Friends,

Do you ever have trouble explaining “working-class studies” and WCSA to colleagues and friends, or to people you would like to interest in our work?  This difficulty strikes me as more pressing than ever at a time when the national conversation has turned so explicitly to issues of class.

Part of the difficulty seems to be that we are such a hybrid association: scholars, teachers, artists and organizers.  Each of us likely has a primary identification within this mix, just as academics in the WCSA who embrace interdisciplinary work still have an anchor in one discipline or department.  But this of course is the appeal for those of us who affiliate with WCSA: we learn so much from each other’s perspectives and commitments, and we discover opportunities for joint work.

Another branch of the difficulty may be the question as to whether or not working-class studies represents an identity formation, like Black Studies and Women’s Studies, as they were in their early days.  As with those formations, strands in our collective work are designed to support the academic experience of working-class students, and to enhance the visibility and study of working-class projects and cultures.  Yet we also critique the structure and operation of class society more generally, with view to reducing (dare I still say, abolishing?) class exploitation and domination.

A major conceptual difficulty is, of course, ongoing contestation over who and what we mean by working class.   We face the peculiarly American belief that if there was a working class in the US it is now largely “history,” having been replaced by a large middle class with a small sector of the rich above and the poor below.  If the traditional working class persists, it is characterized as largely white, blue collar, and socially conservative.  This is serious nonsense, of course, but the egalitarian myth of the inclusive middle has massive appeal, and it is routinely re-inscribed in popular consciousness during election seasons.  So we always have an uphill battle to establish the salience of the term “working class” itself.

When Janet Zandy and I put together our anthology of American Working-Class Literature, we aimed to correct what Jack Metzgar calls this “American class vernacular,” demonstrating that the US working class was from the beginning one of the most diverse ever assembled, by race, gender, ethnic and national origin, and that all sectors of this evolving class have represented themselves eloquently through various forms of cultural production.  We wanted the book’s cover to reflect this multiplicity through vibrantly colored artwork.  Oxford University Press, however, used only tones of gunmetal blue and grey in a design suggestive of a slab of steel.  The blue-collar, industrial referents seem inescapably connected to the term “working class”.

Which is why it is especially useful, at this juncture when – thanks to the Occupiers and their stark assertion of a divide between the 99% and the 1% – the language of class is spoken everywhere, to have a restatement from Michael Zweig of his clear-eyed analysis of the US class structure.  The second edition of Zweig’s The Working-Class Majority, published in January 2012, confirms the key finding of the first edition:  that in the US, a sharply class-divided society, the working class, defined according to workplace, economic, political and cultural power, is a majority of 60+%.  (In Zweig’s analysis, this group now includes a large percentage of nurses and teachers whose work has been substantially deskilled through corporate management practices.)

Furthermore, as the years since the crisis of 2008 have demonstrated, “the poor” are part of this majority class, in the sense that poverty (including homelessness and incarceration) is something that happens to working-class people as a consequence of the reckless self-interest of the capitalist class.  Meanwhile, of course, we are also seeing creative and widespread protest and resistance to the ongoing blatant redistribution of resources upward and of insecurity and austerity down the class scale.   Contemporary protests are generating alternative forms of organization at levels unseen since the late 1800s.

In Pittsburgh recently, at a memorial celebration of David Montgomery’s life and work— the “dean” of labor historians, Montgomery died December 2, 2011, at the age of 84 — Peter Rachleff pointed out that, according to Montgomery, the “labor movement” in the last quarter of the 19^th century included unions, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, political parties, and reform associations (e.g. for the 8-hour day).  Rachleff noted that the movement today has similar range and multiplicity of focus, including not only revitalized labor unions, but campaigns for immigrant rights and reproductive rights, for political and financial reform, as well as organized struggles over the environment, healthcare, public education, food supply, public transportation, military action, incarceration – multiple arenas in which unjust and destructive power is being challenged.

What, then, is the subject and project of working-class studies at this moment?  And how do we explain our association’s work to our many potential allies?  At the upcoming How Class Works conference, to be held June 7 – 9 at SUNY Stony Brook, we’ll have a chance to debate these issues and to connect the dots between WCSA and the movements unleashed by the Occupiers and by the Madison uprising. Looking ahead, I’m pleased to announce that in June of 2013 the WCSA conference will be held in Madison itself, where the Labor and Working-Class Studies Project is projecting a program that will highlight strategic connections among the activist, academic, and artistic strands of our work, in the context of the movements that took such visible and inspiring shape during the Wisconsin Spring of 2011.

In solidarity,

Nick Coles

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

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

You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of Limbo: Blue Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Alfred Lubrano and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.

Well, that’s not entirely true; many of you know me from previous interactions and conferences—I helped Mike Zweig produce the Stony Brook conferences and have been to most of our association’s conferences.  When Lubrano published his book, those of you who read it knew more about me than most others.  My boyhood buddies were pretty upset when they read it.  We all agreed to talk to Alfred about our lives growing up in working-class culture, and while we all had made the financial leap that had us thinking we must be middle class, the book reminded us that most of us hadn’t.  They didn’t like being associated with the working class, yet they all agreed that they had worked all their lives, and still did.  Can you blame them?  The way the working class is portrayed in the media, you’d think it was a bunch of foul-mouthed buffoons whose kids do nothing but hang out on the Jersey Shore.

If you read Mike Zweig, you’d know that most of us are still working class, though a fancy education might have created the illusion that we are not, and mass media might keep us from identifying ourselves as such.  Politicians avoid using “working class” and create the illusion that most U.S. Americans are middle class.  It makes you wonder if the working class exists at all anymore.  But a long look at the latest statistics tells us that the distance between rich and poor has grown larger than ever, which makes you realize that it is our job to bring class consciousness to students and workers.

