In the 2010s cities and counties across the US witnessed long-overdue change as they engaged more with questions of social, economic, and racial justice. After decades of urban economic restructuring that intensified class divides and institutional and systemic racism, dozens of local governments countered the conventional wisdom that cities couldn’t address inequality—enacting progressive labor market policies, from $15 minimum wages to paid sick leave. In their book Justice at Work: The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities, Marc Doussard and Greg Schrock visit case studies in cities including Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Seattle, and New Orleans, and show that the contemporary wave of successful progressive organizing efforts is likely to endure—but their success hinges on a few factors including sustaining power at the grassroots. Here, Marc Doussard is in conversation with David B. Reynolds.
-Justice at Work: The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities by Marc Doussard and Greg Schrock
-Degraded Work: The Struggle at the Bottom of the Labor Market by Marc Doussard
-A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement by Amy B. Dean and David B. Reynolds
-Igniting Justice and Progressive Power: The Partnership for Working Families Cities by David B. Reynolds and Louise Simmons
-Partnering for Change: Unions and Community Groups Build Coalitions for Economic Justice, edited by David B. Reynolds (with essay by Reynolds and Jen Kern: Labor and the Living Wage Movement)
-”Living Wage Campaigns: An activist’s guide to building the movement for economic justice.” David Reynolds and Jen Kern. (Labor Studies Center, Wayne State University and Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, 2000.)
-Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies by John Kingdon
-The City Is the Factory, edited by Miriam Greenberg and Penny Lewis
Other references:
-Fight for 15
-ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now)
-American Rescue Plan (also known as the American Rescue Plan Act or ARPA)
-The Green New Deal
Cities mentioned:
Seattle
Detroit
Denver
Chicago
San Jose
San Diego
Silicon Valley
Ann Arbor
Chapters
In the 2010s cities and counties across the US witnessed long-overdue change as they engaged more with questions of social, economic, and racial justice. After decades of urban economic restructuring that intensified class divides and institutional and systemic racism, dozens of local governments countered the conventional wisdom that cities couldn’t address inequality—enacting progressive labor market policies, from $15 minimum wages to paid sick leave. In their book Justice at Work: The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities, Marc Doussard and Greg Schrock visit case studies in cities including Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Seattle, and New Orleans, and show that the contemporary wave of successful progressive organizing efforts is likely to endure—but their success hinges on a few factors including sustaining power at the grassroots. Here, Marc Doussard is in conversation with David B. Reynolds.
-Justice at Work: The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities by Marc Doussard and Greg Schrock
-Degraded Work: The Struggle at the Bottom of the Labor Market by Marc Doussard
-A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement by Amy B. Dean and David B. Reynolds
-Igniting Justice and Progressive Power: The Partnership for Working Families Cities by David B. Reynolds and Louise Simmons
-Partnering for Change: Unions and Community Groups Build Coalitions for Economic Justice, edited by David B. Reynolds (with essay by Reynolds and Jen Kern: Labor and the Living Wage Movement)
-”Living Wage Campaigns: An activist’s guide to building the movement for economic justice.” David Reynolds and Jen Kern. (Labor Studies Center, Wayne State University and Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, 2000.)
-Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies by John Kingdon
-The City Is the Factory, edited by Miriam Greenberg and Penny Lewis
Other references:
-Fight for 15
-ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now)
-American Rescue Plan (also known as the American Rescue Plan Act or ARPA)
-The Green New Deal
Cities mentioned:
Seattle
Detroit
Denver
Chicago
San Jose
San Diego
Silicon Valley
Ann Arbor
What is University of Minnesota Press?
Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
David B. Reynolds:
We are living in a new era, when it comes to cities.
Marc Doussard:
What this book, we would like to think, does shows the tremendous tangible and practical benefits to thinking about economic and racial justice as, of course, the very same justice.
David B. Reynolds:
Well, hello, Mark. It's a pleasure to be with you today. For our audience, I'm David Reynolds. I just retired as the director of the Center for Labor and Community Studies at the University of, Michigan near Detroit and, have been a labor educator for twenty years and was very excited to get a copy of your book Justice at Work, The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities. And I'm looking forward to discussing it.
David B. Reynolds:
So, Mark, why don't you introduce yourself and say a bit about your coauthor?
Marc Doussard:
Yeah. For sure. First of all, Mazel Tov on your retirement. I am a bit of life phase where I think about that more than I should. So I'm Mark Dussard from the University of Illinois along with, Greg Schrock from Portland State University, who's not here today, unfortunately.
Marc Doussard:
I'm the coauthor of Justice at Work, the rise of economic and racial justice coalitions in cities. And I'm particularly happy to be here because David and I have been treading the same terrain, if you will, for an extremely long time. And it's, always nice to meet somebody whose work you like.
David B. Reynolds:
Yeah. So, in fact, I wanted to get into how both of us kind of came to this work because we have been kind of, in a conversation kind of just through our publishing and our interest for years. I came to this topic because for the better part of twenty years, I was involved in a a network of labor educators and researchers that work with the national AFL CIO. And what we were doing was to try to document and provide materials for efforts to revive their central labor councils, the local AFL CIO bodies that traditionally had been fairly weak and moribund in America. But there was a real effort to make them a a way to rebuild the labor movement as a movement and especially build those community connections.
David B. Reynolds:
And so, out of that, what we realized was that a new model was emerging for how to build power one region at a time in America. We actually coined the term regional power building. We did case studies about that. This turned into a book called A New New Deal, how regional activism will transform the labor movement. And in that, we laid out the basic strategy where the local AFL CIO or some key unions set up anchor organizations that built these long term coalitions.
David B. Reynolds:
So how do we use the powers of local government to make real change and get a real agenda going and really build a movement? And and and the pitch in that was this was important. It needs to get more resources and far more attention, which it has. And so, more recently, Louise Simmons and I published a book, which is now in paperback, called Igniting Justice and Progressive Power, the Partnership for Working Families Cities. So that partnership for Working Families Cities is the network which unites all these kind of anchor organizations.
David B. Reynolds:
The exciting thing is that these have evolved. In some ways, they're kind of a subset of what you're talking about, which, you know, they're kind of a particular model, but then you're talking about this broader economic and racial justice coalition. So just say a little bit about kinda how you came into this.
Marc Doussard:
Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I showed up after the spade work had been done by the revitalization of Central Labor Councils and the labor movement's decision to go local. In that way, as a young person, I had zero curiosity about the world before when I came to it, and I just assumed that it had always been this way. And then, of course, got to learn a lot.
Marc Doussard:
You know, my interest in this work has been seeing changes in unions and the labor movement itself and in the collaboration with community organizations. You know, when Greg and I were doing this book, we came from a place where in the mid two thousands, unions and community organizations were selling all out for these tiny victories by today's standards. You know, a living wage for employees of big box retailers, small unenforceable wage premiums for municipal employees, you know, things where people would organize for two years to try to raise a few people's pay to $10 an hour or something that really wasn't gonna move the needle on poverty, life, and so on. And about a decade later, a third of the country is in a state where the minimum wage is slated to go to $15, and the agenda for unions and community organizations is getting bigger, not smaller. Right?
