Paul Scully
Embedded Files
Executive Director, Building One America
Conference Participation
Lightning Round III: The Impact of Government & Public Interventions on Marginalized Communities
Paper: The New Leisure Class: Embracing the end of work.
Abstract: The labor movement must return to its commitment to leisure time if it is to ever become relevant and powerful again.
The founder of the American Federation of Labor was once asked, "What does labor want?" Samuel Gompers, hardly a radical unionist, gave an answer that sounds radical today.
“We want more schoolhouses and fewer jails; more books and fewer arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood [and womanhood] more noble… and more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright.”
Other than the antiquated gender stereotypes, this powerful description of labor’s vision for the American worker from 1890 is urgently needed today if we are to combat widening inequality and confront the unprecedented global power of the very rich.
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Biography: Paul Scully is Executive Director of Building One America, a national coalition organizing multiracial working-class communities in key industrial regions. With 25+ years in senior labor roles—SEIU, Gamaliel, and ILGWU—he has directed corporate campaigns, strike strategies, and fair housing fights. A Justice for Janitors veteran and Obama 2008 field trainer, he specializes in high-leverage organizing. His paper, The New Leisure Class, challenges labor to abandon "Jobs, jobs, jobs!" and reclaim its historic vision—from Gompers to Randolph—of demanding less work, more pay, and leisure as technology's rightful yield. Drawing on Rifkin, Wilson, and Wacquant, he argues that automation, including AI, enriches only the owning class while labor offers empty rhetoric. He calls for a multiracial coalition to fight for shorter work weeks, earlier retirement, expanded leave, and public investment in community, culture, and recreation. He warns that without worker power, technology only sustains oppression. Scully also writes and illustrates political cartoons on Substack, advancing these themes with visual satire. He insists the movement must champion purpose, meaning, and free time—not survival.
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