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WOKENESS AND THE AMERICAN WORKING CLASS

by Jack Metzgar

Recent attacks by some Democrats on other Democrats for being too “woke” have revealed complicated class dynamics and a certain professional class blindness that afflicts the Democratic Party.

The standard charge against Democratic wokeness is that it is turning off working-class voters by advocating (or even considering) defunding the police, open borders for immigration, and critical race theory. Few Democratic politicians actually embrace these views, but they are still scored for not running away from them. Conversely, woke Democrats conclude that their critics want to pander to white racism that the woke see as endemic in American society, and especially in the white working class.

In this debate the working class is defined as all those who do not have at least a bachelor’s degree and the middle class, as everybody who does. Often, even though everybody would get it right on a true-false test, the working class is assumed to be all white and the Democratic Party no longer the party of the working class. In fact, fifty-eight percent of the coalition that elected Joe Biden was working class—thirty-two percent white and twenty-six percent workers of color. This multi-colored working class tends to share a political perspective that does not fit into a standard left-right, liberal-conservative spectrum. A large portion, probably a majority, does not recognize itself in this conventional line-up of political positions.

Though research has shown this over and over again, middle-class professionals continue over and over again to try to fit working-class voters into what is a political line-up peculiar to the thirty-six percent of adults with college educations.

Though not universal, a characteristic working-class political perspective across all races combines a strong-to-moderate social and cultural conservatism with a solid populist economic progressivism. Within this general orientation against broad social and cultural change but for

A large portion, probably a majority, does not recognize itself in this conventional lineup of political positions.

progressive economic change, there are an even wider range of political views that do not fall easily into a left-right spectrum. Social conservatives are not necessarily conservative on all social issues, and economic populists line up differently in relation to different economic policies. As a recent study by Jacobin’s Center for Working-Class Politics found: “Ideological consistency across issues is relatively exceptional and tends to be concentrated among the well-educated and wealthy.”

The wildly diverse ideological inconsistency among working-class voters is generally ignored among pollsters, pundits, and the politically conscious in favor of simple racial-class stereotypes that are not completely inaccurate but that obscure important realities and the potentials within them. For example, most black workers abhor the idea of defunding the police, most Latino and Latina voters are skeptical about illegal immigration, and most white workers do not think they are racists and would be ashamed of themselves if they were. Majorities or large minorities, however, support rigorous police reform, comprehensive immigration reform, and prohibitions against racial discrimination of any kind. These are not fully progressive positions, but neither are they fully socially conservative. On economics, on the other hand, majority working-class views range from mildly liberal to well to the left of Joe Biden, especially on taxing the rich.

Somewhere in this ideological stew there is a sweet spot that Democratic activists and operatives either can’t find or aren’t even looking for because they are isolated in professional middle-class venues at work and at home. In those restricted environments the left-right spectrum is the only one that makes sense, and it guides their thinking away from the rich complexity of a messily multicultural American working class. The actually existing working class has much more positive political potential than either woke or anti-woke Democrats can apparently see.

“Ideological consistency across issues is relatively exceptional and tends to be concentrated among the well-educated and wealthy.”

THE EXCERPT

Ihad written about badass criminals like Bruce White for decades—in the newspaper, on television, and in fiction under the morbid cloak of “The Monster That Ate the City of Baltimore.” But until I met Bruce near the end of 2012, I never truly knew one.

White had been a notorious, gun-crazed biker/junkie and career criminal in a city with an entrenched heroin problem going back at least to the 1930s, a two-time inmate who passed a seven-year stretch without a single visitor other than his attorney.

Our relationship began late in the summer of 2012 with a longdistance call from Baltimore as I walked my daughter’s dog in Hollywood.

“Rafael Alvarez?”

“Yes?”

“I’m Bruce White,” said a gravelly, right-to-the-point voice on the other end. “I hear you’re a writer.”

Indeed: Writer-for-hire; no job too small.

The day that Bruce called I hadn’t worked in television for about five years, since the one-hundred-day Writers Guild of America strike from Halloween 2007 to Valentine’s Day 2008. I’d driven to LA from Baltimore to work on a screenplay with my daughter

while taking network meetings in hopes of landing a script—any script—to prevent a lapse in my WGA health insurance.

Bruce found me through Michael Salconi, an actor from Baltimore’s Little Italy who played a uniform cop named Santangelo on the HBO series The Wire. I wrote for the first three seasons of the show, a much-heralded drama praised for everything from the social arguments it posited (never put your faith in institutions) to the nuanced humanity of its bad guys, some of them very bad guys.

But not even on The Wire did bloody reprobates take netherworld journeys worthy of Dante and Bela Lugosi and come back to tell the tale.

“When I flat-lined and the old dude in the other world said, ‘I read your book,’ I knew he meant the book of my life,” said Bruce, recounting a moment from his near-death experience after being shot by a SWAT team. “After that sunk in for a few years, I knew I needed to write that book and knew I didn’t have the education or talent to do it.”

I’m not sure about the talent (always a wild card), but Bruce is one of the more intelligent people I’ve met in a lifetime of befriending strangers. Had things been different in his early years—if he had not been molested as a young boy, if the tens of thousands of dollars his family spent on hospitals and lawyers had gone instead to summer camp, travel, and tuition—his life surely would have been otherwise.

The son of a successful decorative box salesman and an elementary school teacher, Bruce was born into an all-white, postwar suburb of lawyers, doctors, and businessmen. As a child, he took dance and etiquette lessons and had all of his needs—and most of his wants—met. White’s rosy memories of this somewhat idyllic childhood are brief, ending abruptly when he was six or seven years old and sexually abused by older boys in the neighborhood,

the foundational trauma of many an addiction. By the fourth grade, he was smoking cigarettes and drinking wine in the woods. Marijuana soon followed.

Pot is often called the gateway to hard narcotics. For Bruce, simply being alive opened the floodgates to anything that would let him forget who he was. By his mid-teens, White was shooting dope and soon robbing pharmacies. He once allowed a jail doctor to remove part of his salivary gland just for the pain meds that came with the surgery.

Now in his early sixties and drug free since 2003, he said, “I used every hustle out there to get one more—just one more hit.”

White was paroled after serving seven years (twice escaping attempts by other inmates to kill him), and for a while, the prosecutor who convicted him kept a photograph on her desk of Bruce in a cap and gown, college diploma in hand. It was a reminder that while rehabilitation among hardened criminals is rare, anything is possible.

A decidedly nonreligious man, Bruce is adamant that almost everything he does is an attempt to serve the will of the God who brought him back from hell in this world and the edge of Gehenna in the next. Of the journey, he says, “I was an animal, and then I had a Saul conversion.”

It is a conversion in which he became drug free behind bars, began advising the same courts that sent him to prison on how to deal with fellow addicts facing jail time, and started a drug treatment center with absolute insistence on abstinence.

No matter how much progress the multibillion-dollar treatment industry makes in understanding the science behind addiction— and what little progress they have made has been slow—the spiritual component of recovery is cited as crucial by virtually every addict with quality recovery.

Against the twenty-first-century opioid epidemic, the Bruce White story is a detailed portrait of the brutal intractability of addiction while supporting an equal, illogical truth: even the most depraved junkie can recover from the progressive, fatal disease.

Addiction in all its guises has thoroughly saturated American society, and thus there are overlapping audiences for this book. It is neither self-help manual, academic text, nor religious tract. Just the story of one man.

This is a piercing look into the psyche of the addict, beginning long before the first drink was taken, the first drug ingested. It courses through decades of criminal activity, practically inevitable in the world of hard drugs. It may provide insight, for treatment providers, policy makers, law enforcement, and the long-suffering families and friends of addicts. The most prized reader, however, would be the hopeless junkie craving one more—“one more hit,” as White puts it—the person who can’t fathom the possibility of a way out.

Bruce White was that person. And, for some time now, he has not been.

“If I can get clean and sober,” he said, “anyone can.”

The Most Interesting Book the Old Man Had Ever Read

“You promised me he would not end like this.”

—Mernie, Bruce’s grandmother

On January 7, 1998—watching a movie and ingesting narcotics the way someone else might enjoy a bowl of popcorn—Bruce White yet again faced cinematic, near-certain death.