Marc Doussard:
They're rolling logs. More and more things are being placed on the table. And what we wanted to do in this book was capture that by talking talking about some of the connective tissue nationally in this project of regional power building. So how are these organizations knitted together nationally? And we wanted to talk about what this means for urban politics.
Marc Doussard:
So as scholars of urban planning, Greg and I care a lot, and we have to think in terms of electoral politics and things like that. And our education as graduate students started with this kind of finger wag that don't you dare try anything redistributive in cities. You'll be punished swiftly for it. And what really made us want to write this book was looking around and realizing that kind of first hazing lesson we had in graduate school is mercifully completely out of date now. So we wanted to write a book about how this happened, how the field flipped, how labor and community organizations went from two ships passing in the night to partners, how they went from playing defense to offense, and how being a progressive, which used to be a dirty word, I think, in urban politics, came to be something that, elected officials are kind of climbing over themselves to claim.
Marc Doussard:
That's the very long winded gist of where this came from.
David B. Reynolds:
Yes. And and that's what I think makes this book so important. You know, I think of the conversations I have around, lunchtime with my some of my progressive friends. You know, inevitably, you get on the talk of politics and what's going on. And and, you know, it's either while during the Trump era was the bad stuff that was happening, and now it's the stuff that, well, it got filibustered.
David B. Reynolds:
Oh, congress is split. And you you end up getting cynical. Why are Americans so conservative and all this and that? And I'm sure you've had the same experience, and and both of us probably have to be the ones to inject some optimism there to say, well, you know, there's stuff that is not being covered in the evening news, and that's the subject of what we're we're writing about. So why don't we dive into that?
David B. Reynolds:
Because you you have four chapters on four different kind of policy campaign areas. And the the first one does concern wages. I think you you do make this important point that, you know, in in the year February, no cities had minimum wages. Very few states had minimum wage above the federal level. And if you look at it simply in terms of the federal level, you got depressed.
David B. Reynolds:
It's like, well, it hasn't gone up in a long time. Right? How can you can't survive on that wage. Yet the it starts out with this really modest beginnings of the living wage movement, where all you're asking is that companies that get a contract or financial support from the local government pay those people above the poverty level. Right?
David B. Reynolds:
But nevertheless, that leads to where today, the majority of Americans get more than the federal minimum wage. And increasingly, they're covered by a $15 an hour minimum wage, which I remember when the fight for 15 movement first came out. People were like, ah, it's a pie in the sky. It'll never happen. This is crazy.
David B. Reynolds:
But you show how this kind of evolved. So so get into that.
Marc Doussard:
For sure. And let me start by saying that, I'm not so smart because when, some folks in the labor movement sounded me out and said, you know, we're thinking of going for $15 minimum wage. What do you think? I said, basically, fail big. Obviously, it'll never work, but you gotta try.
Marc Doussard:
So, it's nice to be humbled for those reasons, I guess. In the book, we talk a lot about the living wage movement, which we see as kind of a watershed. And there's a lot of things to appreciate here. So the living wage movement as we know it, first of all, took a long time. So it started with, Baltimore living wage law in 1994, I believe.
Marc Doussard:
And if you look at the living wage movement on its own terms, if you were to stop the analysis around the year February, you'd kinda throw your hands up in the air and say, I guess we succeeded, but I'm not sure what we won. You know? So the first living wage ordinance and the hundreds that then diffuse throughout US cities proposed basically to raise, the minimum wage for some city employees or city contractors by an amount that if you heard it today, you'd spit out your coffee. A dollar, a dollar 25. So it wasn't a lot.
Marc Doussard:
There were other problems with the living wage. You were asking for small raises for tiny segments of the workforce. And then on top of that, enforcing those laws was next to impossible. Right? There really weren't mechanisms to do it.
Marc Doussard:
This all sounds incredibly depressing, but social movements and change take a long time. And the living wage movement did a lot of things that are now the kind of backbone for things we take for for granted about, urban politics today. For one, focusing on the living wages meant focusing on low wage service jobs. The worst of the worst that happened to this country after deindustrialization. Right?
Marc Doussard:
Replacing stable, decently paid jobs with minimum wage, jobs with a few protections, no benefits. Focusing on those jobs, elevated the concerns of low wage communities of color. It was a predominantly feminized workforce. So this kind of changed the who. It kind of moved the labor movement, if you would, a little bit off the kind of naive class analysis into thinking more through the other kinds of social difference that were a part and parcel of who ended up in these jobs.
Marc Doussard:
This was a significant change over time. A second thing was that to operationalize living wage campaigns, you know, David talked about the historical the kind of revitalization of central labor councils. Well, this gave them a target to hit. Right? So even if the initial target you're hitting of a small living wage ordinance isn't terribly significant, learning to work together.
Marc Doussard:
And, you know, unions and community organizations are federated in different ways. They have different conventions, different kinds of resources. This is, yeah, I'm not gonna make it like the Brady Bunch or something like that. But, these were some seriously different, family traditions that needed to be reconciled, and the living wage movement provided glue for that. I think a third really significant thing was the living wage movement was nationally, federated.
Marc Doussard:
So working through, ACORN, which was the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, ACORN set up a national living wage resource center. And this kind of circulated model legislation, ideas, testimony, advice. And if you look at that kind of elemental simple form, that's kind of the backbone for take an issue, minimum wage, something I'm working on today, basic income. They all work through that structure of kind of having a national clearing house to kind of knit together and learn from these local campaigns. And I think a fourth thing, which will just doesn't need to go into a lot of detail, but we'll talk about it for the rest of the time here, really.
Marc Doussard:
This introduced community organizations and unions as a kind of combined force in urban politics, if you will. They built a citywide coalition designed to move all Germanic votes. And once you, have a coalition in every ward, you have, as they say, a coalition in every ward, and you have some real power.
David B. Reynolds:
Yeah. I was excited to see how, yeah, you linked this idea that one of the things that was new was this national connection and national network. In my own modest way, you know, just as I was starting my career, I proposed and got funding for a living wage resource guide, a handbook of how to organize these campaigns. And so I actually worked with the Acorn person, Jen Kern, who was the national resource person. And, yeah, we got to see that that book go out in several thousand per copies out all around the country.
David B. Reynolds:
We did some of that locally and, yeah, to put a face on it. Like, I remember it just just the the the cultural learning. Sitting in the, Central Labor Council's office where the head of the Labor Council brings his mail in that has his guns and ammo magazine that he's all very excited about because he was a gun collector. And, you know, he's sitting there with some environmental people and some peace people, you know, and and we're all getting along great. Right?
David B. Reynolds:
Because, you know, there there was that kind of this recognition what, you know, what unites us is far bigger than what's, what's the buy us. So just say a little bit about where we at now today with the minimum wage. Yeah. I think
Marc Doussard:
there was a delightful time when we were, concluding the draft, getting the book out for review, and doing the proofs where all of our facts about the minimum wage were out of date as soon as we wrote them down. So, you know, the the long story short is that's where we are with the minimum wage, is that it has become so popular that nobody opposes it on the face of it. Not really. The states, if I were to do this off the top of my head, the states with a $15 minimum wage right now going west to east, I believe, are Hawaii, California, Oregon, Illinois, New York, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, and then the real outliers, Florida and Nebraska, which are remarkable things to think about, given our stylized facts about politics. Where we are today is that the limits of the minimum wage, which used to be basically nonviable everywhere, are the limits of current electoral politics.
