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Trump’s Tariffs and Trade War

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#MeToo in the Hospitality Sector
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Filipino Migrants’ Radical History

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Why Janus v. AFSCME Matters

REAL WORLD ECONOMICS
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What’s Behind the

H E R S ’
T E A C
R I K E S
T
S A Labor
Movement
Analysis
 DOLLARS < From the Editors

&SENSE Our New Annual Labor Issue

W
REAL WORLD ECONOMICS
ith this issue, we move our Annual Labor Issue from September/October to May/
June—or, as we have been telling people, from the bosses’ Labor Day to where it
Dollars & Sense magazine explains the workings of
the U.S. and international economies and provides
belongs: near May 1st, which is celebrated almost everywhere besides the United States
left perspectives on current economic affairs. It is as International Workers’ Day.
edited and produced by a collective of economists,
journalists, and activists who are committed to social
Our cover story, by veteran labor organizer Ellen David Friedman, looks at the biggest sto-
justice and economic democracy. ry in the U.S. labor movement today—the teachers’ strikes that have caught fire in West
the d&s collective Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, and Colorado. The strikes caught many people by sur-
Betsy Aron, Will Beaman, Autumn Beaudoin, prise because they are happening in “red” states with relatively weak unions and labor rights.
Sarah Cannon, Peter Kolozi, Tom Louie,
John Miller, Jawied Nawabi, Nick Serpe,
But GOP austerity policies in those states have squeezed public-sector workers, and teachers
Zoe Sherman, Bryan Snyder, Chris Sturr, in particular, for years; the strikes are a response by teachers who have reached a breaking
De’En Tarkpor, Cadwell Turnbull,
William Whitham, Jeanne Winner
point. Friedman analyzes the insurgency as the last recourse teachers have when politicians
and labor bureaucrats have failed them. But this “movement moment” also includes the
staff
co-editors Nick Serpe, Chris Sturr
growing democratic rank-and-file caucuses in the blue states, like the one that took over the
business and office manager De’En Tarkpor Chicago Teaches’ Union, which are linking up with likeminded teachers in the red states.
communications and
outreach coordinator Tom Louie
Public-sector workers are about to feel yet another squeeze—from the expected U.S.
Supreme Court ruling in in Janus v. AFSCME Council 31. That ruling, which could come by
editorial intern
Aashna Alim early summer, is likely to eliminate the requirement that workers who don’t want to join an
existing union have to pay an agency fee for the collective bargaining services that the
work study
Lauren Morgan union provides. In his “Economy in Numbers” column in this issue, Gerald Friedman pro-
vides some background to Janus, including the precipitous rise of public-sector unions in
the d&s board
Gerald Friedman, John Miller, the 1960s and ’70s; the steady rate of unionization in the public sector since then, even as
Steven Pressman, Abby Scher, the rate in the private-sector has fallen; and the fact that women, African Americans, and
Chris Sturr, De’En Tarkpor
Latinos are disproportionately likely to work in the public sector and to be in public-sector
Ten-year collective members (historical) unions. These groups will be affected most by Janus, but the ruling will also undermine the
Frank Ackerman, Randy Albelda, Betsy Aron,
Phineas Baxandall, Mark Breibart, Marc Breslow, positive pressure public-sector unions have on wages and pensions for all workers.
Beth Burgess, Jim Campen, Dick Cluster, As is the case in teaching, women are also represented disproportionately in the hos-
Chuck Collins, Ellen Frank, Amy Gluckman,
Erkut Gomulu, Sue Helper, Arthur MacEwan,
pitality sector. Economist Ellen Mutari’s feature in this issue examines how that affects
John Miller, Laura Orlando, Linda Pinkow, the dynamics of sexual harassment in the sector, with a focus on casino workers. Mutari
Alejandro Reuss, Adria Scharf, Bryan Snyder,
Chris Sturr, Chris Tilly, Jeanne Winner
emphasizes how intersecting institutionalized power structures of gender, race, and class
are key to understanding workplace harassment and how it differs from sector to sector.
Five-year staff members (historical)
Nancy Banks, Marc Breslow, Randall Divinski,
Collective action, including militant action through unions and through organizations
Deborah Dover, Daniel Fireside, Amy Gluckman, like the Restaurant Opportunities Center United, will be key to moving the #MeToo
Maryalice Guilford, Patricia Horn, Linda Pinkow,
Paul Piwko, Alejandro Reuss, Abby Scher,
movement from a hashtag/media phenomenon focused on Hollywood to a robust social
Chris Sturr, Vince Valvano, Tim Wise movement encompassing industries with lower-wage workers.
design History holds important lessons about the importance of labor militancy. As Jane
layout Chris Sturr Slaughter noted recently in Labor Notes, the striking teachers in West Virginia wore red
front cover design Chris Sturr
printing   Boyertown Publishing
bandanas in homage to that state’s heritage of militant organizing among coal miners.
Similarly, David Bacon’s feature on the role of militant Filipino activists in the history of
Dollars & Sense (USPS 120-730) is pub­lished bimonthly
by the Economic Affairs Bureau, Inc., 89 South Street, the famous grape strike of the late 1960s credits the activists for keeping a legacy of la-
LL02, Boston, MA 02111, a non-profit corporation.
ISSN: 0012-5245. 617-447-2177. Fax: 617-447-2179.
bor militancy alive through another period of reaction, the Cold War.
E-mail: dollars@dollarsandsense.org. Periodical postage Also in this issue: John Miller looks at the Wall Street Journal’s criticisms of Trump’s tariffs
paid at Boston, MA, and additional mailing offices.
and the resulting trade war with China and outlines a progressive alternative to both
For subscription information, contact Dollars & Sense, 89
South Street, LL02, Boston, MA 02111. To subscribe,
Trump’s trade chaos and the Journal’s free-market trade policies; Arthur MacEwan responds
go to: www.dollarsandsense.org/subscriptions.Please to a reader’s question about what regional wage variations mean for the proposal to raise
allow 4–6 weeks for delivery.
the minimum wage to $15/hour; we begin a new series by teacher and community activist
POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Dollars &
Sense, 89 South Street, LL02, Boston, MA 02111. All Jane Paul on efforts to build a sustainable economy in Los Angeles; and more! D&S
articles copyrighted. Dollars & Sense is indexed in
Sociological Abstracts, PAIS Bulletin, Alternative Press
~~~
Index, and The Left Index. Subscriptions: 1 year, $24.95; We are very pleased to announce that Dollars & Sense has a new co-editor, Nick Serpe!
2 years, $39.95; institutions, $45/year; Canada, $33/
year; other foreign, $49/year (airmail), plus $20 for Nick worked for several years as an editor at our comrade publication, Dissent magazine,
institutions. Back issues available for $5.00 prepaid, or
on microfilm from UMI, 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann
and more recently did graduate work in economic history at Columbia University, where
Arbor, MI 48106. he studied the political economy of Silicon Valley. He brings extensive experience in edit-
www.dollarsandsense.org ing and left publishing and also a passion for labor organizing and left political activism.
Welcome, Nick!

2  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  MAY/JUNE 2018

 DOLLARS
&SENSE
REAL WORLD ECONOMICS

NUMBER 336 | MAY/JUNE 2018

CON TENT S

page 7 page 18

TH E R E GUL AR S

NEW ANNUAL L ABOR IS SUE

4 the short run

FEATUR ES 5 up against the wall st journal

Beyond Trump’s Trade War
7 What’s Behind the Teachers’ Strikes
The Labor-Movement Dynamic of Teacher Insurgencies 30 in review
E L L E N D AV I D F R I E D M A N Dominique Morisseau, Skeleton Crew

12 #MeToo in the Hospitality Sector 32 economy in numbers

How sex, gender, and class intersect when workers Why Janus Matters
routinely face sexual harassment.
E L L E N M U TA R I
34 ask dr. dollar
What are the effects of a $15 per hour
18 How Filipino Migrants Gave the Grape Strike
minimum wage?
Its Radical Politics
Honoring Larry Itliong and a generation of radicals whose
political ideas are as relevant to workers now as they were in 1965.
D AV I D B A C O N

26 Financing a Sustainable Economy in Los Angeles

Part 1 of a Series: A Sustainable Economy Rises in Lost Angeles
JANE PAUL

MAY/JUNE 2018  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  3

< The Short Run
By Nick Serpe and Zoe Sherman
Disney Disses the Union
Promoters of the recently passed tax
“reform” bill tried to make the case that
it would be good for workers. With a
low corporate tax rate, they said, em-
ployers could afford to raise wages. (In
public, at least, they kept a straight
face. They did not, however, explain
why the money they promised would
go to workers had to pass through em-
ployers’ hands first.) This fantasy seems
to have been realized in the Magic
Kingdom. According to a March 13
report by NPR’s Marketplace, Disney
celebrated the tax break bonanza by
giving $1,000 bonuses to each of more
than 80,000 Disney World employees.
The system works!
Except that ... a bonus is not a raise.
And, even more disturbing, only non-
union employees got the bonus. The
38,000 union members, currently in
the midst of contract negotiations, did
not. The message is clear: the corpo-
4  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l MAY/JUNE 2018
rate lords may sometimes toss a few
coins to the peasants on a whim. But
when the peasants organize and
threaten to chip away at the lords’
power, the lords don’t feel so whimsi-
cal anymore. —ZS
Compassion Takes Flight
Facing public outcry for its mistreat-
ment of passengers, United Airlines
decided to implement a new “compas-
sion training program” in which ap-
proximately 30,000 employees will
have to participate. But it doesn’t seem
like executives at the airline are taking
the same lessons to heart. They recent-
ly introduced a lottery system for cash
and prizes (like cars and vacation pack-
ages) that would replace employee bo-
nuses, reversing course only after
thousands of United workers com-
plained about the change.
According to a memo obtained by
the Chicago Business Journal, United
president Scott Kirby believed this
“exciting new rewards program” was in
keeping with the company’s efforts to
burnish a more humane public image.
The connection between compassion
training and taking away bonuses was
lost on employees. The program, called
“core4 Score Rewards,” was designed
so that only employees that met cer-
tain criteria, such as perfect atten-
dance, would qualify to participate in
the lottery. One flight attendant wrote,
“Guess next time I get the flu I’ll still
drag myself to work, because the com-
pany only rewards all our hard work to
make this company a success if we nev-
er call in sick.” As another flight atten-
dant put it, United employees reject an
incentive system that pits coworkers
against one another: “I win at the ex-
pense of tens of thousands of fellow
employees? No thanks.” —NS
The NCAA’s Iron Cage
College athletes generate a lot of
revenue for their schools. But NCAA
officials reject the idea that student
players should be paid, because what
they do doesn’t qualify as “work.” As
Shaun King reported in The Intercept,
when one former college athlete sued
the athletic association for pay, NCAA
lawyers made this point using a
disturbing precedent: the exemption
carved out for prisoner laborers in 13th
Amendment’s ban on “involuntary
servitude.” Just as prison workers and the
people who control their lives do not
have an employment relationship
(according to the Supreme Court), the
amateur tradition of collegiate athletics
falls outside the social relations between
employee and employer. King boils it
down: “The body that runs college
sports wants to use a justification for the
slave labor of convicted criminals to
justify its outrageous greed.” Apparently,
the NCAA would rather reveal the
contempt with which it views its athletes
than share the profits made from their
hard work. —NS D&S
< Up Against the Wall Street Journal
W $J
Beyond Trump’s Trade War
BY JOHN MILLER Mr. Trump raised the stakes late
Thursday in his tariff showdown

T he Wall Street Journal editors are
right that President Trump’s tariffs
will undoubtedly harm the U.S. econo-
my. Just how much will depend on
whether his tariffs and trade bluster
ignite a trade war. Not that it much
worries Trump, who insists that trade
wars “are easy to win.” (See box below
for an account of Trump’s tariffs and
trade threats.)
But that doesn’t make the non-
interventionist, free-market policies
the Wall Street Journal editors are
peddling a desirable alternative. Their
hyper-globalization policies have not
brought and will not bring economic
relief to those who have been left be-
hind and will instead continue to
shower gains on financial elites.
The Trump Tariffs and the
Triumph of Economic Illiteracy
The Wall Street Journal editors have
complained that it is hard to discern
the overall strategy to Trump trade
policy, which seems to be backed up
by little other than “nonsense trade
economics.” Economists of all stripes,
advocates and critics of market-led
globalization, agree.
To begin with, there’s Trump’s fixa-
tion with the U.S. trade deficit with
China ($337 billion in 2017), when the
United States trades with many other
THE TRUMP TARIFF SAGA IN A NUTSHELL
vowing to impose another $100 billi with Beijing,
on in tariffs on Chinese goods in
“unfair retaliation” after his initial light of its
$50 billion in tariffs. … Then Chi
in return, saying it is ready to “for na popped off
cefully” strike back if the new tarif
The basic economic problem with fs are imposed.
trade protectionism is that it is a poli
vention that distorts markets. One tical inter-
political intervention leads to another
mulative consequence is higher pric , and the cu-
es, less investment and slower econ
—“Punishing America First” by omi c growth.
the Editorial Board, Wall Street
April 7, 2018. Journal,
countries, too. Martin Wolf, the
pro-globalization columnist at the ers is good, and buying stuff [that could
Financial Times, the leading British have been made in the United States]
business daily, likens worrying about from foreigners is bad,” is conservative
running a trade deficit with one coun- economist Robert Barro’s best guess as
try to worrying about running a con- to what constitutes Trump’s theory of
sistent trade deficit with your local international trade. For Barro, Trump
supermarket (where you buy without has things backward: “Imports are
selling). Your supermarket deficit is of things we want,” and “exports are the
no concern to you (or the supermar- price we have to pay to get the im-
ket) as long as you continue to pay ports.” One doesn’t have to accept
your bills. Economist Joseph Stiglitz, a Barro’s vision of trade to acknowledge
leading critic of corporate globaliza- that any coherent trade theory needs
tion, adds that even if tariffs reduced to take into account the benefits of im-
Chinese imports, they would not cre- ports to consumers and producers as
ate jobs in the United States. Those well as the production and employ-
tariffs would just increase prices for ment effect of exports, and to recognize
U.S. consumers and create jobs in that running a trade deficit (imports
Bangladesh, Vietnam, or any other that exceed exports) is not in and of
country that steps in to replace the itself a sign of a failed trade policy.
imports that had come from China. On top of that, Trump’s tariffs are
Then there’s Trump’s exports-only likely to cost U.S. manufacturers jobs,
approach to trade policy. “Selling stuff even without considering the debilitat-
[made in the United States] to foreign- ing effects of Chinese retaliatory tariffs.