Soon to be forty years old, Bruce was in his room at his parents’ home in lily-white Lutherville, Baltimore County, Maryland. A convicted felon, he’d been using drugs every chance he had since elementary school.

At first, he felt extraordinary pain, lost consciousness, and embarked on an adventure worthy of Alice, except that White’s Wonderland was an especially odious subdivision of hell.

Bruce was the complete give-me-what-I-want-and-get-out-ofmy-way-or-I’ll-fuck-you-up dope fiend. He had seen and caused a lot of pain and ugliness to anyone unlucky enough to cross his path in a life devoted to drugs, kicks, fast machines, women, and violence. On the face of it, not a unique story.

But very few have experienced the sojourn Bruce took while minding his own business and watching a war movie at his father’s home on a winter’s night. Or at least come back to tell the tale.

Bruce awoke from a narcotic drowse with pain in his hand, having passed out in his bedroom with a cigarette between his fingers. He lit another and glanced at the TV to pick up the thread of Platoon.

“It was the part where Willem Dafoe is going into the tunnel. I always liked this part,” said Bruce, noting that at the time—thirtyeight years old and weary of the street game—he was “lost in my own tunnel of explosions.”

He kept a safe in the room and went to it for Dilaudid—an opioid painkiller—laughing because he couldn’t remember the last time he was able to watch a movie in one sitting. Kneeling to open the safe, he hoped there’d be some “good red pot” left to complement the Dilaudid. He found a needle and the pills but was out of reefer. Reaching into the pocket of a pair of pants, he found a dollar bill and folded into it eight tablets of the Dilaudid—“all that would fit into the syringe”—and looked around for something to crush the pills.

The amount, he said, “was maybe three times as much as anyone might use.”

Using a glass by the bed, he crushed the Dilaudid inside the dollar bill, shook the powder into a spoon, and tapped the rolled-up bill to get every last speck of dope. Putting a dab on his tongue he pronounced it bitter, familiar, and pleasant.

The ritual had begun. In the bathroom, he ran water in the glass, used it to fill a hypodermic needle, and then squeezed the water

THE PATH FORWARD FOR UNIONS AFTER AMAZON

by David Madland

The failed effort by workers at Amazon’s Bessemer Alabama warehouse to unionize highlighted just how difficult it is to form a union under US labor law—as well as created a moment to think about the path forward for labor unions.

Because US law contains glaring weaknesses that allow employers to intimidate workers with, for example, one-on-one meetings with direct supervisors about the union that often include veiled threats and provide no monetary penalties if employers cross the line and fire or discipline a worker for union support, much of the discussion has focused on these flaws. But the path forward for unions needs to involve not just stronger rights for workers and a fairer process for joining a union but also policies that actively encourage workers to join unions and encourage broader-based bargaining.

Active encouragement of unionization—by providing unions with a platform to recruit members and incentives for workers to join unions—and support for broader-based bargaining so that all workers doing similar work receive similar pay are key steps forward for unions in today’s economy, as I explain in my book, Re-Union: How Bold Labor Reforms Can Repair, Revitalize, and Reunite the United States

Unions provide a service that benefits society broadly—higher wages for most workers, including many non-union workers, and political voice for the working class. Because people can benefit from these services even if they don’t pay for it, society gets too little of public goods like unions. As a result, policy should not only provide strong union rights but also needs to actively encourage membership.

Unions provide a service that benefits society broadly—higher wages for most workers, including many non-union workers, and political voice for the working class.

Unions provide a service that benefits society broadly—higher wages for most workers, including many nonunion workers, and political voice for the working class.

Indeed, Amazon allegedly threatened to close down the Bessemer, Alabama warehouse if it were unionization.

Just as the government supports small businesses with targeted lending, government contracts, and protections from monopoly competitors, it also needs to encourage labor unions with a range of policies. Unions, for example, should deliver or help people access governmental benefits—including workforce training, retirement benefits, and enforcement of workplace laws—akin to how unions help make unemployment insurance work in countries like Sweden, Demark, and Belgium. This model has proven effective at ensuring quality services and generating high and stable union membership: it ensures visibility, provides access to workers, creates incentives for workers to join, and paves the way for greater recognition of the important work that unions do to support a fair economy.

The changing economy has also made it harder for workers to collectively bargain at their worksites—the place where American labor law encourages bargaining to occur—because worksites have become more mobile and companies can increasingly contract out work. Bargaining solely at a single worksite has always left out too many workers compared to bargaining at a higher level such as the sector or regional level—but the problem has gotten much worse in the modern economy. Workplace-level bargaining also causes unionized employers to have higher labor costs than their competitors and thus increases employer resistance to unions. Indeed, Amazon allegedly threatened to close down the Bessemer, Alabama warehouse if it were unionization.

In today’s economy, unions need to be able to bargain not just at the worksite, but also for all workers across an entire industry no matter the type of workplace they have, no matter how their employment is structured. This is often called sectoral or broad-based bargaining.

Broader-based bargaining raises wages for more workers and ensures that similar work receives similar pay, which not only limits opportunities for discrimination and closes racial and gender wage gaps, but also encourages industries to more efficiently allocate economic resources and prevents good employers from being undercut by low-road competitors.

Supporters of unions should seek to not only ensure workers have strong rights, but also ensure that policies create platforms for recruitment and incentives for membership as well as encourage bargaining beyond the worksite level.

The Cornell University Press Podcast an interview with Bruce White and raphael alvarez, aBout Don’t Count me out hosted by Johnathan hall

The following is a transcript of an episode of 1869, the Cornell University Press podcast. It has been transcribed using AI software. Any typos, errors, or inconsistencies may be the result of the transcription or the natural pattern of the human voice and speech. If you wish to listen to the origial, search 1869 podcast through whicever podcast service you prefer.

WWelcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I’m Jonathan Hall. In this episode we speak with author Rafael Alvarez and addictions counselor Bruce White, subject of Raphael’s new book Don’t Count Me Out: A Baltimore Dope Fiend’s Miraculous Recovery. Rafael Alvarez is a former City Desk reporter for the Baltimore Sun and former writer for the HBO drama, The Wire. He is the author of many books of fiction and nonfiction. Bruce White is an addictions counselor and the founder of One Promise: A counseling, education, and housing program in Baltimore for those struggling with addiction. Bruce got clean in 2003. After decades of active addiction, and use the 12 step program to rebuild his life. We spoke with Raphael and Bruce about how Bruce’s dangerous journey through addiction and his incredible recovery can offer addicts and those who love them hope and inspiration, and how Raphael and Bruce hope the new book and its message will help make a positive difference in the lives of those impacted by addiction. Hello, Rafael and Bruce, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Good morning.

Good morning, Jonathan. Good morning, Raphael. It’s nice to see you guys this morning.

Nice to see you guys. So congratulations on this new book, Don’t Count Me Out: A Baltimore Dope Fiend’s Miraculous Recovery. I read in the introduction that you go over how you both first met. Tell us about that story. And how that introduction resulted in the book that we now have.

Well, I’ll let Bruce say how he found out about me, and then I’ll tell you about the cool phone call I got in August of 2012.

So I was going to Costa Rica with a buddy of mine. I guess I had a bad 10 or 15 years clean and we started being able to travel outside of the country started having a little bit of finance and stuff. And the guy’s name was Mike Salconi. And Mike Salconi was Detective Mike in the HBO series the wire that Raphael was a writer on and I told Mike about my aspirations of having a book about my life. Because looking at it from outside of myself, it was a great story of redemption and recovery. So I wanted to be able to have somebody document that. And I wasn’t the guy to do it. And he said he knew this guy Rafael Alvarez. And so then here we go to the phone call Rafael.

