What Can Labor Unions Learn from the Occupy Movement?

[Better Believe It]

What Can Unions Learn from the Occupy Movement?
By Jane Slaughter
Chief Editor of Labor Notes
November 17, 2011

Tens of thousands of occupiers nationwide are celebrating the two-month anniversary of the Occupy phenomenon today with teach-ins and marches onto bridges to highlight the need for infrastructure repair—and jobs.

In New York, the morning has seen hundreds of arrests during confrontations aimed to disrupt the financial architecture at the heart of the country’s concentrated wealth and rotted political system.

So why has the Occupy movement captured the public imagination, when unions, which have been saying many of the same things, railing against corporate overreach and the Wall Street bailout for years, decades, haven’t?

Unions, after all, have far more members than the Occupy encampments, including members who are strategically located to wield power.

http://labornotes.org/2011/11/what-can-unions-learn-occupy-movement


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The following is an excerpt from a talk Jane Slaughter gave on November 15th to the Washtenaw County Community Action Team, an alliance
of unions and community members in southeast Michigan. It was a public speech and therefore not copyrighted. BBI




Social Forum on Rebuilding Working People’s Power (FB RSVP)

Where: Kalamazoo Room, Second Floor of Michigan League (UM Campus)

When: Tuesday, 7:00-9:00pm

Who: Tom Weisskopf (UM Political Economist), Jane Slaughter (Chief Editor of LaborNotes.org), Maureen Taylor (Michigan Organization for Welfare Rights)


I see three reasons why the Occupiers have garnered more support than unions:

1. The Occupiers chose a bold tactic. When was the last union occupation of a workplace that you can remember? Flint 1937?

Actually, just this summer, longshore workers in Washington state blocked railroad tracks, invaded a grain terminal, and opened the hoppers on a train carrying 10,000 tons of grain and spilled it onto the ground.

But in general unions seldom even strike anymore, much less occupy anything. Last year, there were only 11 strikes of more than 1,000 workers. The record low was set in 2009, at five.

In the 1970s, in contrast, there were 269 big strikes a year. In 1952 there were 470.

So Occupy Wall Street gained attention because of its new/old and bold tactic. The Occupiers symbolically seized a symbol—Wall Street. Today the Occupiers upped their attempt to disrupt in New York, preventing some Wall Streeters from getting to their nefarious work, for a while anyway, with the police closing off many streets.

2. The Occupiers have a better slogan.

Who is it that have unions been trying to defend for the last 20 years?

The middle class. By which is meant workers with middle-class pay levels.

Which captures better the idea that we have an unrighteous enemy—to proclaim that we’re the middle class, or that we are the 99%? To talk about the 1% points to the pinnacle of the economy and says that we’re on different sides. “The middle class” just says we’re differentiating ourselves from the poor.

Occupy has a better slogan, one that evokes class hatred. Even if “1%” isn't totally accurate for pointing out who’s on the other side, it does point out the complete lack of democracy in letting our country be run by a tiny oligarchy.

3. But the real reason unions haven’t ignited a movement is that mostly – with some major exceptions – we haven’t taken the actions that would ignite a movement. Unions have been stuck in stale, timid, conservative politics for too long.

Here’s a quote from United Auto Workers President Bob King, in an editorial in the Detroit News: “The UAW is fundamentally a moderate, pragmatic and socially responsible player in the dialogue.” Does that inspire anyone to want to join with auto workers? It sounds like the union is trying to impress the 1%, not the 99ers.

Working Together

The welcoming reaction of union leaders and members to the Occupy movement has been heartening. So has the willingness of the Occupiers to work with institutions—unions they had good reason to see as sclerotic. That’s the advantage of the 99% slogan—whatever problems you may see with unions, it’s clear that union members aren't in the 1%.

We’ve seen some great examples of unions and Occupiers working together: at Sotheby’s art auction house; when billionaire Mayor Bloomberg tried to evict the Occupiers to “clean” Zuccotti Park the first time; in Boston, when Occupiers joined telephone workers fighting concessions to surround a Verizon store; and in Oakland, when the Occupiers got plenty of union support when they marched on the docks.

In Detroit we’ve had labor marches to support the occupation, but what I found more impressive was the story of a GM retiree. He went to his monthly retirees meeting and collected $700. Who would have thought these older folks would be inspired by the Occupiers?

Many union activists have been surprised by and proud of the reactions of both members and officials. We groaned when the president of AFSCME, Gerry McEntee, declared that unions wanted to channel the Occupiers’ energy into the elections in 2012. Occupy Wall Street spokespeople immediately declared that was not going to happen.

Learn from Them

Unions need to learn some of Occupy’s lessons.

