Labor Organizing in the Age of Service Work

In 2024, a Cato Institute poll found that most Americans “believe the country would be better off if more Americans worked in factories.”1 In an economy where nearly 80 percent of the U.S. workforce performs “services-providing” labor (nursing, waiting tables, clerical work) while 20 percent does “goods-producing” work (extraction, construction, and manufacturing), reindustrialization is more than just a popular belief. Indeed, reindustrialization shows up across the political spectrum. We see it in the policy prescriptions of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and Emmanuel Macron; in the “Reindustrialize Summit” (a collaboration between traditional U.S. manufacturing companies like Ford and newer AI-driven military-industrial-complex firms like Anduril and Palantir); and in the rhetoric of major U.S. labor unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the Teamsters. The case for creating more goods-producing jobs often hinges on a straightforward economic argument. Because manufacturing labor allows for more productivity growth, reindustrializers argue that its wages are inevitably higher than those paid to service workers. As Dustin Guastella—a researcher for The Center for Working Class Politics and a Teamsters staffer—put it in a Guardian op-ed last year, “a Starbucks store can introduce more efficient espresso machines but . . . Starbucks is selling a service, a consumer experience, and it’s hard to increase the per-worker output of an experience.”2 Of course, those same opportunities for “productivity growth” (i.e., mechanization and automation) are what caused the precipitous global decline in the share of labor employed in manufacturing over the last half-century, a fact that makes contemporary reindustrialization feel more like a fantasy than a real opportunity. But Guastella is certainly right to note the predominance of low wages in the service economy, and at least partially right in connecting them to its relatively low productivity growth. Although the services-providing supersector includes high-waged and enduringly professionalized occupations (lawyers, doctors, financial consultants), far more service-sector workers labor in low-waged and precarious jobs like home health care, retail sales and cashier work, fast-food, clerical, restaurant services, and elementary school teaching. Workers in non-professionalized service-sector occupations are more likely to be classified as among the “working poor” than any other group, and they are more likely to be subjected to constantly changing shifts and schedules, unpredictable working hours, and involuntary part-time work.3

As Guastella suggests, most low-waged service jobs involve in-person work where substantial productivity gains are either difficult or impossible. It is hard to exponentially increase the productivity of a barista’s work in the way technology like the assembly line transformed the industrial labor process. As result, he contends, even unionized service workers lack the necessary “leverage to win wage demands” as compared to unionized goods-producing workers. Of course, one might argue that the impossibility of fully automating service work—as well as the difficulty of outsourcing or off-shoring it—could give service workers more political leverage. But Guastella, like many proponents of reindustrialization, ultimately seeks to defend not simply the economic affordances of goods-producing labor but also its social, political, and even moral superiority. Yoking the development of industrial production to progress, modernity, and national vitality, Guastella makes an explicitly normative distinction between goods-producing and services-provisioning labor. “The health of a nation is tied to the health of its industrial heartlands,” he claims, citing not just “economic health” but also, and more ambiguously, “social health”: “Everywhere factories have fled, social rot has followed.”4

Workers in non-professionalized service-sector occupations are more likely to be classified as among the “working poor” than any other group, and they are more likely to be subjected to constantly changing shifts and schedules, unpredictable working hours, and involuntary part-time work.

