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  • From the Editorial Team

Once upon a time—so the storyline used to go—global, free market, finance-driven capitalism was destined to open up a passway to universal prosperity and social progress. Now a grimmer narrative prevails. Austerity and marginalization are the benchmarks of a society caught up in a relentless march backwards. Naturally enough, resistance to this undertow of retrogression has emerged. This issue of New Labor Forum begins an examination of these linked experiences of austerity, marginalization, and resistance.

Virtually every state of the union, not to mention the federal government, has committed itself to draconian budget cuts aimed almost entirely at those social services and income supports that make life livable for ordinary working people. Governing elites do this as if they had no other choice, as if the country had been struck by some natural—not man-made—disaster, and as if there were no alternatives. But the catastrophe of the Great Recession was not a natural one. It was instead caused by dominant financial institutions and their political facilitators. Budget deficits are a direct outcome of that collapse of finance capitalism. And there are alternatives to solving the havoc left behind that don’t entail excising the vital organs of everyday life. Robert Pollin and Jeff Thompson lay out a menu of such possibilities that state governments might adopt which would not only address the deficit problem, but also contribute to real economic, job-creating recovery. Josh Bivens analyzes the same austerity regime at the national level. He paints a disturbing picture of how federal budget slashing will not only undermine everything from getting educated to staying healthy, but will also—by eliminating thousands and thousands of government jobs and the economic recovery they help make possible—actually aggravate the deficit that the cuts were ostensibly designed to remedy.

Marginalized labor has typified global capitalism for a long generation. Work in underground economies—in sweatshops here and abroad, labor occurring outside or beneath the radar of labor laws, the mass conversion of peasants into migratory birds of passage headed either into the vast urban slums of their own countries or into the transcontinental tides of immigrant labor—is becoming the new normal in an age of long-term economic decline and austerity. Such a condition has afflicted the Mexican political economy for decades and especially since the advent of NAFTA. James M. Cypher explores that dynamic which threatens to turn Mexico into a failed state, despite the efforts of its ruling oligarchy to depict the country as a haven for a new, mass middle class. David Bacon’s photo essay (appearing in our “Working-Class Voices” section) depicts a trailer-camp mixed community of Native Americans and Mexican migrants working the fields of the Coachella Valley in California. It provides an intimate look at how people struggling to get by and sustain their own community perceive their lives. Meanwhile, in the heartland of Rust Belt America, white working-class families cope with their own social descent, some taking solace in evangelical Christianity. Ken Estey explores whether or not that means they are lost to the cause of social justice.

Whether or not white working-class evangelicals are about to enlist in the struggle against austerity and marginalization, clearly others are, both here and abroad. A cluster of articles examines different facets of this resistance. Michael Schwartz describes the [End Page 4] unfinished Egyptian revolution, noting how deeply rooted it was in that country’s labor insurgency and how much, in turn, that insurgency was embedded in the dynamics of international capitalism. Worker centers have become a more and more conspicuous way workers, mainly immigrants, have struggled against discrimination and exploitation in the “informal economy.” Janice Fine assesses their strengths and weaknesses, and their growing connection to the organized trade union movement. In June 2010, nine independent organizations of such marginalized workers—from day laborers to domestics—founded the Excluded Workers Congress to improve working conditions for those who fall outside U.S. labor protections and to expand the legal framework for workers’ rights. Harmony Goldberg and Randy Jackson explore the possibilities of this alliance and its increasing ties to the organized labor movement. Two...

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