Debt Is Wage Theft, Debt Steals Leisure Time, Debt Can Suppress Strikes: Debt Is a Labor Issue

“The key conclusion is that while inflation indeed induces strike activity, as we’re seeing now, the burden of personal debt offsets that increase,” Giorgos Gouzoulis wrote in Jacobin. ​“In fact, my research finds that personal debt has been suppressing major strikes over the last five decades.”

My own research has generally focused on education and debt, but I have also been exploring debt’s intersection with labor—and how the issues cannot be unlinked. The United Auto Workers’ (UAW) historic ​“standup” strike in fall 2023 had a big impact on me. I saw that UAW comrades, like so many workers everywhere, were striking to take back the wages, time and slices of life that debt robs them of, and it confirmed how sorely the labor movement needs a coherent debt analysis and collective strategies to fight for debt cancelation.

UAW workers on the picket line in Pennsylvania taught me how deeply their debts and the standup strike were intertwined. Since then, I’ve been speaking about debt more intentionally with workers and labor leaders across the country.

All of the conversations were powerful and moving. The labor leaders I spoke with all talked about the deep impact debt has on their comrades and membership, and how transformative debt relief would be for labor.

United Farm Workers President Teresa Romero spoke of how farmworkers, often poor and undocumented, are unable to secure medical care, and that just making it to the United States can put them in thousands of dollars in debt. The cost of dying in the United States is another issue.

“Sometimes it’s $18,000 to send the body of a loved one back to their country,” Romero explained.

Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jackson Potter told me that some union members are anxious of potential strikes because so many members are dealing with the impact of debt. He added that battling debt cannot be done in isolation and that unions need to build and join coalitions that can ​“defeat that kind of money power.”

Brittany Alston, Executive Director of the Philly Black Worker Project talked about how Philadelphia ​“serves as a microcosm for what the impact of racial capitalism looks like on Black people in America.”

“Instead of having that conversation, we’re often having conversations about the symptoms of the problem,” she said. “[We need to] really make sure we are rooted in the fact that this city has been deeply disinvested in.”

Olivia Schwob, Co-Chair of the Freelance Solidarity Project described an entire field where freelancing and debt ​“intersect in this really terrible way,” especially because freelancers have a really hard time knowing where their next paycheck might be coming from and it’s often impossible to predict income.

Collectively, all of my conversations have underscored how much debt shapes the lives of workers, both individually and collectively.

The myth that those in power spin would have us believe that indebted workers are living irresponsibly or have somehow failed as workers, but those of us saddled with debt know otherwise. That’s why storytelling is a critical part of what we do at Debt Collective. We have been convening debtor assemblies across the country, where those who are in debt are encouraged to share their stories. Sharing these stories reminds debtors that we are not alone; there are millions and millions of others.

In telling and hearing the tales and details of debt, a destigmatizing shift occurs. A debtor movement has momentum and direction when one debtor can say to another, ​“I have debt, and you have debt, and that means that we have debt.”

We feel the effects of a rigged neoliberal economy in every corner of the country. In Michigan, traditionally the hub of the U.S. automobile industry, for every $1 of income, households have $1.30 in debt. Not surprisingly, historically marginalized communities generally carry heavier debt burdens. The effect of the rigged neoliberal economy is that it has given us stagnant wages, higher costs for basic goods, and income inequality not seen in this country since the Gilded Age. Most in the United States don’t take on debt because they are living beyond their means, but because it’s the only means to live. People aren’t in debt because they don’t work enough, but because the work we do doesn’t cover the bills we have.

Workers with debt can and do fight back. As Debt Collective co-founder (and my colleague) Hannah Appel has argued, the starting point for debtor organizing is to ask what would happen if we understood the staggering $17.69 trillion in total household debt as a source of collective leverage, rather than aggregate individual liabilities. Organizing for better wages and benefits is to organize against debt. To organize for debt abolition is to strengthen the power of the working class. Given the current historic juncture in which both labor and debtor organizing is on the rise, now is the time to focus on building worker-debtor power.

The more labor wins, the less debt workers have; the less debt workers have, the more labor wins.

My interview below with Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, goes a long way toward underscoring the Debt Collective saying: ​“Alone our debts are a burden, but together, they make us powerful.”

These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

Could you share a little bit about your own story of debt? And what you’ve learned from other conversations about debt in the labor movement?

SARA NELSON: It is really expensive to be poor. When I left school, I had approximately $45,000 to pay down. I was working four jobs. 

So here I am looking at all of this and then I start to get the notices that my student loan repayment is going to start, and I’m barely piecing together how to just live based on what I was making. I was terrified. I had no idea how I was going to make ends meet. 

