phantasmagorical

“There used to be a sense that unemployment was rich soil for radicalization and revolt,” says Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor of labor history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “That was a motif in American history for a long time, but we don’t seem to have that anymore.”

But why? It’s partly because of the greater dispersion of the unemployed, and partly because of the weakening of the institutions that previously mobilized them.

Unemployment doesn’t necessarily beget apathy, Mr. McDonald says. Rather, demographic groups that are more likely to be unemployed also happen to be the same groups that are less likely to vote to begin with, such as the poor and the low-skilled.

Even so, numerous studies have shown that unemployment leads to feelings of shame and a loss of self-worth. And that is not particularly conducive to political organizing. As Heather Boushey, an economist at the liberal Center for American Progress, puts it, rather bluntly: “Nobody wants to join the Lame Club.”

Here there is real potential for unions outside the AFL-CIO structure to build quality organizations. The I.W.W. is rebuilding worker education centers and emphasizing larger ideas of workplace justice in its Starbucks campaign.

This alternative strategy makes a lot of sense given the continued failure of the AFL-CIO strategies of workplace organizing since 1980. Harold Meyerson had a recent piece exploring SEIU door-to-door campaigns that have nothing to do with organizing a specific workplace, but rather seek to build a larger coalition of the poor and unemployed. Given corporations’ goal of returning us to the Gilded Age, it makes a lot of sense to start revisiting older forms of labor tactics as a response.

It’s true that pre-New Deal unions always had a tremendously difficult time succeeding. It took government intervention on the side of workers to make unionization happen for most. But that intervention would not have happened were it not for 50 years of agitation by workers determined to improve their lives. It’s time to start rebuilding multiple forms of worker and poor person organization to best prepare for the brutal struggles ahead, struggles that some day may convince the government again to care about working-class people.