So it’s, I believe it’s August, late August of 2012. And I’m in LA chasing

TV work. And things were not exactly going my way. Let’s say I had had a good run on The wire. And I had written for NBC for about five years. Then the industry changed. And we had gone on strike as writers. And the phone rings. I’m walking my daughter’s dog, like near the Capitol Records building in Hollywood. And it’s I don’t know the name doesn’t even have a name. But uh it’s a Baltimore area code. So I take the call and in my mind, it went like this. You Rafeal Alvarez in his voice, right? The voice you just heard. I’m like, yeah, and he goes, I hear you’re a writer. I’m like, yeah. And then he says, and this is pure Baltimore. This part he dropped Salconi’s name. And I’ve known Michael Salconi for years for Little Italy, and mutual friends. And in Baltimore, that’s all it takes, you know, he dropped the right name. If he would have dropped some name I’d never heard of it would have been a different conversation. So now he’s got my attention. And not because Falcone was an actor on the wire, but because he was a friend and says, I want you to write my story. And I said, All right, I’ll be back in Baltimore in about two weeks. We made a date for coffee. And we kicked around some of the ground rules. And on this face of it, it was a great story. As I say in the in my introduction. I had written about a lot of bad asses before. But I never actually got to know one to really no one. I had been a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun I wrote about bad guys on The Wire, blah, blah, blah. And the cool thing was that every time I saw I heard the best story Bruce had he topic and then indicated no, I was doing this. But in between our coffee sessions, I go back, and double and triple check with my police sources with documents. Everything he ever told me panned out. So then we started really getting down to the serious work. This is long before we knew there was going to be a Cornell University Press in the game. This is just me and Bruce. One on One banging out a good story.

Wow, wow, it is an incredible story. I mean, I don’t even know how to begin. It’s a it’s a page turner, a lot of the reviewers, both before the book as well, as you know, online and on Amazon things. They say once you open the book, you can’t put it down.

Yeah, a lot of my friends have said they read it in one sitting, which says something in a day and age where the New York Times tell you something’s a five minute read, you know, exactly. Those phrases didn’t exist when I was reading the newspaper as a kid, you know, but um, yeah, a lot of people are reading in one setting.

That’s great. That’s great. And that’s really good, because, you know, a compelling story, but also with a message and a mission. And one of the missions that you have is to kind of make a dent in the stigma of drug addiction. How do you both hope, don’t count me out will make a difference in the world now that it’s out.

That’s a Bruce question.

Jonathan

When I got the inspiration to document my journey, it was never about me. And me being a different being it was about the message of recovery, it was about the message, that there is redemption it was the message that we can recover and we can move forward in our lives. And furthermore, we can be accepted by the highest offices in our judiciaries, and be valued and have the integrity to speak in front of these judges, to speak with the mayor or whoever, and be understood and heard and 100% believed, because you’ve earned that. It was about getting the message out there. I literally, you know, remember, in 2009, walking into the exact courthouse, I’ve walked out with 25 years of prison time, which I’ve done about 12 of that love and a half 12 of that. And people were very nervous. I mean State’s Attorneys and Rafael goes to it elegantly In the book where they didn’t want me in their courthouse, where one one of the judges, Ambrose was know, he needs to be barred when she was a state’s attorney tried to prosecute me for some things that, you know, unsavory type things and, and they let me in. And yesterday, I was buying Girl Scout cookies from one of my friend’s daughters who’s a judge. And when I enter his chambers, he gives me a big hug and tells me how nice it is to see me. So it comes down to like there’s a sociology aspect to the whole thing. Where if I continued working it like Atlas, my first job with this lovely sold Steve Sturgis, who helped me tremendously. When I first came home, from prison, if I’d have stayed there, I would have been a different being than get dropped and immersed into that more refined, gentlemanly society, you know, of wearing a suit and tie every day. You know, obviously today I’m not you know, I’m with you. So, so there was a lot I wanted out of the book, I wanted people to know, you know, that you can recover, you can reenter society. And I had to prove myself year after year after year, I had to prove myself. And what I understood is like, basically, I knew I might be the only copy of the basic text. These people ever see these lawyers and judges and prosecutors ever see. And when it started, it wasn’t like that. I just wanted the message out there. But as it evolved as Rafael and I have worked together for years and years, and evolved into this thing that was bigger than either of us, this this story, and it’s not about me or Rafael, it’s about the message that you can come from where I come from, and you can end up sitting, I’m sitting in my own drug treatment facility, we got 100 beds in in mental health, and I have 23 people working with me. And, you know, it started it started with hope.

That’s great. That’s great. So, so this message of hope, it kind of leads me to one question I had you know that your story, there’s so many twists and turns, it’s an incredible story. And, you know, even says, you know, it’s a miraculous recovery, it does appear like a miracle that you’re here talking to us. Looking back from where you are, from where you are now, was there any running thread that that you feel like kept you alive? During this whole thing?

I think my ignorance to change, I think source energy as I prefer to call it, people call God, whatever. But universal energy that quantum physics

of this particles communicate with that particle in the universe. And, and that I think, just kept me alive. And I think there was purpose in my life. But I had to get through so much to get there. And I don’t think I had to do all this. I think when I made the decision to continue to use him to continue to do this, that the two outcomes were either my my horrific death that I almost met, you know, when I got shot up by the SWAT team, or this, or this, that that was, you know, the two outcomes, I don’t think pardon me. Yeah.

Jonathan, there was several reasons that the first chapter of this book is Bruce’s near death experience after being shot by the SWAT team. One is that it’s a fascinating journey. But to I think it answers, at least for me, your last question to Bruce of what kept him alive. And his, you know, the stereotype of of the Near Death Experience is the white light in the corner, and you gravitate towards it. That was not what Bruce got. Not, you know, nobody wants to think about the flip side of that coin. And, of course, the Near Death Experience chapter, which I put at the beginning, because it encapsulates the whole journey while being very, very provocative. And it was the one chapter I couldn’t double check or triple check or go to Documents for right. But it was very specific. It wasn’t vague at all. And for those who believe, no matter what you want to call it, the names don’t matter. Something wanted Bruce White on this earth. Certainly wasn’t the parents of all the kids that he, you know, went down wrong roads with, there were people who would not talk to me, because years later, they’re still very angry at Bruce, something bigger than all of us. If you read that first chapter, there was a design for him to still be with us. And I feel like I was part of that. There are plenty of writers in Baltimore, you know. And compared to the success I was having in Los Angeles as a TV writer, this is not on that level. This is almost a very private thing. As weird as that sounds, a very public book, but a very private story. Bruce White is supposed to be with us. That’s all that’s as much as I can fathom it. So there you go. That’s powerful.

It’s powerful. Do you think you want to add Bruce to that?

I think Rafael’s said it perfectly. I don’t really know why and I don’t even feel deserving of my life and where I am and what I know it’s not about like things it’s about the work I do, you know, helping the addict is still suffers, you know, my door is always open. I’m the CEO of a fairly large drug treatment facility. And clients will come in here and they’ll sit down in that chair right there. And it’s goingt to make me cry but still. Pardon me. They’ll want to talk about the first step. They want to talk about what what my first step look like with that. So right Under look alike. And they’ll tell me that I’ve never, you know, met the owner of a treatment facility, and I’ve been in 10 of them. And I tell them, that’s the problem. It’s an honor and a privilege for me to be able to serve this population is intimately as I’m allowed to, you know, I have a case of basic texts (Narcotics Anonymous) right over there on that floor. I have a case of Narcan

bruce

raphael Jonathan

right over there on my floor. And when I go down to the service center, the Mayor Frank says, to me, says you’re the only treatment facility that comes in, buys these basic texts to give the clients and, you know, he said, I’m so proud that you still do that. I can’t imagine not given these beautiful souls, the tools they need to recover, you know. So for me, it’s just such a privilege, it’s a privilege to be, you know, I’m a 63 year old man with hepatitis C, destroyed, my liver, didn’t know I had it, you know, I’m sitting here with cirrhosis, and I’m still moving great. And go to the gym, you know, four or five days a week, you know, I haven’t had a substance in my body for more than 19 years, you know, anything, come back and nothing, you know, drink a lot of coffee, you know. But it’s a privilege for me, to be able to interact with the judiciary, the system. And this population. To try to change...I’ve met, many people just need help man they’d need, they need an interruption in the addiction process. You know, so they can get a moment of clarity. A lot of times, we want to promise her that moment of clarity. If that makes sense.