At that moment, on a very cold day in February, my friend called me. We were best friends in college, and she had become a flight attendant. She said, ​“This job is no joke.” And she described the flight attendant contract, and it was going to be more pay than my first year as a teacher. It had incredible flexibility, healthcare that was also focused on what women need, and it had a pension. 

They put me through six weeks of unpaid training because I didn’t become a union member until I graduated from training. I was down to $12 before I was supposed to get my first paycheck, and I didn’t get it. I was told that people get their first paycheck at different times for different reasons. So I’m thinking, ​“I gotta make it through two and a half weeks until the next payday. How am I going to do that?” I ate a lot of ramen and prayed for trips on planes so that I could eat plane food. 

So I got to the next payday, and there was still a problem. And that’s when another flight attendant saw me, and she tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around. She’s holding her checkbook, asking me how to spell my name, and she hands me a check for $800. I’d never met her before. 

I remember her union pin right above her wings, and she said ​“number one, you go take care of yourself, and number two, you call our union.” 

I learned everything I needed to know in that moment: In our unions, we’re never alone. And through our unions, we can make the most out of being together and make a difference in each other’s lives. That’s what got me involved. 

Flight attendants very likely have debt, and very likely are at the very least living paycheck to paycheck. This is the normal situation for all flight attendants and, frankly, the working class across the board. This has increasingly become the case as wages have stayed flat over the last 40 years. Here I am, 50 years old, and I still have debt I’m paying off.

What is your understanding of the range of debt issues that flight attendants are wrestling with?

NELSON: Flight attendants are one of the most-educated workforces, so a lot of them are carrying student loan debt going into the job. There’s also this expectation that you should do the job for next to nothing.

The requirements for flight attendants just to get to work will typically put them in debt in those early years. And then, as you move along in life and you move up the pay scale, you may be in a better position to cover life’s expenses, but you’re basically breaking even and not getting rid of that debt. And the debt exponentially rises, because usually it’s credit card debt with incredibly high interest rates, and it’s almost impossible to pay that off.

So it’s really those first few years that set the foundation for what you’re experiencing for the rest of your career. But the biggest reason that flight attendants are in debt is the same reason the rest of Americans are. It has to do with housing. We can’t afford to live in these expensive cities where the airports are, so we’re either commuting by air or by car for hours to get to work.

We also work in a job where there is a high rate of injuries. We’ve had health studies that found flight attendants have a much higher rate of cancer as opposed to the general population, even though it’s my understanding that flight attendants are generally more fit than the general population. My hearing is not great. Guess why? Because of jet engines. There are all kinds of hazards in the workplace.

I could probably continue on for a long time about all of the reasons that people get in debt and the likelihood of that happening, or any one of those cracks you can fall into

I was hoping we could talk about some dynamics that fuse labor and debt together: how debt is a form of wage theft, that it robs us of our leisure time, that workers in debt are less likely to strike or be politically engaged. What are your thoughts?

NELSON: OK, so debt is wage theft. I mean, that’s just literally true. It’s management extracting more from working people. Because they’re now controlling this from Wall Street, because they want to extract as much wealth as they possibly can — which means that our wages have stayed flat, which is essentially wage theft.

On the political activity, I talk to people all the time who say they don’t have time to vote. Even if it’s a requirement that they get time off to go vote, they don’t have the ability to think about it or be politically engaged or civic minded because they’re so busy just trying to put food on the table. And the corporate league knows this. They know that if you keep the working class desperate, workers are more likely to accept a job for less, more likely to accept worse conditions, and less likely to organize a union or take action on the job — because workers are so busy trying to make ends meet that we can’t even think of these ideas or talk with our coworkers about having the same experience, and workers can just be in a hole by ourselves.

In the worst-case scenarios, that leads to suicide. Even in best-case scenarios, they’re so busy just trying to keep their lives together that they don’t even have the time to think politically or think how there could be another system that could be better.

How might it help the labor movement if unions had more of a debt analysis or strategy of bringing debt discussions into conversations?

NELSON: I think it’s powerful, first and foremost, to say that the conditions working people are in are horrific. One of the reasons the UAW strike was so powerful was that Shawn Fain was not afraid to talk about the horrid conditions that had to change, not afraid to define those issues. We have to find every way to tell these stories, to share these experiences and understand what workers come to when they actually are in a union and are taking a strike vote, getting very sharp on what the issues are, why they’re willing to take strike action — where they’re actually saying, ​“I’m willing to sacrifice because this is so bad; I have to sacrifice to make it better.” And you have to have nearly unanimous decision-making to make that work.

When you talk about these issues and people share their common experience, you find that, actually, the working class has a common narrative, no matter what the job is, no matter what the sector or industry is. And we can do something about it together.