Marc Doussard:
So states with democratic trifectas typically today have $15 minimum wages or something near. What you might think of as red states, the legislatures do not introduce the legislation there. But when you get a ballot initiative to put it in front of voters, they stampede towards it. Right? So the minimum wage has won on far more levels than we ever thought was possible.
Marc Doussard:
Cities have their own minimum wages, which is kind of a first step. And a lot of what's distinctive about the fight for 15, I see I've got the story a little bit backwards here, is that by moving cities and by changing opinion and the law one city at a time, this became the backbone for moving container, policy at the level of states, which is a much bigger container to influence a lot more people. So there's this been this very real way where coalitions and cities have been able to scale up the idea of the minimum wage by making it so popular and by using their political connection so skillfully that, there's not a lot of states at this point that do not have minimum wages higher than the federal one. It's been a remarkable transformation.
David B. Reynolds:
Yeah. And and to come back to it, again, this didn't just happen. This was all lots of hard work on the ground organizing these coalitions. And I think this this wage activism did lead people to think, well, what more can we do? Like, I remember in Detroit where the, Detroit Metro Detroit AFL CIO got this put on the ballot and it passed by 80%.
David B. Reynolds:
And I just just how stunned people were like, wow. You know, we've been fighting defensive battles for years. Look at this. We just went out there and we want this thing. What else can we do?
David B. Reynolds:
And so one of the questions that you're looking at is this question of and, well, what about job access, especially for low income and communities of color getting access to jobs that are coming back to cities and maybe thinking about community benefits, while we're at it. So so talk about that. That's the kind of the second case study in your book.
Marc Doussard:
Yeah. For sure. So one of the long time drawbacks to this kind of naive class analysis of work that said where the bargain was, think about class, numbers of jobs, and economics, and this long time approach that kind of consign social difference to secondary importance. One of the downsides about that is people would tend to be able some movements would create net or aggregate job opportunity. We might make more good jobs.
Marc Doussard:
And then, you know, when those jobs go to the same people over and over, namely white men, you tend to not get the results you want. And furthermore, in addition to it being kind of normally disappointing at a minimum, you you had a condition where this was not good for your broader organizing coalition. Right? If you're creating jobs that sound great but are reserved for a small segment of the population, this isn't going anywhere. So one of the long time goals of the kind of community side of community labor coalitions was having some say over who had access to good jobs.
Marc Doussard:
And this went to historical racism within the building trades. This goes to the so called spatial mismatch, where you would have urbanized populations of color and, good wage jobs far away from them. And other things, one of the long time goals of these organizations was to ensure that representative communities and the people who actually live near the jobs could get them. It was a very similar story to the living wage and the minimum wage. You had a bunch of, frankly, unenforceable early laws that sounded great, but they won small victories that didn't amount to much.
Marc Doussard:
What we've seen since 02/2010 is, lesser than the minimum wage, but for sure, a resurgence of this kind of approach. And what we talk about in the book is that when you get away from a simple issue like the minimum wage, which everybody knows what it means and everybody knows it's not high enough no matter how high it is, you have to deal with other kinds of inequalities. And this is where the kind of strength of community labor coalitions comes in. So we look at a few cases, but we look in particular at the case of a green jobs ordinance, construction climate jobs ordinance in Seattle. And what you find is that community organizations having both sides of the equation, understanding the brass tacks of how construction jobs are assigned, but understanding the social side of discrimination and shutout access was key.
Marc Doussard:
And there, what you had was a third variable, coalition in a city where it had a lot of bites at the apple. So if the minimum wage is something that's kind of a miniature from federal policy, and we can just kind of imagine localizing it and everybody knows how it works, These climate jobs ordinances like you're seeing are experimental, and they require greater strength. So this is something where we found success to be sure in a way that you wouldn't have thought possible ten, twenty, certainly thirty years ago. But it's also definitely a more qualified kind of success just because the issue is that much thornier. And as we're gonna get into the other chapters in the book, this is a lot of the story.
Marc Doussard:
Certain kinds of inequalities are easier to organize on than others, although racial justice is a, tremendous asset in organizing all of them.
David B. Reynolds:
Yeah. And I I think this job access. Yeah. The the link to racial justice and the link to starting to think about what's going on with development in my city, in my region, and how do we get more from it than the vague promise of jobs that are gonna go to the white guys is important. I mean, you get in a little bit to the community benefits, agreement movement, which would try and get these binding agreements on big development projects that included job access, but might include other things like, you know, investments in a park, investments in community funds, living wage, etcetera.
David B. Reynolds:
And, even when these were modest, it seems that you're still really achieving something. And and I I I saw that, you know, we had a community benefits agreement in Detroit. The hospital that signed it wouldn't even call it that. They called it a a letter of agreement. But nevertheless, it was with a coalition of 21 community groups.
David B. Reynolds:
And in the process of doing that, the building trades were supportive and got into a conversation with these inner city Detroit groups. And, you know, that just cut through, you know, decades of tension between black Detroit and the building trades in the metro area. And so you you can't underestimate what's kind of going on behind the scenes in addition to winning that little formal thing that, you think about. We encountered this, you and I coauthored in igniting, justice and progressive power. We did a case study of Metro Denver, where there you have a group originally called the Frontline Economic Strategy Center that's grew out of activism by the local AFL CIO, and they get involved in this community benefits campaign that takes three years around the gates, rubber and development.
David B. Reynolds:
It all this time and resources. And then what happens? The economy collapse as the development didn't happen. You say, well, what do we achieve? Well, still, like, you know, it built the relationships.
David B. Reynolds:
And I think it built people's sense of horizon. Like, no, we don't we're not just fighting defensive battles. We can actually be proactive. What kind of city do we really wanna live in? What kind of economy do we really want?
David B. Reynolds:
And so it it wasn't surprising that today you have well, it's been renamed the, United for a New Economy, and it moved out to the suburbs. You still have all this activism going around a different model. They really had to evolve things. But nevertheless, this organizing, even when it was ultimately unsuccessful, led to something bigger, and more long term. So I wanna get into then the third case study because, you know, the minimum wage activism, the access to jobs is all about family supporting work.
David B. Reynolds:
But there's another part of family supporting work and that is actually having the time for your family. That's the third case study that you look at. So say say a bit more about that. And how kind of more from, the right to time off from being sick or vacations or getting into the issue of what control do I have over my work schedule?
Marc Doussard:
Yeah. This landed on my radar in a big way in the early days of the fight for fifteen. When I was involved in Chicago and spent a lot of time interviewing striking workers, why do you do this? What are your conditions on the job? And what was really striking was that even though the movement was called the fight for fifteen, it was named after hourly pay.
Marc Doussard:
Nobody started their grievances with low hourly pay. I mean, to be sure, the pay was too low. Everybody complained about schedules. And after in the wake of the great recession and with the introduction of scheduling software, the stories you heard were you know, they're almost Dickensian in their brutality. So there's someone who's in the book.
Marc Doussard:
She had, pretty harrowing to hear her describe it. She had a perfect schedule. She had two full time minimum wage jobs. And by working sixteen hours a day for hardly anything per hour, She could scrape together a living and, you know, for her kid who, by the way, she never got to see. And just to make sure to protect her windfall, this worker went to her boss on her day job and said, I have a night job.