Take the 25% tariff that Trump imposed
on imported steel (which probably will
end up being paid by China, most other

I n February, the Trump administration imposed a 30% tariff on solar imports,

an industry dominated by China. A month later, the Trump administration
added a 30% tariff on steel and a 10% tariff on aluminum. After a multitude of
Asian countries that export steel to the
United States, and Russia). Steel tariffs
might protect the jobs of workers in the
country exemptions, several Asian countries and Russia are likely to be the only steel industry, but they will damage
major importers subject to the tariffs. In April, China retaliated with tariffs on industries and cost jobs in the many
128 U.S. products. Trump then announced 25% tariffs on another 1,300 Chinese industries that use steel as an input.
products, about $50 billion of China’s exports into the United States. In re- That includes the automobile sector,
sponse, China threatened a 25% tariff on 106 U.S. exports (including soybeans, aerospace, heavy equipment, and con-
cars, and airplanes), to go in effect whenever the U.S. tariffs do. Then Trump struction, all of which will have to pay
vowed to impose another $100 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods because of higher prices for steel. And the indus-
China’s “unfair retaliation” to his initial $50 billion in tariffs. That’s when the Wall tries that use steel employ 80 times as
Street Journal editors chimed in with the editorial above. many people as steel-producing indus-

MAY/JUNE 2018  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  5

 < Up Against the Wall Street Journal
tries, according to the estimates of
economists Lydia Cox and Kadee Russ.
While the United States might not get
punished first, as the editors maintain,
Trump’s tariff policy does amount to
a “stop or I’ll shoot our economy in
the foot strategy,” as former Clinton
Administration Treasury Secretary and
Obama Administration economic advi-
sor, Lawrence Summers, has put it.
Free-Trade Free Fall
The free-trade policies favored by the
Wall Street Journal editors and tradi-
tional trade economists might be more
disciplined than Trump’s hodgepodge
of tariffs, but they would do no less to
serve the rich and do no more to im-
prove the lot of those who have been
left behind by globalization. In fact, a
populist backlash against those poli-
cies helped to elect Trump president.
Honestly presented trade theory
never promised a “win-win for every-
one,” as economist Paul Krugman puts
it. Rather, traditional trade theory sug-
gests that trade, rather than increase or
decrease the number of jobs in a coun-
try, instead changes the mix of jobs.
That in turn causes massive dislocation
that leaves many behind, especially
when they get little or no support
from government. In his book The
Globalization Paradox, economist Dani
Rodrik finds that the primary effect of
reducing tariffs in the United States
would be to shift income from some
groups to others, typically from those
already hurt by globalization to those
who are already benefitting. Rodrik cal-
culates that in the case of the United
States, for every $1 of overall gains, $50
of income gets shifted from one group
to another. For typical working families,
the $1 of overall gains is likely to be
swamped by the fact that they are on
the losing end of the $50 income shift.
On top of that, much of the gains
from trade are diffuse, going to millions
of consumers in the form of lower pric-
es for cheap imports, while losses are
highly concentrated, materializing in
the form of lost jobs and the economic
6  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  MAY/JUNE 2018
decline of towns and regions. An hon-
est case for freer trade would require
government to compensate those los-
ers to ensure that everyone wins. But in
the United States that compensation
seldom, if ever, happens.
Even the net gains from free trade
have been called into question. In their
exhaustive empirical study of the ma-
jor studies of trade policy and eco-
nomic growth, Rodrik and fellow econ-
omist Francisco Rodriguez found “little
evidence that open trade policies…are
significantly associated with economic
growth.”
Historical evidence also casts doubt
on the benefits of free trade. New York
Times columnist Thomas Friedman once
challenged the critics of globalization
to name “a single country that has flour-
ished, or upgraded its living or worker
standards, without free trade and inte-
gration.” The accurate answer is that
every one of today’s developed coun-
tries relied heavily on government poli-
cies that managed and controlled its
involvement in international commerce
during its rise to prowess. The world’s
first industrial power, Great Britain, ad-
vocated free trade only after protec-
tionist policies helped 18th-century in-
dustries become well established. In the
half century following the Civil War, the
United States imposed tariffs on im-
ports that averaged around 40%, a level
higher than those imposed in virtually
all of today’s developing economies.
During the second half of the 20th cen-
tury, both Germany and Japan relied on
managed trade, not free trade, to pro-
pel their rapid economic growth, as did
South Korea and Taiwan during the
1960s and 1970s.
What Would Be Better?
A progressive policy would not turn
away from trade but would engage
the global economy with rules and
policies that are more democratic and
serve the interests of people across the
globe. To begin with, a global commit-
ment to sustained full employment
would help workers escape jobs with
dangerous working conditions that
pay rock-bottom wages. It would also
go a long way toward limiting transna-
tional corporations’ ability to pit the
workers in one country against their
employees in another country.
Nor should a progressive policy
sweep away all tariffs. In his column last
year (“What Would a Progressive Trade
Policy Look Like?” D&S, July/August
2017), Arthur MacEwan made the case
for two changes in U.S. international
agreements that would use tariffs to
reduce inequality and insecurity. First,
goods produced under conditions
where workers’ basic rights to organize
and to reasonable health and safety
conditions are denied would not be giv-
en unfettered access to global markets.
Second, goods whose production or
use is environmentally destructive
would likewise face trade restrictions.
Beyond those changes, with in-
creased international trade comes the
need for increased government inter-
vention. Government must support
people displaced by changes due to
trade, from employment insurance
funds to well-funded retraining pro-
grams to provisions for continuing
medical care and pensions.
Those sorts of trade policies would
help the majority of the world’s people
flourish economically. D&S
J O H N M I L L E R is a professor of eco-
nomics at Wheaton College and a mem-
ber of the Dollars & Sense collective.
S O U R C E S : “Trump’s China Tariffs,” Wall Street
Journal editorial, March 22, 2018; Joseph Stiglitz,
“Trump’s Trade Confusion,” Project Syndicate, April 5,
2018; Martin Wolf, “The Folly of Donald Trump’s
Bilateralism in Global Trade,” Financial Times, March
14, 2017; Robert Barro, “Trump and China Share a
Bad Idea on Trade,” Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2018;
Bob Davis and Lingling Wei, “U.S. Set to Boost
Pressure on China,” Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2018;
Lydia Cox and Kadee Russ, “Will Steel Tariffs put U.S.
Jobs at Risk?” Econofact, February 26, 2018; Paul
Krugman, “Oh, What a Trumpy Trade War!” New York
Times, March 8, 2018; Larry Summers, “Tariffs Are a
‘Stop or I’ll Shoot Myself in the Foot’ Policy,” CNBC,
April 6, 2018; Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox
(W.W. Norton, New York: 2011); John Miller, “The
Misleading Case for Unmanaged Global Free Trade,”
Scholars Strategy Network, January 13, 2015.
 What’s Behind the
Teachers’
Strikes The Labor-Movement
Dynamic of Teacher
Insurgencies
B Y E L L E N D AV I D F R I E D M A N

A S W E WAT C H — R A P T — T H E U N E X P E C T E D T E A C H E R I N S U RG E N C I E S

››
in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, and Colorado, we’re also grasping for understanding:
Roadside
Why is this stunning revolt occurring where unions are weak, where labor rights are thin, and where popular protest by
politics are considered to be on the right? To understand the insurgency, we need to look at economics, and at striking
political economy specifically. But we especially need a labor-movement analysis. teachers in
West Virginia,
A labor-movement analysis starts by understanding the political and economic conditions that shape the February 18,
objective conditions of a particular group of workers (or labor market) at a given moment—prevailing wages, 2018.
benefits, work processes, structures of employment, stability of work, market forces in the sector, etc. Then we
Credit:
look at how workers respond to those material factors and conditions: how they understand their interests, how
Eric Bourgeois,
they see their own power (or lack of it), how they understand the interests of the employers and what influences via Wikimedia
them, and how they develop tactics, strategies, and institutions to bring their power to bear against the power of Commons,
employers. Finally, the self-directed activity of workers (including their ideas, ideologies, methods of organiza- CC BY 4.0.
tion, decision-making, and what actions they take) can be embedded in the larger context of other sectors of
workers, other social movements, and historical labor movements. Such an analysis can help us interpret the
teacher strike wave and, perhaps, gain insights that can help us rebuild capable, fighting unions.

Economics and Politics

The economic motivations of these insurgencies are clear: protracted and relentless constriction of wages
and benefits have driven teachers to a condition of precarity normally reserved for workers who lack col-
lege degrees. Financial insecurity is matched by erosion of job security, as statutory probation periods are
lengthened (three years of probation is now standard) and tenure is watered down. Facing severe job vacan-
cies, many states lower—or eliminate—hiring standards and issue “emergency” waivers freely. In Arizona
right now, there are more than 5,000 classrooms without a certified teacher. No wonder, then, that teach-
ers feel they are being undervalued; they are.
The political economics of these insurgencies are also becoming more obvious. As tens of thousands of teach-
ers—many of them newly politicized—rush to understand their states’ tax structures, they discover a fiscal sys-
tem engineered to starve public services and feed corporate portfolios. This transforms their sense of being
undervalued into a comprehension that they have been betrayed by big business and the state itself.
Through years of frozen wages, cuts to student services, deteriorating buildings, and the hysterical drumbeat
that public schools are failing and must be replaced with private charters, teachers have hunkered down and
“made do.” That is, they have accommodated themselves to a widely promoted “common sense” that argued
that tax cuts serve the general good by creating jobs, and increasing individual’s buying power. Starting with the
infamous Prop 13 in California in 1978, which severely capped property taxes, and coincides with the rise of
neoliberal ideology, the redistribution of wealth away from publicly held resources (notably, public schools) and
into private hands has been relentless. But modern U.S. history reminds us that when inequalities become
chronically damaging—as in the 1930s or the 1970s—the dominant narrative can crack and resistance can be
kindled. This is when the paralysis of feeling disrespected and duped can transform into conviction and action. ››
MAY/JUNE 2018  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  7
 TEACHERS’ STRIKES
A Labor-Movement Analysis
Challenging economic and political circumstances
have certainly begun to foster a growing sense of
commonality among teachers. But awareness alone
does not automatically translate into action, much
less the collective action we can legitimately call a
labor movement. It’s therefore helpful to build up
a more nuanced analysis of teachers in their inter-
twined roles as workers, as unionists, and as mem-
bers of civil society, to assess whether these insur-
gencies signal that teachers could emerge as leaders
in a broader class movement.
As workers, teachers are in a unique structural posi-
tion, for several reasons. Teaching is the only wholly
“public profession” in the United States: a regulated
category of work originally created to perform public
Because of their intimate and vital connections
to parents, taxpayers, voters, providers of
social services, higher education, and the job
market into which students emerge, teachers
can speak to, and amplify, the critical central
needs of any community.
service (this is still true, as teachers in private schools
aren’t required to hold teaching licenses). Teachers are
employed and paid by public bodies and are subject
to public governance. Moreover, it’s a highly decen-
tralized form of public employment, with both fund-
ing and governance historically centered in towns and
cities. And it is a uniquely horizontal profession
where, until fairly recently, schools were sites of little
hierarchy and teachers were quite self-directing. These
are all structural conditions reflecting, and reinforc-
ing, radically democratic principles.
As unionists, teachers have a long history of orga-
nization. The National Education Association
(NEA) was founded in 1857. Though it was not
originally a labor union in function, it is now the
largest union in the United States, with 3.2 million
members. The American Federation of Teachers
(AFT), founded in 1916, now has 1.7 million mem-
bers. Teaching has the highest union density of any
job category in the United States; union
8  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  MAY/JUNE 2018
representation is essentially universal. Before collec-
tive bargaining was legally sanctioned at the state
level for teachers, which happened first in 1959 in
Wisconsin, there were traditions of consultation
between teachers and their school boards. Even in
states where collective bargaining is affirmatively
banned, there are well-established standards—a uni-
fied salary schedule based on years of experience and
education level, a comprehensive benefit package,
pensions, specified length of work day and year,
prep time, professional development subsidies, some
kind of grievance procedure, and so on. More than
any other sector of workers, teachers experience a
union environment—or at least an associational and
consultative environment—as the norm.
Teachers can be considered, in many ways, central
to the project of U.S. civil society. Public education
has been the main channel for incorporating “future
citizens” into economic, social, and political engage-
ment; and exclusion from adequate public education
has been a device for exclusion from civil society
more generally. And as tectonic upheavals occur—
Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, the build-up of
industrial mass production, post-WWII consumer
society, expansion of the liberal welfare state, and its
deconstruction—the shifts and conflicts all play out
in schools. Teachers are on the front line of interpret-
ing every profound societal transformation, with all
the tensions and challenges experienced personally in
individual families. This places teachers in central
positions in their communities. Because of their inti-
mate and vital connections to parents, taxpayers, vot-
ers, providers of social services, higher education, and
the job market into which students emerge, teachers
can speak to, and amplify, the critical central needs of
any community.
The combination of these three intertwined roles
has radical potential. The profession of teaching is
shaped by public imperatives, grounded in demo-
cratic practices, present everywhere, and universally
organized through job sites, and teachers hold the
levers of social meaning and aspiration for our entire
society. All the musculature of power is present—
but, until now, largely unflexed.
Unflexed Musculature of Power
Explanations in traditional “industrial labor rela-
tions” theory—and in the practice of most U.S.
unionists over the last half century—suggest that
workers are strongest where there are comprehen-
sive and enforceable labor laws that institutionalize
freedom of association, protec-
tions against anti-union animus
and retaliation, mechanisms to
establish recognition of “exclu-
sive bargaining representation”
by a majority union, guarantees
of collective bargaining, and of
course the legally sanctioned
right to strike. Our teacher
unions have been considered
strongest in those states where
these rights existed, and
where the most advanced forms
of institutional practice
could develop.