What would you say to any worker that’s struggling with debt?

NELSON: The very first thing I would say is essentially what that flight attendant, who was holding her checkbook, said to me: ​“You are not alone.”

JASON WOZNIAK: Can you share about the Philly Black Worker Project and the kinds of work and organizing you do?

BRITTANY ALSTON: The Philly Black Worker Project is a worker center that sets out to build power alongside Black workers to fight for dignity and respect at work. The organization began to take shape in 2019. We were asking ourselves, ​“How do we meet the need for organizing in economies that are both growing and also far more informal than what we were used to?” And so we started thinking about the container to hold that organizing. And we landed on the Philly Black Worker Project, as a worker center formation that we thought could support people in both creating a pathway to a high quality job, but also transforming industries that historically have exploited Black and brown workers. While we focus on Black workers, we recognize the ways that the informal economy doesn’t just impact Black workers here, but Black and brown workers in the Global South. That analysis really informs our organizing

I often think about the ways that Philly illustrates the impact of racial capitalism on Black people in America. I think that instead of having that conversation, we’re too often having conversations about the outgrowths of that problem. We talk about gun violence, about mass incarceration, but I think our organizing needs to be rooted in the fact that this city has been deeply disinvested in, has been abandoned by corporate ​“allies” and elected officials, resulting in a city where people do not have access to the things they need, and they act accordingly.

WOZNIAK: How do you see and think about the intersections of racial capitalism and debt?

ALSTON: Social programs have been systematically and intentionally underfunded. Our safety nets have been destroyed. This disinvestment opens the door to the privatization of goods and services. These aren’t victimless acts. People are left to navigate these broken systems. Working class people end up carrying the burden.

We feel the crushing pressure of debt. I am being really specific and saying ​“feel” because it’s true. It’s weighted, it impacts our bodies, our mental health, it shows up in so many ways. It also creates an intense isolation. People feel like they are the problem, when really it’s a systemic failure. I’ve been broke, I’m often broke, and you become the most savvy money manager: you’re calculating all your expenses, you’re choosing your meals according to how much money you have. You’re making $20 stretch until your next paycheck. The problem isn’t financial irresponsibility, it’s that our economy is built on low-wage jobs.

WOZNIAK: At Debt Collective, we try to foster a space where people can talk about their debt without feeling shame and guilt. We’re so conditioned to think of our debt as an individual failing, so recognizing that we’re not alone can be incredibly empowering. Would you be willing to share a bit about your experiences with debt?

ALSTON: I have $89,900 in student loan debt. It feels like something that I won’t be able to get out from under. There have been jobs that I’ve had to leave because they just didn’t pay enough for me to be able to make my student loan payments. In order to make those payments, I was leaning pretty heavily on my credit cards. I remember working in D.C., and I got in so much debt because my rent was so high that I had to find other ways to keep up with the bills. I ended up taking out my 401(k) money recently so that I could pay off my credit card debt, so that I can just focus on my student loan debt. I grew up with a mom who worked three jobs. We were constantly trying to make ends meet, robbing Peter to pay Paul. I think that there is a gendered dynamic to debt, in that it keeps people in relationships that they don’t want to be in or that they need to escape from. Debt is a really strong example of what freedom does not look like.

That feels really salient when it comes to our membership — most of our members are justice impacted. After being incarcerated, you face supervision fees, court fees, restitution fees. This is assuming you don’t already have other debt. You may have a number of expenses, you might have children you need to provide for. All of these expenses pile up, and meanwhile you’re trapped in an economy that has systematically locked you out. So a lot of the work that we do is around organizing folks who are working in the contingent workforce, in temp work. You can see the ways that the carceral state has entrapped people well after they’ve been incarcerated.

To that end, we’re starting a pilot program where basically, you come in for political education classes over a weekend, after which we’ll help pay off your fines and fees. That’s essential because these things pile up: if you can’t pay your fines, you can lose your license, then you’re unable to drive to work. Now your probation officer is on your behind because you have a work requirement. So now your freedom is threatened again. It’s a horrible, vicious cycle.

WOZNIAK: At Debt Collective we’ve come to conceptualize debt in a number of ways: as a form of wage theft, as an attack on leisure time, and as a mechanism to discipline workers. How do you make sense of the political ramifications of debt?

ALSTON: I worked on this campaign with UNITE HERE and we were surveying Marriott workers. I started looking at their pay stubs and seeing that there were these huge fees going out of their check back to the company. The employer had set up a credit union that had high interest rates which workers relied on because they did not make enough money. They were trapped in a cycle, paying the principal and interest on these loans that they were taking out from their employer at close to 20% to 30% interest. So workers came together and organized, I think it was a class action suit, and they got their money back. Employers are baking in debt to their employment model, and going into the pockets of workers, because these workers don’t have what they need. It was the most infuriating thing that I had ever seen. It was like a company town.

