Amy Dean has a more radical, if wonkier, idea.

Hailed as the “Mother Jones of Silicon Valley,” Dean has long been well-known in the region as the executive director of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council.

But after 15 years of organizing in the valley, she’s now living in Chicago, where she’s writing a book — working title: “Towards a More Perfect Union” — about workers in the new economy. With a grant from the Century Foundation, she’s focusing on how public policy and labor unions must change to serve today’s workers.

Dean, who is still the president of the Silicon Valley nonprofit Working Partnerships USA, left her post at the AFL-CIO last July, just as the outsourcing of white-collar tech jobs was becoming a hot topic. But reached at her home by phone, she had plenty to say about what can be done — and what can’t — to meet the threat of offshoring to the American worker.

What response do you think that U.S. technology workers should make to the offshoring of jobs overseas?

I don’t believe that the phenomenon of outsourcing and offshoring will do anything but proliferate over time. As a consequence, employees and their relationship to an employer will increasingly be flexible and volatile.

That means the obligation of the employee is to constantly keep skills upgraded and keep really current in whatever field that you work in. It also means that the social networks that you’re a part of become increasingly important, because they become the vehicle that connects you to employment.

The real question, though, about what is to be done about offshoring is that it is as much the employer’s responsibility as it is the employees’.

If outsourcing continues as a practice, employers should be obligated to increase the amount of funding that they put into training and to look at calling people back based on seniority. But it’s really a public policy question: How do we reform America’s labor market institutions to respond to a very changing work environment?

People increasingly will work on a temporary, part-time, contingent, outsourced basis. As a result, our labor laws and employment laws and overall labor market institutions need to change to provide security for those workers who are working in a very different context today than when those laws were written.

Do you think that government policies would have to be changed in order to get employers to do some of the things that you’re suggesting? Cost isn’t the only reason that companies are offshoring, but it’s one major one. It’s difficult to imagine companies funding programs to help the workers that they’re displacing if the point of displacing them is to save money.

We absolutely have to have labor law reform, employment policy reform, and we even need to look at reform with regard to our trade laws.

We could make some very, very basic changes that wouldn’t require a whole lot of political innovation or political courage to ensure that employees that work on a contingent basis are covered during periods of unemployment.

When we created our unemployment insurance system 60-some years ago, we created it with the assumption that there would only be brief periods of interruption of an employee’s employment. The economy would ebb and flow. There would be moments when people would get disconnected from their jobs. They would be caught by the safety net and then they would return back to that same job eventually. [But] we know that that’s just not the case anymore.

We know that there is a higher incidence of separation for the labor market today than there once was. We know that the majority of people do not return back to the same employer. And as a consequence many of these employees are not eligible for unemployment insurance during the times that they find themselves unemployed.

When we built the National Labor Relations Act, which was a legal agreement that was created 60 years ago, most people had a permanent relationship to one employer over their lifetime. Under those laws, the groups of employees who work for an employer over time can form a community of interest, get together and bargain collectively over terms and conditions of employment.

Well, what’s the group for people who may work in the same occupation but are spread across hundreds of different employers? What’s the group for employees who work for an employer but aren’t housed under one roof, but they’re spread across the globe?

It may be true that unions as constituted previously are a relic of the past. But working people have a common basis for unity when it comes to their economic interests.

That’s not a relic of the past.

So rather than trying to slow down or stop offshoring or outsourcing directly, workers need to lobby for public policy changes that would help protect their interests?

For example, [say] I work for Selectron. And I am one of many people, even though we may have different employers of record, who do contract manufacturing. I realize that I’m in a very volatile industry. But if I had the ability to come together with my co-workers to negotiate with my employer, we may not be able to negotiate the stemming of the tide of outsourcing. But we certainly can negotiate a trust fund that says that a certain amount of wages and healthcare are covered during periods of dislocation.

And if we had reform in laws, we could have those kinds of agreements across multiple employers … I think that essentially is the nexus for the next New Deal in America. Which is, yes, we recognize that flexibility is something that employers need to have, but employees need security. And we can have both.

So you can have flexibility for employers, but you can have some kind of continuity for employees?

To achieve that, we’d also need reform of labor law that says that employees and employers are entitled to bargain over this range of issues.

The other problem with the National Labor Relations Act is that it defines a very narrow scope of issues that can actually be brought up for purposes of collective bargaining between employees and employers. The way it works now is that management makes decisions about the firm, and the employees get to sort of bargain over the crumbs that will get left behind.

The new generation of American unions has to be able to play a much bigger role in the strategic direction of the firm and see itself as a partner with the firm.

Current labor law doesn’t really address the fact that employers can now easily go to a country where people can’t bargain over wages and hours and so on, and have them do the work there for a fraction of the cost.

When it comes to outsourcing, important as it is to have domestic reforms, like labor laws and employment insurance and healthcare reform, we absolutely have to turn our attention to international trade policy as well.

We cannot continue to have trade policy in this country that does not take into account conditions of the workers and the environment. We have all sorts of protections in our trade laws to protect intellectual property. We have all sorts of rules in our trade laws to protect compact discs.

If we had one-quarter of the same rights for a human being as we do for compact discs, we’d see a huge breakthrough in trade policy.

It’s complicated, and I’ll try to oversimplify it. The debate in this country often has been characterized between people who think that trade is a good thing, and people who think that trade is a bad thing.

The real debate isn’t about whether trade is a yes or no, a good prospect or a bad prospect. The real debate in America has to be: Under what conditions do we trade with countries?

[Then] you get into this whole debate where you say: “Well, we should impose an international minimum wage, or we should regulate wages.” Many of the Southern developing countries, they don’t agree with that. They think that’s just America and the First World trying to protect and insulate its workforce. But if you began to have a conversation with the developing world that says, “Let’s just simply make as a condition of trade the right for employees to freely associate with one another,” it becomes a completely different argument and a completely different discussion.

Because if you say to someone who is slogging away in the developing world for a buck an hour, “What’s better? No job or a job for $1 an hour?” the employee is going to tell you that the job for $1 an hour is better. But if you ask that same employee, “What’s better? That job for $1 an hour where the employer tells you, ‘Here are your hours, and here is the money that you’re going to get paid, and here are the conditions under which you work,’ or the job that allows you to get together with your co-workers and determine that with your employer?”

