New Directions in the Study of Labor

Panelists

William Darwall is a PhD candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at Berkeley Law working on social, political, and legal theory of work, the workplace, and its management. Will’s dissertation employs a critical historical account of the emergence and ongoing development of the science of management to reframe and reconstruct normative debates over the legitimacy and appropriate legal regulation of workplace hierarchy, authority, and control. Special attention, here, is paid to the present and future of techniques and technologies of workplace management, as the workplace as we know it dissipates, if not disappears. Prior to graduate work, Will co-founded and managed a worker-cooperative cafe and bar in Philadelphia, PA.

Kristy Kim, a PhD Candidate in the UC Berkeley Department of Economics, researches issues at the intersection of public and behavioral economics. Her job market paper studies how changes in retirement benefits affect labor supply and workforce composition. Her other research focuses on the distributional impacts on tax-preferred property inheritances and behavioral welfare measures.

 

Vera Parra, a PhD Student in the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, interested in labor history, political economy, and organizing in the 21st century. She is researching the recent history of auto industry organizing drives, both in the US and Mexico. She is interested in examining how green industrial policy– in particular the transition to EVs and attempts to secure a North American supply chain– shape organizing conditions on both sides of the border.

 

John Logan (moderator) is Professor and Director of Labor Studies at San Francisco State University and a Visiting Scholar at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. He is an expert on the anti-union industry and anti-union legislation in the U.S., and comparative labor issues, particularly how multinational companies treat employees and unions differently in the U.S. compared to European countries.

 

Podcast and Transcript

Listen to the presentation as a podcast below or on Apple Podcasts.

 

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MARION FOURCADE: Hello, everyone. My name is Marion Fourcade. I’m the Director of Social Science Matrix. And it’s such a great pleasure to welcome you to this panel on the New Directions in the Study of Labor. Matrix organizes New Directions panels twice a year. These are panels where the presenters are exclusively graduate students. And so for us, it’s very special.

And I’m very excited today because our panelists will explore the dynamics of work management and labor organization. And as is common with all our Matrix panels, they come from different departments, jurisprudence and social policy, economics, and sociology. So you have a wide range of approaches to this topic.

This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, the UC Berkeley Labor Center, and the Berkeley Law Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy. Before I introduce our moderator, let me just say a few upcoming events. This is a busy week at Matrix. This is the last week of the semester, but it is busy.

This panel today. Tomorrow, we have an Author Meets Critics panel. A book by my brand new colleague, Stephanie Canizales. And then actually my own book talk on Friday. This is an event that’s co-sponsored by Matrix but organized by BESI. So I actually did not schedule myself for this.

Anyway, let me now introduce John Logan, who is our moderator for today’s event. John is Professor and Director of Labor Studies at San Francisco State University and a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. He is an expert on the anti-union industry and anti-union legislation in the US, on comparative labor issues, and particularly on how multinational companies treat employees and unions differently in the US compared to European countries. And so John will now introduce our panelists, and thank you all for being here, and I very much look forward to this.

JOHN LOGAN: Thank you all for coming. I will just briefly introduce the panelists who are all going to speak for about 15 minutes, and then we should have at least half an hour or slightly over for questions, and comments, and discussion.

I mean, we have a great panel to discuss new directions in labor history. As we just heard, people from three separate social science disciplines, from economics, from sociology, and from jurisprudence, law. I’m actually from history background originally. I never taught in the history– My first job was an industrial relations department at London School of Economics, and I taught comparative labor. And then I was Director of the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

But I mean, it’s appropriate, I think, to have these sort of multidisciplinary conversations when talking about new directions in the study of labor and I think new directions in the labor movement more broadly because, I mean, the two, depending on your discipline, are very closely connected often.

And the disciplines represented today, I mean, sociology for several years now has had the largest sort of labor contingent within academic disciplines. I don’t know how many hundreds of members are in the labor group at the ASA, but that’s where a lot of the scholarship has come out.

I mean, economics is obviously the labor economists, people like John R. Commons and Selig Perlman were the people who founded industrial relations and sort of labor scholarship as an academic discipline in the US. And economists have been sort of central to academic debates over labor ever since then. Even although I’m not an economist, I spent most of my academic life around economists.

And law and jurisprudence too. I mean, when I started graduate school over 25 years ago, it was the sort of critical legal studies scholarship. People like Karl Klare, and Mark Barenberg, and Kathy Stone, this sort of influenced my own work originally. And now Berkeley has become very much a sort of center for the study of labor law with Catherine Fisk and others who are now at Berkeley Law.

So are we going in this direction? Yes. So I apologize for the longwinded. First is Will Darwell, who’s a PhD candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at Berkeley Law. And his research is on the politics and political economy, past, present and future regimes of workplace management, broadly defined.

WILLIAM DARWELL: Yeah. Thanks, everybody, for coming. Thanks so much, Ambrosia and Marion, for organizing and John for moderating. and yeah, showing up after Thanksgiving on an academic calendar is really something. So I’m glad to see more faces in the room than I expected, to be honest.

So yeah. I guess sort of in that spirit of interdisciplinarity that John mentioned, I thought that what I would use my time today to present is almost something like a method section for my dissertation. So I come from a philosophy background but do moral, political, and legal theory of work and the workplace. Particular, workplace management is what I’m most focused on.

But yeah. Since we’re coming from different disciplinary backgrounds, I thought it might make sense to just open the hood a little bit on how I approach that as a legal theorist. So the broadest way of talking about what I try to do is try to identify what’s fundamentally political about work, the workplace and its management.

So there’s been a sort of a really, really large and cresting tide of new scholarship and normative theories of political economy, of moral economy, and the workplace and workplace justice. In general, in my view though, that literature tends to conceive of the nature of doing political theory of work in terms of the normatively salient effects of institutions of work in the workplace and workplace management.

And the main conceptual intervention that I’m trying to make is to give an account really of what sort of constitutively political about work. The practices through which we work, the spaces in which we work, which is a slice of a broader question about what’s political about the economy in general.

So just some sort brief overview of the way that literature slices up sort of potentially normatively concerning effects of workplace management. Some are distributional, some account of unjust appropriation of the benefits of labor. Fruits of labor, some economic surplus to which the answer is some kind of regime of ameliorated, either pre or redistribution.

Other sort of like dignitary effects like vulnerability to demeaning working conditions, which are supposed to be protected against by the implementation of the right kinds of regulatory guardrails. Others are accounts of ways in which people are allowed to express their equal moral agency as working people, which is supposed to be protected by some set of fundamental rights of workers.