I get asked all the time, Jonathan. Well, how did he quit? How did he you know, after the horrific, you know, first 40 years or whatever. And they will, you know, you want to know. And if you read the book, you’ll realize there was no amount of earthly pain that would get Bruce to quit. And this goes back to the mystery of, of why he’s still here. And I say, for as dramatic as the horror show was, the moment of awakening was very mundane. One day, he woke up and said, I don’t want this anymore. I don’t know. And I’ve heard that so many times, in the work that I do, I don’t know how you get somebody to the point where they wake up and say, You know what, I’m done. That some combination of relation science has yet it’s a billion dollar treatment industry, Bruce knows it far better than I because he’s a professional. science hasn’t cracked this thing. With all due respect to the medical community. It’s got to be science, willingness, and then that weird third wheel of mystery, which all faith is, is a has a component of mystery in it. Over and over again, I’ve heard people who have changed their life the way Bruce has, and that’s whether it’s the, you know, the 60 year old little lady who’s the librarian who can’t wait to have a sherry every night, to the hardcore junkie shooting up in his neck. You know, they’re all the same in a certain degree. They wake up one day, they look in the mirror and they say, I’m done. And no one has been able to crack that nut yet as to how that day arrives. It certainly ain’t bosses, judges, spouses, or the law.

That’s great. That’s great. That makes sense. Yeah. So this this moment of surrender, as you said, a mystery. Science doesn’t have the answers. And that within the 12 step program, the whole idea of hitting bottom, when do you hit bottom when? And you you’re saying that, you know, there were many bottoms in the story, but that one day, as you said it in a mundane fashion, Bruce just woke up and said, Okay, I’ve had enough.

Yeah, he couldn’t even tell me the last time he shocked Oh, he sort of

raphael Jonathan raphael

knew the week so to speak. But, you know, I wanted that moment. Just like, just like the readers. Bruce, what was the moment where you were done because I think it was a Tuesday, like, Oh, that’s great.

You want this crescendo...and that was not a crescendo, but it was but so much leading up to it. That’s fascinating. That’s fascinating.

I’ll tell you some guys can handle more pain than others? It’s, it’s the pain of it’s the pain that you know versus the pain that you don’t know. I’ve never known anyone that was willing to take more pain than brutes.

I have such a high threshold of pain that we’re at the end of a meeting when we start one, do that moment, a prayer before prayer. I always pray for the addict with the hot threshold and pain, because that’s me. You know, in the day of fentanyl, they’re not getting the chances I got, you know, I shot heroin. I didn’t, you know, we didn’t have that deadly drug. And today, I just see, you know, playing out with differently, you know, we’re losing a lot about next generation counselors, our next drug treatment starters and owners who do it in an ethical, loving, caring way, we’re losing that population to the to the fentanyl epidemic, you know, that’s brutal.

That’s brutal. So, tell us, tell us about so you your system is abstinence based. But then there’s a lot of clinics that use methadone, like as a substitute to control addiction, tell us the advantages of the abstinence based recovery program in your in your mind.

Okay, I drank methadone for about 15 years, maybe a few years longer. It was always my starting point was just to stop me from being sick, until I open my spirit completely up with abstinence, that what the change that you see today that we’re talking about today, Don’t Count Me Out is written about that miraculous change is impossible to happen with MAT’s in you now, one problem is we take people on methadone, now we have a property for them. And we take people on Suboxone, we have property for them. But we’re still abstinence intention. We want people to live because the fentanyl changed, that we were 100% absence did not take people. And then since 2012, or 13. I remember I lost three guys, I sponsored like bam, bam, bam, in like 13. And I started saying we got to do something a little different. So we started structuring a little different. And tried to we get a lot of people now that are on Suboxone. And then when they leave us, they’re not. And they’re so happy when they get off of that. But trust me, I’m supporting you, if you need that, that’s as good as it gets. That’s way better than going out there and playing Russian roulette. And five years ago would have never said that. You know, but today I’m fine. If you’re on drug replacement therapy, you know, it’s not clean, and it’s not sober. And some of those folks want to say they’re clean or sober on Suboxone or methadone. They’re not, you know, but they’re a third tradition says All you need is a desire to stop using. So you’re in

Jonathan

raphael bruce

Jonathan bruce

Jonathan

recovery process, and you’re welcomed into the rooms of Narcotics Anonymous, and we want to help you and love you and get you somewhere different. If that fits you. It’s very personal at this point, you know, and fentanyl has changed that. Okay,

So the symbol for your clinic is says One Promise and then it’s got the Yin Yang symbol. Tell us more about that and the connection to spirit and the spiritual approach.

So I’m working with the sponsor, he’s from Iran after the Shah lost power, he walked over the mountains in Turkey with nothing but an ounce of raw heroin in his sock, because he knew the new regime would have done him. You know, that would have been it for him. And he came here and I met him in 2006. His name was Majeed. And he took me on this spiritual journey. I studied kind of all of the religions from Hinduism, Buddhism, Bodhisattva. You know, the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Koran, I kind of looked through everything. I kind of settled in with A Course in Miracles came down, you know, Wayne Dyer, Marianne Williamson, Deepak Chopra, Carolyn Myss, you know, all these spirits. Listen, I did. After I finished the 12 steps. I went on this journey for about four years. And at the end, not the end, the journey is still going obviously. But what I came up with was we needed that balance and like, where you have the white and the dark of the Ah, ying yang symbol in the light part is darkness. And in the dark part, there’s light. And that just touched my spirit my heart in such a genuine way that we adopted that symbol.

You know? That’s great. That’s great. So what would you how would you like you have an introduction, obviously to the book, but how would you like to enter that book to them? What would you like to say to that person who may have, who may be an addict themselves or have an addict in their family? What would be kind of like the introduction that you would give like, verbally to someone as you hand them your book?

Let me tell you a funny story that just happened in Los Angeles, like I told you, I’ve written for television out there. For about five years, right before I met Bruce. And I’ve got a lot of friends out there, some of them are still in the business. But the reason I go there is that’s where my daughter and my granddaughter live. And I just got back. And I was having breakfast with someone that you might call a heavy hitter, somebody named dude who had some pool. And of course, I’m a human being Bruce as a human being, we’re very ambitious, you know, I’m in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, you know, maybe this guy can hand this book off to somebody that could make Cornell University a lot of money. So I bring a book along. And this guy is also in recovery. It just so happens. And, and I’m of two minds, because this is really a spiritual book. But at the same time, if we’re in the material world, you know, I’m a working writer, I want success. And in my mind, I’m thinking, you know, how do I ask him to see if he can put this into the right hands? The right hands, right?

bruce Jonathan raphael

So finally, he goes to the men’s room, and I just put the book at his place. And when he comes back, he goes, Oh, man, thanks. I know exactly who I’m giving this to. Well, let me tell you what, and Steven Spielberg. It was this 32 year old cokehead, who had a couple of weeks sobriety with just destroyed his life. And that is the god of recovery, working to get this book, where it’s supposed to be, my guess is, and Bruce can answer this as well, that it’s not going to be the guy that still shaking or standing in the methadone line or had peed his pants the night before. It’s going to be someone who loves that guy. That’s going to get this book. And then moving along. What would you say, Bruce?

I want to thank Billy Gardell for writing the foreword in the book. I mean, he is a heavy hitter, and I like him in the Mike & Molly show. And it touched my soul when this guy wanted to write the foreword. But for me, the book is about the message of recovery. It’s not about Bruce White did this great stuff. And he recovered in Oh, it’s such a great guy. I’m a guy riddled with anxiety. Still, I had so much anxiety. That’s why I’ve had it for six weeks. My PTSD from being shot of being in motorcycle wrecks, shows up with absolute anxiety. I can kind of do anything I want. I’m financially secure, as F, and this book isn’t about me being more fun. A matter of fact, any profit from this book on my behalf, goes back to the attic, this still suffers. I’m not taking one dime of profit from the wall. It’s about the message, man. It’s about the message that that you can stop using lose the desire to use and find a new way to live to met the message.