The argument for reindustrialization is a relatively new one, driven by decades of wage stagnation, outsourcing, and growing dissatisfaction with the neoliberal compact of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as by the revanchist and often fascistic populism that has defined the Trump era. Yet in what follows, I suggest that the association of goods-producing work with modernity and development, with progressive labor reform, and with the labor movement as such—as well as the constitutive exclusion of services-providing labor from those categories—is more long-standing. In exploring the history of service work, I want to take seriously the fundamental differences between the labor process of service-providing work and that of goods-producing work, including differences in the measurement and management of productivity. Reindustrialization discourse treats these differences normatively, seeing them as evidence that service work contributes less to social life than manufacturing and that service workers thus cannot be the leading protagonists of working-class struggle. But we might instead use the differences between these two core sectors as an opportunity to rethink long-standing assumptions about wages, management, mechanization, and regulation under capitalism derived exclusively from manufacturing. In this context, I note the link between the industrial-union tradition of indexing of wage gains to technological increases in productivity (precisely the kinds of “leverage” Guastella avows) and the history of producerism. Producerism, an ideology central to U.S. populism since the eighteenth century, is defined by historian Michael Kazin as the celebration of “those who creat[e] wealth in tangible, material ways” and the conviction that “manual labor [is] the only honest, authentic, and natural kind.”5 A producerist emphasis on productivity, technological development, and “tangible” work has long justified the exclusion of service workers from labor history, labor regulation, and even traditional unionism. In fact, however, the relatively lower productivity of service work has not made organizing in the sector less urgent or less powerful. To the contrary, it has generated new ways of thinking about, and organizing around, compensation, survival, and social life in an age of service work.

A History of Exclusion

The omission—or even dismissal—of service work and service workers is nothing new. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, servant labor was effectively written out of political economy. In thinkers from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, domestic service appears as a residual, pre-modern form of labor largely omitted from the paradigm of capitalist exploitation and even from working-class identity. Even as the tradition of domestic service transformed, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, into an ever-expanding labor force of in-person service workers in public cafes, restaurants, hotels, and trains, service work received relatively little attention from theorists of capitalist labor and exploitation. Influential Marxist accounts of “the making of the working class” by thinkers like E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, as well as important theories of the labor process and the “degradation of work” like Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital, have little to say about service work. Beginning in the 1970s, Marxist feminists and feminists of color began to produce immensely significant accounts of both waged and unwaged housework focused on the domination, exploitation, intensification, and low wages common in private-sphere service labor.6 Yet theories of public-sphere service work have often been limited by the predominance of the “emotional labor” paradigm first developed by Arlie Hochschild in her 1983 study of female flight attendants, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. According to Hochschild, the service worker must not just “seem to ‘love the job’” but “actually try to love it” by “develop[ing] feelings for the parts she plays” and “participat[ing] in the illusion.”7 As this claim suggests, The Managed Heart was focused not so much on labor exploitation (and not at all on labor militancy) but rather on what Hochschild calls the “timeless” question of “what an emotion is and how we can manage it.”8 Yet Hochschild’s account has remained immensely influential both in the sociology of labor and in scholarship on postindustrial labor, with the result that service work has rarely been subjected to the kind of labor-process analysis that has long been vital to understanding industrial labor.9 The predominance of the “emotional labor” argument has also made it far harder to identify the ways service workers have been and continue to be active and often radical participants in labor struggles.

[T]he relatively lower productivity of service work has not made organizing in the sector less urgent or less powerful. To the contrary, it has generated new ways of thinking about, and organizing around, compensation, survival, and social life in an age of service work.

Service work’s exclusion from theories and histories of capitalist labor is due in part to a long-standing tendency to naturalize the features of industrial work: its use of hourly wages, rationalized scientific management, standardized time discipline, and mechanized production processes. The belief that these features make manufacturing constitutively more modern, more valuable, and more regulatable than service work is part of the producerist fetish described above, but it is certainly true that service work is fundamentally different from industrial labor. Service work is an activity, not a product. Its “output” can be alienated neither from the body of the service worker herself nor from the body of the person she serves. As a result, the service sector has innovated its own repertoire of labor exploitation and discipline. Although we tend to treat the regulated hourly wage as a conceptual, political, and historical norm, for example, service work has long relied on irregular cash wages, in-kind payment, piece-rate or task-rate wages, and tips paid directly by the customer. Likewise, histories of labor often connect work discipline to the standardization of time (working days with a fixed length and measured by clocks), to the modernization of wage agreements (“a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay”), and to the rationalization of management. Yet service work tends to involve unpredictable work hours and irregular efficiency, more “self-management,” and a less measurable output. As a result, exploitation in the service sector depends not so much on rationalization as on intensification, a form of labor control that combines indirect, “scientific” forms of managerial control with direct domination, often simply by compelling service workers to work harder, faster, and longer. As I have already suggested, such intensification is necessary in part because service work tends to be labor-intensive and technologically “stagnant.” It is difficult to mechanize, let alone fully automate. Nonetheless, technologies of deskilling, which break up a job into smaller parts that can be performed by less-skilled or lower-waged workers, are increasingly central to the service sector.