Others are about autonomy, concerns, ways in which the way that work is distributed, and structured, and managed might interfere with people’s ability to realize the sort of rational plan of life. These are sort of supposed to be protected against by different ways of structuring markets.

But obviously, most primarily structuring the labor market in specific ways. And there’s a more general concern about domination or subjection to arbitrary control, where theorists try to analyze and examine potential schemes for rendering the kind of control that work is supposed to necessarily involve, that labor is supposed to necessarily involve non-arbitrary or subject to some kind of scheme of co-determination of one kind or another.

So in my view, the tendency to conceive of the normative problematic of work in this way as sort of a question about the normatively salient effects of workplace management is kind of downstream of trends in the social sciences on the one hand that sort of conceive of the economy as a distinct realm of human activity.

On the one hand, that’s downstream of just neoclassical economic conceptions of efficient markets. On the other hand, Weberian conceptions of the economy as a realm of necessity, governed solely by instrumental rather than intrinsic reasons.

So moral philosophers, political philosophers, theorists in general, I think, try to tend to accept this picture. But in terms of a scholarly division of labor, I think it’s sort of our job to interrogate that conception of economic activity rather than accept it and then ask questions within or having accepted that assumption.

So here, I sort of like start from what’s a really well-worn observation in labor studies and studies of employment in general, that labor contracts are radically underspecified, which makes them sort of fit poorly as an object of economic analysis. And it’s hard to do market efficiency analysis of something that’s underspecified in this way. It sort of makes labor weird as a commodity, as it were.

So then to the extent that to the extent that work is treated by market institutions as a commodity, it’s something that we literally produce for sale into a labor marketplace. It’s always what heterodox economists would call a contested economy. That’s a contested commodity rather.

So it’s a commodity that nature or the content of which isn’t prespecified but is fought over, contested between the exchanging parties. So in their model, that means that labor as a commodity is subject to what they call enforcement rents. It basically means that the more powerful, whether that’s the form of social, or a market, or other kind of power, means that that empowered party will sort of win the day in determining the nature of that commodity.

That to me is a sort of a starting point for thinking about the political nature of work, the political nature of labor, and the labor exchange, which I take to be sort of constitutively political rather than political and the effects it produces.

Another way of saying that it’s sort of like necessarily a creature of political morality. But I take that to mean is that it’s a kind of a social practice that involves overlapping confluences and conflicts of interest for which the rules that govern those confluences and conflicts of interests aren’t pre-given and necessarily can’t be determined a priori but must be constituted, authored, and maintained by the parties to those practices.

And so I arrive at that sort formal definition by some grounding work in philosophy of joint action and social practices that I’ll skip, so that nobody leaves while I’m talking. Stuff that sort of only the philosophers want to stick around for.

But briefly, I find that that literature sort of fails on two accounts. One is a failure of attention to the internal organization of jointly acting groups, which except in what I take to be edge cases, involve some kind of vertical or asymmetric division of roles within those groups, which raises the question of control of any kind of joint or shared productive activity.

The other is that lack of attention to the structural dynamics that are generated by repeated and long term practices of social coordination and joint action. So institutions create sort of durable forms of social relations and a sort of a slogan, a way of saying.

The point here is that there’s no such thing as a merely technical division of labor. Divisions of labor are always social in the sense that they’re constructive of asymmetrical social relations, as well as the people or roles that fit in to those sort of relational matrices, not to make a pun.

So since those social relations tend to self-naturalize but are always, in every case, constructed by some kind of deliberate human activity, the social relations themselves are worthy or apt objects of normative analysis and criticism. So that’s the sort of starting point or how we get to the starting point for the project.

So I use that to then reconstruct this actually existing normative debate over workplace justice. So as I mentioned before, there’s a lot of recent writing. I was looking through the list of edited volumes that I have to read upcoming. And there’s just a lot of writing these days that people are compiling on normative questions about the nature of economic organization, from the highest to the lowest level.

Yeah. So again, against the sort of construction of that normative problematic as a set of questions about what sort of positive or negative effects are generated by the way that we structure our economic institutions.

I try to look for a way of reconstructing that debate in general from what you might call something like output reasons to input reasons or sort of where I generally find a normative requirement that people participate in the processes of their own subject formation.

So insofar as the kinds of social relations that are necessarily generated by the workplace construct us as individuals on lots of different kinds of normative frameworks. The result I find is that people have either a right or relevant interest of one kind or another to be able to participate in the processes and institutions that construct them as individuals.

I use that set of core normative interventions and then apply them to a set of real world cases in the latter parts of the dissertation. So those are going to be very, very familiar. But the first is algorithmic management. The second is platform employment or platform-based gig work.

And the second is corporate fissuring, corporate restructurings that place workers at one or two or three levels of removed from who we might think of as their real employer. Some sort of dominant form in a sometimes global value chain.

So that’s, again, that’s the sort of general pitch about how I do the kind of work that I do, which again is aimed at producing work for this, what I see as a kind of a cloistered set of conversations within normative theory around what might render the way that we work together just or at least in what ways that the ways that we work together are criticizable and might be ameliorated or require amelioration of one kind or another.

I figured I’d use the last couple of minutes that I have to just say a couple of things about what I take to be interesting new directions for the study of labor. Yeah. Here they are. So first, and these are sort of basically like stuff that I am paying attention to and reading that informs my work.

One is the a renewal of a certain kind of Marxian analysis built from people call the value form reading of Marx’s work, that reads the work rather than developing a critical political economy or something like that. Like built from assumptions about the labor being the source of all value, this kind of Ricardian Marxism.

Instead reads Marx as offering a critique of political economy, where he’s using the ways that political economists of his time have analyzed market society to try to identify in a kind of a German sense of the term, critique, what are the conditions of possibility of the society that we have and what set of historically specific social relations does it generate?

As part of that, growing out of that, I mean, there’s a reading group at the Matrix, I think, [INAUDIBLE] the Matrix, on the new translation of Marx that I think is bringing this reading also to the surface. So that’s really great. But yeah.

One particular way of describing the Marxist project on that reading is the analysis of the dynamics of class and a historically specific moment, where class means borrowing from Benkler and Syed, the asymmetric social relations in the Division of Labor and the distribution of its fruits, rather than conceiving class as either an identity category, a job category, or merely about distributional struggle or the expropriation of a surplus.

