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The Blue-Collar Fight for Social Justice<\/em>, Sunday Review, The New York Times, October 10, 2021<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Today’s Sunday Review in The New York Times, one of the most widely-read sections of print in the world, in print and online, has two remarkable pieces. If they were not planned to be read together, they should have been.<\/p>\n Truth, when delivered in a manner that is both straightforward and complex at once, is a striking thing. These “companion” pieces deliver.<\/p>\n Farah Stockman of the Editorial Board is the author of one piece and Ezra Klein of the Time’s podcast The Ezra Klein Show the other.<\/p>\n Here’s an excerpt from Stockman:<\/p>\n I first met Shannon in 2017, shortly after her bosses announced that Rexnord, the bearing factory where she worked, was shutting down and moving to Mexico and Texas. I followed her for seven months as the plant closed down around her, watching her agonize about whether she should train her Mexican replacement or stand with her union and refuse. I also followed two of her co-workers: Wally, a Black bearing assembler who dreamed of opening his own barbecue business, and John, a white union representative who aspired to buy a house to replace the one he\u2019d lost in a bankruptcy.<\/em><\/p>\n One of the biggest takeaways from the experience was that some of the most consequential battles in the fight for social justice took place on factory floors, not college campuses. For many Americans without college degrees, who make up two-thirds of adults in the country, the labor movement, the civil rights movement and the women\u2019s liberation movement largely boiled down to one thing: access to well-paying factory jobs. …<\/em><\/p>\n Shannon\u2019s feminism felt radically different from the women\u2019s liberation movement that I grew up with. The movement I knew about was inspired by Betty Friedan\u2019s \u201cThe Feminine Mystique,\u201d the groundbreaking second-wave feminist tract that spoke of the emptiness and boredom of well-off housewives. That movement focused heavily on breaking glass ceilings in the white-collar world: the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court (Sandra Day O\u2019Connor, 1981); the first female secretary of state (Madeleine Albright, 1997).<\/em><\/p>\n But low-income women, especially Black women, have always worked, not out of boredom but out of necessity. Their struggles, which the labor historian Dorothy Sue Cobble has called \u201cthe other women\u2019s movement<\/a>,\u201d garnered far less media coverage. Who knows the name of the first female coal miner? How many know the full name of \u201cMother Jones,\u201d the fearless labor organizer once labeled \u201cthe most dangerous woman in America\u201d because legions of mine workers laid down their picks at her command? (It was Mary Harris Jones.) …<\/em><\/p>\n Of course, for every story like Shannon\u2019s, there\u2019s a story about a woman in India or China or Mexico who has a job now \u2014 and more financial independence \u2014 because of a new factory. Globalization and social justice have many sides.<\/em><\/p>\n But those foreign workers don\u2019t vote in American elections. The fate of our democracy does not depend on them the way it hinges on voters like Shannon, Wally and John. The American experiment is unraveling. The only way to knit it back together is for decision makers in this country, nearly all of whom have college degrees, to reconnect with those of the working class, who make up a majority of voters.<\/em><\/p>\n And an excerpt from Klein:<\/p>\n For Shor, cancellation, traumatic though it was, turned him into a star. His personal story became proof of his political theory: The Democratic Party was trapped in an echo chamber of Twitter activists and woke staff members. It had lost touch with the working-class voters of all races that it needs to win elections, and even progressive institutions dedicated to data analysis were refusing to face the hard facts of public opinion and electoral geography. …<\/em><\/p>\n Shor believes the party has become too unrepresentative at its elite levels to continue being representative at the mass level. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s a coincidence that the people we\u2019ve lost are likely to be low-socioeconomic-status people,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you look inside the Democratic Party, there are three times more moderate or conservative nonwhite people than very liberal white people, but very liberal white people are infinitely more represented. That\u2019s morally bad, but it also means eventually they\u2019ll leave.\u201d The only way out of this, he said, is to \u201ccare more and cater to the preference of our low-socioeconomic-status supporters.\u201d …<\/em><\/p>\n Shor is right about how the Obama campaign understood the electorate. David Simas, the director of opinion research on Obama\u2019s 2012 campaign, recalled a focus group of non-college, undecided white women on immigration. It was a 90-minute discussion, and the Obama campaign made all its best arguments. Then they went around the table. Just hearing about the issue pushed the women toward Mitt Romney. The same process then played out in reverse with shipping jobs overseas. Even when all of Romney\u2019s best arguments were made, the issue itself pushed the women toward Obama. The lesson the Obama team took from that was simple: Don\u2019t talk about immigration.