A historian friend once taught me the German word Zeitgenossen, explaining that it referred to one’s contemporaries, or members of one’s generation, but also more particularly connoted something like a “time-comrade.” Gabe Winant has become a great time-comrade to me, a thinker whose insights into questions of history and generationality, kinship and aging, have deeply enriched my own thinking on these subjects. His first book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America
, traces the transformation of Pittsburgh, the archetypal industrial steel town, into a city powered by the labor of hospital workers. It offers both a finely drawn portrait of working-class life in industrial and postindustrial Pittsburgh and a vision for how care work—which has long divided workers along lines of race, gender, and generation—could become the basis for a new kind of solidarity. In doing so, it also offers a profound look at how not just the workday but the life course has been ordered and reordered by the economic shifts of the past 75 years. I took the opportunity to chat with Gabe about the book, and about the past, present, and future of American labor. This conversation has been condensed and edited. It originally appeared in yesterday’s email newsletter, to which you can