(1) Labor has been shy about a crucial aspect of movement-building: defining the enemy. The Occupy movement has succeeded in defining the enemy—the 1%—while for decades labor was caught up in cooperation plans and declaring partnership with our employers.

Remember the labor-management cooperation plans of the 1980s and 1990s? If you spend 35 months out of 36 declaring that the employer is your partner, when management comes in the 36th month to demand concessions, it’s hard to draw a line in the sand. We’ve known that cooperation is a dead letter for some years now, but we were weakened by our futile desire for partnership with our enemy.

(2) Unite the many. Look broadly for allies. Occupy has shown that people are willing to think broadly and think big about who is on the same side they are. Unions should shake the cobwebs out of their thinking and think about how to reach out to non-usual suspects—and offer support proactively, not wait till it’s our turn in the barrel.

(3) If you want to get the attention of the powers that be, you have to throw sand in the gears.

The uprising in Wisconsin this year was the most impressive response I’ve seen to the employers’ offensive since it began 32 years ago. It was huge in numbers and it was sustained over weeks. But what it mostly didn’t do was throw sand in the gears.

In the beginning, the uprising was touched off by the graduate employees union occupying the Capitol, and the teachers, who pulled a strike.

But most of the uprising was typified by rallies, which took place all over the state and attracted more than 100,000 people. You can imagine Scott Walker looking out his window at the crowds demonstrating on a Saturday and thinking, “As long as they’re back at work on Monday…”

We learned that you can rally hundreds of thousands on a weekly basis and still get steamrolled. The unions revved the engine of organized labor, then let it idle. We can’t mobilize that many people and have the answer to the question “What next?” be only “recall Republicans.” Or even only “come to the next march.”

Notice how important it is to city authorities all around the country to clear out the parks. At Zuccotti Park on November 15, after the eviction, 130 cops with riot gear and batons were assigned to guard it, to keep protesters from returning. We shouldn't forget how important order and control are to governments. They must show they’re in control even if it’s over something so seemingly unimportant as who’s sleeping where.

Let’s discover more ways to get sand in the gears. As long as labor’s strike statistics are 11 per year, there’s too much business-as-usual going on. We can learn from the Occupiers.

http://labornotes.org/2011/11/what-can-unions-learn-occupy-movement

[AdHocSolver]

1. K & R. A toothless junkyard dog doesn't do much protecting. nt

[FreakinDJ]

2. Labor Unions could learn A LOT from OWS right now

They are doing a lot more to raise awareness of the repressive take over of our political system by the Wealthy 1%

[Starry Messenger]

3. Two-words: Taft-Hartley.

It's all very well to rail about what the unions "should" be doing. Most of the things on her list are illegal for us under the USA's draconian anti-union laws. This part of Occupy is frustrating to me, the lack of knowledge about what fascist legal constraints unions operate under. It's only now that the public has started feeling the pain and support is shifting to pro-union that we can afford to get creative under the umbrella of Occupy. Do people know that all of the teachers and doctors who "sicked-out" in Madison last winter and were so brave are now in real trouble? http://www.superiortelegram.com/event/article/id/60045/group/News/ Want more union support? Lobby for the repeal of Taft-Hartley. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act

[Better Believe It]

5. One word: Defiance

The labor movement officials didn't challenge the Taft-Hartley law provisions and refused to organize massive defiance.

So which "things" that she advocates are "illegal" under federal law?

Even more reactionary laws than Taft-Hartley failed to stop the labor movement and civil rights movement from successfully organizng and winning their battles.

Massive defiance of right-wing laws has been the trademark of all successful mass movements in all nations.

[Starry Messenger]

7. They didn't?

They fought in the courts for years. Where was the grassroots support? Oh yeah, it was run to ribbons during the McCarthy era. Then everybody went quiet. Labor has been trying to get that piece of shit law overturned all the while. Carter's's legislature turned down the opportunity. I doubt it is going away anytime soon either. http://lpa.igc.org/lpv26/lp05.htm

Sympathy strikes are illegal, and most teachers can't strike at all. It is illegal. 21 states in the country are "right-to-work" and have very little protection. Are you offering to pay the court fees for everyone who gets prosecuted under TH? Is anyone? Help me out here.

Accusations like this are why the unions seem "stagnant". Why should they trust the fickle and uninformed public? Massive defiance is going to take *massive* public support of labor, which has been sorely lacking in left circles for decades. Glad to see some activists in Occupy catching up. With more understanding, the unions will stay on board. I was at the General Strike in Oakland and the Longshoremen were very supportive.

[Better Believe It]

8. No. They did not. John L. Lewis called for massive resistance in 1947 but other labor leaders

refused to engage in such a general labor campaign of resistance.

Instead, the union bureaucracy decided the fight a losing battle in the courts .... as if they expected the federal courts to rule on the side of working people!