That said, I think there are many ways to conceptualize debt. Debt is also an agitator. If they continue to take our money, if they continue to not pay us, then we also have a lot of leverage to organize our people to get our shit back. So yes, debt can constrain organizing, but I think it can also make us better organizers. Debt as it exists challenges us to be better organizers, to remember that we don’t have what’s theirs, we don’t owe them, they owe us. Especially for Black folks, they’ve always owed us. In that sense, I think about debt almost as the exact opposite of reparations. I don’t think I can ever conceive of how someone could rationalize not paying people for centuries, whether it was free labor, or underpaid labor, and then say we owe anything. How dare you! You know what I mean?

WOZNIAK: If you could say anything to workers struggling with debt, what would it be?

ALSTON: We have to find community, we have to find organizing spaces that allow us to communicate about what we’re going through. Organizing spaces allow us to contextualize our experiences not as individual failings, but as failures of disinvestment. Debt can crush our self esteem and really dim our lights — particularly Black folks, women, queer and trans folks who have already been oppressed for who they are. And so when people can come together to find their light, I think that is a powerful thing.

I hope that more people can find that light and breathe a little bit easier knowing that we have the power to transform this society into one that doesn’t make us feel like it makes us feel right now.

JASON WOZNIAK: How does debt impact farm workers and the United Farm Workers collectively as a union?

TERESA ROMERO: In many cases, it’s not just credit card debt or student debt. It is debt from medical needs that farm workers have. The average farm worker, both in California and nationwide, lives below the poverty line. And what happens is, in many cases, when they need to see a doctor, it’s not just the debt, but they wait as long as they can to see a doctor because they cannot afford it. The majority of farm workers are undocumented, the majority of farm workers do not have health insurance— unless they have a union contract. And they live with the idea that the money they make is to pay rent and to support their family. And when they have medical debt, it is another stress because they don’t make enough money.

WOZNIAK: So how do you feel about the fact that so many farm workers are delaying treatments and working under such difficult conditions?

ROMERO: Their situation is very difficult. The majority of them are undocumented. And so here in California, they’re now able to apply for medical insurance, but that does not offer long-term security, because the way the budget is in California, that could disappear. So it affects their financial health and their physical health. And by the time they go to the doctor it’s because they can’t wait any longer. And their health has gotten worse and the expense is going to be higher, but they wait as long as they can so they don’t risk losing their jobs.

The difficult conditions that farmworkers are working under, every summer, the temperatures are getting higher and higher. Sometimes, even though in California we have protections that they have to get some rest periods and shade and water, farm workers who don’t have a union contract are afraid to ask for that. A study found that nearly 50% of farm workers in California experience workplaces out of compliance with the State’s heat safety law. And they continue to work. And what happens at that point, if they collapse, or they’re feeling so sick, they have to go to the doctor. Because it is too much.

But even then, they try to go to the doctor as a last resort. They endure everything that they put in front of them.

WOZNIAK: How much of this is about immigration status, too? I would think debt and immigration status and health care are intertwined.

ROMERO: Immigration status is a big issue, especially in agriculture. The way that vulnerability works is that the fear they have of taking time to go to the doctor is that they might get fired. And because they can’t work, or if they are not going to be able to work, a supervisor or owner may replace them immediately. It is job security that they’re concerned with.

We need to remember a large majority of farmworkers’ work is seasonal work. So if they have worked for six months, then the other six months they’re trying to figure out where else they’re going to work. It is the fear of losing their job and the fear that if they have to be out for two or three days, not getting paid, then they won’t be able to meet their needs.

WOZNIAK: In dealing with seasonal work, are there periods where farm workers will take out loans or borrow money to survive?

ROMERO: I have heard from workers that sometimes they do that, and I don’t know that they’re going go to a bank and take out a loan. But they do take a loan from a friend from a family member. So in the end, the friend and family members are expected to get paid, of course, but they do that. It is very difficult for them to get a bank loan.

WOZNIAK: Are there other areas where farm workers have to pay large fees or debts?

ROMERO: There are two sets of workers we work with. One group are the workers that come with a H2A visa. Those workers unfortunately, and we’re working on trying to solve this, but these workers pay thousands of dollars to the recruiters.

WOZNIAK: Recruiters? Can you say more about that?

ROMERO: They are recruiters that bring recruited workers from their countries of origin. I have spoken with families with workers that pay $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 to the recruiter and when they first come here to work in the United States with a visa, which is a temporary visa, the recruiter takes away their phone and their papers. And they have to work to pay their debt first, before they can get their phone and papers back.

