interviews
A Bifurcated Approach
by Paul Frymer
February 24, 2021
This interview with Paul Frymer, Professor of Politics at Princeton University and author, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Paul | The Wagner Act was built on the idea of making the workplace accountable to the workers, of getting better wages, and improving working conditions. It is a relic of a time when the government was involved in regulatory action. We just don't do that much anymore at least in the realm of labor politics.
One thing I write about in my book, Black and Blue, is that at the time of the New Deal, civil rights were really not a priority for most U.S. politicians. Though the vast majority of African-Americans had no voting rights and no protection against economic discrimination, these big pieces of legislation like the Wagner Act did not try to change that structure.
The New Deal was built around the idea of a white working class, and the Wagner Act is part of that.
What would it have looked like if it included civil rights?
Most straightforwardly, the NAACP wanted a provision in the Wagner Act that said that employers can’t discriminate on a basis of race. That was not in there.
The Democratic Party, which was reliant on Southern Democrats at the time, did not want that and it was not put in the bill. As such, the legislation allowed companies and unions to discriminate on the basis of race. There is a case in the 1950s that I mention in my book where an employer was accused of firing workers because they were union members. You can't do that according to the Wagner Act. So, he said he didn't fire them because they were union members, he fired them because they were black. That was fine under the law.
Workers in Hole, photograph, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth56863/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Hardin-Simmons University Library.
You write about how labor movements and civil rights movements often act independently of each other, rather than in conjunction. Why is there bifurcation?
It is a great and complicated question. W. E. B. Du Bois, the great civil rights intellectual and activist in the early 20th century, famously wrote about just how easy it is for employers to divide workers on the basis of racism.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, employers used to bring in African-Americans from the South or Chinese workers to break strikes and to create racial conflict. Though we are a long way from those kinds of extreme examples, today, we can still see the ways in which race and class have difficulty coalescing. We have lots of great examples of when they do when multi-racial or multi-ethnic coalitions form around class lines, but it’s very hard to do.
Specifically, in terms of the Wagner Act, the 1930s was the time of the labor movement and the labor movement, itself, was largely white. Later, in the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement gets underway. The white labor movement publicly supports civil rights, but not always privately. Just as we have seen in the Trump era, there were conflicts among white workers who did not want greater diversity. Unions have continued to struggle with this.
Democrats have stepped back from workers. Trump towards them. Do you think his labor support is essentially just about race?
No, it was not just race. He gave them a sympathetic story to buy into. He said that he was going to give them their jobs back. He said that the United States and the Democratic and Republican Party had forgotten about the working class and that they don't care about the working class. They shipped your jobs out to other countries, he said. The sympathetic story is not that far off from the same one Bernie Sanders told. Jesse Jackson ran on that message in the 1980s and 1990s. It is a very powerful message that resonates.
The problem is, a lot of people out there, media and politicians, look for a scapegoat, and race is an easy scapegoat. Economic messages resonate a lot more when there are people who “don't look like us” that are perceived as threatening the white working class. So we point to things like building a wall.
[Workers on Platform], photograph, [1965-05-13..1965-05-24]; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1011027/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.
There's long been a debate within the Democratic Party about class and race, and how to emphasize both. One part of the party says it’s all about class and that race is an artificial construction that employers used to keep themselves in power, so we should emphasize economic distribution and racial inequality will be reduced in the process. That goes so far, but it doesn't go all the way. Race may be an artificial construct, in that we no longer attribute race with individual differences, but it still has taken an incredibly powerful meaning in our society as a result of longstanding prejudice and discrimination. Our solutions can’t just be about universal policies. We need to recognize that there is racism, discrimination, and prejudice in America and that it needs to be addressed on its own. It too cannot be dealt with in isolation from issues of class, but it needs its own stress and dedication. It's really complicated to have those conversations, obviously with Trump voters, but with progressives, suburbanites, and just about everyone else as well.
