What Can Labor Learn?
It won’t be easy for union leaders to accept the Occupy movement’s most important lesson.
BY Mike Elk
Unions’ ability to take full advantage of the Occupy movement will hinge on their ability to embrace social movements, and their willingness to take bold actions in smart strategic campaigns and to stick with those campaigns over the long run.
The Occupy protesters have quickly altered the political landscape of the United States.
They are standing up for all those who find themselves in thrall to a grasping and ever-more powerful oligarchy, aka “the 1%.”
In its December 2011 issue, In These Times explores the terrain of this all-American revolt—an uprising that may be the most formidable challenge to neoliberalism yet. —The editors
“I feel like Wisconsin was the prologue, but this could be the first chapter. With Occupy Wall Street we are finally seeing the beginning of how to rebuild the labor movement,” says 97-year-old labor journalist Harry Kelber, who covered the labor movement in the 1930s.
Many in labor are hoping that the energy of the Occupy movement will re-invigorate their movement, which today represents only 6.9 percent of private-sector workers.
It’s not entirely clear, however, how protests in public spaces will create an increased sense of solidarity—and hunger for a union contract—in the private space of the workplace, where bosses are able to fire at-will workers who attempt to organize unions.
Fiercely anti-union companies are clearly adept at undermining organizing campaigns.
But many people in the labor movement say there is a lot more unions could be doing to successfully organize in a hostile climate.
In the end, the Occupy movement may benefit the labor movement most not by building solidarity in the street, but by forcing labor leaders to rethink their strategy for rebuilding the labor movement.
Unions’ ability to take full advantage of the Occupy movement will hinge on its ability to embrace social movements, be willing to take bold actions in smart strategic campaigns, to stick with those campaigns over the long run and to reform themselves to look and operate more like the Occupy protests.
In the past, the labor movement has had trouble fully embracing movements it did not control, says Dorian Warren, a Columbia University political science professor.
“Unions have different functions than social movements,” Warren says. “You see this with unions’ campaign contributions and scripted rallies. However, when you disrupt things and raise fundamental questions about society or the system, you have an ability to attract people and become more powerful. When unions speak, it’s often about a specific set of union members to which most people do not belong, and the rhetoric quickly starts to sound like ‘us versus them’ instead of the 99% movement.”
Labor has had a difficult time being co-partners with social movements. A prime example of this is website launched by the AFL-CIO’s Building Trades Council, which depicts environmental activists opposed to the Keystone Pipeline as “Hollywood’s elite 1%.” On other issues such as reproductive justice or racial justice, the labor movement has sometimes remained silent or narrow-minded in its focus.
“Look at Hurricane Katrina. Had the labor movement challenged publicly the policy of racism about how the schools were being reopened and what neighborhoods people were allowed to move back into, and not gone just to get the contract to rebuild, they could have really changed the dynamics in the South,” Cornell Professor Kate Bronfenbrenner says. “Yes, they would have alienated some members, but they would have gotten legs in the crowd in terms of organizing more in the south.”
The Occupy movement is at its core about taking action—occupying public space to make demands visible—and that attracts some people. But unions have often been hesitant about taking bold action.
“It’s just fascinating that the Occupy folks captured the mood of the nation, while many of us have spent years unsuccessfully trying to make this happen,” says Stephen Lerner, a member of SEIU’s executive board who called for mass direct action against financial institutions earlier this year in forums including In These Times’ May 2011 issue.
“We can come up with messages and slogans that the majority of people agree with, but if it doesn’t make people want to get out of their seat and do something, then the message doesn’t work.
“The idea of 99% versus 1%, combined with people willing to risk arrest, adds a seriousness that brings the words to life,” says Lerner.
“This may be the moment where the labor movement and other progressives finally break out of the Stockholm syndrome, which has trapped us into thinking we can only succeed by being sympathetic to and appealing to our captors — giant corporations.”
While in the past labor has shied away from movements that used civil disobedience (unless unions directly controlled them), AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was quick to endorse OWS in early October, although he and other leaders are clearly being careful not to co-opt the movement in its infancy—or appear to.
“We need to have people in the street right now,” Trumka told In These Times, explaining his endorsement.
“Occupy Wall Street is an organic movement. We should support it and not try to control it. We have to understand their organic structure and respond to it.” AFL-CIO support has been very tangible for protesters: The labor federation allowed people occupying K Street to use showers in its D.C. headquarters.
But how exactly labor support for Occupy Wall Street will translate into support for organized labor is unclear.
“If people try to narrow this and put their specific issue at the top of the agenda, it’s not going to work. The opportunity is to build on what is already there. In Chicago, The Teachers Union has a concrete set of proposals that go to how Wall Street is bankrupting public services and public education—it moved people because it fits naturally with everyone’s experience on the ground,” says Lerner. “I think you are going to see an explosion of activity as people connect the damage Wall Street has done nationally to local struggles.”
Labor has helped integrate itself into the fabric of the Occupy movement through spontaneous, often uncoordinated actions.
Already some OWS protests are naturally drifting into labor struggles, with OWS marching to support locked-out Sotheby art handlers (members of the Teamsters) and marching on Verizon Headquarters in support of 45,000 workers—members of the Communication Workers of America (CWA) and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers attempting to bargain a contract.
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