What do you think that employee’s answer is going to be, no matter what part of the world that they come from?

[This would be] very consistent with the foundation of our country. It’s a very Madisonian concept that people should be allowed to freely associate for purposes of advancing their own interests. You couldn’t ask for a more Western or American value.

And to be able to extend those values into our trade agreements, I think, is much more respectful of other countries. On the one hand, it protects our interests, but it also protects the interests of workers in those countries.

It’s a much more respectful approach to harmonizing trade relations from a workers’ rights perspective than creating some kind of international minimum wage, which the developing world sees as a largely American labor strategy to protect and insulate jobs.

So, is there any political movement toward these broader reforms you’re describing? The U.S. Senate passed a bill last week that included a provision that would ban giving government contracts to some firms that outsource or offshore. It seems that one limited way that the federal government, and some state governments, are responding to offshoring is by saying, We’re not going to give our dollars to companies that do this.

Just by saying, “We’re going to create procurement policies that ban doing business with these companies,” at the end of the day, it doesn’t do anything to help workers, because we’re not taking a structural approach to the reform. At the same time, I think those are good moves, because they do begin to thrust the issue into the public debate. It does begin to raise the whole question of values and the economy. What values are important to us as a nation? And I think that’s very, very significant, because for many, many years we stopped pursing economic policies as a means toward achieving political values and political goals, and we just sort of said: “Economic policy has value in and of itself.”

We have severed the relationship between the economy and values. And I think getting back to these kinds of debates, where local and state governments are willing to assert a certain set of values around conducting its business, is a very significant move.

Do you see anybody working for these larger labor law reforms?

I think that the most exciting thing that’s happening in America is that there is a renaissance in the American labor movement. And that for the first time in decades the American labor movement is debating its direction. And it’s struggling with lots of different strategies and trying to figure out what is the best way to go to rebuild its presence.

We don’t get to rationalize the employment system in America and create any kind of parity of influence for American workers — I don’t care if they’re at the high end of the labor market or at the low end of the labor market — without a resurgent labor movement. There is a very broad economic justice movement growing across America, and the labor movement is at the center of it.

Look around the country and there is all sorts of work going on where people are advancing policies, whether its living-wage policies or community-benefit policies or procurement policies where they are trying to say, “Government — because we can affect government as an employer — needs to be able to link its investments to ensuring outcomes for the community.”

Until recently, offshoring has been regarded as a manufacturing issue. But in the last couple of years, white-collar jobs, like computer programming, have started to move overseas. What impact do you think that job losses moving up the corporate ladder is going to have for the labor movement?

I think that anytime a social and economic phenomenon begins to affect a broad cross-section of society, it increases the likelihood that there will be reform. Anytime the lack of rights or the lack of protections begins to affect not just low-income people, but people across the economic spectrum, that is always when the conditions for reform are ripe.

Some companies that have offshored have argued that they sell their products internationally, so what’s wrong with them creating jobs around the world? Do you think that companies founded and headquartered here in the U.S. have any obligation to create good jobs domestically?

I think on the one hand firms do have a certain amount of responsibility to the community that they’re in. If you are Hewlett-Packard or Apple Computers or AMD or Applied Materials, and you’re doing business in Silicon Valley, you have a certain obligation to the community of course, and more than simply just being philanthropic.

You’re a huge consumer of land. You’re a huge consumer of energy. You’re a huge consumer of transportation services. You really depend on the regional infrastructure of an economy, and as a consequence you do have an obligation to give as much as you take.

But I would say that the real debate isn’t whether jobs should or shouldn’t be created offshore. It’s really a question of under what conditions do we terminate jobs, and under what conditions do we create jobs? And when we simply create jobs to save money for a firm, that’s when this whole issue of freedom of association must become a part of our trade policy.

If there are other reasons for creating jobs offshore, that there’s a set of knowledge workers that have a certain set of expertise, or there’s a certain strategic advantage to being in that region, that’s one thing. But when it becomes an issue of saving money because we can employ people for less, if we’ve going to ensure that trade policy meets everybody’s interests in our country, not just industry’s interests, not just capital’s interest, but working people’s interests, that’s when we’ve got to be able to have trade policies that say, “Those workers need to enjoy the same liberties that we do in our country.” Otherwise you really are taking jobs and moving them for the exclusive purpose of being able to undercut labor costs.

But it becomes a different conversation when the workers in those countries have the rights to negotiate with an employer. And I would argue that the moment that we are able to create freedom of association as a condition of trade, we will absolutely be able to stem the tide of offshore outsourcing.

Oh, really?

I absolutely believe so. I don’t think that we will do it wholesale, but I think that we will take away a portion of the incentive.

Would that be hard to regulate? Some people have said, “Oh, well, it’s much easier to regulate steel coming in and out of ports than it is to regulate code being sent over the Internet.”

If we can regulate the intellectual property violations, it sure seems to me that we can ensure that when workers try to organize collectively in another country that they’re not jailed for it.

What do you think that Silicon Valley will be like 20 years from now?

I think that it is very realistic to assume that the economy will become increasingly hollow. In other words, whatever middle is left will continue to be hollowed out.

Silicon Valley may create the next New New Thing. It probably will. But that means that the R&D that’s necessary to create the next new thing will take place in Silicon Valley. That does not mean that the coding of software will take place there. Forget about whether the manufacturing will take place there, because we know that’s not happening.

That doesn’t mean that anything beyond the design of those systems will take place in Silicon Valley. The coding and the testing and the quality assurance of those systems will happen offshore. It’s happening now.

And so while we will continue to have innovation and product development take place in Silicon Valley, more and more of the production — and I don’t mean just manufacturing, I mean the software production — will continue to happen offshore.

So, those people who are working so hard and so diligently to create innovation will need to have their wastebaskets emptied and their toilets scrubbed and get massages and go out to dinner on the weekend. It’s not unrealistic, nor am I being sarcastic or cynical to say that there will be people who are working on the very top end of innovation, and there will be people servicing them, with very little in between.