Backing up a little bit — in the 1930s, there were very few black members in unions. Over time it really moves up, but union participation more broadly declines. Why is that?
You are right. During the time in which African-Americans and Latinos have joined the labor movement, labor movement numbers declined dramatically.
Part of the reason for that is globalization. Part of the reason is that employers can reclassify workers so that they cannot be unionized--see the battles over Uber and Lyft and the gig economy more generally. And a big part of the reason is that employers are incredibly aggressive. Employers are very aggressively breaking the law and they can get away with it. What employers will do immediately is fire union organizers. That is against the law, but they know that they will just be slapped on the wrist, if anything. There is a lot of intimidation. Employers have all of these opportunities to make appeals to workers, to talk to them as a ‘captured audience’. The union does not have the right to access these workers, the way employers do.
You can see these aggressive tactics with the current Amazon fight. Amazon is about to have a union election in Alabama.
The union is fighting for the ability to vote by mail in light of COVID, and Amazon, just as the Republican party does, is fighting to make voting more difficult.
They don't want people to vote in the privacy of their homes because they know they will quite likely vote yes to the union.
What do you wish the media would note in their coverage of something union organizing?
The media has often made it seem like the union is the bully and the employer is the individual. They make it seem like people have the right to make as much money as they want, and whether individuals want to work for a certain company or not, is their individual problem. This whole idea of collective action is hard for a lot of Americans to understand.
It is also important to note that in a place like Alabama, where racism is deeply embedded in the history, culture, and still resonates in current politics, the employers use hiring practices to capitalize on this. They will bring in more immigrants to work. This racializes the workforce and the employers know what they are doing. In sweatshops and meatpacking plants, for example, they hire workers that speak all different languages so that they have difficulty communicating with each other.
So union organizing work is very, very hard and incredibly stressful. Especially going against Amazon, a massive corporation that is going to throw everything at you. Any worker who has been part of a union drive knows it is an incredibly stressful and often quite scary period of time. Employers will try to capitalize on this further by saying, vote against the union, and all this stress will go away.
Do you think support from local and national politicians is helpful or maybe even a requirement for successful labor union activism?
Totally. At the local level, we do have politicians to do that, and that is helpful. And Bernie will show up. And AOC will show up.
But what we need is the Democratic Party as a whole to stand by unions.
You see this dynamic right now going on with teachers and the nurse's unions and the question about whether the Biden administration will negotiate with teachers over COVID issues at school. The Democratic Party, generally, supports unions, but they frequently offer very little direct support to union campaigns. I mean the Democratic Party taking on Amazon is a big, big pill. Jeff Bezos gives a ton of money to the Democratic Party. He owns the Washington Post. Look at the conflict a few years ago when he pulled a potential Amazon plant from New York City in response to AOC’s opposition. It is not easy, and it often pits Democrats against Democrats.
Why do you think, politically, workers are sidelined for the swing voter? What do you think this obsession with the swing voter is, rather than the working class?
2020 is a good example of that. The African-American vote was the backbone of the Democratic victory. The African-American was critical to winning Georgia. The vote probably won Michigan, and on and on. President Trump obviously realized that because he was trying to make African American voting in Philadelphia and Detroit and in Atlanta much more difficult, or even throw large numbers of votes out.
But the strategists of the Democratic Party are overwhelmingly white.
Most of them are ambivalent on issues of race themselves. They look at the broader map and they say, "Well, who are voters that we need to win?" And frequently, they draw a big circle around white suburbanites. Election after election, the conventional wisdom is white suburbanites. We see that after what happened 2016. The focus immediately turns to those disgruntled white Trump voters in Wisconsin and Michigan and Ohio.
And there is some truth to that. The white suburban vote in Georgia was also critical. Not independently of the African-American vote, but the African-American vote is not a majority vote in this country or in any state. You do need a significant proportion of white voters. But the Democratic Party, I think, has overplayed that idea in the sense that they think that in order to win the white vote, you need to then downplay civil rights, and downplay things like Black Lives Matter. There's evidence that goes in both directions. A lot of political scientists are currently studying how much the Black Lives Matter protests helped or hurt the Democratic Party. This is an incredibly fraught issue.