These are tough times for all.  As withering tax bases shrink state contributions to all levels of education, as tenured jobs evaporate into the mist of part-time jobs and larger classes, as unemployment grows, the time has come for everyone to begin to see the effects of today’s economy on class and the effects of mass media on creating class identities.  Understanding class in the U.S. is crucial to creating responsible citizens; through education in the academy and the workplace we can improve our world, and that  is what I see as one of the major jobs of those of us connected to each other through the Working Class Studies Association.  I hope you will teach each other how to do better through our publications and conferences, how to fight for just and livable wages, and how to improve working conditions and create healthy environments for all.

I agreed to become a leader in this organization at a time when I could have been hiding behind my tenure and professor status, whiling away my time on projects that I had abandoned in my pursuit of the great American academic dream.  I ran for president because I believe in the responsibility of stewardship that comes to those who have gained a modicum of success in their fields. Like you, I will not ignore the need to continue to keep the spark of skepticism alive, hoping that it could ignite students and workers into knowing hegemony when they see it, questioning authority always, and generating thinking that leads to constructive and compassionate action for change.

Keep up with your great work.  Keep me posted on what you’d like to see this organization doing, and please come to Chicago for our next conference.

To us, it’s astounding that the United States is the only developed nation in the world that does not have universal healthcare. Yet the public option is presented as a dangerous experiment, a “government takeover,” rather than a long overdue reform.  Middle-class people often spend a disproportionate amount of their incomes on health insurance premiums, but it is the working class, increasingly making low wages in non-union jobs, which are often uninsured or underinsured.

The United States, and indeed the world, continues to grapple with the recession.  We also grapple with employers whose first response to the economic downturn is to cut jobs and/or benefits. But we are fighting back. In response to draconian budget cuts (17 billion in 2 years) and soaring student fees (182% increase since 2002) students and faculty at the University of California campuses organized a Day of Action on March 4.  Many thousands participated in rallies and actions across the state.  In thirty-two states people organized actions in solidarity with those in California.

At one time the public higher education system in California was the envy of the nation.  Its colleges and universities provided a first-rate education for many working-class first-generation students.  Where will those students go now?  What can students do when they can’t afford a public college?

We know that the issue isn’t just resources; it’s priorities. Increasingly colleges are run on a corporate model featuring top-down decision making.  High profile projects, such as building new sports facilities, are deemed more important than funding academic programs.  Working-class people have long recognized that they must organize to protect their interests. Academics are starting to learn this lesson.

The Working-Class Studies Association must continue to study the forces that impact the lives of working people and to work for economic equality. The How Class Works Conference at SUNY Stony Brook, June 3-5, will be a venue for academic and activist work. It will be a truly international conference, with scholars from a dozen countries and five panels devoted to papers on various countries.  Plenary sessions feature Bill Fletcher and William Tabb examining the working class and right-wing populism, the economic crisis and political paralysis, and the AFT critique of charter schools.

Every conference gives us the opportunity to celebrate what we have accomplished and assess what we need to do.  In sharing our research and our skills, we collaborate. I look forward to seeing many of you in June.

In Solidarity,

Michelle M. Tokarczyk

As I write this letter, our nation is in the midst of a debate on healthcare. There are few issues more important for working people. As Jack Metzger notes in the Working-Class Perspectives blog, a study that will soon be published in the American Journal of Public Health calculates that each year 45,000 Americans die because they don’t have health insurance. Many other Americans are underinsured because they can’t afford the exorbitant—and rising—rates that profit-driven insurance companies charge. Recently at the private liberal arts college where I teach, faculty sat gloomily in their chairs as we were told that one of our current carriers was increasing premiums 31%; we should think about whether we valued choice of doctors or affordability more highly. How many of us in that room could be among the underinsured facing financial disaster–or worse?

The crisis in healthcare is but one example of how the quality of working Americans’ lives has decreased while corporations and those who lead them have increased their profits. The situation is familiar to those of us in working-class studies: Americans are working longer hours for less and are continually threatened with loss—loss of jobs, loss of health insurance, loss of a home or a livable community.

While the challenges facing us are daunting, they are not insurmountable. Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story depicts many instances of people suddenly, surprisingly refusing to accept economic oppression: a family reclaims its foreclosed home, fired workers refuse to vacate without compensation. We see other signs of rebellion on state campuses where faculty are unwilling to accept furloughs, increased class sizes, and layoffs; and where working-class students see their dreams of a college education threatened.

The Working-Class Studies Association is an increasingly important organization. Yes, we are small, but our work reverberates outside of our conference rooms and computer screens. We make our impact organizing workers, advocating with underserved communities, and campaigning for progressive politicians. We study the lives of working-class people and their representation in the arts. In doing so we “talk back” to stereotypes of the working class. As important, we extend our activism and our scholarship beyond the U.S. borders so that we can understand and work with working people in a global context.

Within the organization, we are continually looking for ways to expand our membership and to address the concerns of those who are members. We’ve formed an Outreach Committee to connect with people who are committed to working-class issues but who may not be aware of the Working-Class Studies Association—especially activists. We’ve also formed a Graduate Student Committee to address the needs of students who may have to explain their interdisciplinary field of study to more traditional faculty or hiring committees.

When we are faced with national and international crises, it’s important to remember that each of us can make a difference because of the kind of work we’ve chosen to do. We can also share that work with one another through the Working-Class Studies Association.

In Solidarity,

Michelle M. Tokarczyk