In 1947 the union movement with did have the massive public support you say was necessary to defeat anti-labor legislation and make its enforcement impossible. The labor movement had just won in 1946, with massive public support, the biggest strike wave involving millions of workers in American history.

This was well before McCarthyism set in and the refusal of the CIO and AFL leadership to organize a massive defiance campaign involving 20 million organized workers helped pave the way for the anti-radical witch-hunt and McCarthyism to emerge and be successful.

[Starry Messenger]

9. That link I posted has a good timeline of events:

"The measures were a workers' nightmare: They restored anti-strike injunctions; limited labor's ability to mass picket; prohibited secondary boycotts; restricted political contributions by unions; outlawed welfare funds not jointly controlled by management; authorized employer interference in organizing; denied "economic" strikers the right to vote in representation elections; allowed bosses to fire workers for some types of union activity; outlawed the closed shop, and authorized states to ban the union shop; opened union treasuries to raids through lawsuits; and interfered in internal union politics by requiring officers to sign affidavits that they were not "communists."

It was no surprise that corporations were out to get the unions: In a little more than a decade, the number of union members in the U.S. had grown from less than 4 million to some 15 million. Labor had flexed its muscles soon after World War 2 ended in 1945 with a series of strikes aimed at dramatically increasing living standards for industrial workers. Electrical, oil, steel, auto, rubber, and packinghouse workers, among others, went on strike simultaneously, bringing the U.S. to the verge of a general strike in basic industry. Their successful job actions modestly redistributed the corporations' bloated war-time profits.

EMPLOYERS VS. NEW DEAL

In response, corporations were mounting an attack on New Deal legislation that had given workers some of their newfound strength. Big business also employed the Cold War to whip up a "red scare" that wreaked internal havoc in unions across the country. C.E. Wilson, head of General Electric, frankly declared the Cold War had two targets: labor at home, and the Soviet Union abroad.

In April 1947, the CIO organized a "Defend Labor" month, urging mass actions, plant-gate rallies, and an all-out campaign to get resolutions, letters and telegrams sent to Washington to counter Taft-Hartley and the whole labor assault. Sixty members of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) spent a frustrating two days trying to convince members of Congress that any of the 200-plus anti-labor bills would be disastrous. They didn't get a good reception: Taft refused to meet with them. Indiana's Sen. Homer Capehart, a manufacturer employing UE members, told the union delegation he was "against big business, big unions, and big government. But I'll start on big unions."

On April 17, the House passed the Hartley bill. And on May 13, 1947, the Senate voted 68-21 to adopt the Taft bill. Democrats were split exactly 50-50, with 21 voting for, and 21 against.

Heavy pressure convinced President Harry Truman to veto the bill at the last minute. But in a move Bill Clinton must have studied, he did little to influence the override vote that followed. Both House and Senate voted to override the veto.

LABOR'S BALL AND CHAIN

Taft-Hartley has been labor's ball and chain ever since. Early on, labor made a bid at resisting the law. UE, the Steelworkers, and other CIO unions pledged not to cooperate with the new Taft-Hartley Labor Board. CIO president Philip Murray and Mineworkers president John L. Lewis vowed they would not sign the measure's red-scare affidavit. But within a few years, unions were forced to submit. "

...

You are incorrect that this was all "well-before McCarthyism". The Second Red Scare began in 1947. It was a direct result of the massively successful General Strikes of 1946. : "The term Red Scare denotes two distinct periods of strong Anti-Communism in the United States: the First Red Scare, from 1919 to 1920, and the Second Red Scare, from 1947 to 1957. The First Red Scare was about worker (socialist) revolution and political radicalism. The Second Red Scare was focused on national and foreign communists influencing society or infiltrating the federal government, or both." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare#Second_Red_Scare_.281947.E2.80.9357.29

It was a period of domestic terrorism, against labor and workers. Why didn't the whole country rise up to protect the achievements of unions?

[Brickbat]

10. Well said.

Keep it up.

[AdHocSolver]

11. You are correct.

The government and the courts are largely (and always will be, for that matter) conservative and anti-union. Playing on corporate turf, in the long run, is not a winning strategy.

In 1947, the workers had their largest amount of power because The U.S. had the only fully intact industrial base of any country. The unions could have shut down the world's economy and this capability would have been a significant threat to Wall Street.

Most union leaders are like politicians--unable to see the "big picture", and satisfied with winning small victories even as they lose the game.

The best way to get Wall Street's attention is to hit them in their wallets.

[DonCoquixote]

4. Be inclusive

If labor unions had one flaw, it is that they got too cliquish and clannish. The more diverse the movement is, the better.

[LWolf]

6. I know what Dennis Van Roekel can learn from them.

Don't back down. Don't give up. Don't sell us out by endorsing a 1%er.