[Sometimes the most revolutionary thing you can do is listen.]
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A BOLD EXPERIMENT IN WORKING-CLASS JOURNALISM  
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Lauren Schandevel
August 3, 2021
In These Times - Labor
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_ Sometimes the most revolutionary thing you can do is listen. _

Maximillian Alvarez conducts an interview for the Real News Network.
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I have a recurring fantasy that goes something like this:

I am eating breakfast at a diner in my hometown in Macomb County,
Michigan, when I am approached by a journalist. This journalist is
writing an article about political sentiment in blue collar swing
districts, or something nebulous and overdone like that. He asks me
for a quote and I respond by delivering an awful, Sorkin-esque
monologue about how corporate greed shuttered our factories, how
billionaires stole our wages, and how both parties consistently fail
to meet the needs of the working class. Then, I tell him to fuck off.
Everyone in the diner cheers as he slinks back into his rental car and
drives away.

It’s not my proudest admission, but if _your_ community became
a national scapegoat every four years, then you would probably have
cringeworthy daydreams about telling off reporters, too. For an
embarrassingly long time, I based my opinion of Macomb on articles
written by self-righteous liberals or faux-populist conservatives,
both of whom made assumptions about the area that were objectively
false but fit so well into the paradigm of ​“Middle America”
that it would have been too inconvenient (or worse, _nuanced_) to
disclose the truth. It wasn’t until I moved back to my hometown to
work as a community organizer that I realized just how many of these
accounts were cherrypicked and distorted by people who probably
wouldn’t bat an eye if the entire Midwest slid off the face of the
earth tomorrow. Pundits don’t care that the diverse, blue collar
southern half of Macomb County voted decisively
[[link removed]] for Biden in
2020, or that the stereotypical Trump voter lives north of M‑59,
where the median household income is higher (sometimes much higher)
than the state average. Those details only complicate the predominant
narrative that the working class in the US is overwhelmingly white and
conservative — a narrative that is cynically deployed by
pundits and politicians in service of stomping out progressive ideas
like a lit cigarette. After all, who can refute this random guy we
interviewed at a Home Depot who thinks raising the minimum wage is
a bad idea? Never mind the fact that he owns a chain of used car
dealerships and drives a $45,000 truck — he’s _working class_
because he smokes Newport menthols and wears flannel.

If there is anyone who is angrier about the media’s treatment of the
working class than I am, it is probably Maximillian Alvarez, creator
and host of the aptly-titled _Working People
[[link removed]]_, a podcast ​“by, for, and
about the working class today.” (Disclosure: _In These Times_ has
a partnership with this podcast and syndicates its shows.)

I met Max at the University of Michigan when I was an undergrad and
he was a PhD student. At the time, I was agitating against the
University’s mistreatment of low-income students and my friend
suggested we consult with him on strategy. The meeting went like this,
more or less:

Us: _​“We want to yell at the administration.”_

Him:_ ​“Sounds good, have fun.”_

From that short encounter, a friendship was born. Since then, Max has
invited me on his podcast three times, and even asked me to write a
(tragically paywalled) article for the_ Chronicle of Higher Education_
about the myth of meritocracy — a real test of faith
considering I was in my early 20s and my political analysis was still
very much a work in progress.

All of this is my way of saying that I am grateful to him for
believing in me when my only real credential was my anger.

It is Saturday afternoon and Max, who also serves as Editor-in-Chief
at the Real News Network [[link removed]], is taking
a much-needed break from interviewing
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farmers who are battling CAFOs in rural Wisconsin. Over the next hour,
within the glitchy confines of Zoom, the two of us unravel the nuances
of working class life and the responsibilities of those who
depict it.

“Everyone has a unique story,” Max begins. ​“Everyone has
really interesting life experiences and thoughts to share.”

_Working People _debuted in 2018 with all of the forceful idealism of
a project that fully understood its own significance. The premise was
simple: Each episode would focus on a different person, profession,
and life story. ​“Working class” would be loosely defined,
challenging listeners to put their prejudices aside and construct
their own definition of the term, ideally one that includes
themselves. Over time, these humanizing conversations would forge the
kind of solidarity necessary for a mass movement.

With all of the show’s righteous ambition, Max admits that the first
few episodes were a bit heavy-handed.

