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Boston Globe 

April 06, 2014 - Last month, when the college football players of Northwestern University tentatively won the right to unionize, the ruling by the regional National Labor Relations Board asserted that even though these young men were students at their school, they were also its employees. The decision-which could still be reversed-promised to make union men out of a group that looked quite different, at least on the surface, from the blue-collar factory workers who have traditionally been the face of American labor.

But to look around the modern landscape of American employment is to see a number of equally surprising organizing efforts. Music video dancers recently unionized. Adjunct professors on some college campuses have, too. In New York, jazz musicians have been pressuring nonunion nightclubs for pensions and other benefits, and on the Internet, video game designers have discussed the possibility of unionizing as a means of protecting themselves against game companies. Meanwhile, fast-food workers all over the country have been organizing with the help of the Service Employees International Union.

These people might seem like they have nothing particular in common. But behind their disparate organizing efforts, which come amid plummeting private-sector union membership overall, is a profound shift affecting nearly every industry in the American economy. More and more working people, at all levels of income, are operating in a gray area in terms of their employment status. For some, this means being hired as independent contractors or temps; for others, it means working for a subcontracting company or a franchise that takes orders from a massive corporation. For others still-this would include the college football players-it means being told that the work they're doing is not work at all. As Boston University School of Management professor David Weil writes in his recent book, "The Fissured Workplace," "employment is no longer the clear relationship between a well-defined employer and a worker."

Most workers affected by this new paradigm are not at risk for being maimed or killed on the job, the way American miners were in the 1860s when dangerous working conditions spurred them to unionize. But they feel vulnerable in a different way. In a world where a full-time, long-term job with benefits at a single company is increasingly rare, these so-called precarious or contingent workers often lead unpredictable lives without financial stability or a clear set of similarly affected colleagues.

Under this new regime, formal unionization is out of the question for millions of Americans. In response, the labor movement has begun to experiment with new possibilities for how workers might negotiate for better conditions. Beyond outside shots at unionization like that of the college football players, worker groups and labor advocates are exploring ways to harness collective action without the official bargaining rights that made unions such powerful institutions in the past.

"Most of our labor law is built on this New Deal vision of the industrial workforce, when it was fairly clear who the employers were," said Kate Griffith, an associate professor at Cornell University's ILR School and cochair of the Precarious Workers Initiative. "Generally speaking, there wasn't the same level of complexity that we have now." Figuring out how to organize workers who would otherwise be excluded from the labor movement entirely, Griffith said, is an attempt to "adapt the old labor law model to new realities."

As union membership in the country continues to decline-from its peak of around 35 percent of the private-sector workforce in the 1950s to 9.2 percent in 1994 to just 6.6 percent in 2013-the flowering of nontraditional organizing campaigns around the country can be seen as an indicator of how the job market has created new categories of Americans who see themselves as vulnerable to exploitation. Taken together, their efforts represent a major shift in thinking-both within the labor movement and outside it-about what today's workers have in common, and what kinds of obstacles they face.

"There's been a fundamental shift in the workplace in this country," said Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center. "These are all experiments in trying to organize the new working class."
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Labor unions first began to form in the United States during the mid-19th century, as the industrial revolution created a vast range of new jobs in which workers felt themselves to be at the mercy of their employers. Joining a union meant that individual dissatisfactions could be turned into a collective demand for better pay, less grueling schedules, and safer working conditions; by presenting a united front, workers gained leverage to pressure employers into signing contracts that guaranteed these and other protections....(Click title for more)

A lawyer. A computer scientist. A military analyst. A teacher.

What do these people have in common? They are trained professionals who cannot find full-time jobs. Since 2008, they have been tenuously employed - working one-year contracts, consulting on the side, hustling to survive. They spent thousands on undergraduate and graduate training to avoid that hustle. They eschewed dreams - journalism, art, entertainment - for safer bets, only to discover that the safest bet is that your job will be contingent and disposable.

Unemployed graduates are told that their predicament is their own fault. They should have chosen a more "practical" major, like science or engineering, and stayed away from the fickle and loathsome humanities. The reality is that, in the "jobless recovery", nearly every sector of the economy has been decimated. Companies have turned permanent jobs into contingency labour, and entry-level positions into unpaid internships.

Changing your major will not change a broken economy.

