Labor historian & 2023-24 CASBS fellow Gabriel Winant in conversation with 2018-19 CASBS fellow Ruth Milkman, among the nation's most renowned sociologists of labor. In addition to interrogating divisions within and segmentation across labor markets in recent decades, Milkman also has remained attuned to the complexity of the overall working class experience, essential for illuminating ways in which workers can unite and organize.
Labor historian & 2023-24 CASBS fellow Gabriel Winant in conversation with 2018-19 CASBS fellow Ruth Milkman, among the nation's most renowned sociologists of labor. In addition to interrogating divisions within and segmentation across labor markets in recent decades, Milkman also has remained attuned to the complexity of the overall working class experience, essential for illuminating ways in which workers can unite and organize.
RUTH MILKMAN: CUNY faculty page | personal website | ASA bio |
Milkman's book Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat (2020) | Polity Press Q&A |
GABRIEL WINANT: CASBS bio | Univ. of Chicago faculty page | faculty Q&A |
Winant's book The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America (2022)
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered.
Thank . Under what conditions do workers find ways to fight back against exploitation they face in the workplace, and how do they overcome divisions within labor markets? These central questions have motivated the four decades and running career of one of the nation's most renowned sociologists of labor and labor movements. Today on Human Centered, a conversation with 2018-19 CASBIS fellow Ruth Milkman, distinguished professor of sociology and history at the CUNY Graduate Center, chair of the Labor Studies Department at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, and past president of the American Sociological Association.
Milkman has studied and written on a broad range of topics related to work and organized labor in the US, both in modern and historical contexts. This includes the impacts of economic crises in war in the 1930s and 40s on women workers in the US. The restructuring of the US automobile industry and its impact on workers and their union in the 1980s and 90s, policy-oriented work on topics such as wage theft, unionization trends, paid sick leave, and the aging workforce, and the employment conditions of low wage immigrant workers and the dynamics of organizing them.
Her 2020 book written at CASBS is titled Immigrant Labor and the New Precarious. We'll provide links to Milkman's extensive body of work and accomplishments in the episode notes. Engaging Milkman is Gabriel Winant, a 2023 to 24 CASBS fellow and labor historian at the University of Chicago.
While at CASBS, Winant is writing a book that reinterprets the earliest 20th century transformation of US labor markets and in the process, reframing the politics of the welfare state and how its employment patterns reshaped everyday life and social practices. Winant knows Milkman's work extremely well and as you're about to hear, definitely interrogates those central guiding questions across the full scope of her work. The through line Gabe reveals is that, not withstanding various patterns of deep labor market differentiation and segmentation, Ruth has remained painstakingly attuned to the complexity of the overall working class experience so vital for understanding and illuminating for the rest of us how workers can unite and organize.
And in so doing, create positive change that revitalizes contemporary American political economy. Let's listen.
Gabriel Winant: Hi Ruth, it's really nice to see you.
Ruth Milkman: Likewise.
Gabriel Winant: So I wanted to ask, as one current CASBS fellow to another, former one, about where your time here kind of fit or how it fit into the course of your career and your thinking and, you know, sometimes the leave year can be really good for doing big reflection or taking a step back or for finishing a project in another way. And so I thought that could be a nice way to kind of take us into the arc of your work and your ideas over your career.
Ruth Milkman: Okay, sure. Well, so basically the fellowship allowed me to find time to actually write this thing that I had been thinking about for a long time before but had not had any time to really focus on. And so that was the biggest thing.
But, you know, it's just an incredible gift to have no teaching or more important bureaucratic responsibilities for nine months. So that was just amazing. And for me, anyway, writing requires that kind of big open space.
So it was fantastic that way. And, you know, it's a very stimulating environment, obviously. And I did learn a lot from the other fellows, but I definitely benefited from feedback, you know, after giving a talk about it here and just chatting with folks.
Gabriel Winant: Will you tell us about the book that that you were working on then?
Ruth Milkman: Sure. So it was published in 2020, which was not ideal, given that it was the height of the pandemic and people weren't really that interested in new books at that moment. But it's gotten a little circulation despite that since that time.
It's called Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat. And it is a study of the relationship between immigration and employment in the 20th century and early 21st century US focused on a bunch of different cases. The punchline is basically that contrary to what I call the immigrant threat narrative, this idea that immigrants are a threat to US born workers in terms of both jobs and other quality of life kinds of concerns, that that narrative has the causality kind of backwards and that low wage immigrants are employed in response to deterioration in the living standards and pay of US born workers who then who typically abandon jobs that are no longer desirable and employers then turn to immigrants.
So it's kind of, you know, as you can see already, writing this in the middle of the Trump years, it's really a response to that whole set of arguments and an alternative way of thinking about it. And, you know, but based on a bunch of empirical cases.