“My introductions were like 20 minutes long,” he jokes,
​“because I was so idealistic and I really wanted to communicate
to people: ​‘This project is important and I want to tell
you why!’”

As the show went on, Max learned to step back and let the stories
speak for themselves. Now, three years after its inaugural episode,
_Working People_ has evolved into a beautiful examination of humanity
and the persistence of dignity in some of the cruelest and most
demeaning corners of a late-capitalist world.

_“I had to kill myself on overtime to get close to $1300 or $1400
[every two weeks],”_ recounts Terrill Haigler, a former sanitation
worker featured in Season 4, Episode 19. _​“When I say ​‘kill
myself,’ I mean an extra 40 – 45 hours. That’s an extra
five hours a day.”_

_“There’s so much stigma against fast food workers,”_ says
Burgerville employee and union organizer, Drew Edmonds, in Episode 29
of Season 2. _​“Every time there’s a minimum wage campaign
it’s all about ​‘well those fast food workers don’t deserve
a raise.’”_

_“The work that we do is inherently isolating,” _says Vanessa
Bain, a full-time gig worker interviewed in Episode 10 of Season 3.
_​“There is no real centralized workplace, and that’s something
that benefits these companies, that we don’t get to talk to each
other very often or ever in person.”_

At times, the show can feel a lot like listening to a coworker vent,
and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. When
I bussed tables, the only time I felt even remotely human was on my
cigarette break, when the cooks and servers would gather near the
dumpster behind the restaurant and exchange stories about shitty
customers and bad tips. It was the only way to stay sane, entertaining
your coworkers with an uproarious retelling of an experience that was,
at the time, deeply humiliating and degrading. Similarly, when Max’s
guests describe some of the more demoralizing aspects of their jobs,
you can sometimes hear the animation in their voices. Though it may
seem counterintuitive to anyone who hasn’t worked a service job
before, complaining about — and finding humor in — poor
working conditions can be the ultimate exercise of agency (next to
forming a union, of course) for workers who feel limited in every
other facet of their professional lives. In that way, _Working People_
is kind of like the smoky breakroom of the podcasting world.

While the guests alone distinguish _Working People_ from other
left-wing podcasts, which typically (and often appropriately) bring in
academics, journalists, and professional activists to elaborate on
their subject matter, the show’s other discerning feature is its
willingness to delve deep into the life stories of its interviewees as
a necessary prerequisite to understanding their professions and
political views. At its core, _Working People_ is a podcast that
cares about workers and values what they have to say. Unfortunately,
those qualities make it an anomaly in the contemporary
media landscape.

“The capitalist media has a fundamentally impossible job,” Max
explains, ​“which is to convince an entire population that the
levels of inequality and injustice that are features of the system we
live in are natural and inevitable.”

Impossible as their job may be, that doesn’t stop them from trying.
Media depictions of working class people as uneducated, lazy, or even
downright cruel, all feed into the narrative that those on the
bottommost rung of the economic ladder deserve to be there. Obscured
by the illusion of a predetermined social hierarchy, economic
inequality can persist without question.

“The media [reduces] the complex lives and humanity of working
people,” Max explains, ​“into these reductive terms that comfort
the comfortable and allow people to continue believing that we exist
where we are because we want it, or our individual choices have put us
there, or we’re too stupid…to want what’s good for us.”

One of my college professors, Dean Hubbs, referred to the media elite
as the ​“narrating class
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stuck with me. Journalists in the US are, by and large, predominantly
white
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and most come from economically privileged backgrounds — but in
spite of this, we still trust them to tell us who the working class
are and what they need. Unsurprisingly, the media often takes
advantage of our misplaced faith by framing the needs of the wealthy
as good for — even desired by —working people.

Take, for instance, this _Politico_ article
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from 2019, which speculates about the fate of working class jobs under
a single payer health care system.

