differentclasswar

[differentclasswar]

Class is not a baseball cap: Jacob Swenson-Lengyel interviews me on Necessary Trouble

Class is not a baseball cap: Jacob Swenson-Lengyel interviews me on Necessary Trouble

I am used to calling Jacob Swenson-Lengyel, of People’s Action, when I need to know what kind of trouble is being stirred up across the country. Their work is featured across Necessary Trouble, and so it was great fun to let Jacob turn the tables and interview me about the book for the Campaign for America’s Future blog.  An excerpt, but you should read the whole thing: You write in the book that…

[differentclasswar]

Starred Review at Kirkus!

Starred Review at Kirkus!

This is so exciting! An essential guide to forces shaping our nation and the 2016 presidential election. Read the rest at Kirkus!

[differentclasswar]

Review at In These Times!

Review at In These Times!

Thanks, Shaun Richman, for the lovely review at my old workplace (CWA represent). In These Times was where I worked out a lot of the ideas in this book, so excellent to see it reviewed there. They’ll also be co-sponsoring my Chicago appearance next month–stay tuned for details, it’s gonna be so good. Something is happening. Socialism is no longer a dirty word (the “S-word”), but something a…

[differentclasswar]

changeslifebowie

Inspired by Melissa. 

like all girls of a certain age, I met him here: 

but unlike all girls, it was my name he was saying. 

Even then it was a lie: "You have no power over me."

In high school I saw this:

and I want to go back and shake my 15-year-old self and tell her she doesn't know what she's seeing, that this

will matter so much for so long. (bye bye love) (1.Outside is a really good album) (I have a thing about Bowie's punctuation)

In another high school hundreds of miles away, a boy who was never really mine (this is also a pattern) played this for me:

I didn't want to admit to him what was new and what wasn't so I shrugged, outside.

In college I bought this on vinyl before I even had a record player

danced to this at so many 80s nights

and this too

and then the glam rock Saturdays at the Shim Sham began and I was doomed,

doomed,

doomed

I wrote a short story listening to this in an overly-hot apartment in Denver and added to it for years

it's still somewhere, waiting to be finished. I bought that live record in a book/record store in New Hampshire visiting my grandmother. I had a record player by then, or maybe my second one.

there was this, somewhere in there:

and another boy who wasn't mine kissed me at a karaoke night and tried to convince me this was an anti-imperialist song

I got my heart broken hard enough to leave scars (not his fault) and this was, incongruously, what I reached for

when Spotify hit the US I started at the top and went all through the 2000s albums and I fell deeply in love with this

bought this on vinyl and obsessed over the quotation marks around "Heroes"

and this dropped after years and years without new Bowie, and we prayed for a tour and the video was everything

wrote a book review and karaoke'd to this, always my song from the first time I heard it

and when the news came out that he was gone, this was the song that sent me over the edge into real, hard, ugly tears

[differentclasswar]

When an attack of hauteur masked as civility strikes, one would do well to recall Sam Gompers’ reply to Mark Hanna’s complaint about the ‘undiplomatic’ behavior of the Buffalo Steelworkers in his employ who had gone on strike to protest abuse by their foremen. ‘We don’t raise diplomats,’ said Gompers, ‘at fifteen cents an hour.’

The Populist Persuasion, Michael Kazin

Been trying all day to figure out where this quote can fit into the chapter of my book I’m working on and finally decided that it needs to go elsewhere. But it’s a good one for the current moment, so I’m sharing it with y’all. 

[differentclasswar]

Election time!

It's that time of the year that we always dread, everyone. Somehow without really meaning to, I did write a bunch of stories that are somehow relevant to next Tuesday's vote-a-thon. If you're in New York, particularly, these links are relevant, but there's some stuff about national politics or other states, too. 

Here, then, in reverse chronological order, are my election-related pieces for this season: 

A Teacher on the Ballot, Belabored podcast, October 31, 2014. We talk about the education and labor issues at stake in the New York governor and lieutenant governor's races with Brian Jones, Green Party candidate for LG. 

Maine governor slammed over vetoes of expanded Medicaid program, Al Jazeera America, October 30, 2014. A look at what the refusal to expand Medicaid in several states has meant for residents of those states, and how it's become a campaign issue for Democrats looking to unseat Republican governors. 

Philadelphia's school reform debacle: despised governor crosses the line, Salon, October 7, 2014. Tom Corbett's last-ditch effort to be reelected: try to destroy the Philadelphia teachers' union. (It's probably not working.)

