Category Archives: Publications

Poor White, Redneck, Trash: The Working Class in American Culture

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Presidential evocations of American identity have presupposed a
nation that despite its ethnic, regional and class diversity is unified in terms of its intrinsic opposition to an anti-American threat. Such homogeneity is nonetheless threatened, as it has always been, by heterogeneous figure of the poor white. Such a figure may be seen to articulate simultaneously both the foundational ideals of American democracy (as the pioneer, the backwoodsman) and the nations failure, at the hands of corporate capitalism, to live up to its exceptionalist promise (as inbred mountain mutant or urban trailer trash).

The proposed collection sets out to explore the politically problematic status of the white working class through representation of that group across a range of media: film and television, literature and film, music and dance. It aims to explore, moreover, a largely neglected minoritarian American consciousness that remains (for all its economic marginalization) white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant.

Papers are thus invited from specialists in all aspects of the humanities; including, perhaps, consideration of: – the representational genealogy of the WASP working class in American culture from the C17 to the present / – the white working class /- the European left and nativist populism/ – the subversive potential of white working class culture/ – the white working class in mass culture: social opiate and demonised scapegoat / – minority status: the white working class and ethnicity / – desiring in, of and by the white working class /- queering the white working class / – white working class women / – the aesthetics of white working class culture / – class consciousness and a sense of place/ – the white working class family.

Abstracts, of around 300 words should be emailed to l.blake@mmu.ac.uk by 1 November. Any queries to the same address please.

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Black faculty members “continue to struggle for full inclusion in the academy,” according to a new book, Exposing the “Culture of Arrogance” in the Academy: A Blueprint for Increasing Black Faculty Satisfaction in Higher Education (Stylus).

The book is based on surveys of and interviews with black faculty members and the experiences of the two authors: Gail L. Thompson, an associate professor of education at Claremont Graduate University, and Angela C. Louque, a professor of education at California State University at San Bernardino.

Thompson recently responded to questions from Inside Higher Ed about the new book.

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Inside Higher Ed: “Stress and the female faculty member

Women in the professoriate are more stressed out than men. That’s probably not shocking to female professors (or many of their male colleagues). But a new study — based on both surveys and in-depth interviews and focus groups — attempts to provide new insights into that stress. And the study says that women are justified in their stress — answering strongly in the negative the question the study poses: “Are women faculty just worrywarts?”

The education professors who conducted the study — Jennifer L. Hart of the University of Missouri at Columbia and Christine M. Cress of Portland State University — write that answering that question is important because many in academe may believe otherwise.

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In the “Politics of Professional Advancement Among College Faculty” Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter and Neil Nevitte argue that there is ideological discrimination in higher education that relegates Republican, women, and praciticing Christian professors to “lower quality schools than their professional accomplishments would predict.” Their conclusions are based upon a national survey of over 1,500 faculty members from 183 four-year colleges and univerities.

The Forum: The Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics has just published a paper by University of Pittsburgh researchers that shows Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte’s work is “plagued by theoretical and methodological problems that render their conclusions unsustainable by the available evidence.” In Hide the Republicans, the Christians, and the Women: A Response to “Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty” authors Barry Ames, David C. Barker, Chris W. Bonneau, and Christopher J. Carman offer an alternative hypothesis theoretically consistent with Rothman et al.’s findings. Unfortunately, the authors were unable to subject their alternative hypothesis to empirical assessment (or even to replicate the initial results of Rothman et al.) since they have refused to make their data available to the scientific community.

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From CorpWatch: The great American jobs scam.

by Greg LeRoy, Special to CorpWatch
August 10th, 2005

Lurking within the records of most cities and states in America there lies a scandal. A tax scandal. A jobs scandal. A corporate and political scandal.

It’s the Great American Jobs Scam: an intentionally constructed system that enables corporations to exact huge taxpayer subsidies by promising quality jobs – and then lets them fail to deliver. The other benefit often promised – higher tax revenues – often proves false or exaggerated as well.
Take for example: New York City, which must hold the record for job blackmail, though it is hardly alone. One study of 80 companies that had received “retention” subsidies from the Big Apple found that at least 39 had later announced major layoffs, or they had entered into large-scale mergers or put themselves up for sale – events that usually trigger mass layoffs. A detailed analysis of 10 subsidized companies found they had

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MRZine review of An Injury to One by Reter Rachleff.

2005 will mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Industrial Workers World, the I.W.W., popularly known as the “Wobblies.” The most radical, mass-based labor organization to emerge within U.S. history, they embodied the slogan “An Injury to One Is an Injury to All,” as they organized unskilled as well as skilled workers, immigrants as well as the native born, women as well as men, workers of color as well as whites. They practiced internationalism, organizing not only in Canada and Mexico but also across the world. At a grassroots level, the Wobblies employed creative tactics like “striking on the job,” “working to rule,” and “sabotage,” while calling for a general strike to achieve “industrial freedom.” They articulated a vision of a new form of industrial, social, and political order, one in which workers might answer to no authority above their own collective organizations. And they employed culture as a weapon, from poetry and music to cartoons, murals, pageants, and plays.

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Call for Essays, Interviews, Reviews, Art, Photography, Fiction, and Poetry for Issue III: “Working” Deadline: 8/31/05. The Editors at Your Black Eye: An e-Journal for Critical Consciousness, are pleased to announce the publication of our second issue, available now at Your Black Eye.

