[AUDIO] Organizing Precarious Workers
[AUDIO] Organizing Precarious Workers
Organizing Precarious Workers
There has been a heated discussion on the left about “precarity.” The debate, often theoretical, has centered on whether the “precariat”—made up of contingent laborers, the under- and overemployed, freelancers, undocumented workers, and so forth—can be considered a new class, perhaps even the “revolutionary subject” of the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, in the realm of active politics, the Left perennially bemoans the decline of labor unions and the impossibility of a resurgent Left without finding a way to organize workers in the new economy.
The goal of the panel discussion we co-hosted with Verso Books at Left Forum this year—”The New Dangerous Class? Perspectives on Organizing Precarious Labor”—was to bring these two issues together, drawing precarity out of the realm of theory and into practical politics. We wanted to see if the idea of precarity itself made sense: do adjunct faculty, domestic care workers, interns, guest workers, and graduate students really have enough in common to justify the umbrella term? And if so, what can this tell us about organizing workers to fight?
The conversation that ensued was extraordinary. The discussants uncovered points of commonality and described the range of strategies being employed to empower precarious laborers. We heard about guest workers who, realizing they had been brought in as precarious labor to replace unionized labor, went on strike in solidarity with that union. We heard about graduate students struggling alongside clerical and maintenance workers to unionize their university—the new shop floor—wall to wall. We heard about domestic workers who, despite the fact that they often lack citizenship, have built a powerful advocacy organization without any union at all and are now forming cross-class alliances to protect and expand their victories.
The conversation could have gone on well past the scheduled end of the panel, and in the pages of Dissent, it will. Precarious labor is now a central question for the Left, and we’re proud to present this remarkable beginning to answering it.
We encourage readers who weren’t at Left Forum to take the time to listen by clicking here. The audio is available courtesy of Francis Reynolds.
The panelists were:
Ross Perlin is the author of Intern Nation (Verso). He has written for the New York Times, Time magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, and Open Democracy.
Mary Nolan is co-editor of The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace. She is a professor of history at NYU and on the editorial boards of International Labor and Working-Class History and of Politics and Society.
Stephen Boykewich is communications director for the National Guestworker Alliance, a membership organization of guestworkers dedicated to winning dignified work, the right to organize, empowered migration, and a just economy for all workers. He has worked as a media and communications strategist with numerous community organizations and networks, and as a journalist and commentator on four continents.
Joyce Gill-Campbell is a Domestic Workers United organizer and activist.
Max Fraser is a journalist, doctoral student, and organizer who lives in New Haven, Connecticut. He is a member of the steering committee of GESO, the Graduate Employees and Student Organization, at Yale University, where he studies American labor history. His writing has appeared in the Nation, Dissent, New Labor Forum, and elsewhere. His most recent Dissent article documented his travels through American cities undergoing industrial decline.
Sarah Leonard (moderator) is associate editor at Dissent and co-editor of the New Inquiry Magazine‘s “Precarity” issue.