I have a piece in The Progressive which is not online, looking at ballot measures on the minimum wage and paid sick time--if you happen to be in a bookstore or newsstand, check it out. 

How Zephyr Teachout Taught Democrats a Lesson in Democracy, The Nation, September 10, 2014. No, she's not on the ballot, and I've not included every piece I wrote about Teachout's campaign, but I am linking this one here because I think we should all remember to challenge inevitability narratives. 

It's time to raise the minimum wage, The Guardian, September 2, 2014. As expected, about the minimum wage, the uselessness of Congress, and the movements that are changing the debate anyway.

How New York's governor is playing politics with Women's Equality, RH Reality Check, July 30, 2014. About the Women's Equality Party, which is neither made up of women, an actual party, nor about equality. 

Will Cuomo keep his promises? In These Times, June 2, 2014. On the Working Families Party's decision to endorse Andrew Cuomo. The answer to the question in the headline from so many months ago appears, so far, to be "No." 

[differentclasswar]

Happy Labor Day

The folks at Jobs with Justice have a fun initiative to celebrate Labor Day this year. They're asking people to share stories of the work their grandparents did, and to think about what they learned from them. 

I'm actually writing this about the one grandparent I didn't know. My mother's father, Lionel Morin, died before I was born. (On the other side of the family, I am the granddaughter of a small businessman--catering--and a schoolteacher.) 

My grandfather's father owned a brickyard in Maine. It shut down well before I was ever thought of, but the bricks that came from it dot the town in New Hampshire where my mother grew up, where I used to go to visit my grandmother and still go to visit my aunt and uncle. The church we went to for my grandfather's funeral was made from Morin bricks. 

I can't say that he taught me anything about work directly. Instead, what I learned about him came from my grandmother and my mother, who were and are both the kind of women who don't shy away from hard, physical work as well as incredibly precise household labor (and a whole lot of care work). 

But a few years ago, my uncle gave me a booklet put together by a man named Edward Vetter (Edward, if you're out there, I hope you don't mind me sharing this, and I'd love to talk to you about your research). Vetter had been interested in photography and had collected pictures of the brickyards in Maine. 

These are some photos of my grandfather and the brickyard from that book. 

[differentclasswar]

I’ve always been convinced that my true profession is that of a journalist. What I didn’t like about journalism before were the working conditions. Besides, I had to condition my thoughts and ideas to the interests of the newspaper. Now, after having worked as a novelist, and having achieved financial independence as a novelist, I can really choose the themes that interest me and correspond to my ideas. In any case, I always very much enjoy the chance of doing a great piece of journalism.

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 69, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

[differentclasswar]

Come and celebrate our chapbook with us this Thursday at Melville House, 145 Plymouth St. in Brooklyn. 7pm. There will be cake, and Jennifer Pan will ask Melissa Gira Grant and I questions about feelings, work, feminism, and classwar. You can buy the book there, or if you cannot make it, you can still order it here. 

[differentclasswar]

“I mean, ­journalists should be dark, funny, mean people. It’s appropriate for their ­antag­onistic, adversarial role.”

Raging Against Hacks With Matt Taibbi -- Daily Intelligencer I am a fan of Matt Taibbi's work and look forward to reading his stuff at First Look. In fact, pretty much everyone that's been announced as part of the First Look team is a reporter I love and respect. But this line is sitting hard with me this morning, and Twitter's not really allowing me the space to say what I want to about it in a nuanced fashion. See, I mostly agree with this line. Gallows humor is part of the gig when you dig up depressing, awful things for a living. You have to be willing to see the dark stuff, not look away, and be able to handle that and not crack. (Mostly.) But what bothers me, I think, is that I'm watching more and more young(ish) mostly white male journalists be handed new media empires. So many of us are wondering where the women are, and it's sentences like this that give us a clue as to the answer. Those characteristics--dark, funny, mean--are rarely attributed to women. Women are supposed to be nice, sweet, caring. We're not funny, according to major comedy outlets and news outlets alike. Mean? Good luck getting work ever again if, as a woman, you're accused of being mean. (And even when you just set boundaries of what work you will and will not do, and how much you will and will not take in pay.) I know lots of women who are brilliant, fierce reporters, who live in the dark and manage to be funny anyway. A few of those women are even part of these new media endeavors, but they haven't been the subject of the glowing profiles I've read. This is hard for me to write. I too am a journalist who doesn't want to burn bridges or anger people who might want to hire me and who've unfailingly supported my work. But I'm writing it because this is a structural issue that goes way beyond whether or not women lean in. It's an issue of how we perceive people based in gender and race (it is unsurprising too that few men of color get to be "mean"--as we know, even talking back briefly gets young men of color killed), and what that says about who gets to do this work that I've dedicated my life to, that I think matters deeply.