Now the real challenge that arises is how do you sustain a region where hospital and healthcare workers and firefighters and teachers can continue to live and work in a community? Because as you have that hollowing out of the economy, it’s the high end of the workforce that begins to determine prices for land and other products that the low end has to then pay.

But this trend of the bifurcation of the labor market that’s happening in Silicon Valley is also the trend that’s happening across the rest of the country. It may be more pronounced in Silicon Valley, but Silicon Valley is not an aberration. It’s not unique. This is the way the U.S. economy is growing.

What can be done about it?

To summarize, the solution to that is that we really need labor law reform, and we need fair-trade policies. If we were able to reform our labor laws, if we were able to have fair-trade policies, we would really be able to make a dent in rationalizing the new employment contract.

What’s different today than the post-World War II economy is that in the post-World War II economy, workers were much more insulated by public policies and through collective bargaining to the ebbs and flows of the economy.

The economy inevitably ebbs and flows. The business cycle is something that’s here to stay. But in the post-World War II economy we had a set of legal arrangements and public policies and institutional arrangements that at least ensured that the risk associated with the ebbs and flows of the economy were equally shared between employer and employee.

Today, an employee bears almost exclusively the risk that’s associated with the business cycle. Because our public policies and our legal institutions have not kept up to ensure at least a sharing of those consequences between employer and employee.

What could someone reading this story, just an ordinary employee, actually do to create the kind of major reforms you’re talking about?

I think it’s so important that employees tell their story of what’s happening in the American workplace.

It’s incomprehensible for the majority of American lawmakers to think that workers at the high end of the labor market — white-collar workers — have many of the same challenges and experiences at the low end of the labor market.

And I think it is so critically important for workers to be able to tell their story about what is happening in the workplace: “I went to school. I studied hard. I played by the rules. And I’m not getting the fair end of the deal.”

I spent the last 15 years living in Silicon Valley, and I can’t tell you how many times in a nonprofessional context, just simply in a social context, I would have friends tell me about how they were getting laid off from engineering jobs because jobs were going offshore. And I think when you’re overly educated you tend to think that it’s your fault, it’s not the fault of a set of rules and laws.

I think that people need to expect more from their employer and they need to demand more from their public servants, and not assume that it’s their own shortcomings. There is something very significant going on in the economy today. No one is insulated from it. And the only way that we begin to beat that back and make the system at least fair for employees is that employees begin to increase their expectations and demand more from their public servants. Recognize that no matter how educated you are, no matter how highly skilled you are, you will be able to make a better living and improve your conditions by joining together with your colleagues than trying to go it alone.

These are just a few of the questions on the minds of parents and educators all over the country. But in the explosive debate that has followed the court’s ruling, one question is more immediate: Will the decision inspire only debate, or will it inspire systemic change?

The Supreme Court decision, after all, did not mandate the use of vouchers. The justices only ruled that the voucher system of Cleveland, Ohio — which provides up to $2,250 each to families of about 3,700 low-income students — is constitutional. The onus, the court decided, is now on states. But only Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin have experimented with vouchers; 27 states have rejected them, with California voters twice defeating voucher initiatives. Nationwide, polls show that more people oppose them than favor them. In such a climate, does the Supreme Court decision even matter?

Terry Moe is in a unique position to answer this question. A senior fellow at Hoover Institution and professor of political science at Stanford, Moe is the author of “Schools, Vouchers and the American Public.” He is a vocal proponent of vouchers — “it’s my life,” he says — but unlike many other voucher-related tomes, Moe’s 2001 book is not so much an attempt to shift public opinion as it is an analysis of it. Most of the book grows out of his 1995 survey of more than 4,000 people.

Moe discovered that at the time, 65 percent of Americans said they hadn’t heard of vouchers, though even then, the debate in education circles had been long-running. As a result, most voucher initiatives and legislation, he concluded, faced a tough fight. But a major factor was constitutionality, and now that obstacle has been cleared.

In a telephone interview, Salon questioned Moe about the real-world effects of the Supreme Court ruling.

The Supreme Court decision clears up constitutional questions about voucher programs, but will the legal certainty necessarily lead to a radical change in the landscape of American education? How will the decision actually affect the country’s education system?

It will have a big effect over the long haul. In the short run, what we’ll see is enhanced legitimacy for vouchers and greater interest in vouchers among some citizens and some policy makers, who had been considering moving in this direction but had some doubt on constitutional grounds. So I think it will give impetus to the voucher movement and will give rise to more proposals. But the power alignments will be the same, as they have been for years. And here, the single most important factor is that the teachers’ unions are far and away the most powerful force in the politics of education. They are dedicated to the defeat of vouchers under any and all circumstances. For them, vouchers are a survival issue, and they will be opposed to vouchers no matter what — even if we were able to show, with 100 percent certainty, that vouchers are good for kids, that they promote better schools. The unions would still be opposed to them. They will use their power to defeat them.

More specifically, the Supreme Court said that states now have the right to establish vouchers. Right now, only Florida, Wisconsin and Ohio have them, but which states do you think will experiment first? Where will the first voucher proposals appear?

Legislators can bring this up anywhere, and there are even some legislators in California who are determined to bring it up. They were waiting for this to happen. But the fact is, the Legislature in California is controlled by the Democrats, and we have a Democratic government — and they’re all pledged to not even consider vouchers. The unions would never allow them to do it.

But couldn’t the decision be a sea change, the kind of thing that would even change the minds of Democrats in California?

I wouldn’t go that far; definitely it is a sea change. I think the legitimacy issue is a big one. People are going to view vouchers in a different way from here on out. But in a political system where there are so many veto points in any legislative process, it’s easy to block. So if a group has a lot of power, as the teachers unions do, they find it very easy to block. Almost all the time, they can block these proposals from becoming law.

Also, in initiative campaigns, most Americans are not very familiar with vouchers. They’re basically positively inclined when vouchers are explained to them but they’re not very familiar with the issue, and as a result, during an initiative campaign, the unions can spend millions of dollars on media blitzes that convince people that vouchers could undermine the public schools. This makes people uncertain, and they vote no. The unions hold a lot of cards here.

