and recognized

where they already exist. All working-class organizations should
have open spaces for free discussion and debate. The main goal
is to address issues directly and forcefully. Don’t sweep anything
under the rug.
Third, as I said earlier in this chapter, make all the hierarchies
within the working class central to the work of organizing, the
functioning of every working-class entity, and the building of
alternative ways of constructing the production, distribution,
and reproduction of society. Mao Zedong said that developing
collective relations of production was as important as increasing
production, perhaps more so because only a culture of equality
could unleash humanity’s creative potential. Fourth, don’t allow
race and gender hierarchy struggles to be co-opted by mainstream
politics. For example, the “Me Too” upsurge has focused mainly on
famous men who have assaulted and demeaned women. However,
most of the women who daily face male depredations are in the
working class. That is where radical efforts should be concen-
trated, in the workplaces, homes, and communities where most
women are exploited and their labor expropriated. In the United
States, for example, it is unlikely that top labor leaders will press
the issue of patriarchy with fervor. Women and male allies should
press unions as hard as possible on this. All those who want to
change the world should support every anti-racist and anti-patri-
archy upheaval.
With its land thefts and attendant wars, imperialism has caused
tens of millions to abandon their homelands and flee to other
countries, often in the Global North. These immigrants have
suffered every imaginable indignity: forced into squalid camps,
robbed by unscrupulous people who “help” them get across the
border; arrested by border police and kept in detention centers
awaiting deportation; compelled to take the worst jobs while living
in constant fear of arrest; always treated as second-class persons,
even in countries that profess compassion for them.56 A combi-
nation of racism and virulent nationalism has arisen worldwide,
waging class struggle 207

fueled by neo-fascist political parties, causing still more brutal

treatment of immigrants. In the United States, the administration
of former president Donald Trump declared war on immigrants,
even refusing asylum requests for women and children in danger
of extreme violence in their home countries. It separated parents
from children, placing the latter in thinly disguised concentra-
tion camps run by private enterprises.57 Not much seems to have
changed under the current U.S. president, Joe Biden.
Though many protests and other actions supporting immigrant
rights have taken place, labor unions and labor political parties
should do much more.58 They should help fund immigrant rights
groups and form their own. They should organize mass demon-
strations at camp and detention center sites. They should picket
the houses of politicians who have criminalized immigration.
Principles of open borders and “No one is illegal” should appear
on their banners. They should engage in the immigration educa-
tion of their members. In the United States, immigrants have been
one bright spot in the labor movement, joining unions and engag-
ing in class struggle, whether they are documented or not.59 They
are far less likely to be criminals or terrorists than the native-born.
This is a critically important matter. If the “We” means anything,
it means embracing immigrants as our brothers and sisters. As
a woman from whom we rented an apartment in Tucson said to
us about Mexicans coming north, “But they’re our neighbors.”
Indeed, they are.

Direct Action

It takes boldness and courage to attack capital. But attack we must.

This system is a human disaster, and it proves itself every day to
be incapable of satisfying our most basic needs. It has assaulted
all aspects of life, including the metabolism of the earth. If it does
not cease to exist, wealth will continue to flow to the top, and soon
the richest handful of persons will own most of what everyone
else depends upon for life. Work will continue to be an exercise in
208 WORK WORK WORK

misery. The exhortation to become ever more productive—or else!

—will get louder, ringing in our ears until our minds and bodies
are shipwrecked. Food supplies will become more contaminated
and unfit to eat. Land thefts will accelerate. Rising temperatures
will kill us or make us want to kill each other. Authoritarian, neo-
fascist governments will become commonplace. Barbarism won’t
be the half of it.
If unions, peasant associations, and political entities are to work
together to change the world, to bring an unalienating society into
existence, then the motto of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement
must become the rallying cry for everyone: “Occupy, Resist,
Produce.” Unions must resurrect the strike, which can still cripple
production and disrupt the extraction of surplus value from the
labor power of the working class. This is especially true in those
sectors of the global economy tied together by complex but physi-
cally separated supply chains and sophisticated logistics. Railway
workers, dockworkers who load and unload the giant container
ships, sailors and others who work on ships, warehouse employees
in the large logistics complexes near the world’s large cities, com-
munication workers, IT specialists, call center operators—these
are workers whose efforts keep the flow of goods and services
going. Rolling strikes by teachers, food workers, and sanitation
employees can make capital tremble on as large a geographical
scale as possible.
Immigrants around the globe, those who tend the crops, clean
houses and hotel rooms, tend the lines in restaurant kitchens, build
the houses, do the yard work, take care of people’s plumbing, elec-
trical, and mechanical needs, manicure hands and feet, and care
for other people’s children can strike, showing both their power
and their indispensability and demanding that they be respected.
One reason why unions must be democratic, with radical aims, is
that, when they are, they are more likely to strike, picket (not just
workplaces but the homes of their bosses, suppliers, and buyers),
and boycott. And when they do, these will be effective because the
members have taken control of their actions. The history of strikes
waging class struggle 209

tells us this is so. Workers shouldn’t have to relearn it, but they and
society will be rewarded when they do.60
Rather than waste time voting for traditional political parties,
believing that they can be pressured to the left, workers must
confront the state directly. Neoliberalism has ravaged Argentina’s
working class, exacerbated by an economic collapse that began in
2001 and left much of the workforce unemployed or forced to labor
in the informal economy. Traditional labor unions and political
institutions embedded in a corporatist, capital-labor compromise
were no longer relevant to those left behind. To organize them-
selves, unemployed workers and their allies began blocking local,
regional, and national roads. They came to be known as piqueteros,
the Spanish word for “picketers.” They found that they could stall
commerce and, in this way, stop the flow of profits just like wage
workers do when they strike. Many groups were formed, some com-
munity-based, democratic, with informal education of members
and attempts to produce goods and services. Although the partici-
pants eventually succumbed to internal disagreements among the
left-wing parties that infiltrated them, government repression and
concession, and exhaustion, they provide another example of the
kind of organization that foreshadows a better future.61
Members of the Movement for Black Lives have taken to the
streets of U.S. towns and cities for several years now, protesting
continuing police violence against Black men, women, and chil-
dren. In September 2017, protesters blocked streets in St. Louis
to demand justice in yet another acquittal of a police murderer.
Such actions, combined with a growing and sophisticated move-
ment aimed at Black liberation, not only empower participants but
make visible in a direct way the realities of Black lives in the United
States. They bear witness, and they force the state to respond, either
with further violence or concession. Combined with lawsuits and
attempts to organize production in some places, these actions
eschew ordinary politics and attack capital and state directly. In
Greensboro, North Carolina, activists in the Black community,
following in the footsteps of Occupy Wall Street, made a valiant
210 WORK WORK WORK

effort to gain ownership of an abandoned shopping mall, intend-

ing to start a group of worker-community cooperatives, including
a grocery store. Many such efforts fail, like that of the Argentine
piqueteros. Still, they serve a radical educational function and pro-
vide a base for building future forms of collective self-help and
confrontation.62
These actions reflect the heritage of the Black Panther Party,
which took seriously a duty to occupy, resist, and produce. The
party initiated a remarkable number of collective self-help mea-
sures, providing services that poor communities could not get in
the capitalist marketplace. “These programs eventually included
the Free Breakfast for Children Program, liberation schools,
free health clinics, the Free Food Distribution Program, the Free
Clothing Program, child development centers, the Free Shoe
Program, the Free Busing to Prison Program, the Sickle Cell
Anemia Research Foundation, free housing cooperatives, the
Free Pest Control Program, the Free Plumbing and Maintenance
Program, renter’s assistance, legal aid, the Seniors Escorts Program,
and the Free Ambulance Program.”63
Occupation is a direct action that can take various forms, but it
typically involves efforts to retake the commons or convert private
property into common property. Occupy Wall Street is a famous
example. Beginning in Zuccotti Park in the Wall Street district of
New York, in September 2011, it spread throughout the United
States and the world.

Public spaces were occupied; clashes with police ensued immedi-

ately; diverse discussions and debates took place; the movement
spread rapidly across the nation and then the world; and millions
of people were energized and made to feel part of something
of great importance. Open-air classrooms scrutinized critical
issues. People learned that they could make decisions and effec-
tively organize daily life. Those camped out in Zuccotti secured
food and shelter, took care of sanitation, and solved complex
problems of logistics every day.64
waging class struggle 211

Homeless people can occupy abandoned buildings or set up tent

encampments in public spaces. Community groups can take over
abandoned land for gardens. Workers can occupy closed factories.
The act of occupation can lead to an arrangement with govern-
ment authorities to sell the property at a nominal price or one in
which the state turns a blind eye to the occupation. Again, we can
have collective self-help at work.
In the case of Cuban agriculture, we have seen that the state
can encourage and support working-class cooperation. To a
lesser degree, this has been true in Venezuela as well. Even before
Hugo Chavez became president, local associations in both rural
and urban areas had begun to hold meetings of the people in a
neighborhood or small geographical area to discuss common
problems and their solutions. Chavez saw that such groups could
be the foundation of participatory socialism. Control over society
could eventually devolve to the working class, replacing the liberal
democratic state that had proven incapable of meeting basic social
needs. Thus were born the communal councils, of which there are
now 47,000 in the country:

A communal council is the assembly of a self-chosen territory.

In urban areas it comprises 150–200 families or living units, in
rural areas 20–30 and in indigenous areas, that are even less
densely populated, 10–20, and they decide themselves what is
the territory of the community. The communal council is the
assembly of all people of the community that decides on all
matters.
The communal councils form workgroups for different issues,
depending on their needs: infrastructure, water, sports, culture,
etc., and these workgroups elaborate proposals that are then voted
by the community assembly to establish what is more important.
Then they get the projects financed through public institutions.
The financing structure that was created was no longer attached
to the representative institutions at a local level, which would
have brought them into this direct, unequal competition. . . .
212 WORK WORK WORK

Instead it was situated at a national or at least regional levels. And

this created a possibility to have a more community-centered,
more independent [council structure] . . .65

Funded projects have generated community-controlled enter-

prises, which can supply goods and services locally, be exchanged
with similar entities in nearby territories, or sold in the mar-
ketplace. There are also some six thousand communes, which
combine several councils and coordinate activities at a larger
spatial level. There are difficulties of unequal power between
councils and communes and between both of these and the state.
They have been worsened by the economic crisis and attempts by
U.S. imperialism to overthrow the Venezuelan government. The
ideological climate in both councils and communes, however,
has been one in which the “We” has taken hold, weakening the
grip of the “I” on people’s consciousness. This shift in thinking
will make it difficult to overturn the positive steps that have been
undertaken.
With both council and commune, as well as several attempts at
worker control of factories, the working class, which, as always,
includes peasants, we see an expansion of the commons, an asser-
tion by those whose lives have been severely circumscribed by
capital to take back what should have been theirs to begin with.66
Another example of the logic of “Occupy, Resist, Produce” has
been taking place in the U.S. city of Jackson, Mississippi, and the
surrounding area.67 Control of land has been a recurring theme
among Black dissidents. The Nation of Islam has farms in vari-
ous parts of the United States that produce organic food. Some in
the U.S. Communist Party argued that the “Black Belt” running
across the southern United States constituted a nation that should
be independent of the nation that had enslaved Black people. The
Black Panther Party and Malcolm X stressed the need to control
this most important means of production. To produce necessary
goods, land is needed. Without it, how can any group be economi-
cally independent?
waging class struggle 213

The movement in Jackson is called Cooperation Jackson (CJ),

and it grew out of various efforts by Blacks to build a socialist
community in the heart of U.S. capitalism. The rallying cry of the
people who began Cooperation Jackson—one of the most notable
of these was Black radical Chokwe Lumumba, who eventually
became Jackson’s mayor, something remarkable in its own right—
was “Free the Land.” After doing some preliminary organizing in
the area, they acquired land and began to develop an ambitious
plan of eco-socialist production, distribution, and education. In
the South, global warming is going to inundate low-lying areas with
water. This fact and the disaster in New Orleans after Hurricane
Katrina made these leaders grasp that any scheme that doesn’t take
ecology seriously cannot hope to change the world. Therefore, CJ
maintained from the beginning that whatever they did had to be
based upon the principle of sustaining the environment.
The CJ project has four goals: gaining Black working-class con-
trol of the means of production in Jackson and the area close to
it; building and advancing the development of the ecologically
regenerative forces of production; making the working class the
agent of combining the means of production into socially useful
outputs, and democratically transforming Jackson, and then the
state of Mississippi, and outward to the entire South. CJ has started
cooperatives: a cooperative school, a training center, a union, and a
bank. Farms and grocery stores are an integral part of cooperative
production. There is much more to CJ, including using technolo-
gies like 3D printers to make useful goods, the development of
substantive political democracy following the model of Venezuela,
and eco-friendly public infrastructure. The industrialization plan
is particularly ambitious. It can be criticized as not feasible, but
things will have to be made using one technology or another in
any conceivable future. By beginning to conceptualize this and
then implementing it, CJ will help show the way forward.
In all the examples in this section, education has been of para-
mount importance. Experts and novices learn from one another
in non-hierarchical, collective settings. Radical education will be
214 WORK WORK WORK

critical for the struggle to terminate the rule of capital and built a
different world. There has been much discussion recently about
higher education in the United States, as racial and ethnic minori-
ties, and especially women, have sought to pressure colleges and
universities to become more inclusive. We should applaud these
efforts, but as historian Robin D. G. Kelley points out, the uni-
versity cannot be reformed by the simple addition of more Black,
brown, and women teachers and students, more diversity train-
ing, and safe spaces. Institutions of higher learning are integral to
the reproduction of capitalism and its multiple oppressions. It is
possible to learn in them, but this learning should be used to sub-
vert the colleges themselves, to supersede them. Take from these
institutions what they offer and then build alternative forms of
education in spaces controlled by the working class.68
Concerning labor education, working-class political parties and
organizations began labor colleges in the first forty years of the
twentieth century:

In the United States, the Communist Party (CPUSA) began the

New York Workers School in 1923 (later renamed the Jefferson
School) and remained active in worker education until the Cold
War assault on the left. The CPUSA also had schools through-
out the country, including the California Labor School in the
Bay Area. These saw as their purpose the development of a radi-
cal class consciousness among workers, and they tried to link
theoretical knowledge of capitalism with practical efforts to
construct a radical working-class culture. They conducted hun-
dreds of classes for thousands of students, especially during and
after the Second World War. The curriculum centered around
Marxism, which was called the “science of society,” but around
this center there were courses on every imaginable subject: lit-
erature, art, drama, psychology, even dressing for success (this
last had a class focus, aimed at both women who would be par-
ticipating in their unions as leaders and immigrants and their
children, who needed to know the norms of their new country).
waging class struggle 215

Many of the instructors were top-notch scholars and artists.

