About Me
My experience as a labor activist has been a significant guiding factor in my life over the past few years.
I fight for $15 and a union because I've worked all of my young adult life for minimum wage (or ever so slightly above minimum wage) and it is a miserable existence.
I have organized both on my campus, at the University of Michigan, and with Detroit 15 over the past couple years in multiple efforts to direct attention to the need for a living wage.
This website is a collection of my writings, but more than anything it is a guide to joining the most important labor movement in recent history.
My Writing
Here are pieces I've written relevant to labor, my position as a well-educated--yet, working class--individual, and my belief in the importance of skilled, underpaid work.
Higher Education Today is a research-augmented profile on my cousin/employer Jeremy Wilhoit. Jeremy owns and operates his own landscaping and construction company. His path to modest success is unique and worth exploring, especially alongside research relevant to the importance of skilled labor and the fallacy that college is for everyone.
Recently, as a part of a psychology class, I conducted a survey for undergraduate students, which polled their employment status and evaluated their perceived stress. I hypothesized that working students would show greater perceived stress than non-working students. What I found was remakably high stress among all 42 participants, but I was unable to link this above-average stress to any specific aspect of employment because the work environments catalogued were so diverse.
In this essay, I seek to redefine higher education as something more than just a four-year university path, as it seems to be inherently defined today. College is not for everyone. And that argument pushes many young people away from the path they would be best on, like trade school or going straight from high school into the workforce. There are significant financial and emotional benefits to both options as alternatives to 4-year college.
This essay is a how-to guide for organizing an action burried in a tale of my evolution as a writer. My growth as a writer was deeply tied to my development as an activist and an organizer. Once I started really giving a shit about underpaid workers and actively fighting with them, I set myself on a track to never run out of content to write about because I'll always write for those in need.