It sounds like you think that the Supreme Court decision won’t actually have much of an effect.

No, I don’t think that. I just think it’s going to be a slow process. I think the unions are going to lose in the long run. We’re going to have lots of voucher programs over the long haul. But in the short term, the unions, because of their huge power advantage, are going to defeat almost all proposals.

What do you mean by “the long run”? At what point will the unions start to really lose on this issue?

They’ve already lost in Milwaukee, in Cleveland, a couple times in Florida. They will have other losses in the immediate future, the next couple years. And these things accumulate. So when I look ahead, I’m thinking 10, 20, 30 or 40 years. It’s just going to take time for them to lose their grip on this.

How will these programs look when they’re first enacted? Will they be state- or citywide, or more targeted?

In the beginning, they’ll all be targeted.

Toward whom?

The poor — low-income minority parents who live in cities, and who are stuck right now with the worst schools.

How broad will the mandate for these people be? Do you think there will be any limits on religion, and how much money will parents likely get in voucher form?

Voucher programs can be designed in a variety of different ways. They tend to get stereotyped by the critics, but the fact is that almost everything is a variable. So, the size of the voucher: That can vary. It can be $1,000, it can be $10,000. In a state like New Jersey, they’re spending $11,000 a kid. You can give people $11,000 vouchers. In Milwaukee, the vouchers are $5,000 but the public schools are spending $10,000 a kid.

You can have rules that the private schools have to abide by. They can have to have, say, random admissions. You can have rules for curriculum, for teacher qualifications, for student testing. These again are all variables. Some states or districts might want to have these things, and others might not want to have them. Also there will be tax credit arrangements as well. These things will probably involve giving tax credits to businesses, and the money will go into a private foundation and the private foundation will give out vouchers. In those cases, you might not have a system which rules so much as private scholarships that allow kids to go to school on money that would otherwise have gone to the government but never did.

So I think, through a variety of means — not just voucher systems — we’re going to have much more choice, with a lot more kids going private. And in the beginning, all of them will be poor.

So what’s the endgame? Are public schools destined for oblivion?

No, what we’ll end up with is a mixed system. Think about the Postal Service. They carry packages, but so does UPS and Federal Express. We can send our packages through the Postal Service, or through UPS or Federal Express — it’s up to us. So the Postal Service is big but it’s not as big as it would be — right? — if it weren’t for UPS and Federal Express. They siphon off some of the business, a lot of the business actually. And it’s not written in concrete or stone how big the Postal Service ought to be, or what percentage of the packages it ought to carry. I think that’s the way it will be with the school system. A lot of people 20 to 30 years from now will still want to send their kids to regular public schools. But a lot more people will want to send their children to private schools on vouchers, or to charter schools. It will be mixed system that’s partly a governmental system and partly a choice-driven system that relies on markets.

What about the religious aspect? Do you think those who focus on this issue are overreacting? How much will vouchers become forms of religious sponsorship?

First of all, ordinary Americans don’t freak out about this at all. This is really a matter that the intelligentsia wrings its hands over; and in particular, it’s a matter that liberal intellectuals are especially concerned with. But they’re the only ones that really want to draw a strict line.

But it seems clear that vouchers will run afoul not just of liberals. After all, Bush’s attempt to encourage faith-based initiatives largely failed to be adopted because there was a realization that whatever money they set aside would have to go everyone, including Muslims and members of New Age religions — groups that most Christian-Coalition Republicans tend to fear or disagree with. So in this case, it’s possible that vouchers would be used to fund a Madrasa that is being investigated by Ashcroft’s Department of Justice. What makes you think that conservatives are going to go for this?

These are the kinds of things that can be handled. Basically, what happened [with faith-based initiatives] was that the Democrats weren’t going to go along with it, and it got stopped.

What do you mean by “handled”?

Well, you ultimately are going to have rules that determine who gets what. But in a choice system, where the money is going to parents — and where you can have basic rules about, say, not teaching hatred — then it’s OK. There are going to be Muslim schools and as long as those schools are not teaching hatred, then they should be fine.

How have the programs that are already in place developed on this issue? And has there been anything that’s surprised you, in terms of the way the system reacts to vouchers?

These are still small pilot programs. They’re just barely voucher programs. For a long time, the Milwaukee program had less than 1,000 kids in a district that has more than 100,000 kids. There were very few schools participating in the program; three-fourths of the kids were in just three private schools. Everyone’s looking at Milwaukee as though it’s supposed to demonstrate whether vouchers work or not but most of the kids are in three schools. Who cares if those kids achieve more than the kids in the public schools? That’s not a test of whether competition works or not. So as long as these programs are as small as they are, you really can’t tell that much from them. I wouldn’t draw that many conclusions from them. The importance of them is that they’re a foot in the door, a way to get people to see that we can do this. These programs are up and running, they work fine and there’s no real downside risk. Let’s just do it.

But isn’t it also too soon to know whether there’s a downside risk? Critics have repeatedly argued that vouchers will hurt the neediest schools and students. Could this turn out to be a more accurate prediction?

Look, in many of these urban systems, the schools are failing. In Cleveland, well over half the kids never graduate from high school. A lot of them can’t read or do basic math. The Cleveland school system is ruining their futures. If we don’t do something radical and big now, those kids are going to be lost.

And yet, you don’t think that this argument will be adopted on a wide scale …

This is what I think is going to happen. There will be more proposals in legislatures around the country because of [this Supreme Court decision]. There will be more support for vouchers as a result of this. It’s not going to be a groundswell of ordinary people; they’re not that familiar with it, so it will be at the legislative level. The unions will fight it. The unions will win most of these, almost all of these. But they will lose some fights and the ones that they lose will then accumulate over time. And they will snowball. It’s going to take a long time but in the meantime, the civil rights groups are going to move. Because these are their constituents: poor, minority parents in cities. These parents are very supportive of vouchers. They’re in failing schools and they need help. The civil rights groups like the NAACP are not representing them on this. They’re out of sync with their own people. And there are young blacks who are rising up now, and who are providing leadership for these people. If the NAACP doesn’t move, it’s going to be displaced. Furthermore, over time, the older leaders of the NAACP are going to move out and they’re going to be replaced by these younger people. And these people are very open to vouchers. They see vouchers as a way of empowering poor people. So within 10 years, the civil rights groups will move on this. And when they do, it’s over. The unions will then be on the fringe; the civil rights groups will then play a major role in designing voucher programs. And the world will look very different.