Yeah. So taking class in that way of describing it is describing the set of rules in a complex society and how they relate to one another. I’ll just say a couple of things. Yeah. One is just about the changing role of labor in global political economy and the way that that is creating changes in the nature of class composition domestically and globally.

So one set of literature comes from Robert Brenner and student Aaron Benanav about premature deindustrialization and global industrial overcapacity yielding secular decline in the global economy and how that is likely to generate chronic underemployment rather than something like automation creating technical unemployment or something like that.

What I see as a really sort of related thread insofar as it’s about the declining role of labor in social reproduction is work, on the one hand, on asset manager capitalism, and in particular, Melinda Cooper, and I forget her co-authors, book on asset economy, which emphasizes the sort of declining role of remuneration from work in household and in household finances essentially as compared with Minskian households, which are making decisions under uncertainty to manage capital flows and secure their sort of financial well-being in that way, rather than primarily through remuneration from work, whether it’s salary wages or whatnot.

I think to just bring us back to a picture of the working class as the most general category when we’re talking about class analysis as constituted by a negative unity, constituted by what it lacks rather than what it has, which is namely, in the old formula, the double freedom and inability to reproduce itself apart from the work that it can sell into the labor market.

And I think that Vera is going to talk about this a little bit more, but the last slide that I have is just about renationalisation in global political economy and the reassertion of states as economic actors. Yeah. And that’s just a big question mark, basically, what’s that going to look like. But I think it’s going to have really, really significant effects on international division of labor, domestic division of labor, and class structure in general.

[APPLAUSE]

JOHN LOGAN: Next, we have Kristy Kim, a PhD candidate in the economics department at UC Berkeley, whose work studies changes in retirement benefits affect labor supply and workforce composition. I won’t take up any of your time, but reporters contact me all the time about labor issues.

And one of the things that they want to know most these days. I mean, we’ve had these strikes, obviously, the big three, involving UAW and more recently, Boeing and Puget Sound. And everyone’s like, oh, are we going to get a return to defined benefit pension plans? And I say, not a chance. But I mean, of course, it’s more complicated than that. But it’s interesting that it has become back on sort of the union agenda in terms of the– pleas, sorry. Go ahead.

KRISTY KIM: Yeah, no. That’s perfect because– so I’ll go a little bit into my research, which actually looks at exactly the movement away from defined benefit pensions to more defined contribution plans. And so sorry. Thank you for hosting this panel, everyone, and for everyone who came.

So I’m Kristy. I work in behavioral public economics. So I really try to understand how individuals behave towards different policy designs with an emphasis on looking at quasi-experimental settings, sort of in the wilds, and trying to understand through the choices that people make, what the implications would be if policy was different.

And so I will go into my dissertation. And so I’ll start a little bit more niche and then try to bring it out more towards the political movements and the unionization efforts to change retirement benefits. But my dissertation focuses on how changes in workforce retirement benefits affect firm-specific labor supply.

And this is across the lifecycle. So throughout your whole life, as retirement benefits change, how does your labor supply decisions change? And so this is in part to understand how non-cash compensation, which has become this large portion of total compensation in the United States, is really affecting labor supply decisions, especially when we think about a marketplace of firms that are offering different compensation structures.

And so normally, empirically, this is difficult to understand for two reasons. So one, there’s just very limited data on private employer pension plans. And so we can theorize how these things go. But often, the incentives for retirement plans are non-linear, they’re dynamic, and so they’re very difficult to predict.

And if you do have data on them, they’re often very limited in scope, right? So you’ll have a few years. The second reason why it’s difficult is because it’s really hard to disentangle pure incentive effects of retirement systems that we’re interested in versus selection effects.

And so what I mean by that is that there are different types of people that will choose to work for different types of firms because of their retirement benefits. And so when we study the effects of retirement benefits, what we don’t want to do is conflate the fact that different types of workers are going into different types of work, versus the retirement benefit itself changing your behavior.

And so in my work, what we do is that we study federal government workers around a policy change that occurs in 1984. And there are some nice things about this setting. So one, it’s the US government, so it’s the largest employer. In the United States, they employ about 2% of all the workforce.

And two, it’s going to happen in the ’80s, right? And so we have 35 years of their entire work history. And so we can really follow these people through their life cycle or most of their life cycle. Some people will work more than 35 years.

And the last sort of quality about this policy change that’s really nice is that it’s actually retroactive. And so what that means is that the people who start under this new system, when they change it discretely for newly hired workers in 1984, they’re not going to be aware of what the retirement system looks like for about two years, which means this really helps us mitigate the selection effects. So we’re going to have pretty similar workers but with two different retirement benefits. And that’s really the strategy that I use to figure out what happens to the labor supply outcomes of these workers.

And specifically, what we do is that we study the last few cohorts of the old system and the first few cohorts of the new system, with the assumption being that these workers are similar and compare them across time. So I can explain a little bit about what the federal government does and why and how we should think about it.

And so in the ’80s, they’re going to make this move towards retirement benefits that look a lot like private sector retirement benefits. So prior to 1984, the retirement benefit that they had was just to a pure defined benefit plan, where they provided an annuity to their workers based on their work history.

And so we can think of this as really employer-tied benefits. Your benefits at retirement really depend on your wages that you’ve accrued there, the tenure at the firm, and whatever percentage they want to give. And they move away from that. They decrease that annuity portion, and they introduce more modern technologies.

So they introduce what we would think of as like a 401(k). So what that is that you would put some of your own money away, and that’ll grow in an investment vehicle. You would get it as a lump sum, but you sort of carry the risk of outliving it.

And in addition, they add Social Security, which is sort of like an annuity, but it’s based on your total employment history. And so what we think of this is as a movement away from employer-tied benefits to more portable benefits. Now you can pick up the 401(k). You can move it around to different employers. Social Security will only depend on all formal employment. So you can leave more freely.

And so what we’ll find in this study is that this movement away from defined benefit to a mixed defined benefit, defined contribution system is going to reduce the total lifetime retirement benefits that they’ll receive. It will reduce on average for workers by about $45,000, which is pretty substantial. We can think if people are in retirement for about 20 years, that’s about over $2,000 a year that they sort of lose out on from this new retirement system.

It is going to increase the portable benefits but really severely decrease the benefits tied to the employer. But it’s not going to change anything about the quality of the jobs or their cash compensation. So they’re not compensating these workers for this loss in benefits.