Marc Doussard:
Please don't schedule me for nights. She was immediately scheduled to work nothing but nights, remarkably. So her employer scheduled her straight into a conflict, and she finally went back. She quit the second job. She went back to the boss, said, okay.
Marc Doussard:
I quit the second job, and she's never worked a night since. So this is terrifying in terms of so many different ways that it makes a mockery out of what people want for work. You know, first of all, contra the story you get about shirking or people who don't wanna work. This woman labeled more hours than I've ever worked in my life a perfect scenario. All she wanted was control over her time.
Marc Doussard:
She would happily fork over massive amounts of time, sixteen hours a day, in order to have some scheduling flexibility, and even that was denied to her just because. So when you talk to low wage workers, and this just scratches the surface, the typical response in a lot of low wage retail is if you get sick or if a kid gets sick or a parent gets sick because a lot of people are in multigenerational families, you just quit your job. You know you don't get days off, and you just quit your job and go start again somewhere else. Right? This way that the lives of working people, you know, you're often tap dancing on the head of a pen.
Marc Doussard:
There's been a range of policy models and movements to try to improve this. The two major efforts are paid time off, earned sick time legislation, which, some states now have as a result of this movement. And the other one is so called fair work week laws. Both of these get at the problem of how you reconcile work with life or what we just talked about as social reproduction in the book. They've been modestly successful, but what we found in the book is it's mostly because these legislative efforts have been riding the coattails of the minimum wage.
Marc Doussard:
Namely, anywhere where a coalition is powerful enough to win a minimum wage, it can come back for another bite at the apple and to do more. However, while you can kind of win the public's attention with the minimum wage, sick days are really hard. And in the book, we show that sometimes people represented it as a human dignity issue. Sometimes activists represented it as a child care issue. Sometimes, this will have a lot more traction after COVID.
Marc Doussard:
They represented it as a public health issue. You don't want me showing up at the job sick. So they couldn't ever really settle on a way to sell it, and we concluded in the book that this comes down to the kind of more invisible role of the feminized work that is behind needing to control your schedule. You know, everybody can picture Rosie the Riveter on the job and counting up the hours she works, but we don't have a very good picture of Rosie the Riveter at home or trying to balance her schedules or take care of a sick mother or something like that. So we talked about that in the book, and the same thing for so called fair work week laws.
Marc Doussard:
We're just there to to just to regulate the horrors that are visited on people with scheduling. You need to define, like, eight new legal categories. Right? So one thing workers talk about is the neologism of the clopin, which is when you close your retailer last thing at night and you're called back six hours later in the morning to work an opening shift. Clopin.
Marc Doussard:
Right? And why? Yeah. Basically, because your boss wants you to stay miserable is why people work clopins. So they have to come up with one way to regulate a clopin, and another to get advance notice of scheduling changes, and another for being sent home early.
Marc Doussard:
And what we concluded in the book is that in our masculinized society, our vocabulary for physical labor and paid work is stronger, more familiar, more intuitive sounding than our vocabulary for the feminized aspects that go to your work in the home. You know, we concluded modestly, I think, that this represents the current power of the movement to move legislation. But here, this is despite, I think, what you could consider a failure to win the battle of ideas, if you would.
David B. Reynolds:
And I think this hearkens back to these campaigns take resources and time. Because one of the things that that in my publishing is that the coalitions have these anchor organizations. Like, you know, for Chicago, it's the grassroots collaborative, it might be LA, the LA Alliance for New Economy, Atlanta, Georgia Stand Up, because it takes time to really define the problem and develop the policy that can address it. And as you're speaking to, some of these are more straightforward than others. And so it is this process, but what you're identifying is that there are these resources there at the grassroots level.
David B. Reynolds:
And as you mentioned before, more importantly, they are networks. So there's a national conversation going on about how do we do this work. Well, I think that with this issue, right, we're we're we're catching it in the middle of things. Right? That, things are are are evolving and developing.
David B. Reynolds:
Well, I I wanna, turn to the the last case study in your book, which concerns municipal budgets. So I think that's inevitable if you're talking about what do families need to thrive, then you're getting into municipal budgets because municipal budgets have not been going in positive directions for about a half century. Right? The the federal and state governments have been cutting aid to, to cities. Local governments have been been giving away the tax base, whether it's through the big public stadium that, you know, you throw an ungodly amount of money at or, these kind of more secretive things like these tax increment finance districts where we draw a line around the neighborhood.
David B. Reynolds:
No. All new development that raises property values in that neighborhood will stay in there and not get shared for the general coffers of the cities. And as the black lives ladder movement made public headlines with their call to defund the police, which is easily misunderstood, but it's pointing to a reality that for decades, we have been taking money out of social spending and putting it into police and prison spending. Right? So they're raising a very key question that in your, chapter on this, you look at how people have begun raising important questions about, oh, hey.
David B. Reynolds:
Wait a minute. Time out. Are we really using our public funds the best way we can?
Marc Doussard:
Yeah. So I don't wanna speak for Greg, although that is what I'm doing here, but this was my favorite chapter in the book by a mile. And the reason why, it's because this makes me the most hopeful. I thought forever that austerity was basically this inviolable rule of urban politics and that no amount of starving people and cutting off your nose to spite your face could bring sense. And what we found in the book is that a vision of racial justice, organizations putting their money where their mouth is with hiring female organizers, organizers of color, and so on, played this absolutely crucial role in getting traction on austerity.
Marc Doussard:
And there's a few examples of how it does this. One example would be tax increment financing. And, David, you gave about as simple an explanation of TIF as I've ever heard. But TIF destroys urban budgets. It basically creates a parallel budget for, wealthy neighborhoods and for services that, white folks who don't wanna send their kids to public schools use, essentially.
Marc Doussard:
It's really destructive. The problem is it's through an an equalized assessed value increment earned over time, but not inflation adjusted, consigned to a special district for particular aldermanic uses for twenty three years under circumstances of blight, but also renewable. Nobody could organize around this. It's it's nonsense coming out of my mouth. It's like, you know, listeners might have clicked off just in the middle of hearing this.
Marc Doussard:
And for a long time, community organizations in Chicago, in particular, tried to educate people on TIF. I once rather disastrously gave a lecture in Spanish on the economic theory behind TIF. Nobody was having it, and you can't blame them. As someone in the book reflected, we presented too many PowerPoints with these multidimensional graphs trying to explain what TIF does to your budget. And then what they discovered, this and this would be in particular in Chicago grassroots collaborative said, you know, the effect of TIF is racist.
Marc Doussard:
It transfers revenues from communities of color to gentrified neighborhoods that those communities are locked out of. We're just gonna start describing TIF as racist. As soon as they did that, the penny dropped. And this is an important lesson for finance because the things that go on in finance can be so Byzantine, like the bespoke arrangements that go over Chicago privatizing the parking meters, the Detroit bankruptcy and the state's attempt to privatize the water system there. You're talking about swaps and sweeps, and you need to really like to know, arcane financial argument.
Marc Doussard:
And so community organizations discovered, you know, we can just say that this is racist just like Wall Street's racist, just like, high ATM fees are racist when the only bank in your neighborhood is an ATM. And once Grassroots Collaborative and other organizations started describing TIF as racist, people didn't need to understand the details of the system as much because this accorded with their lived experience. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Of course, people in Lincoln Park keep more money for themselves, and, of course, neighborhoods on the South And West Side are starved, same as it ever was.
