Making Labor History Relevant for Young People

Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated

Jennifer : So I say to kids, "Listen, if you're standing up for something you believe in and it's hurting, you're probably standing up for something good." It often hurts to stand up for marginalized people, it often hurts to stand up as a marginalized person, but we have to do it if our society is going to be the ones that we talk about for kids inside of our classrooms.

Natieka : Hello, and welcome to School Me, the National Education Association's podcast dedicated to helping educators [00:00:30] thrive at every stage of their careers. I'm your host Natieka Samuels. Today we're talking to Author Jennifer Albert Mann about her book Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States, which is a labor history book for teens and young adults. Shift Happens was the September young adult book recommendation on NEA's Read Across America calendar under the theme invite transformation.

Thank you so much for joining us today, Jennifer.

Jennifer : Thank you for having me, Natieka. I'm really happy to be here.

Natieka : Let's start with just [00:01:00] a quick bio, just tell us a little bit about yourself and your work as an author?

Jennifer : I see myself as a disability activist first, a writer for children second, and then a proud union member third. And nothing is really in that order, but that's how I see myself. And as a writer for children, I really got my start in my mid-30s, so I would say that I came late to the profession. And I know I'm speaking to teachers so I'll say that as a student in [00:01:30] elementary school, I really struggled. I had a lot of trouble learning and I was a late reader. In fact, my younger sister taught me how to read. She was five, I was seven. I did not grow up with my nose in a book, I did not grow up with a pen in my hand, taking notes on the people around me. It wasn't until my mid-30s when I began to write and that is because I had something to say and I felt that fiction, and historical fiction, and now nonfiction was a great way to say it.

Natieka : So in your writing journey, [00:02:00] how did you arrive at a place where you wanted to start writing for young people?

Jennifer : I'd never left my own childhood, the lessons I learned there and the amount of aha moments, they really stuck with me when I entered adulthood. And I really wanted to go back and be a voice for kids, and be a bridge from adulthood back into childhood for children. I really just like young people. I think [00:02:30] that they are filled with hope, they're open to changing their minds, they're open to learning. I also think they're really open to different truths. And I really respect them and I think they have a lot going on for them.

Natieka : So the book that we're here to talk about today is called Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States. It's a labor history book that's in the young adult, teen market. So why do you think that it's so important for young people, kids [00:03:00] even, to understand labor and union history?

Jennifer : I think to understand US history, you have to understand labor history, and you can't understand our history without understanding labor history. So if you're saying, "Why do kids need to know labor history?" Number one, they're all, most of them, are going to enter the workforce. They need to know their rights and they need to know how we got here as a labor movement. And to do that, you have to understand not just labor [00:03:30] history, but US history. And not just US history, but labor's piece of US history.

Natieka : Maybe from when you were in school, when I was in school, I don't remember hearing a ton about labor history, and maybe it's just no one was ever talking about it as labor history. They're just talking about the Industrial Revolution, so you hear about factories and stuff, and child labor, and all of that. But what is taught currently about labor history [00:04:00] in schools and how do you feel like your book is positioned to fill in some of those gaps?

Jennifer : We still don't learn a lot about labor history in our schools and part of the reason for that is exactly what I just said. That it's very hard to put up a monument to talk about labor history in any great way because our main economic system in this country is capitalism, so it really does need to devalue that labor. So that's one reason [00:04:30] why we're not taught labor history and how the working class built this country and continues to build this country.

How we are taught it in schools is really interesting. I call it old-timey history. And when I go and I talk to students and ask them, "If you think about labor history, what is the number one event that you think about?" It's also if you were to just Google or go to Amazon and say, "What is the number one labor event?" So if put in the labor movement, you look in [00:05:00] children's literature, what are you going to find? A lot of times, those students know and that is the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. So this is a fire that happened over 100 years ago. It was devastating, it changed a lot, and it was an awful moment for labor. It was actually also just kind of par for the course, these kinds of events happened constantly.