In many states where these
conditions prevail, starting in the
1960s and continuing to the
present day, the AFT and NEA
affiliates often became known as the best damned
service unions around. Teacher locals typically grew
by training up rank-and-file members to bargain
contracts, cost out proposals, and rep grievances—
with all the rule-enforcing, technique-mastering
power that these activities entail. Despite the very
uneven quality of state teacher labor laws, the routine
practice of formal labor relations—whether through
“meet and confer,” legislative lobbying, or strict col-
lective bargaining—became nearly universal in the
teaching sector. Reflecting the radically decentral-
ized, bottom-up character of U.S. public education
itself, every NEA or AFT local started at a school, or
a school district, representing a discrete group of
employees hired by a local school board. During the
last half of the 20th century, the two national federa-
tions evolved as umbrellas for thousands and thou-
sands of essentially autonomous local unions—all
figuring out how to bargain and service their own
contracts—reflecting the fact that no union could
possibly afford to hire enough professional staff to
centrally service them.
Under these objective conditions, innumerable
rank-and-file teachers were elected, or drafted, or
volunteered to learn the craft labor relations, and
became a dense army of capable technicians. By the
1980s, as the numbers of unionized teachers swelled
and dues revenue soared, the unions began to staff
up and professionalize, precipitating a culture of
negotiating instead of fighting, servicing instead of
organizing, and relegating members to client status.
As long as the economic tides were rising—as they
generally did in the 1980s, ’90s, and early 2000s—a
››
complacent and increasingly bureaucratic system for
maintaining the status quo seemed to make sense. Teachers from
West Virginia,
This is consistent with the historically recognized
Kentucky, and
tendency, articulated by Seymour Martin Lipset in Arizona speak
1956, as the “iron rule of oligarchy” through which on a panel at
bureaucracy supplants democracy. this year’s
Labor Notes
But bureaucracy itself isn’t the main problem. conference,
The arrival of neoliberalism—the driving political April 7, 2018.
philosophy of the last 40 years—has also reshaped
Credit:
our unions. While we typically associate neoliber- © Jim West,
alism with market fundamentalism—deregulation jimwestphoto
of financial structures, regressive tax reform, priva- .com.
tization, weakening of the state role in labor and
environmental protection—it is the rise of neolib-
eral organizational principles that proved toxic to
union democracy. By the mid-90s, many unions,
and non-profits of every stripe, took a turn toward
corporate management methods. In AFT and
NEA affiliates, leaders adopted key principles such
as rule by experts, inflated executive salaries, limits
on internal democracy, centralization of decision-
making, and intolerance of dissent.
As the high-value operational aspects of the
union—negotiating contracts and processing griev-
ances—migrated upward into the hands of staff and
top leaders, so too did power. Members were often
treated paternalistically, with information and deci-
sion-making kept opaque, back-door deals struck
between union leaders and politicians, and privileges
accruing at the top. Salaries of top officers soared
while average take-home pay of members stagnated, ››
MAY/JUNE 2018  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  9
 TEACHERS’ STRIKES
union halls were renovated into executive office suites
while school buildings crumbled, and channels of
union decision-making went from democratic to des-
potic, often reflecting the autocratic leadership of the
employing school boards and administrators.
The demobilizing of millions of teachers within
their own unions should not be understood as a prob-
lem of “apathetic members,” though union staff and
elected officers often describe it just this way. Rather,
it is the logical result of unions adopting a corporate
culture over the last few decades that degrades and
excludes rank-and-file members. They were often
grateful that someone was doing the arcane business
of the union, but this was an institutional invitation
to dependence and acquiescence. Many a naive new-
comer goes to a union meeting and dares ask a ques-
tion that is taken by leadership as a challenge; the
When there is no effective access to meaningful
channels for change, workers resort naturally to
the only power no one can steal from them
—the power to withhold their labor.
This spontaneous chain of wildcat strikes may be
the only recourse left for the teachers when the
unions and the politicians fail them.
newcomer is often patronized, ignored, disparaged,
or actively marginalized. Bargaining teams disappear
for months behind closed doors and then present a
fully bargained tentative agreement to be ratified—
take it or leave it. Membership meetings in many
unions are dominated by one-way leadership reports
or gripe sessions, where leaders are expected to take
member concerns up the ladder of administration for
them. It doesn’t take too many of these cues before
rank-and-file members stop coming around.
Concurrent with these trends has been the big-
gest failed strategy of all: substituting the power of
rank-and-file members with dependence on the
Democratic Party. Union members are not taught to
analyze and fight collectively on issues that matter to
them, but instead to docilely make PAC contribu-
tions, join campaign phone-banks, and support
whichever candidate the union leaders endorsed.
10  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  MAY/JUNE 2018
The results are pretty clear: Democrats have helped
restructure the economy—in the interest of private
wealth, at the expense of public good—as enthusias-
tically as Republicans. This has produced not only
the well-documented upward redistribution of
wealth, resulting in teacher poverty and starvation of
school budgets, but also the travesty of “education
reform”—where standardized curricula are tied to
high-stakes testing, which produces failed schools,
especially in communities of color, and allows for
the entry of private charters, where the culture of
teacher micro-management flourishes and bullying
principals thrive. This set of policy imperatives has
been brought to us by governors and legislatures of
every party composition.
Between the financial hardship and professional
affronts, the loss of voice and fear of retaliation by
administrators, the degraded conditions and program
losses for students, and the sense of being abandoned
by the Democrats, many teachers have been teetering
between shock, anxiety, and despair for years.
By the time the serious fiscal, political, and social
crises really began bubbling in U.S. public educa-
tion around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, the
vast majority of teacher union members felt power-
less. They were at best distant from, and at worst
angrily resentful of, their unions. Most damningly,
they saw the union as being the top officers and staff,
not themselves. Even in states with relatively strong
labor laws and well-resourced union structures, the
norm was a hollowed-out organization, with low
levels of knowledge and participation at the base,
and little autonomous power. Rank-and-file mem-
bers who did try to turn to their leaders for inspira-
tion or guidance frequently found neither.
Re-energizing the Rank and File
in Blue Cities and States
But out of this paralysis and isolation, a powerful
counter-trend is emerging (not unknown in the
history of our labor movement): Progressive rank-
and-file teacher union caucuses—groups of union
members formed to push their unions into
action—are coalescing in cities and states, inspired
by the stunning takeover of the Chicago Teachers
Union by the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators
(CORE) in 2010, and their riveting, successful
2012 strike. This movement, an internal insur-
gency inside our biggest unions, possesses the
authentic features of a social movement: it is bot-
tom-up, scrappy, unfunded, rooted in a critical
social analysis, and committed to radically demo-
cratic values. Their common program elements
show up as union democracy, dignity of educators
and students, and defense of public education, and
often rally under the edict that “we should be the
union we want our union to be.”
These caucuses are now in elected leadership in
Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, and statewide in
Hawai’i and Massachusetts. They are contending
for—or sharing—leadership in Philadelphia,
Baltimore, New York City, Minneapolis, Madison,
Albuquerque, Seattle, and Oakland, and organiz-
ing at the state level in North Carolina, New Jersey,
and elsewhere. Through round upon round of trial
and error, the caucuses are building a durable ana-
lytic framework and plan of action to guide them:
• Simply running to replace “bad union leaders”
is rarely a solution to anything, if you haven’t
built a base among members who are joined
by common values, deeply committed
to making the union better and willing to
work tirelessly.
• Learn how to survive the harsh charges from
old guard leaders that they are divisive
and even “anti-union” for daring to
provoke debate.
• Fight to open up bargaining, to insist on trans-
parency and accountability inside the union,
to risk raising critical social issues—around
racism, immigration, bullying, gentrifica-
tion—and work through the resistance of fel-
low unionists.
• Reach out humbly and helpfully to parents,
community groups, other unions, faith com-
munities, and social issue organizations as a
partner in the fight to rebalance power away
from elites and toward the majority.
• Become confident in practices of inclusivity,
debate, collaboration, and horizontal
leadership.
• Learn how to fight the boss, the financial inter-
ests behind “education reform,” and the state,
directly and fearlessly.
Along the way these caucuses convened a national
network—United Caucuses of Rank-and-File
Educators (UCORE)—almost organically through
Labor Notes, the project that has held down the “rank-
and-file pole” of U.S. unionism through publications
and conferences for 40 years.
Rank-and-File Insurgencies in Red States
Insurgents in WV, AZ, KY, OK, and CO thinking
about how to consolidate rank-and-file power
inside their unions have found their way onto the
UCORE and Labor Notes platform, too, bringing
together teacher activists from the red states and
blue cities, union-weak and union-strong environ-
ments, to discover that they are all after the same
thing: using collective power from the bottom-up
to win social progress for the majority.
It is through this prism of labor-movement analy-
sis that we can now start to understand the appar-
ently paradoxical eruptions of teachers in states with
the weakest institutional environment—regions with
low union membership, weak infrastructure, no bar-
gaining rights, and fiercely anti-union legislatures.
When there is no effective access to meaningful
channels for change, workers resort naturally to the
only power no one can steal from them—the power
to withhold their labor. This spontaneous chain of
wildcat strikes may be the only recourse left for the
teachers when the unions and the politicians fail
them, but they are also facilitated by the very weak-
ness of the union bureaucratic environment around
them. By sharp contrast, the progressive teacher
union caucuses have emerged in generally “strong”
union environments in more progressive cities or
regions, where they have had to spend more time
fighting their own union bureaucracy and much less
sparking the spontaneous and unified action show-
ing up in the “weak” union environments.
But teacher unionists in both environments are
moving. They are in a movement moment.
If we keep in mind the immediate affinity felt by
the insurgent teachers and the caucus teachers, their
sense of shared purpose, their common hope for a
democratic, activist, bottom-up union culture, their
willingness to risk, and their refusal to be complacent,
we can start to see the potential for teacher conver-
gence. Coming from very disparate starting points,
present in every corner of the country, connected by
their fierce will to protect kids and public schools,
increasingly cornered by the system of manufactured
austerity and therefore ever-more identified with the
majority of workers, teachers could give us a genera-
tive moment, a moment to be amplifed. D&S
E L L E N D A V I D F R I E D M A N is a long-time
organizer with the National Education Association in
Vermont, a founding member of Vermont’s Progres-
sive Party, and a member of the Labor Notes Policy
Committee. She facilitates the United Caucuses of
Rank-and-File Educators (UCORE), the national net-
work of progressive teacher union caucuses.
MAY/JUNE 2018  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  11
 #MeToo
in the
Hospitality
Sector

How sex, gender, and class intersect

when workers routinely face sexual harassment.
B Y E L L E N M U TA R I

S U E BE E ( NO T H E R R E A L N A M E) S PE N T 2 7 Y E A R S WOR K I NG I N T H E
››

gaming pits of Atlantic City’s casinos. In an interview for a book about working in the casino industry,
Blackjack
dealers and she recounted the routine sexual harassment that she experienced. She vividly described the details of one
dancers at incident that stood out for her:
Pussycat Dolls,
part of the
Pure Nightclub I remember standing at a blackjack game, and I had a skirt on. It was not short. I was not promiscu-
at Caesars ous. My skirt was like Catholic school; if you kneeled on the floor and your skirt touched the floor, you
Palace in Las were good. That’s how I wore my skirts. And I had a supervisor and I dropped a card, I dropped a chip,
Vegas, 2007.
I dropped something. And the supervisor bent down to pick up the chip and had my leg, around my
Credit: Flickr ankle, with his other hand. And as he stood up, he rode up my leg with his hand, and I was frozen. I
user Xuanxu, was just, I was on a live game, I was dealing and everything just kind of stopped. And I froze, and he
CC BY 2.0.
stopped when he got to my knee and threw the chip on the table and said something about what great
legs I had or laughing and … I was just like, I couldn’t speak! I was flabbergasted! I was like, “Did that
guy just do that?!” I was stunned. I was stunned. I didn’t know what to say or do.

Lily (also a pseudonym) recalled her “training” to be promoted to a server at a casino nightclub, which
included a trip to similar high-end clubs in New York City:

12  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  MAY/JUNE 2018

 By the time we got done with the second
one (it might have been the third one), one
of our managers was completely drunk. And
I was dancing with one of my girlfriends
who was gonna be working at the club. He
came up behind me, and started dancing
with me. And he said, very quickly, he said,
“Oh, you’re definitely getting the best shift.”
Lily was disappointed in herself for not respond-
ing more forcefully. “It’s such an awkward position.
Because you want to say to yourself, if that hap-
pened—which I always thought—I would defi-
nitely just say, you know, come right out and you
know, be very forward about it, and you know, really
confront, confront the person.’” On the ride home,
the same manager tried to put his head in her lap
and his hand up her leg. This time Lily told him it
was “not okay.” She knew she could report him, but
she said that “economic and social factors” stopped
her. So he became one of her bosses, continuing to
make suggestive comments periodically.
Of course, sexual harassment occurs no matter
how a woman dresses, what type of job she has, or
where she works. This truth makes it tempting to
lump all forms of sexual harassment into one broad
category. There are important lessons to be learned,
however, from being attentive to the details of how
harassment plays out in particular contexts. The
dynamics of harassment against women breaking
into the “bro” culture of Silicon Valley are not
exactly the same as the hostile working conditions
for women pioneers in construction. Furthermore,
both of these male-dominated domains construct
different messages about gender than the routine
harassment found in many feminized occupations.
And while 85% of charges filed with the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission were
brought by women, men experience sexual harass-
ment in ways that are both strikingly similar and
diametrically distinct. Consequently, #MeToo and
the “Time’s Up” movement are reaching out to
fight harassment and gender discrimination in
their many forms.
Beyond Hollywood
As Hollywood actresses, actors, and others in the
entertainment industry spoke up and brought the
#MeToo movement some much-needed publicity,
they illuminated the specific vulnerability of a
high-stakes gig economy where careers can be
short, employment contracts are even shorter, and
power is consolidated in a tight network of indus-
try players. Despite their relative privilege and
apparent glamour, these women demonstrated that
real economic power is extremely concentrated.