And what we’ll find when we compare the labor supply outcomes for these workers is as follows. So in the beginning, what we have suggestive evidence for is that workers are quite inattentive when they first enter work about the retirement system. So they don’t seem to be reacting to early incentives in your work.

So like vesting schedules, we don’t see any reaction towards, but we see some kind of learning happening around 10 years of service towards the federal government, where both young and old workers will start responding. So it doesn’t seem to be a function of how close you are to retirement but basically for how long you’ve worked at, in this case, the government for.

And essentially, we find that workers mid to late career are the workers that really start responding to these changes and benefits. They are about 2 to 3 percentage points less likely to be in the federal workforce between 15 to 30 years of tenure. This roughly translates into a one to three-year reduction in their tenure.

And so in a resource perspective, this sort of all checks out. You have a $45,000 reduction in your lifetime benefits. And for workers who maybe face better wages outside, maybe they can get $20,000 extra per year. They work that one to three years more and make up for that loss in benefits.

And this is really going to be concentrated among workers who have better outside options, so who face better private sector wages. So that tends to be workers who start off with higher education levels, higher pay, starting pay. And it’s also going to be concentrated amongst workers who seem to be working through the government pretty quickly and being promoted really fast.

And so what this seems to suggest is that moving away from a defined benefit plan does save the government a lot of money. It saves them about $94,000 per person. But they do start losing out on their very experienced and very productive workers.

And so ultimately, because I don’t have additional data on how productive these workers are or how much they might mean to the employer, the welfare consequences are sort of ambiguous. Or like the sort utility of workers from moving to one place to another, I don’t have information on where they move.

So we have this sort of ambiguous effect. And then sort of later on in life, we see a convergence of the percent of workers that are separated because now, most of the workers under the new system have left earlier. Under the old system, they’ll start to leave as they become eligible for retirement.

And so yeah. So now, it’s sort of become this interesting stage because in the last 50 years, many employers, institutions have really started moving towards the defined contribution type of benefit, right? Because it’s more sustainable fiscally or financially for the employer to provide these kinds of benefits.

So Berkeley has done it, for anyone who works here, and other state governments are now considering reducing their pension plans and really introducing these savings. And so we as economists, we can speak to what might happen to the workforce.

And it’s sort of interesting now that– so I think Boeing is the big one that want to bring back the pension plans. And ultimately, it’s hard to give a normative or even like a positive judgment on how this might affect the employer or the worker in economic terms.

It ultimately will depend on, so I can do the financials. I can say how much it saves. But ultimately it sort depend on what you’re losing from losing these older, more productive workers. There’s a tradeoff, right? Sometimes, what we want is we want to upskill an organization. And so having these workers churn out could be beneficial for both the firm and also for the worker because now that they have benefits that are less tied to the employer, they’re free to move to another employer that might better match their skills or preferences.

But on the other hand, these older workers bring a lot of experience, and it’s hard to retrain and rehire workers. And so you might be losing out on those workers. And these workers might be losing out on benefits that they don’t realize they’re losing out on.

And so ultimately, I think by revealed preference, it seems people prefer the defined benefit plan. I think the reason why employers seem to be very resistant against these defined benefit plans is because the costliness, they’re going to have to spend, at least if we look at the federal government, at least like $100,000 more per employee in addition to these regulations that they will have to follow and promise to these employers.

And so what I’m hoping to do with my research is give a little piece of the puzzle and really show empirically with data how workers are responding throughout their lifetime, which has been very difficult to do. Yeah. And so I’ll pass it on to Vera to talk about her research.

VERA PARRA: OK. Two caveats before I begin. One, I’m a second year, and this is all very new research. So first time I’m presenting about it. The other caveat is that the election really affects a lot of things about tariffs, trade, the relationship between the United States and Mexico. Every day, I get a fun new piece of news. So I have that to look forward to for the next four years.

And yeah. I’m still sort of like– and I think it’ll actually just take time to see how this shapes what was the pattern that was established under the Biden administration and in Trump’s first term. So with that, what I’ll do is I’ll share a little bit about my own research and how I came to it. And then I’ll also offer some extemporaneous thoughts about labor and the election.

So yeah. My master’s research topic is on the paradoxical impacts of US trade protectionism on the Mexican labor movement, which, as Will referenced, we are moving, it seems clear, into a world of more trade protectionism. We don’t know yet what that will look like. But increased competition over exports in a world with less demand, and in particular, increased competition between the United States and China.

And that has had actually some interesting– it puts at least Mexico, potentially, maybe other countries positioned similarly as Mexico, but in a pretty interesting position. So yeah. I’ll say a little bit more broadly my larger research agenda, like the questions that brought me to grad school, are about how the 21st century political economy is evolving and what that means in terms of the possibilities for labor organizing.

And I’ll share I come from a background of immigrant rights organizing. It became increasingly clear to me that the pathway on immigration runs through the labor movement. And with that brings the question of what the actual possibilities for labor and labor organizing are in the 21st century for some of the reasons that we’ll mention at the end that we can maybe talk about.

So as I was kind of looking around what was happening and sort of seeing what are some of the bigger picture, bigger structural changes, one is a clear move towards more protectionist trade policy that we saw under the Trump administration but also under Biden. So it’s something that is seemingly bipartisan. And in particular, as I mentioned, competition over exports.

And then with that, under the Biden administration, also green industrial policy, which we don’t know what will come of that. But a real attempt to stimulate, to use the energy, to use climate crisis as a, I don’t know, pretext, we could call it, to use state intervention to try to stimulate investment and an attempt to bring back manufacturing. That may or may not work. We’ll see. There’s a lot of reason to be very skeptical about the possibility of that, but it has certainly changed the politics.

So that was sort of like the stuff I was paying attention to. And then I went to a Labor Notes Conference this past year in 2023 or 2024, this year. Labor Notes, for those who don’t know, kind of interesting labor left institution that formed in the 1970s with a vision to try to reform unions from within through rank and file internal movements for internal democracy.

Labor Notes, interestingly, in this moment, it is a tiny old institution. And I think for a confluence of interesting, different set of circumstances, has massively exploded over the course of the last six years. So the conference they had last year had a waiting list of 4,000 labor leaders and organizers. So something interesting happening there, which of course overlaps with the leadership transition in the UAW with Shawn Fain.

So here I was at Labor Notes. And I met some organizers who had come from Mexico who were organizing Mexican auto plants and were there looking to build relationships with the UAW, with leaders at the UAW.