Marc Doussard:
So in the case of TIF, this culminated in a successful lawsuit that stopped hundreds of millions of dollars of city subsidies for, planned redevelopment and a very well located part of the North Side on the grounds that it was racist. And calling TIF racist brought the city back to the table and inaugurated after twenty plus years of demands, TIF reforms, including some kind of community input. That's a first example. There's two more very small ones that I just wanna say are very vivid. Another was a seniors organization in Chicago that learned that by adding a racial equity analysis to looking at funding for, home health and nursing services for seniors, learned that they could broaden their coalition and that they could analyze the issue better.
Marc Doussard:
So, before, they said these services are underserved. And now, they say they're racist, and they're racist because they're they're services for communities of color, with workers of color. And, of course, those services are underfunded, and they got traction in Springfield after years of not doing it. And I think, finally, if you look at the Chicago Teachers Union and red for ed, and I I do apologize for my examples being so Chicago centric. The Chicago Teachers Union, in advance of rolling over several mayors to win kind of unthinkable amounts unthinkable in The US amounts of, resources for primary education.
Marc Doussard:
The report that inaugurated this declared the city to have a state of educational apartheid. That's not very subtle, but segregation and racism are very subtle, and it's very much to the point. This convenes bigger coalitions. It simplifies issues. And I think it gives you a kind of legal threat around systemic racism.
Marc Doussard:
So I love this chapter because you're starting to see austerity be contested in meaningful rather than symbolic ways. And racial justice in particular plays a driving role.
David B. Reynolds:
Yeah. I mean, I've seen this in, the community benefit organizing, both in Detroit, my own little town of Ypsilanti nearby, that people get the idea where you say, well, is this development really gonna fit the neighborhoods? I mean, you they at a gut level, people get, yes. Resource look look at one neighborhood looks one way, and other neighborhoods look the other. And what's going on?
David B. Reynolds:
Right? And it's defining it that way, you know, makes it very obvious to people, like, right. That's the that's the effect. I I would also say that, in doing, igniting justice, we came across several cases in San Jose and in San Diego. We're also raising the question of local democracy and budgets.
David B. Reynolds:
Right? Like, shouldn't people be able to get together and look at numbers are, how much money, the city has, and where it's going. And, actually, you can do that. And in both cases, that's what these coalitions have done. They've had an organized process of getting people together, examining the budget so they understand the numbers, and then starting to talk about what are what are needs and how does that match up to what is actually happening and can lead to some very meaningful change.
David B. Reynolds:
One of the things that'll pop out is how much the local government spends on policing versus other, things. Right? That immediately always always strikes people. What what I wanna do now is step back from these these case studies because I think, you make a very good point. Right?
David B. Reynolds:
That a lot of the classic studies of urban politics is one city at a time. Right? That a case. And what you've done through these cases, if you looked at across the country and now four different kind of policy areas, and that allows you to really kind of highlight some things about what's happening, what's exciting about what's happening today. And you talk about the three p's, which I think is a very as an organizer can be a very helpful tool.
David B. Reynolds:
And those are policy, politics, and problems. And policy, I think you can get your head around. You know, it's it's it's developing the, actual change that you want enacted that using the powers of local government. And, one of the discoveries I think, was of this movement was that local governments have a lot more powers than we give them credit for. And then if you understand them, you can actually make meaningful change.
David B. Reynolds:
There's a politics which I'll talk about in a bit, but I wanted to talk about this problem, which is really kind of the starting point. Right? That that that that this is how change happens. The first step is to define the problem in a way that you can do something about it. You know, I think of, you know, when politicians are running for office and always talking about jobs.
David B. Reynolds:
Right? But what a lot of these movements that we're talking about did is good family supporting jobs. Right? And that's the problem. Right?
David B. Reynolds:
So talk about this. This is crucial first step in in defining the problem. How folks have been able to do it and how this can be a struggle.
Marc Doussard:
Yeah. So we owe a debt here to the, a a kind of classic book of political science by John Kingdon. And the idea is simply that the political system has, what we would call today limited bandwidth. Controlling problems, what Kingdon calls the problem stream, is your surest way to relevance because you're defining which issues politicians have to consider. And, you know, part of the development of these movements has been to change the way we talk about things.
Marc Doussard:
So the problem of tax increment financing used to be an arbitrary and unenforceable definition of blight, which wasn't gonna move to the top of anybody's queue. And now the problem's racism. People are like, okay. We better deal with that. Similarly, with the minimum wage, I remember the early days of local organizing around this.
Marc Doussard:
I think the labor movement may basically spend its time apologizing. Well, we don't think anybody will lose their jobs. Businesses can bear the increase. Nobody was talking about the problem of our economy creating jobs that make a mockery of what you work for. And so there's been this shift in how community and labor coalitions define problems.
Marc Doussard:
A lot of that is centering the racial equity portion of their analysis. So this is it's not window dressing. It helps them define problems in terms that match the lived experience of people in cities. But what we document in the book is basically, it's a lot easier to control what your city council cares about than to control what the federal government does. And if you think about it this way, the old saw that if you wanna do something about the economy, do it federally, not locally, in some ways, it has it backwards.
Marc Doussard:
Because to get something done federally, what, everybody knows how big the filibuster is, how our system's gerrymandered to protect rural states, and so on. You don't need a lot to set the agenda and define the problems at city hall, though. And this is a major element of the book, and I think a major reason of why regional power building works. A lot of cities have city councils of 10 to 12, older people. In Denver, really, everybody knows there's one older woman.
Marc Doussard:
You get her on your side, you can make something an issue. This is a lot nicer than Congress where it really often doesn't matter who your congressperson is. Community organizations, if you work with them, most of them have, ins and deep working relationships with the city and with, elected officials. And, you know, finally, go on Univision or go on the local news or, go in your local, black newspaper or, if all else fails, go march around city hall. It's really easy to set the agenda in cities.
Marc Doussard:
So the problem stream is the one we talk about the most. And then, of course, that plays out in different ways. Right? And part of what we talk about is that defining the problem of nobody earning enough at work is pretty easy because I don't think I'm giving away anything when I say nobody feels like they're paid enough. Whereas defining the problem with sick days or paid time off or fair work weeks gets tougher.
Marc Doussard:
So this is kind of a basic dimension of power, and reworking advocacy to the urban scale puts activists in such a better position to define the problems that politicians have to focus on.
David B. Reynolds:
And I think this is just a story it's almost impossible to appreciate enough. That this is where your capacity is and where you really only need to know two or three people in a city to get something on the agenda. It's it's a remarkable amount of power. And and like you said, sometimes this can be fairly straightforward. Like, you know, in our living wage campaign here in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, you know, yes, you get your sympathetic reporter and have them interview the parking lot attendant at the city owned parking structures and talk about how their wages, fell when the work was privatized.
David B. Reynolds:
You know, you you get it. However, some like you said, it can also take a lot of work. And so one of the things that that in in my writing that we're focused on and the the partnership of working families network or these anchor of nonprofits, these think and act tanks. And the the thinking part is is kind of what we're talking about, which is how do you define the problem? So for example, you know, twenty plus years ago when Working Partnerships USA was getting started in Silicon Valley, they did a report called growing together or drifting apart.