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t have the luxury of just sending one mobilization message that isn\u2019t going to be heard by a whole bunch of persuadable voters,\u201d Simas told me. \u201cSo if we make immigration the central part of a message in Wisconsin, what\u2019s that going to do to the massive amount of non-college whites who\u2019re much more concerned about bread-and-butter economic issues?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n These are barely tastes of the depth of these pieces.<\/p>\n A quote from Stockman bears repeating, that for every story about a woman (or man) whose job has been lost to globalization,\u00a0there\u2019s a story about a woman in India or China or Mexico who has a job now \u2014 and more financial independence \u2014 because of a new factory. Globalization and social justice have many sides.<\/em><\/p>\n Yes. Which is why globalization needs to evolve to what philosophically supported it–The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the most basic rights of food, shelter, health care and education for all.<\/p>\n We’ve been saying this for some time and history has been proving it for some time–we’re in one world and the global system has to work for everyone.<\/em><\/p>\n In the meantime, as Stockman points out, only Americans vote in America, and American democracy will be sustained or not on the provision of basic needs and rights for all. America is still the linchpin for the rest. And both the linchpin and the rest have never been more at risk.<\/p>\n Read on, please:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n “What Killed the Blue-Collar Struggle for Social Justice”<\/a><\/p>\n Ms. Stockman is a member of the editorial board. This essay is adapted from her forthcoming book, \u201cAmerican Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n In 1998, Shannon Mulcahy<\/a>\u2019s boyfriend beat her up so badly that prosecutors in Indiana decided to press charges. She hid in a closet rather than obey the subpoena to testify in court. How could she help convict the man who put a roof over her head? Over her son\u2019s head? Eventually, she left him. Shannon, a white woman in her 20s, got the money and the confidence to strike out on her own from a job at a factory. She worked at a bearing plant in Indianapolis for 17 years, rising to become the first woman to operate the furnaces, one of the most dangerous and highly paid jobs on the factory floor.<\/p>\n I first met Shannon in 2017<\/a>, shortly after her bosses announced that Rexnord, the bearing factory where she worked, was shutting down and moving to Mexico and Texas. I followed her for seven months as the plant closed down around her, watching her agonize about whether she should train her Mexican replacement or stand with her union and refuse. I also followed two of her co-workers: Wally, a Black bearing assembler who dreamed of opening his own barbecue business, and John, a white union representative who aspired to buy a house to replace the one he\u2019d lost in a bankruptcy.<\/p>\n One of the biggest takeaways from the experience was that some of the most consequential battles in the fight for social justice took place on factory floors, not college campuses. For many Americans without college degrees, who make up two-thirds of adults in the country, the labor movement, the civil rights movement and the women\u2019s liberation movement largely boiled down to one thing: access to well-paying factory jobs.<\/p>\n Shannon had experienced more abuse and workplace sexual harassment than anyone I knew. Yet she hadn\u2019t been drawn to #MeToo or the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton. To Shannon, women\u2019s liberation meant having a right to the same jobs men had in the factory. She signed her name on the bid sheet to become a heat-treat operator, even though no woman had ever lasted in that department before. Heat-treat operators were an elite group, like samurai warriors and Navy SEALs. They worked with explosive gases. The men who were supposed to train Shannon tried to get her fired instead. \u201cHeat treat is not for a woman,\u201d one said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She persisted. Heat-treat operators earned $25 an hour, more money than she\u2019d ever earned in her life. She wasn\u2019t going to let men drive her away. She wasn\u2019t above using her sexuality to her advantage. She flirted with the union president and wore revealing shirts into the heat-treat department. \u201cAm I showing too much cleavage?\u201d she\u2019d ask. She paid particular attention to Stan Settles, a much older man who knew how to run every furnace. If his shirt came untucked while he was bending over, exposing the top of his butt, Shannon would issue a solemn warning: \u201cCrack kills, Stan.\u201d<\/p>\n In the end, Stan took her under his wing and taught her everything about the furnaces that there was to know. By the time I met Shannon, she was the veteran in charge of training new heat-treat operators. She took pride in the fact that she didn\u2019t depend on a man \u2014 even, and perhaps especially, Uncle Sam.