And they told me some pretty interesting things. Kind of the story is like a paradoxical impact of increased US trade protectionism. The USMCA, the new NAFTA negotiated under Trump, had actually really enormously benefited efforts to build independent unions in Mexico.

And they were like, we’re on the phone every day with the Department of Labor. To our surprise, they’re really helping us. We don’t totally understand why, but we’re taking the opportunity that we have in this moment and running with it. So I got curious about this, and that’s what the premise of what’s become my master’s project. So I’ll share just a little bit about the Mexican auto industry. So the Mexican auto industry largely supplies parts for the American market.

There’s an earlier wave of plants in Mexico. But really, it grew. It expanded massively after ’76 as profits– As the big three in the United States faced competition from Germany and Japan, they used Mexico in order to be able to– as basically for parts to supply cheap parts and cheap labor.

And during this period of time, Mexico switched from having an import substitution model to a low wage export model of development. And what you saw is really beginning in the late ’70s, rapid industrialization in Mexico but real wages declining during this entire period of time.

Now we’re in the midst of a shift where the US is trying to reindustrialize by onshoring or what sometimes also get nearshoring or sometimes called friendshoring. So manufacturing in response to the Trump election in 2016 and then also in the context of escalating trade competition.

And so there are three actually tightly interrelated policies that were passed between the years 2018 and 2022 under multiple administrations. So the USMCA was negotiated, finally approved in 2020 as Trump is leaving. Negotiations begin earlier.

And in addition, a 2018 labor law reform in Mexico. And then the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act. And I’ll share a little bit about how these policies are all sort of woven together. So back up.

So Mexico has a corporatist model of Labor Relations. And this is basically from the Mexican Revolution, this system was in place, is built into the Constitution. Where the Mexican Revolutionary Party, the party that ruled as one party rule for a long time, relied on the labor movement in Mexico, on state-backed unions.

The Mexican Union Federation is called the CTM, the Confederacion de Trabajadores de Mejicanos, relied on them to do turnout and but also relied on them to control any more independent or militant labor organizing.

And so it was really like, the CTM is like a pillar of the party, which had single party control in Mexico for a long time. What that meant is that during the period of the ’60s and the early ’70s, you had under Import substitution. Basically, everybody was [INAUDIBLE] workers were benefiting under that model.

The union was quite powerful within the PRI. And then also the state supported the CTM to repress any kind of independent labor organizing efforts. There’s an interesting blip in the 1970s of union democratization, which sort of overlaps with the same period of time as you have big labor movements developing in Brazil and in South Africa. I can circle back to that.

But then starting in ’76 with the big three, beginning to produce auto parts plants in Mexico. There’s US pressure on Mexico through the IMF to clamp down on this like new wave of independent labor organizing that started, and the CTM begins a practice of employer protection contracts.

So basically, it’ll be like GM comes in, negotiates with the government of Mexico, says we want to build a plant here. They negotiate on a wage, agree to which union affiliate of the CTM is going to become the union that represents the workers. The union rubber stamps the wage and the contract, and the workers are none the wiser.

And that practice began in the 80s and then like continues Mexico’s entry into the GATT, and then NAFTA just exacerbates that. So that’s why you’ve seen rapid industrialization while wages decline for Mexican auto workers.

The question is what’s happening now? And I’ll say maybe just like a little bit in terms of the literature that I’m speaking to. So Beverly Silver’s Forces of Labor, masterful work. Who has this sort of like pithy summary is where capital goes, labor unrest follows. And Beverly Silver writing in 2003 looking for hope for workers of the world.

Basically is like it is– labor– so at the site of divestment. So for workers in the Global North where capital is divesting, that means that labor loses power. But at the site of investment in the Global South, if you have the expansion of new supply chains, investment in the Global South will also mean labor unrest in the Global South.

And she traces with a real focus on auto as like leading edge of capitalist profitability in the 20th century. And so her examples, she’s like, Brazil, South Africa, all examples of big labor unrest that develops in the ’70s and ’80s. In many ways, my question is like why not Mexico in this period of time? Why was there not big labor unrest in Mexico? And then also how do we explain the current moment where we’re seeing the seeds, like maybe little springtime of labor movement in Mexico?

And here I build on Silver by drawing on the political economy framework of growth models. So this is the work of Baccaro and Pontusson and Mark Bly. They published a– yeah. Anyways. And according to this framework, the idea is states pursue distinct growth models, importantly in relation to an integrated and also increasingly competitive and with low growth political economy.

And the thing I find very useful about this framework is it helps to think about how when growth is difficult to come to come by, political coalitions have to become unstable and have to shift and rearrange themselves. And it helps understand the kind of critical relationship between Mexico and the United States in influencing the shape of Mexico’s own labor movement.

So the argument I’m making is that the shifts in growth models impacts impact the state’s own system of labor relations and set new limits on the strategic possibilities for labor actors. And that the major changes in the US’s own growth model have in turn forced Mexico to adapt its growth strategy and in turn, its own system of labor relations is the overall hypothesis or thing I’m trying to argue.

So there’s these two phases. We’re in the late 1970s, facing rising international competition. The US, via the IMF, pressured the Mexican government to shift from an import substitution to a low wage export led growth model. And importantly, unlike Brazil, where Brazil also shifted from import substitution to export. But it was final assembly in Brazil, like final car assembly and for a more diversified export market.

In contrast, in Mexico, the real focus was auto parts, where wages must be much lower because profits are lower, and it goes entirely to the United States domestic market, which gives the United States an enormous amount of say and pressure on Mexico, as we all are seeing today.

And so in this context, the Mexican government, under the PRI pressures, the CTM, the Trade Federation, to encourage these employer protection contracts and suppress workers’ efforts to build independent unions.

And the argument is that in this latter period, from 2018 to 2024, the US’s own attempts to adapt its growth model through protectionist trade policy, an attempt at green industrial policy, which to be determined what comes of that, but impacted Mexican labor organizing in two ways.

So first, the USMCA directly empowers independent labor unions in Mexico to fight for higher wages through some mechanisms that I’ll explain. And it also incentivized AMLO and the Morena Party to implement a genuine reform of Mexico’s system of labor relations. So that’s the impact of the USMCA.

And second, IRA subsidies resulted in growing investments in Mexican EV manufacturing, thereby easing some of the pressure on Mexico to suppress wages in the auto industry. That first part remains in place or at least until the renegotiation of the USMCA in 2026.

