Capital & Main is an award-winning publication that reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.
Mark Janus, an Illinois child-support worker, will soon argue before the U.S. Supreme Court that his free speech rights have been violated because he must pay “agency fees” to a union that, inter alia, negotiates contracts on his behalf. Last year California elementary school teacher Rebecca Friedrichs made the same First Amendment arguments at the high court against the teachers association to which she paid agency fees. The court deadlocked on Friedrichs’ s complaint following the death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, but his replacement, Justice Neil Gorsuch, is widely expected to cast a decisive vote in favor of Janus and against public-sector unions.
Generational labels are fraught with inconsistencies. Growing up is not, after all, a controlled experiment. But to the extent that millennial labels apply, Andrew Cohen’s story is emblematic. He watched as his parents fell victim to eroding protections for employees (his father, a luxury car salesman, lost his job and declared bankruptcy when Cohen was 8). He graduated from high school, only to find college extremely expensive and, because he had to pay his own way, ran up $20,000 in student-loan debt.
Later he would enter the Great Recession’s depressed job market, with few slots available to liberal arts graduates outside the low-paying service industry.
“A lot of my friends expected to own a house and have a family by the time they turned 30,” he says. “It was very shaky for people.” Among millennials who head households, a Pew Research Center study found in September, more live in poverty than do households led by previous generations.
By the time Cohen was 23 years old in 2009, the plans he had laid for his life collapsed. A self-described “dirty, punk-rock kid,” he had been thinking about environmental and economic justice, while participating in protests and direct actions. Armed with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, he expected to begin his post-college life with Teach for America, working with disadvantaged students in under-funded urban schools.
But after several rounds of interviews, Teach for America unexpectedly rejected his application. He suspects that a felony assault charge, incurred during a mass arrest at the 2008 Republican National Convention, had something do to with it, even though the charge was dropped. “The timing,” he says, “was suspicious.” At any rate, he needed another option.