They owe the recruiter and so what happens is that recruiters take their documents and phones, they don’t have a way to communicate. They live in the premises of the employer, they’re more isolated, and so the first few months of their work is to pay the debt.

WOZNIAK: That’s indentured servitude.

ROMERO: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s illegal and they try to hide it.

WOZNIAK: And the companies know about it?

ROMERO: You know, they claim not to. If you talk to any company who brings H2A workers, they said we work with an attorney in Mexico, or Guatemala, or El Salvador, wherever they come from, and we work with the people that are recruiting the workers there. And they, you know, they wash their hands. If you ask me, yes, I think they know.

WOZNIAK: Are they getting charged interest on those loans?

ROMERO: Not that any has reported to me, but even when it comes to certain things, if they pay for the ticket, for example, to come to the United States, they are supposed to get reimbursed for it. I talk to workers where they are not being reimbursed the entire amount. Once a company knows that we’re talking to the workers, you know, the next year, or the next time they come, they get reimbursed the whole amount.

WOZNIAK: That hits on a really powerful note, which is to name that the UFW has, already in essence, been doing work around debt struggle, as you’re showing with this situation.

ROMERO: And one way we’re doing it is that there were some regulations with the Department of Labor, where, specifically for the workers that come with these work visas, where every person, every recruiter is going to have to register it. And if we get reports that they’re doing something like this, we will report it to the Department of Labor, and then they will not allow them to recruit workers. You know they’re going to find a way around it. But at least we’re taking some steps.

Another thing is we have farm workers who have a loved one who died. And just to send the body to their countries of origin, they can get into debt because they want to bury him, in Mexico, Guatemala, and elsewhere. The needs that they have are sometimes very different to other populations. But that’s another thing, you know, sometimes it’s $18,000 to send the body of a loved one back to their country.

WOZNIAK: Wow. So one thing we could say is that death is a debt sentence for the families you’re describing, it sounds like it puts them into massive amounts of debt.

ROMERO: Just the fact that they want to transfer the body to their countries of origin, that is expensive, they have to go through a funeral home here, a funeral home in Mexico, it is an expensive process. I don’t think that is necessarily anything that anybody is doing that is taking advantage of workers. It is just a process that is expensive, but that gets them into debt, just to be able to fulfill the wishes of their loved one when they die.

WOZNIAK: For any farmworkers reading this interview, what would you want to share with them directly about any issues with debt they’re facing?

ROMERO: You know, I wish I had comforting words to tell them. But their realities are so hard, so complicated. It is their legal status, their debts, their health, their children’s health. When we were going through the pandemic, many were not sending kids to school because they were staying home and getting their education via Zoom. Farm workers don’t have computers or don’t have multiple computers so their kids can easily Zoom in. They would have to pay for babysitters or bring their kids to work. So the word ​“debt” for them encompasses all this. If they wanted to get their kids educated, they would have to buy computers. They cannot buy computers unless they go into more debt. They don’t have, in their remote areas where they live, good WiFi. So they have to make a decision: Do I do it? Do I get in debt? Can I get in debt and afford to do this? Or the sacrifice is going to be that my kids are not going to be able to have the education that they deserve.

WOZNIAK: That’s really wild, because you just highlighted another form of education debt. Like it’s not just student loans in college.

ROMERO: Yes, yes. And the kids are paying the consequences. Now they’re going back to school. Those kids who did not have parents that could afford to buy computers, they’re behind.

WOZNIAK: We’re coming to a close and I wanted to offer something we say at Debt Collective which is that alone, our debts are a burden, but together, they give us power. So if we can unite debtors, we can make some noise.

ROMERO: Si, se puede.

JASON WOZNIAK: Can you share how debt impacts your life personally as a freelancer or how it impacts those in the Freelance Solidarity Project?

OLIVIA SCHWOB: Freelancers, like other workers, are worried about debt. But freelancers uniquely have a really hard time predicting their income. And so that works on all of us psychologically to limit the kinds of risks we feel we can take creatively and professionally. It also means that the stakes of some of the difficult work conditions that we experience as freelancers are high because many of us have loans hanging over our heads.

As I was preparing for this interview, I heard from a couple of members who shared the ways that debt in general, but especially student loan debt, impacts their ability to take various steps on the career path that would help them achieve success within media — unpaid internships or really low-paid entry-level jobs. Those things are not really open to media workers with debt. In the way that freelancing works, often workers assume a lot of the upfront costs and a lot of the upfront risks of producing media — take for example a reporting trip that only works if you can cover expenses yourself and then hopefully get reimbursed. These can be individually small, but add up to an overwhelming psychological state of precarity, and debt is a large dimension of that.