The revelations about casino magnate Steve Wynn,
in contrast, documented by the Wall Street Journal
in January, shifted attention to relatively anony-
mous low-wage workers who were also preyed
upon by a powerful person with control over their
economic lives. Harassment, however, is not only
about bosses exerting power. An anti-harassment
campaign called “Hands Off Pants On” was initi-
ated by the Chicago local of the hotel and restau-
rant workers’ union UNITE-HERE. Their objec-
tive is to raise consciousness about commonplace
harassment from customers that is ignored or even
encouraged by some workplaces. For example,
while much publicity accompanied Harvey
Weinstein’s accusers’ descriptions of encounters
with him in hotel rooms, guest-room attendants
are routinely alone as they do their jobs. Almost
The dynamics of harassment against women
breaking into the “bro” culture of Silicon Valley
are not exactly the same as the hostile working
conditions for women pioneers in construction.
Furthermore, both of these male-dominated
domains construct different messages about
gender than the routine harassment found in
many feminized occupations.
half of the Chicago hotel guest-room attendants
surveyed by the union reported that guests had
exposed themselves, flashed their genitals, or
answered the door naked. Often women of color
and sometimes foreign-born, people in these jobs
are socially invisible, making it even more difficult
for them to speak up as individuals.
It is not incidental that such stories originate in
service and entertainment industries. The product
being sold by these industries is an experience.
Sexualization of their employees—especially
female employees—is a common marketing ploy.
Lena, who bounced around the casino ››
MAY/JUNE 2018  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  13
 SEXUAL HARASSMENT
industry—serving drinks, cashing chips, working
in marketing, and dealing poker—observed:
As far as from housekeeping to cleaning,
most all you see is female staff. Cocktail
waitressing. Food and beverage. Mostly an
all-female staff unless you go into the high,
high-end restaurants where the only thing
you see is male management and the wait-
A blackjack
dealer at ers themselves. Other than that, it’s all
Harrah’s female. You walk into a club, it’s mostly
Casino in Las female staff. Everywhere you go, it’s a big
Vegas, 2007.
female market.
Credit:
Antoine She claimed the reason was clear: “I just think it’s
Taveneaux,
a big tipping industry and they’re more interested [in
via Wikimedia
Commons, bringing in male gamblers]. So you gotta keep the
CC BY 3.0. place full of females.” Interactive service jobs where
part of one’s pay is dependent upon tips shift some
››
supervisory and disciplinary power onto the
14  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  MAY/JUNE 2018
customers themselves. As noted by Restaurant
Opportunities Center (ROC) United, tipping puts
restaurant workers “on the menu,” and makes them
far more vulnerable to sexual harassment. The orga-
nization alleges that 90% of servers in tipped posi-
tions report experiences with unwelcome comments,
touching, and/or advances. A constant balancing act
requires these employees to weigh the indignities of
harassment against the need for tips, as documented
in a recent New York Times profile of restaurant work-
ers called “The Tipping Equation.” While customer
harassment occurs in restaurants as diverse as 24-hour
diners and high-end establishments, the problem is
particularly acute when the image of sexual availabil-
ity is part of the marketing strategy.
At the Borgata casino bottle club—a venue where
groups of customers must purchase entire bottles of
high-priced, high-end liquor and mixers that are
served to them by workers who are also expected to
dance and entertain the customers—sex is part of
the marketing strategy. Lily commented, “It’s just
considered part of the atmosphere, part of what is
expected in the job.” She described herself at work:
“Here I am, I’m like half-naked, and I’m dolled up,
and I’m here to serve you. And the outfits, you see
how short they are. I have to bend over to pour
drinks. I have to bend in front of them … They see
me like that. And they look and treat me like they
see me, which is like a piece of meat.” Touching the
servers was formally against club rules. So Lily would
report this behavior—grabbing her butt or brushing
her breasts—at least once or twice a week. Then one
of the managers told her that she was the server who
had the most people kicked out of the club. It
seemed more like a warning than an innocent com-
ment. Even though an employer can be held legally
liable if a provocative uniform or other policies are
viewed as inviting harassment, such regulations are
rarely enforced.
Interesecting Power Structures
Too many observers commenting on the #MeToo
movement and these stories of workplace harass-
ment try to reduce such issues to either a gender
problem (the universality of male domination) or a
class problem (exploitation in the workplace). But,
as these stories show us, it is more fruitful to view
workplace harassment as illuminating the feminist
concept of intersectionality. Intersectionality theory
asserts that class, race, gender, and other institution-
alized power structures do not operate as discrete
and separate categories. Instead, the experience of
class is shaped by gender—and gender plays out dif-
ferently depending on one’s class and race.
Gender assignments are often implicitly built
into job descriptions. Employers, employees, and
customers unconsciously reproduce gender norms.
Feminist scholars argue that our gender identities
are not anchored in our biology. They are social
constructions produced through our daily activi-
ties, as we behave in ways that conform (or don’t
conform) with social norms and that differentiate
us (or don’t) from the opposite gender. Gender, in
this view, is partly a performance. Workers in femi-
nized occupations—like cocktail servers—and
their customers routinely perform gender. For
example, when we asked about the qualities it takes
to do her job well, college graduate Zoe told us,
“One of my favorite sayings, when people … get
real complicated on their order or they ask all sorts
of technical stuff, and I always kind of look at them
and say ‘Look, you know,’ and I say it in a cute way,
‘I applied for this job in a bikini. Don’t make it too
hard.’” She proceeded to share the many invisible
interpersonal skills needed to get more tips, to
avoid conflicts with handsy customers, and to dip-
lomatically cut off customers who’ve had too much
to drink. For Zoe, “doing gender” on the job meant
deliberately playing into the stereotype that
women, especially pretty women, are dumb and
unskilled, even as she exhibited a high level of
social competence that was not identified or recog-
nized. The sexualization of service workers is an
extreme example of doing gender. But it also occurs
when secretaries are expected to fetch coffee, when
female bosses exerting authority are called
“bitches,” and when police officers are expected to
assert masculine aggression toward suspects.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which
bars employment discrimination against
protected classes, allows the sex of the
employee to be a “bona fide occupational
qualification” only for a few categories of
workers. Entertainers are one permissible
category. So sexualization of various casino
jobs is sometimes accompanied by adding the
word “entertainment” to the job title.
Our common understandings of class exploita-
tion are too often grounded in a narrow archetype
of a white male manufacturing worker. This gen-
der-blindness obscures the diverse ways class is
experienced. It also limits our understanding of
how the economy reinforces and even reshapes
gender and racial norms. It was a combination of
class-based need for wage income with their iden-
tity as women that produced the experiences of
harassment SueBee and Lily describe. Zoe’s strate-
gies for performing her job competently involved
playing to one particular vision of what is femi-
nine: pretty and not too bright.
While it is commonplace to say that sexual
harassment is about power and not sex, the reality
is that power, sex, gender, and class are intertwined.
Harassment can be used to reinforce male privilege
(including wage premiums) and protect male ››
MAY/JUNE 2018  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  15
 SEXUAL HARASSMENT
domains (occupational segregation). In feminized
domains, sexual harassment and other gender per-
formances send coded messages about someone’s
(lack of ) dignity and value, reinforcing the gender
wage gap. For women of color in feminized and
racialized jobs, devaluation intersects with social
invisibility. Harassment and the sexualization of
work can also serve the bottom line by encouraging
job turnover, limiting upward mobility, and ren-
dering skills invisible.
Harassment affects employee morale. A study in
the Journal of Gambling Studies found that casino
employees who reported being sexually harassed
were less satisfied with their jobs, less committed to
the organization, and more likely to quit. Of course,
higher turnover rates do not always trouble employ-
ers if they prefer to cycle in a younger, fresher crop of
employees at the bottom of the wage scale. In such
Addressing rampant sexual harassment in its
many forms will require fighting on multiple
fronts due to the specific dynamics confronting
workers in various workplaces. Having a strong
union advocate for public policy and bring
lawsuits against unfair practices is critical.
instances, sexual harassment and the marketing of
women’s bodies furthers class interests. As legal
scholar Ann McGinley observed about casino per-
sonnel practices, “When a job has a sexual compo-
nent, people assume that there are few other qualifi-
cations needed for the job.” Such assumptions tend
to depress wage rates and block career mobility.
Casino employees I encountered in my research
coped with overt and subtle harassments from cus-
tomers, supervisors, and coworkers in different
ways, but most tended to downplay their experi-
ences—perhaps because they needed to in order to
survive. Other studies support the idea that employ-
ees in sexualized jobs are more likely to view harass-
ment as part of the job and are therefore less likely to
view it as a problem. For them, their work role is a
sex role. They take the work environment as given
and figure out individual coping strategies for any
aspects of the job they dislike.
16  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  MAY/JUNE 2018
But some women in the casino industry and
other hospitality workers have begun to fight back
collectively.
Harrah’s Resort in Atlantic City, for example, was
accused by about 40 employees of creating a “cul-
ture of accepted sexual harassment” at The Pool, a
nightclub surrounding a swimming pool where the
cocktail servers wear swimsuits. One manager was
accused in thirteen different lawsuits of making ver-
bal and physical advances after pressuring female
employees to drink on duty. Two male employees
claimed they suffered retaliation when they tried to
report the harassment, and managers in human
resources were sued for covering up the problems.
At least one case was settled. But these cases speak to
a disturbing pattern—one that the accusations
against Wynn indicate is still ongoing.
Lawsuits based on various practices related to
appearance have been lodged by cocktail servers
against three Atlantic City casinos, though none
have been successful so far. In the most famous case,
brought by (overwhelmingly female) cocktail servers
called “Borgata Babes,” UNITE-HERE Local 54
contested a policy that stated that they could gain
no more than 7% of their body weight. Some of the
servers alleged that managers encouraged them to
take laxatives to lose weight. Superior Court Judge
Nelson Johnson, who is the author of the book that
inspired the HBO series Boardwalk Empire (set in
Atlantic City during the Prohibition era), issued a
summary judgment letting the policy stand, insist-
ing that “Plaintiffs cannot shed the label babe; they
embraced it when they went to work for Borgata.”
In making this statement, he reinforced a class struc-
ture in which the employer defines the job and
workers are faced with a take-it-or-leave-it choice
about their livelihoods. If they take it, they forfeit
the power to contest the terms of their employment.
If they leave it, they forfeit the income. At the same
time, he also upheld the gendered definition of the
job characteristics by employers.
Judge Johnson also noted that the audition for
the job implied that they were part entertainers.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which
bars employment discrimination against protected
classes, allows the sex of the employee to be a
“bona fide occupational qualification” (BFOQ)
only for a few categories of workers. Entertainers
are one permissible category. In casting a play,
movie, or television show, one can factor in the sex
of the actor. So sexualization of various casino jobs
is sometimes accompanied by adding the word
“entertainment” to the job title. Entertainment
dealers, for example, wear skimpy costumes and
are expected to dance for customers in addition to
the regular dealer duties.

Movement Forward
Social change movements often build from individ-
ual stories to collective action. #MeToo is following
this trajectory. Addressing rampant sexual harass-
ment in its many forms will require fighting on mul-
tiple fronts due to the specific dynamics confronting
workers in various workplaces. As UNITE-HERE
has shown, having a strong union advocate for pub-
lic policy and bring lawsuits against unfair practices
is critical. The Hands Off Pants On campaign in
Chicago recently won a small victory—a city ordi-
nance that requires employers to provide guest-
room attendants with panic buttons and to protect
them from retaliation. ROC United argues that
#OneFairWage (one minimum wage as opposed to
the subminimum for tipped workers) would
improve servers’ bargaining power in resisting work-
place indignities. The National Women’s Law
Center, which has advocated against discrimination
since 1972, has established a Time’s Up Legal
Defense Fund to assist individual women who can-
not afford representation. The Center has also devel-
oped a list of recommended policies that they are
publicizing with the hashtag #MeTooWhatNext.
According to Maya Raghu and JoAnna Suriani of
the National Women’s Law Center, “the incidence of
harassment appears to be higher in workplaces with
››
S O U R C E S : Alexandra Berzon et al., “Dozens of People Recount
stark power imbalances between workers and employ- Pattern of Sexual Misconduct by Las Vegas Mogul Steve Wynn,” Wall Street Protester at
Journal, January 27, 2018; Hands Off, Pants On campaign (handsoffpant-
ers, and is exacerbated by the devaluation of work the Women’s
son.org); Yvonne Stedham and Merwin C. Mitchell, “Sexual Harassment in March in New
performed by women.” Class intersects with gender Casinos: Effects on Employee Attitudes and Behaviors,” Journal of Gam-
York City,
(and race) in constructing such power imbalances. bling Studies 14, no. 4 (1998): 381-400; Ann C. McGinley, “Babes and
January 20,
Beefcake: Exclusive Hiring Arrangements and Sexy Dress Codes,” Duke
Sexual forms of harassment at work, by undermining Journal of Gender Law and Policy 14, no. 1 (2007); Gregory J. Kamer and
2018.
employees’ dignity and reinforcing their devaluation, Edwin A. Keller Jr., “Give Me $5 Chips, a Jack and Coke—Hold the Cleav-
perpetuate a specific form of gendered class inequality age: A Look at Employee Appearance Issues in the Gaming Industry,” Credit:
Gaming Law Review 7, n. 5 (2003); Lynda Cohen, “New Sexual Harassment Alec Perkins,
in the workplace, and in society as a whole. D&S Suits Go Beyond The Pool, Allege Harrah’s Knew and Covered Up, Press of via Wikimedia
Atlantic City, February 9, 2010; Jennifer Bogdan, “Harrah’s Waitress Settles Commons,
Sex-Harassment Suit,” Press of Atlantic City, May 22, 2012; Jennifer Bogdan, CC BY 2.0.
E L L E N M U T A R I is a professor of economics at
“A.C. Does Sexy,” Press of Atlantic City, February 17, 2013; Jennifer Bogdan,
Stockton University in New Jersey. Her most recent “Borgata Can Make ‘Babes’ Watch Weight,” Press of Atlantic City, July 25,
book (co-authored with Deborah M. Figart) is Just One 2013; Restaurant Opportunities Center United (rocunited.org); Catrin
Einhorn and Rachel Abrams, “The Tipping Equation,” New York Times,
More Hand: Life in the Casino Economy (Rowman & March 18, 2018; Meika Loe, “Working at Bazooms: The Intersection of
Littlefield, 2015). Power, Gender, and Sexuality,” in Mapping the Social Landscape: Readings
in Sociology, ed. Susan J. Ferguson (McGraw Hill, 2010), 330-345; Maya
Raghu and Joanna Suriani, #MeTooWhatNext: Strengthening Workplace
N O T E : All of the quoted interviews are from Ellen Sexual Harassment Protections and Accountability, National Women’s Law
Mutari and Deborah M. Figart, Just One More Hand. Center, December 2017 (nwlc.org).

