This is a response to the None of us are winning, yet by Subhash Kateel which we posted late Tuesday night as a challenge to Sally Kohn’s original piece in the American Prospect which criticized the nature of the Occupy Wall Street Protest. We are publishing this back and forth because  our mission at Organizing Upgrade is to upgrade the theory and practice of left organizing, and this exchange is great example of real time debate about what is happening right now. Also, it is great to see two people with so much respect for each other engage in a principled public debate. Big ups to Subhash and Sally. For more information on Occupy Wall Street go here:  https://occupywallst.org/. 

Subhash Kateel is one of my heroes. He launched one of the most visionary, cutting edge community based organizations in the country, Families for Freedom. While I want to make clear what I attempted to convey in my original piece that any form of struggle is inherently worthwhile and admirable, two things about Families for Freedom caught my eye initially.

First, it was an organization not started by well-meaning white folks who wanted to help immigrants. Those are great, but we have plenty of ‘em. Families for Freedom was started by two visionary organizers of color in touch with the communities they were organizing and personally shaped by the issue of deportation.

Second, yes, Families for Freedom sometimes protested for protest’s sake — understandable given the desperation and powerlessness many of their members felt. But they also used creative tactics designed to make a real impact. Once, passing by some embassies in Washington, D.C., I noticed folks wearing Families for Freedom t-shirts. Huh? It turns out, rather than just pressuring the United States government to stop deportations, Families for Freedom was enlisting the home countries of immigrants to fight for their nationals. Their campaign drew on novel interpretations of international law to push bold and tangible demands. It was strategically and tactically brilliant. [As a footnote/disclaimer: I was so inspired by Subhash and Families for Freedom’s work, I agreed to serve on the board for a period and helped the organization raise money.]

My piece in the American Prospect, imperfect though it may be, was intended as a constructive critique and prompt for self-reflection about all of our organizing and protest tactics, using Occupy Wall Street as a timely lens. Apparently, the jokes about smelly anarchists fell flat with many (though I suspect just as many laughed) — but I’m more saddened that my defenses of Occupy Wall Street and the value of their taking action were apparently obscured by my critique. I’d encourage those interested to read my piece for CNN.com (actually, written before the American Prospect post) in which I defend not only Occupy Wall Street but the necessity of protest and direct action in general.

That said, a lot of things understandably ruffled Subhash and others about my critique of Occupy Wall Street. But I hope that being ruffled — that challenging our assumptions, reflecting on what works and doesn’t work in our field, engaging in healthy debate not among our opponents but our friends — is precisely what will make us stronger.

I quoted the New York Times not because I believe it is a bastion of truth but because I believe it fairly closely represents what I would call “official mainstream opinion” — that is, most Americans don’t read the New York Times but they get their news and information from media makers who almost exclusively rely on the reporting and framing of the Times. So if our goal is to get out on the streets and vent and protest, it doesn’t matter what the Times thinks. If our goal is to reach the progressive choir through progressive media outlets, it doesn’t matter what the Times thinks. But if our goal is to reach mainstream America, to shape and shift popular opinion and popular will, then at the very least the New York Times is an appropriate barometer.

My favorite part of Subhash’s post was, “To be sure, Sally’s point about the disconnect between seemingly privileged participants of Occupy Wall Street, and the struggling folks of the five boroughs is well taken. I have heard the same criticism from a bunch of people on the ground.” In fact, that was the entire point of my piece — that we should see protest as a “collective art form”, the collective coming from “deeper, sustained work of movement building”, the art coming from innovative and unexpected forms of disobedience.

Subhash ends by reminding us “Another world is possible.” Yes, and another movement is possible, too. If I’m guilty of wanting that movement to be as grounded and representative of all Americans, especially those on the front-lines of suffering in our broken economy, springing from the very same well of accountable leadership Subhash has demonstrated throughout his work, I can live with that.

Sally Kohn is a grassroots strategist actively engaged in movement building for equality and justice. She is a regular on Fox News (Hannity, O’Reilly Factor, Megyn Kelly) and MSNBC (Ed Show). Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, USA Today, CNN.com, FoxNews.com, Reuters, The Guardian and the American Prospect among other outlets.

Let’s make a toast, but don’t drink yet

Thursday felt like time for a toast for America’s largest social movement, the folks fighting for immigrant rights. With the news that the Obama administration would review many of its pending 300,000 deportation cases and allow some of those with no “criminal” record to stay, you could literally hear the cries of joy jumping out of Facebook updates, twitter feeds, cafecito spots (I live in Miami), college campuses, and even a detention center or two.

After over two years of pressuring the Obama administration to use its executive power to stop tearing apart immigrant families and communities; after hunger strikes, 1000 mile walks, and mass arrests, after multiple insistences from the Administration that it didn’t have that authority, after multiple cover-ups by the administration of how many people they were deporting that had done nothing wrong, it seems like the Administration is finally listening. And while there are tears of joy, and sighs of relief, there is also plenty of healthy skepticism. After all, we have an Administration that has cried (falsely), “we only deport dangerous criminals!” more than that boy who cried wolf.

So the questions remain.

Who is going to be carrying out this new case-by-case review? Is it going to be the ICE agents whose union doesn’t want to use its discretionary power and calls this a  “back door amnesty?” What is their incentive to review cases fairly?

And when the administration says that they will focus on “criminals”, what do they mean? Isn’t immigration policy the same set of laws that famously calls people “aggravated felons” for things that are neither aggravated nor felonies? Isn’t ICE the same agency that deported thousands of suspected “terrorists” after 9/11 that were never really terrorists? And don’t ICE’s “worst of the worst” categories include a Baptist pastor with a 16 year old conviction from when he was homeless, a Gulf War Veteran with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder who was arrested for marijuana possession after his wife died, and a 36-year-old youth community worker who helps young people stay away from the mistakes he made as a 16 year old? If the Administration is really turning over a new leaf, does that mean ICE is turning over a new leaf?

And then there is what the Obama Administration still refuses to do. It still refuses to create enforceable standards for how it treats immigrants in detention so that they don’t die in custody. The administration still refuses to reign in the deputized powers it gives to bad sheriffs with long lists of civil rights complaints like the real-life Boss-Hog, Joe Arpaio. The Administration still refuses to call of its “creepy” Secure Communities program, which is looking more and more like the first step of a science fiction-like national database that may one day include everyone.

But the Administration is also failing to take the lead in pushing common sense legislation that will begin to fix the broken immigration system while everyone waits for the mythical grand compromise. For one, the best way to ensure the case-by-case reviews o f immigration cases is done right is to give immigration judges back the discretion they need (and lost in 1996) instead of pushing ICE employees to exercise the discretion many of them seem to not want (that they gained over a decade ago).

But lets not rain on the parade. This is no doubt a victory. Afterall, it seems like there are only a few constituencies of non-millionaires that have gotten any significant demand from the administration: the LGBT movement, the Tea Party, and the immigrant rights movement to name a few. And the tie that binds these movements together (for better or worse) is that they fought like hell and refused to just “let the President do his job.”

So let there be a toast. A toast to democracy-in-action and the thousands of squeaky wheels that provided the vehicle to demand more oil. A toast that remembers those families that new policies may never help, the ones that have already been separated and torn apart. And a toast to the hope that regular people are pushing the Administration to finally have enough courage to make real change.

Yep, its time for a toast…but don’t drink the juice yet.

Welcome back to Fast Forum!  We pick a hot topic and ask 3 – 6 organizers from across the country to weigh in. Our hope is to draw out new ideas and to encourage new voices to take a stab at the freshest challenges facing our community. This month we asked B Loewe, Communications Director from the National Day Labor Organizing Network, to reach out to organizers in the migrants rights movement to comment ont he state of the movement in light of recent legislative victories and defeats.

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Unite Against Attacks

-Voces de la Frontera – Milwaukee, WI

Where is the fight for migrant justice in your state?

Immigrant rights organizations like ours have united in an unprecedented manner with labor unions, education unions, and other groups in opposition to the recent attacks on all public workers in Wisconsin.

Currently, we are strategizing against an Arizona-style anti-immigrant bill, AB-173, which Wisconsin law enforcement officers to confirm the immigration status of anyone charged with a crime or civil violation (which can include violations as small as jaywalking) if there is “reasonable suspicion”.  Voces and our allies have been mobilizing against this since last fall, when it was first announced.  AB-173 is now headed to the Homeland Security Committee.  We now need national support in continuing to fight it.  For more info on how to help, visit vdlf.org.

In addition, state budget signed by Governor Scott Walker has just eliminated in-state tuition for undocumented students- a victory that had been hard-won in 2009. Although it was claimed to be done as a means to reduce spending, the amount of undocumented students that applied for in-state tuition was so few that its’ financial impact was irrelevant in the budget.

What are the factors that have lead to the situation you are in in your state?

The Republican majority that took over both Wisconsin’s House and Senate has created a political environment which has made it acceptable to make grievous offenses against immigrants and workers across the state.  The economic situation of Wisconsin has provided these officials and lawmakers such as Governor Scott Walker a convenient excuse to use immigrants as scapegoats, as is the case with the elimination of in-state tuition for undocumented students.

What are the next steps for organizing in your state for migrant rights? What strategies and tactics are you excited by and seeing success with?

The recent budget signed by the governor, which targets not only immigrant students, but all of the middle and working class, has brought unprecedented alliances between various groups including immigrants and Latino workers, and students and organized labor.

This collaboration could not be more visible than in this year’s May Day march, which had a theme of “Solidarity for Immigrant and Worker Rights’ which drew nearly 100,000 people and including National AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka.

Prior to the state budget being passed, we organized a non-violent civil disobedience action at the Joint Finance Committee meeting on education, in an effort to stall the vote which would remove in-state tuition for undocumented students.  Community leaders from around the state participated, including members of the school board, the faith community, and public teachers.  The action drew attention to the need for those opposed to the budget to escalate strategies to defend immigrant and worker rights.

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Right to Remain: Congress of Day Laborers fight back in New Orleans

- Congress of Day Laborers

Immigrants in New Orleans are living in a state of siege. On day labor corners, immigration agents are arriving camouflaged as contractors to pick up undocumented immigrants and fill quotas. At worksites, police and immigrants agents are collaborating to resolve labor disputes on behalf of employers, criminalizing the very workers who courageously come forward to report violations of labor law. On the streets, traffic tickets, broken tail-lights and just being Latino lead to detention and deportation. In the apartment complexes, where immigrant families live with the constant precipice of eviction, law enforcement agents have conducted home invasions, pulling residents out of beds and showers in violation of their constitutional rights.

 In all of these ways, the criminal justice system’s anti-immigrant strategy denies the community access to justice, humiliates the community’s efforts to gain dignity, and severely destabilizes all efforts to put down roots and achieve economic and cultural permanence. Incarceration directly removes immigrant community leaders from their communities in the United States and chills actions by threatening retaliatory arrests and deportations against immigrant leadership. The de-humanizing identity assigned by the criminal justice system impedes immigrant communities’ ability to even search for and build power. And as the immigrant community is pushed farther and farther into isolation and hiding, the criminal justice system further compounds their cumulative disadvantage by separating them from democratic institutions which should help build community and power—schools, community organizations, etc. In effect, the immigrant community is sentenced to remain temporary, unstable and in crisis.

In New Orleans, Louisiana, the fight against the criminal justice system is the Congress of Day Laborer’s fight for the Right to Remain in a city they now call home. As a membership organization, in deep alliance with the African American community, the Congress of Day Laborers is organizing for “the right to remain” in New Orleans, the right to hold control over their political future in Louisiana, and their right not to be defined by their relationship to the criminal justice system. In a state where the criminal justice system has historically driven the political economy of race and the politics of marginalization, the Congress of Day Laborers is a vehicle for the immigrant community to turn the tide on immigration enforcement so that it can expand democracy and live out its dreams.