Gabriel Winant: One thing I've wondered about and thinking about the trajectory of your work is I know that you started thinking and writing about immigration while you were in California and then you moved to New York and both of those are LA and New York are both obviously immigrant cities in different ways. And I'm curious about how or if that move kind of shaped your thinking.
Ruth Milkman: Yeah, it probably did. I mean, the big difference between LA and New York in terms of at least the low wage immigrant population is the diversity of national origins in New York compared to California. So, particularly Southern California, where it's overwhelmingly Spanish speaking, Mexican and Central American immigrants in the part of the labor market I was interested in.
And I'm not sure if that's the reason, but the other striking difference is that politically, in Southern California, the immigrant rights movement, the labor movement's relationship to immigrants is just much more expansive than in New York, where everybody's in their own silo and it's kind of fragmented. So, that was sort of a little bit of a shock when I moved back to the East, but this book was written quite a while after that. It really did come out of an earlier project that I, that was, it's a book called LA.
Story that makes kind of a similar argument, but in a much narrower way about some LA industries. And so, this, the book I worked on here was really meant to kind of expand the space for that whole set of thoughts. And in a, I think the more important shift in context than shifting to the East Coast was Trump, you know, where it just felt like much more urgent set of arguments than even though, you know, it was those issues were around for a long time before. They were kind of at their height at the time I was here.
Gabriel Winant: Another question I've always wanted to ask you and part of the reason I signed up to do this podcast is I have many questions I've always wanted to ask you. But in LA story, you make this interesting point, and I'm just going to summarize it quickly for a listener who doesn't know labor history that well, that some of the unions that have enjoyed kind of new energy and new dynamism in recent years, especially organizing the immigrant working class in LA are what were historically the old AFL unions, which in labor history are often seen, not without reason, as more hidebound, conservative, often racially exclusionary, and so on. And so they kind of leapfrog over their traditionally kind of more dynamic counterparts in the labor movement.
And I'd be curious to hear you talk more about why you think that is, if that still seems right to you, or if you would elaborate or modify or even extend or kind of double down on that on that view since since you wrote that book.
Ruth Milkman: So that argument, which is pretty central to the historical part of the book, has gotten a lot of pushback, I guess you could say, politically, from some people who are very wedded to the idea that the CIO unions, the industrial unions that emerged in the US in the 1930s and 40s are the kind of progressive part of the labor movement, which is the view that I grew up with my generation. You know, I started studying this stuff in the late 1970s, early 80s, and that was the conventional wisdom, and I bought it too. So it was quite surprising to discover in researching this stuff in LA that, well, first of all, in Southern California, the CIO unions were never that big a presence.
So that's different from the rest of the country. But and then as the new labor movement, as I like to call it, I guess it's not that new anymore, the 21st century labor movement burgeoned. It was led really by unions like the Service Employees Union, the hotel and restaurant workers.
And a few others, which all were indeed pre-CIO unions that seemed to take the lead. So, yeah, that was surprising to me at first, but it really did become central to the historical argument in that book. And I do think it's still true.
It's not a question of judging like the CIO unions were bad and these other ones were better, but more a product of the history of what happened to the industrial unions as industries collapsed in their traditional jurisdictions and it became, you know, very difficult to sustain much activity at all, progressive or otherwise. Whereas, so what was left standing as the labor movement was attacked by employers and, you know, reduced to a much smaller presence in the labor market was the service sector unions that weren't, you know, those jobs couldn't go anywhere. So that was a big part of it, too.
Well, I think what's changed since then, the main thing is there's we have seen some real changes in, well, particularly the United Auto Workers Union, which just last year had a very successful and dynamic strike that it's not the old UAW at all. It has new leadership, but still it has kind of risen from the ashes in that regard. And then also, that's the union that has been so involved in organizing graduate students, especially and also some adjunct faculty on universities, which has been an area of explosive growth in the last few years.
Now, this was all way after I wrote the LA Storybook, although in the University of California, the UAW was already a big presence then. It's just continued to expand since.
Gabriel Winant: Graduate students are now a quarter of the membership, I think.
Ruth Milkman: Yeah, there's a joke that it should be called the Union of Academic Workers.
Gabriel Winant: Yeah, I've had the same thought in particular because there was that period, I guess, in the 40s when the UAW was adding new industries, but they all started with A, right? Aviation, agricultural implement, aerospace. Yeah.
So, just keep adding A's. You know, I was thinking before this about how I think of the arc of your work and the value that it has for me, and I'm going to try to give my own version of that. I'm curious to hear you respond or modify or reject or whatever you want to do.