_“If the health care system were actually restructured to eliminate
private insurance, the way Medicare for All’s advocates ultimately
envision it,” _the article reads, ​“_a lot of people with
steady, good-paying jobs right now might find themselves out
of work.”_

Quotes from a steel mill worker’s daughter, paired with striking
photos of the Pittsburgh skyline, really hammer home the feeling of
blue collar desperation. Against the backdrop of a swing state, the
whole thing reeks of the kind of pseudo-folksy grift that allows
people like J.D. Vance to dress up a ruling class agenda in coveralls
and call it Appalachian wisdom. Questionable intent aside, at least
the author bothered to actually interview working class people, unlike
a _Forbes_ article
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from earlier this year, titled ​‘Raising The Minimum Wage Hurts
The Most Disadvantaged.’ Check out this bullshit:

_“To understand why minimum wage hurts the most disadvantaged, you
must imagine the person who is having trouble getting hired at a job
paying $7 per hour or higher. They may not have had a job ever or
have had one only in the past year. Their communication skills may not
be adequate or they may not be fluent in the language. They may not
have finished basic schooling. They may not have learned to follow
instructions, show up on time, or diligently complete tasks they
don’t like. It is difficult for the privileged to envision someone
without adequate job skills, let alone hire them… Alas, because we
can’t imagine working for minimum wage, we think everyone can easily
earn more than minimum wage.”_

Look at that weaponization of privilege discourse! Bravo, sir!

The media’s ongoing exclusion of working class voices makes articles
like the one above seem perfectly reasonable. After all, if you, like
the average _Forbes_ reader, have spent a negligible amount of time
interacting with working class people beyond those who are being paid
to serve you, then how do you even begin to refute these
characterizations? While this sort of bad faith punditry, which uses
the working class as a Trojan horse for ruling class ideology, is
something Max hopes to challenge with _Working People_, sticking it to
the ghouls at the _Wall Street Journal_ is far from the only political
function of the show.

When Max first started interviewing workers, he did so with the goal
of supporting a strong working class movement that is both rooted in
and driven by a sense of shared humanity. I know the
podcast-to-revolution pipeline is probably more of an ideal than
a reality at this point, but in the death spiral of late capitalism,
any medium that humanizes an exploited underclass makes the job of an
organizer profoundly easier. Speaking from my own experience,
community organizing is all about relationships, and in the absence of
free food, the most effective way to convince someone to attend
a meeting, sign a petition, vote a certain way, or join a union is
to forge a genuine connection with them. As obvious as this may
sound, you can’t have a relationship with someone you don’t
already see as human, and media depictions of working class people
that serve to justify inequality and champion the economic priorities
of the elite are supremely dehumanizing. It is hard to empathize with
your fellow workers when they are constantly portrayed by an
out-of-touch third party source as reactionary, lazy, uneducated, and
violent — and without that baseline empathy, there can be no
solidarity. By allowing workers to share their stories on their own
terms, _Working People _is actually helping to create the conditions
for collective action.

“If we’re going to build the sort of political movement we need to
build,” Max says, ​“then we’re never going to get there until
we start to reconnect with one another on that human level.”

Throughout our interview, Max makes it abundantly clear that he does
not, under any circumstances, want to speak for the working class.
However, with so few working class voices in the media, he is
frequently asked to do just that. In the last few minutes of our
conversation, Max makes the case that more people need to step up and
interview workers — I mean _really_ interview them, not just
pull a quote or a soundbite — so that their representation can
be as far-reaching and authentic as possible.

“You should feel the absences of all of the people who I couldn’t
talk to and you should go fill those absences,” Max implores
his listeners.

When working people are not given space to tell their own stories,
someone with a larger platform (and more money and power) will always
step in to fill their silence. Sometimes that person is a venture
capitalist from Ohio who parrots AEI talking points about individual
responsibility and moral decay; sometimes it is a political leader
who resents the progressive faction of their own party; and sometimes
it is a business mogul and TV personality who will say anything to
get elected. Too often, the people who claim to speak on behalf of the
working class have something to gain from supplanting all of its
nuance with a narrative that corroborates their own political views.
Though not all of us have the platform to elevate the stories of
working people, we do have the ability to listen to workers, to be in
relationship with them, and to challenge questionable interpretations
of who they are and what they need. For those of us who are on the
ground organizing, these undertakings are not optional; in fact, they
are essential to building the kind of coalition needed to create
a kinder, more just world. If Max’s thesis holds, then the more
time we spend listening to people’s stories, the more invested we
will become in our shared humanity, which is the cornerstone of any
successful working class movement.

“We are going to need to build that solidarity with one another,”
Max says, ​“and the way we do that is by retraining ourselves to
see one another as human beings, and as human beings, recognize that
this world is unlivable and that we deserve so much better.”

_This article is reprinted with permission from The Fragments Project
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