David B. Reynolds:
And this was at a time when the national press was heralding Silicon Valley is this miracle economy of the future and the knowledge economy, and this is what America needs to be and blah blah blah. And, what this report showed was that this was half the story, but the other half of the story was this explosion of low wage service jobs that among other things, half of the workforce of Silicon Valley could not afford to live in Silicon Valley. And so it it it created the problem. Right? And the problem was prosperity wasn't being shared.
David B. Reynolds:
And, a few years ago, we actually used this we stole their title. We did the same thing, in what here in Washtenaw County in Ann Arbor because it's the same thing. It's like, oh, Ann Arbor is prosperous. We're one of the highest per capita incomes in Michigan. Oh, but half of the jobs are poverty wage jobs that are getting cranked out by our economy.
David B. Reynolds:
So this also does take some deliberate effort. I do wanna say a bit more about effort because especially in the wage organizing, you make a very important point of how it may start as a very resource intensive knock down drag out battle. But because this stuff is networked and it's not just happening in your city or area, the ease can change over time. So say some more about that.
Marc Doussard:
I think this is a vital thing that can change the way we think about what's possible and what kinds of policies are worth trying
David B. Reynolds:
to move.
Marc Doussard:
So we talked earlier about the Acorn Living Wage Resource Center. You know, that circulated model legislation, but it also circulated a remarkably well built out national infrastructure for these kinds of things. Around the minimum wage, if you were to look at, for example, whenever we do get to a solution for making a I know it when I see it problem out of just in time work schedules and, paid days off, it'll be through two organizations called A Better Balance and nine to five, which are think and do tanks for the nation, right, that organize these local campaigns, provide legislation, legislation, help people, and then they help people learn from their experiences, which is crucial. So the minimum wage, you went from the first local minimum wage of $15 in The US was in SeaTac, Washington. It's a city of 40,000, basically a box drawn around the airport there.
Marc Doussard:
That campaign was in no way sustainable if you took it on its own terms. Basically, the organizers, as far as I can tell, knocked on literally every door in the town because this was gonna be done via a ballot initiative. So they needed everybody to turn out. Hundreds of organizers took part. It built on a decade plus of kind of deep spade work, you might call it, by unions and community organizations.
Marc Doussard:
And you would think looking at this, well, this is no kind of model. We did all that to raise the minimum wage to 15 for a municipality of 40,000 people. And yet that both derisked the idea and worked out some better techniques. So the campaign moved up the highway to Seattle, and there, the organizers found a way to get to scale. They said, well, we obviously can't knock on every door in Seattle, but there's a mayoral campaign.
Marc Doussard:
We're gonna organize the mayoral campaign. So they knew that there was a democratic socialist of America, City Councilwoman, who in the way of democratic socialists, monopolized the attention of the local press. They got her to champion the issue. And then they started organizing mayoral town halls. So just within the space, these happened, you know, you could drive from one campaign to the other in a half hour.
Marc Doussard:
And just in the space of a few months difference between these two, you went from a knockout drag out effort to something where they figured out how to mobilize the mayors. And both mayoral candidates in Seattle, by the end of this election, were fighting with each other over who embraced the $15 minimum wage more. And then finally, when you move to Chicago, there wasn't even really a sustained campaign. The activist passed a symbolic ordinance with no teeth in the local elections to show that, most Chicagoans would like a $15 minimum wage. And then they convene one of these blue ribbon working groups, such as it were, which, normally, that's the kiss of death.
Marc Doussard:
That's where an issue goes to die. But then they showed up, and they organized the working group, and it became standard. And if you fast forward a few years when Illinois achieved the democratic trifecta, and they were gonna move on the minimum wage, I was brought to Springfield to testify. I testified to a committee. They said, well, we'll call you back for the for the actual bill.
Marc Doussard:
They never did. They didn't need to. Nobody was even fighting the issue at that point. The network infrastructure is so good at disseminating techniques for how to organize, how to message, where to look for political opportunities. And this is a remarkable thing we've seen kind of play out over and over.
Marc Doussard:
And I guess I go into this amount of detail because I think the details are kind of cool, but also because it's pretty humble to recognize that you can set up a national network that is going to move policy around US cities so capably.
David B. Reynolds:
Yeah. And then and I think you do a great job of highlighting this. And, again, you know, it it doesn't show up in the evening news. It's it's the background story, but it's a crucial, I think background story. I do wanna touch on the first couple parts of your book, and one of which is highlighting that whole network that's really kind of developed.
David B. Reynolds:
But also what this said points to is that we are living in a new era, when it comes to cities. And and I discovered this when I wrote a a new new deal, which is that that, you know, there's so much focus at all. The global economy and everything seems outside of our control and national governments even have less control. Why would you think locally? But the regional power building movement that first began in California, I think took ideas from the business community and their thinking, which was that no.
David B. Reynolds:
In the global economy, the operating element is the region. Right? The the metropolitan urban area. And then that's how economic activity organizes itself and moves around and and so forth. And so you're kinda telling a parallel story where, you know, in in the late twentieth century, the, a lot of urban scholars and also practical activists on the ground would say, well, it's all over.
David B. Reynolds:
Cities are falling apart. We can't get anything. But that's not what cities are in 2023. So, give a plug for, for urban activism.
Marc Doussard:
I think it's pretty simple, and it accords with, most people's lived experience today. Forty, fifty years ago, I think the idea was that cities needed capital more than capital needed cities, and the future of investment was suburbs and somewhere else. And what we've seen for twenty five years now is, I think, that balance of power. It's not the same everywhere. I'm aware that you're near Detroit, but it's altered.
Marc Doussard:
And now there's another book with a tremendous title, which is The City is the Factory. And the argument is simply that the city is the factory of twenty first century capitalism. And that's because corporations, business needs an urban location to coordinate these very complex bespoke tasks to put together a labor market with the depth to find the kind of specialist it needs. A lot of my books about Chicago, everybody who doesn't like Chicago and Illinois makes hay over the falling population. It's true the population of Chicago is falling in the aggregate based on thinning out from the very far South Side what's essentially already a suburb.
Marc Doussard:
Everywhere around the loop, you know, it's the, and the North Side Lakefront, the opposite's the case. You cannot pack in people soon enough. The Central part of cities is so important in the contemporary economy. And this just means leverage that urban activists never used to have. A ball bearing factory could say, could make a credible threat.
Marc Doussard:
You know, we don't like the wages you want us to pay. We're gonna move. A hotel's not doing that. A casino's not doing that. Restaurants, laundries are not doing that.
Marc Doussard:
And that the economic base of cities today is based on firms who benefit from having affluent citizens and who, even if they don't, can rarely execute a credible threat to leave. And that means that cities can pick their heads up and say, I think we can pass the minimum wage now because everybody who would flee a higher minimum wage has, let's be honest, already moved offshore. So it's a grim story from that point of view, but in the aggregate, it means that there is leverage for place based policy. And it's what you found in a new new deal, and, you know, the region is the kind of container for these things for geographers. But the central coordinating unit in the region is the city, and the center of the city is the central business district.
Marc Doussard:
And building out from those things, I think, leverage abounds for people who want more equity.