But the thing I think that has made me so, I mean, I am very, I'll just say for the listener, I'm very deeply influenced by Ruth Milkman. You're someone I've been reading since my first year of graduate school. I've read all your books, and I think if I had to pick out for myself, the nature of that influence, what I would say is that you're really distinguished, I think, by how you are really closely attuned to the complex patterns often of segmentation in labor markets, going all the way back to your first book and the ways that working class people and working class experience and working class organization is highly differentiated across industries, across sectors, by gender, by race, by national status, and by organization, as you were just saying.
So you have a real care for the complexity of working class experience and differentiation without losing the idea that working class people do unite sometimes, right, in doing that do also change the world. And that balance, I think, often people seem to kind of get stuck on one or the other side of that. So I really think of you as a kind of model of someone who holds both sides of that. And I don't know if that's, well, I guess I'm curious to hear you react to that.
Ruth Milkman: Well, so thank you for those kind words. You know, the beginning of my academic life was rooted in studying gender and gender in the labor force. That was, you know, where I began.
And I started out with a political background in what was then called socialist feminism. I think it's actually revived a little bit lately, but most, you know, for many years was sort of buried in the ashcan of history or whatever. And so as a kind of budding Marxist and feminist, I thought, well, you know, it would be really interesting to study what happened in the labor force in the 1930s and 40s when the conventional wisdom again, that maybe let me just back up a minute and just say, like, my history as a researcher is being wrong a lot of the time, and then therefore discovering something new.
So that was true in the LA case that we were just talking about in that, you know, I assumed initially that, you know, yeah, the CIO unions are where it's at, and then discovered this whole new angle on it. But it really goes back to the very beginning. The very first research I did was about women workers in the United States in the Great Depression, and ideas of socialism, feminism.
I thought women were like a reserve army of labor, like Mark suggested, and were, you know, pulled into the labor force during periods of expansion and pushed out during periods of contraction. So the Great Depression being the biggest contraction ever in US history. I thought, well, of course, that's what must have happened.
And then as I started to actually do the research, I soon found that, in fact, that wasn't the case that women's unemployment rate was lower than men's unemployment rate. Why? Because they were in sectors and industries that were not as impacted by the collapse of the Great Depression, which was concentrated at least initially in things like construction, manufacturing, male dominated sectors.
So that's who lost their jobs. So that kind of clued me into that, that job segregation by gender was the big thing that shaped women's experience in the labor market, which is not where I started at all. I think maybe that's the answer to your question in a way.
From the very start, it was clear that this was not one labor market. It was very clearly segmented. So my initial interest was in gender, but the same thing is true of race, immigration status, etc.
So yeah, and that eventually led to an interest in the relationship of all that to organize labor. And very soon I found that there too, there was a lot of variation, that not all unions were the same. Some were able to unite workers across gender lines, race lines later got interested in as well.
Others were either very patriarchal or for one reason or another, that was not part of the agenda, or they only organized one type of worker or whatever. So I think that's always been the central question, like under what conditions can you overcome these very tenacious divisions within the labor market and getting interested in organizing in unions was like kind of a natural flow out of that because who else is going to do that? Unification, right? So yeah, so that's kind of where it all came from.
Gabriel Winant: When I got into labor history, I started graduate school in 2010, and I remember so well just in my first year of grad school, I went to a historical conference that was happening nearby. I wasn't presenting yet, I was just sort of going to check it out. Someone I knew introduced me to some senior scholar, not in the field, just some famous guy, I can't even remember who it was, just because we were standing near each other.
And he nicely said, Oh, you just started graduate school, what are you studying? And I said, labor history. And he said, labor history, you're still making that?
And it was very cutting, right? Not just because of the kind of surface level meaning of, is that still a lively field that's still being pursued by scholarly research, but also the underlying meaning, right? Which is, is labor history still being made out there in the world, right?
In other words, do groups of workers actually still make history? And in 2010, it kind of seemed like maybe not, right? And certainly across the 1990s and 2000s, the field, I mean, I came to understand all of this.
The field had gone through this big sort of swoon and people thought it was dead. And I feel very lucky to be part of a generation that feels like we kind of get to experience its return in some way. But I'm curious to hear you reflect on some of that trajectory and in particular, what feel like the questions that you think we need to answer or that we have not succeeded in answering or that have have plagued us or anything like that.
Ruth Milkman: So I love that you're assuming that I'm a historian because I'm not. I'm a sociologist by training.
Gabriel Winant: I treat you like one because your first book was published in that classic labor history series.
Ruth Milkman: Well, I'm a wannabe historian basically. So I'm always flattered when people get mixed up about that. But no, the reason I mention it is because I think what happened over the course of my career, which again goes back now about 40 years.
