There’s a huge and ubiquitous problem we’re not talking enough about: mass layoffs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines mass layoffs as 50 or more workers filing for unemployment insurance at a single company during a five-week span. Millions of workers have experienced them over the past several decades. Mass layoffs are driven by Wall Street’s incessant demand for cost-cutting measures to service debt payments and fund stock buybacks. The consequences of ignoring mass layoffs are enormous. Not only do they cause suffering and trauma for working families who experience them, but they are fueling the growth of far right authoritarianism. However, mass layoffs are not inevitable. They are the products of policy choices, and they can be stopped.

This is the argument of an important new book, Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do About It, by longtime labor educator and author Les Leopold. The book is rooted in extensive research and numerous interviews with workers, and it represents an urgent plea for progressives — and the Democrats — to take the problem of mass layoffs much more seriously.

Leopold is the co-founder and longtime executive director of the Labor Institute, which carries out research, education and trainings aimed at challenging inequality and bridging workplaces and communities. Leopold is also the author of movement classics such as Runaway Inequality: An Activist’s Guide to Economic Justice and The Man Who Loved Labor And Hated Work: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi.

Wall Street’s War on Workers is a must-read for anyone who wants to better understand how Wall Street has driven thousands of mass layoffs, the role of the Democrats and Republicans in enabling mass layoffs, how mass layoffs have boosted the far right, and, most importantly, how we can begin to challenge mass layoffs and build a working-class anti-authoritarian politics. Leopold discusses these themes — and more — in this exclusive interview with Truthout.

Derek Seidman: What are the origins of this book? Why did you want to focus on mass layoffs?

Les Leopold: I’m an Oberlin College alumnus, and I got involved in a fight over mass layoffs at Oberlin during the pandemic. Oberlin engaged in union-busting by subcontracting out around a hundred janitorial and food service jobs. A group of alumni got together and tried to stop it. We weren’t successful, though we were able to dramatically increase their severance pay through alumni donations. The workers were devastated. I start off each chapter of the book with a quote from a laid off Oberlin worker.

At first, I couldn’t understand why Oberlin did this, but I soon realized that the college leadership had completely bought into the Wall Street mindset that turned working people into disposable numbers. That got me thinking about how generalized mass layoffs have become. We’ve just become accustomed to it. I wondered: How big is this problem?

We found a Bureau of Labor Statistics database that included 20 million people who had gone through mass layoffs from 1996 to 2012. In workshops with steel workers, we found out that virtually all of them had gone through a mass layoff, and some of them several times.

We found health studies that showed that mass layoffs are really debilitating events for workers. The Department of Labor says it’s one of the most traumatic things you can experience in your lifetime.

My big fear is that mass layoffs are behind the slide towards authoritarianism. At a minimum, a democracy should provide stable employment, but we’re talking about tens of millions of people who have gone through mass layoffs.

You argue that Wall Street is causing mass layoffs through things like stock buybacks and leveraged buyouts. Can you explain?

Let’s start with leveraged buyouts, which are absolute job killers. When hedge funds and private equity firms buy a company, investor money only covers about 10 percent of the cost. Then they borrow the other 90 percent from financial institutions. They take that new debt and put it on the company’s books. So, the company they just purchased now suddenly must service that enormous........

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