But when we look at labor now or we teach it, we often teach the Triangle [00:05:30] Shirtwaist Factory fire. We often teach Bread and Roses, which is the Lawrence Textile strike. We teach these moments during the Industrial Revolution and it's almost like what I would call spot history. You're just dropped into a spot. You're not taught it from the beginning, like when Columbus came and enslaved the Taino or the Lokono people all the way up to what was happening with today with Starbucks and Amazon trying to unionize. So you're not taught [00:06:00] this full history. We talk about maybe the civil rights following the industrialization. Even when we talk about civil rights, we don't talk about the Memphis Sanitation strike and what happened with MLK as labor. We talk about it as a civil rights only and we don't even connect it to labor, which of course it's completely connected.

So this old-timey history is what I see happening in schools and I try to teach students that labor was there in the beginning, the working class was there in the beginning. [00:06:30] The working class is still there and things are still happening, the fight is still on. And a lot of times, older people will say to me, "Well, labor's done a lot and we have weekends." I'm like, "Do we have weekends?" Because when I talk to young folks, I don't know if we do. The gig economy has happened and it's been wiping out. Do we have parameters, like a nine to five? My own husband has been teaching middle school for 35 years and he [00:07:00] would tell you that there was a time where he left school and maybe took his grading home. But now of course, he's working, emailing parents right into the evening. So I don't know that our gains are not always forever. Labor is happening today and I really would love teachers and educators to know that we need to teach labor history in all of its fullness and not just the Industrial Revolution.

Natieka : What is one of the most [00:07:30] common questions that kids or even adults ask you about either what appears in your book or labor history in general?

Jennifer : The number one question from high school students and middle school students is they are confused between the words democracy and capitalism. That they will tell me, "Well, we're a capitalist country." And I say, "Well, we are, but what does that mean?" And then they'll describe voting. They have [00:08:00] confused or conflated democracy with capitalism and it's the number one thing that, when I leave a classroom, that I want students to know. That one is an economic system and one is our system of government, and the reason that they are confused is on purpose. It's that we talk about capitalism like it's some sort of freedom and we need to understand that we're actually talking about [00:08:30] democracy.

Natieka : And what do you think is the most common adult question that you get about labor history?

Jennifer : I think it's not so much a question, but it is an almost an attitude of we can't win. And I understand the hopelessness. If you read the book, labor history is a difficult history. Capitalism is a violent economic system, it's volatile. And if you look at the history of capitalism just in our country, you will see [00:09:00] many, many depressions and recessions. It's an unsteady system. When we put profit above people, not good things happen. So over our history, including the Great Depression, we've had many hard moments.

I think adults today have this attitude that we can't win. I love to point out read the book because we have won in the past and we can win again. It's moving a little bit away from allowing the owning [00:09:30] class or the very wealthy in our country to have the biggest say in our democracy. And of course, they have that and adults know this, but they have it through what I call the three legs of the stool. Which are government, the owning class, and the media. Those are three legs and they know each other very, very well. They are the people who support the things they want, lobby in government. And I think adults just become a little hopeless at that, but I feels as though if they [00:10:00] know history, they will be filled with hope.

And that's another reason I go to kids with this because they often are like, "Yeah, we can change this." Youth has always been a power. If we look at civil rights, if we look at Vietnam or any of our eras where great things happened, youth has always been at the forefront.

Natieka : This question sounds strange, but what is the role of children, youth, however you want to put it, in labor?

Jennifer : [00:10:30] What is their role in labor? I would say it would be to learn and educate themselves. So many times, students will say to me, "What can I do? What can I do?" Because they're chomping at the bit, they have tons of energy and their ideas are popping. And I will say to them, "Now is the time to learn. Now is the quiet time." And this is a really important time in your life because so often, once we graduate high school, graduate college, the world crushes [00:11:00] in very, very quickly, and we move from being children to being adults faster than a child can imagine. So I always tell young people to learn, "This is your job right now and that's the best thing you could do for yourself and for society because later on, you're going to use that and what you've learned in the unquiet moments of adulthood when responsibility comes rushing in, along with all the other trappings that [00:11:30] adulthood brings."

That is the role of youth right now. And if they feel like they're not doing anything, they're absolutely wrong. Learning is so important.

Natieka : It felt like the question was weird because even in my own education, the only time you hear about children in history period I think is when you're talking about children's hands being small and that's why they worked in factories, and they were mistreated, and then child labor [00:12:00] laws came, and now we never have to talk about children in the world of labor again.