MAY/JUNE 2018  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  17

 How Filipino
Migrants Gave the
Grape Strike Its
Radical Politics
Honoring Larry Itliong and a
generation of radicals whose political
ideas are as relevant to workers now as
they were in 1965.

B Y D AV I D B A C O N

T HE GREAT DELANO GRAPE STRIKE

started on September 8, 1965, when Filipino
pickers stayed in their labor camps and refused to go
into the fields. Mexican workers joined them two
weeks later. The strike went on for five years, until
all California table grape growers were forced to sign
contracts in 1970. The conflict was a watershed
struggle for civil and labor rights, supported by mil-
lions of people across the country. It breathed new
life into the labor movement and opened doors for
immigrants and people of color.
California’s politics have changed profoundly
in the 52 years since then, in large part because of
that strike. Delano’s mayor today is a Filipino.
That would have been unthinkable in 1965, when
growers treated the town as a plantation. Children
of farm worker families have become members of the state legislature. Last year they spearheaded pas-
››

sage of a law that requires the same overtime pay for farm workers as for all other workers—the second
Members
state, after Hawai’i, to pass such a law.
of the
Agricultural The United Farm Workers, created in that strike, was the product of a social movement. The strategic ideas
Workers the union used to fight for its survival evolved as the responses of thousands of people to problems faced by
Organizing farm worker unions for a century—strikebreaking, geographic isolation, poverty, and grower violence. The
Committee
(AWOC) picket tools they chose, the strike and the boycott, have been used by farm workers ever since.
during the Every year spontaneous work stoppages like he Delano strike take place in U.S. fields, although not on that
grape strike scale. Anger over miserable wages and living conditions led workers in Washington state, for instance, to go
in Delano,
Calif., in the
on strike four years ago. They then organized the country’s newest farm worker union, Familias Unidas por
late 1960s. la Justicia (see David Bacon, “These Things Can Change,” Dollars & Sense, March/April 2015). Combining
action in the fields with a boycott of Driscoll’s berries, they won their first union contract last year.
Photo by
In the years since 1965, farm worker unions have grown to over a dozen, in Washington, Oregon,
Harvey
Richards; Arizona, Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, Connecticut, Florida, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania, in addition
used with to California. To one degree or another, all draw inspiration from the movement that started in Delano.
permission. Liberal mythology holds that farm worker unions hardly existed until the creation of United Farm Workers
in the ’60s and that the farm worker unions and advocacy organizations of today appeared with no history of
earlier struggles. But the importance of the Delano strike requires a reexamination of this idea, especially a reas-
sessment of the radical career of Larry Itliong.
18  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  MAY/JUNE 2018

Larry Itliong and the Filipino Radicals
Larry Itliong, who headed the Agricultural Workers
Organizing Committee (AWOC), not only shared
the strike’s leadership with Cesar Chavez, but actu-
ally started it. Chavez was born in 1927 near Yuma,
Ariz.; Itliong was born in 1913 in the Philippines—
almost a generation before. By 1965 he had been
organizing farm workers for many years.
During the 1930s, Filipinos and other farm
workers formed left-wing unions and mounted
huge strikes. According to Oberlin professor Rick
Baldoz, “The burgeoning strike activity involving
thousands of Filipinos in the mid-1930s occa-
sioned a furious backlash from growers who
worked closely with local law enforcement.”
One of the most important people to influence
Itliong was Carlos Bulosan, who wrote America Is
in the Heart, a classic account of life as a Filipino
migrant farm worker during the 1930s. The FBI
considered the book dangerous—evidence of the
reader’s Communist sympathies during the Cold
War. Both men were active in the union orga-
nized by Filipino workers in the salmon canneries
on the Alaska coast. These were mostly single
men, recruited from the Philippines to come as
laborers in the 1920s. In Alaska, their union
fought to end rampant discrimination and
terrible conditions, and forced the fish companies
››
to sign contracts. Larry Itiong.
Known as “manongs,” these men were the chil-
dren of colonialism. From 1898 to 1946 the Photo by
Bob Fitch,
Philippines was a U.S. colony, and even in the most © Stanford
remote islands, children were taught in English, University
from U.S. textbooks, by missionary teachers from Libraries.
Used with
Philadelphia or New Jersey. Students studied the permission.
promises of the Declaration of Independence before
they knew the names of José Rizal, Emilio
Aguinaldo, and Andrés Bonifacio, who led Filipinos
in their war for independence against the Spaniards,
and later against the Americans.
The manongs were radicalized because they
compared the ideals of the U.S. Constitution, and
of the Filipinos’ own quest for freedom, with the
harsh reality they found in the United States. Some
even volunteered for the International Brigades
during the Spanish Civil War, opposing fascism in
the country that was their former colonizer. In
Spain, Pedro Penino organized the Rizal Company,
named in honor of José Rizal.
The “manongs” were radicalized because they
compared the ideals of the U.S. Constitution,
and of the Filipinos’ own quest for freedom,
with the harsh reality they found in the United
States. Many of the manongs were Communists,
believing that fighting for better wages was
part of fighting against capitalism and
colonialism, to change the system.
Baldoz gained access to the file on Bulosan
kept by the FBI, which monitored Filipino radi-
cals. “The fact that these partisans attracted the
attention of federal authorities during the Cold
War is hardly surprising,” he says. “Filipino work-
ers had developed a well-earned reputation for
labor militancy in the United States dating back
to the early 1930s.”
Many of the manongs were Communists,
believing that fighting for better wages was part
of fighting against capitalism and colonialism, to
change the system. Bulosan wrote, “America is
not bound by geographical latitudes. America is ››
MAY/JUNE 2018  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  19
 FILIPINO ACTIVISTS
not merely a land or an institution. America is in
the hearts of people that died for freedom; it is
also in the eyes of people building a new world.”
In 1952 he was hired by leaders of the fish can-
nery union to edit its yearbook. Among its many
Filipino appeals for radical causes, it opposed nuclear war
immigrant and U.S. military intervention abroad, and urged
workers at an
organizing solidarity with the Huk movement in the
rally at the Philippines, which was fighting continued U.S.
Forty Acres, domination of its former colony.
the historic
home of the
Until 1949 the fish cannery union, Local 37,
United Farm was part of the farm workers union of the Congress
Workers. of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the United
Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers
Credit:
© David of America (UCAPAWA). As the Cold War started,
Bacon. the CIO expelled nine unions, including
UCAPAWA and the International Longshore and
››
20  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  MAY/JUNE 2018
Warehouse Union (ILWU), because of their left-
wing politics and often Communist leaders. At the
height of the McCarthyite hysteria more than 30
members of Local 37 were arrested and threatened
with deportation to the Philippines, including its
officers Ernesto Mangaoang and Chris Mensalvas,
and activists Ponce Torres, Pablo Valdez, George
Dumlao, and Joe Prudencio.
Eventually Mangaoang’s deportation case was
thrown out by the courts. He argued that he
couldn’t be deported, given that he’d been a U.S.
“national” since he arrived in Seattle in the 1920s.
“National” was a status given Filipinos because the
Philippines was a U.S. colony at the time. Filipinos
couldn’t be considered immigrants, but they
weren’t citizens either.
Filipino Workers Kept Farm
Unionism Alive in the Cold War
Larry Itliong had a long history as an organizer. He
was Mangaoang’s protégé and Local 37’s dis-
patcher, sending workers on the boats from Seattle
to the Alaska salmon canneries every season. After
the salmon season was over, many Filipinos would
return home to California’s Salinas and San Joaquin
Valleys, where they worked as farm laborers for the
rest of the year.
In the segregated barrios of towns like Stockton
and Salinas they formed hometown associations
and social clubs. Itliong used these networks to
organize Filipinos when they went to work in the
fields, including strikes in Stockton’s asparagus
fields in 1948 and 1949. At the time, growers kept
workers under guard in labor camps, where if they
held open meetings, they risked being fired and
even beaten. To help the asparagus cutters orga-
nize, Itliong would sneak into a camp, crawl under
the bunkhouse, and speak to workers through the
cracks in the floor.
UCAPAWA was destroyed in the 1949 CIO
purge, and the Filipino local in Seattle was taken in
by the ILWU. It survived, and today is part of the
ILWU’s Inland Boatman’s Union. The Federal gov-
ernment tried to bankrupt Local 37, forcing its lead-
ers to exhaust their resources on high bail and law-
yers’ fees. With the radicals tied up in legal defense,
a conservative faction took control of the union and
stopped its farm worker organizing drives. That
group held it until it was thrown out in the 1980s by
a new young generation of radical Filipinos, two of
whom, Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes (a former
farm worker), were assassinated by
agents of Philippine dictator
Ferdinand Marcos.
Yet in the early 1950s Filipino
farm workers continued to orga-
nize. Ernesto Galarza built an alli-
ance between them and the
National Farm Labor Union
(NFLU) in the late 1940s and early
1950s, when the union mounted
30 strikes. Galarza was an immi-
grant from Nayarit—a poet and
writer as well as an organizer. The
NFLU struck the giant DiGiorgio
Corporation, then California’s larg-
est grower, for 30 months, and was
eventually defeated. Supporters of
the workers made a movie about it,
Poverty in the Valley of Plenty, which urged people to
boycott the company’s fruit. Di Giorgio used its
political muscle to have it banned, and sued any
organization that tried to show it.
In 1959 the Agricultural Workers Organizing
Committee (AWOC) was set up by the merged
AFL-CIO.  After hiring Itliong as an organizer
because of his history among Filipino workers,
AWOC used flying squads of pickets to mount
quick strikes. In 1961, AWOC, together with the
United Packinghouse Workers, another left-wing
former CIO union, struck the Imperial Valley let-
tuce harvest, demanding $1.25 per hour.
Growers kept wages low by employing bracero
contract labor from Mexico. Under that program
growers brought workers under tightly controlled,
highly exploitative conditions. During the strike
the U.S. Department of Agriculture threatened
that braceros would be deported if they joined the
mostly Filipino strike. Galarza said, “The state was
flooded with braceros while we were on strike. I lost
track of the number of times I was thrown out of
camps trying to talk with them. If they were seen
talking with you they were deported home to
Mexico.” Despite the threats, however, some brace-
ros joined the strike.
Itliong and the Filipinos
in the Delano Grape Strike
Finally, in 1965, led by Itliong, Filipino workers
struck the vineyards in the Coachella Valley, near
the Mexican border, where California’s grape har-
vest begins. They won a 40¢/hour wage increase
from grape growers and forced authorities to drop
››
charges against arrested strikers. After winning in Rufino
Coachella, the strikers moved with the grape har- Dominguez,
vest into the San Joaquin Valley, where their strike Mixteco
migrant
was met with fierce opposition.
leader, talks
In Delano, Filipinos workers began sitting in at with men
the camps, refusing to leave to go to work. UFW who worked
founder Dolores Huerta described to historian in the U.S. as
braceros in
Dawn Mabalon the first days of the Delano strike, the 1950s.
saying that she, Cesar Chavez, and other National
Farm Worker Association (NFWA) organizers were Credit:
© David
shocked at grower violence against the Filipinos. Bacon.
“Some of them were beaten up by the growers
[who] would shut off the gas and the lights and the
water in the labor camps,” Huerta recalled. Growers
kicked the Filipino strikers out, forcing them to
move into town, and Filipino Hall in Delano
became the center of the strike. If Delano’s mayor
today is a Filipino, it’s because of what the growers
started in 1965.
The timing of the 1965 strike was not acci-
dental. It took place the year after Galarza,
Huerta, Bert Corona, Cesar Chavez, and other
civil rights and labor activists forced Congress to
repeal Public Law 78 and end the bracero pro-
gram. Farm worker leaders knew that once the
program ended growers would no longer be able
to bring braceros into the United States to break
strikes. Nevertheless, the grape barons searched
for strikebreakers throughout the conflict’s five
years. From their first picket lines in Delano,
strikers watched as growers brought in crews to
take their jobs. When braceros were no longer ››
MAY/JUNE 2018  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  21
 FILIPINO ACTIVISTS
available, often the Border Patrol opened the
border, and trucks hauling strikebreakers roared
through the desert every night. Local police and
sheriffs provided armed protection.
Both Filipinos and Mexicans wanted to keep
growers and the government from using immigra-
tion policy against them. Strikers and labor advocates
sought policies that would instead favor families and
communities.  In the 1965 immigration reform,
passed the year after the bracero program ended, they
established family reunification as a basic principle.
This enabled thousands of people, especially family
members of farm workers, to immigrate from the
Philippines, Mexico, and other developing countries,
while keeping employers from treating immigration
purely as a labor supply system.
A crew of
farm workers Immigration Reform and the Boycott
picks table
grapes in Today, President Trump’s talk about ending “chain
Thermal, in migration” is coded language for trying to do away
California’s with family reunification, an achievement of the
Coachella
Valley,
civil rights movement. Both Trump and growers
where the want to return to a more overt labor supply system
temperature in agriculture, based on the H-2A guest worker
at noon is
visa program, much like the old bracero program.
over 110
degrees. The government uses raids and deportations
against undocumented workers, much as it did
Credit: during the bracero era of the 1950s, to provide a
© David
Bacon. pretext for importing contract labor. ICE audits
the records of growers, finds the names of
››
22  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  MAY/JUNE 2018
undocumented people, and demands they be fired,
while conducting deportation raids in farm worker
communities. At the same time, the Departments
of Labor and Homeland Security certify grower
applications to import a mushrooming number of
H-2A contract workers—160,000 in 2016,
200,000 last year, and more predicted for this year.
“ICE uses audits and raids to create fear and
anxiety,” according to Armando Elenes, vice-pres-
ident of the United Farm Workers. “People get
afraid to demand their rights, or even just to come
to work. Then growers demand changes to make
H-2A workers even cheaper by eliminating wage
requirements, or the requirement that they pro-
vide housing.”