WOZNIAK: I wonder if debt also impacts what people are willing to write on? In other words, if you’re not going to take as many risks, or you’re gonna be more conservative — does debt ever play a role in actually shaping reporting projects?

SCHWOB: I think this is true in other industries as well: if you have a large debt burden, that influences the kinds of work that you can take on. An independent journalist with a huge amount of student debt from journalism school can only go work for a media institution that’s very well-resourced and able to pay them consistently, at a level where they know they’ll be able to repay that debt. There’s obviously a power dynamic inherent in that which is troubling.

It also means that the media that gets produced is not necessarily the most socially necessary media. It’s just the media that serves the interest of the highly-resourced media institutions. For freelancers, that’s probably even more the case — you can’t take risks on projects that might not come through. You can’t take the personal financial risk of an assignment for a publication that can’t pay as well, because you have this debt burden hanging over your head. It’s definitely a force shaping the industry for the worse.

The level of risk that a worker personally feels that they can take varies so much based on how much debt someone has, but also what the rest of their financial situation looks like, including how much access to capital and support networks they have. Especially when media institutions are shuttering and laying people off by the thousands, the people who are making the personal assessments that they can’t tolerate this level of instability and uncertainty in the industry as a whole are sometimes then leaving journalism and going to do something else entirely. And those media workers are probably more likely to be people of color or people with less generational wealth.

WOZNIAK: Do you see debt as being so bad for freelancers that it could potentially spark something new and different in the industry?

SCHWOB: Given the consensus that the state of the media industry is the worst it’s ever been, it’s definitive evidence that the system as it has existed is not working. One of the hopeful responses in this moment has been an increased interest in forming worker-owned media co-ops as a potentially more sustainable and less profit-motivated model. But access to that kind of solution is also dependent on your access to startup capital.

WOZNIAK: How would you respond to or think about the following statements about debt? One, debt is a form of wage theft. Two, debt robs workers of leisure time. Third, debt makes workers less likely or less willing to engage in either strikes or more radical political action.

SCHWOB: How debt works structurally is that it passes risk onto the least powerful individuals in the system: the worker. And for freelancers, that’s very much the case. We have very few legally guaranteed rights to being paid on time, being paid at all — and that’s changing. NWU is doing work to get laws in place across the country that enshrine some of those rights. But absent that legal protection, any time a freelance worker takes on an assignment they are taking on the risk that that assignment will not be paid. There is a period of time where they’re just living with risk and then potentially putting expenses on credit cards while they’re waiting to get paid. And that makes it so the effective wage for the work that you’ve done is lower because you have had to involve credit in that way.

It’s an interesting intellectual and rhetorical challenge to make it clear that it is all part of this one system. People tend to think of student debt, medical debt, and various other kinds of debt as separate from one another. But as a total condition, it makes debtors or workers assume the risk of not knowing what’s going to happen in the future, and then that kind of consumes you mentally. It’s a lot harder to think creatively and expansively, and this matters a lot for media workers. It’s a lot harder to think freely when you have loan payments hanging over your head.

WOZNIAK: And what about debt robbing our free time?

SCHWOB: I think about debt as kind of like psychic weight. You’re constantly looking for ways to get out from under the debt. Any amount of time that you can turn into money becomes critical, your time becomes a sort of exploitable resource, and it’s really rough to think of your whole 24 hours in your day as a potentially exploitable resource. Freelancers are very vulnerable to thinking that way because any hour that we’re not working on a paid gig is an hour that we’re losing the ability to get on top of our financial situation.

WOZNIAK: Turning a bit more, hopefully, optimistically, to the question of debt resistance. And you know, one of the reasons I wanted to do this project and talk to folks in labor is because the hypothesis is that if labor were to take on or adopt more of a debt analysis, it would give us different ways of building power, and maybe we will be able to find different cracks and points of leverage. I’m curious if you have any thoughts about what it may or may not do for you all at the Freelance Solidarity Project and the National Writers Union to talk more about debt.

SCHWOB: There’s one scholar whose work I really like, Monica Prasad, who outlines the way that the U.S. welfare state was constructed to rest on this foundation of individual debt rather than sort of like redistribution. And that, I think, is key to how I think labor should think about debt. Because, in the journalism context for instance, the most visible or direct connection to debt is journalism school loans. And that is very much a mounting issue. Schools are getting more expensive. There are fewer and fewer jobs. Inflation is killer, all of that. I don’t necessarily think that our media industry employers are the people who can give us satisfaction on that issue. It’s sort of a broader social failure to fund the public good, which is a functioning media system. So I think identifying debt that is carried by individual workers as an instance of the system passing on risk to these individuals with the least power is key. We should be demanding a different distribution of risk and responsibility for making media possible, through taxing the hell out of companies that are profiting from the decline of traditional media, taxing the rich, using those resources to fund a robust, diverse, creative, useful media system. That, I think, is what the solution ultimately would have to be. But I think talking about it through the lens of debt is really powerful for helping individual workers feel like they have a stake in that larger systemic change.