Jennifer : And of course, that's changing rapidly as many states right now begin to drop the age that children can work from 16 to 14. Many states are doing this. They're also opening up dangerous construction jobs and things like that, where we had moved away from child labor and closed those dangerous jobs to children. And then of course, the most vulnerable of us all besides [00:12:30] being children are immigrant children. So of course, if their families are on the down low at the moment, then they are the most vulnerable. They're going into, in great numbers, going into these very dangerous jobs working many, many hours because they're not being checked by those state governments.

So one thing that I think is really important to remember, there's something called wig history, and wig history says that things were always getting better. So a lot of people can point to history is progressive and [00:13:00] I think that's the most dangerous thing that we can teach anyone, and that it's just not true. If you look at the Taino or the Lokono people, they were living their lives, they had their culture, they were doing just fine, and then Columbus sailed over and decimated their population. Didn't kill them all, they still exist today, but their numbers were depleted. So if you ask a Taino person, "Is history always getting better," they would [00:13:30] say absolutely not. And this happens many times in our history and I think that we have to remember that the gains we won, we can lose. And at this moment in labor's history and for the last 30 to 40 years, we have been losing. During COVID, there was a moment where things looked like maybe they would turn around, but that moment has already been crushed.

Natieka : Yeah, the question is always getting better for whom? I know that the Red for Ed movement actually makes an appearance [00:14:00] in your book. So can you talk a bit about how that got started and what you talk about in your history?

Jennifer : So I think the Red for Ed movement, which really began in 2018, this is a fantastic story of winning. And also, a fantastic story to take us out of this old-timey idea that labor happened and it had to do with factories and we don't have it happened around us anymore. So Red for Ed, if you ask me, it really got [00:14:30] its start in 2012 with the Chicago teachers strike because that's where the capitalists really went after public education and began just an overt attack on public education.

Now, the attack on public education is always there, as teachers and educators absolutely realize. Because if we look at capitalism when we see, say war, there's a lot of tax money that if we're in a war or we're building up our arms, that's a lot of money for corporations to make. That's a huge, [00:15:00] huge bank account to tap into. Capitalists look at public education, it's not making anyone money. So they look at it and they say, "Wow, but it could be. It could be making a profit." So they wanted to privatize public education for a very long time. And in Chicago, they got pretty close, but the Chicago's Teachers Union and the community came out full force and put a stop to it.

But what thing that has been happening, and teachers and educators definitely feel this, is public education is always being devalued because this [00:15:30] is the way that we privatize it. We don't give it money and then we test it with No Child Left Behind and we say, "Oh, look, teachers aren't doing well, it's not working." Or we move it to charter programs where privatization is happening on a smaller scale. And then we look at our public education and we say, "It's not working." And part of that devaluation is not paying teachers.

And I always think that you need to take into consideration who becomes a teacher. So in elementary [00:16:00] and high school, mostly it's women. For social reasons, women have been going into it. We're taught as women to care for children, take care of children, and so you have this massive amount of women in teaching. So what the capitalists haven't really understood is that when you take away money for food for kids, these teachers are bringing in food for kids. When you take away supplies to kids you don't fund, these teachers are going out on their salaries and buying supplies for kids. They're raising [00:16:30] money on their off time to be able to educate the kids in their classroom. They don't understand who they're dealing with.

But of course, everybody has a breaking point. So I really believe that this devaluing of education is going on all around us. And in 2017, the US government gave $1 trillion in tax breaks to corporations. And then states turned around, and in West Virginia, they turned around and they said to the teachers after four years of not [00:17:00] giving them a raise that their governor announced they were going to be given a 1% raise. So a 1% raise after four years, and after giving all these tax breaks to corporations within his own state. Now, you have to know that Jim Justice, the governor, was the richest man in the state. He was the richest man. This is often what happens is the very wealthy run our government. So the teachers, not only were they given 1%, but their healthcare costs rose in that same year, so they were actually making [00:17:30] less money.