When I started out again, women's history and to some extent women's labor history was very alive and burgeoning as a new field because there really hadn't been much attention to gender and labor history. Then as the labor movement started to fall apart, yeah, there were fewer and fewer people interested in this. The extreme case of course is economics, which used to dominate labor studies, if we can call it that.
They just completely abandoned the turf as union density collapsed over the course of the late 20th century. Well, if it's only 6 percent of the private sector, we're not interested in that. It's like a trivial phenomenon.
So it just disappeared. I think labor history never disappeared, but definitely the interest declined. By default, sociology became the place where there was much more going on.
I suddenly felt as a wannabe historian, very lucky to have landed where I did, which was not entirely comfortable in the early days. Anyway, yeah, I just think as long as we have capitalism, studying workers and their relationship to employment is going to be part of the scene. It's just that I think when the guy who asked you that question was referring more to the organized labor movement and that is something that is ebbed and flowed as we all know in the course of all of American history, and for that matter in other countries.
So we now seem to be at a moment where it might be picking up again. I think it's a little early to proclaim that, but there's certainly a lot of interesting developments in the last couple of years since 2020 basically. I think now there is a new generation.
I don't think you're quite in this group of researchers, scholars, observers who've really gotten hooked by this all over again. I feel like I've seen this movie before, but because it's happened several times in the course of my own career, but there definitely were periods where it was like, “why are you studying this archaic phenomenon labor unions? They're finished.” I've gotten that reaction as well.
Gabriel Winant: So for a first-year graduate student in sociology, who is part of this generational phenomenon you're describing, and they show up at the grad center and they want to work with you, but they don't know where to look or how to start really. They just have the kind of political commitment. That was certainly where I began.
Bad form for advisors to tell students what to study, but we do try to say, well, you might think about this and you might think about that. I guess I'm curious what you would say to a person in that situation in terms of what feels like a need study.
Ruth Milkman: Yeah, I'm not sure it's like a new set of questions, but the big question always to me is, is under what conditions do workers find ways to fight back against the exploitation they face in the workplace? That doesn't always take the form of traditional unions as we know. You can ask that question about many different sets of workers.
For me, dealing with students, my own approach is to ask a question that you don't already think you know the answer to. I tell them, first of all, if you're going to do this, you need to really be passionate about what you're studying because you're up against a lot of obstacles and it's not easy to make a career doing this. If you don't love it, it's not going to happen.
I don't think there's a one size fits all answer to this. I try to figure out where are they coming from, what do they really care about, why are they here, and take it from there. But the other thing I tell them, which is related to that story I told you about my very first project about the 1930s is, it's really good to be wrong.
That's how you figure out something that people don't already know. It's when, that's not what I was expecting. So what do I do with this?
Gabriel Winant: Well, let me ask you about something that I've been trying to return to, speaking of opening up stuff that I'm sure I'm going to get wrong. I just want to get your advice about it, I suppose. One thing that has seemed to me, it used to be a really important part of a lot of labor studies, both in sociology and in history and in other fields too, economics in a way.
Is the area of research that we used to call labor process studies. Again, I'll just give a quick definition of what this is. This is the idea that something important actually happens in how work processes themselves are organized, and that there's not a obvious way that any particular form of production is necessarily going to be organized, that that's actually a conflict that happens in a workplace.
As employers try to either exert more control or create more efficiency, and workers try to either maintain their control over the work process, or respond to what employers are doing, and that actually any given work process is full of incredible complexity, of tiny decisions that people are making all the time, conflictually and cooperatively about how it's going to be done. This was a huge theme in labor studies in the 70s and the 80s, and it seems like in sociology, I think there's been more persistent attention to it than in history. But in history, I don't think people do it a lot anymore.
Ruth Milkman: That's interesting, yeah.
Gabriel Winant: And, for one thing, I think that's meant is that in a lot of these newer service industries that you were talking about in regard to your last couple of books, where these older unions have had these revivals, we don't really know a lot about the labor process in a lot of them, it seems to me.
Ruth Milkman: That’s so true, yeah.
Gabriel Winant: So that's something I tried to do a little bit in my first book, but only a little bit, to be honest. I'm curious if that's an area that you have, how you've related to it in your career, how you might think about it now. You've never really been a workplace ethnographer exactly.
Ruth Milkman: No, although I've done a lot of interviews, which isn't quite the same thing. But yeah. Well, so I think actually it's your work that is most relevant here, that one of the expanding areas of employment, of course, is care work, as it's often called.
And as many people have argued, this is the most rapidly growing segment of the labor market. And you're right, we don't know that much about what that entails. What we do know is that workers are constantly, many, this is also a female dominated part of the workforce, obviously.