[differentclasswar]

get yours

[differentclasswar]

Guillotine #6: For Love or Money

"We talk a lot about the need for a politics of pleasure, and once again I’m talking not just sexual pleasure but all sorts of pleasures. To be able to say that not only should people not worry about starving to death but that they should be able to eat healthy, fresh, good food that they like. And I think it’s important to point out that this is not greed, that the myth of the greedy poor person is a distraction from the real greed, the systemic greed that’s embedded in policy. This is our right to live lives that are enjoyable, not just to pursue happiness or whatever the damn cliché is."

Melissa Gira Grant and I spend a lot of time talking to each other about politics, power, sex, labor, money, and love. Now we've put that conversation into chapbook form, brought to you by the fabulous Sarah McCarry and Guillotine press.

Preorder the special edition, with a limited-edition broadside designed by Bryan Reedy and letterpress printed by Sarah McCarry, here.

[differentclasswar]

Employees receive no tax deduction for the donations, as they do by giving to a charity directly. When soliciting employee contributions to PACs in exchange for charitable donations, companies typically say they want to increase voluntary participation in the political process and support pro-business candidates. Many companies offer a one-for-one match and donate the money to a charity of the employee’s choosing. Coca-Cola and HP both do this. Wal-Mart goes further. It offers a two-for-one match, and the contribution must go to the Associates in Critical Need Trust, or ACNT, a charity the company started in 2001 to help its own store workers facing financial distress. Wal-Mart gave the ACNT about $3.6 million in double-matching funds in the year that ended January 31, according to an audit of the charity’s financial filings.

Wal-Mart to HP Reap Worker Political Donations Through Charities - Bloomberg

So I talked a bit on the podcast, with the fabulous Liza Featherstone, about the story of Walmart employees being expected to donate food to their needy colleagues and how this demonstrates something about the corporate culture at Walmart that Bethany Moreton has explained so well.

Well, this is an even more fascinating twist on the whole story. 

In To Serve God and Wal-Mart, Moreton lays out the company's twin narratives--the exploitation of (mostly female) caring labor for low wages, and the growth of Walmart as a political-ideological powerhouse. This latest report twines them both together perfectly. 

Walmart asks its employees to donate to its political work (which is not tax-deductible, though few Walmart associates probably make enough for tax deductions to matter, managers might) and will match that donation two-to-one to a charity. So: appealing to the workers' better natures by offering a big charitable donation in exchange for a small political one. 

But the charity has to be the one that Walmart chooses--and it's the one that Walmart controls, set up to donate to its own employees "facing financial distress." 

Yes, that's right. Instead of giving the associates a raise, Walmart prefers to donate to a "charity" of its own making, creating a fund to help out a few associates rather than spreading some wealth across the board. 

And that charity serves as a way to exploit workers' feelings of care and support for one another to raise funds for its political lobbying--which focuses on "pro-business" policies that mostly harm those same workers. 

"Wal-Mart has been vocal on issues including the minimum wage," the article notes. 

And then there's this: 

In 2009, IntercontinentalExchange Group Inc. (ICE), which operates global commodity and financial products marketplaces, asked the FEC for an advisory opinion on starting a double-matching program. The commission split evenly on the matter and issued no opinion. According to an audio recording of the meeting that April, three of six commissioners concluded double-matching would “skew the incentives” and “undercut the voluntariness” of contributions to the PAC. One said a double-match would “smack of buying off the contributor,” noting it could open the door to five-to-one matching or more.

So, while the practice as a whole is legal, the FEC is a little iffy as to whether double-matching "undercuts the voluntariness" of the money employees give to the political network. And "Tying the PAC and the charity could confuse donors," according to a "former official at the Wal-Mart Foundation and associates charity," who spoke anonymously. 

Right. 