This is where I always think that they got pushed and they just broke, and that was they also introduced the most ridiculous thing. Where they introduce an app that these teachers now had to walk a certain amount of steps, and if they didn't walk these amount of steps, they were charged just a little more for their healthcare. Now, they had to sign up for this up. West Virginia teachers, they were like, "No." They showed up for [00:18:00] one-day, thousand of them, at the capitol, and this is where Jim Justice really, really went wrong. So in a speech to them, he called them "dumb bunnies." Now, you had 10,000 showing up on those steps. They were just done and it set off just an amazing strike wave.

So that is what Red for Ed is. Of course, West Virginia was the 48th state in pay for teachers, the 48th. So when they went up [00:18:30] against Jim Justice and won, Oklahoma, who was 49th being paid, teachers were 49th in the United States being paid, they had had no raise for 10 years, 10 years. Well, Oklahoma, they also stood up and stuck. And then after that, it was Arizona, then Georgia, then Colorado, then Kentucky, then Tennessee, then California. It went on. Teachers had just had enough. People were really rising up and saying, "How much do we have to take? How poor [00:19:00] do we have to get? How sick do we have to get? And how rich do they have to get before we decide we need to walk off?" And striking, really, I just want to say this, striking is our main way of fighting back. Solidarity through the strike is our main way. We need to use it much more often in this country than we do.

Natieka : Looking for more tips, resources, and opportunities to build your professional skills? Text P-O-D to 48744 [00:19:30] to have the latest sent straight to your phone.

It's interesting because I have worked at NEA through that time, from 2018, so I saw the Red for Ed movement happening from this side of things. But things don't feel historic while they're happening all the time. So it's very interesting to me to hear you recap it, you've written this into a book, so now you're recapping history, but at one point it was just Tuesday.

Jennifer : Absolutely, Natieka. [00:20:00] And that's such an important point because so often, while we're living history, we can look back at what happened, and a great example of this is Martin Luther King, Jr. And that in his time, historically in his moment, he was very hated in this country by white history and by white people. He wasn't supported, he wasn't revered. He was having a really, really difficult go of it. He was really challenging us as a society and he wasn't well liked. [00:20:30] So I say to kids, "Listen, if you're standing up for something you believe in and it's hurting, you're probably standing up for something good." It often hurts to stand up for marginalized people, it often hurts to stand up as a marginalized person, but we have to do it if our society is going to be the ones that we talk about for kids inside of our classrooms.

And I want to give teachers, educators, and students something to think about. And that is as a democracy, and a proud democracy, America is very [00:21:00] proud of its democracy, and as a proud democracy we believe that we have rights as citizens. That we have a vote and we have a say in our government. So I just want to challenge us all to think why does that stop at our employment's door? Why do we get to our jobs and walk inside and say, "Oh, well, we have no rights in here and we're going to give up our rights in here?" I just don't understand it. A democracy should [00:21:30] go through that employment door. We should have a say in our country, we should have a say in our jobs.

Natieka : So aside from Red for Ed, do you have a favorite labor related story from your book?

Jennifer : Yes, I absolutely do and it's going to be from the 1930s because it was just such a, I'm not going to say a happy time for labor, but it was a happening time for labor. So the Great Depression had happened, it devastated the working class. 75% of Americans [00:22:00] dropped below the poverty line. It was so, so devastating. People died of hunger, people died of cold, they were thrown out of their houses. It was a bad.

So in response to that, the New Deal came about and part of that was "fixing," and I'm putting that in air quotes, economic system a little bit, evening it out because capitalism is volatile. So the New Deal came in to relieve some of that violence as [00:22:30] it happens to working people because the violence is always perpetrated on the working class. So the New Deal stepped in with laws like the National Industrial Recovery Act and it gave rights to unions for the first time in our nation's history, so that was 1933.

So now comes the Funsten Nut strike of 1933. So in St. Louis, you had women, almost 100% women, shelled nuts for a living. 90% [00:23:00] of those women were Black women, 10% of those women were immigrant Polish women, so that's who was working in St. Louis in the nut industry. Now, the nut industry happens around the US, but its centers are Texas, San Antonio, and St. Louis. So after this happens, the nut workers were having a really hard time. So there's one nut worker who spoke to a newspaper and she was like, "In 1918, I made $18 an hour shelling nuts," and in 1933, she was making $3 [00:23:30] an hour. Their wages had really, really dropped. And not only that, but there was a difference. They made something like 3-cents if you were Black woman shelling nuts, you would make 5-cents if you were a white Polish woman.