In order to do this, the Congress of Day Laborers has built grassroots immigrant leadership, strong campaigns, a social movement around the issues of anti-immigrant enforcement and the attacks of the criminal justice system. In the future we hope to create permanent progressive infrastructure for immigrants, so that immigrants can build the institutional power necessary to change the political conditions that allow the criminal justice system to flourish.

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Tod@s Somos Arizona y Georgia:

Rebuilding the Social Movement, Turning the Tide

- Cesar Lopez, Tierra y Libertad Organization

The passage of SB1070 in Arizona 2010 was a jolt to many in the migrant and social justice movements. In Arizona we see SB1070 as a mass statewide institutionalization of the already existing local/federal laws and culture of hate and greed that has led us to 1070. This legislation has led to mass mobilizations and deep organizing strategy evaluation state and nationwide. This evaluation has led to tough truths on what effective organizing is and has recharged the grassroots to work on rebuilding the social justice movement through deep sustained base-building work in Arizona and throughout the country. The last decades focus of the Migrant Rights movement on solutions coming from Washington, DC have have not only been ineffective, they have moved the people’s movement further from justice and taken away the voice of the grassroots migrants fighting for dignity and equality.

In 2011, Arizona has seen a large flow of continuing hate legislation. Every year and legislative session we see our communities come under attack by a higher intensity war of attrition. Attacks to further restrict the movement of migrants and make life impossible to live. This year we saw bills targeting the prohibition of emergency services for migrants by hospitals and clinic staff, bills that would require teachers and school principals to report migrant children and their families and the building hate in 2011 around another 2010 law HB2287 that aims to shut out cultural and ethnic education for Arizona children in all schools. Also, for more than a decade the Southern Arizona desert has been a graveyard for our migrant brothers and sisters walking into this country in harsh summer and winter climates. Their is a continued build up of militarization through checkpoints, 287G and local related laws, greedy privatized prisons for migrants, a massive border patrol and military presence, a rebuilding by the Obama administration of the border wall, and the existence of paramilitary organizations/anti-migrant militias all of which threaten the peace and fragile social fabric of border communities as well the violation of the sovereignty of the Tohono O’odham Nation people. On the border we see as a result of programs like the federal Secure Communities the mass deportation of migrants from around the country. Here we see the next phase of family separation that leaves our communities in desperation.

How does this culture of hate and destructful legislation exist. The polarization of Arizona communities has been building for decades. There are many factors that have led us to where we are. Over the past several decades conservative voters and activists from other parts of the country have migrated to Arizona in droves. This has led to a voting base that is active and makes and environment where hate and this type of legislation are a part of everyday life. As a result of this we see that Arizona is the first state to ban drivers licenses for migrants in the nineties. Another factor is the federal government’s continued focus on the criminalization of migrants. This has been a strong factor that has led to the culture of hate to build in Arizona. The criminalization of migrants at the federal level is has given permission for this to exist in Arizona.

Arizona 2011 is not all hate bad policy. We have also been called into action to rebuild our social justice movement using effective grassroots organizing. The community resistance to HB2281 from teachers, youth and elders has been strong and inspiring in Arizona and the country. The statewide We Will Not Comply with SB1070 July and August actions are still talked about and evaluated in our communities. Many groups have strengthened their focus to organizing that empowers migrants to raise their voice and be the leaders of this movement. To empower migrants to be go beyond mobilization and into deep organizing of the Barrios to build power from the ground up. This organizing has looked like deep organizing in the Barrio to build Barrio Defense Comites. Their is lots of beautiful organizing work continuing and being born all over Arizona. TYLO in Southside Tucson is working on building two sustained Barrio Comites as well as incorporating youth, education, organizing capacity building and food and economic sustainability as part of our Comite work. Through grassroots organizing we empower migrants to recognize their role and responsibility as leaders and we are rebuilding not only the migrant and social justice movement, but weaving stronger together the fragile social fabric that keeps our Barrios together.

Many sectors are seen working together, figuring our growing pains and collaborations and building to launch effective campaigns. The strength of the migrant justice movement has propelled many other sectors into action, rebuilding and reorganization. The diferent secotrs of the social justice movement realize that we are in together in the same fight and that we must be realistic about where our movement is at and where it can be. All of us together can build a social justice movement that will fight and dare to win!

Come visit us and other organizations in Tucson, AZ. Share with us your skills and capacity and learn about our work. Keep your hearts, ears and eyes open for news from organizing for justice in Geogia and the kickoff of Georgia Human Rights Summer.

Check out this article: http://altopolimigra.com/2011/07/01/being-part-of-this-movement-is-something-beautiful-georgia-summer-of-human-rights/

Nos vemos en los Barrios! cesar lopez is a community organizer with Tierra Y Libertad Organization in the Southside hoods of Tucson, AZ.

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Taking the Dream Home

- Casa de Maryland

The fight for us in MD within the migrant rights movement is similar to that of the entire nation… we are pushing back on hostile enforcement policies that are separating countless families and threatening to devastate our communities.  In the face of this, our organization in partnership with our community and local other organizations decided to push forward with a piece of pro-immigration legislation in the shape of an in-state tuition bill (SB167) or the “MD DREAM Act”.

After having experienced the disappointing failure of the Federal DREAM Act, due to political games and lack of courage on the part of elected officials, we continued the fight to provide better access to higher education to students regardless of immigration status in Maryland. We recognized that through local tangible victories we can to strengthen our communities and mobilize countless youth in our state for any future revolutionary movements.

The factors that led to the need for such a laws are blatantly obvious. This can be seen in the disparity in the quality of primary education (K-12) and the available access to higher education among communities of color, immigrant communities in particular, from county to county. This was caused by the increasing attacks on precious resources for students from non-English speaking communities in our public schools and an prevalence of anti-immigrant rhetoric and lawsuits against institutions that support the higher education of low income immigrant students.

Recognizing that the national dialogue on immigration related issues have turned so sour, our youth needed and wanted to prove that not all states are like Arizona and Georgia. We wanted to prove that there is still hope and that this country is still a place where people can dream. We knew that if Maryland became the 10^th state to stand up for fair access to higher education, we would show the country and the world that equality is not something that you beg for it is something that is deserved and demanded. Here in Maryland we are proving that Arizona and Georgia are wrong; our communities are hardworking, intelligent, and that deserve and demand equality and justice.

We WON! Maryland indeed became the 10th state to pass an in-state tuition law and send a clear message across the nation that we embrace equality for our immigrant families and their children.

It was a hard fight that lasted over 10 years!

Our victory was described by political analysts and journalists as an amazing combination and balance of legislative strategy and grassroots organizing (first time students had such a visible presence and involvement which directly affected legislators).

Undocumented students from across Maryland took the risk and spoke about their stories and became protagonists of their own struggle!

Through this process students not only empowered themselves, but also politically transformed themselves into a strong united voice. This gives them the chance to begin identifying other areas in their lives they wanted to change; like fighting “Secure Communities” which in our state, under the guise of gang prevention is targeting our youth.

Unfortunately, the fight for just laws are never easy, and it has now been made harder through the launching of a referendum initiative lead by some of the most hateful, racist, extremist anti-immigrant (right wing) groups, and legislative leaders of Maryland residents. They are attempting to undermine the democratic legislative process that rightfully expressed the will of our citizens by bringing the law to a ballot vote. It is sad to say that the Maryland Board of Elections recently certified the necessary signatures to move the Maryland DREAM Act ever closer to a ballot.

Thursday, June 30th marked the beginning of our efforts to launch a massive education campaign to dispel the lies and misinformation being spread about the MD DREAM Act.

We are increasing our media communication and our voter registration so we can continue to defend and fight for our students and our community.

I’m excited about new and creative ways we can educate our communities and Maryland’s registered voters about this issue (street theaters, youth PSA’s, etc). I’m excited to see how we make connections between the varieties of issues arising in our state; I’m excited to see students bridging the gap on the immigrants’ rights movement and collectively fight for human rights under a broad umbrella and not as a single issue. I’m excited to witness the breaking of chains of guilt, fear, and shame attached to one’s immigration status that weigh students down and discourage them from reaching their potential.

In summary I’m looking forward to taking it to the streets!

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Building a “Multi-” Movement

-Kentucky Jobs with Justice

Where is the fight for migrant justice in your state?

The fight in Kentucky includes building a movement that is multiethnic, multigenerational, multilingual, multiracial and fully inclusive of the broad spectrum of immigrants in Kentucky.  It is a fight that calls us to bring together the traditional civil rights movements and the new wave of social justice activism that is mutually respectful and beneficial.  Geographically and geopolitically, the fight for migrant justice in our state has to reach across political boundaries, it has to reach across the rural and urban expanse and it has to reach across mountains and rivers.  Hopefully, we can connect to groups in the southeast that are doing some good work around bridging the urban/rural divide.

What are the factors that have lead to the situation you are in your state?

In Kentucky, some of the factors that have gotten us to the point of being much more intentional in our work around comprehensive and progressive immigration reform are the changing demographics in our state, the legislative attacks on immigrants and the economic impact of the migrant population.  Louisville, Kentucky has been a federal destination city for immigrants and refugees for nearly 40 years.  With both the 2000 and 2010 Census, our entire state has seen a growth (in some places more than 100%) in immigrant populations in our state which means that there is a visible change in the political and social fabric of Kentucky.

And like many states in the South, Kentucky succumbed to the growing tide of legislative attacks against immigrants by introducing an Arizona copycat bill during our general assembly in January.  The bill passed the Senate, but because we responded quickly and have a strong history of community organizing in some of our larger cities, we were able to defeat the legislation in our house of representatives.  We defeated the bill because we were able to highlight the economic impact from the fiscal note to the fact that many of the employees in our horse industry are migrants – an industry that would crumble if we were not able to host the Kentucky Derby.

What are the next steps for organizing in your state for migrant rights?

Our next steps include continuing to build a strong state network that is ready to halt attempts to legislate hate against immigrants when our general assembly reconvenes in January 2012, supporting the Kentucky DREAM Coalition and being in solidarity with other states in the southeast so that the organizing moves beyond our state borders and becomes a coordinated and strategic regional fight.

Besides creating a toolkit on building strong statewide immigration movements, we are partnering with SEIRN to support direct action in our region as it relates to immigrant rights, being more intentional in engaging with young people in this work, lifting up the work of the “People, Not Profiles” campaign to push back against Secure Communities (Lexington has already signed an agreement) and we are researching and assessing curriculum of “Freedom Institute” models already in place in KY to use as a way to develop the next generation of social justice activists.

We are helping to get the word out about the candlelight vigils in Alabama to oppose HB56 and we are sending a crew to Georgia to fight back against HB87.  At Kentucky Jobs with Justice we believe in being there for someone else’s fight as well as our own – it’s about solidarity.

What strategies and tactics are you excited by and seeing success with?

It is exciting to see traditional civil rights groups in Alabama speaking with such strength in opposition to that states Arizona copycat.  We are excited that the South East Immigrant Rights Network is rebuilding and reengaging groups in the region.  And we are moved by the undocumented youth across the country who are undocumented and unafraid and who are leading their own efforts to pass the DREAM Act.

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Awakened and Activated

- Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights

What are the factors that have lead to the situation you are in your state?

The newest phase of the immigrant community began arriving in 1996 when the boosters of the Olympics sent a call out for workers to complete construction of all the facilities.  Word was passed along that those who arrived to build would have no worries about immigration enforcement during the construction period. Thousands arrived and after the Olympics were completed moved into agriculture, textile, poultry, and residential construction industries.

However in 2001, the attack on the twin towers transformed the image of immigrants into a national threat once again.  With that as a pretext we began witnessing a new right-wing anti-immigrant movement that quickly moved legislation. In 2002, one couldn’t get a driver’s license without a social security number any more. But Georgia’s immigrant history can be divided before and after 2006 when SB 529 and other bills passed barring students from in-state tuition, introducing e-verify, ending access to English language programs for the undocumented and more.