The people who are attracted to the jobs that are primarily care oriented, you know, want to do it right. That's why they're there. And what they continually run up against is employer's desire to limit the amount of time they can spend taking care of a patient, or a child, or whatever it is, because it costs money and the employer doesn't, you know, wants to compress that.
So you get the, so that's a very different labor process than a manufacturing or construction job, right? But I think that's like the cutting edge issue right now. And also these jobs, you know, we're in an era where everybody's talking about artificial intelligence and new technology and so on.
They don't have much relevance that those new technologies in, you know, for a nurse. There's, I mean, there's obviously technology in hospitals and stuff, but you know more about this than I do. But really the job is making sure the person is getting what they need.
And you might use some technology in doing that. But there's not, I think the robots aren't going to take that job over. That's just not going to happen, not in our lifetimes anyway.
So, you know, I think the whole question of what we used to call the labor process, which was all about how many widgets you're going to make in an hour and the struggles over speed up and things like that. There's speed up issues, but it's a completely different texture and set of tasks that people are doing. So, I don't know, I guess you could maybe mobilize the old arguments about labor process there, but they don't seem all that helpful.
Gabriel Winant: It doesn't work in the same way.
Ruth Milkman: Yeah, I don't think so. And I mean, we still have plenty of jobs where it is relevant. But the expanding sectors of the economy, less so.
A long time ago, I wrote a book about auto workers. And it was about a factory in New Jersey that is now gone, but at the time was undergoing a lot of technological change, and its workforce shrunk and people took a buyout that was offered by the employer and left. And I followed a bunch of them for a few years to see what had happened to them.
So, and that was another one that was full of surprises because I thought they were crazy to give up these jobs. These were non-college-educated workers who had been at, this was before the real deterioration of pay and benefits in the auto industry is in the 80s when that was just sort of beginning to take off. And, you know, where are they going to get a job like that anywhere else?
I thought people were crazy. So again, I was wrong. I learned that those jobs did pay well and have some, well, maybe not security, but great benefits, pensions, all those things that we now wonder what happened to.
But people hated working there and given the chance to get a nice piece of money and get out of there, especially if they were young and had the energy and ability to start their careers over again, they were thrilled to do this. So I was very curious to see what happened to these people who took it. And I found that they mostly they landed on their feet.
A lot of them started or expanded like these side small businesses that they had all along. And they didn't become millionaires, but most of them were just okay economically as they had been before. And they were so much happier.
They also that. But anyway, one day I was in, I was visiting a relative of mine in Kentucky of all places. And I realized on my list of people who had taken this buyout, there was a guy who had moved to that area. So I reached out and I thought, well, I could interview him while I'm here. So I did. I took him out to lunch and I did my interview with my tape recorder.
And like we all do and or did in those days, I guess now we do do it on our phone. And you know, I had my standard set of questions and he answered them and it was all, it wasn't particularly exciting, but I know I was. And then we finished our lunch. We walked out to the parking lot, this being Kentucky. And he says, off tape, of course, you know, the real reason I left that place was I was doing a lot of drugs and I just needed to start over somewhere else. I actually didn't put that in the book because it seemed like he didn't want it, you know, but it's a perfect example of what you're talking about. Like that, it happens all the time.
Gabriel Winant: Yeah. You know, speaking of that book, that book was actually, I think, the first one of years that I read, Farewell to the Factory. And what was so exciting about it for me as a graduate student was I was interested in deindustrialization.
And that's what I wound up writing my dissertation about. And for so many people and so much of the existing scholarship, it seemed like deindustrialization was kind of the end of the story. Right.
And there was this thing that had happened, this kind of long arc across the 19th century, across most of the 20th century, you know, the growing industrial working class and it's as it grew, you know, its size, its power and its organization grew. And, you know, that would lead us eventually to a kind of more equal society. And then, you know, by the time, even by the time I was born in 1986, it was obvious that that that had not been the trajectory. Right. And we were living in the aftermath of that. And that was really disorienting, I think, for lots of I mean, even for me still, and certainly for previous generations.
And so there was a certain way in which, like the moment that the factory gate closed, where they blow up the smokestack or whatever your preferred symbol is, that was kind of the end of labor story. And I think I really appreciated about Farewell to the Factory was that it resisted the nostalgia that that way of thinking about it might invite. Right.
It's not that you are skeptical of the kind of positive sides of that industrial work, as you said, right, that was sort of the assumption you came into it with. But the end of the era of industrial employment like that actually still brought about new opportunities even for potentially individual workers. And, you know, I think historically a lot of your work since then has been about how there are new possibilities collectively for the working class too.