It was May 2001 that the Harvard Living Wage Campaign ended its 21-day occupation of the building housing the president’s office, the longest sit-in in the university’s history, and certainly one of the most effective. The campus group had been working for years to convince the school to begin paying workers a wage appropriate to living costs in the area. Over 1,000 campus employees were said to earn less than $10.25 an hour, the minimum wage in Cambridge, Mass. — in many cases much less. Despite petitions, rallies and meetings with the administration, the group saw no results.

The sit-in was supposed to last about five days. But when support began to build (parallel protests outside became a tent city; Democratic Massachusetts Sens. John Kerry and Ted Kennedy came to voice solidarity; and most importantly, campus workers disregarded threats from employers and instead came to rally with the students) the protesters hunkered down.

Police maintained a constant presence in the occupied building, waiting for the students to slip up and surrender any of their seized territory. “I will resign before I will negotiate,” said Neil L. Rudenstine, Harvard’s president at the time. Three weeks after the protest began, Rudenstine changed his mind and agreed to form a committee of students, professors, administrators and union employees to review campus labor conditions. “These movements represent a new moral consciousness,” Robert Reich said at the conclusion of the occupation.

Maple Razsa, one of the campaign’s organizers, borrowed a digital video camera for the sit-in, and in the months after the protest, he directed and co-produced “Occupation,” a documentary of the event. Narrated by Ben Affleck, whose father was a janitor and stepmother a cleaning woman at Harvard, the film has begun to attract attention. Historian Howard Zinn called it a “wonderful gift,” and scenes from “Occupation” were recently shown on “Oprah.” The film has been screened in small venues around the country, and in July will run at New York’s Pioneer Theater.

I talked to Razsa recently (full disclosure: Maple is an old friend) about the living wage movement, life inside the sit-in — there was one bathroom — and Oprah’s strange take on poverty.

How did you respond to critics who said, “These janitors don’t have to work at Harvard. If they don’t like their wages, why not let someone else take the job who actually wants the $8 an hour”?

You have to counter that by asking, why are people working two or three jobs? Are they foolish? Have they just not thought about all their options? If they thought they could get more money somewhere else, they’d have gone somewhere else.

Look at what’s happened to low-paid workers around the country over the last 15 years. The minimum wage hasn’t kept pace at all with the cost of living, so people end up working two or three jobs just to get by, whereas a single job as a janitor 15 years ago was much closer to being a professional position. You could make $40,000 a year as a janitor.

One criticism we heard was borrowed from the minimum wage debate. People would say if you start paying people more, there’ll be a different educational and racial makeup in the workforce — you’re fucking with the perfect invisible hand, and there’ll be unexpected consequences. We usually countered that Harvard is the largest employer in the state of Massachusetts. It isn’t overwhelmed by market forces — in fact, it has the power to decide who it hires, and what their educational and racial makeup is.

Where does the campaign stand now?

Right now things are fairly wrapped up in terms of the living wage campaign at Harvard. Out of the sit-in, a committee was formed that was inclusive of the students involved in the sit-in, low-paid workers, a few administrators and faculty. It took about six months to do a study of Harvard labor policies. One result of that process was that wages were renegotiated for the three unions that represent low-paid workers on campus.

It’s a significant improvement. In terms of the wage that people are at now, it’s higher than what we’d been demanding. The janitors now make a starting minimum of $11.35, and the guards make $11.15 starting, and they had made as low as $8. The thing that’s key about it is that it doesn’t only cover people directly hired by Harvard and represented by unions, but there’s a parity clause, which means anyone who’s subcontracted is required to get matching pay and benefits to those directly hired. That’s really big.

Subcontracting is way to shift responsibility for employment practices to a third party — it mirrors the use of offshore production with sweatshops, in a lot of ways. So this should undermine the incentive for hiring outsourced labor, because it’s primarily been used to leverage against directly hired people.

The exception is that these wage increases aren’t pegged to inflation — it’s essentially a one-time increase. The workers will have to start over again and negotiate with the university in three years, so it’s just going to be a constant struggle.

Given that most of the world isn’t familiar with these criticisms, was the protest viewed as a bunch of privileged whining at first?

I think some did think that before the sit-in — including Harvard workers themselves — but the direct action won workers over, as well as other people. In the making of the film, one woman I interviewed, a janitor, told me she’d said to herself, Who are these kids, they just want some excitement, they just want an issue to be concerned with. But as the sit-in developed, she said she was won over by the commitment.

Also, it helped that we’d tried everything else, prior to the sit-in. We met with the administration on 14 occasions, we’d had petitions, we’d had a dozen protests. Clearly this institution was not going to budge without direct action. So being able to argue that we’d tried everything else was essential to the success of the sit-in.

How did the school explain its resistance initially?

They claimed that other changes would be more advantageous to workers than better wages, such as free education — the claim being that people could work their way up to a better job. We agreed that education was a key component to benefits at Harvard, but they gave the impression to the public that Harvard workers had the opportunity to receive Harvard degrees, when in fact all that was offered was ESL and a few computer classes.

More fundamental, though, was the problem that the workers often worked two or three jobs, and there was never any time to take advantage of these education programs. They gave free museum passes to the Harvard Museum. Most landlords don’t accept that as a form of barter.

How does the Harvard Corporation [the school's executive governing board] fit in here?

It’s the Harvard Corporation that lies at the center of most of Harvard’s problems — issues of a lack of democratic accountability and transparency, and community responsibility reside in its governance structure.

It’s a remarkable club. It was set up by the court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1650, and has seven members, including the president of Harvard. They self-select replacements, so it’s essentially a social club that runs continuously from 1650 without any outside input. The list of overlapping corporate boards that intersect with the corporation is staggering — Exxon-Mobil, Ford, DynCorp and, until recently, Enron.

