Examples/Empirics for the Perm – reform possible

The COVID- 19 pandemic has cast the crisis of care into particularly stark relief. Caregivers, both waged and unwaged, have endured the most of underinvestment in public health and public caregiving. Health care workers have been stretched thin responding to waves of infection and have themselves been disproportionately subject to COVID- 19 infection.32 The closure of schools and daycares, meanwhile, has driven millions of women, particularly working- class women and women of color, to drop out of the labor force in order to meet family caregiving needs.33 The pandemic has also served to highlight the importance of a political project that can tackle the crisis of care and the climate crisis at the same time— particularly since climate change itself will drive the emergence of new diseases as wildlife habitation and migration patterns change and intersect with human activities in new ways. Industrial agriculture, too, is a major source of novel pathogens: preventing future pandemics thus requires not only attending to public health but improving animal welfare and making farming more ecologically sustainable.34 More generally, climate change is likely to increase the need for care in response to climate- fueled disasters and deteriorating environmental conditions. Yet while the need for such projects may be clearer than ever, we should not underestimate the political challenges they will face. A Green New Deal that expands access to care would represent a reversal of the trends of the past several decades. As Cedric Johnson points out, what was “exceptional” about the New Deal is that “capital was forced to take responsibility for the costs of social reproduction of labor.”35 But today, after decades of neoliberal decimation of the welfare state, even its relatively mild goals seem radical. Even the moderate welfare state of social democracy instituted by the New Deal was ultimately deemed unaffordable. The decline of living standards in the past few decades is the direct result of increased global competition that has forced corporations to drive down prices and wages. Under these circumstances, forcing capital to pay for the reproduction even of its own workers will be challenging enough; forcing capital to pay for ways of living that do not serve capital directly— for universal public services and ecological care— will be even more difficult. Where will the leverage to command such major concessions come from? The scale of transformation that the Green New Deal represents will require a broader social base than extractive industry workers alone. Workers performing the work of social and ecological reproduction are workers who can form part of the political coalition for the Green New Deal— and they can bring the communities they serve with them. These workers have already begun to organize their workplaces and the broader communities in which they are embedded. Workers in the fields of care and education have been among the most militant in recent years: in 2018 the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported twenty “major work stoppages” involving 485,000 workers, with education, health care, and “social assistance” industries accounting for over 90 percent of workers on strike. The Bureau also reports that “between 2009 and 2018 the educational services and health care and social assistance industries accounted for nearly one half of all major work stoppages.”36 Many of these strikes have also taken on a distinctive form. As Jane McAlevey argues, unions win when they do “whole- worker organizing”— organizing that sees workers as connected to broader communities and that organizes communities alongside them.37 These kinds of organizing are particularly crucial in fields where workers who strike are often charged with harming their students or patients: bosses win when they can pit the public against workers. So using a framework known as “Bargaining for the Common Good,” teachers and nurses have rejected the division between workplace and community, organizing with and alongside students, parents, and community members to win victories around both community and teacher demands (for more, see chapter 14 by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò in this volume). As one Chicago Teachers Union slogan puts it, “Our working conditions are their learning conditions.” Amid the 2018 wave of teachers’ strikes known as #REDforED, teachers in Los Angeles and Arizona brought thousands of community members into the streets to support teachers’ action in the workplace. Workers in these sectors have organized alongside movements pushing for the decommodification of social services and insisting that industries that have long offloaded their environmental costs onto the public finally pay what they owe. In New York City such coalitions have produced free pre- K for all; the Chicago Teacher’s Union fought former mayor Rahm Emanuel’s school closures. In places like West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, meanwhile, teachers have fought to make the fossil fuel industry pay more in taxes to fund schools and teachers’ salaries.38 As Sarah Jaffe writes, teachers in West Virginia echo the struggles of coal miners before them in “demanding that the energy barons who have so much power in the state government as well as in its economy— the governor is a second- generation coal billionaire— pay more to those they have exploited.”39 Organizing beyond the workplace is also important for winning struggles within it; at the same time, the workplace can serve as an anchor for organizing broader political struggles and building working- class power. Such expansive approaches to organizing are essential for addressing climate change: climate change is embedded in the patterns of daily life, and class struggle must be, too. Many of the signal political struggles of the contemporary moment, from Standing Rock to Fight for $15, from Black Lives Matter to RED for ED, have combined critiques of economic and racial inequality with attention to the conditions of life both within and beyond the workplace. The uprisings following the police murder of George Floyd represent the most recent set of struggles around the conditions of life itself— and Black life in particular. Activists have outlined a divest- invest platform that calls for defunding police and funding crucial social services: the 8toAbolition platform, for example, calls for “building up life- sustaining systems that reduce, prevent, and better address harm” by, among other things, investing in “care, not cops.” 40 Such calls are entirely compatible with the vision of a Green New Deal for Care that I have outlined here and suggest the potential for new forms of solidarity. The Green New Deal for Care suggests that we need to change more than our energy sources. The desire for such transformation is already latent in contemporary struggles— in demands for Medicare for All and public childcare, in struggles to improve wages and working conditions for care workers, in calls for “care not cops.” A Green New Deal for Care can help bring these struggles together, demanding a new way of organizing both social and ecological reproduction in service of a future where everyone has what they need to live a healthy and fulfilling life on a habitable planet.