Understanding contemporary low-waged service work thus requires that we decenter manufacturing labor in our understanding of the wages, management, and technology of capitalist labor. It also demands rethinking the politics of labor regulation and reform. As nineteenth-century industrialization produced both labor revolts and labor reforms in Britain, domestic servants were almost immediately excluded from the category “employee.” In the twentieth century, as the United States innovated a new regulatory regime around the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), service workers were shut out of minimum wage and maximum hours regulations and excluded from social welfare guarantees because they did not make “vendible goods.” Likewise, the regulatory distinction between “employees” and “independent contractors” was based on the difference between goods-producing manufacturing workers—centralized in one space and controlled by scientific managers—and goods-circulating service workers, who were excluded from the legal rights granted to formally waged workers. These and other techniques of informalization have shaped the legal and political status of a wide range of service workers: early twentieth-century domestic workers paid in hand-me-downs, tip workers vulnerable to time theft, subcontracted clerical outworkers, digital microworkers performing unregulated work in their own homes, and twenty-first-century “independent contractors” spending unpaid hours on gig-work platforms just waiting for work.

Understanding contemporary low-waged service work . . . requires that we decenter manufacturing labor in our understanding of the wages, management, and technology of capitalist labor. It also demands rethinking the politics of labor regulation and reform.

Attention to the problem of regulation reveals another vitally important aspect of service work, namely that it has historically been performed primarily by women, non-white workers, immigrant and migrant workers, and workers with disabilities. The intractably low wages in the service sector are not due solely to its lower productivity, as Guastella suggests. They have also long been justified by the same racialized, gendered, xenophobic, and ableist logics that normatively differentiated it from industrial labor. Service work has long been made to appear as exceptional, whether in the sense that it is mostly performed by women and non-white workers or in the sense that it is premodern, outside of or improper to the sphere of capitalism itself. As a result, service work has never been understood as free labor. Instead, like unwaged reproductive work (including the entire domain of household labor, i.e., procreation, child raising, cooking, cleaning, etc.), it has been perceived as the “natural” domain of women and non-white/non-citizen subjects whose “substandard” productivity or skill did not make them fit for “real” work.

Boundaries of Unionism

Understanding contemporary service work requires understanding its complex relationship to traditional unionism. Service workers were historically denied the right to collectively bargain and often were ignored by or excluded from industrial unions. Mid-twentieth-century Black domestic workers, for example, “operated in the shadows of the formal union movement,” labor historian Premilla Nadasen explains, while a 1970 AFL-CIO report claimed it was “impossible” for the organization to include domestic workers, who “have several different employers in the course of a week.”10 Yet as historian Ashley D. Farmer has documented, a revolutionary vanguard of “militant Negro domestics,” nonetheless, forged a vital network of radical Third Worldist solidarity.11 Black feminist Marxists of this period such as Louise Thompson Patterson, Claudia Jones, and Alice Childress organized through the Communist Party, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, the National Negro Labor Council, and the independent Domestic Workers Union (DWU). These women were theorists as well as organizers, developing their own conceptual paradigms to describe the exploitation specific to non-white, female domestic servants.12 Likewise, Dorothy Cobble has explored the history of early-to-mid-twentieth-century waitress unions, noting that precisely because their work did not fit a “mass production unionism” model (and because many of those unions were uninterested in organizing a predominantly non-white and female service workforce), waitresses were compelled to reimagine what unionism looked like from the perspective of their distinct labor process, thus developing their own organic tradition of “occupational unionism.”13

Attention to the problem of regulation reveals another vitally important aspect of service work, namely that it has historically been performed primarily by women, non-white workers, immigrant and migrant workers, and workers with disabilities.