There is a board of overseers, elected by alumni, and technically it has to approve decisions by the corporation, but it has never contradicted them. It’s essentially a rubber stamp.

Tell me how the actual sit-in began.

About an hour before we went into Massachusetts Hall, we gathered one by one in a basement next door. We had been very secretive: We had a number of false communications on our university e-mail accounts, and set up Yahoo accounts to do our real planning. We had received information that the administration was reading and monitoring our e-mail. In fact at one point a school guard actually showed us an e-mail of ours that had been printed out and used in preparation for a protest we were going to have. So we were fearful that they’d discover the plan and we wouldn’t be able to get into the building.

What was it like once you were inside?

We tried to do things with a light touch. It’s a pretty conservative school, and we had to maintain the moral high ground if we were going to succeed. No smoking, no drinking — we didn’t even sit on the antique furniture.

The conditions in general were rough. We had a single bathroom for 48 people, and no shower. We slept on the floor. It was 21 days of never being by yourself. But a real feeling of camaraderie developed.

We only brought enough food for five days — we hadn’t planned to stay so long. The dining hall workers came to the door on the first night with food, and were told by police that they couldn’t deliver it. But the workers were incredibly forceful, and began chanting, and said that one way or another they were going to feed us. So the police conceded, and that’s sort of how we ended up eating. Community groups and area restaurants donated a lot of food.

The first few days felt pretty tenuous. Most workers didn’t feel safe coming to the protest — they were told they’d be fired, or deported if they were undocumented. And more subtle intimidation happened, too: not giving people overtime, or shifting them to the night shift.

What made it a success was the lesson that the way students were able to use their privilege ended up creating a stage and transforming the political atmosphere in such a way that workers started to feel empowered and emboldened to speak for themselves. They started to plan their own protests, and by the second week, they were marching on the director of labor relations’ office and delivering a list of demands. That was moving to see.

What was the relationship between the workers and the students?

It was pretty amazing. There was almost a kind of social fission as class and race lines were crossed. We had spoken with workers for a long time leading up to this, so it wasn’t like we didn’t know each other before, but being in the struggle together brought us to a new level. Not since the 1930s has there been an alliance like the kind we’re seeing now between students and workers, as far as I know.

Why did labor fall out of vogue among college activists?

I think it’s partly a product of labor’s politics during the Cold War, in that organized labor took a strong supporting role alongside the State Department. In the ’80s, they even toed the Reagan line on Central America. That’s partly a product of McCarthy-era purges that happened in the labor movement, the fear of always being attacked as a communist. A lot of activists and students felt alienated from them because of that. So I think the post-Cold War setting creates new possibilities, which might be why we’re seeing such an amazing upswing of this kind of activism.

How was “Oprah”?

“Oprah” was kind of a disaster. She was doing a follow-up on a show she’d done a year earlier on making it on the minimum wage. It was moving to see, insofar as you rarely see the daily struggle of low-paid workers on mainstream television. That said, it was politically irresponsible.

The whole show built toward finding out what happened to these two workers, a year later. We kept hearing that something had improved, and that we’d be hearing shortly what that was after the next commercial. When we finally got to that moment, we learned that when these workers were on the show last year, there happened to be a multimillionaire Wall Street financier in the audience, and he decided to give them a small stipend. So apparently the policy solution for the 30 million working poor in America is to find Wall Street financier sponsors. There was a tearful thank you to the millionaire, who was smiling in the audience. Nice.

Free agents include everyone from the creative director who quits her job at a big ad agency to sell her services back to her former employer and other clients at three times her former salary to the stay-at-home mom who starts a home-based “microbusiness” to make money while spending more time with her kids to the perma-temp office worker who toils for years at the same company but can’t get health insurance or other benefits.

In 1997, Pink quit his job as a speechwriter for then Vice President Gore, and took a cross-country road trip with his wife and young daughter to perform his own unofficial census of independent workers. Now, with the release of his new book, he’s both a member and a chronicler of the free-agent nation. In Chicago, where he was giving a presentation at consulting firm Arthur Andersen, Pink spoke to me from his cellphone — in true free-agent fashion — from the city’s Navy Pier, with seagulls cawing and wind whistling in the background.

Do you think the appeal of going independent has dimmed now that when people aren’t leaping out of companies, they’re getting pushed out by layoffs? Has the glamour of free-agent work lost its sheen?

Maybe a touch. But the most important question to ask yourself is, compared to what? Compared to working at Dell, which just laid off 10 percent of its workforce? Compared to working at Cisco, which just laid off gigantic numbers of people? There isn’t long-term security in any realm.

Why do you think more people are striking out on their own? Does it represent some kind of failure in the way that companies work now? Is working for the Man really that bad?

It’s partly that. Companies really did poison the well by treating workers so badly, especially in the late ’80s and early ’90s with endless downsizing and layoffs, and treating people like commodities. I think that a lot of people felt incredibly scorched and are going to be fearful about going back close to the flame.

We had this age of corporate paternalism where corporations took care of people. You had companies like Kodak that called itself “The Great Yellow Father,” the phone company that called itself “Ma Bell.” And by the early 1990s that was over. IBM used to have a no-layoffs policy. No matter what happened, it said, “we’ll never lay anybody off.” And then in the early ’90s it laid off something like 50,000 people. There was a big “Never mind!”

Technology is obviously part of it, too. It’s Karl Marx’s revenge, because workers can now own the means of production. The tools that you need to create wealth used to be extremely large, expensive and difficult for one person to operate. Now, they’re the exact reverse.

But big reality check for all of you liberal arts majors out there: Roughly one out of four workers is a free agent; that means three out of four still have regular jobs. Traditional jobs are not going away. This is not the end of the job [market].

On your road trip, what was the most unexpected thing you found?

People weren’t saying: “I can own the means of production. I can go do this myself.” They weren’t saying: “I can make more money because power has shifted to the individual.” They were saying: “I’m miserable.” “I don’t like working for an idiot boss.” “Office politics are getting me down.” “I can’t be my authentic self at work.” “I have no freedom.” “You know what? Money isn’t everything. Promotions aren’t everything.” “I want to define success on my own terms.” “I miss my family.”

