Editors’ Introduction

The idyllic image of college students whose sole duty is attending classes, sitting on the quad, going to parties, and cramming for exams has always been more myth than reality. In 2018, however, it has become increasingly difficult to defend a vision of the college student existing in a temporary space outside the confines of the labor market, a kind of holding zone before they embark upon careers and enter the workforce. We know that for today’s college student in particular, going to class is just one part of a busy life that includes one or often more part time jobs; caretaking duties for children, siblings, parents, and other family members; unpaid internships; and work-study. Our students are not now, nor have they ever been, in a category outside the workforce. As such, their voices are incredibly important but often overlooked in the academic field of Labor Studies and in the labor movement.

While many of us have grown accustomed to reading news reports about the stagnation of unions, recent news has shown a few glimmers of hope. In recent years, support for unions among young people has skyrocketed. A 2018 Pew poll found that people under 30 have a 68% favorable view of labor unions; Gallup puts the number closer to a stunning 76%. The recent poll numbers are cause for celebration, and there’s strong reason to believe that young people today have very different ideas about what unions and a strong labor movement should look like. With only about 10% of today’s workforce in a traditional union structure, recent organizing efforts have shifted to include various models of workers’ centers and cooperatives, electoral politics (especially the “blue wave” pushing to shift the Democratic Party to the left and the skyrocketing chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America and their Young DSA counterparts), and ballot initiatives for higher pay and paid leave.

This year has spurned serious challenges, both for the labor movement as a whole and for the UMass system. In June, the Supreme Court ruled as expected in favor of Mark Janus in the Janus v. AFSCME case. Janus, a Chicago social worker backed by anti-union organizations, argued that paying dues to his union was an infringement upon his First Amendment free speech rights – but that he should still receive the benefits of a union contract. More locally, the UMass Boston, in seeking to reduce a $30 million structural budget defcit to $5 million, has cut classes, eliminated programs and laid off employees, reducing access to and resources for the largely working-class population of students of color who make up the majority of the students at that campus. Both of these challenges have spurred an outpouring of student and labor activism on our campuses and in our communities.

In creating the Undergraduate Journal on Work, Labor and Social Movements, the Labor Extension Program of the University of Massachusetts system hopes to foster a cross-campus conversation among undergraduate students at each UMass campus. This is a space for students to research trends in labor from historical, economic, and sociological perspectives; to explore the roles that labor and the labor movement play in their own lives and those of their peers; and to reflect on their own activism.

For this inaugural issue, the editors chose three categories for submissions: research, creative work, and activist reflections. The finalists we selected for publication examine questions of education, training, theory, and worker justice from a variety of lenses emphasizing the predominance of intersectionality in the way our students are thinking about labor and activism. As we have seen in the Dreamers movement, the #MeToo movement, March for Our Lives, and the Movement for Black Lives, many of today’s most successful youth organizers do not see economic justice as separate from racial justice, gender and sexuality justice, immigrant justice, and environmental justice.

Not surprisingly, several of our submissions analyzed the topic of public education from a variety of perspectives. Joy O’Halloran’s “Contradictions of Priority: Unpacking Charles Murray’s ‘Are Too Many People Going to College?’” tackles the argument by the controversial author of The Bell Curve that higher education has become too accessible in the United States. O’Halloran criticizes Murray’s determinist model of student achievement and vigorously defends the liberal arts model of critical thinking. Elijah Pontes’s “Separate and Unequal” questions the assumption that segregation, particularly in the public education system, ended with the Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the Supreme Court in 1954. Pontes’ insightful reading tracks the ways in which state-monitored supervision of desegregation broke down relatively quickly after it began, as well as the ways in which unequal tax allocations perpetuate basic economic inequalities, exacerbated by unequal access to quality education. While not focused directly on public education, Varun Palnati’s essay “A Look at the Skill-Biased Technological Change Paradigm and Why it Fails to Adequately Explain Labor Market Shifts” looks at the question of workforce training models, particularly when it comes to technological shifts that change the way we think about what work is and how it is performed. Palnati argues that technology has caused the middle to drop out of the labor market, pushing jobs either towards highly-skilled workers or unskilled workers. The notion that technology will allow more workers to earn higher wages is fawed, he says, particularly when combined with the rising trend of shorter-term jobs that disincentivize quality employee training.

The other essays chosen for publication here demonstrate a wide variety of skillful, creative, and playful thinking about work and activism. In “The Proletariat Spectre,” Jesse Johnson updates the famous line from Marx for an audience reared on The Walking Dead and imagines class conflict as an all-out war of zombies v. vampires. Marx’s spectre, they argue, is a more apt metaphor for granting agency to the working classes, a haunting that shows its presence in every labor uprising that weakens the power of the ruling classes. Folasade Imani Smith’s creative nonfiction piece, “Sweet Pea,” gives readers a moving and compelling portrait of the hectic life of a young activist coming to terms with her ethnicity and sexuality. She marches across campus with Black Lives Matter activists, goes home to be a dutiful daughter, and balances the diffculties of living her truth in every segment of her life. Last but not least, Katherine McCormick’s “SEIU Summer: A Photo Diary” documents her internship with the Service Employees International Union, where she had the opportunity to learn about strikes and organizing on her feet. McCormick shares images from her participation in the Philadelphia airport workers’ campaign as well as in the coalition working to pass the Safe Communities Act in Massachusetts to protect immigrants and refugees in our state.

All of this wonderful work from our students demonstrates a new hope for the future of the labor movement, but it shows something else too: this generation is reshaping the way all of us think about work, workers, and economic justice. This first issue of the Undergraduate Journal on Work, Labor and Social Movements sends the resounding message that the new labor movement is intersectional, and it sees the worker as a whole person whose ethnic, cultural, gender, and sexual orientation identities all shape their experiences at work.

Our sincere thanks to University of Massachusetts President Marty Meehan for his generous support of labor education and extension through the Future of Work funds.