Introduction

Somewhat fortuitously, the otherwise diverse offerings in this issue all illustrate aspects of an evolving service economy, discrete from if necessarily dependent upon a surrounding world of extraction and production. Chronologically, we begin with Hannah Forsyth’s inquiry into the roots and logic of the professions in Broken Hill, an iconic mining town in the western outback of New South Wales, Australia. Reflecting Labor’s interest at once in conceptual innovations in the field as well as the transnational reach of social-economic development, Forsyth’s essay surprisingly suggests how crucial as well as numerous were the ranks of a middle-class population even in a rock-ribbed industrial heartland. With close attention to accountants, engineers, journalists, nurses, and teachers, Forsyth charts the role of a self-denying class that moralized and to a degree tamed capitalist logic even as it advanced and legitimized the accumulation project.

In the midst of what many might label the nadir of the US labor movement, two pieces capture moments and strategies of both worker power and organized labor influence. Reconsidering one of the most notorious chapters of American unionism, the corrupt Chicago teamsters of the 1950s, Liesl Miller Orenic draws our attention to the power and the progressive influence of forty-year Local 743 president Don Peters. In particular, she argues that in today’s era, a time when warehouse workers occupy a large (but almost wholly unorganized) employment sector, Peters’s success in bringing the mammoth and notoriously antiunion Montgomery Ward to heel deserves close attention. The Teamster campaign in the mail-order industry (which built on an earlier effort by the CIO’s retail clerks’ union, the RWDSU) involved a combination of department-by-department organization, community outreach, and opportunistic plays on managerial discontent. With a purely pragmatic touch, Peters also opened the doors of the union to legions of black men and young white female workers. This same giant leap in the service sector, however, was somehow accomplished at the same time as Peters and other national union officials were cutting the mafia in on the union’s welfare and pension funds. For decades, a Teamster form of “social unionism” enhanced working-class lives, albeit at the cost of union democracy and outlaw status in the eyes of middle-class prosecutors.

If the Chicago warehouse workers learned to play both an inside and an outside game, so in their way did the Los Angeles Service Employees International Union in its late 1980s, early 1990s Justice for Janitors campaign. As lead organizer Jono Shaffer relates to historian Andrew Gomez, the Justice for Janitors movement—famous for its disruptive mass picketing of LA skyscrapers—actually employed a mixed bag of tricks in attacking building owners who had hidden behind low-wage subcontracting schemes to undo a previous generation of collective bargaining agreements. In addition to recalling the covert forms of contact between organizers and rank-and-file workers, Shaffer points to “trigger agreements” and innovative uses of National Labor Relations Board complaints to counter widespread employer resort to “double-breasting.”

At the noir end of the service sector, Will Cooley contends, we should include the occupational work culture of drug dealers. In particular, he zeroes in on the entry and experience of black and Latino men into an already well-established rackets trade in the late 1960s and 1970s. For many who entered the trade, he suggests, “drug dealing provided an outlet for risk-takers who rejected the strictures of ordinary employment as well as the liberal credence of pushing for change through the system.” Once engaged, the new dealers, like their outlaw forebears, pressed for rational regulation of the naturally undisciplined drug marketplace. Unlike their white predecessors, however, minority gangsters in the trade never achieved a “cooperative consortium” (i.e., effective regulatory and protective arrangements) with police or political officials that would have controlled the violence of the industry: “White mobsters could lean on cops to do their dirty work[;] for nonwhites, the task of rationalization fell to them.” With the 1980s crack epidemic came a massive police and carceral crackdown, although Cooley claims that dealers ultimately “patched together their own version...