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Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, essential workers lashed out against low wages, long hours, and safety risks, attracting a level of support unseen in decades. This explosion of labor unrest seemed sudden to many. But Essential reveals that American workers had simmered in discontent long before their anger boiled over.
In Essential, award-winning sociologist Jamie K. McCallum uncovers the deep roots of essential workers’ rage and reveals how their fight for better jobs during the pandemic revolutionized US labor politics. The outbreak of COVID-19 may have thrown American working life into a tumult, but McCallum shows that decades of inequality and austerity had already left essential workers vulnerable to employer abuse, lacking government protections, and increasingly furious. When the pandemic hit, they were primed to revolt.
Through firsthand research conducted as the pandemic unfolded, McCallum tracks the evolution of workers’ militancy, showing how their struggles for safer workplaces, better pay and universal health care, and the right to unionize benefitted all Americans and spurred a radical new phase of the labor movement. In other words, during the pandemic, workers breathed new life into the old slogan: An injury to one is an injury to all.
Combining rigorous research with immersive storytelling, McCallum’s book is essential reading for understanding the past, present, and future of the American working class.
Worked Over:
How Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream
Popular discussions of overwork typically focus on striving professionals. But in Worked Over, award-winning sociologist Jamie K. McCallum demonstrates that from Amazon warehouses to Rust Belt factories to California's gig economy, it's the hours of low-wage workers that have increased the most—but are also the most volatile and precarious. Their schedules are often punishing, and their jobs leave them particularly vulnerable in times of crisis. Managers and their scheduling algorithms have gained more and more say over when and how we work. What’s needed is not individual solutions: it’s a collective struggle not just for leisure, but to control the time we spend working and gain the time we need to live the rest of our lives.
Annual hours of labor declined for a century through hard-fought labor-movement victories. But they’ve increased for everyone significantly since the seventies. Yet today many still find themselves desperate for enough work to survive, or for dependable schedules, revealing the unequal distribution of our work time. McCallum traces the varied reasons why our lives became tethered to unstable jobs, and describes how we might gain a greater say over our work time—and build a more just society in the process.
Combining the rigor of a scholar, the storytelling of a journalist, and the vision of an activist, McCallum shows that winning shorter hours will require a radical break from our current political and economic system. Worked Over recounts the inspiring stories of those battling capitalism today to win back their time.
Global Unions, Local Power: The New Spirit of Transnational Labor Organizing
Winner of the best book award from the Labor Section of the American Sociological Association.
Global Unions, Local Power tells the story of the most successful campaign ever waged by workers at the global level. In so doing, it develops a new theory of labor power by examining campaigns of workers around the world to challenge corporate governance.
“A unique and useful insight into labor’s potential pathway to power...Anyone interested in the future of labor should read this book.” - Rina Agarwala, American Journal of Sociology
“One of great integrity...may well become the standard against which all future work on transnational unionism will be measured.” - Cedric DeLeon, Contemporary Sociology
“Groundbreaking...useful to scholars across a broad range of disciplines".” -Tamara Kay, International Studies Review
The Crisis of Global Youth Unemployment
Since the economic and financial crisis of 2008, the proportion of unemployed young people has exceeded any other group of unemployed adults. This phenomenon marks the emergence of a new laborscape. This concept recognizes that, although youth unemployment is not consistent across the world, it is a coherent problem in the global political economy. This book examines this crisis of youth unemployment, drawing on international case studies, organized around four key dimensions of the crisis: precarity, flexibility, migration, and policy responses. With contributions from leading experts in the field, the chapters offer a dynamic portrait of unemployment and how this is being challenged through new modes of resistance.