Dashiell Hammett taught a course on the mystery novel, for
instance. All of the Party’s schools were connected in one way or
another to the labor movement, mainly to the left-led unions of
the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), some of whose
leaders were either Party members or “fellow travelers.”
There were other schools for worker education, for exam-
ple the Brookwood Labor College, Work People’s College,
and the Highlander Folk School. All aimed to prepare work-
ers for struggle, in their trade unions and in the larger society.
Willing to ally themselves with supportive unions and non-
sectarian in their admissions practices, they were committed
to a radically liberal education. Interestingly, Local 189 of the
Communication Workers of America, a contemporary union
of labor educators (today, after a merger with the University
and College Labor Education Association, it is the United
Association for Labor Education or UALE), began as Local 189
of the American Federation of Teachers, which represented the
faculty at Brookwood Labor College. Work People’s College
was begun by Finnish immigrants in Minnesota and later came
under the sway of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),
which reopened the school in 2006. The Highlander Folk School
is the most famous of these colleges, and it is still going strong as
the Highlander Research and Education Center. One of its most
famous students was Rosa Parks.69

Robin D. G. Kelley gives several examples of Black Americans

educating themselves, not only about their oppression but about
their rejection of and battles to end it and forge a better world. The
Mississippi Freedom Schools of the early 1960s, whose students and
teachers “didn’t want equal opportunity in a burning house; they
wanted to build a new house.” The Black women of Mount Vernon,
New York, who began an education program a few years later, “saw
education as a vehicle for collective transformation and an incu-
bator of knowledge, not a path to upward mobility and material
216 WORK WORK WORK

wealth.” There have been independent Black schools and institutes,

and numerous study groups started without much money but with
a desire to, as Kelley puts it, “love, study, struggle.”70

Final Words

The implication of everything said in this book is that the working

class must change the world. There is no choice. The long rule of
capital has created profoundly alienated conditions for nearly all
of humanity. Despite creating unimaginable quantities of goods
and services, capitalism has never managed to ensure that these
are distributed with even a tolerable degree of equality. Today, the
combined wealth of eight billionaires is as great as the total wealth
of half the people in the world.71 After several hundred years, there
are still several billion people existing on the brink of economic
ruin. Work is still hell for all but a few. Today it is a rare person
who has not lived through war, and the greatest imperial power,
the United States, is waging war in scores of countries and has sub-
jected several to absolute ruin. Capital has even managed to upend
Earth’s metabolism, generating manifold disasters that might soon
make our planet largely uninhabitable. If we are to recover our
humanness somehow and reverse course, the working class will
have to change the world. Capital will never do it, nor will the
relatively well-off middle class of small-scale businesspersons and
professionals. Only the working class, with its vast numbers and
potential power, can get the job done.
Here in this last chapter, I have offered some ideas about how the
world can begin anew. My argument can be summed up in a few
words. Only radical thinking and acting have any chance of stav-
ing off higher and higher levels of barbarism. Newer instruments
must be forged: radically democratic labor unions and political
parties, a scaling-up of collective self-help activities, massive levels
of “Occupy, Resist, Produce.” The old ways have failed. Traditional
labor unions and social democratic politics are now irrelevant in
that they will never bring about radical social transformation. So
waging class struggle 217

too are mainstream environmental groups, the non-governmental

organizations that have proliferated like invasive species, and the
plethora of liberal feminist and ethnic and racial advocacy associa-
tions. Their stakes are all too tied to the bourgeois order of things;
mainly, they all want just a slightly larger share of the pie. The pie
and how it came to be are matters that sail over their heads in
terms of understanding.
We cannot afford to settle for incremental changes that, even if
they happen, never amount to what is qualitatively and radically
different, and can soon enough be reversed and usually are. To
believe otherwise is surely utopian. The radical upending of the
social order is now hardheaded realism, the only path forward. No
doubt, it might already be too late. It will take time for a class riven
with so many fundamental cleavages, by race/ethnicity and gender
most importantly, to unify itself and destroy its class enemy. Mother
Earth may take her revenge on us before that. In the meantime,
though, best to do what we can, in whatever ways we are capable:
by any and all tactics, everywhere, all the time, in every part of
the capitalist system. Fight landlords, disrupt classrooms, take on
bosses, write for and with the working class; nothing is unimport-
ant. And as we do this, remember that those who have suffered the
most—workers and peasants in the Global South, minorities in
the Global North, working-class women everywhere—are going
to lead struggles, or they are likely to fail.
Regarding work, the subject of this book, we should strive for
a society in which this word is no longer used except to describe
the past. What we are, as human beings, is a species that can
thoughtfully produce what is needed for survival and enjoyment.
There should be no workers, no wages, no bosses, no capitalists,
no panopticon—only cooperative and beneficial production, with
substantive equality in all aspects of life. Instead of becoming
habituated to misery, exploitation, and expropriation, we will take
for granted that most profound maxim: From each according to
ability, to each according to need. When this necessity is realized,
only then will we be free.
 Postface

I
f we are to create a new world without work as we know it, pro-
duction will have to become more localized, smaller-scale, and
aimed at serving the needs of medium-sized geographical areas.
If, for example, land was radically redistributed and regenerative
farming became the norm, a couple billion peasants and farm-
workers could engage in the production of healthy food without
destroying the earth’s metabolism or the interface between
the metabolism of nature and human beings. In addition, food
production could absorb millions of workers now engaged in
meaningless and alienated labor. The tools and machinery nec-
essary for farming could be produced collectively by teams of
trained craftspersons, and these could be built to reinforce the
new relations of production. The distribution of food would also
require labor power. We have enough examples globally to know
that these things can be done.1
Some on the left argue that all we need to do to build a social-
ist system of production and distribution is socialize existing
capitalist enterprises. A perusal of Jacobin magazine will provide
examples of this argument. However, capitalist businesses have
arisen and grown based on endlessly accumulating capital. Their
POSTFACE 219

every aspect is geared toward this goal. This includes the technol-
ogy. For example, the machinery used in industrial farming will
be completely inapplicable to an ecosocialist agriculture. The same
will be true for the way in which land is used. Similarly, whatever
transportation vehicles a new society decides to produce, the now
dominant system of assembly lines and the lean production con-
trol now mandatory will no longer be of any use.
In the late 1980s, Swedish vehicle manufacturer Volvo experi-
mented with eliminating assembly lines. Together with a strong
labor union, the company began to organize production with col-
laborative teams of workers that would perform a task or a set of
tasks from beginning to end.

Production teams learned every aspect of car, truck, or bus pro-

duction, working with engineers and then making the products
collectively without an assembly line. This is what Volvo and the
automobile workers’ union did at a plant in Uddevalla, Sweden.
Teams of employees performed a variety of tasks in pre-assem-
bly stations, and then the partly assembled cars were moved by
conveying devices to be finally assembled, again by work groups.
Alienation fell, and productivity rose.2

The plant was profitable and showed high worker satisfac-

tion and productivity. Ultimately, however, it was not profitable
enough to withstand severe competitive pressures in a period of
market turbulence. But this is all the more reason to believe that in
a non-capitalist system, such innovations will be successful from
society’s perspective.
If we are serious about the need to radically change how we
labor, then existing labor unions and political parties must put the
nature of work on their agendas. They should begin now to use the
often large sums of money at their disposal to finance ecosocialist
production, including the training of those who will be responsi-
ble for production. Making necessary products, rehabilitating old
buildings, growing food, supplying services—there is no limit to
220 WORK, WORK, WORK

what could be done. Time is short, and there is no reason to delay

what is possible.
 Notes

Preface
1. For an interesting inquiry into the nature of work, see Raymond Geuss,
A Philosopher Looks at Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2021). I thank my friend Sayres Rudy for sending me a copy of this book.
2. Jeremy Seabrook, “The Language of Labouring Reveals Its Tortured
Roots,” The Guardian, January 14, 2013, [Link]
commentisfree/2013/jan/14/language-labouring-reveals-tortured-
roots1.

2. Introduction
1. See Eric Schutz, Inequality, Class, and Economics (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2022).
2. For a fuller account of surplus value, see Michael Heinrich, An
Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2012).
3. See Michael D. Yates, In and Out of the Working Class (Winnipeg:
Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2009).

1. Take This Job and . . .

1. Gad Levanon, Amy Lui Abel, Allen Li, and Calvin Rong, Job Satisfaction
2021: Job satisfaction remains high even in the midst of the pandemic
and economic chaos, the Conference Board, [Link]
org/[Link]?masterProductID=27278.
2. Michael D. Yates, Can the Working Class Change the World? (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 2018), 24.
222 NOTES TO PAGES 23–36

3. Ibid., 151.
4. Ben Hamper, Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line (New York:
Warner Books, 1991).
5. See U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Automotive Industry: Employment,
Earnings, and Hours, [Link] There are
upward of 14 million employees in the automotive sector worldwide. See
International Labour Organization, The future of work in the automotive
industry: The need to invest in people’s capabilities and decent and
sustainable work, [Link]
dialogue/---sector/documents/meetingdocument/wcms_741659.pdf.
6. Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter, Choosing Sides: Unions and the Team
Concept (Boston: South End Press, 1988).

2. Labor Markets: The Neoclassical Dogma

1. Michael D. Yates, Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the
Global Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003), 123.
2. Michael D. Yates, “Markets Are the Problem (Not the Solution),”
[Link], April 16, 2014, [Link]
the-problem-not-the-solution/. Kunkel’s comment can be found at
[Link]
obsession_an_actual_marxist_sounds_off/.
3. Michael D. Yates, “Your Economics Professor Is Almost Certainly
a Charlatan: A Review with Commentary of My Mis-Education in 3
Graphics,” a film by Mary Filippo. See [Link]
[Link]/.
4. The phrase “dismal science” was coined by Scottish historian and
philosopher Thomas Carlyle. There is debate about why economics is
a “dismal science,” but given how economists have rationalized every
kind of human misery, it may be an understatement to declare it
dismal. Certainly, many of its practitioners are a dismal lot.
5. See John Ifcher and Homa Zarghamee, “The rapid evolution of homo
economicus: Brief exposure to neoclassical assumptions increases self-
interested behavior,” Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics
75 (August 2018): 55–65.
6. David Card and Alan B. Krueger, Myth and Measurement: The New
Economics of the Minimum Wage, Twentieth Anniversary Edition
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
7. See Michael D. Yates, The Great Inequality (London: Routledge, 2016).
8. See Economic Policy Institute, “The Productivity-Pay Gap,” updated
May 2021, [Link] The graph is a
telling rejection of the neoclassical prediction.
NOTES TO PAGES 36–47 223

9. See Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist

America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic
Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
10. That is, more schooling may send a signal to an employer that a person
is more productive than another, whether or not this is true. Therefore,
the less productive person might be hired and paid a higher wage than
the person who was, in fact, more productive. In another context, skin
color might signal to an employer that a Black person is less productive
and worthy only of a lower wage, irrespective of whether this is true.
This assumes that productivity is a meaningful concept when applied
to individual workers.
11. See John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna,
“Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism,”
Monthly Review 62/11 (April 2011): 1–39. Also, see Matt Stoller, “America
faces supply-chain disruption and shortages. Here’s why,” The Guardian,
October 1, 2021, [Link]
oct/01/america-supply-chain-shortages?
12. Michael D. Yates, “Occupy Wall Street and the Celebrity Economists,”
October 22, 2011, [Link]
occupy-wall-street-and-the-celebrity-economists/.
13. See, The Editors, “Listen, Keynesians!” Monthly Review 34/8 (January
1983): 1–11.
14. Michael D. Yates, “All the Economics You Need to Know in One Lesson,”
MR Online, October 14, 2006, [Link] 6/10/14/all-
the-economics-you-need-to-know-in-one-lesson/.