There has been significantly more service-worker union activity in recent decades, particularly among public-sector workers organized by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), professionalized workers in education and health care, and lower-waged private-sector workers in unions like UNITE-HERE. Yet subsets of the service sector like restaurant and food-service work continue to have the lowest rates of unionization in the country, while those in the ever-growing gig economy have had to push the “boundaries of ‘legitimate’ labor activity” and mobilize “outside of traditional trade unions,” as law professor Veena Dubal puts it.14 To this end, we must pay particular attention to the distinct organizing strategies, tactics, and demands being forged by contemporary service workers both inside and outside traditional unions. Workers whose exploitation depends on “independent contractor” classification, for example, have organized not just as members of a trade or industry, but around their shared legal status, from delivery gig worker organizations such as Los Deliveristas Unidos to cleaning-worker groups such as Liberty Cleaners. Tip-worker groups such as One Fair Wage (OFW) are likewise organizing and creating solidarity networks around shared vulnerability to a specific wage form, connecting baristas and bartenders to nail salon workers and parking lot attendants. Organizations such as the Tech Workers Coalition (TWC), meanwhile, are going beyond even “wall-to-wall” union organizing by mobilizing not only professionalized and salaried tech workers, but also informalized, outsourced microworkers paid by the piece.

Even when service workers are organized into more familiar types of collective bargaining units, their demands and their rhetoric often look and sound different from traditional union wage demands. To understand why, we must depart from the producerist rhetoric of reindustrialization, which often relies on an understanding of labor, compensation, and productivity borrowed exclusively from the realm of regulated, organized, and highly rationalized industrial work. As Cobble and labor historian Michael Merrill suggest, this imaginary defines labor as “a process by which ‘man’ (literally) engages and dominates ‘nature’ with skill, will, and tools.”15 Most historical accounts argue that this producerist ethos emerged out of U.S. populism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period in which skill was understood as a form of property whose ownership gave the possessor a stake in society. For reformers of the late-nineteenth century, historian Laurence Glickman notes, “rewards could be fair only if they amounted to the full fruits of one’s labor.” The discourse of “fair wages” in early labor reform movements, he explains, thus “shared the prevailing producerist assumptions” about workers’ right to receive in compensation the value of the product they produced.16 This artisanal or “independent” producerist rhetoric waned somewhat with the rise of industrial wage labor and with the regulatory apparatus of the New Deal. Yet we find residues of it in the FLSA’s definition of commerce as the production of physical goods (a definition used to exclude the entire service sector from regulation) and in its creation of a “subminimum wage” for those with “substandard” productivity (the same category that would ultimately carve out a “tip-credit wage” for service workers).

Even when service workers are organized into more familiar types of collective bargaining units, their demands and their rhetoric often look and sound different from traditional union wage demands.

Nor were labor unions themselves entirely successful in casting off the producerist ethos. Political scientist Stephen Amberg, for instance, argues that the early-twentieth-century industrial union movement developed a kind of “liberal producerism” through which workers were empowered “to improve products and processes and thereby increase productivity, which would enable America to maintain employment and its superior standard of living.”17 As a prime example of that belief, we might consider the immensely significant UAW agreements of the late 1940s. These contracts tethered wage gains directly to productivity increases via the “annual improvement factor clause,” which was predicated on steady reductions in labor-cost per unit of output. This arrangement depended on the producerist belief that, as UAW-CIO president Walter Reuther put it in 1950, “continuing improvement in the standard of living of employees depends on technological progress” and that “to produce more with the same amount of human effort is a sound economic and social objective.”18