The second part, there’s a big question now with Trump election. So Tesla had a plant that they already started constructing in Monterrey, which was canceled. Musk said he would wait until after the election to see if that plant would continue in effect.

Chinese. The Chinese auto EV company, BYD, is moving forward in building but also paused until after the election. In response to all of that, Sheinbaum has announced that she’s that they’re going to build a Mexican EV, but we’ll see how that goes. But this is all very much in flux.

And yeah. So just briefly, in terms of what the USMCA actually does. So one is Mexico’s labor law reform was a precondition for the passage of the USMCA. So basically, in order for– so negotiators, and this was largely pushed by the Dems, were like in order for us to be able to continue in negotiations over the USMCA and not pull out of the agreement, we’re forcing AMLO’s government to push through a labor law reform.

This was initially begun under Peña Nieto, more conservative under the PRI Party. And when AMLO comes in, they implement a much broader labor law reform than Peña Nieto would have done. But either way, there was a labor law reform that was going to be in place.

What the labor law reform does is a few important things. One, it requires like some internal mechanisms of union democracy. And then importantly, it also makes it much easier for workers to be able to form independent unions.

And the final thing that it did was it required all workers to approve the existing contracts. So contracts that weren’t up for a vote among workers got nullified. When a contract is nullified, then workers have the opportunity to vote if they want to put a new union in place. So that was the labor law reform, among other things. Oh, and it also moved union negotiations outside of the executive into the judiciary branch. So it’s no longer under the executive.

And then the USMCA, which sort of went like hand in hand with this labor law reform in Mexico, does a few things. Most notably, there’s a rapid response enforcement mechanism, which basically, if you are a worker or an organizer and there’s some experience a labor law violation, you can actually appeal to a body that was created, like an oversight body that was created through the USMCA with trade representatives from the United States and from Canada, and they will intervene on your behalf.

The enforcement piece of this, because there was some sort of nominal labor side agreement to NAFTA. But the enforcement piece of the USMCA is that if the company refuses to respond, then they actually could face penalties in terms of losing their special non-tariff status.

So this has actually been used a lot of times. And in fact, every case where there was an independent labor union that formed, that I’ve tracked in Mexico, there was some intervention of the USMCA on the American side, which is why the organizers were like we’re on the phone all the time with American trade officials. It’s very strange, but here we are.

And the other thing is that there is an enormous amount of money that came from the US Department of Labor that went into funding, organizing on the Mexican side through something called the Solidarity Center, which has a, for those who know, there’s a new book out, Blue Collar Empire. For those who know, there’s a long history of US intervention in international labor movements for IIL. This though might be a case of US intervention in Mexico for good. And it’s through this Solidarity Center, which then funds organizers in different places to form these independent unions.

So yeah. I have done some preliminary interviews and ethnographic work in Coahuila in Mexico, where there was a campaign and then also where there are active campaigns right now, where they’re salting in plants. And in the process of interviewing labor leaders and organizers and then also government officials who are responsible for implementing the labor reform law. And then also, we’ll be looking at archival records as well, comparing this earlier period to the present period.

And yeah, I’ve been talking a while. So I’ll close with that. Maybe just to say I think some of the questions that are up for grabs for sure in terms of the relationship between Trump and Sheinbaum. The USMCA gets renegotiated in 2026. Likely the main issue will be at stake is the question of electric vehicles built by Chinese companies in Mexico making their way into the American market.

And yeah, we don’t really know where it’s going to go. But in some ways, the USMCA really was negotiated when Trump attempted to pull out of NAFTA on the first round. The AFL-CIO saw an opportunity. The big three really can’t do that. And the AFL-CIO there saw an opportunity to be able to push forward something that they’d wanted to do for a very long time. And so we’ll see in an ongoing way how those negotiations play out moving forward. Yeah. We’ll close.

[APPLAUSE]

JOHN LOGAN: I’ll just open it up for questions and comments. I just said very briefly, and so as I said at the beginning, with the field like labor, I mean, it’s true of other fields too, of course, of subspecialties of study. There’s always this sort of balance between innovations in the discipline. Like if you’re an economist, if you’re a sociologist, and like what’s really new and exciting that’s happening within your discipline? How is your research agenda influenced by that?

But then there’s also the real world of labor out there and how that sort of impacts what you think are the most important questions to ask. And the balance between those two things is always like varies with individual people. Like my own work, I mean, I’ve worked with unions since I was a grad student, and I was always obsessed with contemporary labor issues, even although I supposedly was a historian, wasn’t a very good historian.

Most of my publications have not been historically historical. Hopefully not ahistorical, but they were always obsessed with this real world of labor, what’s happening out there. How does a sort of historical sensibility help us understand how we got to where we got. And I think, we see in the three presentations here too, there is sort of that dynamic going on. But anyway, sorry. I don’t want to take up time. Open it up to questions and comments.

AUDIENCE: Ah, yes. This was really, really interesting. So thank you all to the panelists. I learned a lot. I have a question for William. It’s kind of two-sided question. I’m curious about where you classify surveillance and sort of how do you think about competing moral claims between employers and employees, especially considering that courts typically side with employers and their moral visions?

WILLIAM DARWELL: Yeah. Surveillance is a big issue. It raises, lots of different kinds of normative concerns. I think like maybe what I’ll say just as far as my work goes, and yeah, I don’t have too much to say about the courts, apart from they’re very sensitive to employer concerns.

As far as what my sort of distinctive take on intervention, the way that I think about what’s going on there is, again, to think about the way that subjection to one kind of mode of discipline, control, vulnerability to being watched in any variety of ways across any variety of like ways of conceiving what a person is to think about sort of vulnerability to being out of control of the conditions of your own self-making or something like that, as a sort of, again, the formal language that I’m working with.

Kind of, maybe not obvious is too strong. But I take it as kind of obvious that like the modes of surveillance that people are subject to at work ought to really alarm us in many cases. My aim is to try to articulate what’s wrong with what’s going on there in those terms to add something to the literature in general.

JOHN LOGAN: Can I just add very briefly to that, Sorry? I try to think about your paper, and like I do not have any philosophy background, and I always have to think try to make things concrete. And I mean, obviously what you’re saying brings to mind Amazon. And Amazon has adopted this slogan, we are not robots, because this is the way they’re being treated. Every sort of like single movement within the workplace is being surveilled, and monitored, and people are being penalized for.