In the United States, nine percent of computer science graduates are unemployed, and 14.7 percent of those who hold degrees in information systems have no job. Graduates with degrees in STEM - science, technology, engineering and medicine - are facing record joblessness, with unemployment at more than twice pre-recession levels. The job market for law degree holders continues to erode, with only 55 percent of 2011 law graduates in full-time jobs. Even in the military, that behemoth of the national budget, positions are being eliminated or becoming contingent due to the sequester.

It is not skills or majors that are being devalued. It is people.

Academics face particular derision for their choice of profession. "You got a PhD - what did you expect?" they are told when they note that 76 percent of professors work without job security, usually for poverty wages.

It is true that the academic job market has been terrible for decades. But until 2008, PhDs could have expected more. Since 2009, most disciplines have lost roughly 40 percent of their positions, while the backlog of qualified candidates continues to grow. Most PhDs work as adjunct faculty or in the new euphemistic sectors of high-brow impoverishment: "non-stipendiary fellow", "special assistant professor" or "voluntary development opportunity".

Despite the dire employment conditions of higher education, young people continue to enrol in graduate school. Detractors roll their eyes: Why would a young person spend years earning a degree of questionable value? Why not "go get a job"? To which the 20-something laughs, having graduated into an economy where peers spend years vainly looking for a job, finding only unpaid internships or low-wage contingency labour, often while living at home. A funded graduate programme, with health insurance, seems a welcome escape.

"But it is not just about your current earnings," the detractor continues, "It is about the wages you lose while in the programme." To which the 30-something, having spent their adult life in an economy of stagnant wages and eroding opportunities, takes the 20-something aside, and explains that this is a maxim they, too, were told, but from which they never benefitted. They tell the 20-something what they already know: It is hard to plan for what is already gone.

We live in the tunnel at the end of the light.

If you are 35 or younger - and quite often, older - the advice of the old economy does not apply to you. You live in the post-employment economy, where corporations have decided not to pay people. Profits are still high. The money is still there. But not for you. You will work without a pay rise, benefits, or job security. Survival is now a laudable aspiration....(Click title for more)

April 4, 2014 - Here's the scenario: This year's epic drought devastates agriculture in California. Water use is rationed, so the cost of grain goes up, and, because cattle eat grain, the cost of beef goes up too. To cut expenses, the owners of a fast food restaurant cut a worker's wages and benefits by a couple bucks an hour. Next month he won't be able to send money to his wife and kids back in Mexico, where the same drought is also decimating farms-and may be contributing to even more northward migration.

What's the origin of the restaurant worker's predicament?

"Intersectionality" is a way of thinking holistically about how different forms of oppression interact in people's lives.

Is it climate change, which makes droughts more severe and more likely to persist? Is it the labor policies that allowed the worker's wages to be cut? Or is it that NAFTA has flooded the Mexican market with cheap, U.S.-grown corn since 1996, forcing him to leave his family's farm and migrate to California in the first place?

The likely answer is that it's a little bit of everything. "People don't have one dimensional identities as human beings," says Brooke Anderson-a Labor Fellow at the Oakland-based nonprofit, the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project-and the issues that affect them aren't one-dimensional, either.

There's a word for this kind of thinking: "intersectionality." And while the word has been around for more than 25 years, it's being used more and more frequently all over in social justice movements today, from climate to reproductive rights to immigration. It's a way of thinking holistically about how different forms of oppression interact in people's lives. More recently, it's also led to a more collaborative form of organizing that reflects that, rather than taking on one issue at a time.

"Intersectionality" has become a buzzword in activist circles, at conferences, and in progressive media. Google searches for this term have gone up 400 percent since 2009. Last year's Power Shift youth climate conference featured a workshop called "Why the Climate Movement Must Be Intersectional." It's a trendy word in academia, the subject of countless papers and panel discussions, and in the feminist blogosphere.

But is it more than that? Does adoption of this concept signal a sea change in social movement thinking away from single-issue platforms and toward a more holistic worldview, one that fosters strong alliances and therefore might help build a movement broad and complex enough to take on the myriad forms of economic, racial, and gender oppression we face?

Possibly-but first, it's important to understand what intersectionality really means. The term has evolved since Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA and Columbia University, first coined the term in a legal article published in 1989. In the article, she tried to contextualize a 1964 lawsuit against General Motors, in which five black women sued for discrimination. They were prohibited from working in the factory, they claimed, which was reserved for black men. But they were also prohibited from working in the front offices, which were for white women....(Click title for more)

Solidarity, Carl Davidson, CCDS