There’s a really great part of the book, where Bruce has just been released from prison. And he’s trying to find a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. And he goes to this place where they’re supposed to be helping addicts and they don’t have any directors right. And he’s walking out and this woman by the door who’s half nodded out that she’s a junkie, somehow has overheard all these things have to line up exactly for this stuff to happen. She’s overheard what Bruce has said she reaches in her ratty old shopping bag, enhanced Bruce in Narcotics Anonymous directory and goes here. You can have this I don’t want it. Underline one right. That’s how this book is going to save lives. I’ve been given I’ve given a lot of way we’ve sold a fair amount Somebody’s you know, somebody’s gonna leave, forget it on a bus, somebody’s going to sell it to Goodwill, it’s going to be laying in somebody’s house. And the right person is going to say, Hey, what is this? And that’s the person that’s going to get sober.

That’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. So yeah, this idea, you know, Carl Jung would call synchronicity. Some of the faith might call grace, this book has an opportunity and will change lives and helps save someone. And so help save loved ones as well. So I’m really honored and grateful to be able to talk to you guys, I’m so glad that you have worked together from this phone call, you know, over a decade ago to have the book come out, and that this is a book that is going to make a difference, and that that message that you have is so hopeful, and I’m so proud that our Press

raphael

bruce

Jonathan

raphael

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is publishing it and I’m just glad that you guys got together that some synchronicity brought you guys together to make this happen. So thank

Thank you, Jonathan.

Jonathan, thank you so much for having us today. It was a privilege to be honest with you.

Thank you so much. You guys take care. That was author Rafael Alvarez and addictions counselor Bruce White, talking about the new book, Don’t Count Me Out: A Baltimore Dope Fiend’s Miraculous Recovery.

three Questions with TAKAKAZU YAMAGISHI author of Health Insurance Politics in Japan

1. What inspired you to write this book?

To understand what health care means to people

To understand the nature of Japanese politics

Not having good books on the development of health care policy of Japan

3. In what ways will your book resonate with readers?

This book helps one understand why and how Japan achieved relatively low-cost health care system.

This book helps one understand why the Japanese government’s COVID-19 handling, including its vaccine policy, is so confusing.

This book helps one understand what role the Japanese Medical Association and other interest groups play in the development of health insurance policy and in response to

2. How will your book make a difference?

To add a book on the long-term institutional and political development of health insurancepolitics of Japan

To produce a book that pays attention to the path dependency effect, particularly ones of the

Meiji period and World War II, in the development of the Japanese health insurance policy

COVID-19.

THE EXCERPT

Introduction

A Japanese care home at night. An older man wanders along an empty corridor, looking confused, until he comes face to face with “Pepper,” a four- foot- tall white plastic- and- metal humanoid robot, with big, illuminated eyes and a high- pitched chirpy voice. As the man walks up to the robot, it starts talking to him: “Good evening! Where are you off to so late?” and asks him a series of questions: “When’s your birthday? Tell me something you can be proud of. Where’s your home? Who do you live with?” Meanwhile, the robot covertly takes a photo of his face and emails it to a care worker, who rushes to the scene and escorts the man back to bed.

(Description of a staged 2016 promotional video for a “monitoring” app for the robot Pepper1)

A Japanese care home in daytime. A care worker, Fujita, spends several minutes booting up the same type of humanoid robot Pepper in the room where it is stored, and when it is ready to go, she wheels it into the corridor. She helps an older female resident, Suzuki, toward the robot, and quickly carries a chair over for her to sit on so that she is positioned in front of it. Suzuki seems excited to interact with Pepper. Fujita uses the robot’s touch screen to select its quiz app, and it begins the quiz with Suzuki. At first, every thing seems to go well, and Fujita goes off to do other tasks, although she continues to keep an eye on Suzuki’s interaction with the robot. But the background noise of the care home begins to interfere with Pepper’s speech recognition. It asks Suzuki, “What’s four times six?” She answers: “Twenty- four.” There is a pause. She repeats, “Twenty- four.” Pause. “Twenty- four!” “Wrong answer.” “Twenty- four!!”

“Wrong answer.” “What do you mean it’s the wrong answer, it’s twentyfour!” “Wrong answer.” Eventually, Suzuki loses patience with the robot and starts to get up. Fujita runs over to help her up and take her back to her usual seat, and then immediately wheels Pepper back to its storage area in case another resident trips over it. She says to me with a wry smile, “How much does this thing cost again?”

(Pepper in use at a nursing care home in Japan in April 2017, description based on field notes)

This is a book about robots, Japan, and the future of care. It is about state and corporate attempts to bring together increasingly sophisticated, but also exceedingly hyped, robotic technologies with the unprecedented number of older people requiring care. It is also a book about what it means to do care work with robots. Are robots an ideal solution to the “problem” of aging, or do they create new problems of their own? Could a machine, or a suite of machines, partially or fully replace the need for human care workers? If so, what would become of care and care work?

Although this book focuses on Japan, the questions it asks and hopes to answer are critical for many other higher income countries that are contending with growing populations of older people but do not seem to have enough caregivers to look after them. Japan may appear to be a special case since it is facing such a serious care crisis. The statistics seem to paint an extraordinary picture. By 2050, the proportion of people over sixty-five years of age is forecast to grow to nearly 40  percent of the overall population, with 514,000 people over one hundred years of age—nearly ten times the number in 2016. In 2000, there were about four adults of working age for every person over sixty-five; by 2050, there will be near parity. By the same year, almost one in ten of the population—nine million people—is expected to be living with dementia. To cope with the level of care that will be needed, Japan’s government expects that by 2040, one in ten adults of working age will be employed as a care worker, up from around one in 160 in 2000, not counting the many people providing informal care to older family members and friends. In 2012, annual social benefit spending for older adults was at an all-time high—¥74.1 trillion ($741 billion), representing 21  percent of national income. By 2040, it is forecast to hit ¥190 trillion ($1.9 trillion).2

Japan is, however, not alone in this predicament. In Eu rope, it is estimated that one-third of the population will be over sixty-five years of age by 2060, leading to a doubling of care needs for older adults compared with the level in 2012. In the United States, the figure is expected to be slightly lower, with around onequarter of the population over sixty-five by 2060, although a sense of crisis is even more immediate due to the absence of state assistance for eldercare.3 Many European Union countries as well as the United Kingdom expect significant and growing shortages of care staff in the near future. This is why policymakers and nursing home administrators across Eu rope and North Amer ica are looking to Japan for possible technological solutions to their caring crisis.

In attempts to preempt some of the vast social and economic transformations that these predictions seem to imply, some in Japan and other aging countries have been imagining alternative futures. Over the past twenty years, one such vision has increasingly materialized among government technocrats, research

managers, and corporations. It is a future populated by robots that care, and it has driven Japan to pioneer a new kind of techno–welfare state increasingly focused on high-tech systems and networked digital devices. In this technologycentered reimagining of care, machines with names like Hug, HAL, and Pepper are intended to supplement or replace the work of human caregivers while also assisting older people to look after themselves, breaking down the tasks of care into linear strings of simple, repeatable physical actions and speech that can be digitally reproduced by computational algorithms and performed by robots.

Japan is an ideal case study in helping us explore the fantasy of robots solving the significant social and demographic challenges that confront aging postindustrial societies. The idea of robots coming to the rescue taps into a rich invented tradition of Japan as “robot kingdom” which has been cultivated over decades, with relentless promotion of robots in popu lar culture and across state, media, and industry. Yet despite considerable domestic and international interest in eye-catching Japa nese robots, actual knowledge about what kinds of technologies are being developed, how, and for what purposes remains scant. Many news stories portray an exoticized version of Japan that fails to capture the complex real ity of how care robots are developed and used, while many academic studies of robots are conducted by those with significant stakes in the success of the industry.

This book explores the world’s single largest project to date aimed at developing and implementing care robots, launched by the Japa nese government, as a lens through which to view this attempt to transform the future of care. It examines the differences between how the roboticization of care is imagined, how it is proceeding, and what this process looks like from the perspective of an eldercare facility and care workers expected to use robots. In doing so, it grapples with a number of questions: What do robots mean for the future of care? Will robots decimate human employment in the care sector, and would this in fact be a desirable outcome, given the often-negative reputation of caring jobs? What is the interface between the engineers and technocrats who design and promote robots, the workers who use them, and the care home residents whose lives they are ostensibly designed to improve? How do robots contribute to transformations of care labor and practices, what it means to care, and how those doing this work understand good care?

