by Steve Early
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has offered our timorous, unimaginative, and politically ambivalent unions a a lot-needed ideological dope slap. Some may well describe this, much more diplomatically, as a second injection of “outside-the-box” considering and new organizational blood.
Prime AFL-CIO officials first sought an infusion of individuals scarce commodities in labor when they jetted into Wisconsin last winter. Without having their organizing or path, the spontaneous community-labor uprising in Wisconsin was in the procedure of recasting the debate about public sector bargaining throughout the U.S. So they had been eager to join the protest even even though it was launched from the bottom up, rather than in response to union headquarters directives from Washington, D.C.
This fall, OWS has turn into the new Lourdes for the old, lame, and blind of American labor. Union leaders have been making normal visits to Zuccotti Park and other substantial-profile encampments around the country. According to NYC retail retailer union leader Stuart Applebaum, “the Occupy motion has changed unions”—both in the region of membership mobilization and ”messaging.”
It would be a miraculous transformation indeed if organized labor abruptly embraced better direct action, democratic selection-producing, and rank-and-file militancy. Since that’s unlikely to take place in the absence of internal upheavals, unions may possibly want to focus as an alternative on casting aside the crutch of their personal flawed messaging. That indicates adopting the Occupation movement’s brilliant common “framing” of the class divide and ditching labor’s own muddled conception of class in America.
Them and Us Updated
In his 1974 memoir and union background, United Electrical Workers co-founder Jim Matles reminded readers that labor struggles are about “them and us”—or, as OWS puts it, “the one percent” vs. the “99 %.” Unfortunately, most other unions have long relied on substantial-priced Democratic Celebration consultants, their concentrate groups and viewpoint polling, to form labor’s public “messaging” in considerably much less effective style. The benefits of this collaboration have been unhelpful, to say the least. Organizations that are supposed to the voice of the operating class majority have instead positioned themselves–narrowly and confusedly–as defenders of America’s “middle class,” an always fuzzy construct now getting rendered even less meaningful by the recession-driven downward mobility of millions of people.
As SUNY professor Michael Zweig argued in his book, The Functioning Class Majority: America’s Very best-Kept Secret (Cornell ILR Press, 2000), labor’s by no means ending mantra about the “middle class” leaves class relations—and the real class position of most of the population–shrouded in rhetorical fog.
Zweig points out that the working class in America nowadays looks really different than the blue-collar proletariat of the final century, which leads a lot of to believe that differences in “status, revenue, or life-styles” define exactly where they stand on the financial and social ladder. But “the actual basis of social class lies in the varying quantities of power men and women have at function and in the bigger society….The sooner we comprehend that classes exist and comprehend the electrical power relations that are driving the financial and political alterations swirling about us, the sooner we will be in a position to construct an openly working class politics.”
As Zweig would agree I’m certain, labor’s “framing” not only lacks the clear resonance of that employed by the new anti-capitalist campaigners of OWS “one of the excellent weaknesses” of the normal union view of class “is that it confuses the target of political conflict.” When the working class disappears into an amorphous “middle class,” not only do the “working poor” (a mere 46 million robust) drop out of the picture, but “the capitalist class disappears into ‘the rich.’ And when the capitalist class disappears from view, it can not be a target.”
Nicely, thanks to OWS —but not most unions—that target is back in view. As a result of Occupation activity, there is now a far a lot more favorable climate of public viewpoint for waging key contract fights at Verizon and other Fortune 500 firms.
A Corporate Pig Roast in Albany
During the two-week strike by 45,000 Verizon employees in August, union PR people issued leaflets urging support for the CWA-IBEW “fight to defend middle-class jobs.” This characterization of strike ambitions enabled Verizon to run newspaper advertisements claiming that the $ 75,000 a year or much more earned by phone technicians created them part of the “upper middle class”—and as a result, apparently not worthy of sympathy from buyers or members of the public whose jobs provide family incomes closer to the national or regional common.
By late October, Verizon technicians, who are element of a reform motion in CWA Nearby 1101, had marched by means of lower Manhattan in solidarity with OWS and along with NYC teachers, teamsters, and transit employees. Comparable links in between occupiers and Verizon contract campaigners created in Boston.
Meanwhile, in upstate New York, members of CWA Local 1118 held a “corporate pig roast”—right about the corner from “Cuomoville,” the OWS encampment in downtown Albany that has so annoyed the state’s Democratic governor. At this OWS-inspired occasion, Verizon workers invited occupiers (a lot more utilised to vegan and vegetarian fare) to join them. They have been also brandishing new indicators, with a far much better, a lot more universalist message: “We are the 99 %!”
Interaction like this, in between OWS and union rank-and-filers, has been mutually useful in several other spots. On the labor side, Occupation activity has been a considerably-necessary source of new energy and ideas. Lets hope that union members can keep pushing labor’s communications technique in a much more resonant OWS-influenced course. If they do well with that objective, far more substantive and harder to achieve organizational modify could be next on the agenda.
Steve Early is a former national staff member of the Communications Employees of America (CWA) who has been active in labor causes given that 1972. He is the author of The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor (Haymarket Books, 2010) and a contributor to the forthcoming, Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back, from Month-to-month Review Press. An earlier version of this post appeared in Logos. See www.logosjournal.com
TALKINGREADER.COM
by Mike Hall, Nov 15, 2011 AFL-CIO
Thursday, Nov 17, thousands of faculty members created background by participating in the 1st-ever strike of the California State University method.
Jimmy Johns Workers Union
