Organizing for Power
Description
Boston's economy has become defined by a disconcerting trend that has intensified throughout much of the United States since the 2008 recession. Economic growth now delivers remarkably few benefits to large sectors of the working class - a phenomenon that is particularly severe for immigrants, people of color, and women. Labor in 21st Century Boston explores this nation-wide phenomenon of "unshared growth" by focusing on Boston, a city that is famously liberal, relatively wealthy, and increasingly difficult for working people (who service the city's needs) to actually live in. Labor in 21st Century Boston is the only comprehensive analysis of labor and popular mobilizing in Boston today, the volume contributes to a growing body of academic and popular literature that examines urban America, racial and economic inequality, labor and immigration, and the right-wing assault on working people.
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Persons
Aviva Chomsky is professor of history at Salem State University in Massachusetts. Her recent books include They Take Our Jobs! And 20 Other Myths about Immigration; Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal; A History of the Cuban Revolution. She has been active in Latin America solidarity and immigrant rights movements since the 1980s.
Steve Striffler is Director of the Labor Research Center and Professor of Anthropology at UMass Boston
Content
- Intro
- Copyright
- Contents
- Introduction
- Part I: Labor, Power, and Inequality in Boston
- 1.Unshared Growth: Earners and Earnings Inequality in Boston Before and After the Great Recession
- 2.Boston's Public Sector and the Fight for Union Survival
- 3.A Tangle of Exclusion: Boston's Black Working Class and the Struggle for Racial and Economic Justice
- Part II: Boston's Workers and Unions Confront the Twenty-First Century
- 4.It's Not in the Water: Surviving the Neoliberal Onslaught in Lynn, Massachusetts
- 5.If We Don't Get It, Shut it Down!: University Cafeteria-Worker Organizing, the Information Economy, and Boston's Inequality Problem
- 6.Non-tenure-track Faculty: On the Vanguard of a Renaissance in the Boston Labor Movement?
- 7.Raise Up Massachusetts: Experiment in a New, Universal Labor Movement
- 8.Coalition Building in the Age of Trump?: Lessons from the Solidarity School
- 9.Immigrants and Worker Centers in Boston in the Shadow of Trump
- 10.Policy Group on Tradeswomen's Issues: A Collaborative Learning Community Crushing the Barriers to Women's Careers in the Construction Trades
- 11.Organizing under Criminalization: Policing and Sex Workers' Rights in Rhode Island
- 12.Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
- Back Cover