I thought that this was an economics class, but it turned out to be a kind of psychology and theology class.

What is the most common misperception among wage slaves about people who work for themselves?

That everyone is kind of kicking back and watching “Oprah” and wearing bunny slippers and not really doing any work, when in fact the bigger problem among a lot of free agents is overwork. One guy said to me: “The worst part about being a free agent is that you have to work 24 hours a day; the good part is you can pick which 24 hours.”

Also, there is an incredible misperception that these people are miserable or have been forced into it. And that is just flatly not true. There are some hassles to working for yourself; there is a lack of security. But you know what? There are bigger hassles working for the Man, and there’s no security there either. Working for yourself, you have to be the CFO and the accountant, and you empty the garbage. And that can be a drain. But again people ask themselves: “Compared to what?” You can have a terrible boss and earn less than what you’re worth and have somebody empty the garbage, or you can work for yourself, earn your market value and empty the garbage yourself.

Some of your critics have suggested that this whole “free agency” thing is an elitist phenomenon that only benefits the cream-of-the-crop marketing managers, graphic designers, software stars and so on. What about the office temp slaves and perma-temp factory workers and outsourced janitors?

There are plenty of people who are free agents who are not college educated — there are people who are plumbers and electricians. The construction industry operates on the free-agent model. Those are very skilled professions. Anybody with skills is rewarded in this kind of market, and anybody who isn’t is punished. That has very little to do with free agency. Talented people have an enormous number of options in this kind of economy compared to previous economies, and people who are less skilled face far higher hurdles.

That’s why a lot of the unionization efforts are taking place among low-wage free agents. One of the biggest labor-organizing successes in the last 10 years was of independent home healthcare workers in Southern California, who are low-wage free agents and who wanted that collective action to boost their standing in the workplace. One of the people in the book, Grandma Betty, was 68 years old, jobless and pensionless, and became a free agent.

If you look at the numbers, there are about 30 million or so free agents, and about 3 million or so are temps. And even if you stipulate that most of those temps are miserable, you’re talking about [only] 10 percent of free agents. I would say that that is a better average than in corporate America. If you did a survey of corporate America and asked: “How many of you despise what you’re doing and would like to get out?” I would say that you’d hit much higher numbers than if you took the same survey among independent workers. I’d bet the mortgage on that, actually.

Is this a youth phenomenon?

We’re about to hit a massive labor shortage, and so we’re going to have this large, experienced and incredibly healthy pool of older Americans who are going to be able to dictate the terms of their employment. They’re not going to want to go back and work full time, but they might want to work part time as free agents. So our notions of old age and retirement might change.

People want some kind of challenge in their life, they want some kind of purpose in their lives, and it’s hard to find that in total leisure. That said, I don’t think that people are going to be working full time until they’re 90. But I do think that you’re going to see these part-time free agents among older Americans.

The other thing is just pure demographic and market forces. We are going to run out of “working age” people. Suddenly, we’re going to look around and say, “We’ve got all this work to do, and we don’t have young people to do it. Hey, wait a second, there are these aging boomers. They’re remarkably healthy for older people, and they’re willing to work part time. Sign them up!”

Corporate recruiters are going to be going to retirement homes, having career fairs at AARP meetings. At that point, Americans are going to have incredible bargaining power in the labor market.

Some of the frustrations of working for oneself are caused by the current healthcare and tax system. But how will free agents ever band together to change those things if it’s an ethic of individualism that drives them?

We have 44 million people without health insurance in this country. To me that’s a structural problem — in part, because more people are working as free agents, but we have a healthcare system that’s designed for employees.

We get health insurance in this country through a job. No other country in the world does it that way. There’s no moral or economic logic behind the arrangement. It’s a historical accident. When Roosevelt froze wages in the early 1940s, to get around it, employers said, “Oh, what can we offer? Hey, we’ll offer health insurance.” A couple of changes to the tax code and voilà! Now we get health insurance through our jobs.

A big obstacle is campaign finance. Fewer than one out of 10 Americans today works for a Fortune 500 company. Fewer than one out of 10 private sector workers belongs to a labor union, yet our politics is still a pitched battle between big business and big labor, largely because of campaign contributions. There’s not a free-agent PAC. There aren’t squadrons of lobbyists on [Washington's] K Street lobbying for tax breaks for free agents. I do think that eventually some enterprising politician will realize that this is a pretty awesome constituency.

What impact do you think the free-agent phenomenon has on aspects of life other than work?

The joining of work and family — the industrial age created an artificial separation where you worked one place and lived another place, where you left your family behind to work. And now we’re rejoining that.

People working at home changes the nature of neighborhoods a little bit. In the past we used to have these neutron bomb neighborhoods. During work hours, it looked like a neutron bomb had hit: The buildings were still standing, but all the people were gone.

Now, as more people work flexible schedules or work at home as free agents, you have a kind of revival of neighborhoods. It sounds apocryphal, but it really is true. My next-door neighbor in Washington is a free agent too. I’ve had them come over to borrow eggs, but they’ve also come over to borrow Post-its.

Think about Starbucks. Starbucks is all over this like a cheap suit. Starbucks just did a deal with Compaq and Microsoft to provide wireless Internet connections in its stores. Why? Because more and more independent workers and traditional workers are using Starbucks as a form of commercial real estate.

How do people deal with the blurring of work and home life, besides holding business meetings at Starbucks?

People sculpt boundaries in their own idiosyncratic ways depending on their circumstances. One guy I interviewed has a home office in a neighbor’s house, because he needed what he called a “soft separation” between work and home. Some people will get an office outside of the house because they don’t want to blur the boundaries too severely.

My office is in the attic of our house. I have a separate phone line. I don’t bring my work to the second and third floor of our house; I keep it all in the attic. But if it’s not that busy of a day, I’d rather have our 5-year-old daughter come into my office and plop down and start talking to me than some schmo from accounting: “Hey, ya busy? Want to do our NCAA pool?”

So people draw their own boundaries?

It’s part of the anthropology of free agency that people instead of inheriting rituals from the traditional workplace establish their own rituals.