The article notes that most of the people who contribute are managers rather than hourly associates, possibly because hourly associates don't make enough money to make donations, charitable or otherwise, and also possibly because as Moreton notes, managers at Walmart are likely to have been picked for ideological reasons, from ideologically-aligned programs that Walmart funds at colleges and universities, and so on.

So they may well agree with the political direction that Walmart is steering them in. But even if they don't, the company's come up with yet another way to turn any potential care and solidarity they might have with their fellow workers to its advantage. 

[differentclasswar]

a brief blog post about Springsteen

I'm reading (and loving) Jefferson Cowie's Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, and one of my favorite things about it is how Cowie, a labor historian by trade, deftly dips into cultural criticism and reads the films and music of the 70s as well as the political and labor struggles. 

I'm in the midst of his excellent reading of Darkness on the Edge of Town, which is a record that I love by an artist that I adore, and in my head I find myself picking a fight with his description of "Thunder Road" (and all of Born to Run) as uncritical depictions of the desire of the working-class man to escape his hometown. 

For me, I always read "Thunder Road" as a bit of desperation, as the last hope of a guy who knows this hope too probably won't work. I've been a runner all my life, I think, and this song resonates with me in a way that many more "political" Springsteen songs don't. I never read that record straight, in other words, but rather as a performance of the bravado of a certain kind of youth that's staring down the barrel of a hard life of work. 

Because lines like "So you're scared and you're thinking that maybe we ain't that young anymore" load "Thunder Road" with equivocation; it's full of fragile bravado. Even if you read the "not a hero" of the song as a representation of Bruce himself (a thing you'd be unwise to do considering he's one of the best narrative songwriters ever), the thing that has given Springsteen staying power is that he knows just how fragile his own success is, just how rare, and just how little separates him from the people he left behind.

But I'm realizing too that I'm an 80s baby; that I didn't hear Born to Run when it came out and didn't even experience the whole album until sometime in the early 2000s I started to dig into Springsteen along with the Americana/alt-country of Lucero and Cory Branan. My memories of "Thunder Road" begin with a Best of Springsteen album that my mother and I bought on a road trip as something we could agree to listen to, and thus I always heard that song bleeding into "Badlands" and especially "The River" (from the double album of the same name from the year of my birth, 1980). 

Because "The River" is the flipside of "Thunder Road," it's what happens after the guy and the girl "ride out of that valley down to where the fields were green" and realize that there's nothing out there waiting for them except more hard work, "a union card and a wedding coat."

I always read the "heaven waiting down on the tracks" through the lens of the question asked by 1980 Bruce: "Is a dream a lie if it don't come true?"

(A digression that doesn't fit with anything else I'm working on, but it's been quite a while since I've felt inspired to write something purely for the pleasure of it.)

[differentclasswar]

References for "Labor of Love: How Unpaid Work Exacerbates Inequality"

These links will get you more information on many of the subjects mentioned in my talk. 

Danielle Lee, Scientific American, "Responding to No name Life Science Blog Editor who called me out of my name"

Adam Kotsko, "Follow your dreams"

Patricia Williams, The Nation, "Writing as Woman's Work"

Madeleine Schwartz, Dissent, "Opportunity Costs: The true price of internships"

Blair Hickman and Christie Thompson, ProPublica, "How Unpaid Interns Aren't Protected from Sexual Harassment"

InternJustice.com

Josh Sanburn, Time, "The Beginning of the End of the Unpaid Internship As We Know It"

Erin Cunningham, The Daily Beast, Conde Nast Ends Internship Program

Steven Greenhouse, The New York Times, "The Unpaid Intern, Legal or Not"

Steven Greenhouse, The New York Times, "Interns, Unpaid by a Studio, File Suit"

Kathryn Anne Edwards and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Economic Policy Institute, "Not-So-Equal Protection--Reforming the Regulation of Student Internships"

Farai Chideya, The Nation, "How to Fix Journalism's Class and Color Crisis"

Heidi Moore, The Guardian, "Little surprise here: Women expected to do more at home--and at work"

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, "A General Strike"

Silvia Federici, "Wages Against Housework"

Me at Jacobin: "A Day Without Care"

Me at In These Times: "Opting for Free Time"

Me at In These Times: "Overworking Women: How long hours lead to gender-segregated jobs"

Lawrence Mishel, EPI, "The wedges between productivity and median compensation growth"

[differentclasswar]

I'll be hosting a panel on Sandy and inequality next Monday, with excellent panelists--come check it out if you can.