Fight Like Hell: An Interview with Labor Writer Kim Kelly
Kim Kelly
Pronouns: she, her, hers
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We're in the midst of an amazing movement moment—workers are organizing for their rights, joining unions, and fighting like hell to make sure we all have protections in our workplace. Workers have always done the work to change our workplaces for the better—for all of us—with ingenuity. One problem? Many of their stories—particularly workers of color, queer, disabled, immigrant, and women workers have been overlooked or ignored in history. A new book, Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor by Kim Kelly, seeks to make their work visible for a new generation of workers, in hopes that we'll continue to fight like hell for their legacies—and our own rights.
Here is our interview with independent journalist, labor organizer, Teen Vogue columnist, and author Kim Kelly:
ReproJobs: There's this idea that labor organizing is a movement for working class white men who work in manufacturing or other manual labor fields, but that is absolutely not true. Your book Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor writes the Black, indigenous, people of color, queer, disabled, and women labor visionaries and organizers back into their rightful place in history. Can you tell us what made you want to write this book and bring this history to our forefront, particularly now?
Kim Kelly: We’re living through a truly historic moment right now, and I couldn’t be more excited about it. I sat down to write this book in early 2020, when the pandemic had only just begun tearing gaping holes in our already fragile social fabric; throughout the course of that year, I flew back and forth to Alabama more times than I can count to cover a union drive in Bessemer and a coal miners’ strike in Brookwood; workers began quitting their unsatisfactory jobs in droves, squeezed by the pandemic and cognizant of the tight labor market; Striketober hit, with its welcome deluge of mainstream coverage; the Amazon Labor Union notched its first victory against a giant, and a nationwide union organizing wave at Starbucks caught fire. That it’s coming out now, after all of these incredible developments, feels like a massive stroke of luck. My overall goal for this book was to write something that would educate and inspire other workers to dig deeper into our shared history, see themselves in these centuries of struggle, and feel empowered to get involved in the movement themselves; I hope that folks will read FIGHT LIKE HELL on the bus or the train or after a hard day’s work, and find something within its pages that gives them the push they need to make this fight their own.
ReproJobs: While reading your book, it struck us how many historical stories we've been told had the labor element erased from their origins. In particular, Buck v. Bell—a famous Supreme Court case allowing the forced sterilization of disabled people—began as a sexual assault in the workplace. Can you talk about why so many issues begin as labor issues?
Kim Kelly: Every story is a labor story, and every movement for social, political, and economic change in this country has intersected with the labor movement in some way. The reason for that is simple: almost everyone either has a job, has had a job, or will hold a job at some point in their lives; that experience is pretty close to universal, and that means that nearly everyone has probably also experienced unsafe working conditions, or low wages, or harassment and discrimination, or a shitty boss, whether we’re talking about 1722 or 2022. Those connections aren’t always made explicit when we read about them now, though, so that’s something I tried to do with this book—to show the connective tissue between these movements that are often represented as individual fights instead of as different facets of the same working class struggle.
ReproJobs: You've reported on labor organizing and toxic workplaces in repro previously. What similar labor issue challenges and union busting tactics have you observed in repro workplaces that also exist in other workplaces in other fields?
Kim Kelly: The tactics are very similar all across the board, because union busters still follow the same tired old playbook that they’ve been using for as long as unions have existed in this country: misinformation, intimidation, retaliation, and quite often (at least in a historical sense) outright violence to crush workers’ efforts to organize and build collective power. Back during the West Virginia Mine Wars, coal miners who were trying to unionize literally had to fight for their lives against the coal bosses’ hired guns. We’ve seen repro workers at Planned Parenthood in Texas and Colorado deal with the same divide-and-conquer propaganda, disingenuous messaging, and anti-union legal strategies that Amazon used to threaten warehouse workers in Alabama and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz encourages his management teams to use on unionizing baristas. It really just underlines how important it is for workers in any profession to organize—if unions weren’t an effective way to raise wages and improve working conditions, bosses would spend far less time (and money) trying to bust them.
ReproJobs: In the book, you outline many moments in history when anti-Blackness, racism, and ableism in a workplace led to workers being fed up and organizing unions. We're seeing more workers turning towards unions during the Black Lives Matter uprisings and lack of protections during COVID. Why do you think these are all connected?
