Erica Smiley: Visibilizing Labor

Settle in with Abby and labor organizer Erica Smiley for a free-wheeling conversation about unions, democracy, history, and so much more. Smiley is the Executive Director of Jobs with Justice, a national labor group working to change the meta-narrative about who the economy is for and what it should look like. She is also the author, along with Sarita Gupta, of The Future We Need: Organizing for a Better Democracy in the Twenty-First Century. The book focuses on where the labor movement has been, while also imagining a future in which working people fight to regain power, influence, and dignity not only in the workplace, but beyond. Abby calls the way Smiley frames the concept of collective bargaining “radically important.” According to Smiley, workers who are struggling to form unions at places like Starbucks and Amazon “are seeing their struggles in the workplace not simply as something that they need for themselves…But also as their way of contributing to the effort to save and expand democracy.” She points out that the civil rights movement was also about economic justice. Martin Luther King Jr’s March on Washington was for Jobs and Civil Rights. “Visibilizing” that connection is important, Smiley tells Abby. As they talk, Abby and Smiley travel through time and space, linking up slave labor management to practices still used in today’s service economy. They end by agreeing that it’s better to fight together than apart.

Follow Smiley on Twitter @SmileyJWJ. For more information on Erica Smiley, and her work at Jobs with Justice, go to https://www.jwj.org/.

EPISODE LINKS
The Future We Need: Organizing for a Better Democracy in the Twenty-First Century (Buy it here.)
Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) (now Worker’s United)
Encyclopedia Britannica’s Definition of Taylorism
Book Review: “Accounting for Slavery” — Plantation Roots of Scientific Management (The Arts Fuse)
Poor People's Campaign (The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute)
The Last March of Martin Luther King Jr. (The Atlantic)
New Orleans Apologizes for 1891 Lynching of Italian-Americans (Smithsonian)
How Black washerwomen in the South became pioneers of American labor (The Washington Post)