Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice (Jamie McCallum)
The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics (Raina Lipsitz)
Please join Thursday March 9th at 7pm for us for a conversation with Jamie McCallum and Raina Lipsitz moderated by Isa Francisco.
How essential workers’ fight for better jobs during the pandemic revolutionized US labor politics
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, essential workers lashed out against low wages, long hours, and safety risks, attracting a level of support unseen in decades. This explosion of labor unrest seemed sudden to many. But Essential reveals that American workers had simmered in discontent long before their anger boiled over.
Decades of austerity, sociologist Jamie K. McCallum shows, have left frontline workers vulnerable to employer abuse, lacking government protections, and increasingly furious. Through firsthand research conducted as the pandemic unfolded, McCallum traces the evolution of workers’ militancy, showing how their struggles for safer workplaces, better pay and health care, and the right to unionize have benefitted all Americans and spurred a radical new phase of the labor movement. This is essential reading for understanding the past, present, and future of the working class.
The mushrooming rolls of the Democratic Socialists of America, Marxist explainers in Teen Vogue, and the outsized impact of the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all herald a new, youth-inflected radical politics.
The Rise of a New Left gets behind the headlines about AOC and her cohort of elected officials to tell the stories of the young organizers who created the Squad and the new social movements that have roiled US politics, from the DSA to the Sunrise Movement to Justice Democrats. Ranging across the country to describe grassroots organizing in places like rural Pennsylvania, upstate New York, Kentucky, Florida, and California, this book examines the panoply of strategies and struggles of activists working in—and trying to transform—electoral politics and the climate justice, racial justice, and labor movements. Alongside Ocasio-Cortez, we hear from the even younger Alexandra Rojas, one of the strategists who guided her political insurgency.
Propelled by scores of immersive and absorbing conversations on political strategy with young activists determined to reshape the country, this book—by a writer who is herself a member of this generational movement—is a riveting account of a resurgent left.
Jamie McCallum is associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College. His third book, Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Struggle for Worker Justice, will be published mid-November by Basic Books. His work has been featured in the New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, Jacobin, Dissent, as well as many scholarly journals. He’s also an elected school board representative in Vermont and a volunteer firefighter.
Raina Lipsitz is the author of The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics. Her work has appeared in Al Jazeera America, The Appeal, The Atlantic, The Conversationalist, The Nation, and The New Republic.
Isa Francisco currently sits on the Organizing Committee for the Lower Manhattan Branch of New York City DSA, the largest chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. She is also the Lower Manhattan Branch Representative for NYC-DSA's Citywide Steering Committee. Before moving to New York, Isa was an organizer with Boston DSA and led canvasses in both NH and MA for the Bernie Sanders 2020 Democratic Primary. She also organizes with Anakbayan Manhattan, a national democratic and anti-imperialist youth organization for Filipinos in the US.
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