3. Work Is Hell
1. Readers interested in the details of the feudal mode of production and
the creation of the working class will find these sources of great interest:
Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, vol. 1: The Growth of Ties of Dependence
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964) and Feudal Society, vol. 2:
Social Classes and Political Organization (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1964); Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Penguin, 2004, originally
published in 1867), sec. 8, “So-Called Primitive Accumulation”; E. P.
Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Open
Road Media, 2016, originally published in 1963); and Peter Linebaugh,
Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance (Oakland, CA: PM
Press, 2014).
2. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 925.
3. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Kindle Edition.
4. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 279–80.
224 NOTES TO PAGES 48–55

5. This first appeared in Counterpunch at httpwwwcounterpunchorgyates

05202009html/. However, the chapter in this book has been updated
and revised.
6. Unless otherwise noted, the data in this chapter are from [Link]
org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/---publ/documents/
publication/wcms_734455.pdf or [Link]
public/---dgreports/---dcomm/---publ/documents/publication/
wcms_795453.pdf.
7. The poverty thresholds are given in terms of the concept of purchasing
power parity (PPP). That is, a fixed basket of goods in India will have
a certain price in rupees. The same can be said for a similar basket
in the United States. The ratio between the two gives an exchange
rate between Indian rupees and U.S. dollars. Suppose this rate is 100
rupees for one U.S. dollar. If a collection of goods and services deemed
necessary to sustain a certain minimal subsistence per day in India has
a cost of 200 rupees, then the dollar equivalent is $2.
8. Martha Allen Chen, The Informal Economy: Definitions, Theories
and Policies (Cambridge, MA: Women in Informal Employment:
Globalizing and Organizing [WIEGO], 2012), [Link]
sites/[Link]/files/publications/files/Chen_WIEGO_WP1.pdf.
9. For a detailed analysis of global poverty, see Seth Donnelly, The Lie of
Global Prosperity: How Neoliberals Distort Data to Mask Poverty and
Exploitation (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019).
10. See the FAO’s The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World
2021, [Link]
11. The data in this paragraph are from the ILO report, Child Labour: Global
Estimates 2020, Trends and the Road Forward. The pdf can be downloaded
at [Link]
-en/[Link].
12. See Jonathan Silvers, “Child Labor in Pakistan,” The Atlantic, February
1996, available at [Link]
02/child-labor-in-pakistan/304660/.
13. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2007).
14. See [Link]
workers - climate-change-factory-fires?fbclid=IwAR0BH29-z1kRPDf4Q
axEWUgosAtPOqzu1IqlLy0zRYZpn2vcFr5LbL1ttM.
15. See [Link]
[Link].
16. See [Link]
02/[Link]. I cannot give credible figures for the
number of child sex workers. A look at the Wikipedia entry gives many
references, but only a couple are less than ten years old.
NOTES TO PAGES 56–63 225

17. Silvers, “Child Labor in Pakistan.”

18. ILO, Child Labour: Global Estimates 2020, Trends and the Road
Forward, 17.
19. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 363–64. This quote is from the famous
chapter titled “The Working Day.” Reading it changed radically how I
taught my classes and made my political outlook more radical. It is still
a shock to read again the working conditions in Great Britain at the
very time when the country was the leading capitalist nation.
20. Forrest Norman, “Screwed If by Sea: Cruise Lines Throw Workers
Overboard When It Comes to Providing Urgent Medical Care,” Miami New
Times, available at [Link]
news/[Link].
21. Austin Carr, “The Cruise Ship Suicides,” Bloomberg Businessweek,
December 30, 2020, [Link]
cruise-ship-suicides/. See also Mina Kaji, “300,000 seafarers still
stuck on ships: ‘We feel like hostages,’” September 11, 2020, https://
[Link]/Politics/300000-seafarers-stuck-ships-feel-hostages/
story?id=72948111.
22. Deborah Sontag, “For Poor, Life ‘Trapped in a Cage,’ ” New York Times,
October 6, 1996, [Link]
[Link].
23. See U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and
Wage Statistics, [Link]
0000 .
24. Charles H. Collins, From Highland Hills to an Emperor’s Tomb
(Cincinnati: R. Clarke & Company, 1886), 46.
25. David Bacon, “Child Labor: The Hidden History of Mexico’s Export
Farms,” [Link]
26. Michael D. Yates, Can the Working Class Change the World? (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2018), 151. See also, Helena Bottemiller Evich,
Ximena Bustillo, and Liz Crampton, “Harvest of shame: Farmworkers
face coronavirus disaster,” [Link], September 8, 2020, https://
[Link]/news/2020/09/08/farmworkers-coronavirus-
disaster-409339.
27. Marc Cooper, “The Heartland’s Raw Deal: How Meatpacking Is Creating
a New Immigrant Underclass,” in Understanding Inequality: The
Intersection of Race/Ethnicity, Class, and Gender, ed. Barbara A. Arrighi,
2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007).
28. On the work and the union organizing, see Roger Horowitz, Negro and
White, “Unite and Fight”: A Social History of Industrial Unionism, in
Meatpacking, 1930–90 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). I
reviewed this book in Monthly Review 50/5 (October 1998).
226 NOTES TO PAGES 66–78

29. Terri Gerstein, “Other People’s Rotten Jobs Are Bad for Them. And for
You,” New York Times, September 6, 2021.
30. Michael D. Yates, Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: An Economist’s
Travelogue (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007).
31. Kevin Daniel Henson, Just a Temp (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1996), 87.
32. Keith Hoeller, “Colleges lay off underpaid adjuncts then challenge their
unemployment claims,” MR Online, July 22, 2020, [Link]
org/2020/07/22/colleges-layoff-underpaid-adjuncts-then-challenge-
their-unemployment-claims/.
33. Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (New
York: Harper Perennial, 1991).
34. Virginia E. Schein, Working from the Margins: Voices of Mothers in
Poverty (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1995), 107.
35. Memorandum in possession of author.
36. Reese Erlich, “Prison Labor: Workin’ for the Man,” Covert Action
Quarterly (Fall 1995), available at [Link]
private/[Link].
37. Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How
They Feel About What They Do (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974).
38. Ibid.

4. The Injuries of Class

1. See, for example, Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (London:
Routledge, 2017, originally published in 1972); Alan Barnard, Hunters
and Gatherers: What Can We Learn from Them (Staines, UK: Balestier
Press, 2020); James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the
Earliest States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); Richard B. Lee,
“Hunter-Gatherers and Human Evolution: New Light on Old Debates,”
Annual Review of Anthropology 47, 513–31 (October 2018), available
at [Link]
light-old-debates-richard-b-lee.
2. This chapter is a revised and updated version of Michael D. Yates, “The
Injuries of Class,” Monthly Review 59/8 (January 2008).
3. John Bellamy Foster and Michael D. Yates, “Thomas Piketty and the
Crisis of Neoclassical Economics,” Monthly Review 66/ 6 (November
2014): 22; New York Times, [Link]
income+inequality.
4. Jonathan Dee, “At Their Service,” New York Times Sunday
Magazine, October 14, 2007, [Link]
magazine/[Link]. Be sure to click on the slideshow, which
is titled “Catering to the Superrich.”
NOTES TO PAGES 80–88 227

5. Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur, “The Pedagogy of

Oppression,” Monthly Review (July–August, 2006).
6. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels said in the Communist Manifesto that
the changes brought about by capitalism’s relentless accumulation of
capital mean that “all that is solid melts into air.” (London: Penguin
Classics, 2002, first published in 1848), chap. 1.
7. Michael D. Yates, “Class: A Personal Story,” Monthly Review 58/3 (July–
August 2006).
8. See “Rising Unemployment Causes Higher Death Rates, Yale Researcher
Shows,” YaleNews, May 23, 2002, [Link]
rising-unemployment-causes-higher-death-rates-new-study-yale-
researcher-shows.
9. Michael Gates Gill, How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege
Learns to Live Like Everyone Else (New York: Gotham Books, 2007).
10. See “Inequality and Health,” [Link]
and-health/; Peter Montague, “Economic Inequality and Health,” June
6, 1996, [Link]
11. Here, hundreds of sources could be given. A good starting point would
be the many works of John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review
magazine. Just google his name and the word “ecology.”
12. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), Book 5, chap. 1.
13. See Office of the Inspector General, USPS, A Closer Look at Postal
Labor Costs, December 2, 2019, [Link]
files/document-library-files/2019/[Link].
14. Matthew Daly and Anthony Izaguirre, “Postal leader defends charges,
denies ‘sabotaging’ election,” Associated Press, August 24, 2020, https://
[Link]/article/virus-outbreak-election-2020-ap-top-news-
politics-us-news-dc647214b5fc91cc29e776d8f4a4accf.
15. Alexis Fernandez Campbell, “USPS has cheated mail carriers for years,”
Center for Public Integrity, August 31, 2021, [Link]
org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/workers-rights/cheated-at-work/
usps-cheated-mail-carriers/.
16. Ibid.
17. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Automotive Industry: Employment,
Earnings, and Hours,” [Link] .
18. Laurie Graham, On the Line at Subaru-Isuzu: The Japanese Model and
the American Worker (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1995).
19. Caroline O’Donovan, “At Tesla’s Factory, Building the Car of the Future
Has Painful and Permanent Consequences for Some Workers,” BuzzFeed
News, February 4, 2018, [Link]
donovan/tesla-fremont-factory-injuries. On a failed attempt to organize
228 NOTES TO PAGES 88–91

a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee (for a second time), see Bobby Allyn,

“Tennessee Workers Reject Union At Volkswagen Plant—Again,” NPR,
June 15, 2019, [Link]
workers-reject-union-at-volkswagen-plant-again.
20. On UAW corruption, see the detailed essays of former automobile
worker Thomas Adams, “A Tale of Corruption by the United Auto
Workers and the Big Three American Automakers,” MR Online, August
19, 2019, [Link]
the-united-auto-workers-and-the-big-three-american-automakers/;
and “Fight for all or lose it all,” MR Online, January 29, 2020, https://
[Link]/2020/01/29/fight-for-all-or-lose-it-all/. For an excellent
account of the rise and fall of the UAW, see Greg Shotwell, Autoworkers
Under the Gun (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012).
21. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Occupational Employment and Wage
Statistics,” [Link]
A detailed search of this table is necessary to get an estimate of the
number of clerks, who are spread over many industries.
22. Lori Harwood, “Customer Behavior Is Driving Pandemic Distress for
Grocery Store Workers, Report Finds,” December 14, 2020, https://
[Link]/story/customer-behavior-driving-pandemic-
distress-grocery-store-workers-report-finds.
23. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Occupational Employment and Wage
Statistics.”
24. Daisy Meager, “New Study Reveals Just How Unhealthy It Is to Be a
Chef,” May 4, 2017, [Link]
study-reveals-just-how-unhealthy-it-is-to-be-a-chef.
25. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Occupational Employment and Wage
Statistics.”
26. For a summary of the physical and emotion toll work takes on secretaries,
see “Secretaries Under Siege,” December 31, 2020, [Link]
[Link]/encyclopedia/work-and-health-41/occupational-
health-news-507/[Link]#toggle-gdpr.
27. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage
Statistics,
28. A good book on this topic is Susie Day, The Brother You Choose: Paul
Coates and Eddie Conway Talk About Life, Politics, and the Revolution
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020). Eddie Conway, incarcerated for
more than forty years for a crime he did not commit, describes the
casual cruelties inflicted on inmates, especially those who fought back
against prison injustice. He also explains the phenomenon of guards in
the military who tortured prisoners in places like Abu Ghraib prison in
Iraq and then came back to work as guards in U.S. prisons.
NOTES TO PAGES 91–96 229

29. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage

Statistics.
30. I described this campaign in Michael D. Yates, Power on the Job: The
Legal Rights of Working People (Boston: South End Press, 1999). See the
chapter titled “Mike and Jane,” about the custodians who spearheaded
the union campaign.
31. Ibid.
32. “KFF/Post Survey Reveals the Serious Mental Health Challenges Facing
Frontline Health Care Workers a Year into the COVID-19 Pandemic,”
April 6, 2021, [Link]
kff-post-survey-reveals-the-serious-mental-health-challenges-facing-
frontline-health-care-workers-a-year-into-the-covid-19-pandemic/.
33. Azeem Azhar, “Inequality is growing between gig workers and
employees,” Rest of [Link], September 16, 2021, [Link]
org/2021/exponential-age-azeem-azhar-on-gig-workers/.
34. Caroline O’Donovan and Ken Bensinger, “Amazon’s Next-Day Delivery
Has Brought Chaos and Carnage to America’s Streets—But the World’s
Biggest Retailer Has a System to Escape the Blame,” BuzzFeed, August
31, 2019, [Link]
amazon-next-day-delivery-deaths.
35. Claudia Irizarry Aponte and Josefa Velasquez, “NYC Food Delivery
Workers Face Paltry Pay and High Risks, Analysis Shows,” [Link],
September 13, 2021, [Link]
nyc-food-delivery-workers-pay-risk. On gig workers in India, see Prajwal
Suvarna, “Gig workers forgo dignity, safety in quest for a living,” Deccan
Herald, August 29, 2021, [Link]
insight/gig-workers-forgo-dignity-safety-in-quest-for-a-living-1024703.
html.
36. Maria Figueroa, Ligia Guallpa, Andrew Wolf, Glendy Tsitouras,
and Hildalyn Colón Hernández, Essential but Unprotected: App-
Based Food Couriers in New York City, Workers Justice Project, 2021,
[Link]
797bd8c26b8e/09142021CHARTSLos%20Deliveristas%20Unidos-v02.
pdf.
37. The famous Whitehall Studies done in the United Kingdom showed
that the lower the job status, the poorer the health and the greater
the stress. See Sara Gorman, “Inequality, Stress, and Health: The
Whitehall Studies,” The Pump [Link], October 3, 2012, http://
[Link]/2012/10/03/inequality-stress-and-health-
the-whitehall-studies/.
38. See Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 3rd ed. (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980, first published in 1933).
230 NOTES TO PAGES 97–103

5. Panopticon
1. From [Link]
panopticon-effect/.
2. See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New
York: Open Road Media, 2016, originally published in 1963).
3. For a horrific fictional account of orphanage labor, see Glyn Hughes,
The Rape of the Rose (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
4. See page xvi of John Bellamy Foster’s Introduction to the Braverman
book (see note 5).
5. See Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of
Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998,
originally published in 1973). The relationship between mechanization
and skill requirements for jobs is examined in chapter 9, “Machinery.”
6. “Do we need humans for that job? Automation booms after covid,”
[Link], September 5, 2021, [Link]
we-need-humans-for-that-job-automation-booms-after-covid/.
7. Ibid.
8. Amelia Lucas, “Salad chain Sweetgreen bets on automation by
acquiring Spyce and its robotic kitchen tech,” CNBC, August 24, 2021,
[Link]
[Link].
9. What follows draws on Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital,
chaps. 4 and 5.
10. For an example, see Rachel Sandler, “Amazon Is Installing AI-Powered
Cameras to Monitor Delivery Drivers,” February 3, 2021, [Link]
[Link]/sites/rachelsandler/2021/02/03/in-bid-for-road-safety-
amazon-is-rolling-out-ai-powered-cameras-to-monitor-delivery-
drivers/.
11. Caroline O’Donovan and Ken Bensinger, “Amazon’s Next-Day Delivery
Has Brought Chaos and Carnage to America’s Streets—But the World’s
Biggest Retailer Has a System to Escape the Blame,” BuzzFeed, August
31, 2019, [Link]
amazon-next-day-delivery-deaths.
12. See Richard Seymour, “Slaves to the Algorithm,” April 9, 2021, https://
[Link]/posts/slaves-to-algo-49819931. To read this essay, it
is necessary to become a subscriber to Seymour’s Patreon column.
13. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, chap. 4.
14. See Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter, Working Smart: A Union Guide to
Participation Programs and Reengineering/With Union Strategy Guide
(Detroit: Labor Notes, 1994). For more on lean production as well as a
discussion of the propaganda put forward in its favor, see Michael D.
Yates, “The ‘New Economy’ and the Labor Movement,” Monthly Review
NOTES TO PAGES 103–106 231