And so I guess when I tried to explain to people like what is it that’s happening right now with these union campaigns, Amazon, and elsewhere, I think, well, if people think they’re being treated unfairly, unjustly at work, they have some notion of what constitutes just treatment, and where they get these notions of what constitutes just treatment is a sort of complicated issue. It comes from all over the place. And like surveillance at work is one of the things that they have really focused upon in terms of articulating their notions of just treatment at the workplace. But sorry.

AUDIENCE: Yes, thanks. Thank you for this amazing panel. It was really instructive. I have two questions. One to William, one to Vera. I guess this is going to be like a huge question. I apologize in advance. But what do you exactly mean by political in this setting. Because political can mean a lot of different things. And you said work is inherently, constitutively, I think, political, which I would agree. But I would like you to clarify what you mean by that. And kind of like going on the political thread, I guess.

My question to Vera, when you were mentioning, like why not Mexico, with this 1970s, ’80s labor upsurge in Brazil and South Africa but not so much in Mexico, from drawing from Beverly Silver. One thing that came to my mind was like, well, there’s actually big political movements going on in these two countries in South Africa and Brazil.

In Brazil, it’s democratization coming out of the military dictatorship. And in South Africa, obviously, the anti-apartheid movement. So my question is like, what is going on at this time in Mexico? And I don’t know how to insert this in the causal chain, but like how would that factor into this map that your conceptual map that you’re drawing? Thank you.

WILLIAM DARWELL: Yeah. So thanks for the question. I think it’s really great. I’m really stoked to talk about it. So again, the first attempt at a definition that I tried to give is like what I mean when I say the word political and saying that there’s something constitutively political about work is that politics is about the terms on which we live together.

And what it means to live together is to be sort of in these overlapping situations or situations and practices together where they’re overlapping confluences and conflicts of interest. So we can’t do what we’re doing together, engage in a kind of a social practice. And the terms of that social practice bring us into conflict with one another, either over our role in the practice, or again, the disposition of the fruits of that practice.

And it’s that notion of living together but in a kind of a tense way. That’s what’s constitutive of politics for me. So like part of what’s– yeah, there’s some other work on like, yeah, there’s a live question in moral theory right now about whether there’s a distinctive kind of normativity called political normativity or whether that’s all just reducible to just moral claims building off of the work of Bernard Williams, who’s at Berkeley and who made the sort of first claim that there’s something sort of different about what we do when we operate as groups through institutions and most importantly, with the institution of estate that’s different than the kind of terms of interpersonal morality, blah, blah, blah.

And I think that, again, the best way to think about what that is that the political is the way in which we set the terms of living together in a sort of a social relationship. One more thing that I’ll say about that is like there’s another kind of slogan that I feel like is good for labor studies.

In the past, the labor movement saw as its telos industrial democracy, which means let us run the economy, right? Either as a sort of a full participant through our unions or just give us the firms. We’ll do it. We know how to do it, like factories to the workers.

And so I think that like one thing that I would push for is also a new direction. Labor is also thinking about talking more between labor studies and business studies and thinking of corporations, firms. However, we want to think about them, as sort of like a horizon for labor to aim toward.

The reason that I say that in the context of the question about what I mean by political is because there’s also lots of interesting new work in theories of the corporation, the things about the corporation as a political actor. And one version of it, it’s just the thinking about the corporation as operating a concession from the state as sort of basically being a deputized form of the state itself.

And when we think about the corporation as a sort of like fundamentally like franchised or deputized form of what we’re really doing as states or people governed by states, is again setting the terms by which we live together, that’s the way in which I’m thinking about the work. And again, work in firms, shared work, socially necessary work as necessary or constitutively political.

VERA PARRA: Yeah. Thanks for that question. I think it’s a really good question. So one thing I can say is so Mexico in ’68, there a big student movement. Many of the young people who came up in that movement had, kind of parallel to in the United States, the sort of like move to industrializing or salting. There were people who came out of the movement of ’68 and entered into to try to build independent unions.

And in the early ’70s, so under then Echeverria’s government, had something called the apertura democratica, so the democratic opening, which was a response to the Dirty War in Mexico and the student and guerrilla movements there.

And it created a momentary opening for independent unions to form of that legacy comes basically like a three-year period in which the only independent unions that exist, at least in the auto industry formed in Mexico.

The argument that I’m making is that moment was like a real moment of possibility, and it gets cut short in 1976. So it isn’t given the chance to develop because of the influence of the United States and this push or like a shift in Mexico’s growth model, if that makes sense.

So there was actually the leadership and the social movement possibility. And if we were to compare it to, I don’t know how it would compare to Brazil and South Africa. The kind of curious thing is that in Brazil, the labor movement in auto develops in the context of dictatorship, and it’s actually the shift into dictatorship during that period of time that the Brazilian labor movement grows. Whereas in Mexico, the Democratic closing then really clamps down. So it doesn’t totally answer the question.

I’ll say just like two more thoughts. This isn’t a real answer. I think probably I’ve been thinking about it as labor movement creates the conditions for broader social movements. And there might be, in your question, like maybe there’s a reverse causality thing or it’s sort of like multiple. But what I will say, of course, is like in the period of time that the labor like industrialization in auto like really kicks off. Obviously after NAFTA, though it’s growing and expanding throughout the 80s.

And of course, the big movement in Mexico is the Zapatistas during that period of time. And I think there’s something to explore about the relationship between the Zapatistas and the state. Like is there something less compatible between the Zapatistas’ strategy of taking territory and not contesting directly for state power and labor? I don’t know. So that’s kind of like a question mark.

Maybe the last thing I’ll say is in spending time there over the summer, it’s clear that the movement that’s really influenced the labor organizers and their perspective coming in a younger generation of labor organizers that has formed is the feminist movement and the like the Ni Una Menos like against violence. And they actually talk in terms of like workplace violence or the abuses in the workplace are a form of violence that then reproduce themselves in the family. So it’s like very much oriented their political consciousness, the feminist movement. Anyways, I’ll leave it at that. All very preliminary.

MARION FOURCADE: Thank you. That was really a wonderful panel. So I have a question for Kristy and one for Vera. So Kristy, if I understand correctly, so the treatment that you’re using is sort of comparing this, sort of the last generation that came in under the old system and then the new generation from the new system, right?

But I was wondering if there’s a way– is there a change in applications? Is there a change in the number of people who want to work in this issue? And it could be that the federal government is not the place where you can see that, and there might be other places. But I was wondering about that. Is there a change in the selection of people who are coming into for government jobs?