Yet that same year, the national immigration debate gave new life to the immigrant rights movement that we see today.

What are the next steps for organizing in your state for migrant rights? What strategies and tactics are you excited by and seeing success with?

The passage of HB 87 has created a window where every day people are awakened and activated.  Therefore reinforcing base-level organizing so that the comites populares are self-sufficient with consciousness, skills, and strategy is the highest priority.  25,000 people attended the July 2^nd march in downtown Atlanta from all over Georgia and the region.  We are running community leadership skills to support those people in continuing the work in their own neighborhoods and becoming their own leaders.

We will continue mobilizing and creating public demonstrations of our strength and our vision for an inclusive Georgia instead of one that criminalizes.

Finally, we’re organizing the business community into “buyspots” or tiendas del pueblo that pledge to visibly oppose HB 87, refuse to donate to those who voted for it, and pledge to support the movement.  More than 200 of those stores closed on our Day Without Immigrants the first day HB 87 went into effect.

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The Politics of Coming Out

Where is the fight for migrant justice in your state?

We are also focusing on local legislation that can help improve the lives of immigrant communities. The IL Dream Act, for example, passed both houses and is to be signed by the Governor at the end of July. The bill makes institutional changes that open up opportunities for undocumented students in the state, but it will also be important to watch how the legislation is enacted. Issues to watch will include whether undocumented students are included in the ‘Dream Commission’, and some of the specific qualifications for who gets access to the resources this bill provides.

Additionally, we know that many of our peers and our family members continue to be deported. At a national level undocumented youth are well organized, and have been able to pressure the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into deferring dozens of deportation cases through public campaigns. But just last week my sister was talking about visiting a young person in deportation proceedings, who having a criminal background had little chance of a pardon from an immigration judge, and whose case would have been hard to fight publicly. Even after the IL governor Patt Quinn has refused to collaborate with Secure Communities programs, our work in the immigrant community tells us that undocumented families, workers, and students are still finding their way to the deportation lists. Every time we win the case of an undocumented young person, our community knows that there are hundreds of others being deported and criminalized. So we continue to organize small, individual campaigns with limited resources (most of us are volunteers and undocumented), while advocating for a repeal of Secure Communities and an end to deportations by the Obama administration.

What are the factors that have lead to the situation you are in in your state?

The lack of immigrant rights legislation at a federal level has led local communities and legislators attempting to address the issue through policy and mobilization. In Illinois, specifically Chicago, we are approaching this with a long history of immigrant rights activism, both at the grassroots and at the grass-tops. In experience, Illinois began to distinguish itself from the rest of the country in 2006, when we held one of the first mass immigrant rights marches on March 10th. The work that IYJL has done over the last year and a half, from organizing the “National Coming Out of the Shadows” to our participation in various civil disobediences, stands on the shoulders this kind of local and national social justice organizing.

A bit more recently we have also been good at creating alliances across movements. Last year when the national movement was split between supporting Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) and the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act we were able to work with groups on both sides of the issues towards a common goal (for the most part). Today we continue this collaboration, most recently focusing this strength in addressing secure communities and the IL Dream Act. Another important example has been the work done by LGBTQ organizations, which have attempted to address issues of queer immigration at least since 2006. Although there is a lot of work to be done against homophobia and xenophobia in the immigrant and LGBTQ communities respectively we continue to see strong, formal alliances between the groups, and projects that are attempting to address the issue, where none existed before.

Lastly, undocumented youth all over the country have shown amazing strength, intelligence and conviction in the fight for immigrant rights, but I wanted to give a special shout out to those in Illinois. Over the last two years we have organized at least 4 public “Coming Out of the Shadows” rallies in the city and suburbs, where 8-10 young people tell their stories at each event. This year states like Georgia, Indiana, and Oregon are having their first ‘coming out’ events, some modeled after the work we have done here, and others escalating into civil disobedience. On this point, it is worth mentioning that in the last year 11 undocumented youth from Illinois have participated actions of civil disobedience in Arizona, Washington D.C., and Georgia. I think we get bragging rights for the state with the most undocumented youth who have gotten arrested for immigrant rights.

What are the next steps for organizing in your state for migrant rights? What strategies and tactics are you excited by and seeing success with?

I believe that in order for social change to happen we need to have a multiplicity of tactics, all supporting each other, but I want to say a few words about the strategy of ‘coming out’. To ‘come out of the shadows’ has come to mean an organized and targeted strategy of telling our stories as undocumented people and allies, to advance the fight for immigrant rights. Ever since that Spring in 2010 we have attempted to push the boundaries of what it means to belong in the Untied States, and to call this country our home – as a juxtaposition to the way the government criminalizes us and our families. The arrests and civil disobediences are part of that, but it is important to say that ‘coming out’ also has a powerful personal effect (Coming Out: A How To Guide). For me being able to say that I’m undocumented out loud, and being able to chose the risks that I take in regards to my life and my status, has been an incredibly empowering experience. Since I came out, I have seen hundreds of other young people find their voice, and begin to come to terms with their experience. It is important to say that it is a risky tactic to take on, and one that only undocumented people can chose for themselves- informed, supported, and organized, but with no pressure from others either way. And for me the best chance we have to fight for our rights as immigrant youth is when we are out, and are able to say that we are undocumented, unafraid, and unapologetic about the pursuit of our rights.

During the 2011 Left Forum, organizers from the Excluded Workers congress came together for a dialogue with scholars who study worker organizing and social movements for a big-picture dialogue about historical exclusions, contemporary political-economic transitions and long-term vision.  Organizing Upgrade has been publishing the notes from their  stimulating dialogue in several sections, beginning with a piece on historical exclusions in April and a piece on the role of policy struggles in our last issue.  This final section captures a discussion between the panelists about the relationship between the Excluded Workers Congress and the traditional labor movement.

Panel Participants:

Saket Soni is the Director of the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice which is a part of the Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity.

Erica Smiley works with Jobs with Justice which is a national network of community-labor coalitions based around the country. Smiley is the field organizer for the Southern region where she mobilizes workers from the Southern “right to work for less” sectors.

Premilla Nadasen is a writer and a historian who teaches at Queens College. She writes about social policy, race and organizing. She is also an activist and a supporter of the work of the Domestic Workers United and the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

Frances Fox Piven teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has written a great deal about social movements from the bottom, including movements of welfare recipients and low-wage workers. She has also worked with many grassroots social movements.

Linda Oalican is an long-time organizer with Damayan Migrant Workers Association in New York City which is affiliated with the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

Harmony Goldberg was the moderator of this panel.  She is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center.  She is a long-time movement educator, and she is one of the editors at Organizing Upgrade.

What is the relationship between the Excluded Workers Congress and the traditional labor movement?  What do you think about community-labor alliances, given the contradictions and challenges of the labor movement?

Saket: The community-labor piece is very interesting.  As Smiley said, after we founded the Excluded Workers Congress in Detroit, we had our first meeting in the building of the AFL-CIO. That came out of years and years of building of relationships within each sector that scaffolded up to a moment when we could have this kind of multi-sectored conversation.  To give some examples of that scaffolding, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance is part of the New York City CLC (the Central Labor Council), and the National Day Laborers Organizing Network has had a long-standing partnership with the AFL-CIO.  The National Guest-workers Alliance is about to start a signed partnership agreement, as well, as are a number of other EWC alliances. I think it’s extremely important for there to be intentional work to build deeper relationships with the labor movement.

Our experience is that there have been two things that have been very helpful. First, we need to directly confront the real or perceived contradictions between our constituencies and the traditional labor movement. When we look at the guest-workers question, there is theoretically a contradiction with the unions. But, in reality, when the lives and struggles of workers are at stake, everybody will come together to support the workers. As much as people may have different theoretical positions, when workers go on strike, everyone stands behind them. We’ve found that courageous workers can play an incredible and inspiring role in not only standing up for their workplace rights but also in building a broad coalition behind them. For example, in Tennessee, the President of the State Labor Federation has now become an incredible ally of guest-workers.  We have been organizing guest workers in Mississippi and Texas over the past three years, and they are now deeply allied with the unions of metal trades workers. It is excluded workers themselves who play the most important role in building an alliance with labor. That alliance-building can’t just be thought of as the role of staff. It has to be workers who challenge the traditional labor movement. The workers themselves can not only inspire the labor movement; they can encourage the labor movement to recall the most noble parts of its own history.

The second factor that has been extremely important has been the presence of Jobs with Justice.  It has been really important to have a permanent labor-community coalition that survives beyond single campaigns, that serves as a permanent part of the progressive infrastructure. It was Jobs with Justice that helped us to build relationships with the building trades unions and the State Labor Federation in Tennessee.  It was Jobs with Justice that helped us build with the national AFL-CIO on guest-worker issues.

To sum up, it always comes back to how excluded workers can do this kind of intentional alliance-building work.  It is not enough for our sectors of excluded workers to just organize ourselves. We also have to organize the rest of the labor movement. And the two ingredients that have been important in building those community-labor alliances have been workers’ leadership and the existence of a progressive organization that plays a bridge role between our sectors and the labor movement.

Premilla: I think that there has been an artificial dichotomy between community organizing and labor organizing, a division in how we think about those two arenas of work. But I think that what we’ve seen over the past twenty years is how these two areas of work are connected.  The model of the “workers center” as opposed to a “labor union” based in a certain occupation or a certain industrial sector is one of the best examples of that. Workers centers are organizing centers that are based in a community; they generally aren’t based in a job site. For example, if we look at domestic workers’ organizing here in New York City, the origins of Domestic Workers United was actually in a number of different neighborhood-based and ethnically-based organizations: Pilipino organizations, South Asian organizations and so on. Many of these organizations were rooted in ethnic communities. I think it’s important to recognize that and to reflect on how that impacts the way in which we think about labor organizing. Labor organizing can’t just be about the job site.  It needs to be about people’s larger lives and their connections to their communities.

Linda: I want to clarify what Premilla was talking about in terms of the origins of DWU.  DWU was founded by an Asian workers organization and a South Asian workers organization – CAAAV and Andolan – but then it became its own separate organization. There is also a domestic workers coalition in New York, called the Domestic Workers Justice Coalition.  There are different ethnic community groups in that coalition.  There’s Damayan, which organizes Pilipino workers. And Andolan and Adhikar, organizing South Asian workers. And the biggest group in the coalition was Domestic Worker United, which organizes Caribbean and Latina domestic workers.  That coalition helped to put together the original Bill of Rights and to build the campaign for its victory. Domestic Workers United was the biggest force in the campaign, but it was a coalition that passed the Bill of Rights. We needed that kind of coalition to win that kind of victory. One thing that came out of that campaign was the building of a movement, a united front. It was not just the domestic workers who won that victory.  We also relied on support from religious leaders, students and organized labor.

Frances: I’m worried about all these references to the relationship between the Excluded Workers and the labor movement and the AFL-CIO.  I want to see where that ends up when push comes to shove. The labor movement is very defensive right now.  They are very worried, and they would like to claim as many supporters as possible.  But that doesn’t mean that they are going to invest very much of their capital in supporting those supporters’ demands. So my question is: How are you planning to make the issues of excluded workers part of the fight-back that the unions are now organizing?  How are you going to make excluded workers front-and-center in the fight-back rather than just allowing the unions to use your support to enlarge their public image?

Linda: There is so much in what Frances just said.  We, domestic workers, have been marginalized.  And we will not consent to be used again, for whatever purpose. We believe in unity. That’s why we’re part of the Excluded Workers Congress.  But unity needs to be based on solid ground.  The workers centers and grassroots organizations have a distinct history and struggle. We have embraced the struggles of displaced workers from poor countries who have come here. There are many components of our struggle that aren’t addressed by the labor movement, like how our lives here have impacted our families who are left back home. So while we stand for the unity of the working class – uniting workers centers and grassroots organizations to the organized labor – we also need to be clear about the vision for the unity that we are trying to build. We can see that organized labor has many problems right now, and it will really help them if community organizations and excluded workers organizations could unite with them and show numbers to support the struggle and vice versa. But I hope that the vision for this collaboration should be clear and strategic.  Will it embrace our struggle? It should not only embrace the issues of the white working class in America. It should embrace the struggle of women and migrant workers. And without that vision, I don’t know about the long-term potential for the relationship. Are we talking about tactical relationships or long-term relationships?  Because I believe that this relationship has to be long-term and that our strategy and vision has to be clear.