Thinking beyond the Wage

Such an emphasis on the distribution of the things workers’ labor makes and of the economic value they produce has long obscured both the needs and the aspirations of service workers, whose products are more intangible and whose labor is less straightforwardly “productive.” It is typically not possible for service workers to simply “produce more with the same amount of human effort” via technological improvements. In an era of massive and widespread productivity gains driven by a buoyant manufacturing sector, it was possible to increase real wages while holding the rate of exploitation steady, as in the mid-century UAW contracts. Yet in an age of stagnating or even declining productivity growth, real wages have continued to fall, and wage compromises yoked to productivity no longer promise workers a living wage. To understand these conditions, I have found it helpful to borrow the idea of “metabolic rift” developed in Marxist ecological thought.19 Metabolic rift theory describes how capitalism exhausts the two resources it needs most—nature and workers—by disrupting natural and social cycles of self-subsistence and social renewal. Separated from nature, workers can neither sustain themselves nor prevent the destruction of the natural world from which their sustenance once came. In parallel, service workers today experience what we might term a “reproductive rift.” Domestic workers are unable to afford housing; childcare workers are unable to afford childcare; delivery gig workers are unable to afford groceries.

[S]ervice workers today experience what we might term a “reproductive rift.” Domestic workers are unable to afford housing; child-care workers are unable to afford childcare; delivery gig workers are unable to afford groceries.

Thinking of these situations as instances of reproductive rift helps us understand why organized service workers are not emphasizing their right to a “fair share” of their own productive output, but instead demanding wages adequate to rising subsistence costs. Through this lens, we might historicize the shift from industrial unionism to service-worker unionism by contrasting the UAW’s 1948 productivity-based wage model to the fights waged in 2022 and 2023 by University of California and University of Michigan graduate student workers, also organized by UAW, to win significant wage gains based on the skyrocketing cost of living. Rather than tethering wages to “output” (indeed, explicitly resisting efforts to increase “output” via rising student-to-teacher ratios or ed-tech), graduate student workers and postdocs instead demanded wages indexed to the median cost of housing in the city where each campus was located. Elsewhere, service-worker unions like the SEIU have joined forces with tenant unions to organize coordinated campaigns around housing. As Rob Baril, the president of the SEIU 1199 NE (New England) put it, “It doesn’t make a lot of sense for us just to focus on increasing worker wages if those wages are getting eaten up by housing.”20

Rather than having less “leverage” than the mass-production workers of the past, contemporary service workers arguably have a different kind of leverage entirely.

There is also a long tradition of service workers organizing collectively beyond and outside of traditionally “economic” workplace demands. The mid-century DWU described above, for instance, was international, intersectional, and radically multi-issue. We see something similar on the rise, especially among service workers, of what is variously described as “relational unionism,” “whole-worker organizing,” or “bargaining for the common good.”21 Within these paradigms, service workers are making demands not just for higher wages or better working conditions, but also for the rights of workers with disabilities, the rights of queer and trans workers to gender-affirming health care, police abolition, immigration reform, ecological justice, and divestment from the military-industrial complex. In 2024, the Chicago Teachers Union’s bargaining included a demand to end student homelessness by creating ten thousand new affordable housing units prioritizing Chicago public school households.22 Amazon warehouse workers in Chicago demanded childcare accommodations for Black and Brown single parents forced to work “megacycles” during the pandemic.23 In California, they called for transport solutions for workers commuting across the border from Tijuana.24 In Minnesota, they fought for housing for Somali immigrant women workers priced out of superinflated real estate.25 AFSCME locals have called for limits on police intervention during campus protests and for non-collaboration with ICE.26 Starbucks workers organized with Workers United have called for solidarity with the victims of genocide and displacement in Palestine, while the International Alliance of App-Based Transportation workers is demanding that transportation employers be carbon neutral.27

