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Melissa: Welcome back to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

2022 has been a year of worker action. Throughout the spring workers from McDonald's, Wendy's, Dollar General, and other big national chains walked off the job in more than a dozen states demanding higher wages and better conditions. Those actions by low-wage workers proved effective in California, where lawmakers moved to establish a $15 per hour minimum wage, that's going to take effect starting January 1.

Of course, you remember Amazon warehouse workers in key locations, fighting to establish unions, all those Starbucks workers who established unions across the country, including 100 stores that walked out this past week, and we've been bringing you the story of one of the largest strikes in American Higher Education. It just moves into his fifth week in the University of California system, even as deep disagreements about terms of settlement threatened hard-won solidarity.

Labor organizing sits squarely at the center of 2022, and at the center of our Tuesday pick for The Takeaway Holiday Book Club, Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor, offers context and grounding for the economic battles of workers that we witnessed this year. I sat down with the book's author, Kim Kelly, labor columnist for Teen Vogue.

Kim Kelly: We're living through a historic moment. The workers who have been knocked down and dragged and beaten up and mistreated and exploited for a very long time, a lot of those folks are looking around and thinking, "Something's got to give, maybe it's time for me to do something about all this," and for a lot of those folks that something is joining or organizing a union.

Melissa: Let's look back a bit and tell me a bit about other moments when workers were like, "Actually, enough of this." I'm wondering if there are resonances in those moments, and what's happening now.

Kim Kelly: The most exciting thing that we've been seeing, especially in very recent efforts, like we've seen at Amazon and Starbucks, is the fact that worker-led, worker-directed organizing is having a moment, and that specifically, a lot of the folks leading those efforts are young, Black and brown folks, queer and trans folks. Folks who are working in industries that might have been dismissed previously is hard to organize or unorganizable.

The fact that we're seeing so much solidarity being built on the shop floor and in the factory and in the coffee shops, that really matters. We've had so many moments throughout history, where workers have come together and been like, "All right, screw this, we're going to strike, we're going to unionize, we're going to do something." There's a moment that I love referencing back in 1946, specifically, in Hawaii, during the great sugar strike, where we have the situation where the majority of the land in the islands was owned by these white, mainland American or European guys.

The land was worked by Native Hawaiians and immigrant workers from all around Asia and other parts of the world, and they were treated poorly, they were treated unequally too. The bosses tried to keep the workforce docile and isolated from one another by physically separating the workers. There's a camp for Chinese workers, there's a camp for Japanese and Filipino, and the workers were paid differently, they're treated differently. These manufacturing divisions were enacted and basically try and keep the workers organizing, and it didn't work.

By the time that the strike came around, the way that the workers one was by building these cross-cultural, multilingual, multiracial coalitions that started in the strike kitchens, and in meetings where people brought in translators to make sure everybody could understand what was happening, a community was really built, and that's how they won. They won by realizing, "Okay, maybe we have different experiences, maybe we come from different places, but we're all in this together is really in us against them moment."

They took that, and they won. They made history by doing that. There are so many examples of workers doing that throughout history. It's so exciting to be living through a moment now where we're seeing history repeat itself in a good way because that doesn't happen that often in this country.

Melissa: All right, so let's say a little bit more about that, like when you say, "And then they won." What does it mean to have a labor win?

Kim Kelly: Honestly I think it depends on what you start out, asking for demanding. In the 515 situation we couldn't have-- well, maybe economists who are smarter than me could have predicted that this inflation situation would happen, but really, it comes down to setting a goal, 515 they have a goal, they're still working towards that goal. Lord help all of us if they don't reach that goal. Sometimes it's as simple as trying to win union recognition, or win a strike, get a better contract, get a raise, get the boss to fire someone who isn't behaving properly at work or is abusing other employees, getting rid of the boss himself.

It depends on what the workers in any given situation and community and workspace decide they need, and that's how we win. We haven't won the class war yet, but there have been so many other victories, maybe smaller victories throughout the centuries, that have gotten us a little bit closer to where we need to be. Whether we're talking about the West Virginia mine wars, where coal miners literally went to war against armed guards just to win the right to unionize, Ida Mae Stull, also a miner in Ohio back in the 30s, loved being a coal miner, but the law forbid women from engaging in heavy work heavy industry jobs.

