Dear Friends,

It’s a pleasure to address you for the first time as president of the Working-Class Studies Association.  I’ve been reading back over introductory letters from past presidents, to get a feel for the genre.  They are archived on the WCSA website, and they make inspiring reading.  It’s clear that the association has been favored with committed and visionary leadership since its beginnings in 2004.  The opportunity to help advance the mission of this young but well-founded and growing organization is both an honor and a challenge.  In his first letter, Peter Racleff (2006 – 2007) expressed the WCSA’s purpose this way:  “At the heart of the project of the WCSA is the struggle to make visible the invisible, to demonstrate that there is indeed a working class in the United States, that it is alive and lively, full of potential and energy, not just shaped by the dominant society but able to shape the future itself.”

Other past-presidents have reflected in their letters on events and trends shaping working-class life and struggles in the present moment.   Kitty Krupat (2007 – 2008) wrote about the election campaign that led to Obama’s presidency, and the opportunity it provided for discussion of issues of race, class, gender and sexuality.  David Roediger (2008 – 2009) reminded us of the power of internationalism in a time of mass work protests world-wide, including in China. Michelle Tokarczyk (2009 – 2010) addressed the healthcare reform debate, the worsening recession, and education cutbacks as contexts for our work.  Fred Gardaphe (2010 – 2011) addressed the attack on state employees’ unions and urged the need for a united front of labor and working-class organizations.

We are now in the midst of the deepest and longest-running recession since the great depression, brought on in the US by the double disasters of financial crisis and a decade of war.  The response of the federal government and most state governments has been to impose austerity: cutting jobs, pay and benefits, as well as the services that unemployed people rely on – and of course, curtailing labor rights.  The response of workers, students, unions, and professionals of all stripes from Wisconsin and around the country has been to rise up in protest, drawing inspiration not only from deep traditions of labor and political dissent but also from the mass uprisings of the Arab Spring of 2011.

As I write this, the Occupy Wall Street protests are intensifying and spreading to other cities around the US.   Protesters are accused – along with anyone from Obama down who proposes job creation or progressive taxation – of fomenting “class warfare.”  Well it’s about time we were talking about this.   The ruling class in the US has been conducting a very conscious class war from above for the past thirty years.  Globally, they have been busy grabbing up the planet’s land and resources, converting the global proletariat into a “precariat” of impoverished casual labor, fueling (and denying) climate change, and undermining the democratic processes designed to give the rest of us a voice in these matters.  The coming years will reveal whether they have overreached and whether the resistance we are now seeing will prevail.

The slogan “We Are the 99 Percent” resonates widely in this new Gilded Age of extreme disparities in wealth, with bankers, CEOs and allied politicians representing the 1% who have captured 25% of the wealth while real income for the majority has declined.  (Interestingly, a Time magazine poll reported in the October 10 2010 issue indicates 1% of those surveyed consider current economic conditions “excellent.”)  Even The New York Times, having at first ignored the protests, recognized the justice and timeliness of their message in a recent lead editorial (October 9, 2011).  Typically, the Times makes no mention of the working class: it is the “middle class” that is being ground down and “the poor” whose ranks are swelling.

However, the protesters’ 99% to 1% breakdown echoes those in the WCSA who have been calling for a cross-class alliance of working-class and professional middle-class people against a predatory and ascendant capitalist class.  Michael Zweig has argued that clear recognition and correct naming of class distinctions in the US is necessary to identify our common interests and to focus our actions.  In The Working-Class Majority (2000 edition – a new edition is due out this Fall) he calculates working-class membership at around 62%, middle-class at 36%, and capitalist class at 2%.   Give or take a percentage point, could we now be seeing that alliance of the 98%?  Might it include recognition that poverty is something that can happen to middle-class as well as working-class people, and – a further stretch – that labor is not a “special interest”?

What can the WCSA offer to the broader movement for economic justice in these times?  Dave Roediger, in his first letter, explained: “[A]n analysis that takes class as central and presents it as a lived and concrete set of experiences in highly unequal social relationships has a better chance of being heard now than in a long time.  The shop-worn idea that workers have been “bought off” has seldom been so starkly discredited.  Equally gone is the confidence that markets magically solve things.”

Working-class studies can provide data, analysis, historical perspective and cultural expression that brings clarity to the issues and motivates action.  Just this month, for example, the Center for Working-Class Studies released its quarterly report on the “de facto unemployment rate,” compiled by John Russo and his colleagues at Youngstown State University.  It demonstrates that, when discouraged job seekers and other latent job candidates are added to the official unemployed, the de facto rate stands at 26.37%.  Including the prison population and active military personnel takes the unemployment rate to 29.17%.   As a teacher of literature, I can place data like these alongside poems like Mark Nowak’s in Shut Up / Shut Down and video from the Madison protests earlier this year, to create a fuller picture for my students of how we live now and the range of possible responses.