David B. Reynolds:
Yeah. And I I think, you know, Detroit for decades being a poster child for urban disinvestment. And yet today, if you go to Detroit, certainly the downtown and that area going up north, it's a very different story. And so it's about how do you leverage this to benefit all Detroiters.
Marc Doussard:
Not to pick on Michigan, David, but I think in the book we said, even Detroit has pockets of, gentrification and rising investment.
David B. Reynolds:
That's right. Yeah. And there was a foundational document that people put together in the early two thousands called the hidden power of cities, which made this argument and identified the very concrete powers that cities have. In igniting justice, we got the authors to update it, and they renamed it why cities matter, but it's the same thing. There there's concrete stuff you can do.
David B. Reynolds:
It's not going to bring the revolution and completely solve all problems, but you're gonna solve some problems and lead to some change and that's gonna get people thinking. What else more can we do? I do wanna just put in a plug very briefly why the book is titled The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions. We've we've already talked on that a little bit, especially in terms of budgets and how you define the problem of budgets. But I wanna give you an opportunity to talk more about that because I've seen this in the groups that I study where very deliberate twenty years ago, you know, you peep who are the the heads of these thinking act tanks?
David B. Reynolds:
They were largely white, often women. But you could see over time, this very deliberate, the staff, who they're hiring as staff, and then who's going up the chain. And today, this is a woman of color led movement, in terms of the the partnership for working families, which by the way, if you folks Google that, they need to Google power switch. They changed their name just as our book was coming to print. You know, very clearly, this racial lens has become, I think, you know, very state of the art and very important.
David B. Reynolds:
So I just want you to say a little bit more about it.
Marc Doussard:
Yeah. I mean, I think the important thing, and you really touched on it well, it's not just window dressing. You know? It's not just we're gonna talk about what are economic justice concerns and add a kinda racial justice code of paint to it. It's at every level.
Marc Doussard:
It's through shared resources and practices between unions and community organizations, and a lot of this is the latter day fruits of the living wage movement. It's exactly what you said. Right? I think for for better, the world is is passing by people who look like, well, me and you, David. You know, to to get hired doing organizing, you'd, better speak a language beyond English.
Marc Doussard:
And the movement organizations have been very intentional about elevating women and people of color into leadership. And you look around, the change is really striking. And this does a lot of things. Right? It it adds to your kind of legitimacy in the community and your strength as an organization.
Marc Doussard:
Centering racial justice also, I think, makes movements smarter. One very good example from the book comes from Denver, where there was a fiscal justice organization for the state of Colorado. And that organization had been trying to raise revenue forever. Colorado has a fairly regressive tax code. In the mid to mid twenty tens, this organization started doing outreach to, community organizations representing communities of color in Denver.
Marc Doussard:
And they learned very quickly that these communities that they had assumed to be their fellow travelers on raising revenue were not in any way on the same page. So what happened is upon talking to these organizations, the fiscal justice activists found out that if you're from Northeast Denver, that raising taxes didn't look good to you because, all that tax revenue was gonna go somewhere else. And under Colorado's regressive tax code, you were gonna pay more of the cost. So doing that outreach helped the organization understand that we can't just assume a broad and diverse racial coalition and that we have to take regressivity more seriously over increasing revenue. We have to reinvent the way we talk.
Marc Doussard:
We have to work in legitimate partnership. But what really made this work, of course, is they committed to do all those things. Seeing the world through the lens of racial injustice makes you smarter, but you don't do anything with it. You haven't gained anything. But the organization acted to the point where when the CARES Act came down early in the pandemic, they were able to mobilize this expanded coalition that had been expanded by centering racial justice to, basically sneak through an expanded earned income tax credit for Colorado permanently.
Marc Doussard:
Really simple thing. Right? There's a lot of steps there, but centering racial justice made organizations reflect on what they did, talk differently, think differently, network differently, and they finally got the result they'd wanted all along, which was, of course, going to now very directly benefit those communities of color. So we say a lot of it in the book, but the message I wanna emphasize is that there's a lot of current academic work about racial capitalism that's kind of normative. It says, racial capitalism's a problem.
Marc Doussard:
We need to do something about it. And if you wanna think about what justice at work does, I think it shows the community organizations and unions got there way before scholars and pop discourse did, and that they have been putting a racial capital analysis into practice. And the things that you might not think of is the fruits of racial justice, like the fight for 15, are very directly the fruits of that. And I think every time people, you know, some well intentioned people stop and they think, does talking about race just bring backlash? For sure it brings backlash, but backlash is in plentiful supply.
Marc Doussard:
And what this book, we would like to think, does, it shows the tremendous tangible and practical benefits to thinking about economic and racial justice as, of course, the very same justice.
David B. Reynolds:
Yeah. Exactly. Well, I wanna circle back to where we started, which was the hope for change in America, by bringing in this last p that you talked about, and that's the politics. Now in the book, what you're doing is often talking about politics in terms of the insider outsider game. Right?
David B. Reynolds:
The insider lobbying for what policy you want, and then organizing kind of the street heat from the outside. But there's the more narrow form of politics, which is electoral politics, which in some ways you don't talk a whole lot about, although it's there. In some ways, the connection is indirect because a lot of the coalitions, their anchor organizations are five zero one c threes that by law cannot engage in the partisan politics. They can, however, engage in civic education and getting people out to vote. But I I did.
David B. Reynolds:
There clearly is a connection. And to be very timely, just recently, Brandon Johnson was elected as mayor of Chicago. Right? A a teacher activist. Someone that you would say, well, he doesn't have a chance ten years ago becoming mayor of Chicago.
David B. Reynolds:
So this may have surprised many, but I bet you were not surprised given all the stuff that you studied to what had been happening in Chicago with the Racial and Economic Justice Coalition. So, talk about that.
Marc Doussard:
It's remarkable. I was fairly confident. Everybody I knew was fairly confident that, Brandon Johnson was gonna win that election. And I think the reasons why are easy to see. And if I were to say something provocative, it would be that I don't think that twenty years of people obsessively reading five thirty eight and keeping track of who's gonna win the senate election in Arizona and kind of focusing on the minute details of electoral politics.
Marc Doussard:
I don't think that's made us smarter about how to affect political change. I'd say the opposite. It's made us a lot dumber, or it's focused our attention in the wrong places. Where Brandon Johnson came from was the Chicago Teachers Union and the Chicago Teachers Union committing to rebuilding itself from the ground up. In the book, we talk about it's a very memorable quote.
Marc Doussard:
The first, this organizer, the first time she met the Chicago Teachers Union, she said something like, we came into the school, and these people walked in in fur coats. I said, who's that? They're like, that's the Chicago Teachers Union. It was not a good union. Right?
Marc Doussard:
It was, people who saw the union as their ticket to for Coats. The commitment to rebuild that union, to organizing in a basic way was in some ways stepping away from electoral politics. At the time this was happening, Rahm Emanuel had just taken over as mayor of Chicago. The independent older people were not many. And, you know, Rahm Emanuel, not for nothing, he started out by he was really excited about closing libraries, like, really wanted to close libraries, which is not well, says what you will about your priorities.