52/11 (April 2001). Also, see Mike Parker, “Toyota and the Myth of
Quality,” Labor Notes, March 23, 2010.
15. See Laurie Graham, On the Line at Subaru-Isuzu (Ithaca, NY: ILR
Press, 1995) for a detailed account of hiring at a Japanese transplant
automobile company in the state of Indiana. Also, for a brief description
of metadata, see Philip Arkcoll, “The Age of Behavioral Analytics at
Work: Using IT Metadata to Make Improved Business Decisions,”
IHRIM, Issue 2 (June 2020), [Link]
behavioral-analytics-at-work-using-it-metadata-to-make-improved-
business-decisions-by-philip-arkcoll/. The title of this article is telling
with the phrase “Behavior Analytics.”
16. PBS produced a film in its Frontline Series titled We Are Driven,
about a Nissan plant in Smyrna, Tennessee. It is amazing to see what
a fraud all of the hype about the Japanese employment system is, with
its promise of lifetime employment and diehard employee loyalty to
the corporation. But it is eye-opening to watch U.S. plant workers visit
Japan and joyfully watch Japanese workers submitting to what one
would think was absolutely craven behavior. See [Link]
wgbh/frontline/film/we-are-driven/. The film’s title, We Are Driven, is a
take on Nissan’s advertising slogan of the same name. It also means that
the workers are driven, so much so that a Japanese word was invented
to describe death from overwork: karoshi.
17. Here is where the psychological aspects of forming and training teams
comes in, as well as the willingness of labor unions to go along with this.
Labor and management argued that any given plant was in competition
with every other one, whether it was inter- or intra-company. It is
obvious that when work is parceled out to various subcontractors,
the production of the end product, in this case automobiles (or
trucks, buses, any transportation vehicle), could be brought to a halt
by a strike at the subcontractor’s facility no matter where it is, even
in another country. However, a broad sense of solidarity must exist
among all the workers involved for this to succeed. In this regard,
the failure of unions to educate members; the power of nationalism;
and individualism and the cry for personal “freedom” drummed into
everyone’s heads for the past fifty years of neoliberalism all play a role
in weakening solidarity. See chapter 8, “A Working Class Revolt,” for a
deeper analysis.
18. Michael D. Yates, “The Growing Degradation of Work and Life, and
What We Might Do to End It,” Truthout, March 21, 2015, https://
[Link]/articles/the-growing-degradation-of-work-and-life-and-
what-we-might-do-to-end-it/.
19. See Intan Suwandi, Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism (New
232 NOTES TO PAGES 108–114

York: Monthly Review Press, 2019). This book is based upon field
research in Indonesia.
20. Steven Greenhouse, “‘We deserve more’: an Amazon warehouse’s
high-stakes union drive,” The Guardian, February 23, 2021, https://
[Link]/technology/2021/feb/23/amazon-bessemer-
alabama-union.
21. Both Bezos quotes are from ibid.
22. See Joshua Sperber, Consumer Management in the Internet Age: How
Customers Became Managers in the Modern Workplace (Washington,
DC: Lexington Books, 2019). See also Nora De La Cour, “Platform
Capitalists Are Turning Customers into Managers in Disguise,” Jacobin,
September 6, 2021, [Link]
capitalists-gig-economy-employee-ratings-reviews-yelp-doordash-
uber-lyft-management-discipline-prosumption.
23. For numerous examples of union-busting, see Marty Jay Levitt and Terry
Conrow, Confessions of a Union Buster (New York: Crown Publishers,
1993).
24. On the state’s suppression of class struggle and its intimate connection
to the accumulation of capital and all that entails, see István Mészáros,
Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State, edited and introduced by John
Bellamy Foster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022). On U.S. labor
laws, see Michael D. Yates, Power on the Job: The Legal Rights of Working
People (Boston: South End Press, 1999).

6. A Divided Working Class

1. This chapter is based upon Michael D. Yates, “It’s Still Slavery by Another
Name,” Monthly Review72/1 (May 2020); and Michael D. Yates, Can
the Working Class Change the World? (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2018), chap. 1, “The Working Class,” chap. 2, “Some Theoretical
Considerations,” and chap. 3, “Nothing to Lose But Their Chains.”
2. Two good examples are Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been
Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic
Books, 2014); and Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).
3. Eric Schutz, Inequality and Power: The Economics of Class (London:
Routledge, 2011).
4. Slavery by Another Name, dir. Samuel Pollard, PBS, 2012, available
at [Link]
5. Lawrence Mishel et al., “Mobility,” chap. 3 in The State of Working
America, 12th ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).
6. Michael D. Yates, Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: An Economist’s
Travelogue (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007).
NOTES TO PAGES 115–120 233

7. U.S. Census Bureau, “Figure 1. Real Median Household Income by

Race and Hispanic Origin: 1967 to 2017,” Current Population Survey,
1968 to 2018 Annual Social and Economic Supplements.
8. U.S. Census Bureau, “Wealth and Asset Ownership for Households, by
Type of Asset and Selected Characteristics: 2016.”
9. Data in this and the preceding paragraph are taken from U.S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, “Usual Weekly Earnings
of Wage and Salary Workers: Fourth Quarter 2019,” News Release,
January 17, 2020; “Employed Persons by Detailed Occupation, Sex,
Race, and Hispanic or Latino Ethnicity,” January 22, 2020; “Earnings
and Employment by Occupation, Race, Ethnicity, and Sex, 2010,”
Economics Daily, September 14, 2011. See also David Cooper,
“Workers of Color Are Far More Likely to Be Paid Poverty-Level Wages
Than White Workers,” Economic Policy Institute, June 21, 2018.
10. Jessica Semega, Melissa Kollar, John Creamer, and Abinash Mohanty,
“Table B-1. People in Poverty by Selected Characteristics: 2017 and
2018,” “Table B-3. People with Income Below Specific Ratios of Their
Poverty Thresholds by Selected Characteristics: 2018,” in U.S. Census
Bureau, Income and Poverty in the United States: 2018, Report #P60-
266, September 2019; Kids Count Data Center, “Children in Poverty by
Race and Ethnicity in the United States,” 2018.
11. See U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, [Link]
[Link]; Darrick Hamilton, Algernon Austin, and William Darity, Jr.,
Whiter Jobs, Higher Wages: Occupational Segregation And The Lower
Wages of Black Men, Economic Policy Institute, [Link]
[Link].
12. Nancy Fraser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For an Expanded
Conception of Capitalism,” New Left Review 86 (March–April 2014):
61.
13. Julia Puscheck, “Women and Propaganda in America During World
War II: Methods in Which the United States Propaganda Organizations
Targeted Various Age Groups of Women,” June 8, 2010, http://
[Link]/cgi/[Link]?article=1013&contex
t=histsp.
14. For a breakdown of the global labor force by sector, see [Link]
org/ilostat.
15. UN Population Fund (UNFPA), “Worlds Apart: Reproductive Health
and Rights in an Age of Inequality,” 2017, 46, [Link]
swop.
16. An informative summary of the UNFPA report is Rachael Revesz,
“Women Around the World Earn a Quarter Less than Men, Finds
UN Report,” Independent, October 17, 2017, [Link]
234 NOTES TO PAGES 121–138

[Link]/news/world/women-salaries-men-gender-pay-gap-world-un-
[Link].
17. Eleni X. Karageorge, “COVID-19 Recession Is Tougher on Women,”
Monthly Labor Review, September 2020, [Link]
mlr/2020/beyond-bls/[Link].
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study can be
found at [Link]
[Link].

7. The Rise and Fall of the United Farm Workers

1. See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New
York: Open Road Media, 2016, originally published in 1963); Herbert
Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays
in American Working-Class and Social History (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1976).
2. See Michael D. Yates, Why Unions Matter, 2nd ed. (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2009).
3. Friedrich Engels, “The Ten Hours’ Question” in Marx and Engels,
Collected Works, vol. 10 (New York: International Publishers, 1978), 275.
4. For a personal account of my time with the UFW, see Michael D. Yates,
“Cesar,” MR Online, October 22, 2009, [Link]
cesar/; and “A Union Is Not a ‘Movement,’” MR Online, January 16,
2006, [Link]
november-1977/. This version has an introductory bibliographical note;
the original was published in The Nation, November 19, 1977.
5. For this and other details of what the union meant to farmworkers,
as well as a thorough account of the demise of the UFW, see Frank
Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage: César Chávez and the Two Souls of
the United Farm Workers (New York: Verso, 2012). This is the definitive
history of the union.
6. If California were a country, its Gross Domestic Product would be the
fifth largest in the world.
7. Miriam Pawel, The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in
César Chávez’s Farm Worker Movement (New York: Bloomsbury Press,
2009).
8. One of the first such books was Peter Matthiessen, Sal Si Puedes (Escape
If You Can): César Chávez and the New American Revolution (Oakland:
University of California Press, 2014, first published in 1969). The
foreword to this edition was written by the UFW’s premier apologist,
Marc Grossman, who was Chavez’s personal secretary.
9. See Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage, which fills in the gaps in
Pawel’s book.
NOTES TO PAGES 139–144 235

10. Fernando E. Gapasin, Bill Fletcher Jr., and Bill Gallegos, “Building
Communities of Solidarity,” Monthly Review 72/11 (April 2021): 14–23.
11. Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage, 488–506.
12. Ibid., 495.

8. A Working Class Revolt? Pandemic, Depression, and Protest

in the United States
1. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Including
Theses on Feuerbach (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998, originally
published in 1845). The quote is the eleventh thesis.
2. Samir Amin, “World Poverty, Pauperization and Capital Accumulation,”
Monthly Review 55/5 (October 2003): 1; La Via Campesina, “Declaration
of Rights of Peasants—Women and Men,” 2009, [Link]
net/downloads/PDF/[Link].
3. Michael D. Yates, “The Social Democratic Pipedream,” Left Turn 5
(Winter 2020), [Link]
cratic-pipedream/.
4. Phillip Kane, “The Great Resignation Is Here, and It’s Real,” Inc., August
26, 2021, [Link]
here-its-real.l?fbclid=IwAR2iTNh3qVTYMGRq49FhdbFwtHrtlYaeD
hHfK9oyeARqsuXJXMBYgogwd1o; Matt Egan, “A record number of
Americans are quitting their jobs,” October 12, 2021, [Link]
com/2021/10/12/economy/jolts-job-openings/[Link].
5. Michael Sainato, “Wave of US labor unrest could see tens of thousands
on strike within weeks,” The Guardian, October 1, 2021, [Link]
[Link]/us-news/2021/oct/01/us-labor-unrest-unions-
strikes.
6. This essay was first published as Michael D. Yates, “COVID-19,
Economic Depression, and the Black Lives Matter Protests: Will the
Triple Crisis Bring a Working-Class Revolt in the United States?”
Monthly Review 72/4 (September 2020).
7. A representative work is Eric Blanc, Red State Revolt: The Teachers’
Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics (New York: Verso, 2019).
For the argument that the Bernie Sanders campaign and the DSA
were important factors in the wave of teachers’ strikes in red states,
see Eric Blanc, “How Bernie Helped Spark the Teachers’ Revolt,”
Jacobin, October 30, 2019. For a rejoinder, see Erin Dyke and Brendan
Muckian-Bates, “Social Movements Gave Rise to the ‘Teachers’ Revolt,’
Not Bernie,” New Politics, November 6, 2019.
8. The data in the next few paragraphs and in the second section of
this chapter on major strikes and union density are taken from the
following BLS sources: “Annual Work Stoppages Involving 1,000 or
236 NOTES TO PAGES 144–147

More Workers, 1947–2019,” March 11, 2020; “Union Membership

(Annual) News Release,” January 22, 2020; “Union Membership Rate
10.5 Percent in 2018, Down from 20.1 Percent in 1983,” January 25,
2019; Megan Dunn and James Walker, “Union Membership in the
United States,” September 2016. The BLS website is [Link].
9. Tony Room, “Americans Have Filed More than 40 Million Jobless
Claims in Past 10 Weeks, as Another 2.1 Million Filed for Benefits Last
Week,” Washington Post, May 28, 2020.
10. BLS unemployment data are from “Employment Situation Summary,”
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, July 2, 2020. For the U6 unemployment
rate, which includes the officially unemployed plus involuntary part-time
workers and those who have become too discouraged to recently look for
work, see “Alternative Measures of Labor Underutilization,” July 2, 2020.
11. Meat-processing workers are a case in point. The union that represents
employees in some plants estimates that more than forty died as of the
end of May 2020. See AP News, “Meatpacking Union: 44 COVID-19
Deaths Among Workers,” May 28, 2020, [Link]
f332a2d38e693b25a82a846bf7337a40. However, the companies did their
best to cover up the extent of infection and death. See Michael Grabell,
Claire Perlman, and Bernice Yeung, “Emails Reveal Chaos as Meatpacking
Companies Fought Health Agencies Over COVID-19 Outbreaks in Their
Plants,” ProPublica, June 12, 2020, [Link]
emails-reveal-chaos-as-meatpacking-companies-fought-health-agencies-
over-covid-19-outbreaks-in-their-plants.
12. For details on the racial, ethnic, and gender disparities described in this
paragraph, see Max Ufberg, “The Navajo Nation Is Being Decimated by
This Virus,” MR Online, May 12, 2020, [Link]
the-navajo-nation-is-being-decimated-by-this-virus/; Hye Jin Rho,
Hayley Brown, and Shawn Fremstad, A Basic Demographic Profile of
Workers in Frontline Industries (Washington, DC: Center for Economic
and Policy Research, 2020); “Employment Situation Summary”; and
Alisha Haridasani Gupta, “Why Some Women Call This Recession a
‘Shecession,’ ” New York Times, May 13, 2020.
13. David Bacon, “COVID-Related Strikes Hit Washington’s Apple Sheds,”
Capital & Main, May 14, 2020.
14. Mike Ludwig, “Essential Sanitary Workers Strike for Hazard Pay and
PPE in New Orleans,” Truthout, May 15, 2020.
15. Michael Sainato, “Strikes Erupt as U.S. Essential Workers Demand
Protection Amid Pandemic,” The Guardian, May 19, 2020.
16. May Retta, “Universities to Grad Students: Drop Dead,” Democratic
Underground, May 27, 2020, [Link]
com/1016256641.
NOTES TO PAGES 147–155 237