In the face of these world-historical developments, the steps the WCSA needs to take in the coming year to strengthen our association might seem a bit pedestrian. But they require action if we want to grow the resources the WCSA makes available and extend the association’s reach and impact.   I’ll name two tasks that emerged from lively meetings of our membership at the Chicago conference in June 2011.  (And this is the place to say “thank you” to Jack Metzgar and the rest of the team from the Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies – Liesl Orenic, Bob Bruno, Lew Rosenbaum, and Maria Dokes – for organizing such a terrific gathering.)

• We need to expand and diversify our membership.  Jack’s report on that conference tells us that of the 250 people attending about 20% were non-academics (labor and community activists, artists and writers, filmmakers, publishers), and only 13% were people of color.  Conference participation is constrained by issues of funding and logistics and doesn’t necessarily reflect membership at large.  But still, we need to figure out what the obstacles to membership are, what the benefits are, and what it would take make the WCSA as broadly based as the working class itself.

• We need to generate more activity and sharing of resources between annual conferences.  We have a good start on this with the Working-Class Perspectives weekly blog, the reports coming from the Center for Study of Working-Class Life (including the latest, on the class and geographic origins of US war dead in Afghanistan), and our partnership with the journal New Labor Forum.   But the WCSA’s own website could become a much more interactive source of knowledge and conversation, and we could learn how to better use social media for our purposes.

If you have ideas as to how we might accomplish these tasks please write me at the address below.  Other plans generated in Chicago will be taken up by the Steering Committee in the coming months and I’ll report on them in the Spring issue of the newsletter.

Meantime, if you are reading this but not yet a WCSA member, please consider joining the association via our website.   And think about submitting a proposal for the upcoming conference on How Class Works at Stony Brook, June 7 – 9, 2012.   Proposals are welcome through December 12.  For details, see the call for papers in this issue of the newsletter.

In solidarity,

Nick Coles

WCSA President

Brothers and Sisters,

Welcome to spring, or for others, the end of the seemingly never ending winter.  This will be my last article as president for in the fall, Nicholas Coles takes the lead.  In this short space I want to bring up something that I think is of vital importance to our association and the people we work with and for.

As state governments look for ways to do with less because of the loss of tax revenues they are being guided, lobbied and aided by those who would like to take away what little power the people have these days from the few unions that have any strength.  This is a battle that those of us in academia cannot afford to ignore, and one that workers in the private sector know too well.  We who belong to state-employed teacher unions need to reach out to our colleagues in the service unions to create a united front.   I urge us all to find ways of connecting with other working class organizations so that those trying to destroy the power of the working class will see that it is an impossible task that poses dire consequences.

At our upcoming meeting in Chicago we will have the regular membership meeting, during which the executive committee reports on the work its been doing throughout the year, and discuss with members actions and directions for the future.  Beyond this meeting, we will also hold a public forum on issues that the association could and should address.  To that end I am asking that you send me items you’d like to see on the agenda for that meeting.

This semester I am teaching in Italy, where the working class has a more established and solid base from which to counter threats from those wishing to diminish their power.  These days it might be easy to laugh at some of Italy’s corrupt leaders, but no one is laughing at labor.  Workers have respect, if not power, granted to them by the Italian Constitution.  A big difference between Italy and the U.S. is that Italy—currently celebrating it’s 150^th anniversary as a geo-political nation—was constructed on a fundamental belief in the importance of labor.  Italy is founded on work.  In fact, labor is the eighth word of its constitution. The first sentence of the constitution reads: “Italy is a Democratic Republic, based on labour.”  In comparison, the word labour appears once in the entire U.S. Constitution, in paragraph three of the fourth Article, and it is in reference to the responsibility of the worker to fulfill a contract of labor even if he flees the state, and the right of the employer to have that worker retuned to fulfill the contract:

3:  No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

Interesting is the difference, and it is one not identified by pundits and journalists reporting on recent congressional actions such as the oral reading of the Constitution that occurred earlier this year in the Congress.  While I am not an expert in Constitutional interpretation, I do think that this simple comparison between Italy and the United States raises an important issue that we the people of work and the people who study work need to address.  I look forward to elaborating this discussion at our upcoming conference, through the various sessions and group meetings.  Please try to make it to the open forum session where the discussion will be more focused.  See you in Chicago.

Fred Gardaphe, President