One of the things I was struggling with in \u201cSpadework<\/a>\u201d is the question of politics and time\u2014not only the time of one\u2019s own life and decisions about how to spend it, but time in the sense of the historical moment one is in. I was trying in particular to find a way to think about the classic structure-agency debate\u2014in other words, to think about organizing as neither voluntaristic and heroic, where if you just work hard enough you can overcome all obstacles; nor as completely determined by the historical moment, the power of the university, and everything else that can make action feel impossible.<\/p>\n It does feel like there\u2019s been a real sea change in academic labor politics over the past few years: contracts at Brandeis, NYU, Harvard, Clark, Columbia, Georgetown, Brown; campaigns at Indiana, Dartmouth, Hopkins, Northwestern, Chicago; and many others. Barnard resident assistants just filed for union recognition a few days ago; NYU adjuncts voted to authorize a strike this week. My own grad union, Local 33\/GESO, just filed a new set of cards with the NLRB on Monday and I think that this time the longest-running union campaign in the US may finally succeed.<\/p>\n All of this is obviously part of an enormous shift in labor politics that\u2019s happened in the past few years. Unionization efforts at Starbucks and Amazon obviously stand out as two highlights in a broader labor revival which has seen more elections, more strikes, more wins, as Bernard\u2019s post notes<\/a>. (Jonah Furman\u2019s Who Gets the Bird? substack is a great source of news on labor actions.) Last fall\u2019s strike here at Columbia stood alongside strikes by nurses, coal miners, John Deere workers, and workers in other sectors as part of a strike wave dubbed Striketober. While the tight labor market of the pandemic has clearly changed the balance of power between labor and capital, this is not just a post-Covid phenomenon: Red for Ed, the multi-state teachers\u2019 union movement stands out as a pre-pandemic highlight, for which the Chicago Teachers\u2019 Union strike of 2012 was an important model. There are also big fights looming: namely, the potential freight rail workers\u2019 strike, which was temporarily averted but may be back on, and Teamsters strike threat at UPS.<\/p>\n And yet\u2014organized labor in the US still faces immense structural challenges. In 2021, for example, both the number of union members and percentage of workers who belong to a union continued to decline. Private sector union density stands at a dismal 6.1%. And now that the Fed is explicitly taking action to curb inflation by \u201ccooling the economy,\u201d with the explicit goal of decreasing wage growth by increasing unemployment, the conditions that have been favorable to labor over the past year or so may not last much longer.<\/p>\n The structure\/agency question describes, I think, the tensions and questions at the heart of the two books I wrote about<\/a>\u2014Sarah Jaffe\u2019s Work Won\u2019t Love You Back<\/em> and Aaron Benanav\u2019s Automation and the Future of Work<\/em>. Benanav presents a convincing case that the dynamics of contemporary capitalism are such that the power of labor to challenge capital is increasingly diminished, in the U.S. but also around the world. Jaffe, meanwhile, looks at the way the \u201cnew working class\u201d of service, retail, tech, and other workers\u2014including academics!\u2014is getting organized. While both Benanav and Jaffe have utopian aims, what I find most inspiring in Jaffe\u2019s work is her attention to the ways that people not only envision the utopian future to come but make utopias in the present through acting together. Those experiences stay with people long beyond the moment itself. As the labor historian Gabriel Winant\u2014a Local 33 comrade\u2014noted about last year\u2019s strike wave, \u201ceven after it recedes, we will be able to see the pools it leaves behind \u2013 reservoirs of solidarity, consisting of material victories and new political experiences.\u201d Even struggles that don\u2019t immediately succeed they may help lay the ground work (or do the spadework) for what\u2019s to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Alyssa Battistoni One of the things I was struggling with in \u201cSpadework\u201d is the question of politics and time\u2014not only the time of one\u2019s own life and decisions about how to spend it, but time in the sense of… Continue Reading