17. Sainato, “Strikes Erupt as U.S. Essential Workers Demand Protection

Amid Pandemic.”
18. Jamie Fleming, “The Union Difference: A Tale of Two Plants,” The
Stand, April 23, 2020, [Link]
difference-a-tale-of-two-plants/.
19. Carl Rosen, Andrew Dinkelaker, and Gene Elk, “We Need the Labor
Movement to Organize Worker Fightback in the Face of the COVID-19
Crisis,” In These Times, April 10, 2020.
20. Cal Winslow, unpublished manuscript, 2020; Adam Turl, “The Miners’
Strike of 1977–78,” International Socialist Review 74 (2010).
21. These accomplishments and the failings of labor movements in the United
States and worldwide are discussed in Michael D. Yates, Can the Working
Class Change the World? (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018). On
corruption in the UAW, see Thomas Adams, “A Tale of Corruption by
the United Auto Workers and the Big Three American Automakers,”
MR Essays, August 19, 2019, [Link]
corruption-by-the-united-auto-workers-and-the-big-three-american-
automakers/. For the soft and hard corruption of the UAW, see Gregg
Shotwell, Autoworkers Under the Gun (Chicago: Haymarket, 2011). The
case of my former student is reported in “SEIU Sends ‘Exiled’ Union Boss
Back to SoCal as Organizing Director,” Labor Union Report, April 2, 2019,
[Link]
22. See Michael D. Yates, Why Unions Matter, 2nd ed. (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2009).
23. Chris Brooks and Jane Slaughter, “GM Workers Ratify Contract
Though ‘Mixed at Best,’ ” Labor Notes, October 29, 2019.
24. See “Coronavirus and Social Distancing in the Construction Industry,”
Oakland Socialist blog, March 22, 2020, [Link]
com/2020/03/22/coronavirus-and-social-distancing-in-the-
construction-industry/.
25. Saharra Griffin and Malkie Wall, “President Trump’s Anti-Worker
Agenda,” Center for American Progress, August 28, 2019.
26. The Editors, “Notes from the Editors,” Monthly Review 68/11 (April
2017).
27. Kevin Stankiewicz, “AFL-CIO President Says He Told Trump ‘Workers
Have to Have a Say’ in How Economy Is Restarted,” CNBC, April 17,
2020, [Link]
[Link].
28. Cherrene Horazuk, “Labor Fights for George Floyd in Twin Cities,”
Labor Notes, June 3, 2020.
29. See Mike Elk, “Over 500 Strikes in Last 3 Weeks as BLM Strikes Surge
on Juneteenth,” Payday Report, June 19, 2020.
238 NOTES TO PAGES 155–168

30. Mike Elk, “How Black and Brown Workers Are Redefining Strikes in
the Digital COVID Age,” Payday Report, July 8, 2020.
31. Michael D. Yates, “Police Are the Enemy Within,” Counterpunch, June
12, 2020.
32. Alexia Fernández Campbell, “As Protests Grow, Big Labor Sides with
Police Unions,” Center for Public Integrity, June 5, 2020.
33. Elk, “How Black and Brown Workers Are Redefining Strikes in the
Digital COVID Age.”
34. See Michael D. Yates, “It’s Still Slavery by Another Name,” Monthly
Review 72/1 (May 2020).
35. For details on the direct actions described in this paragraph, see Michael
D. Yates, “Can the Working Class Radically Change the World?,” chap. 6
in Can the Working Class Change the World?; Paul Le Blanc and Michael
D. Yates, “Toward a New Freedom Budget,” chap. 9 in A Freedom Budget
for All Americans (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013).
36. John Tully, “Vale Jack Mundey: Inspirational Australian Union Leader,”
MR Online, June 2, 2020, [Link]
mundey-inspirational-australian-union-leader/.
37. See Roger Horowitz, “Negro and White, Unite and Fight”: A Social
History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930–1990 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1997).
38. For information on the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association, see
their website: [Link]. For a book-length account of worker centers,
see Janice Fine, Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of
the Dream (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
39. Elly Leary, “Immokalee Workers Take Down Taco Bell,” Monthly
Review 57/5 (October 2005): 21–22.
40. For an example of a workers assembly, see the Southern Workers
Assembly website: [Link].
41. Michael D. Yates, “Let’s Get Serious about Inequality and Socialism,”
Truthout, April 30, 2016.
42. See Michael Roberts, “Wealth or Income?,” Michael Roberts’s blog, July
15, 2020, [Link]
or-income/.
43. For more detail about political organizations, see Yates, “Can the
Working Class Radically Change the World?”
44. Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance
(Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013).
45. On education, see Michael D. Yates, “Can the Working Class Radically
Change the World?”
46. For information on the New Brookwood Labor College, see its website:
[Link].
NOTES TO PAGES 170–182 239

47. Mike Elk, “Payday Tracks Its 1,400th Strike as ‘Retail Worker Rebellion’
Grows,” Payday Report, July 7, 2021, [Link]
track-its-1400th-strike-as-retail-worker-rebellion-grows/.

9. Waging Class Struggle: From Principles to Practice

1. James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).
2. For historical background on the farmers’ revolt, see Chaman Lal,
“Farmers in protest: Learning from the past and creating history with
a real definition of nationalism,” MR Online, January, 17, 2021, https://
[Link]/2021/01/17/farmers-in-protest-learning-from-the-past-
and-creating-history-with-a-real-definition-of-nationalism/. On an
important revolt of Indian peasants, see Bernard D’Mello, India after
Naxalbari: Unfinished History (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2018).
3. This chapter is an abridged and re-edited version of chap. 6, “Can the
Working Class Radically Change the World?” in Michael D. Yates, Can
the Working Class Change the World? (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2018).
4. See, for example, Brian M. Lucey, “Is (Teaching) Economics Doing
More Harm than Good?,” October 26, 2014, [Link]
[Link]/2014/10/26/is-teaching-economics-doing-more-
harm-than-good/.
5. Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance
(Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013).
6. Ibid.
7. For many examples of what Linebaugh calls “communing,” see Stop,
Thief!.
8. Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Shaila Dewan, “When Bail Feels Less
Like Freedom, More Like Extortion,” New York Times, March 31, 2018,
[Link]
9. Michael D. Yates, “The Growing Degradation of Work and Life, and
What We Might Do to End It,” Truthout, March 21, 2015, https://
[Link]/articles/the-growing-degradation-of-work-and-life-and-
what-we-might-do-to-end-it/.
10. Linebaugh, Stop Thief!.
11. Yates, “The Growing Degradation of Work and Life, and What We
Might Do to End It.”
12. James Scofield and Michael Yates, “Teaching Marxists to Teach,”
Monthly Review 30/9 (September 1979): 61–62.
13. Leo Huberman, “How to Spread the Word,” Monthly Review 19/7
(December 1967): 44–51.
240 NOTES TO PAGES 183–187

14. Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of
the Earth System (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 160.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 159.
17. The lower estimate is from the World Food Program, [Link]
[Link]/zero-hunger; the higher estimate is from Eric Holt-Gimenez,
A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism: Understanding the Political Economy of
What We Eat (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 178.
18. For a particularly gruesome example of land theft, with perhaps 500,000
killed, this time in the interest of global mining companies, see Gemima
Harvey, “The Human Tragedy of West Papua,” The Diplomat, January
15, 2014, [Link]
papua/.
19. International Land Coalition, Uneven Ground: Land Inequality at the
Heart of Unequal Societies (Oxford, UK: Oxfam, 2020). For an interesting
discussion of how “land property regimes” impede the development of
agroecological land use, see Adam Calo et al., “Achieving Food System
Resilience Requires Challenging Dominant Land Property Regimes,”
Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, September 14, 2021, [Link]
[Link]/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2021.683544/full. Given who owns
the world’s land, it will have to be a worker-peasant class struggle that
topples these regimes.
20. Fred Magdoff, “A Rational Agriculture Is Incompatible with Capitalism,”
Monthly Review 66/10 (March 2015): 9–11. This essay provided
much useful information on the social irrationality of market-based
agriculture. In this chapter, I have not discussed fishing, but what has
been occurring in the oceans is no different than on land. Fishers share
the same plight as farmers. See Stefano B. Longo, Rebecca Clausen,
and Brett Clark, The Tragedy of the Commodity: Oceans, Fisheries, and
Aquaculture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).
21. This paragraph relies upon the informative essay by economist and
Latin America expert Sinan Koont, “The Urban Agriculture of Havana,”
Monthly Review 60/8 (January 1959): 44–63.
22. On the U.S. blockade of Cuba, see Salim Lamrani, The Economic War
Against Cuba: A Historical and Legal Perspective on the U.S. Blockade
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013).
23. Tom Perkins, “On urban farming and ‘colonialism’ in Detroit’s North
End neighborhood,” METROTIMES, December 20, 2017, https://
[Link]/detroit/on-urban-farming-and-colonialism-in-
detroits-north-end-neighborhood/Content?oid=7950059.
24. Larry Gabriel, “Grace Boggs, Detroit and the Next Revolution,”
NOTES TO PAGES 188–192 241

METROTIMES, March 30, 2011, [Link]

grace-boggs-detroit-and-the-next-revolution/Content?oid=2148354.
25. Ian Frazier, “The Vertical Farm: Growing crops in the city, without
soil or natural light,” The New Yorker, January 9, 2017, [Link]
[Link]/magazine/2017/01/09/the-vertical-farm.
26. Ibid.
27. Jules Pretty, “Can Ecological Agriculture Feed Nine Billion People?”
Monthly Review 61/6 (November 2009): 46–58.
28. For a contemporary example in the United States, see Katy Kelleher,
“Maine’s Somali Bantus Are Reenvisioning American Farming,” Down East,
[Link]
american-farming/.
29. Paul E. Little, “New Large Dams in Amazon Could Lead to Ecosystem
Collapse,” September 5, 2013, [Link]
resources/new-large-dams-in-amazon-could-lead-to-ecosystem-
collapse-8081; Tom Gatehouse, ed., Voices of Latin America: Social
Movements and the New Activism (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2019).
30. For the history of peasant uprisings in India, see Bernard D’Mello,
India After Naxalbari: Unfinished History (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2018).
31. Holt-Gimenez, A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism: Understanding the
Political Economy of What We Eat, 111.
32. Benjamin Dangl, “Occupy, Resist, Produce: The Strategy and Political
Vision of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement,” Toward Freedom,
May 22, 2018, [Link]
resist-produce-the-strategy-and-political-vision-of-brazils-landless-
workers-movement/.
33. Holt-Gimenez, A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism, 111.
34. No better book on the difficulties of ridding a union of its entrenched
and corrupt leaders can be found than Gregg Shotwell’s Autoworkers
Under the Gun: A Shop-Floor View of the End of the American Dream
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011).
35. On the Teamsters, see Dan La Botz, Rank-and-File Rebellion: Teamsters
for a Democratic Union (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 1991). For the
mine workers, see Paul F. Clark, The Miners’ Fight for Democracy:
Arnold Miller and the Reform of the United Mine Workers (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1981).
36. On the history of two United Electrical Workers locals in a small
industrial city, see James Young, Union Power: The United Electrical
Workers in Erie, Pennsylvania (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017).
242 NOTES TO PAGES 192–203

See also Michael D. Yates, Why Unions Matter (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2009).
37. On Europe trade unions, see Asbjørn Wahl, “European Labor: Political
and Ideological Crisis in an Increasingly More Authoritarian European
Union,” Monthly Review 65/8 (January 2014), 36–57.
38. National Union of Healthcare Workers website: [Link]
39. Andreas Malm, “Revolution in a Warming World: Lessons from the
Russian to the Syrian Revolutions,” [Link]
com/2018/03/17/malm-revolutionary-strategy/.
40. Ibid.
41. Shotwell, Autoworkers Under the Gun.
42. Dangl, “Occupy, Resist, Produce: The Strategy and Political Vision of
Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement.”
43. For examples, see Bernard D’Mello, India After Naxalbari: Unfinished
History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018).
44. Michael Zelenko, “Colombian Union Leaders Are Being Hunted by
Paramilitary Groups,” Vice News, April 1, 2014, [Link]
article/colombian-union-leaders-are-being-hunted-by-paramilitary-
groups.
45. Elly Leary, “Immokalee Workers Take Down Taco Bell,” Monthly
Review 57/5 (October 2005): 21–22. For information on the Chinese
Staff & Workers’ Association, see [Link] For a book-length
account of worker centers, see Janice Fine, Worker Centers: Organizing
Communities at the Edge of the Dream (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2006).
46. On the Richmond model, see Steve Early, Refinery Town: Big Oil,
Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City (Boston: Beacon
Press, 2017); and Michael D. Yates, “The Promises and Limitations of
Radical Local Politics,” Counterpunch, April 12, 2017, [Link]
[Link]/2017/04/12/the-promises-and-limitations-of-
radical-local-politics/.
47. Malm, “Revolution in a Warming World.”
48. Richard Seymour and Michael D. Yates, “‘Mourning and Militancy,’
Richard Seymour interviewed by Michael D. Yates,” Monthly Review
68/10 (March 2017): 22.
49. For a vivid account of the struggles of Black workers in the steel
industry, see the fine film by filmmaker Tony Buba and Black former
steelworker Ray Henderson, Struggles in Steel, available from California
Newsreel, [Link]
50. For a history of DRUM and related movements, see Dan Georgakis and
Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution,
3rd ed. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012).
NOTES TO PAGES 203–209 243