Smiley: Building off of what Linda just said, I think that this is a real healthy tension that the Excluded Workers Congress is dealing with: getting clear about what our relationship should be with traditional labor unions and about the nature of the AFL-CIO as a federation. I think that we can’t approach that work as being “in solidarity” with the traditional labor movement or with the current fight to defend collective bargaining rights for public sector workers. It can’t be, “The Excluded Workers Congress supports your fight.” We shouldn’t approach it like it’s a separate fight, and we’re out on someone else’s picket line. We’re in solidarity with that fight-back because it is our fight, too. We came together to expand the human right to organize. It just so happens that the political climate right now is forcing many of our brothers and sisters in traditional labor unions to be in that fight, too. They’re beginning to see their own contradictions. And if they don’t see them, we’re there to help them see.

Members of the Excluded Workers Congress were in Indiana. I was there, and early on it was mostly white building trades folks who were out there. I had to try to mobilize some of the excluded workers as well as Black and Brown service sector workers and public sector workers to mix it up a little bit. The point is that, if we’re not there, then we’re going to lose.

The historical challenges that we have with traditional labor are real.  There’s a lot of backstabbing. There’s a lot of self-interest and opportunism, and we can’t be naïve about that.  But, at the same time, it’s not an excuse for us to not try to continue to build unity and unify the working class overall. If we take that history as an excuse, then we are going to continue to be weak and marginal.  We have to continue to skirt the line of this very tense partnership. We have to figure out when it’s a tactical partnership and when it’s an opportunity to build long-term unity. That’s an important contradiction that we continue to struggle with.

Saket: A lot of excellent points have been raised. This has been a very stimulating discussion.  I want to close by talking about: at what level does change happen?  It won’t happen first here and then there and then there. I don’t think there is a clear roadmap.  It’s all going to happen simultaneously.  But, at the end of the day, if there isn’t deep transformation between workers in the same industries or in the same places geographically or in the same sectors of society, then there can’t be institutional transformation.  Let me give you an example. We are building a chapter of Jobs with Justice in New Orleans, and we had a really good steering committee meeting a couple of weeks ago. There was a delegate from the Day Laborers Congress there, and there were a bunch of other people, including people from the traditional labor movement. And a gentleman walked into the room who was the Vice-President of the New Orleans Transit Workers Union, which has been a very militant all-black trade union, especially after Katrina. Now this gentleman was the vice president of the Transit Workers Union, an important position. But no one around the table knew him, except for the day laborer delegate who knew him because he rides his bus every morning. And our day laborer delegate said, “Oh I know you. You’re my bus driver.” And the bus driver said, “Yeah. And I’m also the vice president of the Transit Workers Union.” And it opened up the meeting very beautifully.  Because that’s really the level at which we need to build coalition.  What we’re talking about is building coalitions between working people themselves. That is the basic foundation on which we can rebuild the labor movement and the broader progressive movement in this country.

During the 2011 Left Forum, organizers from the Excluded Workers congress came together for a dialogue with scholars who study workers organizing and social movements for a big-picture dialogue about historical exclusions, contemporary political-economic transitions and long-term vision.  Organizing Upgrade has been publishing the notes from their  stimulating dialogue in several sections, beginning with a piece on historical exclusions in our last issue.  This month’s section captures a provocative exchange between the panelists about the importance and the limitations of policy reforms and “symbolic victories” in the long-term process of building worker power and winning social transformation.

Panel Participants:

Saket Soni is the Director of the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice which is a part of the Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity.

Erica Smiley works with Jobs with Justice which is a national network of community-labor coalitions based around the country. Smiley is the field organizer for the Southern region where she mobilizes workers from the Southern “right to work for less” sectors.

Premilla Nadasen is a writer and a historian who teaches at Queens College. She writes about social policy, race and organizing. She is also an activist and a supporter of the work of the Domestic Workers United and the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

Frances Fox Piven teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has written a great deal about social movements from the bottom, including movements of welfare recipients and low-wage workers. She has also worked with many grassroots social movements.

Linda Oalican is an long-time organizer with Damayan Migrant Workers Association in New York City which is affiliated with the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

Harmony Goldberg was the moderator of this panel.  She is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center.  She is a long-time movement educator, and she is one of the editors at Organizing Upgrade.

Harmony: Following up on our exploration of historical exclusions, we are now going to explore the impact of neoliberal globalization on worker exclusions. Labor laws were constructed in the 1930s and 1940s to deal with the dynamics of massive industrial production. In this period, workplaces were large and centralized, and workers could exercise power against their bosses through their numbers and their ability to halt production. Labor law was developed to help capital negotiate that reality of workers power, to make sure that workers would not- in fact – continue to disrupt production.  That is the framework in which collective bargaining as we know it was developed.  Today, workplaces do not follow this industrial form. We have many decentralized workplaces with much lower worker-to-employer ratios. Work is often flexible and part-time, as Linda described. The old labor laws largely protected citizens, and many of the people in the new excluded workforces are not citizens or they are citizens who have been stripped of citizenship rights due to incarceration.  Does anyone want to share reflections on the impacts of neoliberalism and globalization on the exclusions of these sectors of workers?  How has neoliberal globalization changed the political context and created new exclusions?

Linda: We have been speaking about the history of worker exclusions, exclusions of domestic workers, farmworkers, restaurant workers and others who were not included in the so-called “protections” of U.S. labor laws.  I am going to trace how workers like me, who came from poor countries, were affected by globalization and neoliberalization.  Through globalization and neoliberalization, that began in the1980s, capitalism was intensifying the plunder of poor economies like the Philippines. This has caused widespread poverty, unemployment and cuts to basic human services. These are the underlying issues that are fueling the uprisings and resistance throughout South Asia and the Middle East. The Philippines has seen mass uprisings on the scale of Egypt twice. The first was “People Power” in 1986 when we toppled the late-dictator Marcos, and the second was “People Power 2” in 2001.  And yet, today, 64 – 82% of our 40 million workforce are either unemployed or underemployed. Seventy million of our populations are living under two dollars a day.  In search a livelihood, over ten percent of our people – 4,300 every day – leave the country just to send our children to school. So, by deepening poverty and unemployment, neoliberalization has created a pool of cheap surplus labor globally. So – while the U.S. and TNCs [trans-national corporations] are outsourcing living-wage and middle class jobs – they are pushing cheap surplus labor in the global South to fill jobs in the North. And these jobs are mostly service sector jobs, like domestic workers, where workers suffer exclusions from equal protections.  While domestic workers’ exclusions has a historic link to slavery – currently the U.S has put in the forefront and instituted immigrations regulations to continue the subjugation of domestic workers and other excluded workers. Despite my college education and 14 years in community development work in the Philippines, I could not get a job other than domestic work when I came here. Many Pilipino domestic workers in the United States are professionals.  They are nurses, teachers and others. But our education and our professional training in not accredited here, and that denies us access to jobs other than domestic work.  At the federal level and in most states, we are excluded from major labor laws.  In New York – despite the passage of the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights and our inclusion in NY human rights law – we are still denied the right to organize and other fundamental rights and protection, including notice of termination and severance pay. The U.S. government still refuses to acknowledge the importance of domestic work to society,  continuing to deny us work authorizations and work visas. Why? Because by keeping us undocumented and stripped of basic workers rights, we are not able to access unemployment insurance, Medicare and Social Security. Since the 1980s, neoliberalization has pushed for the liberalization of labor. In the US, labor liberalization has worsened the working conditions of domestic workers. It has promoted the lack of employment contracts and a lack of regulations for our work. Thus, in the privacy of the home, our employers can decide whatever she wants, despite agreed-upon work hours and working conditions. She may even decide when we can eat our meals or when we can go to church or the doctor, even though she doesn’t foot our medical bills.  In our workplace, the worker has no control, and – if you do assert your common sense, rights and dignity as a worker – we run the risk of losing our jobs or of being deported if we are undocumented. Domestic workers are also exploited through contingent employment; many of us are forced to let go of our full-time jobs and to accept part-time jobs. We are told to be “flexible,” which sometimes means working for different hours on different days or being on call on our days off or working for the friends or family members of our employers with no extra pay. Neoliberalization has continued to promote the employers’ privileges to hire and fire workers at will. We are not protected; we don’t get notice of termination and no severance pay. For live-in workers, this means that if we lose our jobs we also lose our housing.  As Ed Ott, a labor organizer, has said, we – the excluded workers – are now at the intersection of hope and disaster.  We are experiencing capital’s most vicious attacks and only we, the workers, together with our allies have the power to decide which way to go: to march towards further disaster or to march towards hope.

Harmony: We have just heard more about how the political-economic context is different today.  Over the past several decades, workers and organizers been innovating new strategies to deal with this changed context. Much of this innovation has been done by the independent workers movement, by the workers centers.  The Excluded Workers Congress represents the “coming of age” of that independent workers movement.  That is the big-picture significance of the Excluded Workers Congress: it is a new workers movement for a new economy.  What do you all see as the significance of the work of the Excluded Workers Congress, particularly given the current political climate and the recent attack on public sector workers?

Premilla: One thing to keep in mind is that there is a long history of worker organizing that goes beyond industrial workers. In the 1930s, there were domestic worker organizations that organized and lobbied to have domestic workers included in the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act. In the 1960s, there were farm workers who organized to have inclusion into minimum wage laws and other labor protections. So there’s a very long history of even “excluded” workers organizing and mobilizing to have an impact on labor law. I think the landscape is very different now, and I think that part of the reason why the landscape is so different is because of the way in which the industrial sector has shrunk in the U.S. today. Manufacturing workers are about ten percent of all workers in this country, which is a very small proportion.  So when we talk about the future of the labor movement, we have to talk about these contingent sectors. We have think about people who are part-time workers, people who are not citizens, people who are in the service sectors and subcontracted workers (who are often in manufacturing as well). So I think that part of what is exciting about the Excluded Workers Congress is the way in which they are beginning to define the issue of “labor rights” outside of even particular employment, the way in which we can think of labor rights not in terms of having a job with a particular employer or in terms of being a citizen. They are saying that we can think about labor rights apart from citizenship, apart from national origin, apart from the particular sector of employment you’re working in.

Frances: I think we have still not addressed the fundamental question of worker power, and the power of these workers specifically. who is it that they have power against? This is a question we can answer for the workers who were not excluded from the labor protections of the 1930s, for industrial workers. They did not – in fact – win those protections from the United States government because they lobbied Congress. They won those protections because they had become a force in the relations of production. That’s where they were organizing, and that’s where they were causing a lot of trouble – with walkouts and expressions of defiance. Employers were trying to reassert their regulation of the workplace, and they did it – in part – by granting collective bargaining rights and ultimately by granting the sorts of protections that we see in the National Labor Relations Act and workplace standards legislation.  Domestic Workers United won a great symbolic victory in the New York State Legislature, but I think that – if we are brutally honest – we will see that this was a symbolic victory. Tens of thousands of domestic workers dispersed in private homes in relations with one or maybe two private employers are going to have enormous difficulty in implementing the rights espoused in the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. However, domestic workers do have a kind of latent power, more power than domestic workers had in the 1930s.  If they don’t come to work, not only do they discomfort many middle class housewives. They would keep home a major section of the workforce. They now have economic strike power on Madison Avenue, on Wall Street, in the banks. That’s because these upper middle class women now perform such important economic roles, and they can’t perform them if they don’t have these domestic workers. So until domestic workers and other categories of excluded workers identify the leverage that they have in the workplace, I’m a little bit skeptical of government proclamation or Bills of Rights yielding significant power to these workers.