So they joined the union because they could, they now had a legal right to do it, and then the Black women walked off. First they asked for higher wages and they tried to collectively bargain, which NIRA gave them the right to do and Funsten said, "Yeah, no." So then they walked out on [00:24:00] strike without the Polish women. So of course, now Funsten went right to the Polish women and were like, "Okay, let's make a deal," whatever. And the Polish women did the most amazing thing, they walked out along with those Black women. And solidarity, when we see that what is called the pyramid of oppression, where our identities are used to split us apart. Black and white. Immigrant, native born. Men, women. There's all these identities that they try to split us apart [00:24:30] and then say, "Well, I'm talking to you, Black people, I'm talking to you, white people." They use identity to split us apart and we cannot let that happen. It's called the pyramid of oppression.

So the Polish women also walked, and so they went on this amazing strike. And Funsten was going to wait them out, but in comes the Jewish community who cooked and fed them for months, and then of course the communists also came in and paid their rent and things like that. So now, Funsten, of course [00:25:00] he is now a little bit in a box because pre-NIRA, he could have done all sorts of things. He could have injunctioned them, had them all fired, all the things that corporations had been doing to unions for forever. He was now in an spot.

So then, what did he do? He went to the Polish people and he said, "We're going to give you a lot of money. We're going to raise you a lot." The Polish women again said no. In the end, everyone was rehired, everyone was given the same pay, and the Funsten [00:25:30] Nut women won their strike. It's a very scary thing to strike and I don't say it lightly when I say we need to strike more. I understand these things cost. We have to pay our rent, we have to eat. These are very scary things to do, but it's also scary to cling to life not knowing, and dying young because we don't have healthcare, and not being able to pay our rent, and not be able to really eat. So I do think that the flip side of that is taking the scary step to strike [00:26:00] and these Funsten Nut women did it and they won. I love nut strikes. There's a lot of them and they're just fantastic stories.

Natieka : I have to say, that is the first time I've heard the term nut strike and I did not realize that there were so many of them, so I'm just learning a lot today.

So Shift Happens is one of the recommended books in this year's Read Across America calendar, which is NEA's year round celebration of diverse [00:26:30] books and readers at every level. So how do you think about diversity through the lens of labor history? I guess you got a little bit into it, we've gotten some previews, but how do you think about it?

Jennifer : You can't talk about the working class without knowing its diverse. Because of racism in our country, because it has existed from the beginning, the poor people in this country are mostly diverse people. So they're mostly Black, and brown, and Asian, and they are diverse. They're women. So [00:27:00] you can't really talk about working class history without talking about diversity or knowing its diverse, they just go hand in hand and they cannot be separated. And of course, we never hear about some of these unbelievable heroes because going back, we need to devalue labor, we can't celebrate it.

But if we did, we would hear about Gabriel, and we would hear about Denmark Vesey, who led strikes against being enslaved to people. We do hear about Harriet Tubman, but almost always not talking about working class history [00:27:30] because that's what she was doing. She was fighting enslavement, but that is working class history. You don't hear of too much about Emma Gold, or Clair Lemlich, or A. Philip Randolph, or Ben Fletcher, or Mother Jones, or Emma Tenayuca who led the biggest strike in San Antonio history, which was a nut strike. You don't hear about Larry Itliong. Sometimes you will hear about Cesar Chavez and Delores Huerta. And a lot of times, you'll hear about them and it's always, again, a fight for brown people when they were fighting for labor. [00:28:00] Those laborers happened to be, at this point, brown people or Asian people. Like Larry Itliong, he was the one who actually started the strike that we always talk about Cesar Chavez.