51. This and the next paragraph rely heavily on Teresa L. Ebert, “Alexandra
Kollontai and Red Love,” Against the Current 81 (July–August 1999),
[Link]
52. Esteban Morales Domínguez, Race in Cuba: Essays on the Revolution
and Racial Inequality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013).
53. Ibid.
54. See the discussion of caste in D’Mello, India After Naxalbari: Unfinished
History, 321–28. These pages comprise an Appendix to D’Mello’s book,
and they are must reading for anyone who believes that the issue of race
(and in India, caste) will be solved by class-first economic policies.
55. David R. Roediger, Class, Race, and Marxism (London: Verso, 2017).
56. For a good introduction to the immigration issue, see Jane Guskin and
David Wilson, The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers, 2nd
ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017); and David Bacon, The
Right to Stay Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2013).
57. For some examples of how the United States is treating immigrant
children, see Kristine Phillips, “‘America is better than this’: What a
doctor saw in a Texas shelter for migrant children,” Washington Post,
June 16, 2018, [Link]
wp/2018/06/16/america-is-better-than-this-what-a-doctor-saw-in-a-
texas-shelter-for-migrant-children/.
58. On the failure of German labor unions to aggressively support immigrants,
see Neva Low, “German Unions and the Rise of Anti-Immigrant
Populism,” The Worker Institute, February 9, 2018, [Link]
edu/mobilizing-against-inequality/post/german-unions-and-rise-anti-
immigrant-populism.
59. For the positive impact of immigrants on the U.S. labor movement,
see Jonathan Rosenblum, “How Immigrant Workers Are Reviving the
Labor Movement,” The Progressive, March 25, 2017, [Link]
org/magazine/how-immigrant-workers-are-reviving-the-labor-
movement/.
60. On the efficacy of strikes, see Kim Moody, On New Terrain: How Capital
Is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Chicago: Haymarket Books,
2017). See also Joe Burns, Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can
Regain Power and Transform America (New York: Ig Publishing, 2011);
and Joe Burns, Strike Back: Using the Militant Tactics of Labor’s Past to
Reignite Public Sector Unionism Today (New York: Ig Publishing, 2014).
61. On the piquetero movement, see Moira Birss, “The Piquetero Movement:
Organizing for Democracy and Social Change in Argentina’s Informal
Sector,” Journal of the International Institute 12/2 (Winter 2005), https://
[Link]/j/jii/4750978.0012.206; New Compass Collective,
244 NOTES TO PAGES 210–214

“The Fall of the Argentine Assembly Movement,” [Link]

net/news/fall-argentine-assembly-movement.
62. Nicole D. Nelson, “When Will Black Lives Matter in St. Louis?,” New
York Times, September 20, 2017, [Link]
opinion/[Link]; Michael Joseph
Roberto, “Crisis, Recovery, and the Transitional Economy: The Struggle
for Cooperative Ownership in Greensboro, North Carolina,” Monthly
Review 66/1 (May 2014): 50–60.
63. Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire: The
History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2013).
64. Michael D. Yates, “Occupy Wall Street and the Significance of Political
Slogans,” Counterpunch, February 27, 2013, [Link]
org/2013/02/27/occupy-wall-street-and-the-significance-of-political-
slogans/.
65. An informative interview with sociologist Dario Azzellini provides
much useful information about attempts to build socialism in Venezuela.
Ricardo Vaz, “Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela: Interview
with Dario Azzellini,” MR Online, May 2, 2018, [Link]
org/2018/05/02/communes-and-workers-control-in-venezuela/.
66. Ibid. In the interview, Azzellini points out that grassroots efforts to
gain working-class control over production and distribution have
been occurring throughout the world: “The first internationally visible
case was the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas; we saw it in Venezuela like
we have been discussing, but also in places like Argentina, Bolivia or
even Kurdistan, always in different forms. We saw it in the workplace
recuperations that occurred worldwide, we saw it in Occupy Wall
Street and 15M [in Spain], in Gezi and Tahrir, as well as plenty of other
cases that we barely heard about, for example in Africa.” See also Cira
Pascual Marquina and Chris Gilbert, “In the Shadow of the Blockade:
Stories of Resistance from El Maizal Commune,” July 23, 2021, ]https://
[Link]/interviews/15268. This is the first of three parts,
all worth reading.
67. The discussion of Jackson is based upon Kali Akuno and Ajamu
Nangwaya, Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and
Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi (Montreal: Daraja Press,
2017); and Max Ajl, “A Socialist Southern Strategy in Jackson,” Viewpoint
Magazine, June 5, 2018, [Link]
socialist-southern-strategy-in-jackson/.
68. Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” Boston Review, March
7, 2016, [Link]
black-struggle.
NOTES TO PAGES 215–219 245

69. Michael D. Yates, “Radical Labor Education, Part 2,” January 4, 2011,
available at [Link]
labor-education-part-2/.
70. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle.”
71. Taylor McNeil, “The Mathematics of Inequality,” TuftsNow, June 10,
2018, [Link]

Postface
1. For such examples, see Max Ajl and Rob Wallace, “Red Vegans Against
Green Peasants,” New Socialist, October 16, 2021, [Link]
[Link]/red-vegans-against-green-peasants/. Also, for an example of
collective agriculture, in which members of a Venezuelan commune
cope with a variety of difficulties, including adapting technology to
democratic and egalitarian farming, see Cira Pascual Marquina and
Chris Gilbert, “In the Shadow of the Blockade: Stories of Resistance
from El Maizal Commune,” July 23, 2021, [Link]
com/interviews/15268. This is the first of three parts, all of which can
be accessed from this link.
2. Michael D. Yates, Can the Working Class Change the World? (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 2018), 96; Steve Lohr, “Making Cars the
Volvo Way,” New York Times, June 23, 1987, [Link]
com/1987/06/23/business/[Link]; Christian
Berggren, “Point/Counterpoint: NUMMI vs. Uddevalla,” MIT Sloan
Management Review, January 15, 1994, [Link]
article/pointcounterpoint-nummi-vs-uddevalla/.
 Index

adjunct professors, 20, 67–69, 107, racism opposition statements,

109, 226n32 154–55; Trumka of, 154, 156
agriculture: agroecological farm- anomalies, in science, 33
ing, 188–89; class struggle in, Aquinas, Thomas, 44–45
183–90; cooperatives, 186; Cuba Argentina, direct actions against
urban farming plan, 185–86; neoliberalism in, 209–10
factory model of, 185–86; global Aronson, Mickey, 58–59
warming and, 183; hunger Australia, Building Laborers
and, 183–84; industrial, 183; Federation in, 163–64
International Land Coalition automotive workers: BLS on,
report on, 184; land as valuable 222n5; class injuries of, 87–89;
commodity, 184; market-based, controlled work regimen, 87;
240n20; urban farming, 185–88; Hamper on, 23, 27, 87; job
vertical farms, 187–88 insecurity, 87; working condi-
agroecological farming, 188–89 tions deterioration, 88; see also
Alinsky, Saul, 137 United Auto Workers
Amazon: employer control at, 101; Azhar, Azeem, 92–93
gig workers, 92, 93–94, 229n34
American Federation of Labor Babbage, Charles, 77, 99
and Congress of Industrial Babbage Principle, on subtasks,
Organizations (AFL-CIO): as 77, 99
enemy of change, 162; Floyd Bangladesh, deadly unsafe labor
response from, 154–55; police in, 54–55
unions and, 155–57; systemic Baran, Paul, 19
index 247

Bardacke, Frank, 140 on Black workers, 115; on res-

Battle at Steakmate, Vera Cruz taurant workers, 89–90; strikes
and, 139 definition by, 144; on unem-
Becker, Gary, 39 ployment rate, 145, 236n10;
Bell, Daniel, 102 on union density, 149, 168–69,
Bentham, Jeremy, 47, 97 235n8
Bezos, Jeff, 108 Bush, George W.: Mankiw as eco-
Black, Indigenous, people of color nomics advisor to, 35; No Child
(BIPOC): COVID-19 impact Left Behind of, 80
on, 146; systemic racism and, Bustamante, Mario, 136–37; as
159 UFW farmworker, 129
Black Lives Matter uprisings, buyers: self-interest of, 33, 47;
154–57, 171 utility maximization focus on
Black Panther Party, 163; direct outputs of, 33
action programs of, 210
Black slave labor, U.S. political cab drivers, as working poor, 60
system and, 112–13 California Agricultural Labor
Black workers: BLS on, 115; unem- Relations Act (1975): farm-
ployment, 116; wages and jobs, workers protective labor law of,
115 130; legal cases against, 126
Boggs, Grace Lee, 187 California Migrant Ministry, as
Borts, George, 34 UFW arm, 128
Boulud, Daniel, 101 Capital (Marx), 18, 180
Bowles, Samuel, 36 capital accumulation and profits,
boycotts, 208; of UFW, 126, 135, 79
136, 139 capitalism, 9, 84; control in, 97;
Braverman, Harry, 19, 77; on early workplace, 174; education
Babbage Principle, 99; on on, 180; employer control in
mechanization, 100, 230n5; on factory setting, 98; exploita-
task timing, 102 tion in, 97, 174; expropriation
Brazil, MST in, 162–63, 189–90, in, 47–48, 97, 174; feudalism
208 compared to, 44–45; Foster on
Brecher, Jeremy, 26 goods and services use value,
Bright, James, 100 39; Fraser on changes from,
Brown, Michael, 157 118–19; individualism in, 173;
Building Laborers Federation, in labor markets in, 29–30, 44;
Australia, 163–64 Magdoff and Krugman on, 41;
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS): managerial control in, 19; Marx
on automotive workers, 222n5; and Engels on changes from,
on Black wages and jobs, 115; 227n6; putting-out process in,
248 index

98; racism and patriarchy in, class consciousness, 26, 27

159; Stiglitz on, 40–41; wage class injuries, 75–78; of auto-
labor exploitation in, 47–48 motive workers, 87–89; of
capitalist class and working class children poor education, 96; of
connections, 78–79 clerks, 89; of custodial work-
Card, David, 34–35 ers, 91; of gig workers, 92–94,
Carlyle, Thomas, 222n4 229n34; imperialism and, 80,
Catholic Church, Henry VIII con- 81; inequality and, 83, 229n37;
trol of manors, 45 insecurity from, 81–82, 83, 159;
change: AFL-CIO as enemy of, media propaganda and, 80,
162; from capitalism, 118–19, 81; of medical workers, 91–92;
227n6; UFW working condi- racism and, 80; Reich, W., on,
tions, 127; see also world change 96; repression and, 80, 81; of
Chávez, César: Board funding restaurant workers, 89–90; of
ballot campaign failure, 132; secretaries, administrative assis-
cultural revolution of, 133; tants, office support, 90–91; of
Dederich friendship with, 132; security workers, 91; unemploy-
farmworkers disdain by, 135; ment, 81–83; of USPS workers,
farmworkers union manage- 85–87
ment opposition, 133–34; class struggle, 171; agriculture,
Hartmire religious order with, peasants, farmworkers and
132; Monday Night Massacre environment, 183–90; direct
incident, 132–33; suffering dis- action, 207–16; labor and
play of, 131; Synanon The Game politics, 198–207; labor unions,
use by, 132–33; as UFW presi- 190–98; peasant and indigenous
dent, 126; on undocumented population alliances, 172–73;
immigrants, 138–39; see also protagonists in capitalism war,
United Farm Workers 172; radical education, 179–83;
Chavez, Hugo, 211 statement of principles and
Chávez, Manuel, 136 commitments, 177–79; world
Chen, Martha Allen, 49 change, 174–77, 216–18
Chicago Teachers Union, 145, 164 clerks: class injuries of, 86;
child labor: farmworkers and, COVID-19 and, 89
61; ILO on, 53–54; India child closed-circuit television (CCTV)
prostitutes, 55; in Pakistan, 56 cameras, in workplace, 101
Chinese Staff and Workers Coalition of Immokalee Workers
Association, in New York City, (CIW), in Florida, 165, 190,
164–65, 197, 238n38 197–98
Choosing Sides (Parker and Cohen, Jerry, 133, 136; UFW and,
Slaughter), 27 128–29
index 249

college campus workplace, 15–16 58–59; farmworkers and, 62;

college professors: adjunct, 20, Greeley meat packing facility
67–69, 107, 109, 226n32; dean and, 64; healthcare system and,
and president arbitrary deci- 158–59; mechanization and,
sions for, 15 100; medical workers and, 92,
commodity: land as valuable, 184; 229n32; pressure campaigns
worker as, 48, 84 in, 147; Smithfield meat pack-
commoning, Linebaugh on, 173– ing facility and, 65; strikes
74, 179 and, 146–47, 168–69; UE and
communal council, in Cuba, DSA for workplace protection,
211–12 148–49; unemployment and, 50,
Communist Party in United States 145; union membership decline,
(CPUSA), direct action in edu- 168–69; unions, Trump and,
cation by, 214–15 152–54; vulnerable employ-
construction union, Trump rela- ment and, 52; women impacted
tionship with, 152–53 by, 146, 167, 234n17; work life
consumption socialization, in and public welfare connection,
world change, 176 65–66; worker job quitting and,
control, 19; automotive worker 143–44; working class divided
work regimen and, 87; in capi- from, 116–17; working class
talism, 97; factories observation women impacted by, 120–21,
and, 99; Henry VIII Catholic 234n17; working poor and,
Church manors, 45; world 52; workplace protection cam-
change for worker-commu- paigns, 147–48, 236n11; World
nity workplace, 176; see also Employment and Social Outlook
employer control; managerial report and, 50
control cross-training, in scientific man-
Cooperation Jackson (CJ) resis- agement, 104–5
tance, 163, 212–13, 244n67 cruise ships: COVID-19 impact
cooperatives, agriculture and, 186 on, 58–59; workers deadly
corporation structure, labor unsafe labor, 58
unions and, 190–91 Cuba: communal council, 211–12;
corruption: in labor movement, farming plan of, 185–86; work-
151; of Teamsters, 191; in UAW, ing-class politics in, 204–5
88, 151, 228n20, 237n21; of cultural revolution, of Chávez, C.,
UFW, 137; in United Mine 133
Workers, 191 custodial workers: class injuries of,
COVID-19 pandemic: BIPOC 91; SEIU organization of, 91
impacted by, 146; clerks and, customer comment platforms,
89; cruise ships impacted by, managerial control through, 109
250 index