In 1965, once the threat of replacement by bra-
ceros was removed, strikers then built a strategy to
force growers to negotiate. Of all the achievements
of the grape strike, its most powerful and enduring
was the boycott. It leveled the playing field in the
fight with the growers over the right to form a
union, and kept growers from using violence freely,
as they’d done in previous decades. Armed grower
militias had killed strikers in Pixley and El Centro,
Calif., in the 1930s. Nagi Daifullah and Juan de la
Cruz lost their lives in the grapes in the 1973 strike.
Rufino Contreras was shot in a struck lettuce field
in the Imperial Valley in 1979.
Non-violence, as urged by Cesar Chavez, was
not universally accepted, however, especially by
Filipino labor veterans. According to Mabalon,
“Many of the members of the Filipino union, the
AWOC, were veterans of the strikes of the 1920s,
’30s, and ’40s and were tough left-
ists, Marxists, and Communists.
They met the violence of the grow-
ers with their own militancy, and
carried guns and knives for self-
defense. For them the drama of
marching behind statues, hunger
strikes, turn-the-other-cheek style
was alien.”
The boycott couldn’t end grower
violence entirely, but after farm
workers crossed the enormous gulf
between the fields and the big cities,
they didn’t have to fight by them-
selves. The political philosophy
shared by most Filipino workers saw
the strike as the fundamental weapon
to win better conditions.
Nevertheless, they could also see the boycott’s
power, and for several years during the strike Itliong
was the national boycott organizer. This strategy
gave new energy to the rest of the union movement,
and led to the most powerful and important alli-
ance between unions and communities in modern
labor history. Today, similar alliances are the bed-
rock of progressive tactics among union activists
across the country, helping to give labor struggles
their character as social movements.
Filipinos and Mexicans: Uneasy Allies
Growers had pitted Mexicans and Filipinos against
each other for decades. The alliance between
Itliong’s AWOC and the Cesar Chavez–led NFWA
was a popular front of workers who had, in many
cases, different politics. AWOC’s members had
their roots in the red UCAPAWA. NFWA’s roots
were in the Community Service Organization
(CSO), which was sometimes hostile to
Communists. Yet both organizations were able to
find common ground and support each other dur-
ing the strike, eventually forming the UFW.
Eliseo Medina, a farm worker who later became
vice-president of one of the country’s largest unions,
the Service Employees, remembers: “Before the strike
began, we lived in different worlds—the Latino
world, the Filipino world, the African-American
world, and the Caucasian world. We co-existed but
never understood who we were or what each other
thought and dreamed about. It wasn’t until the union
began that we finally began to work together, to
know each other and to begin to fight together.”
Cold War fears of communism obscured the
contributions of Itliong and the Filipinos. In his
famous biography of Cesar Chavez in The New
Yorker, writer Peter Matthiessen claimed: “Until
Chavez appeared, union leaders had considered it
impossible to organize seasonal farm labor, which
is in large part illiterate and indigent ...” In reality,
many Filipino workers in Coachella and Delano
were members of ILWU Local 37 in 1965, when
the grape strike began. Every year they continued
to travel from the San Joaquin Valley to the Alaska
fish canneries. Through the end of their lives, they
were often active members of both unions—Local
37 and the United Farm Workers.
But relations between Filipinos and Mexicans
deteriorated after the grape strike. In the first UFW
table grape contracts, won in 1970, the hiring hall
system broke up the Filipino crews. These were, in
effect, communities of single men who’d worked
››
together for 30 or 40 years. Accusations of discrimi-
The hands of
nation against Filipinos in hiring halls were wide- Armando, a
spread. Many Filipino leaders were foremen, with a farmworker
tradition of bargaining for their workers with grow- in California’s
Coachella
ers to win better wages and working conditions. Valley, as he
Itliong mostly organized through them, to get whole clips out dry
crews on board. The 1970 contracts stripped away or unripe
grapes.
their powers. Some supported the Teamsters, who
offered those foremen their power back during that Credit:
union’s raid on the UFW in 1973. But the most pro- © David
union Filipino workers, including ones who had Bacon.
been foremen, stayed with the UFW.
Relations grew even more difficult when Cesar
Chavez visited dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the
Philippines. He then tried to use the Philippine con-
sul in San Francisco to win over Filipino workers in
UFW organizing drives. UFW vice-president Philip
Vera Cruz resigned. Itliong had left even earlier.
“Differences between the leadership and the rank
and file in organizing styles and priorities, philoso-
phies of organizing, and strategy began to pull the
coalition apart,” Mabalon says. Pete Velasco, how-
ever, one of the original AWOC leaders, stuck with
the UFW, and was an executive board member
when he died in 1995, two years after Chavez.
Conditions of Farm Workers Today
Overdependence on boycotts in the 1980s and 90s
had a high price. In the fields there were few elec-
tions and even fewer strikes. As a result, Medina
says, “Workers today are back where they were
before the union. Most are working at minimum
wage again. Employers are back to just trying to
get the work done in the cheapest way possible,
regardless of the impact on workers.” ››
MAY/JUNE 2018  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  23

FILIPINO ACTIVISTS
At the height of the union’s power in the late
1970s the base farm wage was twice the minimum
wage. Today that would be over $20 an hour. Doug
Adair, a young white activist when the grape strike
began, got a union job in the fields and worked
there the rest of his life. He remembers, “When I
worked under that first contract our wages and
benefits were over double the minimum wage of
American workers. We had a health plan that was
the envy of many other unions. We could sit down
with the growers and bargain over grievances. We
wouldn’t always win, but we could negotiate our
working conditions.”
Itliong spent a lifetime organizing workers in
radical fights against growers. His contribution,
and that of his generation of Filipino radicals,
should be honored—not just because they
helped make history, but because their political
and trade union ideas are as relevant
to workers now as they were in 1965.
California has a law recognizing the right of
farm workers to form unions, and another that
requires growers to negotiate first time contracts—
both products of UFW political action. In the last
decade those laws enabled the union to regain con-
tracts where workers voted for it years ago. Today
workers under union contract can enforce state
restrictions on pesticide use and requirements for
better safety conditions. Contract wages aren’t
what Adair remembers, but they’re significantly
higher than the farm labor average.
Nevertheless, today many workers earn less than
the legal minimum, law or no. Growers tore down
most labor camps in California in the era of the
great strikes. As a result, thousands of migrant field
laborers sleep under trees, in cars, or in the fields
themselves as they travel with the harvest. Most
workers have toilets and drinking water, and where
they know their rights, they don’t have to use the
short-handled hoe, which caused debilitating back
injuries to generations of farm workers before it
24  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  MAY/JUNE 2018
was banned in California. But labor contractors,
who were once replaced by union hiring halls, have
retaken control of the fields. And as contractors
compete to sell the labor of farm workers to the
growers, they cut wages. Because contractors have
the power to give work or to fire workers, the prob-
lem of sexual abuse in the fields has become ram-
pant. They demand sex from women who need a
job to support their families, or simply allow daily
humiliation.
The lack of safe working conditions was drama-
tized by the death in 2008 of 17-year-old Maria
Isabel Vasquez Jimenez, who was denied shade and
water and collapsed in 100-degree heat. The low
value put on her life and that of workers like her was
also dramatized by the sentence of community ser-
vice given by the state court to the labor contractor
responsible. West Coast Farms, the grower, wasn’t
penalized at all, because it claimed the contractor was
responsible for conditions in its grape field.
A New Generation and
the Legacy of Radicalism
But just as Larry Itliong followed the migration of
Filipino workers from Seattle to Alaska and then
back to California, the migration of workers today
is offering similar opportunities to farm worker
organizers. An upsurge among indigenous Mexican
farm workers is sweeping through the Pacific coast.
Work stoppages by Triqui and Mixteco blueberry
pickers led to the organization of their indepen-
dent union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, in
Washington state. In the San Quintin Valley of
Baja California, thousands of blueberry and straw-
berry pickers walked out for three weeks in 2015,
organizing an independent union as well. In 2016
at the beginning of the blueberry picking season,
indigenous Mexican workers at Gourmet Trading
near Delano refused to go in to pick, and voted
347 to 68 for the UFW. Last year they signed their
first union contract.
The indigenous Mexican workers in all of these
strikes come from the same towns in Oaxaca, Puebla,
Guerrero, Chiapas, and Michoacan. They get the
worst pay. According to the Indigenous Farm Worker
Study, the median family income in 2008 was
$13,750 for an indigenous family and $22,500 for a
mestizo (non-indigenous) farm worker family. Neither
is a living wage, but the differential reflects structural
discrimination against indigenous people.
 Francisco and
Activists and organizers in the movement of different workers with different religions and dif- Maria Tapec
people from Oaxaca have radical politics and a his- ferent political views.” are Filipino
tory of activism, just as Mangaoang and Itliong In Trampling Out the Vintage Frank Bardacke grape pickers
in Coachella.
did. One UFW organizer in McFarland, Aquiles calls Itiong “a veteran old-style unionist [who] did
Although
Hernandez, from Santa María Tindú, belonged to not have the language of democracy in his arsenal.” Filipino
the left-wing caucus in the Mexican teachers’ Yet Itliong spent a lifetime organizing workers in workers were
union, and was fired and imprisoned for 72 days. radical fights against growers. His contribution, a large and
important
Indigenous organizer Rufino Dominguez used and that of his generation of Filipino radicals, part of the
migrant community networks to organize agricul- should be honored—not just because they helped farm labor
tural strikes in Mexico and later in California. make history, but because their political and trade workforce in
the Coachella
Some of his ideas came from indigenous culture union ideas are as relevant to workers now as they Valley from
and the politics of left-wing organizations in were in 1965. Those ideas, which they kept alive the 1920s to
Mexico. But some also came from the farm work- through the worst years of the Cold War, helped the 1970s,
very few
ers movement in California, with roots going back lead a renaissance of farm labor organizing that is
grape workers
to those Filipino activists. still going on today. D&S come from the
Thousands of people learned the skill of orga- Philippines
nizing in the grape strike and its aftermath. One of D A V I D B A C O N is a journalist and photographer today.
them, Rosalinda Guillen, helped organize FUJ and covering labor, immigration, and the impact of the
Credit:
worked many years for the UFW. She says, “Today global economy on workers. He is author of several © David
farm workers can organize because of what other books, including Illegal People: How Globalization Bacon.

››
farm workers did in the ’60s and ’70s in California. Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon
This is one of the most important legacies of Larry Press, 2009).
Itliong and Cesar Chavez, this coming together of

MAY/JUNE 2018  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  25

 Financing
an Equitable Economy
in Los Angeles
B Y J A N E PA U L

T H E OW N E R S O F A P O P U L A R E A S T L O S A N G E L E S TA C O T RU C K
››

need new cooking equipment and a more attractive sign. The proprietors, husband and wife, visit a
A popular East Los
Angeles taco truck trusted community organization for an honest session of personalized problem-solving, and they come
whose owners away with a low interest loan of $7,500 that allows them to sustain their enterprise.
received funding Things rarely go so well for small business owners in the economically struggling communities in
through
Leadership For Southern California similar to East Los Angeles, where per capita income is less than $15,000 a year.
Urban Renewal Traditional mainstream banks would not offer a loan to these small entrepreneurs, and community devel-
Newtork (LURN). opment finance institutions may only offer micro-loans at interest rates between 9% and 18% (plus fees),
Credit:
which can be unaffordable, and frequently have requirements for credit and documentation that exclude
LURN, used with many small business proprietors. The remaining financial institutions are storefront payday lenders who
permission. extend loans requiring no collateral, but with interest rates that averaged 372% in California in 2016, and
which often result in trapping borrowers in a cycle of debt. Many predatory neighborhood lenders (payday,
car-title, and installment-loan storefronts) offer loans at high interest rates, garnish wages before the bor-
rowers can cover basic needs, and create a debt trap, as customers must borrow repeatedly, merely to repay
their initial loan. “The city of Los Angeles has the highest number of payday lenders in the state, with
about 800 stores found mostly in communities of color,” says Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis.
Without access to other reliable options, small family enterprises cannot build credit, maintain month-to-
month financial security, survive fluctuating business cycles, or grow.

26  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  MAY/JUNE 2018

 First in a series: An Equitable Economy
Rises in Los Angeles
T his new article series tells the story of local and regional efforts to build
a robust and participatory alternative to the current economy. Southern
Californians struggle with stagnant wages and lack of ownership,
opportunity, and voice. Labor is extracted at too high a cost to our mutual
well-being, and earnings fail to support healthy, dignified lives. We explore
alternatives that provide a pathway to regaining the power of production
and restoring democracy in the workplace, marketplace, and community. Some of these options are age-old and some
are so new that they are not yet fully formed, but all meet at the confluence of a better tomorrow.
In response to the needs of our communities, individuals and working families, an alternative equitable economy
is emerging, orchestrated by a growing army of change-makers who are building viable options for a Los Angeles that
is ready to construct and cultivate equity. These contributors are versed in worker ownership, microfinance,
community wealth building, shared equity models, and principles of economic democracy. Alternatives to predatory
lenders, low wages, housing instability, and economic insecurity do exist; options for working class people that invite
authentic, knowledgeable, and empowered participation in the economy.
People interact with an economy not through the rise and fall of stock market prices or interest rates set by the
Federal Reserve, but through their everyday financial transactions and obligations—making paychecks last, keeping a
small business resilient through tough times, and striving to hold onto secure housing in a competitively market-
driven city. The economy that many Angelenos know personally and deeply is manifested in the struggle to meet
food, rent, transit, and healthcare bills. The pressing question of how to change these all-too-common dire scenarios
may be answered in part by the actions of advocates for a democratic economy, who are working to build hope and
regain kinship in workplaces, housing choices, and financial opportunities.

Providing loans for small business and families
was once a significant part of banking in the United
States, but the last few decades have seen a steep
decline in the availability of banking services. As
regions like Los Angeles deindustrialized, and
incomes in working class neighborhoods declined,
the big banks left L.A.’s struggling communities,
creating a gap in access to financial services.
Currently, the most convenient services, and fre-
quently the only ones, are the predatory lenders.
USC’s Neighborhood Data for Social Change states
that almost 600,000 L.A. County residents do not
have access to a single bank. Payday lenders, install-
ment-loan, and car-title lenders prey on these
unbanked low-income communities, charging
exorbitant interest rates—typically, $15 per $100
borrowed, or the equivalent of an interest rate of at
least 300% a year. Loans are made without consid-
eration for the frequency of borrowing, or the abil-
ity of the customer to manage the payments.