[Two Construction Workers], photograph, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc499160/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.
And when you talk about Black Lives Matter you do risk opposition from the white suburbs and other white workers. And that requires the Democratic Party, and our government more broadly, to have bigger conversations. They don't want to have those conversations, obviously. They don't want to explain to people why Black Lives Matter is singularly important for historical and systemic reasons, and how in certain ways, it is also for all of us. Those are hard conversations, and the Democratic party doesn't want to have them.
And you know, you see why any time anyone, whether it’s Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or AOC or Bernie Sanders, says anything of nuance or subtlety, it gets shredded, and frequently, they back away.
This is cynical, but the country is becoming less and less white, at some point the white suburbanite won’t be the majority.
If you look at California in the 1990s, the Republican Party made, in a way, the same big bet on white voters that Trump did. And over time, they have gotten crushed. California is a liberal Democratic state because of demographics and so forth. So, there is hope among progressives that California is a sign of the future of the United States and that the Republicans are going to be crushed in the coming years.
Some Republicans think that too because they are focusing on trying to stop people from voting. They're trying to stop immigrants from entering the United States they fear will become Democrats. They're trying to stop Washington DC from becoming a state.
The one footnote to this is that I find the demographic argument a little bit problematic in that populations are not static. Populations are changing over time. Some populations ‘become white’ over time. We've seen hints of this within the numbers of some Latino populations.
We've already seen it with Cubans, a large number who have been conservatives and Republicans from the first migrations in the 1960s. Puerto Ricans are largely Democrats but there are some openings there, with a strong Republican presence in Puerto Rico itself. You see movement with the third, fourth, fifth-generation Mexican populations in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico as well.
The other thing that you touched on is young people.
What happens with young people as they age? Is the take away from what is currently being said, "I believe black lives matter and I think we need a new era." Or is the takeaway, "I believe black lives matter until it comes to my town and my school and my police department and impacts my housing prices."
This is the moment for the progressive white middle-class to decide how much it embraces racial progress and actively promotes it going forward.
Yeah. How serious are you, I guess.
Oh, I don’t doubt people’s seriousness and sincerity of beliefs. But it is once these beliefs are confronted with different dynamics that you have to really struggle with and be willing to face and accept.
You see this in gentrifying neighborhoods, from Brooklyn to the Mission of San Francisco to Silverlake in LA. These are pockets of progressive white populations. How much are they willing to embrace diversity over the long term, and recognize what it actually means?
The gentrifiers are probably the most progressive politically. Housing in LA is expensive, but…
That is why I think the government is so important. Because you hear these stories you can sympathize or you can find a way to understand it. And I don’t think it's just rationalizing. Every individual story is importantly different. But, that's where the government, I think, needs to step in and say, “We are going to set these rules and everybody has to follow these rules.”
That takes the pressure off of the individuals, and puts the onus on the government to create these spaces that are diverse. That is what we should do as opposed to putting all the energy on the single worker who has to go on strike for a year.
We should put the onus on broader government structures and law so that we actually make it easier for everybody to have it.
interviews
What Mass Incarceration Really Means
by Christopher Wildeman
June 19, 2018
This interview with Christopher Wildeman was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Christopher Wildeman is a Professor of Policy Analysis and Management (PAM) and Sociology (by courtesy) in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University, where he is also co-director of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect (NDACAN) and associate director of the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research (BCTR).
What’s the difference between incarceration and mass incarceration, as you see it?
Incarceration becomes mass incarceration when historically marginalized groups experience incarceration at such high rates that it permeates their entire social and familial existence.
To be totally frank, I think our research on the causes of mass incarceration is pretty weak. And so, when I think about mass incarceration I tend to worry less about what the actual causes of it are, and more about describing it as a social phenomenon. Thinking about contemporary criminal justice policies that we could alter, or dramatically overhaul in an effort to decrease the incarceration rate.