Davis, Mike, 162 socialist system of production

deadly unsafe labor: in and, 218–19
Bangladesh, 54–55; for cruise Dodge Revolutionary Union
ship workers, 58; of Walkley, Movement (DRUM), UAW and,
56–57 203, 242n50
Debs, Eugene, 131
Dederich, Charles, 132–33 economics: as dismal science,
DeLong, J. Bradford, 54 31, 222n4; Filippo audit-
demand and supply: equilibrium ing of classes in, 33; hidden
wage and, 16, 35, 37; graphs for, assumptions in precepts of, 18;
34; in neoclassical economics, hypotheses testing and, 32–33;
30 Mankiw on value-free nature
Democratic Socialists of America of, 32, 35; prediction-generating
(DSA), 235n7; on class-based model for, 33; science claim of,
relief, 122; on COVID-19 32, 41–42
workplace protection, 148–49; economy: graphic models diffi-
political position of, 142–43; culty for, 31–32; world change
worker militancy and, 144; in planned, 176
worldview of, 142 ecosocialist production, working-
democratic union, 195; procedures class politics for, 219–20
of, 192–93; UE as, 192 education, 96, 147, 167, 199; on
democratic working-class parties, capitalism, 180; class struggle
199, 204 and radical, 179–83; on com-
direct action: against Argentina moning, 179; direct action
neoliberalism, 209–10; Black and labor, 213–15; egalitar-
Panther Party programs of, 210; ian teacher/student respect,
CJ movement, 163, 212–13, 179–80; Huberman example
244n67; in class struggle, of radical and critical, 182; as
207–16; CPUSA and, 214–15; human capital, 13; individual-
of Cuba communal council ism promotion in, 79–80; labor
actions, 211–12; of immigrants, union member, 180–81, 193–
208–9; labor education and, 94; nationalism promotion in,
213–15; Movement for Black 79–80; of peasants, 180–81; for
Lives, 209; Occupy Wall Street, productivity, 17, 36–37, 223n10
210–11; for working class resis- egalitarian social relationships: in
tance, 162–63 gathering and hunting groups,
direct observation, 101, 102 75–76, 173; of teacher/student
dismal science, economics as, 31, in education, 179–80; world
222n4 change in, 176–77
distribution: production and, 9; Eggers, Ellen: as UFW attorney,
index 251

128; UFW movement commit- control of, 98–99; dangers for,

ment, 130 23; high pay and benefits of, 23;
Emergency Workplace Organizing plant closings for, 25; stress of,
Committee, of UE and DSA, 24–25; union-busting and, 25;
148–49 see also repetitive labor
employer control: at Amazon, 101; Farahmandpur, Ramin, 80
in factory setting, 98–99; Stiglitz farmer settlements, gathering and
on, 102–3 hunting groups displaced for, 76
employers: human capital and farmworkers: California
hiring decisions, 29; labor mar- Agricultural Labor Relations
kets and laborers inequality Act (1975) and, 126, 130;
with, 29–30; labor unions coop- Chávez, C., disdain for, 135;
eration with, 191; laborers work Chávez, C., opposition to union
capacity for, 44; neoclassical management by, 133–34; child
economics on productive, 13 labor and, 61; class struggle and,
Engels, Frederick, 125, 227n6 183–90; COVID-19 and, 62; see
environment: class struggle and, also United Farm Workers
183–90; labor unions central feudalism, 223n1; capitalism com-
concern for, 195; world change pared to, 44–45; gender and,
for sustainable, 176 117–18
equilibrium wage: college campus Filippo, Mary, 31; film review,
workplace and, 16; in demand 42–43; neoclassical economics
and supply, 16, 35, 37; unem- and, 39
ployment and above-, 102–3 Fisher, Irving, 39
evaluations, managerial control Florida, CIW in, 165, 190, 197–98
through, 109 Floyd, George, 154–55, 162
exploitation: in capitalism, 47–48, Food and Agriculture
97, 174; Marxist economist on Organization (FAO), on hunger,
working class, 14; racism, patri- 52
archy, imperialism connection Food Policy, on meat packing
to, 181 facilities, 66
expropriation: in capitalism, Foster, John Bellamy, on capitalism
47–48, 97, 174; racism, patriar- goods and services use value, 39
chy, imperialism connection to, France, yellow vests movement in,
181; of women, 119 150
free choices, labor unions interfer-
factories: employer control in, 98; ence in, 13
observation and control in, 99 Freidman, Milton, 39
factory workers: boredom of,
24–25; capitalism employer Ganz, Marshall, 133, 134, 136
252 index

gathering and hunting groups: Hamper, Ben, 23, 87; class con-
egalitarian social relationships sciousness and, 27
in, 75–76, 173; farmer settle- Hartmire, Chris, 133; of California
ments displacement of, 76; Migrant Ministry, 128; Chávez,
gender division of labor, 75, 117 C., religious order with, 132
gender: feudalism and, 117–18; healthcare system: COVID-19
Fraser on capitalism changes and, 158–59; failure of, 161
and, 118–19; gathering and Henry VIII (king), 45–46
hunting groups labor divi- Hispanic farmworkers, UFW and,
sions by, 75, 117; working class 138
divided by, 117–22; in working- Hispanic workers, 116; UFW and,
class politics, 202–5 138
General Motors strikes, 145, 152 Ho Chi Minh, 15
geographically centered unions, Hoffa, James, 156
164–65 How Starbucks Saved My Life
gig workers: of Amazon, 92, (Gill), 82
93–94, 229n34; Azhar on, Huberman, Leo, 182
92–93; complaints of, 93; of Huerta, Delores, 127, 129, 135
Uber, 92, 93 human capital: of education and
Gilbreth, Frank, 102 training, 13; employers hiring
Gilbreth, Lillian, 102 decisions and, 29; workers
Gill, Michael Gates, 82 investment in, 13
Gintis, Herbert, 36 hunger, 240n17; agriculture and,
Global Employment Trends: see 183–84; FAO on, 52
World Employment and Social hypotheses, economics testing of,
Outlook 32–33
Global South, labor unions in,
196–97 immigrants, 243nn56–59; direct
global warming: agriculture and, actions of, 208–9; Trump
183; Malm on workplace and, war on, 207; undocumented,
194–95 138–40; working-class politics
goods and services: Foster on support and funding for, 207
capitalism and use value of, 39; imperialism: class and, 80, 81;
working class production of, 79 working-class politics and,
Graham, Laurie, 87–88, 231n15 206–7
graphic models, economy difficult independent unions, NUHW as,
presentation with, 31–32 191–92
Great Depression, 38, 60–61 India, child prostitutes in, 55
Grossman, Mark, 129 indigenous population: mistreat-
Guzman, Cleofas, 136 ment of, 116; peasant alliances
index 253

with, 172–73; vulnerable Kozol, Jonathan, 68–69, 80

employment of, 52–53 Krueger, Alan, 34–35
individual greed, 173; buyer and Krugman, Paul, 41
seller self-interest, 33, 47; labor Kunkel, Ben, 31
markets social well-being and,
30 Labor and Monopoly Capital
individualism: in capitalism, 173; (Braverman), 19, 77, 100
education promotion of, 79–80 labor and politics: see working-
industrial agriculture, 183 class politics
inequality: in class injury, 83, labor markets: before capital-
229n37; COVID-19 and, 159– ism, 44; in capitalism, 29–30;
60; crisis response of, 157–58; economist study of, 33; employ-
employers and laborers inequal- ers and laborers inequality in,
ity, 29–30; social choices and, 29–30; free choices made and
112; in wealth, 35; of women outcomes for, 13; individual
wages, 119–20 greed and social well-being
Inequality and Power (Schutz), 112 in, 30; Marx on, 46–47; social
informal employment: see vulner- optimum in, 30; workplace con-
able employment nection in, 19
insecurity: of automotive worker labor movement: accomplish-
job, 87; from class injuries, ments and failings of, 237n21;
81–82, 83, 159 corruption in, 151; COVID-19
intermediate social class, 76 response from, 160–61; per-
International Labor Organization sonal responsibility in, 167–68
(ILO): on child labor, 53–54; labor unions: class struggle and,
World Employment and Social 190–98, 241n34; collective
Outlook report of, 48–53 bargaining manual for, 126; cor-
International Land Coalition poration structure of, 190–91;
report, 184 employer cooperation from,
191; free choices interference
Jim Crow laws, 113, 114 by, 13; in Global South, 196–97;
just-in-time inventory, in scientific hiring workers and higher
management, 105–6 wages increase, 16; labor rebel-
lions against, 191; member
Kaizen, in scientific management, education in, 180–81, 193–94;
106–7, 231n16 membership management of,
Karageorge, Eleni X., 120–21, 191; resistance role from, 125;
234n17 solidarity of, 196; unemploy-
Kelley, Robin D., 214–15 ment and, 13; for wage and
Keynes, John Maynard, 38–40 benefit determination, 14;
254 index

worker centers cooperation management-by-stress, 20; Parker

with, 197, 198 and Slaughter on, 27
laborers: labor markets and managerial control: in capitalism,
employer inequality with, 19; through evaluations and
29–30; Marx on reserve customer comment platforms,
army of, 99; work capacity 109; laws protecting, 109–10;
for employer, 44; Working on, in task-oriented labor, 77–78;
72–73; see also workers of teachers, 108–9; worker
labor-management, UAW coop- dehumanization and, 110; see
eration with, 88 also scientific management, of
land theft, 45–46, 240n18 Taylor
Landless Worker’s Movement managerial control mechanisms,
(MST), in Brazil, 162–63, 98, 107; Bezos and, 108
189–90, 208 Mankiw, Gregory: as Bush
Laue, Gretchen, 128 economics advisor, 35; on
laws: California Agricultural Labor capitalism, 40; on economics
Relations Act (1975), 126, 130; value-free nature, 32, 35; on
Jim Crow, 113, 114; managerial monopoly power, 38; on profits,
control protection by, 109–10; 37–38
neoclassical economics mini- Mao Zedong, 179
mum wage, 34; No Child Left market socialism, 30
Behind, 80 market-based agriculture, 240n20
lean production, 107, 230n14; markets: deficits in product and
Toyota Corporation on, 103 input, 37; equilibrium of, 35;
Leary, Elly, 197–98 as system veil, 42–43; see also
lettuce strike, UFW, 136 labor markets
liberal economists, Keynes as, Marx, Karl, 18, 39, 41, 141, 180;
39 on changes from capitalism,
Linebaugh, Peter, 166–67; on com- 227n6; on labor markets, 46–47;
moning, 173–74, 179 on reserve army of labor, 99,
Lopez, Sabino, 136–37; as UFW 195; statement and principles
farmworker, 129 of, 179; on Walkley, 225n19; on
Luddites revolt, 124, 162 working class, 14, 46
Lumumba, Chokwe, 213 Marxist economist, on working
class exploitation, 14
Magdoff, Harry, 41 McLaren, Peter, 80
Malm, Andreas: on ecological measurement, of productivity, 35
destruction mitigation, 200– meat packing facilities: COVID-19
201; on workplace and global response and public welfare,
warming, 194–95 65–66; Food Policy on, 66;
index 255

Greeley and COVID-19, 64; monopoly power, Mankiw on, 38

Smithfield and COVID-19, 65 Montgomery, David, 26
meat packing workers: foreign Monthly Review, 18, 40, 41
workers as, 67; in Greeley, Moore, Michael, 25, 27
Colorado, 63–64; illness and Movement for Black Lives, 209
injury rates for, 62–63; UFCW Movement of Rank-and-File
and, 63 Educators, 147
mechanization: Braverman on, Mundey, Jack, 163–64, 192
100, 230n5; Bright on, 100; Myth and Measurement (Card and
COVID-19 and, 100; in res- Krueger), 34–35
taurants, 100–101; World
Economic Forum on workforce n + 1 (magazine), Kunkel as
reduction and, 100 founder of, 31
media propaganda, class and, 80, Nathan, Sandy, 129
81 National Bureau of Economic
medical workers: class injuries Research (NBER), 120, 234n17
of, 91–92; COVID-19 and, 92, National Union of Healthcare
229n32 Workers (NUHW), 164; core
Medina, Eliseo, 134, 135, 137; beliefs of, 193; as independent
joining of UFW union, 130; union, 191–92; SEIU break
UFW leaving by, 133; as UFW away of, 192
organizer, 128 nationalism, education promotion
merchants, Henry VIII Church of, 79–80
land sale to, 45–46 neoclassical economics: demand
middle-class, DeLong on world of and supply in, 30; fallacies of,
high-income, 54 42; Filippo film on, 39; on labor
migrant farmworkers, UFW and, markets, 30; minimum wage
128 laws abolishment, 34; on pro-
minimum wage: prediction- ductive employers, 13; union
generating model of economics abolishment and, 34
on, 34; unemployment from neoliberalism in Argentina, direct
increase in, 34 actions against, 209–10
modern unions, ineffectiveness of, Nissan plant, We Are Driven on,
26–27 231n16
Monday Night Massacre incident, No Child Left Behind, McLaren
of Chávez, C., 132–33 and Farahmandpur on, 80
money amount, as production Norton, Ben, 43
social component, 9
Monopoly Capital (Sweezy and Obama, Barack, 179
Baran), 19 Occupational Safety and Health
256 index