I will argue that despite considerable hype, lofty expectations, and substantial investment, robots alone cannot yet deliver on the promise of solving care crises in Japan or elsewhere. Efforts to develop and implement them instead call attention to what might be lost in the roboticization of care, while also revealing alternative approaches that go beyond technological fixes.

Caring for Capitalism

I first became interested in Japa nese robots in 2007 during my master’s degree at Oxford University. The Japa nese government had just released Innovation 25, an optimistic vision statement that imagined everyday life in Japan in the year 2025—a society full of robots and other high-tech gadgetry. An ambitious new research project aiming to develop a robot version of a human child (CB2) had also been launched, and other Japa nese robots were garnering international media exposure on a regular basis. It seemed as if the futuristic “robot society” depicted by the Japa nese government was just around the corner. My enthusiasm was not shared by my adviser, an anthropology professor, who counselled me not to be distracted by the hype and fanfare of robots that were rarely used in daily life. But by the time I began my PhD in 2014, academic interest in robots was continuing to build. The relatively new field of human-robot interaction studies was expanding rapidly, and scholars across the social sciences showed more interest than ever in the subject. Japan was a key center for the development of interactive and humanoid robots, and the government had just initiated the largest ever care robot development and implementation project. If care robots had not entered everyday life quite yet, they seemed poised to do so.

In Japan, state and industry backers of care robots imagine them as helpful companions, looking after elderly parents and even young children at home, and enabling working-aged members of their family, particularly women, to keep their jobs and pursue econom ically productive lives without having to spend time and effort providing care. These technocrats aim to promote the development and use of a range of what they call personal care robots, to be employed mainly in care institutions but also increasingly in private homes, to help with demanding or time-consuming care tasks. Some of these devices are aimed at physical care, including machines that can help lift older people unable to get up by themselves, assist with mobility and exercise, monitor their physical activity and detect falls, feed them, and help them take a bath or use the toilet. Others are aimed at engaging older people socially and emotionally in order to manage, reduce, and even prevent cognitive decline, provide companionship and therapy for lonely older people and their hard-pressed caregivers, make those with challenging behav ior due to dementia-related conditions easier for care staff to manage, and reduce the number of caregivers required for day-to-day care.

In promoting high-tech robotic solutions to the seemingly technical problems of care, such as the transfer of older people from bed to wheelchair which contributes to widespread back pain among Japa nese caregivers, government and industry supporters also hope to improve poor employee hiring and retention rates. In this way, they expect to be able to capitalize on peripheral elements of

the labor force by encouraging older or less physically able workers into the formal care sector. At the same time, they aim to support informal familial care at home and aid the “independence” of the increasing proportion of older people who live alone, thereby mitigating the ever-growing demand for institutionalization.4 Some believe that introducing care robots to do many of the tasks currently performed by human caregivers can reduce the burden of care on families, alleviate labor shortages, reduce the need for politically problematic migrant care labor from other parts of Asia, and increase productivity in the sector, thereby cutting spiraling care costs and revitalizing the economy. All this while reducing loneliness, preventing elder abuse, and improving standards of well-being and care for older people who require it—although these latter aims tend to be presented as, at best, an afterthought. Care robots are intended to showcase Japanese innovation and technology and to create a massive new high-tech export industry for Japan, supplying an international market that will continue to grow rapidly for decades in tandem with the aging populations of wealthy countries. The imagined benefits of care robots are seemingly endless.

The reason for the care crisis in Japan seems straightforward: there are too many older people who need care and not enough younger people to provide it. Yet, this simple statement obscures layers of political, economic, and sociocultural complexity encompassing ideologies and politics of neoliberalism and globalization, gender and family relations, and intergenerational ethics. If this is a crisis of care at a particular historical moment of demographic extremes, it also seems to be a broader crisis of capitalism. Capitalism requires workers; workers have to be reproduced—not only biologically but also socially: looked after, cared for, brought up, and socialized through countless interactions with family, friends, and other caregivers throughout their lives, most of which is done informally and in the home—unpaid, out of love, duty, or other reasons unrelated to money (Folbre 2001). Without this reproductive labor, capitalism could not exist: as Joan Tronto notes, “No state can function without citizens who are produced and reproduced through care” (2013, 26). Care work, including eldercare work, can be understood as reproductive labor in the sense that care reproduces society and social values, maintaining social cohesion and intergenerational reciprocity. Reproductive labor historically has been undervalued or not valued at all in economic terms; care labor has until relatively recently been taken for granted.

Nancy Fraser has argued that the crises of care seen across many postindustrial societies today originate from this “contradiction” of capitalism that “tends to destabilize the very processes of social reproduction on which it relies” (2016, 100), while Anna Tsing (2015) argues that the translation of noncapitalist areas of value (including, I would suggest, unpaid caring) into capitalist systems is in fact an essential aspect of how capitalism works, which, like Fraser, she sees as

unsustainable in its current form. This process only seems contradictory because of the rhetoric of rationalization used to describe markets and economies, which tends to ignore noncapitalist elements such as care that are among its vital inputs. Crises of care occur as the tacit economic need for unpaid care labor conflicts with the competing drive for maximal employment in the formal labor force. Capitalist models that largely ignore care labor therefore start to look increasingly precarious when reproduction rates fall and large sections of the population pass retirement age.

Whereas most Western countries have turned to the near-term solution of immigration from lower income countries to provide a fresh supply of low-paid care workers, the situation in Japan has been complicated—uniquely among higher income countries—by relatively low levels of immigration, for sociocultural and political reasons that will be examined later. Nevertheless, amid growing international recognition that “ free” familial care is actually paid for by the individual and societal economic opportunity costs of lower household income and fewer employees in the workforce, the Japa nese government has been pushing eldercare from mainly informal and unpaid provision into the paid sector in hopes of freeing up family carers to participate in the formal economy. In the process, it has exposed the substantial economic costs of trying to bring informal unpaid care labor into the formal capitalist economic system through public financing on a national scale. Yet, this formalization of labor is also creating new markets. The world of care, long hidden in plain sight, has now become a crucial area of commodification and “value creation”—a new market frontier ripe for innovative disruption, with older people reconceptualized as a source of economic growth and rejuvenation rather than a burden on national resources. Sociologist Ito Peng (2018) calls this the care economy, arguing that care has become “a key driver of the new ser vice sector economic growth and expansion” across almost all high- and middle-income countries.5

The development of care robots represents an attempt to square the apparent contradiction of capitalism in Japan while continuing to grow the economy: to digitally and mechanically reproduce and replace large swathes of human care, substituting capital for labor and so acting as a kind of bridge between productive and reproductive labor. Use of robots seems the logical extension of efforts to rationalize human work across all sectors and particularly those such as care work that are highly labor intensive by engineering a replacement that is entirely commodified—creating what robotics scholars Noel Sharkey and Amanda Sharkey (2012) have described as akin to an eldercare factory.

The aim of developing care robots is to make eldercare sustainable within the context of Japan’s export- driven economy—providing more efficient care services domestically while at the same time globalizing robot care by standard-

three Questions with MARCEL PARET author of Fractured Militancy

1. What inspired you to write this book?

This book is the culmination of more than a decade of research and publishing on South African society. I decided to write the book for two related reasons: first, to pull together the various themes and threads of my research – on protest, economic precarity, community formation, social movements, xenophobia, and electoral politics, among others – into a coherent narrative; and second, to make a definitive statement about the character and consequences of South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy. To accomplish these

3. In what ways will your book resonate with readers?

The race story. This book is about the failure of formal racial inclusion to deliver Black liberation. It is also about how the process of racial inclusion both encourages ongoing struggles for Black liberation, and fragments or divides those struggles. This could be one hook about the long arc of Black movements, or two hooks about the process of racial inclusion and subsequent protests. Related to all of this is the comparative story about the similarities and differences between South Africa and the ends, I needed the book form.

2. How will your book make a difference to the field?

My central contribution is to demonstrate the centrality of capitalist politics and class struggle to dynamics surrounding race and social movements. Through a novel theoretical framework based on the idea of “passive revolution,” I show how capitalism shapes processes of racial inclusion and popular mobilization.