<\/p>\n Shannon\u2019s feminism felt radically different from the women\u2019s liberation movement that I grew up with. The movement I knew about was inspired by Betty Friedan\u2019s \u201cThe Feminine Mystique,\u201d the groundbreaking second-wave feminist tract that spoke of the emptiness and boredom of well-off housewives. That movement focused heavily on breaking glass ceilings in the white-collar world: the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court (Sandra Day O\u2019Connor, 1981); the first female secretary of state (Madeleine Albright, 1997).<\/p>\n But low-income women, especially Black women, have always worked, not out of boredom but out of necessity. Their struggles, which the labor historian Dorothy Sue Cobble has called \u201cthe other women\u2019s movement<\/a>,\u201d garnered far less media coverage. Who knows the name of the first female coal miner? How many know the full name of \u201cMother Jones,\u201d the fearless labor organizer once labeled \u201cthe most dangerous woman in America\u201d because legions of mine workers laid down their picks at her command? (It was Mary Harris Jones.)<\/p>\n It was not until 1964 that the law enshrined workplace protections against discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race. Women were added to the Civil Rights Act at the last minute, a poison pill<\/a>meant to ruin its chances. But the bill passed, changing the course of history. The percentage of working women rose to 61 percent in 2000 from 43 percent in 1970. From 1976 to 1998, the number of female victims of intimate partner homicides fell by an average 1 percent per year. (The number of male victims of intimate partner homicide fell even more steeply.<\/p>\n But the Civil Rights Act did not benefit all women equally. By far, those who reaped the greatest rewards were college-educated white women who joined the professional world, who grew rich on economic shifts that swept their blue-collar sisters\u2019 jobs away. Today, well-educated women \u2014 who tend to be married to well-educated men \u2014 sit atop the country\u2019s financial pyramid.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The struggles of blue-collar women against a system of occupational segregation \u2014 called \u201cJane Crow\u201d in Nancy MacLean\u2019s book \u201cFreedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace\u201d \u2014 continued against the headwinds of economic challenges. For instance, in 1969, a female steelworker in Chicago named Alice Peurala had to sue to get a job that had been assigned to a man with less seniority. She won and went on to become president of the Steelworkers local. But in the years that followed, the steel industry collapsed. Eventually, her plant shut down for good.<\/p>\n In 2016, about three million American women worked in manufacturing, a far greater number than worked as lawyers or financiers. Yet the urgent needs of blue-collar women for quality child care, paid medical leave and more flexible work schedules rarely made it into the national conversation, perhaps because the professional women who set the agenda already enjoyed those benefits.<\/p>\n So much of the debate about sexism and women\u2019s rights focuses on how to negotiate salaries like a man and get more women onto corporate boards. Meanwhile, blue-collar women are still struggling to find jobs that pay $25 an hour. And the United States remains one of the only countries with no federal law mandating paid maternity leave<\/a>.<\/p>\n To Wally, the Black man I followed, the major success of the civil rights movement was that Black people got a chance at better jobs on the factory floor. Black people had been barred from operating machines, from tractors to typewriters, well into the 20th century, according to \u201cAmerican Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor,\u201d by Jacqueline Jones.<\/p>\n Wally\u2019s uncle Hulan managed to get hired at the bearing plant in the early 1960s, with the help of the N.A.A.C.P. But like every other Black man there, he\u2019d been assigned a janitor\u2019s job. Hulan complained to the union steward. \u201cThere are only so many jobs in this building,\u201d the steward replied. \u201cIf you take one, that means that our sons or son-in-law or our nephew can\u2019t have it.\u201d The day after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, Hulan asked his boss for a chance to operate a machine. The boss, who was known as tough but fair, sent him to the grinding department. But the white man assigned to train him refused to even speak to him. Hulan had to learn by watching from afar.<\/p>\n Eventually, Hulan figured out how to do the job. Over the years, he won over his white co-workers and was promoted to foreman, the first (and last) Black man to serve in that role at the plant.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\nBy <\/span>Farah Stockman, The Sunday Review, The New York Times,\u00a0Oct. 10, 2021<\/span><\/div>\n\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2021\/10\/10\/opinion\/sunday\/07stockman\/07stockman-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale\")
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