So since you've been committed to thinking about the consequences of Trump for American politics and working class life and on the immigration side, you've talked about that, but I guess I'm curious to hear you talk about deindustrialization, which I think is another really big piece of the Trump phenomenon.
Ruth Milkman: Yeah, look, I think it is appropriate to be nostalgic for strong unions, high pay, pensions, all these things that have evaporated since the 70s and 80s. But the work itself is another story. So when we were looking at the people who took this buyout to General Motors Offord, it's a long story how this all came about.
It was not that easy to get access to the place, but with the UAW's interest in how that was working out, I really wanted to study the new technology in the factory initially, and this was like a side thing that we were doing for the union and turned out to be the most interesting part. So I was working with a little team of researchers. We put together a survey that we had a list of all the people who'd taken this buyout.
We called them up, and later we did more real interviews, but originally it was a survey. So we asked all these questions, what led you to take this buyout at the time you took it and all this? We had these possible answers. It was a survey. Then there was this one other thing. Is there anything I haven't asked you about that explains why you took the buyout?
The largest number of responses were to that last part. Yeah, it was a hellhole. No metaphor was too powerful.It was like slavery. The supervisor was a Nazi. These are the kind of things they wrote or said on the phone.
Unbelievable. So that's when it was like, okay, this was not what I was expecting, but clearly this is what the real story is here. They also said they took it maybe because they were worried about whether they would really have a job there later, and these were the kind of things we were expecting, so some people said those things. But literally, a majority of the respondents were all about. So again, I thought they were nuts to do this myself, but I was wrong. They were right.
Well, so getting back to your question about Trump, I think it's really the same phenomenon that you've got these industrial wastelands where Trump has a lot of support from people who are nostalgic for the good old days when they did have a decent income and all those things. I don't think they're particularly nostalgic for the work itself, but this make America great again rhetoric does evoke those old days and my view is these workers have every right to be enraged by what happened to them, the dramatic reversal of fortune that deindustrialization wrecked havoc in their lives. But they need to focus on who's really responsible for that.
And well, in my more recent work, it's not immigrants. In fact, those parts of the country actually have very few immigrants. Doesn't seem to stop people from hating them, but if you go to like Youngstown, Ohio, it's not like a magnet for immigration because they go where the jobs are, not where there's nothing to do.
So they should be thinking about who brought these changes about. And that is the employing class on the one side and public policy makers who did nothing to cushion them against the effects of this. So yeah, it's completely relevant to Trump, but selective nostalgia is okay.
But A, it's not coming back, industrial work on any significant scale, and good riddance is the right response to a lot of that. But what we do need to try to find a way to restore is strong unions, good pay, all those things. And people are now trying to do that, but we'll see how far they get. There's a lot of resistance, obviously.
Gabriel Winant: Yeah, it's an interesting question, how to draw on the past as a kind of a resource that you can use to say, look, we used to have it better in this way and that way. We used to know how to do this kind of thing, like fight an employer to keep our jobs, preserve our retirement security, look at the history of accomplishments of our movements. All of that is central, obviously, not just the labor movement, but to all kinds of democratic struggles.
But you can never do it just like they did it then, right? And that's always the challenge. I think it's hard to figure out.
Ruth Milkman: Well, particularly because the era of the humongous workplace with 20,000 workers in it, like the River Rouge plant or something like that, that's basically an endangered species today. There are some Amazon warehouses do bring together a lot of workers, but this is the exception rather than the rule. So it's a completely different set of challenges now.
Gabriel Winant: Right. This is something that I imagine our mutual friend, Eric Blank, who teaches at Rutgers, he's a labor sociologist, has been writing a lot about recently is the decentralization of working class life. Not just workplaces, but communities and neighborhoods.
I live in Chicago when I'm not here in Palo Alto, and on the south side of Chicago where I live, there used to be whole communities that worked for a steel mill or a packing house. I like to think of it as like almost everyone marching in sync to the factory whistle. Not literally, but whole blocks of people who had more or less the same job, went to the same church or synagogue or whatever, were part of fraternal organizations together. There was a whole social fabric there that certainly has been atomized in some way.
Ruth Milkman: Yeah. Although Eric Blank's work also shows that for young workers, some of that social fabric has been revived through social media. And he shows how important that can be in these efforts to bring people together.
So it was not enough all by itself, but that's the kind of 21st century equivalent of some of what you just described.
Yeah, it opens a new channel or a new pathway.
He's shown how important that is for the recent organizing that we've seen.
Yeah.
Producer Joe: Speaking of social media, do either of you have thoughts on current trends or sentiments online regarding labor? And I'm thinking of the anti-works at Reddit that started growing during the pandemic, things like that.
Ruth Milkman: Yeah. Well, I was blown away by Kathy Weeks' book. What is it called?