Campaigns around wages linked to reproductive costs and campaigns focusing on issues beyond the wage suggest the challenges of organizing a labor-intensive sector in a low-growth economy. But they might also be understood as pointing to something distinct, and possibly radical, about service work itself. Service work yokes our everyday lives to the broader communal relations that ensure our common survival. Precisely insofar as service work has been increasingly socialized under capitalism, and precisely inasmuch as the service sector has been forced to expand as a result of deindustrialization, contemporary service work structures forms of collective survival and subsistence across and within the proletarian class as a whole, creating new forms of non-biological connection between households and the larger social order, between intimates and strangers, between the act of providing service work and the fact of depending on the service work of others. Rather than having less “leverage” than the mass-production workers of the past, contemporary service workers arguably have a different kind of leverage entirely. A mass-scale strike of teachers and other child-carers, for instance, would have ripple effects far beyond those workers’ own workplaces, fundamentally interrupting work and commerce as parents and guardians are unable to work without access to childcare.28 Labor stoppages of nurses and other health care providers can have similarly massive ramifications for social reproduction and vital social infrastructure, as can strikes by public-sector service workers in jobs from administration to sanitation. The increased concentration of grocery stores, retail stores, and especially the commercial logistics economy under an ever-shrinking number of employers means that regional strikes in those sectors can substantially disrupt consumers’ access to necessary goods and interrupt the “just-in-time” model of circulation.29

Both the history and the present of informalized, superexploited service work thus requires that we update long-standing assumptions that the goods-producing worker is the embodiment of the working class—and working-class power—as such. Such metonymy has long justified the subordination of other political interests and desires—from racial equality and gender emancipation to anticolonial and anti-imperialist movements—to the struggles of formally waged male manufacturing workers, and it has privileged the factory as the place where class struggle happens and indeed where class itself is made. The world of waged work is more various than we have acknowledged. So, too, is resistance to the wage.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Annie McClanahan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5853-7826

Footnotes

1. Cato Institute, “2024 Trade and Globalization National Survey,” August 7, 2024, available at https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2024-08/Globalization%20Survey_2024.pdf.

2. Dustin Guastella, “The Case for American Reindustrialization,” The Guardian, May 2, 2025, available at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/02/american-reindustrialization-manufacturing.

3. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “A Profile of the Working Poor,” December 2025, available at https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2023/home.htm; Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett, “Consequences of Routine Work-Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Well-Being,” American Sociological Review 84 (2019): 82-114; National Women’s Law Center, “Collateral Damage: Scheduling Challenges for Workers in Low-Paid Jobs and Their Consequences,” December 2025, https://nwlc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/CollateralDamage_December2025.pdf.

4. Guastella, “The Case for American Reindustrialization.”

5. Michael Kazin, Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 13.

6. Here I am thinking of theorists like Silvia Federici, Leopoldina Fortunati, Maria Mies, Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Angela Davis, Ruth Cohen, Mary Romero, Nona Glazer, Premilla Nadasen, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Judith Rollins, among many others.

7. Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 6, 46.

8. Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 10.

9. It is worth noting here that much more recent scholarship has begun to redress these gaps—of particular importance to my own thinking has been the works of Gabriel Winant, Jason R. Smith, and Maya Gonzalez and Jeanne Neton.

10. Premilla Nadasen, Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story the African American Women Who Built a Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 3; AFL-CIO qtd. in Eileen Boris and Premilla Nadasen, “Domestic Workers Organize!” WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society 11, no. 4 (December 2008): 423.

11. Ashley Farmer, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 20-49.

12. As Magally Miranda has argued, contemporary domestic workers are similarly showing all workers what it looks like to build collectivity outside the standard context of the shared workplace or the union shop. Magally Miranda, “The Power of Trabajadoras and the Subversion of Capital: Notes on a Domestic Workers Inquiry,” Viewpoint, March 2017, available at https://viewpointmag.com/2017/03/07/the-power-of-trabajadoras-and-the-subversion-of-capital-notes-on-a-domestic-workers-inquiry.

