Queer Working-Class Politics and U.S. Labor
NLF Highlights for June 2024
In the twenty-first century, many of the most promising American union upsurges, such as the Starbucks Workers United campaign, have been led by self-identified LGBTQ workers and have made queer issues key to their organizing. “Queer advocacy seems commonsense to many of today’s unionized workers,” writes political scientist Joanna Wuest in her spring 2024 New Labor Forum article “Queer Working-Class Politics and the U.S. Labor Movement.”
But Wuest argues this is not solely because unions advocate specifically for queer workers on the job and in contracts, as important as such advocacy is. Rather, it’s because the kind of universal representation unions provide for all workers in a given workplace is actually the best way to address the lived realities of queer oppression, many of which are rooted in economics.
New Labor Forum editor-at-large Micah Uetricht spoke with Wuest, an incoming assistant professor of political science at Stony Brook University and author of Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement, about her article and the broader issues related to LGBTQ liberation and the labor movement.
For those further interested in the topic, check out the 2015 New Labor Forum essay “Queer Precarity and the Myth of Gay Affluence” by the late Amber Hollibaugh and Margot Weiss, who argue that both labor and the LGBTQ movement “overlook the rising queer precariat.”
- Reinventing Solidarity Episode 50 – Queer Working-Class Politics and the U.S. Labor Movement
- Queer Working-Class Politics and the U.S. Labor Movement– by Joanna Wuest, New Labor Forum
- Queer Precarity and the Myth of Gay Affluence – by Amber Hollibaugh and Margot Weiss, New Labor Forum
Why are unions essential to LGBTQ liberation? Why is union organizing that advocates for all workers essential to uplifting queer workers? And why is queer advocacy so commonsense to many of today’s unionized workers? Political scientist Joanna Wuest explores these questions and more in a conversation with New Labor Forum editor-at-large Micah Uetricht for our podcast Reinventing Solidarity.
Listen here: SLU.CUNY.EDU/PODCAST
Queer Working-Class Politics and the U.S. Labor Movement
Joanna Wuest, New Labor Forum
In the early months of 2020, queer Starbucks baristas brewed a plan to challenge their low wages and workplace discrimination. I first learned about the campaign while attending a national LGBTQ+ advocacy meeting where a group of these workers previewed their organizing agenda. Sitting in a dim hotel conference room, I listened to the baristas share their experiences, which mixed episodes of humiliation and financial hardship—a trans worker’s “dead name” (pre-transition name) that reappeared on each week’s work calendar; a work calendar that never listed one worker’s name (dead or chosen) enough times to keep their name on an apartment lease. Many of the workers shared their disillusionment with a company that had portrayed itself as corporate America’s trans rights vanguardist . . .
Queer Precarity and the Myth of Gay Affluence
Amber Hollibaugh and Margot Weiss, New Labor Forum
The LGBT movement’s laser-focus on marriage equality propagates the myth of gay and lesbian affluence as political strategy, leaving aside any analysis of class or economic inequality or poverty—much less an analysis of capitalism. LGBT people are typically depicted as affluent consumers with high disposable incomes, yet this is hardly the norm. The majority of LGBT/Q people are poor or working class, female, and people of color, who struggle to get a job or hold onto one, to pay their rent and care for themselves and the people they love.1 Yet that reality remains unseen by mainstream LGBT activists and activists in allied movements, including the progressive and activist labor movements, wrote the late Amber Hollibaugh and Margot Weiss in New Labor Forum in 2015.