Administration (OSHA), 63, politics, class struggle for labor

153 and, 198–207
Occupy Wall Street movement, poverty: children and parents’
210–11; Stiglitz on, 40 income advantage, 113–14; PPP
On the Line at Subaru-Isuzu and thresholds of, 224n7
(Graham), 87–88, 231n15 prediction-generating model, for
opportunity cost, profits and, 38 economics, 33; on minimum
oppressive system, in U.S., 112–13 wage and unemployment
organized labor, Black Lives increases, 34
Matter uprisings and, 154–57 pressure campaigns, COVID-19
organized riots, 124 and, 147
outputs: buyers and sellers of, 33; prison workers, 71–72, 113,
workers inputs conversion into, 228n28
19 privatization, 158; USPS workers
outworking: see putting-out stress after, 85–86
process product and input markets, defi-
cits in, 37
Padilla, Gilbert, 133 production: capitalism as mode
Pakistan, child labor in, 56 of, 19; distribution and, 9;
panopticon, 97 employer control in, 98; profits
Parker, Mike, 27, 200 as cost of, 38; social component
patriarchy, 167, 181; in capitalism, of, 9; socialist system of distri-
159; women and, 117 bution and, 218–19; working
Pawel, Miriam, 127, 128, 137 class goods and services, 79;
peasants: class struggle and, working-class politics for eco-
183–90; education of, 180–81; socialist, 219–20
indigenous population productive employers, neoclassical
alliances with, 172–73; worker/ economics on, 13
peasant alliances, 172, 175, productivity: data on same wage
201; working class addition of, with increase in, 36; education
141–42 for, 17, 36–37, 223n10; mea-
personnel management, 20 surement of, 35, 36; skin color
plant closings, 25 and, 223n10; theory deficits on,
police unions, AFL-CIO and, 35–36
155–57 profits: as cost of production, 38;
police violence and systemic Mankiw on, 37–38; opportunity
racism revolt, 159 cost and, 38; sales choices to
political parties: labor parties maximize, 13
reconstruction, 166; working Punching the Clock (PTC) newslet-
class power exertion in, 165–66 ter, on cab drivers, 60
index 257

purchasing power parity (PPP), British labor union Unite on,

poverty thresholds and, 224n7 90; class injuries of, 89–90;
putting-out process, in capitalism, mechanization and, 100–102;
98 substance abuse of, 90; as work-
ing poor, 59
race: Black slave labor, 112–13; Review of Radical Political
frontline workers and, 117; Economics, 18
prison workers, 113; racial Richmond Progressive Alliance
hierarchy, 112; Reconstruction (RPA), as working-class politics
conditions, 113, 114; U.S. model, 199–200
oppressive system, 112–13; Riley, Ken, 155
wage discrepancies, 115–16; Rivethead (Hamper), 23, 87
working class divided by, 111– Roberts, Michael, 166
17; in working-class politics, Rodriquez, Arturo, 129, 137
202–5 Roger and Me (film), 25
racism: in capitalism, 158; class Romero, Teresa, 129
and, 80 Rostow, Walt, 15
radical political economy, of rulers social class, 76
Kunkel, 31 Russia, working-class politics in,
Reconstruction (1877), 113, 114 203–4
Reich, Robert, 89 Russian Revolution, 204
Reich, Wilhelm, 96
religion, working class divided by, sales choices, for profit maximiza-
111 tion, 13
repetitive labor: impact of, 85; in Sanders, Bernie, 144, 235n7
subtasks, 99–100 Savage Inequalities (Kozol), on
repression, class and, 80, 81 teachers, 68–69
reproduction relationship, 79 Schooling in Capitalist America
reserve army of labor, Marx on, (Bowles and Gintis), 36
99, 195 Schutz, Eric, 112
resistance, from working class, science: anomalies in, 33; econom-
20; Australia Building Laborers ics claim of, 32, 41–42
Federation, 163–64; Brazil scientific management, of Taylor:
MST, 162–63, 189–90, 208; CJ, cross-training in, 104–5; just-
163, 212–13, 244n67; direct in-time inventory, 105–6;
actions for, 162–63; examples Kaizen in, 106–7; systematic
of, 162–63; labor union role in, hiring in, 103; team produc-
125; Luddites revolt, 124, 162; tion and, 103, 231n17; workers
organized riots, 124 motions direct observation, 101
restaurant workers: BLS on, 89–90; Seabrook, Jeremy, 9–10
258 index

secretaries, administrative assis- social well-being, labor markets

tants, office support, class individual greed and, 30
injuries of, 90–91, 228n26 socialist system, of production and
security workers, class injuries of, distribution, 218–19
91 solidarity, 26, 196
self-employed: in vulnerable Stalin, Joseph, 204
employment, 49, 52–53; work- statement of principles and com-
ing poor and, 53 mitments: for class struggle
sellers: profit maximization focus movements and organiza-
on outputs of, 33; self-interest tions, 177–79; U.S. transitional
of, 33, 47 demands, 178
Service Employees International Stigler, George, 39
Union (SEIU): Chicago Stiglitz, Joseph: on employer con-
Teachers Union and, 145; cus- trol, 102–3; on Occupy Wall
todial workers organization by, Street movement, 40
91; NUHW break from, 192; stress: anger and rage from, 95–96;
top-down management of, for factory workers, 24–25
191–92 strikes: BLS definition of, 144; of
service workers, customer com- Chicago public school teach-
ment platforms on, 109 ers, 145, 235n7; COVID-19
Seymour, Richard, 202 and, 146–47, 168–69; General
Shor, Ira, 181–82 Motors, 145, 152; major strikes
skin color, productivity and, increase, 144–45, 150; pre-
223n10 WWII mass, 26; statewide,
Slaughter, Jane, 27 144–45; UFW lettuce, 136
Smith, Adam, 30, 38, 84–85 subordinate social class of work-
Smithfield meat packing facility, ers, 76, 83
COVID-19 and, 65 substance abuse, of restaurant
social choices, inequality and, 112 workers, 90
social classes, 76, 83 subtasks: Babbage Principle on, 77,
social component, of production, 99; repetitive labor in, 99–100;
9 Ure on, 99
social optimum, in labor markets, sustainable environment, in world
30 change, 176
social relationships, Seymour on Sweezy, Paul, 18–19
working-class politics, 202 Synanon, of Dederich: Chávez,
social reproduction institutions: C., use for union training, 132;
women and, 118–19; world from drug rehabilitation orga-
change in public ownership of, nization to cult, 132; The Game
176 technique of, 132–33
index 259

systematic hiring, 20; in scientific by, 153; union voters for, 153–
management, 103 54; war on immigration, 207;
systemic racism: AFL-CIO state- on workers as human capital,
ments of opposition to, 154–55; 86, 152; working class hostility
BIPOC and, 159; revolt against from, 152–53
police violence and, 159
Uber gig workers, 92, 93
task timing, Braverman on, 102 undocumented immigrants:
task-oriented labor: Babbage Chávez, C., on, 138–39; UFW
Principle and, 77; managerial intimidation campaign against,
control and, 77–78; subtask 140
division in, 76–77 unemployment: above-equilib-
Taylor, Frederick, 101–7, 231n17 rium wages and, 102–3; of
taylorization, 20 Black workers, 116; BLS on rate
teachers: Chicago public school of, 145, 236n10; Borts on high
teacher strikes, 145, 235n7; wages and, 34; class injury of,
managerial control of, 108–9; 81–83; COVID-19 and, 50, 145;
Savage Inequalities on, 68–69 Keynes on, 39; labor unions
team production, in scientific and, 13; from minimum wage
management, 103, 231n17 increase, 34; unpaid labor of
Teamsters: corruption in, 191; on homemakers and, 82–83; of
COVID-19 protection, 147–48; women, 52; World Employment
Hoffa as president of, 156; UFW and Social Outlook report on,
battle with, 132 48, 50–51
Terkel, Studs, 72–73 unification, of working class,
Thatcher, Margaret, 78 122–23
Theory of Capitalist Development union density: BLS on, 149, 168–
(Sweezy), 18–19 69, 235n8; France yellow vests
therbligs, direct observation and, movement and, 150
102 Union for Radical Political
Thompson, E. P., 46 Economics (URPE), 18
Toyota Corporation (firm), 103 The Union of Their Dreams
training: as human capital, 13; (Pawel), 128, 137
teams, 231n17 union-busting, factory workers
Trumka, Richard, 154, 156 and, 25
Trump, Donald, 65, 144; construc- unions: democratic, 192–93,
tion union relationship with, 195; geographically centered,
152–53; COVID-19, unions 164–65; independent, 191–92;
and, 152–54; on mail sorting ineffectiveness of modern,
machines, 86; OSHA weakened 26–27; neoclassical economics
260 index

on abolishment of, 34; Trump, 129; Teamsters battle with, 132;

COVID-19 and, 152–54; Trump undocumented immigrants
voters from, 153–54; worker intimidation campaign, 140;
production control opposition, working conditions changes
151–52; working class ideol- from, 127; see also Chávez,
ogy failure of, 27; see also labor César
unions; specific union United Food and Commercial
Unite British labor union, on res- Workers (UFCW), 63
taurant workers, 90 United Mine Workers, corruption
United Auto Workers (UAW), 26; in, 191
corruptions scandal in, 88, 151, United States (U.S.): Black slave
228n20, 237n21; DRUM and, labor and political system of,
203, 242n50; recent labor-man- 112–13; education challenges
agement cooperation, 88 to oppression, 167; Movement
United Electrical, Radio and for Black Lives, 209; oppressive
Machine Workers of America system in, 112–13; transitional
(UE), 152, 164, 241n36; on demands in, 178; urban farming
COVID-19 workplace protec- in, 186–87
tion, 148–49; as democratic unpaid family members, 172;
union, 192 unemployment and home-
United Farm Workers (UFW): makers, 82–83; vulnerable
boycotts of, 126, 135, 136, employment and, 52, 53
139; Bustamante farmworker urban farming: advantages of, 188;
and, 129; California Migrant Boggs on, 187; in Cuba, 185–86;
Ministry as arm of, 128; Chávez, in U.S., 186–87
C., as president of, 126; Cohen Ure, Andrew, 77, 99
of, 128–29, 133, 136; corrup- US Postal Service (USPS): postal
tion of, 137; Eggers of, 128, supervisors wage theft, 86–87;
130; Ganz and, 133, 134, 136; stress after privatization of,
Grossman of, 129; Hartmire of, 85–86; Trump on mail sorting
128, 132, 133; Hispanic farm- machines, 86
workers, 138; Huerta of, 127,
129, 135; Laue of, 128; lettuce value-free nature, of economics,
strike, 136; Lopez farmworker 32, 35
and, 129; Medina of, 128, 130, Vera Cruz, Philip, 133, 139
133, 134, 135, 137; migrant vertical farms, 187–88
farmworkers and, 128; Nathan Volvo (firm), 219
of, 129; rise and fall of, 124–40; vulnerable employment: Chen on,
Rodriquez as president of, 129, 49; COVID-19 and, 52; exam-
137; Romero as president of, ples of, 49–50; of indigenous
index 261

population, 52–53; self- worker centers, 164; labor unions

employed in, 49, 52–53; unpaid cooperation with, 197, 198
family members and, 52, 53; of worker/peasant alliances, 172, 175,
women, 52; World Employment 201
and Social Outlook report on, workers: as commodity, 48, 84;
48, 49, 52–53 COVID-19 and job quitting
of, 143–44; DSA on militancy
wage labor, capitalism exploitation of, 144; human capital invest-
of, 47–48 ment of, 13; inputs conversion
wages: BLS on Black jobs and, 115; into outputs by, 19; managerial
Borts on unemployment and control and dehumanization of,
high, 34; data on productivity 110; subordinate social class of,
increase and, 36; inequality of 76, 83; Trump on human capital
women, 119–20; labor unions of, 86, 152; see also automotive
for determination of, 14; labor workers; Black workers; factory
unions hiring workers and workers
increase in, 16; race discrepan- Working (Terkel), 72–73
cies in, 115–16; unemployment working class: capitalist class con-
and above-equilibrium, 102–3; nections with, 78–79; goods
USPS postal supervisors theft and services production, 79;
of, 86–87 Henry VIII creation of, 46;
Walkley, Mary Anne, 56–57, Marx on, 46; Marxist economist
225n19 on exploitation of, 14; peasant
We Are Driven (film), on Nissan addition to, 141–42; Thompson
plant, 231n16 on, 46; Trump hostility toward,
wealth: inequality in, 35; owner- 152–53; unification of, 122–23;
ship, 79 unions failure in ideology of,
The Wealth of Nations (Smith), 27; unpaid family members as,
30, 38 172; see also resistance, from
welfare mothers, 69–70 working class
women: COVID-19 impact on, 146, working class divided, 123;
167, 234n17; expropriation of, COVID-19 impact on, 116–17;
119; Karageorge on COVID-19 by gender, 117–22; by race,
impact on working class, 120–21, 111–17; by religion, 111
234n17; patriarchy and, 117; working conditions, automotive
social reproduction and, 118–19; workers deterioration of, 88
unemployment and, 52; vulner- working poor: adjunct professors
able employment of, 52; wage as, 67–69; of cab drivers, 60;
inequalities, 119–20; welfare COVID-19 and, 52; restaurant
mothers, 69–70; working poor, 52 workers, 59; self-employment
262 index

and, 53; of women, 52; World world change, in class struggle:

Employment and Social Outlook consumption socialization
report on, 48, 51–52 in, 176; demands for, 175–76;
working-class politics, 198; for egalitarian society in, 176–77;
capital defeat, 200–201; Cuba end results for, 174–77; need
and, 204–5; democratic, 199, for radical, 216–17; planned
204; DRUM and, 203, 242n50; economy in, 176; positive
for ecosocialist production, outcomes from, 218; social
219–20; education and, 199; reproduction institutions public
immigrant rights support and ownership in, 176; sustainable
funding, 207; imperialism and, environment in, 176; worker-
206–7; Malm on ecological community workplace control,
destruction mitigation, 200– 176
201; race and gender in, 202–5; World Economic Forum, on
RPA model, 199–200; in Russia, mechanization and workforce
203–4; Seymour on social reduction, 100
relationships in, 202; worker/ World Employment and Social
peasant initiatives support and Outlook report, of ILO:
funding, 201 COVID-19 and, 50; on unem-
workplace: CCTV cameras in, ployment, 48, 50–51; on
101; college campus, 15–16; vulnerable employment, 48, 49,
COVID-19 protection cam- 52–53; on working poor, 48,
paigns in, 147–48, 236n11; early 51–52
capitalist, 174; global warm- World War II (WWII), mass
ing and, 194–95; labor market strikes before, 26
connection to, 19; worker-com-
munity control of, 176