United States, which I address in the Preface and Conclusion. The inequality and resistance story. This book is about a world of rising inequality, written from the perspective of one of the world’s most unequal cities (Johannesburg) and countries (South Africa). It is also about the possibility of popular resistance and social change towards greater equality. I show that those at the very bottom have agency and their own diverse politics. At the same time, however, movements “from below” are divided, thwarting possibilities for effective change.

“I show how capitalism shapes processes of racial inclusion and popular mobilization.”

The Article

CHALLENGING THE SOCIAL MODEL OF DISABILITY

by Amy S. F. Lutz

This morning, I discovered that I had been blocked from commenting or posting in a Facebook group for parents of children with autism because I supported a mom who observed that those with “high functioning” kids are “lucky.” Her son sounds a lot like mine—intellectually disabled, with minimal communication skills and a complete lack of safety awareness that necessitates 24-hour supervision. Yet autistic adults in the group (either parents themselves, or merely interested in advising parents) pounced on her. They suggested that her child was more capable than she described him and dismissed functioning labels as “arbitrary,” “useless,” and “harmful.” When I added that my son also suffers from epilepsy, bipolar disorder, and a history of aggressive and self-injurious rages, she and I were both blasted with a word I’ve seen increasingly weaponized to shut down discourse that doesn’t comport with the prevailing Disability Rights narrative: ableist.

I am both a parent advocate and a historian of medicine, so I’ve been very interested in how the social model of disability—which locates disability in an unaccommodating society, rather than an individual—has become entrenched in Disability Rights and academic narratives. What started out in the 1960s and 1970s as the completely common-sense observation that those with physical and sensory impairments were far less disabled in communities with curb-cuts, ramps, elevators, Braille menus, chirping traffic lights, etc. has evolved into an insistence that all disability— even the most profound intellectual and developmental—is socially constructed. Bioethicist Lisa Freitag called this “a cardinal rule that makes public optimism toward disability a requirement,” that “effectively silences parents who speak out about the hardships they encounter.”

Freitag isn’t the only academic who has challenged the hegemony of the social model. Sociologist Tom Shakespeare, women’s studies scholar Barbara Hillyer, and political scientist Stacy Clifford Sim-

I am both a parent advocate and a historian of medicine, so I’ve been very interested in how the social model of disability—which locates disability in an unaccommodating society, rather than an individual—has become entrenched in Disability Rights and academic narratives.

plican have all argued that the social model fails to consider those with significant cognitive impairments, for whom there is absolutely no societal accommodation that would allow them to live alone, hold competitive, minimum wage employment, or make meaningful decisions about their lives.

But many disability scholars refuse to engage with these critiques.

But many disability scholars refuse to engage with these critiques. In their new book on parent advocacy, for example, Allison Carey, Pamela Block, and Richard Scotch divide parents into “allies” or “obstacles,” depending on whether they align with the goals of the Disability Rights movement. (Yes, they call me out as an obstacle). Nowhere do they consider whether parents who “are more likely to pursue paternalistic approaches to care, such as guardianship, supervision, and imposed treatment” do so because that’s exactly what our kids need, not because we’re control freaks carelessly steamrolling over our children’s autonomy and capacity.

Disability Rights advocates and scholars have worked hard to articulate a broad identity that includes everyone affected by disability, and I have a great appreciation for their many accomplishments. But the key question that has remained undertheorized since Philip Ferguson pointed out in 1987 that “the exclusion of people with severe retardation from the disability rights movement is not simply an oversight…It is also a logical concomitant of the conceptual base” is how to respectfully include those with significant intellectual and developmental disabilities without eclipsing the devastating impairments that make severe autism, as I wrote in that Facebook group, “tragic.” I don’t know how best to do that, but I do know that censoring this perspective is not the answer.

THE EXCERPT

INTRODUCTION

Peter Applebome, Dixie Rising

This book investigates the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) attempts to orga nize foreign-owned vehicle-assembly plants in the southeastern United States. Organizing unfolded in three phases. The first, which began in the mid-1980s and lasted about five years, had mixed results. The UAW failed to orga nize a Nissan plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, but successfully orga nized a truck factory in Mount Holly, North Carolina, owned by the German company now known as Daimler Truck. Exploratory attempts during these years at a Toyota plant in Kentucky and a Bayerische Motoren Werke (BMW) factory in South Carolina made little headway. The UAW launched a second organizing push, this one more strategic and successful, from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, unionizing two additional truck facilities and one bus plant in North Carolina. There were also setbacks. A second campaign at Nissan failed, and the union was unable to gather enough support at a new Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama to pursue recognition. In the third phase, which ran from 2011 to 2019, the UAW invested many tens of millions of dollars and adopted numerous innovations but failed to orga nize any additional workplaces, despite a second unionization attempt at the Alabama Mercedes-Benz plant, three drives at a Volkswagen (VW) factory in Tennessee, and a campaign at a Nissan facility in Canton, Mississippi. The principal objective of this book is to explain why these organizing drives turned out the way they did.

This study shows how employees who supported and opposed unionization, union officials, transnational managers, leaders of the local business community, and state and local politicians developed new tactics and strategies in successive

theSouthhasbeenamericanlabor’sWaterloo,thenutthatnever cracked.

campaigns, in some instances invoking the American Civil War and in others the 1960s US civil rights movement, to sway specific groups of workers. The book explores how deeper transnational market integration and changes in information technology resulting from globalization have impelled and facilitated employee representatives from different parts of the world to cooperate more than in the past, particularly when dealing with a common transnational enterprise. Still, substantial cultural, institutional, interpersonal, legal, and resource constraints remain that minimize the effectiveness of transnational employee cooperation.

Success was not a function of the size or sophistication of transnational employee cooperation. The largest and most advanced effort, which the German metalworkers union Industriegewerkschaft Metall (IG Metall) undertook in cooperation with the UAW at Volkswagen Chattanooga, failed. The unwillingness of the head of VW’s works council network, who was also a member of its supervisory board, to press the company to recognize the UAW blunted the impact of the joint union effort, which already faced fierce opposition from the local business and political communities.

In some instances interventions by employee representatives on a foreign corporate board made a crucial difference such as occurred at Daimler Truck North America (DTNA). That said, well-placed employee representatives on corporate boards were not always sufficient to achieve organizing breakthroughs. In later years, the head of Daimler’s works council, who was also a member of the company’s supervisory board, strongly supported recognition of the UAW at the Mercedes-Benz U.S. International (MBUSI) automobile plant in Alabama but failed to change a determined management’s unaccommodating position and obtain union recognition.

The book also chronicles the emergence of an increasingly comprehensive and standardized union-avoidance playbook and its diffusion among management at transnational vehicle manufacturers. The playbook is open source; managers learn from one another through observation. They also hire line supervisors from other transplants and engage the same small group of law firms that specialize in union avoidance whenever an organizing drive emerges. The playbook uses old tactics, such as management-required captive-audience speeches, firing unpopu lar supervisors to curry favor with the workforce, increasing compensation before a union recognition vote, calling a union a third party from elsewhere that is simply interested in dues money, and suggesting that unionization would produce greater uncertainty regarding compensation and employment levels at the workplace without crossing the line of legality by making threats. The playbook also includes new tactics such as reducing hierarchy, allowing access (albeit controlled) to management to voice complaints and suggestions, offering benefits

to line workers that only white-collar employees traditionally received at domestic firms (e.g., subsidized auto leasing), building plants in rural small towns to scatter the workforce, paying “near union” compensation in regions with a low cost of living and few other good-paying jobs, dividing the workforce by relying heavily on lower-paid temporary employees who cannot vote in union recognition elections because they technically work for temp agencies, avoiding layoffs of permanent employees, and developing close relations with the local community through donations and staging events. Darker pages of the union-avoidance playbook prescribe illegal actions, such as surveilling employees, directly questioning employees about organizing efforts, promising rewards if employees vote against unionization, threatening retaliation if employees vote to unionize, engaging in blackmail and physical coercion, and firing union activists.