“The Problem with Work”
Which comes from that perspective. It's more gender-focused, but basically it comes out of the Italian anti-work obsession. And I don't know, I think we saw elements of that in the pandemic lockdown period, the so-called great resignation, although it turns out a lot of that was job switching, not leaving the labor force.
But contrary to expectation, we have this huge labor shortage and some of it is in fact driven by that. People spend a lot of time with their families and if they can afford to survive without conventional employment, that became very attractive to some folks. I don't know, I'm not really aware of any great research on it. The Kathy Weeks books is more abstract. I guess there's some research, but she's a philosopher. It's more making the case for this way of thinking than documenting its popularity out there.
Gabriel Winant: I'll say, I volunteer with this organization called the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, which you know about. But it's a kind of Organize Your Workplace Help Desk, basically. A lot of these smaller types of workplaces that we've been talking about.
There's no union that's going to take an interest, at least at first off. If it's just one or two disgruntled workers, at least you have to show you have something going anyway before a union might be interested. Even then, it might just be in an industry that no union would touch.
We just try to help people get something going. It's often not even to try to form a union. It's often our tips are being stolen.
Let's get them back or something like this. Or maybe they do want to form a union and they have to get it started on their own and have someone introduce them and that kind of thing. So we can play that role too. I've been doing this for a couple of years now. I love it. It's really fun.
And I'm always getting kind of blown away by the kinds of attitudes that are represented in that reddit in a certain way, in that subreddit that are appearing in the kind of lives and experiences and ideas of universally these younger workers who have reached out to us and figure out how to make ideas that I would have thought of as in some ways obstacles into resources. And I'll give you an example. The first campaign I did was supporting workers at a Boba tea shop. It was 12 workers who worked there. Two of them kind of reached out together to us. It was near where I live, so that's why I got assigned to it.
And they kept saying, you know, maybe we should all just quit anyway. And I came out of an organizing background. I think many more traditional organizers would have this reaction where you don't want to hear that, right?
That's an unhelpful thing for workers to be saying, because it means they have no investment in winning the fight, right? And that was how I related to it. I would start to say stuff like, okay, but think about what it would be like if you change this job to be one that you wanted to stay in.
You know, like shouldn't we sort of aspire to that in some way? I got nowhere with that. And at some point, one of them said to me, Gabe, you know, we're all going to be gone in six months. So let's just do anything we feel like, right?
Ruth Milkman: We're going to be gone because of?
Gabriel Winant: They weren't planning to stay in this job.
Ruth Milkman: Oh, I see. They're going to quit. Yeah.
Gabriel Winant: And some of them had particular plans around that. And but I think beyond that, it was almost like a statistical observation, right? It was just like no one is attached to this job. No one expects to be in it for very long for one reason or another. And so it made them actually kind of fearless in a certain way, which was contrary to the expectation that I had about what that kind of relationship to work does to workers ability to organize.
Ruth Milkman: I think we see that in things like the Starbucks campaign too.
Gabriel Winant: Yeah.
Ruth Milkman: A lot of the people who have been involved in that organizing are college educated workers. This is not what they had planned to do for their work. And so it's like, yeah, I might get fired by Starbucks for doing this organizing, but I can get another job somewhere else as a barista or some other crummy job.
Like what's the big deal? No pain, no gain kind of. So I think that's very embedded in the recent organizing we've seen in those kinds of workforces. It's not really anti-work exactly. It's anti that kind of work. They have ideas about what they would do if the opportunity were there.
Gabriel Winant: Yeah, that's definitely true. But it does throw back in a certain way to a kind of pre-New Deal moment. I was thinking about this recently.
There was a moment from the late 19th century till the 20s, probably, till World War I, when the workers who employers would have called floaters in that period were seen as the vectors of discontent.
Ruth Milkman: Tramps, right?
Gabriel Winant: Tramps, hobos, IWW, radicals, whatever, right? And in the teens and 20s, turnover became really, really high across American industry, and employers took on tons of efforts to try to get it under control. And that was partly because turnover is an economic problem, right?
If your workforce is turning over all the time, it just imposes chaos and costs separate from workers' agitation, but also because they understood it to be related in some way to the kind of traditions of American workers' radicalism, and that the people who are more committed to their job are also more likely to be kind of loyal employees. And that sort of flipped in the 20s and 30s, it seems to me, right, when employers began implementing internal labor markets, forms of security, that kind of thing. And then workers' movements kind of became a defense of the possibility of a lifelong employment relationship.
And now maybe there's something from that earlier moment that we're kind of getting back to in a certain way, where transiency in the labor market is actually an important kind of resource. Resource, yeah.
Ruth Milkman: That's so interesting. Well, my view is that in many, many ways, we're back to the conditions before the New Deal. And this is just one of them.
