By Steve Early, In These Times, November 15, 2011
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has given our timorous, unimaginative and
politically ambivalent unions a much-needed ideological dope slap. Some might
describe this, more diplomatically, as a second injection of “outside-the-box”
thinking and new organizational blood.
Top AFL-CIO officials first sought an
infusion of those scarce commodities in labor when they jetted into Wisconsin
last winter. Without their planning or direction, the spontaneous
community-labor uprising in Wisconsin was in the process of recasting the
debate about public sector bargaining throughout the U.S. So they were eager to
join the protest 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 become the new Lourdes for the old, lame, and blind of American labor.
Union leaders have been making regular visits to Zuccotti Park and other
high-profile encampments around the country. According to NYC retail store
union leader Stuart Applebaum, “the Occupy movement has changed unions”—both in
the area of membership mobilization and ”messaging.”
It would be a miraculous
transformation indeed if organized labor suddenly embraced greater direct
action, democratic decision-making and rank-and-file militancy. Since that’s
unlikely to occur in the absence of internal upheavals, unions might want to
focus instead on casting aside the crutch of their own flawed messaging. That
means adopting the Occupation movement’s brilliant popular “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 history, United Electrical Workers co-founder Jim
Matles reminded readers that labor struggles are about “them and us”—or, as OWS
puts it, “the 1 percent” vs. the “99 percent.” Unfortunately, most other unions
have long relied on high-priced Democratic Party consultants, their focus groups
and opinion polling, to shape labor’s public “messaging” in much less effective
fashion. The results of this collaboration have been unhelpful, to say the
least. Organizations that are supposed to the voice of the working class
majority have instead positioned themselves–narrowly and confusedly–as
defenders of America’s “middle class,” an always fuzzy construct now being
rendered even less meaningful by the recession-driven downward mobility of
millions of people.
As SUNY professor Michael Zweig argued in his book, The
Working Class Majority: America’s Best-Kept Secret, labor’s never ending mantra
about the “middle class” leaves class relations—and the actual class position
of most of the population—is shrouded in rhetorical fog.
Zweig
points out that the working class in America today looks quite different than
the blue-collar proletariat of the last century, which leads many to believe
that differences in “status, income, or life-styles” define where they stand on
the economic and social ladder. But “the real basis of social class lies in the
varying amounts of power people have at work and in the larger society….The
sooner we realize that classes exist and understand the power relations that
are driving the economic and political changes swirling around us, the sooner
we will be able to build an openly working class politics.”
As Zweig would
agree I’m sure, labor’s “framing” not only lacks the clear resonance of that
employed by the new anti-capitalist campaigners of OWS; “one of the great
weaknesses” of the standard 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 strong) drop
out of the picture, but “the capitalist class disappears into ‘the rich.’ And
when the capitalist class disappears from view, it cannot be a target.”
Well,
thanks to OWS —but not most unions—that target is back in view. As a result of
Occupation activity, there is now a far more favorable climate of public
opinion for waging key contract fights at Verizon and other Fortune 500
companies.
A corporate pig roast in Albany
During the two-week strike by 45,000 Verizon
workers in August, union PR people issued leaflets urging support for the
CWA-IBEW “fight to defend middle-class jobs.” This characterization of strike
goals enabled Verizon to run newspaper ads claiming that the $75,000 a
year or more earned by telephone technicians made them part of the “upper
middle class”—and thus, apparently not worthy of sympathy from customers or
members of the public whose jobs provide family incomes closer to the national
or regional average.
By late October, Verizon technicians, who are part of a
reform movement in CWA Local 1101, had marched through lower Manhattan in
solidarity with OWS and along with NYC teachers, teamsters, and transit
workers. Similar links between occupiers and Verizon contract campaigners
developed in Boston.
Meanwhile, in upstate New York, members of CWA Local 1118
held a “corporate pig roast”—right around the corner from “Cuomoville,” the OWS
encampment in downtown Albany that has so annoyed the state’s Democratic
governor. At this OWS-inspired event, Verizon workers invited occupiers (more
used to vegan and vegetarian fare) to join them. They were also brandishing new
signs, with a far better, more universalist message: “We are the 99 percent!”
Interaction
like this, between OWS and union rank-and-filers, has been mutually beneficial
in many other places. On the labor side, Occupation activity has been a
much-needed source of new energy and ideas. Lets hope that union members can
keep pushing labor’s communications strategy in a more resonant OWS-influenced
direction. If they succeed with that objective, more substantive and harder to
achieve organizational change could be next on the agenda.
Steve Early is a former
national staff member of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) who has
been active in labor causes since 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 Monthly Review
Press.
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