Linda: I would agree that the victory for the New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights is largely symbolic because the latent power of domestic workers in private homes has to be discovered by the worker, individually and collectively. And that takes a lot of work. You have to tackle her culture, her internalized oppression, patriarchy, racism, classism. These forces are all at work in our workplaces. Workers feel isolated unless they are politicized.  Unless a worker has an awareness of what is going on with her and of how she got in that condition, she won’t be able to fight for herself. However, with the growth of grassroots organizations like DWU and Damayan and the National Domestic Workers Alliance, we – in the grassroots – see a transformation. Fearful and ashamed workers are now more open, more assertive and more articulate.  So we’re hopeful that – one day – that kind of awareness and that kind of power could happen.  And I think that the material conditions and the attacks on organized labor will hasten that process.

Saket: There is a question about the role of policy and policy victories in an organizing trajectory that we can talk about creatively.   Change is not necessarily sequential; It happens through a kind of simultaneity. Many of us don’t ultimately aspire to change policy, and we don’t build power to change policy. Policy is not the end-all and be-all.  But we do aspire to win policy that can be a pathway to organizing. If it helps us, then we’ll build it.  Policy change is not the path to power, but it is a helpful in creative in creating conditions for organizing. And if we think of it like that, then we can really use it. The Trafficking Victims Protections Act is a wonderful policy that could not stop 110,000 guest workers from being trafficked into the country, and it doesn’t stop employers from holding them in labor camps. Part of what we’ve seen from the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights and other similar policy fights is that you build up to win some policy and – simultaneously – you are doing a whole lot of organizing and leadership development and coalition -building. Hopefully that policy victory can then be used to recruit many, many other workers. Secondly, it gives some leverage when you’re in a dispute with an employer.  I think it’s going to take a number of phases to get to the kind of power that you’re talking about, Dr. Piven. But I think that you are absolutely right in your analysis.  Your book, Poor Peoples Movements, talks about how poverty relief programs were used as a deterrent into organizing is interesting for us. Your analysis of those experiences challenges organizers to think about how to have policy handles that are in the service of a much broader fight. And the debates and contradictions that you chronicle in that book are- in some cases – very much parallel to the challenges in organizing workers today. There is a question that you raised about the uses of proactive policy measures as a vehicle for building power. It is worth getting into that a little more in our organizing across all of our sectors. On the one hand, we are talking about an immediate policy agenda as the Excluded Workers Congress. We’ve laid it out; we’re committed to it across the board. On the other hand, we’re also talking about a much longer-term process of winning a new framework for collective bargaining. We’re not trying to be “included” in labor law in the sense of being included in the NLRA as it exists now.  In fact, we would run miles in the other direction if that was the proposal. Our idea is – instead – to win inclusion in society and to define inclusion much more broadly than just inclusion in present labor law. But it is good to be pushed to think it through: what kinds of policy fights can move us forward on that path?  One possible example of that sort of campaign is the POWER Act, legislation that we wrote last year that we’re trying to build a campaign around. POWER stands for Protect Our Workers from Exploitation and Retaliation, and it would give immigration relief to undocumented workers who are engaged in labor disputes. The idea is to give temporary visa status to undocumented workers if we could show retaliation around labor disputes or show a well-founded fear of retaliation. Those visas would last throughout the course of the labor dispute, and they could lead to citizenship eventually. This is an example of a policy that is not – in itself – the end result, but which would encourage millions of workers in workplaces across the country to organize.  At some point, there would be such a cascade of demand for visas, that it would flood the immigration authorities.  That scale of organizing and that flood of demand would lead to much broader public education about the need for new policies that expand the right organize and that expand immigration law.

Smiley: I want to thank Professor Piven for being so provocative. It makes all of us sit with the important questions that you are raising.  It gives us a way to struggle through this question about our power. In building the Excluded Workers Congress, we didn’t build something to be separate from the traditional labor movement. Many of the networks that are in the Excluded Workers Congress have explicit partnership with the AFL-CIO and – in some instances – with specific trade unions around organizing. We don’t want to disappear into those unions or into the AFL-CIO.  We’re still independent from them, but we also do want to leverage the power traditional trade unions still have and try to use that power to help to expand the right to organize. If we’re going to win, we need to be united with workers from all of these different sectors, and they have to see our fight as their fight and vice versa. What’s happening in the Midwest right now, what’s been happening in the South for a long time and what’s happening around the country in terms of this attack on workers’ right to organize is an opportunity for us to bring excluded workers together with traditional labor and unemployed workers in order to build this broader framework toward the right to organize for dignity.

Piven: I think the historical pattern is that, when marginalized groups gain formal inclusion in a larger collectivity, they don’t necessarily gain standing in that collectivity and they don’t necessarily gain a fair share of the benefits that are won by that collectivity. So that’s something to be worried about.  I also wanted to comment on the interesting back-and-forth because I think that we can generalize about the problem that we are discussing. And I think that generalization is something like this: We try to mobilize grassroots power in different ways. And we try to mobilize the collective power of ordinary people.  And maybe sometimes we’re successful. When we are, institutional elites will respond. When they respond, their responses will be multi-faceted. It will have two or three sides. They will respond to our demands, to some extent. How much of an extent depends on how legitimate our collective action is.  But coupled with that response, there will be responses that are intended to limit our capacity for collective action in the future. They do this by reorganizing our collectivity, by putting some people in another category. You can’t control those responses. You can’t say, “No. I want the Bill to say this or that.” You won’t be able to carry your constituency with that. But at least we can understand it. I think we have to live with the fact that – when we win – the terms of winning may weaken our capacity for action in the future. That’s usually what they are really trying to do.

Premilla: I think that is a really important thing to think about and a really important issue. I think that if you look back at the National Labor Relations Act that gave workers the right to bargain collectively, what it did was that it created a union structure and a union bureaucracy that – in many ways – quashed worker militancy. In the 1940s, it wasn’t employers that were shutting down the wildcat strikes that were taking place in various industries. It was the unions. So, in that regard, I think you are absolutely right. There are ways in which the reforms won through the NLRA actually led to a decline in worker militancy. Now, I think that the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights is an important symbolic victory. Is it going to fundamentally transform the lives of domestic workers in New York State? I’m not so sure about that, But I do think that symbolism is also important in terms of the movement itself. That victory put the domestic workers rights movement in New York State on the map. People around the country knew about it, heard about what domestic workers were doing in this country and it was in the wake of that victory that we saw the formation of the Excluded Workers Congress. So I think that, in many ways, that victory was important symbolically for the movement because it really emboldened the organizers and the workers to continue in their struggle.

Smiley: I think that these are all really good points and really healthy tensions for us to sit with as we do this work. I t is certainly not a clear linear path with clear methods and goals. It’s a very zig-zaggy thing, a “two steps forward, two steps back” kind of thing. We want to ask our academic friends is, “Do you have specific recommendations for how not to proceed, given these contradictions that you have pointed out and these tensions that we have to deal with?

Piven: I don’t think there is a general or categorical answer. I think that we’d have to have lists rather than categorical answers, but here is an answer that I think is based on scores and scores of experiences with the co-optation of insurgent groups.  Groups are not co-opted because they win material benefits.  That just doesn’t make sense.  We say it but it doesn’t make sense. Because if they win one benefit, like if they win a dollar-an-hour raise, why wouldn’t they then demand a two-dollar-an-hour raise. They would. As I said before, it’s the political conditions that go along with material benefits that have to be watched. Some of those condition have to do with the illusion of power and the illusion of being taken into consultative relations, into a committee of this and a committee of that.  And we know a lot about that. That’s not healthy for us. Other concessions have to do with taking the leadership of the organization and giving them some sort of formal relationship to the agency or to the employer. That’s not healthy for our movement either. If the leaders want to do that, they should quit as leaders. But of course they won’t be able to do that, because their entire use is in serving as a mediator. This, at least, we have learned a lot about through a couple of centuries of these kinds of strategies.

Premilla: I don’t know. I’m looking to the workers to answer that.  I do think that it’s a lot about a process of democratization.  And I mean that, not in the simple way that we understand democracy in terms of voting power, but the way in which people empower themselves. And I think that’s absolutely central to how we understand the long-term goal of social change.

Harmony: I want to give a real practical example, dealing with the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights example that we’ve been talking about so much. Sure, it was largely a symbolic victory. But it is only symbolic until we have the power to implement it and enforce it. And the only way to implement the Bill is through the large-scale organization of domestic workers. If DWU is out there making sure that every domestic worker knows their rights, then there is some basis of enforcement of these rights that does not just rely on the Department of Labor. Then enforcement could rely on the power of workers themselves. Domestic Workers United is now trying to do that, to see this moment of victory as an opening, rather than seeing it as a final victory. They aren’t saying, “We won. We’re done.” They are seeing the Bill as an entrée to reach a much broader cross-section of workers.  They are using it as an opportunity to build local bases of power in neighborhoods where domestic workers work and where domestic workers live, sort of an adapted version of union “locals.” DWU is now able to go to a large number of workers and say, “You have these rights. You have the ability to enforce these rights, and we’re here to back you up.”  That enforcement can be through legal clinics or – ideally – through workers enforcing their own rights through collective action. The Bill of Rights was not an end in itself.  It was – in many ways – a symbolic victory, but the point is to leverage it for organizing and to use it to move the longer-term process of building power forward.

Everyday I wake up thinking about how to transform the intense suffering of young people that live in the margins into power. I work everyday to transform the systems that impact my life, the lives of the youth around me.  But I still question what elements in the movement transformed me from just another boy in Miami into a leader in a liberation movement. How did my participation in Students Working for Equal Rights (SWER) [a Florida statewide student immigrant rights organization] give me the strength and power to engage in the Trail of DREAMs, a 4 month walk from Miami to Washington DC highlighting the plight of undocumented youth in the US. How can we engage people in many levels in a way that edifies and empowers themselves and our movement? Those are the question that I try to answer with my actions, daily.

The Trail of DREAMs was the pinnacle of my life in the movement so far.  But there were a series of events that led to that moment, it is those smaller events that shaped me and gave me the courage to fight for justice, to wake up one day and lace up my sneakers and start my walk to DC, my walk for justice.  Revolutions begin in our individual hearts and minds. It’s that moment that you simply acknowledge your own humanity and assert your right to be seen as such that creates a spark that will lead to a fire that will soon consume your whole being.

I’ve grown up like many around the globe. As a young child, I had to endure extreme poverty and hardships in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil until one day my mother got sick and sent me to live in the U.S. with relatives. That was the first big transformation in my life. I was 14 years-old and living in the U.S. without my parents. It was not an easy adaption or assimilation process for me. I even remember that one day I put all of my clothes in a suitcase and asked to return to Brazil. My family talked me back into staying by telling me about the American Dream. This was definitely a foreign concept to me. I was not used to the American promise of a better life since I was so used to the social disparities in Brazil. The worst part about it is that I bought into the lie that catches so many new immigrants, people of color, and working class and poor people in this country.

In high school, I felt betrayed by my family because they had not told me the complete truth about the consequences of not having “legal” status in this country. I felt betrayed by Brazil, my motherland that gave my family no other choice but to leave instead of trying to realize our lives in the place we were born. I also felt rejected by the U.S., the country that I had to learn to love and admire. I used to feel like a foster child waiting to become a legitimate child of a home that I now resided in. This was the beginning of my journey as a new immigrant in the U.S. A boy full of frustrated dreams and completely powerless to our unjust immigration system.

As I got older I did not forget the promise of an American Dream. I found a way to go to Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus where I achieved academically and socially. But on one humid afternoon, a strange man with a funny hat came to my school. He met with a group of students to find out how we felt about the struggles of immigrant youth. He was the first person to ask me and the person to really listen to my response, it was mind blowing.