JASON WOZNIAK: Would you share your own personal debt story or a debt story from a comrade that has resonated with you for some time?

JACKSON POTTER: I think about one of our trustees who sits on our executive board, a Black woman and elementary school teacher of 30 years, Robin Blake Boose, who recently spoke at an event with the Debt Collective. She spoke about how she has been making payments for virtually her entire career, and she could never dig out of it. She noted that she had deferred debt payments during Covid and applied for debt forgiveness under the Biden administration’s program. She qualified, so six figures worth of debt was liquidated overnight.

She just talked about how she’d been carrying this constant worry, anxiety, frustration and stress. That’s a significant decrease in quality of life — and who knows how much that stress, and anxiety reduce your life expectancy, too. She just talked about the relief she felt — as a worker and as a caregiver. She was able to buy a new car, which meant she could do what she needed to do for her family. The sheer extent to which this can release and liberate was pretty phenomenal. That said, there are so many others in need of the same relief who haven’t gotten it.

WOZNIAK: We just had a protest in D.C. around education funding and the genocide in Gaza. And one of the things that we were emphasizing was that one in 10 people have had cancelation happen. That means that nine in 10 haven’t. As an educator, can you speak to the emotional and psychological burden of debt on teachers? How does that influence the way they go about teaching?

POTTER: Teachers are having to work extra jobs, extra hours and summer school, which a lot of our members do to make ends meet. About half of our members will say they want to return to the days when you had deferred pay, where they can receive their pay in 12 month increments, so you’re not facing summer months without a check. We changed that because a slight majority of members prefer to hold on to their own money and invest it and get the interest instead of giving that to the district. But a substantial number still say to this day, ​“I can’t do this by myself. I need help. I would rather that CPS hold my money and distribute it in equal increments over 12 months than like have it available.” They’re having to cope with the magnitude of budget pressures they’re facing, navigating credit card debt, then that means they have less time for self care. They have less time for planning to most benefit their students and be their best selves, and they’re going to burn out faster and be less healthy. That itself, that can also lead to more medical debt. On top of that, we have a self-funded insurance system, and so then that means during negotiations, we have less resources to invest in the classroom because we’re giving it to Blue Cross Blue Shield.

WOZNIAK: One of the things that comes up a lot these days in education circles is teacher burnout. We have teacher retention problems. We have teacher recruitment problems, and this is particularly the case with BIPOC teachers. Since BIPOC teachers come from less generational wealth, to get the teaching degree, to get the Master’s, to get the certifications, they take on massive amounts of debt, especially if they’re not unionized. Meanwhile, salaries are not keeping up. And so people leave the profession. Could you speak to how debt impacts retention, and how this is gendered and racialized as well?

POTTER: About 80% of our members are women of the 30,000 educators in the Chicago Teachers Union. We definitely see a disparity when it comes to gender and debt. What we found, too, is as the district’s racial composition has changed in terms of student enrollment, we’ve had more need for bilingual staff and ESL endorsement, and we now have a majority of Latine students. What ends up happening is the district will require teachers to get that endorsement on their own dime. So people will, you know, on average, spend at least a few thousand dollars to get that endorsement. It’s not compensated by the district. So immediately you’re seeing five to 10% of your pay reduced off the top, before you’ve taken into account any of your other expenses. That’s just to stay in the profession that you want to remain in and that you are hired into, because otherwise you’ll get laid off, you won’t have the credentials necessary to do the work.

Meanwhile, data finds that it’s Black and Latine women, many who are the anchors in their households, that have the greatest amount of debt. So our own president, Stacy Davis Gates, is dealing with her college debt decades later. Nina Hike on our executive board did qualify, she was one of the 10 that you described for loan cancellation. That has allowed her to help her son avoid college debt, because she can help him. So it’s like, this stuff forms a chain reaction.

My buddy Andres Avila is a counselor at Back of the Yards High School, and we would do a lesson about wealth. We both went to the same high school. We both got our education, degrees and credentials at the same time. We were both in the same lane on the salary schedule, so our earnings are identical. And so we teach about how wealth is different than income, and let students ask us questions about our net worth. And they come to find like, within minutes, like, wait a second, you have no college debt, Mr. Potter, and Mr. Avila has $200,000 worth of college debt. What’s going on here? How did you grow up? Like, why don’t you have college debt? Well, my parents paid for my college, versus Nina Hike, who you know, didn’t get loan forgiveness on time for her first child. So that child now has the generational debt that she couldn’t get out of. So it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

WOZNIAK: At Debt Collective we’ve come to conceptualize debt in a number of ways: as a form of wage theft, as an attack on leisure time, and as a mechanism to discipline workers. How do you make sense of the political ramifications of debt?

