Interchange – At Your Service: Organizing in the Service Economy

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Today’s show is a “repackaging” of a program from August 2015 about service sector workers and the future of unions with a focus on the question can there be a labor movement with any strength in the service sector? Perhaps that movement needs to find new forms of organization to stay relevant.

In the coming weeks we’ll feature two interviews about automation and labor in an economy where 80% of work is now in this so-called “service sector.”

This show from over five years ago is prelude but might as well have been produced yesterday – the federal minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour – it’s the same here in Indiana. States can set their own minimum wage – for example the state of Washington’s minimum wage is $13.50 while Georgia and Wyoming must be proud that theirs is $5.50 – and you can bet that many folks are actually happy about it, but they’re not workers.

Mid-twentieth-century union activism transformed manufacturing jobs from backbreaking, low-wage work into careers that allowed workers to buy homes and send their kids to college. Some union activists insist that there is no reason why service-sector workers cannot follow that same path.

Along with our guest, we’ll also hear from Chalondias Smith, a home care worker and member of Service Employees International Union – SEIU HCII.

We’ll begin with a clip from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s April 3, 1968 speech to the striking Memphis Sanitation Workers–known as “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”–a speech that was delivered one day before his assassination.

GUEST
Fran Quigley is author of If We Can Win Here: The New Front Lines of the Labor Movement, and a clinical professor of law in the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis. He’s the Director of the Health and Human Rights Clinic, where students advocate for the rights of the poor, with a special focus on representing low-wage workers.

RELATED
The Battle of Indianapolis: Workers Win Gains Despite Right-to-Work Laws by Fran Quigley
Raising minimum wage is morally right by Fran Quigley
Seeing Through “Right-to-Work” Laws by Fran Quigley
The Strange Life of Work: Kathi Weeks (Interchange)

MUSIC
“Work Song” Charles Mingus
“Whistle While You Work” – Louis Armstrong, Disney Songs the Satchmo Way (1968)
“Go Get Organized” The Redskins, Neither Washington Nor Moscow (1986)
“Cleaning Windows” Van Morrison, Beautiful Vision (1982)
“Hard Worker” The Avett Brothers, Mignonette (2004)
ID music – “Heigh Ho” The Dave Brubeck Quartet, Dave Digs Disney (1957)

CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young