She went to court and she got her job back, that was a win for her. That opened doors for more women workers who wanted to take that job later on. Every win, whether it's small or big, whether it's a legal victory, or financial victory, or just like a moral victory, we've built upon the work of so many other people, and the next generation after us, they're going to build on what we do right now. It's all connected. It's all a chain. Every little step forward, I think that's a win for all of us.

Melissa: For folks who may not think of themselves as workers, because we tend to hold that identity in a very particularized class way. Tell me a lesson from either the history or the contemporary moment of workers organizing that everyone who earns a paycheck should take away.

Kim Kelly: If you have a boss, you need a union. It's as simple as that, whether you're working in the coal mines, or you're working at Gawker Media. I think there are some pretty reductive stereotypes around what "union worker" looks like, or who a worker is. Of course, people like grad students, and coffee shop workers, and people who work in nonprofits for some reason don't count, but they work hard, they get a paycheck, they need to be protected. They deserve to be respected and to have dignity on the job. We're all members of the working class, and that is what we need to remember. It doesn't necessarily matter what your job title is, it matters how you're being treated, and how you can benefit for coming together with your co-workers and demanding something better.

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Melissa: That was Kim Kelly, labor columnist for Teen Vogue, and author of Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor.

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Merriam-Webster's English Dictionary defines gaslighting as? The word of 2022.

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Speaker 1: Gas light, date key, Girlboss.

Melissa: Each year, major dictionaries choose words they believe encapsulate some aspect of the Zeitgeist, and have the potential for lasting cultural significance, and gaslighting is certainly having a moment. It means, "The act or practices of grossly misleading someone, especially for one's own advantage." Merriam-Webster says this year, they saw a nearly 2,000% increase in searches for the word. While it typically gets a lot of mileage in reference to interpersonal relationships, it's taken on a new significance in the context of political polarization, and disinformation. Here's political commentator Charlie Sykes speaking on MSNBC.

Charlie Sykes: Donald Trump is lying. He's lying about lying. What you see there is a classic case of gaslighting.

Melissa: Now, dictionary.com's word of the year is having a similarly politically charged moment. The word woman, the site says searches jumped 1400% a massive leap for such a common word. It saw spikes during certain high-profile events, including the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Senator: Can you provide a definition for the word woman?

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson: Can I provide a definition? No. Senator in my work as a judge what I do is I address disputes. If there's a dispute about a definition, people make arguments and I look at the law and I decide.

Melissa: If these two words aren't quite capturing the vibe of 2022 for you, Oxford University Press might get you their word of the year, "goblin mode."

Participant: [unintelligible 00:09:55]

Melissa: Okay, yes, I had to look this one up too. It means "A type of behavior which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly or greedy typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations." In my head, I see Gollum, a Lord of the Rings hunched over a gleefully [unintelligible 00:10:16] down on a steel wriggling raw fish without a care in the world, or as the Atlantic recently put it. Goblin mode is "A complete shedding of the mask of public life or just staying home and getting weird."

I think it's safe to say that in this post-lockdown year, we've all gone goblin mode at some point. Now, if you're sensing a Y chasm of gravitas between this and the other words of the year, that might be because for the first time ever, Oxford put their word of the year choice to an online poll. That's democracy at work, folks. Goblin mode. In the spirit of listening to the voice of the people, I asked Team Takeaway to tell us their words of the year for 2022. Senior producer Shanta Covington took it in a meta direction.

Shanta: My word of the year is "word." I'm bringing it back because "word" can stand for yes. It can stand for no or it can stand for, Hey, I agree with you 100%.

Monica: I'm Monica Morales-Garcia. I'm an associate producer here at The Takeaway and this year I got a new kitten. My words of the year are definitely "get down."

Melissa: Associate Producer Ryan Wilde chose a retro throwback.

Ryan: My word for 2022 is "far out," when someone says something ridiculous or something's really impressive, it's far out. I guess that's two words for that. Who's counting?

Mary: I'm Mary, Takeaway Associate Producer. I think my word of the year is "growth," because that's what this year felt like for me and it's a good feeling.

Melissa: Here's the newest member of our team to close it out.

Morgan: My name is Morgan Gibbons. I'm an Associate Producer here at The Takeaway and my word of the year is "bruh," B-R-U-R, "bruh." Bruh encompasses so many things. Bruh, unbelievable. Bruh, I'm excited for you. Bruh, no, you didn't do that. My word of the year is "bruh."

Melissa: Bruh. Let us know your picks for word of the year. Tweet us @TheTakeaway, or call us at 877-8-MY-TAKE. That's 877-869-8253.

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