POTTER: We did a survey of people who couldn’t access our credit union that we have a relationship with — a bunch of our members can’t access any of the loans because they have such bad credit ratings. Something like 130 people responded, and even of those 130 people, 50 of them wouldn’t even be eligible for a payday loan because they’re undergoing bankruptcy. And that’s just like a sample size of like, one email going out.

I was at a union meeting the other day and the member described a painful divorce with an abusive husband and had to move in with her mom and two kids, so she’s functionally homeless, within a temporary living situation, and despite kind of having a good paycheck, that crisis, it halved her wealth, and income won’t make up for that. So they’re in crisis as a result. So there’s ways in which just the precarious nature of the entire system reifies the precarity that people are experiencing. Another educator in the same meeting talked about her divorce and how she was having trouble making rent because she lost half her income overnight.

One thing is that we recently had a 12 week paid parental leave expansion and an interim agreement because Mayor Brandon Johnson was elected, and he’s a teacher and he understands. That has been transformational.

WOZNIAK: How do strikes figure in?

POTTER: Every time we’ve taken strikes, and we’ve taken a lot in the last 12 years, the group that in our union has been the most reluctant to strike are our paraprofessionals. These are school clerks, teacher assistants, college career coaches, and they make less than teachers, significantly less, although we’ve improved that over time. They’re all Black and Latine women for the most part. These are people who are living paycheck to paycheck, and have always been the most wary around strike votes because they are worried about not being able to survive if they’re out. We had that 11 day strike in 2019 and I think if it were not for the fact that one of our main priorities was lifting these women out of poverty, it probably would have broken our union in some way. So that is a real thing that undermines solidarity, when people are struggling. I know there are some internationals like UAW that have big strike funds, but then that also means, if you have enough momentum, you’re also spending down that money. And then it means you can’t go on strike in the same way in other sectors, or for new organizing, which is really expensive. So it really diminishes the labor movement’s ability to grow and flourish.

WOZNIAK: Yeah, like the threat of being on strike and maybe losing pay or something else, and then you realize, well, I’m gonna go into debt to sustain myself. That’s a huge one.

POTTER: We always have to plan strikes at the beginning of the month. I don’t know if anybody’s ever noticed this. The reason for that is because otherwise our healthcare could get cut off, if it’s too close to the end of the month.

WOZNIAK: What do you think a debt analysis brings to labor movements, to unions?

POTTER: I think right now, debt is often disguised in the way in which labor operates. That’s in part because if you’re bargaining for thousands of people with folks organizing around issues, a hidden fee and cost is healthcare, which is notoriously dependent on market fluctuations. So if you’re bargaining for a health plan, but you’re having to negotiate copays and annual contributions and deductibles and out of pocket maximums, and that is something that diminishes your ability to bargain for things like paid parental leave, or access to college credit bearing courses that you need in order to maintain your professional credentials. You know, all of these things are pitted against each other.

WOZNIAK: Can you imagine a scenario where debt becomes part of bargaining for the common good-type tactics and strategies?

POTTER: I would hope so. Strategically, it’s hard to say right now with the Supreme Court making it harder to do debt relief — and is it more kind of within our wheelhouse to win things that prevent debt accumulation rather than debt relief. So I think this is like two sides of the same coin, right? So UAW has said, May 1, 2028, let’s align our contracts. If we get enough workers to do it, you could win non-reformist reforms that benefit the entire working class, like national health care, like free college. Maybe we could construct a debt relief or debt elimination model, you could call for reparations that involve debt relief to some degree? Those sort-of bigger demands actually become feasible if people are aligned and organized at the local, state and national level.

WOZNIAK: Any message you want to send to workers, teachers, staff, paraprofessionals who are struggling with debt?

POTTER: I would say you’re not alone, and we have to mobilize our collective strength and our unions to organize around this issue in a meaningful way. And we can’t do it alone. We’ve got to do it with the Debt Collective. We’ve got to do it with our allies and community organizations. We’ve got to think about other unions and other sectors, because it’s such an endemic problem, it’s kind of built into the system we all live under, whether it comes from the credit industry, the real estate industry, the healthcare industry, they’re all built on mountains of debt, and they’re profiting immensely from our suffering. Until we unify our demands, it’s going to be hard to defeat that kind of money power. But we can do it with people power. So I just want to encourage people to keep fighting and finding those alliances.