The People's Free School

02-labor-work-and-organizing

4 min read

Labor, Work, and Organizing

What is work? Who does it, on what terms, for whose benefit? What is a wage, a job, a union, a strike? This theme covers waged labor, unwaged work, the history of the working class, and the long tradition of organizing to change the conditions of work. It also covers what work might be in a different world. It builds directly on the wage relation introduced in How Capitalism Works, and turns to what workers do about it.

How to use this theme

This folder organizes resources by lens. See the Pedagogy document for what the lenses do and why they are structured this way.

  • Experiential: What is your experience with this? What does the room already know?
  • Historical: How did this come to be?
  • Theoretical: How do we understand and analyze it?
  • Practical: What is happening on the ground and what are people doing about it?
  • Liberatory: What would it mean to overcome or transform this?

A session does not need to use all five lenses. A study circle may move across them. Use what serves the room.

Anchor questions

These questions have proven useful for opening up this theme. They are starting points, not a script. Take the ones that fit the room and leave the rest.

  • When you tell someone what you do, what do you say? Does it match what you actually do all day?
  • Who gives the orders where you work, and who carries them out? How was that decided?
  • Have you ever done work that no one paid you for but that someone needed done? Who counted on it?
  • What is a job, really? What do you sell when you take one, and what do you get back?
  • Have you ever been part of trying to change something at work, formally or not? What happened?
  • What did the adults around you teach you about work, unions, and getting ahead? Do you still believe it?
  • When workers have won something, how did they win it? When they lost, why?

Suggested arcs for groups new to this theme. Adapt freely. Every session opens with a check-in and closes with reflection (see the pedagogy document).

Single-session entry point (2 hours). Start experiential: walk through a shift, and ask who gives the orders where people work. Watch a short video together (More Perfect Union’s thirteen-minute How To Start A Union: Step By Step, or Second Thought’s Why Corporate America Hates Unions). Read a few pages of Marx’s Wage-Labour and Capital aloud. Close by returning to the opening question with what has shifted. See the single-session template.

Six-week study circle. Week 1 experiential and framing (what do we already know about our own work; what are we studying and why). Week 2 historical: how the working class and its unions were made, using Brecher’s Strike! and Foner. Weeks 3 to 4 theoretical: labor power, the working day, and the labor process, reading Marx’s “The Working Day” and Braverman, with the social reproduction readings alongside. Week 5 practical: organizing today, using the Labor Notes handbook, the film Union, and McAlevey on deep organizing. Week 6 liberatory: who should run work, staging the debate among councils, unions, cooperatives, and the abolition of work. See the six-week template.

Weekend intensive. Compress the arc above into a Friday-evening-through-Sunday structure, with the historical and theoretical work on Saturday and the practical and liberatory work on Sunday. A screening of Harlan County USA or Union works well as a Saturday-evening anchor. See the weekend-intensive template.

This theme sits at the center of the school’s work and connects closely to several others:

Status

This theme has a developed first pass across all five lenses. Resources continue to be added as the project grows. If you have run a session on this theme, consider contributing back what you used and what you learned.

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