Portside

We often talk about emotional labor in our personal lives. But what about at work?

We need to confront the workplace hierarchy directly. That means unions and labor organizing. It means demands for more democratic workplaces, and established institutions and practices for dealing with sexual harassment.

Much has been made in the recent campaign about the alienation of working-class whites from the Democratic Party. Michael Pierce shows this is a path long traveled; Bill Clinton undermined the budding multi-racial labor coalition in 1970s Arkansas.

Work at Amazon's distribution warehouses in Italy is backbreaking, and thousands of employees are part time and permanently on call. "It is a grim form of exploitation."

When joined by family and friends for Thanksgiving, ask guests to tell stories about their very first food memory, or to recall any family member who was a farmer or a jolly cook. Invite people of diverse backgrounds and all ages. Ask a farm family to join you, or a cheesemaker or others involved in producing food. Then eat, talk, enjoy!

Leaders must also know when it’s time for a new person to take the helm. To keep new blood flowing through the labor movement, older leaders have to make room for their successors, RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United, said. “You have to get out of the way. You can’t just talk about it,” she said. “If you’re a leader, a strong leader, you step down and open that up to someone you believe reflects where this union needs to be.”

Millions of public-sector workers could soon be targeted by conservative groups trying to dissuade them from paying union fees. Co-published by International Business Times.

UE, the union organizing the Second City workers, has recently helped run several successful unionization campaigns with service employees whose jobs are precarious and without benefits, including graduate student workers in Iowa and movie theater concession workers in New England.

Just as enthusiasm for collective bargaining grows, labor’s political power and influence wane toward a historic nadir.

It takes continuous organizational effort—in the form of training and recruitment, new leadership development, and structural change–to insure that the bullying, harassing, divide-and-conquer behavior of bosses, big and small, doesn’t infect and weaken the “house of labor” too.