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Seven Questions for Sarah Jaffe

Nation Intern Emilio Leanza interviewed me about my time as a Nation intern and more.

2. When did you realize you wanted to cover labor, specifically?

I had a lot of lousy jobs and listened to a lot of punk rock. Seriously! I grew up outside of Boston and the Boston punk scene has a lot of proudly working-class bands that sing about unions, the Dropkick Murphys being the most famous. And I worked in the service industry and occasionally staged one-woman revolts over things like scraping gum from underneath tables when we had no customers and I was making $2.13 an hour.

And then when I was in graduate school, the financial crisis happened and everything was moving so quickly, I thought, “Well, I have to figure this stuff out.” When unemployment was through the roof, it wasn’t a great time to want to cover the labor movement, but Max Fraser (then-internship director) and Esther Kaplan and Laura of course gave me early encouragement. And then the Wisconsin protests kicked off in 2011 and suddenly publications wanted labor writers again!

Read the rest at the Nation Institute

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