13. Dorothy Cobble, “Organizing the Postindustrial Work Force,” ILR Review 44, no. 3 (April 1991): 433.

14. Veena Dubal, “Solidarity Unionism V. Company Unionism in the Gig Economy,” LPE Project, June 18, 2019, available at https://lpeproject.org/blog/solidarity-unionism-v-company-unionism-in-the-gig-economy/.

15. Dorothy Cobble and Michael Merrill, “The Promise of Service Worker Unionism,” in Service Work: Critical Perspectives, eds. Cameron MacDonald and Marek Korczynski (London: Routledge, 2009), 155.

16. Laurence Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 27, 67.

17. Stephen Amberg, The Union Inspiration in American Politics: The Autoworkers and the Making of a Liberal Industrial Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 34.

18. Walter Reuther, “Practical Aims and Purposes of American Labor,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 274 (March 1951): 66.

19. See John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2 (September 1999).

20. Qtd. in Rebecca Burns, “Home Is Where the Union Is,” In These Times, May 6, 2025, available at https://inthesetimes.com/article/labor-tenants-unions-housing-workers-landlord-solidarity.

21. On “relational unionism,” see Dorothy Cobble, “Worker Mutualism in an Age of Entrepreneurial Capitalism,” Labor & Industry: A Journal of the Social and Economic Relations of Work 26, no. 3 (2016). On “whole-worker organizing,” see “Interview: Jane McAlevey’s Plan for How to Build a Fighting Labor Movement,” Jacobin, May 2023, available at https://jacobin.com/2023/05/jane-mcalevey-interview-labor-movement-strategy-whole-worker-organizing-supermajority-leadership. On “bargaining for the common good,” see Joseph McCartin, “Bargaining for the Common Good,” Dissent, Spring 2016, available at https://dissentmagazine.org/article/bargaining-common-good-community-union-alignment/.

22. Sarah Lazare, “The Chicago Teachers Union Wants to End Student Homelessness at the Bargaining Table,” Nation, March 25, 2024, https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/chicago-teachers-union-homelessness.

23. Joe DeManuelle-Hall, “Dispersed but Undaunted, Chicago Amazon Workers Win Megacycle Pay Nationwide,” Labor Notes, June 15, 2021, available at https://labornotes.org/2021/06/dispersed-undaunted-chicago-amazon-workers-help-win-megacycle-pay-nationwide.

24. Lauren Kaori Gurley, “Amazon Workers Who Commute across the Border Are Organizing for Better Working Conditions,” Vice, July 8, 2022, available at https://www.vice.com/en/article/amazon-workers-who-commute-across-the-us-mexico-border-every-day-are-organizing-for-better-working-conditions.

25. Maximillian Alvarez, “How Immigrant Workers Took on Amazon and Won,” Real News Network, August 9, 2023, available at https://therealnews.com/how-immigrant-warehouse-workers-in-minnesota-took-on-amazon-and-won.

26. Rutgers Center for Innovation in Worker Organization, “Concrete Examples of Bargaining for the Common Good,” December 20, 2019, available at https://smlr.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/Documents/Centers/CIWO/ciwo_bcg-memo.pdf.

27. Jonathan Rosenblum, “How the Palestinian Justice Movement Helped Starbucks Workers United,” Nation, March 11, 2024, available at https://www.the-nation.com/article/activism/starbucks-gaza-israel-union-organizing; International Alliance of Transportation Workers, “Who We Are,” n.d., available at https://www.iaatw.org.

28. For more on the kinds of leverage available to organized teachers, see Jason Smith, Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), 140-42.

29. For more on the kinds of leverage available to organized logistics workers, see Charmaine Chua and Spencer Cox, “Battling the Behemoth: Amazon and the Rise of America’s New Working Class,” The Socialist Register, November 2022, 59.

Biographies

Annie McClanahan is a professor of English at University of California Irvine. She is the author of Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work (Zone Books, 2026) and Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture (Stanford University Press, 2016). She is also a faculty co-director for UCI LIFTED, which offers a BA to incarcerated students; co-president of the Council of UC Faculty Associations; and the director of the UC Materialist Institute for Research.