One guy I interviewed leaves his house, walks around the block and come back to his house, because that transition period helps him navigate these boundaries. Commuting is a pain in the butt, but it does offer predictable punctuation marks in your day.

There was a guy I met in Washington just the other day, a self-employed guy, and he used to organize this Christmas party for self-employed people. It’s like the office Christmas party for people who don’t work in an office.

But to me the greatest thing to escape is the office Christmas party — and when you’re groggy on Monday morning and someone cheerily bounds into your office and says: “How was your weekend?!”

On Thursday, Carey is going to be arraigned. The indictment, in the language of the New York Times, “indirectly points a finger” at Richard Trumka, too. Trumka is the secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO and is said to have played a part in the fundraising scheme. But Trumka hasn’t been indicted.

The funds that were raised back in 1996 came from various sources, and I can reveal that one of those sources was myself. I have never admitted this before, but it’s true. A friend of mine was working for Carey, and told me that Carey desperately needed to raise money for a union election drive, and quickly, too, and would I help?

In a gesture of Soros-like munificence, I wrote a check for $25. It was perfectly legal (I think). And now that I have confessed my own participation, I figure that I am entitled to comment on what has happened to my money and to the union movement.

What has happened to Ron Carey, and I suppose what might happen to Trumka, strikes me as a distortion of justice. Thirty years ago the American labor movement was in pathetic shape — not in numbers or in political power (the decline in numbers and power came later) but in its integrity and honor.

Gangsters and thugs commanded some of America’s biggest organizations — to begin with, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Union, where Mafia hoodlums had risen to power under the leadership of the notorious James Hoffa Sr. and his friends. Mafia control of the Teamsters represented what was probably gangsterdom’s single biggest triumph in America. The United Mine Workers was likewise under corrupt leadership. But, beginning in the early 1970s, a number of grass-roots reform insurgencies got underway, some of them staffed by young people who had come out of the student movement of those years.

Does anyone remember how much courage went into those reform campaigns? The gangsters and corrupt officials had come by their reputations honestly, so to speak. In the miners’ union, gangster officials arranged for their share of murders. Yet the campaigns persisted, and, in the miners’ union, Trumka, the reform candidate, eventually came to power. He and his group beamed a spirit of honesty into union preserves that had exuded nothing but darkness for many a year. (It was later, having effected his reforms in the miners’ union, that Trumka moved over to the job of secretary-treasurer at the AFL-CIO.)

Then came the reform victory in the Teamsters, in 1991, which represented an even bigger victory. Ron Carey came to power. He did a lot of good. He got rid of some of the gangsters. He led the union on a strike against United Parcel Service, which turned out to be quite a militant strike. He won, and the victory was a huge benefit for the UPS workers, and by extension for people working in similar companies, where wages have to compete. Nor does UPS seem to have suffered, meaning that everybody won and nobody lost. But soon enough Carey faced an enormous campaign by Jimmy Hoffa’s son, James P. Hoffa Jr. and his allies to bring about a restoration of the ancien regime, or at least the restoration of a few of its aspects.

You could wonder why Hoffa Jr. would have had any chance at all against Carey and his allies, given the reformer’s success at getting rid of some of the old gangsters, and the wonderful victory over UPS. But the old Hoffa regime had sunk deep roots in the Teamsters, and in union locals all over the country, minikingpins and satraps were still in office, and they feared Carey and his reformers.

So the old-timers organized a campaign for Hoffa Jr., and did it with a lot of zeal, too. And Carey, in order to retain the presidency and preserve the reforms, suddenly needed to raise a lot more money than anyone had imagined, when he first came to power.

Thus the ridiculous and shady fundraising scheme of 1996. Student militants from the early ’70s had gone directly into union reform campaigns. But there were other students from that time, members of Students for a Democratic Society, who had gone about building social-change institutions of their own, such as Citizen Action. Those people, the ones with institutions at their disposal, seem to have come up with the idea of receiving donations from the Teamsters’ union, which they could turn around and donate, through still other people, to the Carey reelection campaign.

It was a scheme to take union money, which ought not to have been put to factional purposes, and spend it on the factional purpose of getting Carey reelected.

The scheme was illegal. It was idiotic. It was self-destructive. It led to a judicial order prohibiting Carey from running for reelection, which, in turn, led to the victory of Hoffa Jr. in 1998. The scheme has now led to Carey’s indictment, given that, when he was asked about the fundraising shenanigans, he did the natural thing and denied knowing anything about anything.

The scheme made Carey and his allies look no better than any other corrupt union officials. The scheme was bad, bad, bad. And yet it ought to be pointed out that, in spite of appearances, Carey and his allies back in 1996 were not, in fact, corrupt union officials — not in the classic sense of that term anyway. For what was Carey’s motivation, and Trumka’s, and the other people active in the Carey reelection campaign?

Those people were not trying to get rich, nor to bring the Mafia kingpins back into power. They were trying to prevent the bad old days from returning. They had spent their lives fighting for the simplest honesty in some of America’s largest and more powerful institutions, and their fight had been successful, until that moment, and, in their panic, they were doing all too much to preserve what they had won.

After they were caught, a weird unholy alliance of critics stood up to point fingers at them — frustrated Cold War ideologues of the labor movement, from the long-gone era of Lane Kirkland; federal judges and prosecutors; nostalgics of Mafia power; and the champions of Jimmy Hoffa. Republicans pounded the table, demanding legal action against Carey. And now they have got what they demanded, and Carey faces trial, with a possibility of jail.

The Ron Carey affair, as it has played out over the last four years, has made the unions seem as corrupt as in the past. But the unions are not as corrupt. Even the new Hoffa regime in the Teamsters has had to mind its p’s and q’s, so far, due to the legacy of reform. There is more citizenly liveliness in the AFL-CIO today than at any time in recent memory. It is because of people like Carey and Trumka and their allies.

You might have thought that Carey would have won a little gratitude from the public for the role he has played, and the gratitude would tell in his favor now. But no, here he is at age 64, facing the worst. The man is (mostly) a hero, and is being treated like a criminal. The injustice ought to be obvious.