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A dozen years ago, I visited the Chicago offices of the National Nurses Organizing Committee on the city’s West Side. Visible through a large window was a gigantic parking garage, an annex to one of the equally huge hospitals clustered within a dozen blocks. Cook County, Mount Sinai, and three other medical complexes employed tens of thousands of workers. Among those seeking to organize them was an African American NNOC staffer.
Books in Review
The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America
By Gabriel Winant
She told me she was the daughter of an autoworker in Flint, Mich., who’d been a militant in his union during the heyday of the battles waged between the United Auto Workers and General Motors. In Flint, she became a radical activist, inspired by the power of the UAW and the moral energy of the civil rights movement, and in time made a career as a union organizer of nurses and other health care workers.
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called the great compression, from the new deal through the late 1970s which saw the biggest expansion of the middle class. when unions set a floor under wages and government set a floor under want. instituting things like child labor laws, the 40-hour workweek and the minimum wage. when the notion that if you pay workers more, they can afford to buy more. and that means businesses make more and hire more. that did more to end poverty than anything ian rand thought up. repealing that government backed floor. repealing the 20th century, flawed, because african-americans remained deliberately locked out, has become the project of ian rand disciples on the right. their argument is that what really creates poverty is culture. when ryan spoke about a cultural tail spin of inner city men who are not even thinking about learning the value of work, he cited charles murray. the social scientist who believes african-americans are genetically inferior intellectually and that poor
caucus when he harkined back to his father working in a coal mine and his kind of manufacturing. what s interesting is you hit deep ideological bedrock very quickly. the reason for that, on the left we hear that nostalgia all the time. that s an absolute common thing you hear on the left when you critique modern finance capitalism, it is to harkin back to the great compression as paul kremlin calls it. 1950s, 60s and 70s. good wage jobs, higher union density. that nostalgia is not unknown for progressives. but the democratic nostalgia is for a set of laws and regulations that are used to restrain capitalism. the republican nostalgia seems to be for nicer corporate titans. do you think that s what it is, though? i think you re getting at something deep. it s more american dream.