In addition to the coalescence and dissemination of a standardized unionavoidance playbook, a new phenomenon in US labor relations has developed in recent decades that has made union organizing increasingly challenging. For several decades, state and local government officials— especially in the Southeast— have engaged in increasingly extravagant competitions to persuade globally renowned foreign manufacturing firms to build plants in their state. This phenomenon has led to the unprecedented involvement of state and local officeholders in the affairs of these plants. If a unionization attempt emerges at one of these plants, regional officeholders pressure transnational managers to fight it because they fear the impact of unionization on local business and politics. The substantial state and local subsidies give regional officeholders new leverage over transnational managers because subsidies can be curtailed or eliminated if a firm does not meet per formance criteria. Transnational managers go to great lengths to stay in the good graces of regional officeholders because they regularly request additional subsidies to support plant expansions. In instances when the local elite judge the response of transnational managers to an organizing effort to be inadequate, they have launched independent anti-union campaigns of their own. This regional elite-transnational manager nexus has altered US labor relations by carving out nonunion regions in sectors that had previously been fully organized, such as vehicle assembly.

Foreign managers have typically downplayed their role in this transformation, claiming they are merely conforming to the labor relations status quo in the United States. In reality, however, they are essential participants in undermining that status quo by collaborating with state and local officials in the creation of new nonunion regions. The corporate leadership of the foreign-owned vehicle plants often hesitated at first to embrace the aggressive anti-union tactics characteristic of firms in the Southeast but, with intense pressure from local

political and business leaders, have ultimately adopted them. In other words, the local norms changed transnational managers rather than transnational managers changing local norms. This has been no less true for German managers, despite their country’s well-established postwar domestic tradition of labor-management cooperation.1

The fragile and incomplete architecture of transnational employment relations proved inadequate when faced with real-world challenges. Global framework agreements between transnational enterprises and global union federations, the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), and unilateral enterprise commitments to foster environmental, social, and governance principles in most instances failed to dissuade management from resisting unionization at foreign vehicle plants in the southern United States.

When viewed together, the cases show that organizing drives at vehicle transplants in the South do not inevitably fail, but success is difficult. Involving employee representatives from a firm’s home country is not a magic key that guarantees success, as some US union leaders had hoped.2 Organizing foreign transplants now unfolds on three sites: not only the workplace, which is the traditional venue for organizing, but also the corporate boardroom and the political realm. The latter had been limited to the state and local level, but more recently national political actors have also at times intervened. If actors opposing unionization prevail at any of these sites, the organizing drive fails. In other words, union organizing has become difficult because it is now like opening a combination lock. To be successful, everything must align. Opponents, on the other hand, can thwart it by simply prevailing at just one site. Transnational employee cooperation can make a difference, but there is no single factor that guarantees success. Context and the concatenation of actions within and across these sites determines the outcome.

Why does the hollowing out of unionized sectors matter? In recent years, increasing numbers of policymakers and scholars have called for greater unionization to counteract decades of rising inequality in the United States.3 This analysis shows how difficult it would be to increase unionization, given current labor relations practices in the United States. Even when unions such as the UAW invest considerable time and resources, innovate, act strategically, and engage in transnational cooperation, they fail more often than not to overcome the obstacles and opponents to unionization. Only a radical reconceptualization and restructuring of labor relations in the United States—one that draws on understandings and practices predating the juridico-discursive regime of truth4 introduced during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration—can rekindle workers’ power to such a degree that reversing rising inequality and enhancing employees’ voice in the workplace can be achieved.

Organ ization of the Book

This book has six chapters. The first is this introduction, which presents the book’s key findings, data, and method. The introduction also details the growth of foreign-owned vehicle assembly plants (commonly called transplants) in the United States, because it is their rise that prompted the UAW to step up organizing efforts in the Southeast starting in the mid-1980s. Chapters 1 through 4 analyze unionization campaigns at DTNA, MBUSI, Volkswagen Chattanooga, and Nissan’s facilities in Smyrna, Tennessee, and Canton, Mississippi.5 Each of these four substantive chapters focuses on a transnational enterprise and is presented as a historical narrative, because this is the clearest way to explain the dynamics, interconnections, and significance of successive organizing campaigns. Some chapters include thumbnail sketches of organizing activities at other plants and before the 1980s to provide a fuller understanding of the cases under investigation. The conclusion synthesizes the findings and discusses their implications.

Cases

The book investigates all sixteen organizing campaigns undertaken at foreignowned vehicle plants by the UAW in the Southeast since 1984 (table I.1). An individual campaign represents a case.6 The sixteen organizing campaigns occurred at nine plants owned by the four transnational enterprises mentioned above. (The number of cases exceeds the number of plants because the UAW made multiple attempts at some plants.) Nine of the cases culminated in a recognition election, and three others ended with a card-check procedure. The other four cases were substantial enough to be considered an organizing attempt but never gathered enough employee support for union officials to ask for recognition. A majority of employees chose the UAW as their exclusive bargaining agent in six of the twelve instances when a recognition process took place, three through an election and three via card check. One plant had both a card-check procedure and a recognition election because some employees challenged the legitimacy of the former. The UAW won both. In total, the UAW prevailed at five of the nine plants. The collective bargaining parties agreed to a first contract at four of those five plants but failed at the fifth—Volkswagen Chattanooga— because management used the appeals process to challenge whether the unit, which was a small group of skilled employees, was “appropriate.” The UAW ultimately disclaimed interest in the small unit five years later to terminate the appeals process and make way for a second wall-to-wall recognition election in

tabLei.1 United Auto Worker unionization attempts at solely foreign-owned vehicle plants in the southern United States, 1984–2019

1. Nissan Smyrna, TN

2. Freightliner Mount Holly, NC (DTNA)

3. Nissan Smyrna, TN

4.

5.

6. Freightliner Gastonia, NC (DTNA)

7.

Gastonia, NC (DTNA)

8. Freightliner Cleveland, NC (DTNA)

9.

Gaffney, SC (DTNA)

10. Thomas Built Buses, NC (DTNA)

11. Thomas Built Buses, NC (DTNA)

The UAW begins a multiplant organizing effort.

12. Mercedes-Benz U.S. International, AL 2011–2014 No attempt

13. Volkswagen Chattanooga, TN

14. Volkswagen Chattanooga, TN (skilled- trades unit)

15. Nissan Canton, MS

16. Volkswagen Chattanooga, TN

* The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation supported employee challenges to the card- check recognition. The National Labor Relations Board accepted a joint DTNA- UAW proposal to hold a recognition election in 2005 to settle the challenges.

** Volkswagen management challenged the election. The UAW disclaimed the skilled trades unit in 2019 in order to hold a plant- wide recognition election.

that plant. Overall, in sixteen attempts the UAW successfully unionized four of the nine plants under investigation.7

Data and Method

The principal data for this investigation are primary documents from the UAW and the companies and other entities involved in the drives (e.g., foreign trade unions, global trade union confederations, works councils, government bodies, politicians in and out of office, and third-party lobbying entities). Interviews, media accounts, and social media postings are also impor tant source material. The method employed here is comparative historical case study analysis. I use process tracing to analyze each case. Process tracing is a within-case method of causal analysis that is particularly suited to instances such as we have here whereby

three Questions with AL DAVIDOFF author of Unionizing the Ivory Tower

1. What inspired you to write this book?

I was inspired by the Cornell workers I spent fifteen years fighting alongside and helping lead. The courage, spunk, creativity, and tenacity of those with the least privilege at Cornell fueled my activism, changed my life, and provide a fascinating, “David vs. Goliath” story. The story of building an activist local union from scratch also has important value and lessons for other unions and social justice organizations.

3. In what ways will your book resonate with readers?

Low wage workers are mobilizing from Starbucks to Amazon, from grad students to fast food and retail workers. This is a story of union building creativity and success that goes beyond winning an election to building an effective organization.

At a time when the white working class is written off by some as politically lost to Trumpism, this story challenges those assumptions with concrete example of building a progressive,

2. How will your book make a difference to the field?

There are few, if any, books that describe the specific stages of creating a healthy, dynamic local union. Most writing in this field comes from a more macroeconomic or national perspective. The book challenges some of the more conservative and complacent norms of effective trade unionism without being pedantic. The book provides creative approaches to organizing, bargaining, striking, grievance handling, leadership development, coalition building, and community engagement.

socially conscious union with a rural, largely white working class demographic. Racism was explicitly confronted in the building of the union.

“The story of building an activist local union from scratch also has important value and lessons for other unions and social justic organizationsation.”

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