This week's #ThrowbackThursday presents posts focused on worker voice. It features a post sharing the story of an early educator on her path to retirement and worker-voice-centered solutions for her and others like her, another post about workers securing a voice through unions when bosses demand a return to the office, and a series of photos from Northeastern’s graduate workers’ rally with workers literally exercising voice. In sum, this edition lets workers speak for themselves.
How Worker Voice and a Little Capital Can Make Retirement Possible for Early Educators (posted July 12, 2023)
This post, by guest author Kimberly Lucas, tells the story of Rachel, an early educator in her 70s. Rachel has passed retirement age, but continues to keep her licensed family childcare program open to mostly working class-families living in her neighborhood. Her sliding-scale fees making her a little too much to qualify for subsidies and not enough to afford market rates. Rachel’s not alone: national data demonstrate that approximately 29.6% of the early education workforce is at or near retirement age. Care workers are less likely to receive non-wage benefits than the workforce as a whole: while one-third of workers overall have retirement benefits, only one-in-ten childcare workers receive these benefits. These data suggest that few childcare businesses offer access to retirement plans, and those that do may see little uptake.
The Union Difference When Bosses Demand a Return to the Office (posted May 21, 2023)
Bosses from CEOs to front-line managers don’t seem to like being alone in empty offices and darkened hallways. Most of them understood they could not force their employees back to work in confined spaces while the COVID-19 pandemic was raging. Yet, even during the pandemic’s worst days, only one-third to one-half of workers were teleworking. Those percentages declined dramatically as early as the first few months of 2022 when employers’ demand that workers return to work-sites began. So, the balance between remote work and on-site work tipped heavily toward workers being required to show up, even given the grave risks involved.
Photos: Northeastern Graduate Workers Shared Their Stories at Campus Rally (posted April 18, 2023)
This photo series features a Northeastern graduate student worker rally in Centennial Common in April, which provided a space for speakers from their own cohort as well as other Northeastern worker groups to share their stories organizing within the university. Northeastern graduate workers had been trying to organize a union with help from the UAW since 2017. Their stated goals are to secure economic stability, improve health care coverage, and establish strong harassment and discrimination protections.