The East Side Freedom Library invites you to “Striketober” and “The Great Resignation”: Putting the Current Labor Upheaval in Historical Context, a conversation with labor historian Gabriel Winant.

Register here to join this event on Zoom.

Activists, scholars, activist-scholars, journalists, union leaders, and workers have been trying to make sense out of the recent upheaval of labor activism, such as union organizing campaigns and strikes, on the one hand, and the unprecedented rates of workers quitting their jobs, on the other. We are delighted that labor historian Gabriel Winant (University of Chicago) has offered to join us in conversation and that he has provided us with his new essay to read.

Gabriel Winant’s first book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Manufacturing and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America investigates the rise of the “service economy” in the aftermath of manufacturing. The Next Shift locates the origins of today’s social inequality in America’s postwar political economy. Across the Rust Belt, the health care industry today dominates employment, accounting for one in five jobs in places like Detroit, Rochester, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh. As the care economy has grown, it has been an engine of insecurity for workers, who are overwhelmingly women and people of color employed at low wages and in precarious positions. Using Pittsburgh as a case study, The Next Shift shows how deindustrialization triggered the ascent of the care economy and stamped it with the inequalities produced by the New Deal state’s hierarchies of race and gender.

Gabe’s second project, tentatively titled Our Weary Years: How the Working Class Survived Industrial America, explores similar problems in an earlier period. This project will examine the relationship between several key historical phenomena in capitalist development at the turn of the twentieth century: the survival strategies of new migrants in cities like Chicago and New York—often involving practices that were cooperative, informal, illicit, or illegal; the rise of mass production and the ensuing large-scale imbalances between production and consumption; and the construction and contestation of a new set of norms against informal, cooperative, and illicit—that is, non-market—survival strategies and the social worlds that sustained them.

Gabe’s articles have appeared in Dissent, The Nation, and Jacobin, using his scholarly skills to reach non-academic readers. At the end of November, his article “Strike Wave,” appeared in the British journal New Left Review. We hope you will read it and join Gabe—and each other—in a lively conversation hosted by this month’s Labor History Discussion Group.

Free and open to all