And we love to celebrate these people, but not as labor heroes, but as civil rights warriors and not as labor. Because again, this is what they were. Same as Martin Luther King. These folks were all heroes of labor, but we always want to put them into their identities. Put [00:28:30] them into their boxes so we can hierarchy everyone in a pyramid, and when things go wrong we say, "It's this one's fault, it's that one's fault." And instead of all coming together and crossing our boundaries as diverse human beings and gathering together. And taking on what, if you watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is the big bad. The big bad is capitalists and the owning class. And if we want better lives, we have to take on those folks [00:29:00] and we have to do it all together, and the way we do it is through the strike.

Natieka : The theme of labor is take the identities aside and just be all together.

Jennifer : And no one is saying that these identities don't matter, no one is saying they don't exist. No one is saying that we don't live our lives as Black women, as white women, as all the different identities. Those identities are real and true, and our experiences are real and true. No one is taking that away at all. But we do need to [00:29:30] come together and stop allowing ourselves to be separated from one another. We are the working class, we do work for a living. Whether we're programming and being paid 150,000, a writer in Hollywood, to sanitation workers, we are the working class. And no matter if we're being paid a lot or we're Black or white, that solidarity needs to hold.

Natieka : So how do you think that learning about labor at a young age can potentially change [00:30:00] the course of a young person's life? And what do you hope that young people who read your book take away from the experience?

Jennifer : I think it can be eyeopening because it explains so much. So I was born with a physical disability and I had a very different body than a lot of folks out there, and so I was on the outside looking in many times. When your body is on display for others to really stare at, there's a very strange thing that happens. While people are looking at you or your body, [00:30:30] they're not actually seeing you, and so you're able to see them. So I learned a lot about people in that context.

I would say that taking that idea and doing an eyeopening thing with labor. When you look at history through the lens of labor, you're able to see so much of history in a different light. Taking a great example is somebody would say, "Well, why did the Civil War happen in 1865?" Well, if you know anything about history, you'll know that the Springtime of Peoples [00:31:00] happened in Europe where all across Europe, working class rose up against what was called absolutism, which is the kingdoms and the royalty. And saying, "Well, we want rights, we want democracies," and it was crushed. That uprising was huge. I think it was 21 countries.

Well, all those people were disaffected, many of them Germans. They were some of the biggest fighters for democracy. So without a place and without a home and being very sad, they all came to the US. And when they got here, [00:31:30] there was millions of them. And they looked around and they were like, "What, slavery? What?" And they became huge abolitionists, they joined the abolitionists. So if you don't know about the Springtime Peoples, you might not understand why all of a sudden, a country who had a very entrenched idea, this horrendous thing was all okay, and then all of a sudden it wasn't.

So I really do think that you have to understand all of [00:32:00] history, you have to have your eyes opened, and if you look at labor history through historical events and how working class people are responding to the different things that are going on in history. We're not out here striking for no reason. We're not out here ... We're reacting to COVID. We're reacting to Vietnam. We're reacting to the events in history. And I think it's really, really eyeopening to take that labor's perch.

Natieka : As [00:32:30] someone who has spent obviously a lot of time thinking about history from a labor lens, and writing it, and reading about it, how are you feeling about the state of labor right now?

Jennifer : I'm feeling good. And I know that it's a hard thing to feel good about labor often, but I do feel good. And some of the reasons why I feel good is because there's pushback right now. There's amazing pushback against labor right now. I always think when we're about to make some big strides, that [00:33:00] the powers that be get very, very frightened and try to squelch us. So that's always a good sign, when you're feeling that pushback.

I would also say that minds are being changed. You do have people out there who are saying, "Hey, we deserve things as the working class. We deserve healthcare. We deserve not to get sick. We deserve childcare." There's certain things that they're talking about making our society more equitable and people are really listening. [00:33:30] So I have hope for that, too.

I feel young people are getting involved in labor and they're seeing it as an avenue for change. So you can look at all the things that need to be changed in our world, like climate, like inequality, and labor is really a phenomenal route to that change, and I think young people are beginning to gravitate and see how much power we have as the working class. I have a lot of hope for this moment.

Natieka : [00:34:00] So glad to actually end on a positive note at a time like this. Thank you so much for talking to me today. I actually learned a lot and I think that anybody listening will probably learn a little something, and anyone reading your book is going to do the same.

Jennifer : Thanks, Natieka. And go look up some nut strikes, they're pretty great.

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