That man was the youth organizer for SWER, Jose Luis Marantes, and he told me something that changed my life forever. He said: “When service and advocacy don’t work we organize each other to build power.” That very moment marks the beginning of a new stage in my life. Soon after I was politicized and radicalized. I started to understand the power of working together with others in my community. In SWER, we marched together, we cried together, and built community with each other. If it wasn’t for this vehicle created by undocumented youth and fostered by the Florida Immigrant Coalition (FLIC) the Trail of DREAMs would have never happened. The four people that walked to our nations capital were found and developed as leaders in SWER.

In my opinion the Trail didn’t start on January 1, 2010 and end on May 1st, 2010. It started for me on August 2007 when I first got involved with organizing and it will only end the day I die. The Trail was a manifestation of the struggle of youth from all over the nation that were seeking to be seen as whole humans. It is a walk for justice and it will only end when I’m ready to eternally rest knowing that I have done absolutely everything I could to achieve a better world for future generations. The actual walk was only part of the story. Our personal development as leaders in this movement is way more inspiring to me. It’s the transformation that can only happen when organizations such as SWER are created to empower individuals to join together in collective action for power.

Sometimes people tell me about the historical significance of the Trail of DREAMs. I’m not completely sure if this specific action will make it to the history books but I do hope that somehow the determination of thousands of young people will be acknowledged in the future. Our walk triggered us, immigrant youth, to lose the fear of telling our stories. The walk began a process of liberation from the greatest bondage that undocumented immigrants face- fear. We walked spreading love even to those who hated us and opened the doors for others to do the same. The greatest part of this amazing journey is that when one finds her voice no one can ever take it away.

During the walk, I had the privilege to meet the most amazing people along the way. I’ll never forget the farm worker I met in a pecan farm in Georgia. He told me about the great joy he feels when he sees a pecan pie because his work makes someone’s life a little sweeter. Sometimes we asked for inspiration when truly it is all around us all the time. It is inspiring to see a single mother working two jobs to make ends meet and yet she finds time to kiss her children goodnight or the student that won’t give up on her dream even if it means that she’ll only take one college class per semester. The greatest inspiration in any movement is found in the people struggling through great obstacles and still managing to make it. They should be the focal point of our work and it’s their stories that should guide us. Those stories barely ever make it to the halls of Congress or mainstream media. They are our neighbors, classmates or family members. That’s why many times national organizations lose touch and seek compromises that would harm us as a community in the long run. I would push back on the direction the immigrant rights movement have taken in the last ten years and ask for funders to invest in our local base building organizations. It’s not fair that a youth group in Florida such as SWER has to struggle to buy butcher paper for our strategy meetings while national organizations have enough money to host conferences in pompous hotels. We will only have enough power to pass federal legislation when local organizations have a robust infrastructure to shift the power dynamics in each state around the US. One lesson that the progressive movement should have learned from the 2010 elections is that politics is done locally.

Throughout history each movement contributed to a narrative for justice around the world. The immigrant rights movement is not different. The immigrant rights movement comes from the worker’s right struggle. Our first strikes in the US were led by Eastern European immigrants and our most famous hero, Cesar Chavez, was an union organizer. At the bottom of the struggle for worker’s rights is a concept that challenges the dynamics of capitalism- people are not objects and they are more important than profit. The immigrant rights movement is also rooted on a fight against imperialism. When the Monroe Doctrine was first implemented and the US government deemed a whole continent as its backyard, countries such as Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Panama and the list goes on were pushed into bloody wars that destroyed their ability to prosper. Latin America and the Caribbean for centuries have been raped by the US but in the last few years the approached has become more subtle. Trade agreements have been one of the biggest push factors for immigration. Local farmers in Mexico can’t grow their corn and survive as their ancestors did due to NAFTA. People from South America and Central America are coming as a result of wars and bloody dictatorship financed by the US.

How does the US respond to its responsibility to Latin@s and Caribbean people? Immigrants are blamed for our own misfortune. The rhetoric simply condemns the victim for their oppression. According to politicians we are a drain to society and law breakers. We are “illegals”, “aliens”, “wetback”, “bean eaters”, etc. They portray us as less than human because we are the proof for their crimes against our motherland and the genocide that happened within the US borders. Many of us come from indigenous heritage or have African blood flowing in our veins. Our broad noises and black hair remind them of slavery and the killing of millions of indigenous people. When a brown woman takes her daughter across the desert looking for opportunities they find it offensive but when a European man with a law degree comes on a business visa they accept him with open arms.

Immigration laws are racist and homophobic. As the debate becomes more and more “racialized” on topics such as birth right citizenship and state laws that legalize racial profiling it becomes very clear why our opposition hates us so much. They want to legislate away our right to form families and soon our right to free movement. The purpose is to simply drive us even further into the margins and exclusion. This is the same experience that so many other communities face in our country. Racial profiling and fear of local law enforcement has been part of the African American experience for so many years. Family separation is part of the LGBTQ community’s struggle as well. The question is how do we unite under one “progressive movement”?  A movement that does not replicate the same systems of oppression we are trying so hard to fight against. The challenge is that many times the gay rights movement is very “white” and movements that seek liberation for people of color, including the immigrant rights movement, do not claim queer people of color. That’s how our movements get caught up in the same dynamics we find in the “outside world”.

We exclude people for the sake of dealing with one problem at a time when truly people’s identities are more complicated than that. For instance, I’m an undocumented immigrant from the global south who is totally in love with another man. Where do I fit in if our movements don’t acknowledge that my personal experience is different than most? I can’t be an immigrant one day and the next queer. I am who I am everyday and to ask for me to deny any part of my identity is just as monstrous as the attempts that the right has made to limit my humanity. This would be the first step towards a complete liberating process where people in our movement could truly be themselves without fear of exclusion. We have a long way to go but until we address this flaw it will be hard for us to connect with each other in a more meaningful way.

The struggle for the passage of the DREAM Act taught us a thing or two. DREAMers from around the country were ready to embrace the fight for the Repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and we were able to connect with folks in the queer movement as we pushed for equality together. We moved beyond the tensions and the blame games in order to create something new and beautiful. That was a small step but I do hope that our collaboration doesn’t end there.

2010 was a roller coaster year for the immigrant rights movement. We were played with in so many levels. First Senator Schummer from New York promised a Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) bill and his deadline kept being extended endlessly until it was clear that it was not going to happen. Then the Hispanic Caucus in Congress would not allow anyone to push for the DREAM Act as a stand-alone bill even though it was clear that CIR would not go anywhere. If it was not for the courage of undocumented youth to push the Democratic Party and the Hispanic Caucus a vote on the DREAM Act would not have ever happened. We found out that the Republican and Democratic parties were going to use the DREAM Act as a political football and we did not allow them to play with our lives. We protested, engaged in civil disobedience, told our stories on national outlets and claimed back the terms of the debate. The vote on the DREAM Act is a milestone in the immigrant rights movement. This is the first time that undocumented immigrants ran a national grassroots campaign vastly unfunded and passed legislation in one of the chambers of Congress. The DREAM Act movement has taught us to fight differently. Our messaging to the country has always focused on the benefits of having immigrant around. Undocumented youth changed this pattern and we created a way to speak to the American people about our humanity.  We have under estimated for several years the power of story telling and human connection. But now we know that our stories are powerful and our struggle is more alive than ever.

The DREAM Act movement is not perfect. We have made many mistakes along the way. We emphasized how assimilated we are with talk points about our English proficiency and the times we pledged allegiance to the flag in school at the expense of our parents. When truly our parents are the heroes who brought us here with the dream of a better for us. We allowed the media and politicians to talk about them as if they are criminals and we are innocent. During my first trip to Arizona after SB1070 was signed by Governor Brewer, a woman brought a Mexican flag to the rally. She waved her flag with pride as she chanted “si se puede!” Her Mexican heritage was being poured out each time she waved her flag. That woman knew that SB1070 was an attempt to erase such an important part of her identity. The question of assimilation often times come to the immigration debate as if liking tacos or fejoada is a sin. The immigrant heritage is beautiful and being bilingual is an asset. Think Tanks in DC might tell us otherwise but we can’t allow people to erase who we are.

Where do we go from here? The immigrant right movement should be ready to build resistance in our local communities. For many years, we have mistakenly pursued comprehensive immigration reform legislation in the federal level when we have not even truly built enough power to influence local and state politics. We are still struggling to hold the line in local cities that try to pass local anti-immigrant ordinances and now we are dealing with several states that are pursuing similar legislation to Arizona’s SB1070. The problem began when we looked for answers in national groups in Washington, DC instead of listening to the stories in our community. Our people have been talking about driver’s licenses, in-state tuition, police collaboration with Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE), and then legalization. We have been blinded by the promise of legalization without any consideration to our true power. National legislation is only won through a long fight and after years of work. We shouldn’t be trying to pass legislation that is inconsistent with the long-term interest of immigrants in this country. We should not sacrifice future immigrants by furthering the criminalization of our people for the sake of the people who are here. Our answer should be holistic even if takes longer than we expected and in the meanwhile we should focus in making people’s lives more bearable until our failed immigration system is fixed.

As we move forward to build our movement we need to find the points of intersections that honor our full beings. Just as I honor my family and our experience in my home country and this country by fighting for a just immigration policy, I also honor myself by uniting with others in the fight for queer rights, and others still in the fight against racism. Looking at the Trail of DREAMS it is what came before and what came after that matters most to me, it is the trail we are all walking together, towards a united justice.

Felipe is ranked one of the top 20 community college students in the United States and best student in the state of Florida in 2008 according to the American Association of Community Colleges. In addition to his educational excellence, Felipe also found time to serve his peers as student government president of Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus. A graduate from the Honor’s college at Miami Dade College he was born to a single mother in the slums of Brazil, Felipe was sent at age 14 to the United States, where he first dreamed of becoming a teacher. But though he has the intelligence and drive, his immigration status has prevented him from achieving this dream. Felipe has been accepted by many top colleges, but he barred him from getting financial aid. He is currently studying Business and Administration at St. Thomas University and he still hopes that one day he will be able to teach young people, because he believes education is the key to pulling people out of poverty. Currently, he serves his community in finding leaders to speak for the contribution of immigrants in the state of Florida. He has served in the Board of Directors of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, a core leader from Students Working for Equal Rights, he is part of the National Coordinating Committee of the national organization United WE DREAM and an online advocate for the national group Presente.org. He has also walked from Miami to our capital to raise awareness about the plight of undocumented students. This project was called the Trail of DREAMs.

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This piece is primarily excerpted from the “Unity for Dignity: Expanding the Right to Organize to Win Human Rights at Work” report recently released by the Excluded Workers Congress.  The full report is available for download at: www.excludedworkerscongress.org.

Who are Excluded Workers?

At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, millions of workers in the United States are excluded from one of the most basic human rights: the right to organize. Either by policy or by practice, millions of workers cannot organize without facing retaliation. They cannot bargain collectively to transform their workplace conditions, and they cannot access basic labor protections. In short: millions of workers are robbed of dignity.

These workers include more than a million and a half farmworkers, nearly two million domestic workers, millions of public employees in the eleven states and private employees in the twenty-two states that have right-to-work laws, nearly three million tipped workers and hundreds of thousands of guestworkers and day laborers. Some of these workers are excluded through explicit policies: farmworkers and domestic workers are named as exceptions to the right to organize, while restaurant workers are defined as “tipped workers” and excluded from minimum wage laws. Taxi drivers are explicitly excluded from the legal definition of “employee” itself and thus excluded from any labor protections.  Other workers are excluded from labor rights and protections through practice – either because existing laws are not enforced or because their precarious economic and legal status make it dangerous for them to claim even their guaranteed rights. But whether these exclusions are explicit or implicit, they undercut workers’ ability to organize. This leads to exploitative and degraded working conditions for excluded workers that, in turn, lower the floor for all workers.