Marc Doussard:
Then he wanted to close public housing, then he wanted to close schools, and you got the idea. And this was grim stuff. And I think what's simple to say is that controlling politics happened not by setting out to control electoral politics, but rather, in large part, by deliberately reallocating attention and resources away from that, from understanding that dropping everything for the next aldermanic election is probably a fool's errand, and we need to build a more sustainable form of power. And that's what this kind of organizing did. So if you fast forward to the Chicago of today, a former CTU member and, organizer is the mayor.
Marc Doussard:
I am having trouble, if I'm being honest, counting how many I forget how many democratic socialists are on the city council, but I believe I need more than one hand to count them. The progressive block of Alderman, which was, one out of 50 when I moved to Chicago in the nineties, is now over 20. This didn't happen by, you know, obsessively looking at poll results. This happened by embracing this more sustainable, durable, nutritious, if you would, form of power grounded in, the spade work of, growing things from a healthier soil. I'll stop there before I get into more metaphors, but electoral politics, I think, is an artifact of the other things that are more justified in monopolizing an activist organization's attention.
David B. Reynolds:
Yeah. In in a new new deal, Amy Dean and I made a pitch to the labor movement saying, look, you guys are spending a mountain of money when it comes to election season on elections. And while that's all well and good, you might wanna think about having some of that go into this more long term regional power building because ultimately, in the long run, you get a lot more bang for your buck. And in, promoting the paperback edition of Igniting Justice, you know, and I make a plug for the last election. There were two two notable things in the last election.
David B. Reynolds:
One was Arizona elected, Democratic governor and some other statewide offices, and the reelection or the, you know, the the maintenance of two Democratic senators from Georgia. And both of those were connected to long term grassroots organizing. In the case of Arizona, I did a case study on it's called Central Arizonans for a Sustainable Economy and their evolution. And what they ended up was being part of a broad statewide coalition to really mobilize Latino and other low voting populations to become part of the electorate. And that really is a story of why all of a sudden you're seeing Democrats able to start winning statewide offices in Arizona.
David B. Reynolds:
And in Georgia, another case study in the book is of Georgia stand up, in Metro Atlanta, which has been organizing for, you know, fifteen, twenty years now. And one of their campaigns in, before the twenty twenty election was a transit campaign, because what's happening is Atlanta is gentrifying. Poor folks are getting thrown out into the suburbs where there is very little or haphazard connection, for public transportation. So this was a millage to raise more funds for regional transportation, so it was actually regional transportation. And, this led to a lot of door knocking and really going into kinda low income suburban black communities and getting people who were alienated from voting to vote.
David B. Reynolds:
Right? And the millage passed and that then carries forward. It's now easier to say, well, okay, you need to keep voting because now we can have this, you know, black, senate. So, the very is a a a a connection, but it's not gonna be identified in the evening news. Well, I just wanted to wrap up with placing this book in the forward looking twenty first century issues.
David B. Reynolds:
You know, what we Amy called our book a new new deal, referencing the historic new deal. And we mentioned in there that the historic new deal didn't just pop out of the minds of Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats in the midst of the great depression. You can look and trace several decades of grassroots organizing that were fighting for minimum wages and banning child labor and the forty hour workweek and all these things. And sometimes they were successful, sometimes the court struck them down, but it created the the context and the pressure that when this economic crisis hit, all of a sudden these ideas were out there and could actually be actualized. I think it's important for people to think about that today.
David B. Reynolds:
And, you know, we think of, a green new deal, which the Sunrise Movement and other activists succeeded in kind of putting before the national stage. And now what they're doing, the Sunrise Movement itself is actually now trying to sync roots in the local level. So you may not hear them from the news, but there's a lot of organizing going on. And I I so I wanted to wrap up because you mentioned that where is this movement heading. Right?
David B. Reynolds:
And we we look at the issue of climate change and we say, wow. This see. I I haven't heard about the great new deal anymore. What happened to it? No one's doing anything.
David B. Reynolds:
And you if you wanna get depressed, it's a very easy topic to get depressed around. Yet, in preparation for our conversation, I went to the PowerSwitch website, and you can see that they're talking about addressing corporate utilities and the rates they're charging and and combining this racial justice of rates with the climate impact. And then also the fact that guess whose communities are gonna be the worst hit and the the earliest hit as things get worse, it's, the communities of color because they're the ones that get shoved on the marginal land that's in the flood plain, etcetera. So all of a sudden sudden, you're seeing once again, right, big global issue, but we look at what's going on locally and, ah, look at that. People are starting to, you know, make plan.
Marc Doussard:
I guess maybe I like to protect myself from disappointment. So I never read too much about the Green New Deal just because I was fairly certain where it was headed, which is where it ended up. But the job of something like that in the near term is to move the goalposts. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. But what I know is that if you were to look at the local and the state level, the number of piggyback ordinances on this form of power is almost too big to count right now.
Marc Doussard:
We have, you know, something I we could have talked more about in the book. Universal pre k pilots are everywhere, and modestly funded programs, right, to just make childcare a public good or getting off the ground. Here in Illinois, the state passed so there's no Green New Deal, but the state passed something called the Climate Equity Jobs Act, which is a fairly ambitious piece of state level, green jobs legislation. And I think most remarkably, if you were to look around at what's happening with the, ARPA or the American Rescue Plan, we are seeing this kind of policy develop and be circulated and tested at a scale that's almost too big to imagine. So if you look at what some of the ARPA pilots are trying, it's, you know, pardon me for sounding my age.
Marc Doussard:
It's wild. Right? Like, Chicago and Toledo are experimenting with pilots to buy people out of their medical debt. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a basic income trial or a new affordable housing program or baby bonds or some kind of cash program. So some of these things come directly out of the coalitions we have.
Marc Doussard:
Some of them don't. Right? Some of these are kind of wonky ideas that were turbocharged with all the ARPA cash. But what I know is that these ideas are out there in cities now, and the programs are going out. They're creating beneficiaries and constituencies.
Marc Doussard:
And what seems certain is that the infrastructure of economic and racial justice coalitions and then the kind of national learning infrastructure that knits them together is your best bet for how these ideas are going to continue to extend and disseminate and broaden and move from kind of novel programs to, taken for granted policies. Right? Much like Social Security, which I have to remind everybody, used to be an insane idea that was gonna bankrupt the entire planet, but, of course, it wasn't. And these are the kinds of coalitions, and this is the kind of organizing that's gonna make it happen. So I do think that we think a little too much about things like the Green New Deal.
Marc Doussard:
Because if you look at where this coalition is gonna get that traction, it's through, something that looks like the old New Deal, which is a commitment to funneling hundreds of billions of dollars through cities where these kinds of reenergized coalitions are gonna take it up. So, you know, David, you and I have, I don't not sure if it's an antiquated or, an anticipatory professional commitment to optimism, but it's there. And this is one of those things where I think if you look at what's happening in cities right now, that's a surer guide to where things are headed than whatever is getting eaten by the filibuster. And maybe I'll leave that there.
David B. Reynolds:
Well, Mark, it's been a pleasure having this conversation with you and and and reading the book. I hope people get it and, as well as igniting justice. It's it's it's rich, it's timely. And, I think by being exposed to these kind of things, folks can share our carefully qualified, but nevertheless, their optimism, that there is hope for our our nation in the future. So, take care, Mark.
Marc Doussard:
Take care. It's been great. This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Justice at Work, The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.