Socialist Night School: Next Shift
Start: 2023-01-23 18:00:00 UTC Eastern Standard Time (US & Canada) (GMT-05:00)
End: 2023-01-23 20:00:00 UTC Eastern Standard Time (US & Canada) (GMT-05:00)
A link to attend this virtual event will be emailed upon RSVP
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Pittsburgh was once synonymous with steel. But today most of its mills are gone. Like so many places across the United States, a city that was a center of blue-collar manufacturing is now dominated by the service economy — particularly health care, which employs more Americans than any other industry.
Gabriel Winant takes us inside the Rust Belt to show how America’s cities have weathered new economic realities. In Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods, he finds that a new working class has emerged in the wake of de-industrialization. As steelworkers and their families grew older, they required more health care. Even as the industrial economy contracted sharply, the care economy thrived. Hospitals and nursing homes went on hiring sprees.
But many care jobs bear little resemblance to the manufacturing work the city lost. Unlike their blue-collar predecessors, home health aides and hospital staff work unpredictable hours for low pay. And the new working class disproportionately comprises women and people of color. Today health care workers are on the front lines of our most pressing crises, yet we have been slow to appreciate that they are the face of our twenty-first-century workforce.
The Next Shift offers unique insights into how we got here and what could happen next. If health care employees, along with other essential workers, can translate the increasing recognition of their economic value into political power, they may become a major force in the twenty-first century.
Join Metro DC DSA’s Socialist Night School for a discussion of The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America, with author Gabrial Winant. Gabriel Winant is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago. His writing about work, inequality, and capitalism in modern America has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, Dissent, and n+1.
This event is open to both DSA Members and supporters.
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