Kim Kelly: There has been a lot of fully justified anger at a system that viciously exploits and devalues the most marginalized, and the past several years have seen many workers start to reevaluate their relationship with work, and to rethink the value of their labor—and their lives. When the Covid-19 pandemic first hit, there was a brief moment of recognition for all those “essential workers” whose labor has always been essential—but soon enough, the hazard pay dried up and the Thank You signs went down, but people kept dying, and those workers still had to go to work. Black and Brown communities have been hit twice as hard by the pandemic as their white counterparts, and were already far more vulnerable thanks to what the Economic Policy Institute called the preexisting conditions of racism and economic inequality. Something had to give, and unions have long been one of the best tools that workers have to improve their material conditions—especially those who otherwise can’t rely on equal protections under the law, from the Washerwomen of Jackson in 1866 to Civil Rights-era labor organizers like Bayard Rustin and Rosina Tucker to Amazon Labor Union leader Chris Smalls, who was recently arrested for bringing lunch to his former coworkers shortly before the union won its historic election in Staten Island.
ReproJobs: In the book, you highlight how often police are brought in to cut down workers and break labor strikes, despite being in labor unions themselves. Why is that and what efforts exist to address the ways in which police harm labor organizing?
Kim Kelly: The police have only ever existed to protect private property and the interests of capital, and so in the great tug-of-war that has long raged between labor and capital, they have never been on our side. While cops are able to enjoy the benefits of their own bloated, malevolent “unions,” they have embraced their historical role as strikebreakers, union-busters, and gun thugs, from the Battle of Blair Mountain to the murder of United Farm Workers organizer Nagi Daifullah in 1973 to the sheriff who killed Andres Guardado, the son of a UNITE HERE member, in 2021 and the troopers who have looked the other way as coal company goons attack striking miners on the picket line in Alabama. There have been calls from rank-and-file workers and organizers within the labor movement to kick out the cops and disaffiliate from their “unions,” but it’s been an uphill battle due to a number of factors, and will undoubtedly continue to be a thorny, complex argument within labor (at least until we abolish them outright).
ReproJobs: In one chapter, you highlight the ingenuity of sex workers organizing strikes and unions, particularly when experiencing targeted legislation and racism and colorism within their already stigmatized work. Sounds very familiar to abortion workers! But, the feminist movement (and labor movement) hasn't always embraced sex workers. Do you see potential for solidarity between the movements, particularly now, as all of our work is being criminalized and stigmatized?
Kim Kelly: It was very important to me to include a chapter specifically on sex workers’ organizing work in the book (and to only interview current and former sex workers for said chapter) because as workers, as organizers, as leaders, and as activists, they have always been an important part of the labor movement. Unfortunately, these workers have all too often left out of the conversation entirely thanks to the ignorance, stigma, and whorephobia that persists within the organized labor establishment and society at large—and that’s bullshit. Anyone who says they stand with workers and care about workers’ rights needs to prove it, and stand in proud solidarity with sex workers (and abortion workers!). Sex worker-led organizations like Strippers United, the Adult Performance Artists Guild, The Black Sex Worker Collective, Red Canary Song, the Haymarket Pole Collective, and many others are doing incredible, necessary work to protect and lift up marginalized and criminalized workers—some are traditional labor unions, while others operate as nonprofits, community organizations, or other kinds of radical projects—and are building on a long history of militant, creative, radical labor organizing that has and continues to change the world for the better.
ReproJobs: We've found that repro workers have a hard time seeing themselves as part of the labor movement, and vice versa, labor is ignorant and unaccepting of abortion workers. What changes do you believe need to happen before we can move forward as one union?
Kim Kelly: Thankfully, the labor movement is not a monolith, and I think that there is a new, more progressive generation of labor activists and labor leaders who can and should be counted on to show up for repro workers; the problem lies in those more conservative voices who are also a part of the movement, especially those who hold positions of power. It boggles my mind that anyone who enjoys the benefits of a union and says they care about worker power and solidarity could then turn around and exclude certain types of workers for no good reason, but that’s nothing new—there have always been reactionaries in the movement, and there are many shameful chapters in organized labor’s history in this country wherein both the powerful and some rank-and-file members have done just that. The way we’ve moved forward from that in the past has been by bringing in new blood, and elevating new voices and leaders who have actively pushed back against racism, xenophobia and other types of discrimination in the movement—and that’s what it’s going to take to keep moving forward here, too.
ReproJobs: What is your advice for repro workers who are considering unionizing their workplace or learning more about labor organizing?
Kim Kelly: Talk to your coworkers! That’s always the first step; identify the issues in your own workplace, and open up a dialogue with the people you work with to see how they’re feeling, what challenges or problems they may be dealing with on the job, and what they think needs to change. If it turns out that all or most of you are on the same page, then it might be time to reach out to a union organizer or a worker center to weigh your options and decide what steps you’d like to take. There are a lot of great resources like Labor Notes, the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, and the IWW’s organizer trainings if you’re interested in learning more about the process and various strategies, too (and I always recommend reading more about labor history—there are tons of great titles listed in FIGHT LIKE HELL’s bibliography!). A union is simply a group of workers who join together to advocate for themselves and one another in the workplace—and that all starts with a conversation.