Editors’ Note And Introduction

NOTE

The COVID-19 pandemic turned so many parts of our lives upside down, including the publishing of this journal. We have decided to publish it as we would have last year out of respect to the students who submitted papers to us. As you read through their research, reflections and analysis, keep in mind that they were written in late 2019. The following introduction will hopefully bring you back to what we were all experiencing at that time.

INTRODUCTION

Two thousand nineteen was witness to a wave of labor actions and strikes, both here in Massachusetts and nationwide. The previous year had seen the end of a nationwide strike of Marriott workers represented by UNITE-HERE, including members of Local 26 in Boston. But anyone who thought that the widespread strike action of 2018 was a minor blip in labor history was mistaken. Just a few days into the new year, National Grid and United Steelworkers 12012 and 12003 agreed to a contract that would end a months-long, brutal lockout that attempted to force gasworkers into a two-tier contract and would reduce pensions and benefits. In April, more than 30,000 United Food and Commercial Workers members at Stop & Shop stores in the Northeast walked off the job. Dedham teachers, members of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, held a brief but successful wildcat strike in October. And Harvard graduate students welcomed the region’s first major snowstorm with a December strike.

“In a strong economy, why are so many workers on strike?,” asked a New York Times headline in October 2019. Volume 2 of the Undergraduate Journal on Work, Labor and Social Movements gives University of Massachusetts students at each of our four campuses the opportunity to answer this question. Increasingly, our students are recognizing that the economy isn’t designed with working people and their families in mind. If there is one theme that unites this year’s selections, it’s that workers - of all ethnicities, nationalities, ages, and job categories - deserve the right to dignity and respect in the workplace, particularly when it comes to health and safety, the right to a living wage, and benefits that allow us to care for ourselves and our families.

Like Volume 1, our second issue of this journal contains work from all four campuses (Boston, Dartmouth, Amherst and Lowell) and in a variety of formats (research, personal essays, and creative work). This year’s first prize research essay, “Apart at the Seams” by Camille A. Nichols (Dartmouth), examines the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh not as a tragic fatal accident but as the outcome of the abusive and destructive ready-to-wear fashion industry. Nichols also analyzes international responses to the disaster and identifies key factors that would allow the largely female workforce a far larger measure of freedom and safety. Our other research prize winner is Lisa Robinson from Amherst, whose essay “Unpaid Internships: Espresso and Exploitation” is well-researched and provocative. Robinson digs into the finer points of law and guidelines from the Department of Labor to find the loopholes that allow companies to hire interns for unpaid work. This is detrimental to the company, the intern, and all other workers, Robinson argues. (Editors’ note: Some of our programs do provide internships for credit as an option for students to complete their degree requirements outside of traditional learning spaces.)

This volume also includes several creative pieces and personal essays. While fostering research skills is a key part of the educational mission of our programs, we also recognize that students have their own experiences with work and labor to share, and they are endlessly creative in how they reflect on and analyzes their experiences and their research. Our first prize winner for the creative category is UMass Boston’s Michael F. Donahue, whose “Monster dot com” provides an eloquent narrative of working class adolescence. As the narrator explores the impacts of poverty on family life, he comes to a new appreciation of his mother and the sacrifices she makes to raise three kids on her own. In “Money’s Currency,” _____ (Boston) guides us through a cavalcade of liquid metaphors for the ways in which capitalism sweeps along everything in its path. The deck is always stacked against the poor when it comes to building the American Dream, and even those who have managed to see the system for what it is find themselves back in thrall to the greed of acquisition when they manage to rise out of poverty. In the end, we are left with the author, standing alone with his broken dreams, still determined to rebuild - a haunting image for our uncertain times. In “Humanity’s Loss,” Zachary Doherty (Lowell) brings us a screenplay from a dystopian future based on Neal Schusterman’s novel Scythe, revealing the revolutionary potential of fan fiction. In the world Doherty creates for us, artificial intelligence has taken over, supposedly eliminating war and poverty while ushering in a eugenic culling process for humans no longer deemed necessary for the machine to run. Doherty makes clever use of an on-screen “commercial” to critique our own allegiance to the algorithms that determine so much of our day-to-day life, a form of AI that is all too often dismissed as neutral and apolitical.

Finally, we chose one reflection to include in this year’s journal. Daniel Bazarian’s “Economies of the Tragically Hip: Reflections on How I Didn’t Get Fired from the Job I Lost” (Lowell) is a painfully funny and impeccably written essay on the disillusionment that comes from pulling the curtain back on working conditions in trendy lefty establishments. It’s easy to be taken in by businesses that utilize the language of progressive politics to sell lattes without standing by the values of equality and justice, Bazarian argues. Like Nichols, he finds hope in the possibility of collective bargaining, though he recognizes that the fight for unions in the gig economy presents its own unique challenges.