I do. I wrote about it a few years ago. While it wasn't a union of the unemployed, waitress unions were, hmmm, well they acted like employment agencies in a way. I got some of my ideas from Dorothy Sue Cobble's _Dishing it Out_. The rest came from my research on unemployment, not to mention coming to adulthood in a place like Flint where, for a year or so, there literally were no jobs in my community. We had to barter, sleep in our cars, or leave town in order to survive. There's a fairly large literature on organizing among the unemployed since it was the focus during the GD. With that many people out of work, they had to turn to the unemployed.
She doesn't touch on it exactly, but there's also Katherine Newman's _Falling from Grace_. Similarly, while Ehrenreich doesn't explore the issue in depth, she speaks to it obliquely in Bait and Switched. The classic when I was in kollidge was Piven and Cloward's Poor People's Movements as well as their work on welfare organizing. There was a bit of a brouhaha over some of the politics they advocated, since one approach was to actually purposefully overwhelm the welfare system by encouraging people to make demands on the system in order to bring it to its knees.
For me, it wasn't organized labor so much that should be reaching out, but any leftist group. Which will be what you'll find in the Unemployed Leagues, which was more of a community organizing approach to meeting people's immediate needs (c.f. Dorothy Sue Cobble's arguments). A good discussion is in James Lorence's Organizing the Unemployed.
Whether it will resonate during this crisis? I don't know. I think it's a little late for that, I'd say, unless you anticipate years of this. I don't, at least from what I've observed so far -- all subjective. My phone is ringing with inquiries from recruiters, not like before, but it's not like it was a year ago. 'm not actively looking for work which means that when they get to mean, they're scraping the bottom of the digital barrel with ppl who haven't updated their rez in over a year. Also saw some numbers from my company -- which facilitates the sale of luxury goods -- and the numbers of lead inquiries to buy these goods have been rising steadily for 4 months. So, it looks like things are on the upswing.
I think what you'll see is what has happened at least with the last two major crises: early-mid 80s and early-mid 90s. The people hardest hit were concentrated either in certain geographic areas or industries or both. If you ask people about places like Flint or my hometown, people who went through that huge recession? They'll never remember that, literally, entire towns were out of work. They'll never remember that their families might be spread across the country, some living in the 'sun' states because they moved to the south, to Texas, to CA because those states were supposed to have jobs.
My point? That because the impact was concentrated, what appears like a widespread phenom when looked at in retrospect, wasn't experienced that way when it went on. I think there was some discussion of that with regard to the recession of the mid-80s on this list awhile back. damned if i can find it.
meanwhile, if i can find it, i'll send you my bib on unemployment.
The point of organizing around unemployment is that it's an opportunity when people start seeing the social structural reasons for unemployment. You have to reach them because, if you don't, they succumb to what Newman calls 'meritocratic individualism': in spite of the structural explanations for their fate -- clear understandings that joblessness is not their own fault -- the unemployed still end up blaming themselves. This message is exacerbated by any training, job search counseling, or unemployment counseling they might go through. It would be an important point around which to raise people's consciousness. However, I'd think we'd have to do things like offer people something that also improves their lives immediately. Like the xtians Ehrenreich observed did: they offered assistance with finding jobs, counseling, support groups, etc.
shag
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