We currently invite submissions for our third issue, with particulars as follows:

The theme for the third issue is “Working.” The sub-theme is “Werkel.” For the main theme, we invite submissions from any perspective and any genre that directly or indirectly treat the idea of work-see basic submission guidelines below. For the sub-theme, we have in mind short pieces like those found in Studs Terkel’s classic book, Working (1972), and the similar but more contemporary Gig (2000), edited by John Bowe, Marisa Bowe, and Sabin Streeter. Both books provide short, first-person narratives in which, as Terkel’s subtitle states, “people talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do.” We would be interested in receiving recordings of spoken word performances, rants, rap, and original music.

GENERAL SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Text: 5000 words or less, any genre, including: interviews, essays, fiction, poetry, hybrid forms, and reviews (music, movies, and events) in an MS Word format. Photos, Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings: (jpg, bmp, gif). Videos: 10 minutes or less in Real Player or Windows Media Player formats. Music: 10 minutes or less (mp3, wmv). ALL submissions should have your name in the subject line and in the name of your file. INTERVIEWS If you would like to propose interview someone or simply propose an interview subject for an upcoming issue, please correspond with us through ybe@yourblackeye.org.

ESSAYS Essays about any topic are welcome; but we prefer essays that are related topically to an upcoming issue theme. POETRY AND FICTION Poetry and Fiction-any style and about any topic-is welcome. However, we especially welcome works that are topically related to an upcoming issue theme. ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY We welcome image files of original art and photography. We prefer several, related pieces from a contributor, that are related to the tone of the Journal and theme of the issue. BOOK, FILM, AND MUSIC REVIEWS Reviews Sought. We particularly encourage reviews of any material related to the upcoming issue’s theme: Work. For more inforamtion, visit the website
at Your Black Eye

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Today ZNet published a piece by Kim Scipes titled“An unholy alliance: The AFL-CIO and the National Endowment for Democracy in Venezuela”.

The AFL-CIO’s “Solidarity Center” (formally known as the American Center for International Labor Solidarity or ACILS) was actively involved in bringing together the leadership of the right-wing Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV) and that of the business community FEDCAMARAS (along with at least some of the leaders of the Catholic Church) just prior to the April 2002 coup attempt that briefly deposed the democratically-elected President Hugo Chavez. This I reported last year in the April 2004 issue of Labor Notes (For this put in the larger context of AFL-CIO foreign policy, see my May 2005 article in Monthly Review)

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Posted by Tony Budak on the Community Labor News and Working Class Studies mailing lists:

It cccured to me that to collaborate to build a stronger labor movement, it
might be a good idea to discuss, document and announce how the Internet or
information technology is used to make for a better world. The focus should
come from a labor community point of view and lo and behold who better than
CLNews.org of course.

Who knows given the ways things are at the present time, perhaps a few of
these e-mail list servers, web sites, Blogs, and forums with members from
every corner of the working class can somehow collaborate in solidarity. But
we can’t know unless we try, so…

I have opened a new forum on the bulletin board at CLNews,
http://clnews.org/forums
The forum title is “Labor and Information Technology”, it is a place to
“Start a new thread here or reply to current thread about the use of the
Internet within the labor movement”

Being that the forum is up 24/7 it is a good place to post announcements, or
carry on a discussion on a specific topic. In other words network and
collaborate with each other.

So point your web browser to
http://clnews.org/forums
then go to and click the title “Labor and Information Technology”.

I hope that you will use the opportunity. Please give it a try. BTW there
are other forums there, and if you want a forum for a special idea, let me
know.

With Respect and Solidarity,
Tony Budak

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Communicate or Die is a labor blog aiming to build a network of labor and technology professionals to discuss and develop solutions that allow unions to realize the full potential of Internet technology.

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It was a counterintuitive finding that upended conventional wisdom on workplace equity. In a little-noticed study, two University of Manitoba economics professors concluded that Canadian-born visible minorities earned wages similar to their white counterparts.

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Two reports released last month by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) show an even landscape for staff and faculty at universities and colleges in the US, with a growing number of part-time faculty, racial and gender disparities in rank and salary, and disadvantages at for-profit insitutions.

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The May-June issue of AAUP’s Academe focuses on the issue of shared governance.

This issue contains an article by Workplace co-editor Gary Rhoades titled “Capitalism, Academic Style, and Shared Governance”. Rhoades argues that restoring higher education’s democratic commitment requires more than a restoration of the faculty’s internal role in shared governance. It demands an expansion of perspective beyond the academy, and new mechanisms within the academy for democratizing governance.

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The June 2005 issue of Monthly Review is devoted to the topic of labor in the Americas.

Most of the articles in this issue are available online:

Labor Movements: Is There Hope? by Fernando E. Gapasin & Michael D. Yates

Crisis in the U.S. Labor Movement: The Roads Not Taken by Elly Leary

Labor Needs a Radical Vision by David Bacon

Canada Labor Today: Partial Successes, Real Challenges” by Barry Brennan

Mexico’s Labor Movement in Transition by Dan La Botz

Made in Venezuela: The Struggle to Reinvent Venezuelan Labor by Jonah Gindin

Paul Buhle also contributes an article titled “The Legacy of the IWW” to this issue, but it is not available online.

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