In terms of how incarceration affects families, I think there are two or three really specific things that are important to focus on. The first is that families who experience incarceration were disproportionately dealing with a whole bunch of difficult situations before they experienced a family member's incarceration in the first place. This isn't to say that everybody is, this is just talking about averages, so families that experience incarceration would be more likely to be African-American, more likely to have low levels of family income, relatively lower levels of educational attainment, live in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage.
I think one way you could think about family member incarceration is that it's kind of the straw that broke the camel's back. Families are dealing with a ton of things already that make it hard for the women who will eventually be left behind, make it hard for the children, make it hard for the grandparents. There are a whole host of stressors that folks are already exposed to, and an incarceration essentially piles on, in ways that end up hurting children's outcomes even more.
The place where I think the research is probably most well-established, at this point, is in terms of how mass incarceration affects children, so that's the second thing I'll talk about. At this point, there's a pretty broad consensus in the social scientific community that having a father incarcerated dramatically increases children's behavior and mental health problems in early childhood, that it affects their outcomes in school in ways that are extremely negative for them in the long run, that it increases problematic behaviors in adolescents and early adulthood, and that it eventually increases the risk of criminal justice contact in adulthood, especially for boys.
Research on maternal incarceration is a little bit trickier, but for paternal incarceration, there are very strong signals that it's an event that has really negative effects on children in sort of a host of different domains.
The third thing, and I think this is something that's really important when thinking about kids, especially, is that because parental incarceration is unequally distributed, where kids who are already disadvantaged in a bunch of domains are more likely to experience it than kids who are more advantaged, and because it has these negative effects on children,
That's the core, empirical finding of my book, Children of the Prison Boom, that my friend Sara Wakefield and I wrote together.
We find that, depending on the outcome you're considering, mass incarceration has increased black-white disparities in child well-being anywhere between about 5-10%, to about 40-50%. It's actually had these really important effects on childhood inequality.
Thinking about family functioning more broadly, and effects on women who are left behind, I actually think that we know a lot less than we should, at this point. There are certainly folks like Megan Comfort that are doing really great research on that, and my collaborator Hedy Lee and I have done some work in that area, too.
There's certainly some research on those types of effects, but there's actually a good bit less research on the women who are left behind. One of her arguments, which she would make better than I would, but I think it's an interesting argument, is it's actually pretty disrespectful toward African-American women how this research literature has developed, where the effects of having a partner or other family member incarcerated on women is treated mostly as it's important because that then affects the children.
So, the effects of paternal incarceration on children are kind of the core thing that research has been interested in, and the effects on women are kind of the mechanism through which paternal incarceration affects kids. I think it's actually a pretty deep argument, but it's hers, not mine.
The thing that we really, really, really don't have a good handle on in terms of the family functioning literature, is how mass incarceration affects family violence, and how it affects family violence both directly and indirectly. I think this is really a core gap in the existing literature.
Why do you think it's missing?
I think the vast majority of folks who are doing research on the collateral consequences of mass incarceration have this idea that the effects have been largely negative on the African-American community. There's not going to be a neat, tidy, socially acceptable answer about how mass incarceration affects family violence. It's going to be complicated, and it's going to be messy.
One of the things that you read in the criminology literature, I'm a weird, interdisciplinary social scientist at this point, but I'm more a criminologist than anything else, and one of the things that you read in the criminology literature is that immediately before folks experience contact with the police, basically, there is actually an increase in criminal activity. Which is not something that, as somebody who works in the collateral consequences area, are talking about as much, but there is this increase. Often it's some combination of untreated addiction, and mental health problems, or labor market shocks, or housing shocks. Perfectly reasonable things, and one of the things that's tricky is that it probably also means that there's some sort of increase in tensions in romantic relations, especially, around that time, because of these external stressors.