These exclusions developed out of the convergence of two social dynamics: (1) the historical legacy of racial exclusion that has been institutionalized in US labor law (like the exclusion of farmworkers and domestic workers from the National Labor Relations Act as a concession to segregationist Southern senators in the 1930s) and (2) the impact of globalization, which has rendered much of current labor law structurally ineffective in addressing the changed dynamics of workplaces worldwide.  Fundamental shifts in the organization of global political and economic power have forever transformed the conditions facing workers in the United States and around the world. These shifts – the decline of the manufacturing economy in the United States and its emergence in Latin America and Asia, the development of a service economy in the United States, the rise of international migration – have creating new and challenging conditions for workers worldwide, conditions that are becoming increasingly similar over time. The problems facing excluded workers are not theirs alone. The struggles that they face – low wages, unstable employment and weak labor protections – are the struggles of increasing numbers of working class people in the United States.

The Rise of a New Workers Movement

Over the past two decades, hundreds of independent workers centers have emerged from these historically excluded sectors.  At first, these organizations were seen as hopeful upstarts, but they have grown and matured into well-respected organizations that have built sizable membership bases and won significant and innovative victories.  Many of these workers centers have affiliated with national sector-based networks or expanded into national membership organizations: the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Restaurant Opportunities Center United, the National Day Laborers Organizing Network and more. 

These independent workers organizations have waged a number of inspiring campaigns over the past twenty years, and each one provides an inspiring story of triumph against all odds and against every prediction of defeat. Given the long-standing challenges facing the labor movement and other progressive movements, these inspiring moments are important in themselves. But – perhaps more importantly – these hard-won victories suggest larger and more significant trajectories for the emergence of a new framework for labor rights and workers’ power for the 21st century.

The successful passage of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York State has already inspired the introduction of similar legislation in California and the beginnings of similar campaigns in other states around the country. This Bill of Rights is not only significant because it challenges the decades-long exclusion of domestic workers from basic labor protections. Its provision of paid sick days actually extends the reach of government regulation beyond the normal range of labor protections.  Going beyond a more hands-off governmental mediation of “collective bargaining” between workers and employers, the Bill of Rights suggests a model of state-mandated “collective standards” for all workers.

The New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice and the Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity waged a dramatic confrontation with immigration authorities, and they were able to win full legalization for guestworkers who had been trafficked from India by a major corporation. This victory is a demonstration of the ways in which contemporary workers’ struggles must necessarily expand beyond narrow workplace battles or “civil rights” frameworks to incorporate a broader “human rights” framework that can address the full range of international dynamics impacting workers’ lives today.

The HOPE Coalition waged a tenacious confrontation against a North Carolina law in that bars public employees from collective bargaining.  Their fight demonstrates that the long-term battle waged by the labor movement against right-to-work policies in the South is far from over. The multi-racial nature of their struggle also suggests that the vibrancy that is normally attributed strictly to contemporary immigrant workers’ struggle is actually much broader.  They vibrancy extends across racial, sectoral and regional lines.

These positive developments demonstrate the potential for excluded workers to help rejuvenate and transform the broader labor movement. But they also suggest the broad contours of new framework for transformative labor rights and protections for the 21^st century.  These new frameworks must end the explicit exclusions that intentionally restrict the rights of currently excluded sectors, but they must expand beyond inclusion alone. Labor laws must be reshaped so that they reflect the changes in workplace structures and the composition of the workforce in the 21st century. New frameworks for the right to organize, the right to bargain collectively, and other workers’ rights and protections must be rooted in human rights, and they must address the international dynamics of labor in today’s economy. While the specific contours of these policies remain unclear, the formation of the Excluded Workers Congress provides a vehicle for the formation and clarification of new transformative vision.

The Formation of the Excluded Workers Congress

During the June 2010 U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Jobs with Justice and the National Day Laborers Organizing Network brought together nine sectors of excluded workers to found the Excluded Workers Congress. The nine sectors of the Excluded Workers Congress include domestic workers, farm workers, taxi drivers, restaurant workers, day laborers, guestworkers, workers from Southern right- to-work states, workfare workers and formerly incarcerated workers.

These sectors came together around a common dream: to vastly expand the human right to organize in the United States, to win a new era of rights and policies for  workers, and to transform the labor movement in this country. The Excluded Workers Congress was formed to bring “the human right to organize” to life.  All of these workers need a new era of rights and protections. The current framework for collective bargaining in the United States has not caught up with these shifts. Our framework for organizing and bargaining, and our framework for labor law, was won in the 1920’s and 1930’s.  The Excluded Workers Congress is imagining an entirely new framework for organizing. Instead of seeking refuge from antiquated labor law, excluded workers are asserting that they have the human right to organize—and building campaigns to prove it. In response to the transformation of the economy and their own conditions, excluded workers are leading transformative campaigns that bring a human rights frame to life.  By coming together to build the Excluded Workers Congress, these organizations hope to build a shared basis of power that will allow them to work together with established unions to rebuild and transform the labor movement, to win expansive reforms in federal labor law, and to create a reality in which all workers can exercise their human right to organize.

During the first gathering of the Excluded Workers Congress, more than four hundred workers engaged in hours of story-telling to educate each other about the conditions in their different sectors and about the innovative campaigns they have developed to expand labor protections and to build worker power.

Building on the foundation of unity established in Detroit, representatives from each of the nine sectors came together in Washington DC in October 2010 to develop shared analysis, vision and collective strategies. During this meeting, the members of the Excluded Workers Congress formalized their federation and committed to engaging in shared campaign work. After reflecting on the history of racialized exclusion from labor protections and on the recent political-economic shifts that have altered the terrain of workers struggles, the members of the Excluded Workers Congress defined their shared mission to be expanding the right to organize for all workers to meet the new conditions of the 21^st century. They situated that struggle solidly within a human right framework, recognizing that globalized economies require that contemporary workers struggles must also be international in character.

In addition to developing an interim structure and plans for collaborative campaign work, the Excluded Workers Congress used the opportunity of being in the Capital to network with the Department of Labor, members of Congress and national labor leaders.

Congressional Hearings: Restaurant Opportunities Center United held a congressional hearing on health and safety issues in the restaurant industry, and Community Voices Heard led a congressional hearing on Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) during the Congress.  Additionally Jobs with Justice and the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice led a meeting with Representative Miller.

Department of Labor: Members of the Excluded Workers Congress held an extended meeting with the Department of Labor.  The Congress educated Department officials on the conditions of workers in their industries, shared strategies for improving working conditions and discussed the possibility of establishing an Excluded Workers Task Force at the Department of Labor.

Labor Movement: The Excluded Workers Congress also engaged in strategic dialogue with high-ranking representatives from SEIU and the AFL-CIO. The meeting with the AFL-CIO was particularly hopeful, opening the door to ongoing dialogue and meaningful collaboration towards organizing these sectors, which have historically been excluded from the traditional labor movement.

These meetings helped the Excluded Workers Congress to begin to establish itself as a meaningful political force in national labor politics.

Looking Forward

During the DC Gathering, the Excluded Workers Congress identified several broad arenas for shared work: (1) Shared campaigns to win immediate improvements in the conditions facing excluded workers; (2) Strengthening and expanding the labor movement; and (3) Long-term efforts to develop a new framework to transform and expand workers rights to organize in the 21^st century. The Congress intends to use both of these arenas of work as opportunities to deepen its relationships with the broader labor movement.

(1) Collaborative Campaign Work: The Excluded Workers Congress chose two campaigns around which to focus their collaborative campaign work:

Demanding a meaningful minimum wage,campaigns at both state and federal levelsto raise and index the minimum wage.  These campaigns would also work to include workers who are currently excluded from minimum wage protections, including tipped workers, home health care workers and agricultural workers. These campaign efforts are spearheaded by ROC-United.

P.O.W.E.R. Act, federal legislationthat would give legal status to workers who are victims of serious labor violations or are pursuing workplace claims.  This would protect undocumented workers who are fighting for their labor rights, shielding them from the threat of retaliation. The POWER Act campaign was initiated by the Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity.

(2) Strengthening and Expanding the Labor Movement: The Excluded Workers Congress is working to come together with allies in the trade unions to rejuvenate and transform the broader labor movement. The Excluded Workers Congress hopes to engage in joint practice and strategy with the established labor movement in order to develop and advance a new transformative vision for labor rihts and protections. Specifically, The Excluded Workers Congress hopes to:

Engage in ongoing strategic dialogue across the labor movement – dialogues that bring together excluded worker organizations and trade unions to share lessons about the limitations of current collective bargaining policies and to develop new visions toward an expansion of labor protections and the right to organize.

Promote the inclusion of excluded worker organizations in local labor councils and statewide labor federations in order to ensure that solidarity manifests in concrete shared work.

Build solidarity and mutual support between excluded worker organizations and trade unions by supporting each other’s campaigns at both the local and national levels.

Develop and participate in collaborative campaigns that unite excluded worker organizations with trade unions in order to reach unorganized groups of workers and to expand the rights and power of all workers.

(3) Develop new frameworks for the right to organize in the 21^st century: The Excluded Workers Congress is working to develop a big-picture and long-term transformative vision for workers rights and power. Centrally, this vision includes the expansion and transformation of workers rights to organize. The explicit exclusions that intentionally restrict the rights of certain sectors of workers must end, but the Excluded Workers Congress believes that inclusion in current labor laws is insufficient. Labor laws must be reshaped to reflect changes in the structure of workplaces and the composition of the workforce in the 21^st century. Rather than limiting workers’ rights to organize to the restrictions of the National Labor Relations Act, the Excluded Workers Congress believes that new frameworks for workers’ right to organize must be rooted in human rights and that they must be international in scope. Because the specific contours of these frameworks and policies are still unclear, the Excluded Workers Congress is engaging in intentional work to develop clarity on these issues through structured dialogue with researchers and scholars who specialize in labor rights and worker organizing and through joint strategizing with labor organizers in the United States and around the world.  In 2011, the Excluded Workers Congress intends to convene a series of scholar-organizer roundtable and an International Excluded Workers Congress to bring excluded workers from around the United States together with labor organizers from around the world in order to envision a new and more transformative model for workers rights to organize for the 21^st century.

More information about the Excluded Workers Congress is available at www.excludedworkerscongress.org.

One of the most exciting grassroots victories of 2010 was the passage of the New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.  Domestic Workers United put in six long years of hard organizing to pass this historic legislation, and they learned many deep political lessons along the way.  In October of 2010, the Inter-Alliance Dialogue sponsored a learning call so that the staff and members of grassroots social justice organizations from around the country could learn from this inspiring campaign.  The Inter-Alliance Dialogue is a network of national alliances that bring together community and labor-based membership organizations working on social justice issues, including: Grassroots Global Justice, Jobs with Justice, the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, The Right to the City Alliance, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the Pushback Network.  On the call staff, members and allies of Domestic Workers United shared their reflections about the significance of this victory and the lessons that other organizers could draw from their experiences.  Speakers included: Ai-jen Poo (Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance), Priscilla Gonzales (director of Domestic Workers United), Joycelyn Gill-Campbell (Lead Organizer at Domestic Workers United), Deloris Wright (leading member of Domestic Workers United) and Saket Soni (Director of the New Orleans Center for Racial Justice).

Ai-jen: Thank you everyone for getting on the call today. It’s an honor for the domestic workers’ movement to share with you about the ins and outs of this six year-long journey to win the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights in New York, to discuss the implications of this victory for our movement and to talk about some of the enormous challenges and opportunities that are ahead of us in this moment.  It’s really important that we have these kinds of conversations as a movement to share lessons and to figure out how we connect our struggles more to strengthen all of our work. So thank you for the opportunity.

Most of you know that domestic workers are a large workforce that has largely been invisible. In fact, in this country, there are 2.5 million domestic workers doing the work that we call “the work that makes all other work possible.” Throughout the history of this country, domestic workers have been excluded from key labor laws and protections even though they help to grow the economy. Over the course of history, we have seen that as economic inequality grows, so does the domestic work workforce.  So this industry is going to continue to grow throughout the course of the economic crisis.