Bank mergers and consolidations, racialized poli-
cies such as intentional closing of branches in com-
munities of color, and practices that created disparity
in financial access and opportunity along race and
income lines have resulted in a vacuum of financial
choices in South Los Angeles, East Los Angeles, and
other struggling areas. The few banks that remain, or
large mainstream banks in other communities, sim-
ply won’t make a small loan to an independent entre-
preneur without significant collateral, a credit
record, or a permanent business address.
Alternatives do exist—but increasing the size and
viability of a growing sector of new financial services
in low-income communities is an effort that needs
both public support and greater community aware-
ness. New programs such as lending circles (a tradi-
tionally kin- or peer-based rotating system), progres-
sive and innovative banking establishments, credit
unions, and community organizations that make
microloans at 5–8% interest are less known, but they
create powerful local value by building and regenerat-
ing communities, rather than extracting wealth from
them through high interest rates or service charges.
Credit unions, for example, are member owned.
They have the good of their communities at heart
when they offer lower interest rates and less punishing ››
MAY/JUNE 2018  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  27
 E Q U I TA B L E F I N A N C E I N L . A .
fees than the big multinational banks: More local suc-
cess means more members, more dollars spent in the
neighborhood, and a more stable community base of
customers. Big banks earn a large portion of their
profits (up to $6 billion a year nationally) from the
fees paid by customers to keep an account open, to
access credit, and to use money transfer and check
writing services. Local and regional credit unions are
able to offer the same services as the banking giants,
but as non-profits, they don’t serve the shareholders
before the customers and members, and they can pri-
Members of the oritize supporting the financial health of local busi-
family that nesses and residents. Self Help Federal Credit Union,
received funding
throug Leadership a recent arrival in the L.A. area, and Amalgamated
For Urban Renewal Credit Unions consider equity and social responsibil-
Newtork (LURN) ity in their expanded local services, but could build
for improvements
to their taco truck. more storefronts to increase their presence in the
region. Community development finance enterprises
Credit: are also not-for-profit and offer various forms of
LURN, used with
permission.
credit services, but are restrained by their own capital
access, and requirements such as debt-to-income
››
ratios and documentation.
28  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  MAY/JUNE 2018
Lending circles are another model for develop-
ing local financial possibilities. Trusted commu-
nity-based organizations such as East Los Angeles
Community Corporation (ELACC) and the
Pilipino Workers Center have established lending
circles, where a group of community members
meet regularly to offer communal support in
order to lend and borrow money on a rotating
basis at 0% interest. Los Angeles’ lending circles
were launched with the partnership of the
Mission Asset Fund, which provides the techno-
logical platform, along with access to financial
education and loan and credit reporting services.
These lending circles give members an organized
venue from which they can borrow for an apart-
ment deposit, for a small investment in a cottage
business, or for college tuition payments; and,
importantly, participating members then earn a
credit rating: a legitimate foothold in the previ-
ously unreachable financial marketplace.
Other small businesses, like the family-owned
taco truck, are turning to community develop-
ment and urban planning organizations such as
the Leadership for Urban Renewal Network
(LURN) and ELACC. Their models are gaining
in strength and visibility, although there are obsta-
cles for these community-based economic justice
advocates such as limited funding for the organi-
zations’ finance initiatives. These initiatives
strengthen the local economy, creating jobs and
vitality while money is kept within communities
and neighborhoods, instead of allowing transac-
tions to enrich only for-profit corporations and
their privileged investors. Rudy Espinoza of
LURN says that one of the great joys of their lend-
ing programs is “investing in a hard-working per-
son who may not have another shot.” The objec-
tive is to provide Angelenos a foundation from
which they can build financial mobility.
Public, state-owned, and municipal banks have
the potential to service tiny businesses, lessen debt
burdens, and advance generative lending practices,
but they need favorable legislation to grow stronger
and more accessible. The State of Washington and
the City of Los Angeles have public banking bills
proposed, and multiple regions are watching the
process carefully. Organizations such as the
California Reinvestment Coalition (CRC) advocate
for policies that regulate bank practices, protect con-
sumers from unscrupulous lending, and provide
crucial data and real life stories to the media. CRC is
building networks of grassroots partners to support
financial alternatives, utilizing local commitments and
regional political leverage.
Legislators in California have been reluctant to follow
the lead of 14 other states in outlawing predatory lending
practices, for fear of leaving impoverished neighborhoods
with no choices, as well as facing down the influences of
the powerful payday lending lobby. Legislation as well as
efforts in the philanthropic and impact investment sectors
could also benefit alternative financial institutions by allo-
cating resources to build capacity and education, and to
learn how the creative options discussed above are benefi-
cial to families, small business, and individuals.
The alternative economy has these attributes at its
heart: solidarity, participation, and autonomy. For
example, solidarity is in evidence as community-based
organizations in low-income areas establish lending
opportunities in local circles of kinship, mutual trust,
and benefit. Participation is in evidence in the growing
numbers of individuals united in shared investment
and decision-making entities such as cooperative work-
places and cooperative housing structures. Local auton-
omy is in evidence in newfound freedom from the
exclusionary practices of mainstream banks and from
SEPT.
SEPT.
traditional hierarchical workplaces, in the self-suffi-
ciency of community sharing of resources, and in the
27-30
27-30
long-standing traditions of mutual care. 2018
2018
As we work to extend the reach of these emerging
alternative economic efforts, we are able to create stron- 50th Anniversary
ger community bonds, build well-being, and activate Conference & Celebration
new participants toward the goals of equity and stabil-
ity. We can and will show the power of innovation, University of Massachusetts
resilience and solidarity. If this sounds wildly hopeful, it Amherst
is. But at this very moment, individuals, communities Join us for a collective presentation
and organizations are working together to build these of the past, present, and future of
tangible and tested alternatives. The taco truck family is URPE - and the field of radical
political economics as a whole.
a genuine Angeleno family, for whom new opportuni-
All are welcome to join us in our
ties and possibilities await. D&S celebration of this important
anniversary.
J A N E P A U L is a teacher, writer, and community
activist. She teaches urban studies, alternative econo- Childcare will be available
and the conference site
mies, and urban sustainability at Antioch University
is fully accessible.
Los Angeles.

S O U R C E S : “California Reinvestment Coalition Respond to Troubling

New Report About Payday Lending in California,” California Reinvestment
Coalition, July 7, 2017 (calreinvest.org); “Bank Deserts: Nearly One in Five L.A.
County Neighborhoods Lack Banks or Credit Union,” Neighborhood Data for
Social Change, Nov. 27, 2017 (kcet.org); “A crackdown on predatory payday VISIT WWW.URPE50TH.ORG to register,
loans,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 9, 2017 (latimes.com); Alicia Adamczyk, “America’s submit a paper or presentation, and see the
6 Biggest Banks Collected $6 Billion in ATM and Overdraft Fees in 2015,” Time, full program. For more information contact:
Jan. 15, 2016 (time.com). urpe@urpe.org

MAY/JUNE 2018  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  29

< In Review

Theater of Work
A widely produced play focuses on autoworkers in 2008 Detroit.
Review of Skeleton Crew
by Dominique Morisseau

BY ZOE SHERMAN

O ur work lives and our workplace

relationships are underrepresent-
ed in theater. In Skeleton Crew,
Dominique Morisseau uses the form
of the realist drama to hold a mirror
up to this theatrically underexplored
part of our lives. All the action takes
place in a single location: the break-
room at a Detroit auto plant, circa
2008. Four characters, all lifelong
Detroiters, all black, enter and exit
and interact in every possible combi-
nation. Workplace relationships devel-
op over long periods of time, and are
often intimate and intense. Those re-
lationships are constrained by the
structured roles of the workplace, but
they can’t be entirely contained with-
in the formal delineation of job re-
sponsibilities. Morisseau renders
these quotidian workplace relation-
ships in all their complexity. They are
profoundly recognizable, but never
stereotypes.
Early in the first act of Skeleton
Crew, Reggie, a 30-something foreman
who started as a line worker and now
wears a tie to work, approaches Faye,
a 50-something line worker and a
union rep, for counsel. Reggie is un-
easy. He has stepped high enough up
the management ladder to be told
about decisions handed down from Publicity art for the
higher up, and he is responsible for 2017 production at the
Old Globe Theater in
carrying out those decisions, but he San Diego.
doesn’t have any substantial influence.
He has learned that the plant will be
shut down within a year. Operations
have already been cut back—hence a close friend of his late mother. Faye she is thrown into conflict. Her person-
the “skeleton crew” of the title—but helped him get his first job, and al loyalty to Reggie moves her to
full closure had remained, up until Reggie sees her as a trusted elder. But agree, at least temporarily, but with
that moment, a fearsome rumor. when he shares the news of the immi- grave reservations. She desperately
Reggie asks Faye for advice because of nent closure and asks her to keep the hopes that her job will exist long
their personal history: Faye had been news confidential for a little longer, enough for her 30-year anniversary

30  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l MAY/JUNE 2018

with the company, which would bump
up her retirement benefits. And as
union rep, she feels a strong sense of
loyalty to the other workers who have
a right to know immediately about
management decisions that will up-
end their lives. Loyalty to Reggie is a
betrayal of her coworkers and a pain-
ful moral compromise.
Faye delivers an impassioned
monologue on the achievements of
union solidarity to Dez, a younger co-
worker. Dez is skeptical. He evinces an
entrepreneurial individualism and is
mainly hoping the job will last long
enough for him to save up enough to
open his own auto repair shop. As he
becomes more and more convinced
that Faye and Reggie know something
they are not sharing, he becomes more
and more skeptical of Faye’s avowed
pro-union values and tries to force
Faye into a position where she will ei-
ther have to lie or reveal what she
knows. (And yet, when he discovers a
secret about Faye’s personal life that
she is ashamed of, he tells no one, as
much out of kindness as for the power
of his knowledge.)
Shanita, another young line work-
er, desperately wants to be able to
make long-term plans that rely on this
job. She is pregnant with her first
child and expects to be raising this
child without a partner. And Shanita
loves the work. She does not love the
intrusive management that threatens
disciplinary action for using the bath-
room at the wrong time, but she loves
being part of such an intricate pro-
duction choreography that it matters
to everyone in her unit when she
steps away from the line to use the
bathroom. She sometimes sits in the
breakroom listening with pleasure to
the rhythmic sounds of the machin-
ery. And she is intensely proud of her
skill and the quality of her work.
When Dez tries to flirt with her by
complimenting her appearance,
Shanita is irritated. When he tries to
calm her fears of unemployment by
complimenting her skill, she melts.
Our four protagonists and their
unseen coworkers cope with the tran-
sition from anxiety about the future
of their employment to the growing
certainty that their jobs will disap-
pear soon. Layered on top of their
incomplete information about the
coming plant closure is another mys-
tery: the plant is hit by a series of in-
creasingly brazen thefts of produc-
tion materials. If any of the principals
knows anything about who did it,
they’re not saying.
Though set ten years
ago, Skeleton Crew is
urgently relevant now.
The cultural symbolism
and real economic
circumstances of
manufacturing
industries and workers
remain politically
contested.
Skeleton Crew is a play of words.
Faye and Reggie and Dez and
Shanita talk. They talk about their
histories and their hopes for the fu-
ture. They talk about who they blame
for their troubles—one another, or
others outside the room, or circum-
stances that are no one’s fault, or
themselves. They use words to ex-
plain, to hide, to wound, to expose,
to protect, to reconcile. It is also a
play of bodies. Faye and Dez both
have visible scars (a patch of rough-
ened discolored skin on Faye’s arm; a
raised line running down the side of
Dez’s head behind his ear), and both
tell character-revealing stories of
how they got those scars. Shanita
MAY/JUNE 2018  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  31
wonders how the physical hazards of
her workplace will affect her preg-
nancy and her baby. Reggie reaches
a crisis point when he can no longer
handle the demands of his manage-
rial job with measured manipulation
of symbols; he enters the breakroom
trembling and tells Faye that he just
physically threatened his own super-
visor. And in two separate two-per-
son scenes, late in the play, when
they all know that the structure of
their shared workplace won’t be un-
dergirding their relationships with
one another much longer, they touch
each other. They hold hands.
Skeleton Crew was written in 2014
and first performed in New York in
2016. This spring theater season, it is
the third-most-produced play in the
United States. Though set ten years
ago, it is urgently relevant now. The
cultural symbolism and real econom-
ic circumstances of manufacturing
industries and workers remain politi-
cally contested. In an interview origi-
nally printed in the program for a pro-
duction in San Diego, Morisseau said,
“I want to broaden the face of the
working class; I want white working-
class people to watch this story and
to see themselves in it. I think we all
need to see ourselves more in one an-
other.” I attended a beautiful perfor-
mance at the Huntington Theater
Company in Boston and stayed after
the show for an audience conversa-
tion. A white woman said, haltingly,
as she wiped away a few tears, that
she had worked at a GM plant in
Framingham, Massachusetts in its
closing days 40 years ago. “That,” she
said about the drama we had just
watched together, “is exactly what it
was like.” Morisseau could hardly ask
for a better review. D&S
Z O E S H E R M A N is an assitant pro-
fessor of economics at Merrimack
College and a member of the Dollars &
Sense collective.
< Economy in Numbers

Why Janus Matters

Bracing for a U.S. Supreme Court ruling attacking public-sector workers.
BY GERALD FRIEDMAN

U nlike many other countries, when the United States enacted its central private-sector labor law, the National Labor Relations Act,
in 1935, it did not include public employees within the same framework for collective bargaining. While there were public-sec-
tor unions dating back to the 19th century, collective bargaining became widespread only decades later. In 1959 Wisconsin estab-
lished an influential legal framework for municipal collective bargaining, and in 1962 President John Kennedy issued Executive Order
10988 recognizing the right of federal workers to bargain collectively. From there, collective bargaining spread and public-sector
union membership grew rapidly, remaining strong even while membership stagnated and then declined in the private sector.
Public-sector unions have been effective in raising wages and improving conditions for teachers and other public employees.