You probably know Sandy Joukovi's old book, Modern Manners…This is an economic historian…
Gabriel Winant: I’ve been spending all my time with it recently actually.
Ruth Milkman: I think he's retired now, but spent most of his career at UCLA in the business school, actually, but is really one of us and writes about the history of work and workers. Wrote this book called Modern Manners, M-A-N-O-R-S, which tracks the way in which non-union companies strove to build that attachment. What Gabe was just describing between workers and the companies they worked for.
And so the metaphor is a feudal manner, that this was sort of paternalistic kind of thing. But it included, if you think about companies like IBM, I don't think that's one of his, but Sears Roebuck is one of them. It included a lot of the things that we do associate with organized labor a little bit later that like pension plans, promotion possibilities, all kinds of inducements to stick around. High pay is one of the best ways to keep turnover lower, of course, but they weren't always interested in doing that.
Gabriel Winant: I wanted to ask you about whether you've read something, either in this field that we've been talking about, or just, you know, in your, in your civilian life, you know, even a novel or something like that, that you've been really struck by or moved by, anything that you really have liked or wanted to recommend.
Ruth Milkman: Well, there's this book by a guy called Gabriel Winant called The Next Shift that is the one I tell everybody to read. I'm serious.
Gabriel Winant: I really appreciate that, Ruth.
Ruth Milkman: It is like the best labor history book in many years. I mean, I really, I was so blown away by your book. So that's one.
Gabriel Winant: That's really nice to hear.
Ruth Milkman: Well, I just read, I don't know if this is quite in the league of The Next Shift, but it's a pretty interesting book by Max Fraser called Hillbilly Highway. I just finished it last week, which is actually relevant to what we were just talking about. He tries to track what happened to white US born workers in Appalachia and more generally the Upper South, as they moved to places like Detroit and Indiana, and in response to both the collapse of making a living through agriculture or mining, and the lure of these industrial jobs that we were just talking about their demise, but this is about the mid 20th century.
And it's a pretty imaginative approach to something that really nobody has tracked. And of course, these are the MAGA people to some extent, if you fast forward the story to today. So yeah, that's another one that I've been quite impressed by.
Gabriel Winant: Max is my roommate in grad school.
Ruth Milkman: Are you serious? Oh God, that's amazing. Well, I know his dad, of course, because he's been in my world in New York. So Steve Fraser is his dad, who's another distinguished labor historian actually, although he's not officially an academic. He's written a lot of great scholarship.
Gabriel Winant: Something that I thought was amazing in Hillbilly Highway was the approach to social historical research that he gets into at some moments. So again, just to kind of say for listeners, probably folks generally know what social history means in an overall way, which is sort of history of everyday people, ordinary experience, communities, etc. But that can mean a lot of different things.
People do it in a lot of different ways. And it's often hard to kind of get down into the grain of everyday life. And in this book, Max Fraser does this incredible thing where he basically to trace the migration, he's looking at funeral home records to see where people who are born in Kentucky or Tennessee are buried.
And bus company records to see who's buying tickets, where, to understand the movement of people basically in the way. Hence the title, sorry. The movement of people between these regions or the way they make kind of one big interlinked region between Kentucky and Tennessee and Ohio and Indiana and Michigan.
And then I loved that, not to get off on a whole tangent, but I loved the final kind of move to engage with country music, right? As a product, not just-
Ruth Milkman: That's his true love, is how I read it.
Gabriel Winant: I think so too, yeah. A venerable tradition of New York City Jews who love country music.
But, you know, we think of country as like coming out of the rural experience of the South in some kind of primeval way or something, or you might think of it that way. But actually, you know, it's a music born of industrialization and of migration. It's a very modern form in that way.
Ruth Milkman: Yeah. You know, there's an old novel that us socialist feminists all read back in the day, which he quotes from- it's called The Dial Maker by Harriet Arnaut that was published, I'm not sure when, in the 60s maybe.
Which also, I just, in reading his book, Max Fraser's book, I was so reminded of that story, which I think had a huge impact on me. I actually have, as like, you know, epigraph for my very first book, a quote from The Dial Maker. Anyway, yes, he captures so much that has been forgotten.
And I think it's also one of these books like yours that helps us understand the present as much as the past. And, you know, those are the books I love. Well, thank you. This is fun.
Gabriel Winant: Thanks so much for making it happen.
Narrator: That was Ruth Milkman in Conversation with Gabriel Winant, discussing what scholarly commitment to workers' economic justice looks like. As always, you can follow us online or in your podcast app of choice. And if you're interested in learning more about the Center's people, projects and rich history, you can visit our website at casbs.stanford.edu.
Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.