Another piece of that sort of question is, have you thought about looking at UC system? Because I mean, casually, you would expect that, especially with the transformation of the system for the younger generation, especially of faculty, you would expect a lot more turnover, and casually, this seems to be the case. But I don’t know if there’s any sort of truth to that.

And then to Vera, I find this whole question of this sort of development of the labor movement and both sides of the border to be really fascinating because on the one hand, you can say, and indeed, the institutions are sort of called this way. It’s about solidarity. It’s about worker solidarity. The Department of Labor gives them grants, and so on, and so forth.

But of course, if you manage to raise wages in Mexico, of course this is lessening competition with the US. And so the US labor movement directly benefits. So you have two institutions, the US labor movement and Mexican labor movement, who are really in competition with one another but who are using this as a way to assert worker solidarity. So I just want to see how in your interviews and so on, how people navigate this fundamental contradiction in their respective positions. Thank you.

KRISTY KIM: OK, great. I will try to answer really quickly. So the first question was about selection. And to your point, even today, so some things that we might worry about is like perhaps in anticipation of this change in system, even though they don’t know what it is, you might start to hire people a little bit earlier, right? And which will change the composition of workers and become a threat to the identification strategy, which I’m assuming that these workers are very similar.

So one example is that as if you’re trying to find a job today, the threat of a Trump hiring freeze, for example, might cause firms to start hiring in December before the new administration comes in place. So we do check for that. We don’t see necessarily any speed-up of hiring, so we don’t see any anticipation in that sense.

Now I do take it to your point that of course, there may be some unobservable characteristics. Perhaps people who like more risk are OK with entering in the new system without knowing what it is. And that may be true.

And so the limitation of the paper is that the only thing I’m able to look at are observable, measurable characteristics that have existed at that time. But so long as it’s not correlated with– if it’s correlated with observable measures that I have. So let’s say risk is associated with age or your compensation. If that’s the case, then I can more confidently say that we don’t seem to see differences in that.

But certainly there may be other differences that I can’t observe. And so this is just a step towards understanding life cycle effects. And it’s this big movement. So there’s that. And in terms of the UC system, so I think it might be too early to study it because I believe the change happens in 2002.

JOHN LOGAN: 2013.

KRISTY KIM: 2013. OK, OK. So we don’t have a lot of data, and I’m not sure if the UC would provide that data, although I’m sure it’s scrape able based on where faculty go, for example. Anecdotally, it does seem to be the case that younger faculty seem to be looking at their outside options.

The other thing that we might want to think about, so it’s dynamic. So you have these short term workers that might leave sooner, but you also have workers that intend to stay at Berkeley for a really long time. And if we compare like Berkeley versus Harvard, for example, Harvard has no annuity. There are pure savings. The Harvard professors tend to stay much longer than Berkeley professors. They tend to retire in their 60s here, and in Harvard, maybe around their 80s. And so we might see some kind of bimodal effect from these short term workers leave faster, but the ones that intend to stay long, stay longer to build up their retirement savings.

JOHN LOGAN: It’s a national trend among universities. So it’s not just Berkeley.

MAROIN FOURCADE: That would be really interesting to look at the [INAUDIBLE].

KRISTY KIM: We’d like to help.

[LAUGHTER]

VERA PARRA: Yeah. Thanks for the question. I think the like confluence and the interest in confluence and intention are actually quite complicated and also sort of shifting politically. And I think they’ve shifted now after the election. We’ll sort of see what the UAW does.

But what I’ll say is there’s kind of like, from the US labor movement perspective, in terms of specifically thinking, well, it’s like speak specifically about auto, there’s two options, which is do everything you can to try to get them pulled out of the USMCA. Or you do what you can to try to raise wages in Mexico and support independent union organizing.

I think the thing that’s tricky is, of course, if this is like labor ultimately is tied to the companies that it’s part of. So in some ways, I mean, if the United States were to pull out of the USMCA, the big three would totally collapse, and you’d be left with foreign auto companies and Tesla, which of course, are not UAW.

And so in some ways, there is sort of like rhetorically, the UAW, of course, is saying the USMCA was a bad deal. But in reality, the American, the big three depend entirely on Mexico. And so in order to be able to be competitive in any kind of way, you need the parts sector from Mexico.

So the idea is like for the big three to be globally competitive with China or with Chinese EVs, you need to be able to have this nearshore model. Of course, there are tensions and divisions within the UAW itself. And so the move that Fain has made or made at least before the election is to say we’re going to support independent union organizing in Mexico.

And I think within the UAW, there’s also Fain is not in control of the entirety of the UAW, and different local presidents are putting countervailing pressures on him. So I would say I would say that for sure, the sell of the AFL-CIO to the Trump administration and also under the Biden administration is if we raise wages in Mexico, the jobs will come back to the United States.

But the reality is that the wages would have to be raised enormously for it no longer to make sense for GM to be producing cars or to be producing car parts, at least in Mexico, if that makes sense.

So I think it’s part of what I guess I’m seeing is that there’s a kind of labor solidarity that’s possible because of shared interests, actually, where on the one hand, in Mexico, they really need the money and also money from the UAW potentially, I think they feel more comfortable with than money that comes from the American government, where it feels like, A, potentially more strings attached, but B, it’s much more like politically volatile. So people have said to me like we’re depending too much on the Department of Labor and on the rapid response mechanism, which could disappear at any moment.

So that’s on the one hand. And then on the other hand, I think the other potential confluence of interest for the UAW is not just about having wages rise in Mexico enough to bring jobs back, which would really take quite a powerful labor movement, but is also about the possibility of some kind of coordinated strategy and coordinated disruption.

So Stellantis agreed to reopen a plant in Belvidere as part of the big three strike. That was like a victory. And then now is walking that back and is also simultaneously announcing investments in Mexico.

In Coahuila, a place where I’m like doing my field research, if potentially there was actually a strong independent labor movement there that the UAW could coordinate with there would be much more strategic opportunity, certainly in terms labor disruption. and from the conversations I’ve had with people, the supply chains are quite vulnerable to disruption. Like it doesn’t take much to shut down an auto parts plant that then put it’s like just in time production.

And so that potentially the possibility of doing coordinated labor action I think is the real potential benefit to the UAW, more so than wages rising up so much that the jobs return back. I don’t know if that makes sense.

JOHN LOGAN: Thank you all. More comments on that and the auto industry later. Thank you very much for coming and terrific presentations and great discussions. Thank you, everyone.

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