Hedy and I are working on a book on the consequences of mass incarceration for health inequality among women. One of the things that she and I have really been struggling with around intimate partner violence especially, is this idea that it's not going to be a pretty story, nobody on any side of any aisle is going to feel great once it's told, but domestic violence is a huge issue that women, both in the US and throughout the world, face, and so in some ways it feels like we do have this moral obligation to dig in on this issue, even though it's going to be messy.
Once you have that information, what does the research indicate is the best action?
One of the things that's tricky is, with the exception of a very small number of studies, most of which are from policy shocks in other countries, we don't actually have real good facts. Research makes it very hard for us to really seriously tease out whether it would, or exactly how much it would help kids if their parents had ended up getting probation or something, instead of experiencing incarceration. It's a really hard issue.
I think this is playing out in most states that have tried to focus exclusively on diversion programs. If you give someone probation, and you don't provide mental health services, and you don't provide addiction services, and you don't provide job training, certainly some folks will not end up in prisons or jails again, but a lot of folks will, because you're not doing anything to help their situation.
Decreasing the number of children who ever experience incarceration seems like it's almost certain to have benefits for child well-being, but I think focusing exclusively on these really low-level offenses is not going to get us anywhere, or not going to get us everywhere we need to go, in terms of criminal justice policy reform.
Taking seriously the idea that someone who commits murder should maybe not have a maximum sentence of over 15 or 20 years is going to dramatically cut the incarceration rate in the United States, and recidivism rates for folks who get out of prison when they're in their 40s and 50s tend to be pretty low. I don't think there's a big public safety risk that comes along with that.
The low-level cycling through the system piece is actually really, really hard. I think what to do there, especially in a society where the services that are available to poor folks are not that good, from a criminal justice policy side is really, really hard to figure out.
But in terms of devising a policy that would really help families, that one seems much more clear cut to me.
No one has brought that up yet.
Yeah, no, I mean unless you talk to Sara Wakefield, nobody will.
What are some of the literal effects on children with incarcerated parents?
The literature is pretty disorganized. Social science doesn't really move in a scientific way. I would say paternal incarceration increases children's risk of mental health and behavioral problems, including physically aggressive behaviors and externalizing behaviors more broadly, school readiness behavioral indicators, which are de facto an extension of external and internalizing behaviors. You even see, as children age, effects on internalizing behaviors as well.
There's this whole mental health and behavioral problems domain, and anybody who studies mental health and behavioral problems in children can tell you that those things are really interesting and important because they're associated with virtually all adolescent and early adulthood outcomes. Which is not to say that they're related there deterministically or anything, but just that there is a strong relationship.
In one study I did where we used Danish registry data, there was this interesting community service experiment, where basically everybody who would have gotten less than 90 days jail time, instead of spending up to 90 days in jail they just had 90 additional days of community service.
What we saw is that 15 years down the road the people who were in the community service experimental group, their sons had a 25% lower risk of experiencing criminal justice contact before their mid-20s. And so, in the little bit of experimental evidence we do have, we see these really strong effects of experiencing incarceration, or having a father experience incarceration, relative to not having them experience that.
How did you find yourself in this area of research, particularly?
To be honest, in terms of my personal biography, it makes a lot of sense because I grew up in a pretty heavily disadvantaged neighborhood, and certainly noticed high levels of criminal justice contact among folks I was growing up with.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in St. Elmo, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I grew up in basically the only racially integrated neighborhood in Chattanooga. I have Googled my ZIP code from growing up, and looked at it during the census years when I was living there as a small child, and realized that it seemed very normal to me, but it was a pretty poor neighborhood.
It was only after the fact that I reflected on that and thought about that. I started graduate school and I wanted to do stuff on childhood inequality. That was always what I'd been interested in, what made me go on to do my Ph.D., and my second year of graduate school my eventual advisor basically was like if you're really interested in childhood inequality, this is something that hasn't been studied at all in a serious way. If you really care about marginalized children, this is the way to go.