Since the decline in private-sector union membership, public-sector jobs have been distinguished by relatively better conditions
and wages. Because women and minority workers are disproportionately employed in these jobs, public-sector unions are partic-
ularly important for them. These unions have been particularly important for the Democratic Party, which relies on their financing
and votes (just as it relies on the same from women and minorities in general). The partisan divide has led Republicans to attack
public employees and their unions. After rising sharply from 2% in 1960 to 67% in 1990, the share of public employees covered by
laws requiring collective bargaining has fallen, dropping to 63% in 2010. Since then, Republicans in some states, including former
union strongholds Wisconsin and Michigan, have reduced the scope of collective bargaining and removed union-security rules
requiring that workers covered by collective bargaining either belong to the relevant union or pay an agency fee.
The United States Supreme Court is now considering a case brought by Mark Janus, a child-support specialist at the Illinois
Department of Healthcare and Family Services. While Janus is not a union member, in Janus v. AFSCME Council 31, he is disput-
ing the obligation to pay an agency fee for the collective bargaining services provided by the union, that everything done by
the union is a form of political speech and, therefore, that the requirement that he contribute is a form of compelled speech
and a violation of his rights under the First Amendment. Janus would reverse an earlier decision by the Court, the 1977 case
Abood v. Detroit Board of Education. It marks a return of the 2016 case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, which was
not decided by a 4–4 ruling after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. With the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme
Court, it is expected that the ruling in Janus will go against the unions. D&S

G E R A L D F R I E D M A N is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Figure 1: Share of Public- and Private-Sector Workers in Unions, 1968–2000, 1973–2007

Public Sector Private Sector

After rising sharply in the 1960s and early 1970s, the public-sector unionization rate has remained steady even as
the private-sector rate has declined. In the early 1970s, the share of workers belonging to unions was higher in the pri-
vate than in the public sector, and less than 20% of all union members were in the public sector. Public-sector unioniza-
tion rates continued to rise through the 1970s, however, and passed the declining unionization rate in the private sector
in 1974. The public sector advantage has only grown since then. Today, half of all union members are in the public sector,
and the unionization rate there, 34%, is over five times that of private sector workers, at 6%.

32  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l MAY/JUNE 2018

 $

Figure 2: The Effect of Unions, Public and Private, on Wages and Benefits

Private-sector unions have a greater effect on wages and benefits for their members, but because of lower unionization
rates in the private sector, they have less effect on total compensation than do public-sector unions. While public-sector
workers are more likely to belong to unions than their private-sector counterparts, private-sector unions generally have larg-
er effects on member wages and benefits. Controlling for experience and education, for example, public-sector unions raise
wages by almost 15%, compared to the over 20% increase achieved by private-sector unions. Private-sector unions have
much large effects on benefits like health insurance and pensions.
Because there are now so few private-sector union members, their effect on wages and benefits for workers as a
whole is much less. The greater coverage of public-sector unions means that they do more to raise wages and pen-
sions for all workers then do private-sector unions.

Women, African Americans, and Latinos are

Fig. 3: Share of Non-Security Public-Sector Jobs much more likely to work in the public sector
by Race and Gender (apart from the police and corrections) than
are white men, and are therefore much more
likely to belong to public-sector unions. This is
largely due to the large share of caring, teach-
ing, and clerical jobs in the public sector—all
jobs disproportionately held by women and by
racial and ethnic minorities. Nearly 16% of all
women are employed in the public sector, as
are almost 12% of African-American workers
and 8% of Hispanics, compared with barely 7%
of white men. This concentration of women and
minority workers means that the Janus case is
particularly important to these workers.

S O U R C E S : Figure 1: Spreadsheet “Public-Sector Workers Unions” tab “All Public Sector” from Union Stats (unionstats.com); Figure 2: Spreadsheet “Public-Sector Workers
Unions” tab “Wage Effects” from Rosenfeld, What Unions No Longer Do. Figure 3: Spreadsheet “Public-Sector Workers Unions” tab “Emp by Race and Gender” from BLS household
data survey (bls.gov); Figure 4: Spreadsheet “Public-Sector Workers Unions” tab “States Sorted” from Union Stats (unionstats.com); Figure 5: Spreadsheet “Public-Sector Workers
Unions” tab “Politics” from Union Stats (unionstats.com). Rew Hanna and Caitlin Emma,“Supreme Court Could Cripple Public Unions in Run-up to 2018 Midterms,” Politico, Feb. 28,
2018 (politico.com); Jeffrey Keefe, “Laws Enabling Public-Sector Collective Bargaining Have Not Led to Excessive Public-Sector Pay,” Economic Policy Institute, October 16, 2015
(epi.org); P. R. Lockhart, “What the Latest Union Case before the Supreme Court Could Mean for Workers of Color.” Vox, February 26, 2018 (vox.com); Celine McNicholas and Janelle
Jones. “Black Women Will Be Most Affected by Janus,” Economic Policy Institute, Feb. 13, 2018 (epi.org); Jake Rosenfeld, What Unions No Longer Do (Harvard University Press, 2014);
Milla Sanesand John Schmitt, “Regulation of Public Sector Collective Bargaining in the States,” Center for Economic Policy Research, March 2014 (cepr.net).

MAY/JUNE 2018  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  33

< Ask Dr. Dollar

What Are the Effects of a $15 per Hour Minimum Wage?

Dear Dr. Dollar:
Opposition and Response
While I am all for raising the wages of low-income workers, it seems that there are
Nonetheless, there are opponents of the
some problems with setting the minimum wage at $15 per hour. Wouldn’t pushing
new minimum wage laws. They argue
up the minimum wage lead to less employment for low-wage workers, as employers
that if the minimum wage is raised, the
find it more profitable to use more machinery in place of workers and some employ-
level of employment will fall—especially
ers actually shut down their operations, maybe moving offshore? And does it make
for low-wage workers. So instead of be-
sense to have the same minimum throughout the country, when income levels are so
ing helped, they claim, many low-wage
different in different states—West Virginia and Massachusetts, for example?
workers would lose their jobs. It is a sim-
—Rebecca G., Hagerstown, W.V.
ple—and, unfortunately, a simplistic—
B Y A R T H U R M ACE WA N Not a Lot of Money, But…. argument. It is true that if the prices of
Fifteen dollars an hour is not a lot of tomatoes, cars, or many other items rise,

A lthough Bernie Sanders and oth-

ers have called for raising the na-
tional minimum wage to $15 per
hour, this is not going to happen as
long as Republicans control Congress
and Donald Trump is in the White
House. The national minimum wage
remains at $7.25 per hour, where it
has been since 2010. Real action,
however, is taking place at the state
and local level.
Seattle paved the way with 2014
legislation that is slated to raise the
city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour
by 2021. Since then, there have been
efforts in many cities and states to fol-
low Seattle’s lead. Under the “Fight for
$15” banner, a national movement has
emerged. In California, San Francisco
will have a $15 minimum this year, Los
Angeles by 2020, and the whole state
by 2022.
New York’s minimum wage will
reach $15 at different times in different
regions, with New York City’s hitting
the mark at the end of this year for
large employers and at the end of
2019 for small employers (less than 10
employees); the phase-in will be slow-
er in other regions of the state. In
Washington, DC, the minimum wage
will rise to $15 per hour in 2020.
In 2017, either by legislatures’ ac-
tions or by the ballot box, 19 states
raised their minimum wage. While
none moved immediately to $15, and
in some states the increases were very
small, these changes illustrate the ex-
tent to which minimum wage action
has moved out of Washington.
money. Forty hours a week for 52 weeks
a year at this rate yields an annual in-
come of $31,200, roughly half the medi-
an household income in the country. By
2021, when the $15 rate will be reality
in some states and cities, inflation will
have reduced the figure to less than
$14 in current dollars (perhaps lower).
Still, the increase of the minimum
wage to $15 could make a real differ-
ence for low-income workers and their
families. In Massachusetts, for example,
an increase of the minimum to $15 is
under consideration by the legislature,
and, if the legislature does not act favor-
ably, the increase will be on the ballot in
November. The Massachusetts law
would raise the minimum wage from its
current $11 per hour in $1 increments
over the next four years. This increase
would improve the economic well-being
of over a million workers, close to 30% of
the state’s workforce. Fully 91 percent of
affected workers are age 20 or older.
Over half are women. Fifty-eight percent
work full-time. Some 400,000 children
(28 percent of all Massachusetts chil-
dren) have at least one working parent
who would get a raise.
At the current $11 per hour mini-
mum in Massachusetts, even with more
than one person working, a family with
kids can make it only with several pub-
lic supports, such as housing and day-
care vouchers, food stamps, and
MassHealth (a program that combines
Medicaid and the Children’s Health
Insurance Program). Fifteen dollars an
hour won’t solve all this family’s eco-
nomic problems, but it will help.
people will buy less of those items. So,
the argument goes, the same is true for
low-wage workers. Employers, for exam-
ple, will find ways, perhaps by using
more equipment or cutting back servic-
es, to hire fewer employees.
But labor is different than toma-
toes or cars. If a higher price is paid
for the same tomato, that doesn’t
mean the tomato will become tastier.
The same with the car; paying more
for the same car won’t make it run any
better. But pay the same worker more
and things change.
Workers who are paid better tend to
be more productive, either because
they feel better about their jobs or they
now have a greater desire to keep that
job, or both. Greater productivity lowers
costs per unit of output. Also, better pay
means less turnover, which can also
lower employers’ costs. While these cost
reductions may not outweigh the high-
er wage, they certainly reduce the neg-
ative impact of the higher wage on em-
ployers’ bottom lines.
Also, insofar as the higher costs are
a burden on employers, much of that
burden can be passed on to customers
with relatively little impact on purchas-
es. In Massachusetts, for example, even
ignoring cost savings from higher pro-
ductivity and lower turnover,
McDonald’s could fully cover the costs
of raising the minimum wage from $11
to $15 by raising prices by 1.3 percent
per year for four years.
Furthermore, when a city or state
raises its minimum wage, low-wage
firms are unlikely to move away. A

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 $?

large share of the low-wage labor force
is employed in fast food sites and retail
stores. Their very nature ties them to
the location of their clientele. Very few
low-wage workers are in manufactur-
ing firms that might flee abroad.
It should be no surprise, then, that
many economic studies have shown
that in various states negative employ-
ment impacts of increases in the mini-
mum wage have been either non-exis-
tent or trivial. To again use the
Massachusetts example: As the state’s
minimum wage was raised over three
years from $8 per hour to its current
$11 per hour in recent years, there was
no apparent negative impact on em-
ployment. To be sure, some studies of
minimum wage increases show nega-
tive employment impacts. But, on bal-
ance, the increasing number of studies
that show no negative impacts are
more convincing. (See box.)
SEATTLE: A TALE OF TWO STUDIES
Variations
There are major differences among the
states in the minimum wage, income
levels, and the cost of living. States
like Maryland, New Jersey, and
Massachusetts have median house-
hold incomes about 70% higher than
states like Mississippi, West Virginia,
and Louisiana. In the lowest-income
states, the cost of living is also quite
low, so people in those states are not
worse off to the degree that the in-
come difference would imply.
However, in the lowest-income states,
in which the minimum wage is only
the federal minimum of $7.25, a jump
to $15 could be very disruptive to local
firms and damaging to employment.
Yet there are also major differences
within states in the minimum wage,
income levels, and the cost of living.
New York, as noted above, has taken at
least some of this intra-state difference
into account by setting different sched-
ules for the establishment of the $15
minimum wage in different regions. If a
$15 minimum were established nation-
ally, means could be developed to ease
the adjustment in areas where this
would be an especially large increase.
The New York procedure is one option,
but others could be developed.
In whatever manner the introduc-
tion would be handled, there would be
considerable value in moving toward
economic equality among the states.
Until the late 1970s, there was a gener-
al convergence among income levels
across different states. In the 1930s,
Mississippi had had a per capita in-
come level about 30% as high as in
Massachusetts, and by the late 1970s,
that figure was almost 70%. But
today, Mississippi is down to 55% of
Massachusetts. (See Gerald Friedman,
“Growing Together, Flying Apart,” D&S,
March/April 2018.)
This shift from convergence to di-
vergence has been associated with
the general rise of economic inequal-

I n June 2017, two papers were released evaluating the impact on employ-
ment of the increase of the minimum wage in Seattle. At that time, the mini-
mum had increased to $13 an hour.
ity in the country and surely has been
driven by some of the same factors.
Regional inequality is a problem in
The first study, “Seattle’s Minimum Wage Experience 2015–6,” written by a itself, but it is not unreasonable to
group at the University of California Berkeley, found that there was no signifi-
see it as associated with the political
cant impact on employment of the move toward the $15 minimum wage.
The second study, “Minimum Wage Increases, Wages, and Low-Wage and cultural polarization in the
Employment: Evidence from Seattle,” by a group at the University of United States. Establishing a much
Washington yielded, a very different result—that the impact on employment higher national minimum wage,
of low-wage workers was large and negative. This second study has been which would have its greatest impact
widely touted by opponents of increasing the minimum wage. in low-income regions, would be one
But in spite of the attention it received, the second study was unconvinc- step in reducing this undesirable—
ing, in part because the large negative impact it found was very much larger indeed, poisonous—inequality and
than had been found in similar studies of minimum wage increase elsewhere polarization. D&S
by researchers critical of minimum wage increases. Also, this study excluded
data from multi-site firms, which included most fast food and many retails A R T H U R M A C E W A N is professor
sales operations. Further, it failed to effectively take account of the rapid emeritus at UMass Boston and a
growth of the Seattle economy, which appears to have moved many low- Dollars & Sense Associate.
wage workers into higher-higher wage categories.
S O U R C E S : Available at dollarsandsense.org.
The Berkeley study focused on the Seattle food service industry, which is
an intense user of minimum wage workers. If employment impacts resulted
Questions about the economy?
from the increase of the minimum wage, they should show up in this indus-
Ask Dr. Dollar!
try. As a control group, this study used cities elsewhere in the country which
Submit questions by email (dollars@
had economic experiences similar to Seattle over the years leading into the dollarsandsense.org) or U.S. mail (c/o
Seattle wage increase. Its methodology makes its result—no negative im- Dollars & Sense, 89 South St., LL02,
pact on employment—more convincing. Boston, MA 02111).

MAY/JUNE 2018  l  DOLLARS & SENSE  l  35