It’s a common refrain that “we just don’t make things in the US anymore.” Implied in this refrain is the notion that practically all manufacturing jobs have been outsourced overseas as we’ve transitioned to a full-blown “service economy,” and that unions (and the industrial working class they grew out of) are a remnant of the 20th century. “To be sure, offshoring of jobs is a real phenomenon, and has been responsible for the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs,” as co-host of The Jacobin Show Paul Prescod notes. “But the losses in these jobs were partly offset by new job growth related to the reorganization of production, mainly in logistics. Logistics workers are the new core of the US industrial working class.” What do these changes mean for the economy and the labor movement? Can workers in the logistics industry leverage their critical position in the production supply chain to advance labor’s cause?

As part of a special collaboration with Jacobin magazine, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez joined hosts of The Jacobin Show Jen Pan and Paul Prescod for an extended episode examining the past, present, and future of the American labor movement. In this segment from the show, Prescod examines the current state of the industrial working class in the US and the opportunities for rebuilding a battered labor movement. We are sharing this segment with our TRNN audience with permission from Jacobin.

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Paul Prescod is a co-host of The Jacobin Show, a high school social studies teacher, and member of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers.

Jen Pan is a co-host of The Jacobin Show and has written for the New Republic, Dissent, the Nation, and other publications.

Maximillian Alvarez is an Izzy-Award-winning journalist and the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Executive Director of The Real News Network. He is the founder and host of Working People, "a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today," which he started after his family lost their home and life savings during the Financial Crash of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession. Alvarez is the author of The Work of Living: Working People Talk About Their Lives and the Year the World Broke, a collection of interviews with US workers recorded during Year One of of the Covid-19 pandemic. His forthcoming book—tentatively titled “American Sacrifice: Working People Fight for The Lives (and Our Future) in America’s ‘Sacrifice Zones’”—is under contract with Haymarket Books. From April 2022 to March 2024, Alvarez hosted and produced The Art of Class War series on Breaking Points. From September 2016 to January 2019, he was a regular contributor and then a columnist for The Baffler magazine. Prior to joining TRNN, Alvarez was an Associate Editor at the Chronicle Review at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Prior to that, he was a graduate student-worker and rank-and-file member of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (AFT Local 3550) at the University of Michigan, where he earned a dual-PhD in History and Comparative Literature, taught undergraduates, and published academic articles in Media Theory and La Deleuziana: An Online Journal of Philosophy. Prior to that, he worked a litany of low-wage jobs in different restaurants, warehouses, factories, retail stores, etc. Alvarez’s writing has been featured in outlets like The Nation, Poynter, In These Times, Boston Review, The Baffler, Current Affairs, Dissent, Protean Magazine, The New Republic, Truthout, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. As an analyst and commentator, he has appeared on programs like PBS NewsHour, Breaking Points, Democracy Now!, The Laura Flanders Show, NPR’s 1A, The Hill’s Rising, This Is Hell!, Krystal Kyle & Friends, The Michael Brooks Show, The Jacobin Show, CounterPunch Radio, Citations Needed, Bad Faith with Briahna Joy Gray, Know Your Enemy, Srsly Wrong, Left Anchor, Revolutionary Left Radio, The End of Sport Podcast, Pod Damn America, The David Pakman Show, The Megyn Kelly Show, The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent, The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow, The David Feldman Show, and The Marianne Williamson Podcast.