Domestic workers have always been organizing throughout the history of this country.  Our most recent round of organizing started about 15 years ago as a part of the workers center movement and the community-based immigrant rights movement. Over the course of the last fifteen years, you’ve started to see more and more domestic workers coming together, standing up for their rights, breaking out of the isolation of their workplaces, speaking out against abuse and injustice. Over the course of the last 15 years, most of the work of organizing domestic workers has been very slow and incremental. Worker by worker, meeting by meeting, training by training, case by case, this movement has been building.  What we’re seeing now is a real growth spurt in the organizing. When I first started organizing domestic workers in 1998, there were only four groups that were organizing domestic workers.  Today, there are 33 organizations in 17 cities and 11 states that are organizing domestic workers.  And they’re doing it together in concert and in coordination, strategically building through the National Domestic Workers Alliance. This campaign to win the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights in New York is, in many ways, a flagship campaign for our movement.  It’s a reflection of how far we’ve come and how much we’ve grown, and it’s a reflection of the potential of what’s to come.

In terms of what we actually won through the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights (which will go into effect on November 30, 2010), we won a minimum of one day a rest per week for domestic workers.  This is particularly vital for live-in domestic workers and other domestic workers who work around the clock seven days a week.  We also won overtime pay at the regular rate of pay.  In the past, overtime was counted as time-and-a-half of the minimum wage for more than 40 hours a week for live-out domestic workers and 44 hour for live-in workers.  Now, overtime is counted at time-and-a-half of your regular rate of pay, and this will make a huge economic difference for workers. In addition, we won three days paid leave a year for domestic workers.  Of course, workers will be negotiating for much more than that, but at least employers now absolutely have to provide a minimum of three paid days off per year.  In addition, we won protection in anti-discrimination and harassment laws for domestic workers.  So for the first time, domestic workers will be protected from discrimination and harassment from their employers.  And finally, we won a study on the feasibility of collective bargaining for domestic workers. We are currently in the process of working with the Commissioner of Labor to understand the feasibility of collective bargaining for domestic workers and what it would mean for domestic workers in New York State to have the right to organize. So for the first time, we are developing a way forward toward realizing the right bargain collectively for domestic workers.  So it is all very significant.

Up until the Bill of Rights passed in New York, domestic workers had been excluded from most of the core components of labor rights. The Bill of Rights sets the precedent for labor rights through a state-by-state process, but also points towards what’s possible in terms of national labor law reform. At the same time as the domestic workers’ movement has been growing in the United States, the international domestic workers movement has been growing and has had some important parallel victories.  One of the very important victories is that the International Labor Organization (ILO), the arm of the United Nations that sets labor standards internationally, decided two years ago that it was going to enact the very first international law to recognize and protect the rights of the domestic workforce. So over the past two years, almost simultaneous to the process of winning this victory in New York, all of the governments that are part of the United Nations, and all of the labor federations that are in those countries have been in conversation with employers internationally about the rights of domestic workers.

So we’ re in a historic moment where we’ve made major gains in the recognition of this workforce as a real workforce that deserves recognition, that deserves protection, that deserves labor standards and that has a very important place in the labor movement.  The NY Domestic Worker Bill of Rights campaign has been the flagship fight through which we’ve been able to make a breakthrough here in the United States. This victory has some significant scale; it will affect the lives of over 200,000 women, and it sets the stage for other victories like it around the country.  This is particularly important given the current challenges to passing new federal policy through Congress. The nine domestic worker organizations in California are working together to pass legislation to provide labor rights to domestic workers California.  In January, they will introduce the California Domestic Worker Bill of Rights into their state legislature. So we’re seeing real momentum during this window of opportunity, a real growth in organizing.  Domestic workers around the world are breaking out of their isolation and taking their rightful place in the labor movement. So that’s a little bit of context to introduce the story of the victory of the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights.  Now I want to introduce some of the leaders of this campaign.  We are joined today by Deloris Wright, Joycelyn Gill-Campbell and Priscilla Gonzalez from Domestic Workers United.  Deloris will be speaking first, and she is going to talk about the role of domestic workers in the campaign and how worker leadership propelled this campaign forward.

Deloris: Good afternoon.  My name is Deloris Wright.  I have been a nanny for 22 years. And I am a member of Domestic Workers United.  DWU is a very very strong movement, and I am very happy to be part of this movement as a domestic worker. It is very important what we did with this Bill of Rights campaign, and it is very important that workers like myself were able to participate in passing this piece of legislation. The way that we participated was very important: to educate the legislators, to highlight the work that we were doing and how important it was for us to have this bill.  When we went to Albany to meet with legislators, we shared our stories. It was very important to be there as a domestic worker to really put it on the table, to let them know what is going on in the domestic work industry.  Our participation was one of the highlights of the campaign because no one else can tell our stories like we do. We are workers, and we were right there, telling our stories: what we go through on a daily basis, how we’ve been treated, how we’ve been beat down, how we’ve been fired without explanation of why we were being fired, how we were exploited, how we work long hours without overtime pay and how – if you ask for overtime pay – you might lose your job.  So it was very important to be workers there in Albany.

Working on the campaign was very informative. We learned how to do lobby days; we learned how to conduct our campaign meetings, how to speak to the media – it helped me, as a domestic worker, to be on the campaign committee.  The campaign also helped us to learn how we do our thing: how we make decisions, how we get together to go out to do our outreach to other workers. Many workers hadn’t heard about the campaign.  So it was very important for us to learn how to go out there and talk with other domestic workers, how to listen to their stories so we could bring them back and put them on the table. That way, when we went back to the legislators in Albany, we had a clearer picture of the industry and then they could also see the issue from another angle.  So we could say, “This is what I’m talking about, and this is what we’ve been going through as domestic workers.”  I’m very happy to have worked on this legislation. And I want to continue with this work because it is very important what we did with this Bill of Rights. I’m happy right now, and I’m looking forward to continuing to work on this bill.  We still have a lot of work to do. And we have a lot of people to reach out to. We still have workers who are really scared of coming out, even though the bill has passed, they don’t want to come out freely.  So I am so happy that, because I’m not working, I have the capacity to go out and reach out to other workers.  And I’m happy to be working with the Department of Labor to implement this bill that we just got passed.

Ai-jen: Thanks, Deloris, now we’re going to hear from Joycelyn Gill-Campbell, who is an organizer at DWU and a former domestic worker herself. She is going to talk a bit about the power that we had to build and how we went about building that power. In addition to what Deloris described about building the power and engagement of domestic workers, a really broad coalition of groups had to be brought together in order to really build the power that we need to win in the legislature. So Joyce is going to give you a sense of the coalition that we built and the actions that we did together to demonstrate the power that we built.

Joyce: Good afternoon, everyone. I hope you all are doing fine.  Deloris spoke about the campaign for the Bill of Rights. Over the past seven years, we’ve been fighting to have the Bill of Rights passed in New York.  I wanted to start by letting you know that it wasn’t an easy fight.  It started out with us having to educate the legislators and the broader public about the industry.  We knew that we could not do this alone.  Having no political power, we had to build our strength.  We had to strategize and build relationships and to organize actions to demonstrate our power.

DWU and the New York Domestic Workers Justice Coalition organized several major actions every year in New York City in key areas like the Upper East Side in Manhattan. We came up with messages like “Where Wall Street lives and domestic workers labor.” We marched through the streets. We held press conferences. We held a 24-hour vigil outside of City Hall. We held a 12-hour vigil outside of the Governor’s office. We even held a Children’s March where we adults took a back seat, and the children of domestic workers and the children they care for took over. They led a march calling for respect and recognition for domestic workers.  They carried signs that said “Respect my mommy” and “Respect my nanny.” This was powerful because the children told their stories.  They wrote their own stories and we just let them speak what they wrote. It had a great impact on the spectators who had gathered to watch.

We strategized further about how to build power in other arenas. We reached out to the churches, and we had a month dedicated to the domestic workers called “Domestic Workers in the Pulpit.”  We built a strong relationship with the Poverty Initiative at the Union Theological Seminary, and that is what helped make “Domestic Workers in the Pulpit” possible. This is where the domestic workers got into the pulpit and spoke to the congregations around the state. We told them about the industry, the exploitations and the abuses that were happening in the industry. People sitting in the congregations were able to identify themselves with these issues that the domestic workers were facing. Some of them themselves were domestic workers who had never heard about DWU.  So they came forward and helped to build our strength by spreading the word to different churches that we were unable to get into.

We realized that we had to keep building our power bigger and bigger.  There were times when we would go to Albany, and they would ask us how many people did we bring to Albany.  And it was great to be able say that we had 250 people, five busloads of people!  But then they asked us who were our celebrities!  You can imagine what that was like, we were there with 250 people, asking for dignity and rights and respect. And they are asking for celebrities. We had no power to reach out to celebrities like that, but leading activists like Barbara Ehrenreich and Gloria Steinem joined us.

We went into schools and colleges to educate the youth about the industry and about the slave trade. If you look carefully into the textbooks and study the history of this country, you would realize that the struggles of the poor man and the history of slavery are not documented within these books. After some of those trainings, we brought more than 100 students to Albany to speak with the legislators. These students had sisters and mothers and aunts working in this industry, so they were able to enlighten the legislators about the issues that were going on here.

This campaign and the strategies that we used didn’t only motivate the students and the clergy. It also motivated many labor leaders who began to identify themselves with this industry. For instance, John Sweeney, who was the then-president of the AFL-CIO, traveled with us to Albany. It was then that people realized that his mother had been a domestic worker for forty years, so he had a lot to add to this campaign.  So then our campaign was built with unions: SEIU 1199, 32BJ, UFCW local 1500, AFSCME.  A whole coalition of unions worked with us. Jobs with Justice played a big role in making that possible.  They also called Jobs with Justice coalitions in other cities in New York State, like Buffalo, and helped us to build our campaign statewide.

Saket Soni and members from the New Orleans Workers Center joined us. They were on their way walking to Washington on their own long march for justice for a group of exploited guest workers from India, and they stopped over here in New York because they heard of our plight.  I remember we held a rally about abuses against one of our members, and they became so vocal in fighting with us. They helped us, and we exchanged different strategies about how we can win what we are all fighting for, which is dignity and respect.

When we journeyed to Rochester to meet with Susan John [head of the New York State Assembly Labor committee], we openly said to her “We have done everything that you have asked us to do. What else can we do?” And she said, “You go back to your Assemblyman, and you stage the first hearing of domestic workers in New York.  I will come down, and I will chair that meeting.”  So we came back, and the next day we were in Assemblyman Keith Wright’s office [the original sponsor of DWU’s bill]. We set the date for that hearing right then. We had members who testified and historians like Premilla Nadasen who studied the history of domestic workers. We had employers, who were organized by Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, who testified about wanting to do the right thing but – because there were no set guidelines – they didn’t know what to do.  We know in ourselves that there are good employers, and we also know that there are some not-so-good employers.  So we had to strategize all around – for the good ones, the not-so-good ones and those that wanted to do the right thing.

We had a lot of town hall meetings.  One of the greatest town hall meetings that I recall was the one we had this year when Esther Cooper Jackson, a 92 year-old activist who has been addressing the issue of domestic workers ever since she wrote her college papers. As frail as she was, her words were powerful.  Her voice echoed through the church, and it was the Riverside Church where Martin Luther King had delivered one of his speeches.

We built the coalition and spread our word by using the media.  We had a lot of talk shows and interviews on WBAI 99.5. Wherever we could, we got out there and began to speak.  We journeyed out of New York to different colleges and universities.  We built support at Yale and UConn and we strategized with a lot of these people about how we could get this bill.

I remember at the beginning when we started fighting for this bill, people thought that we couldn’t do it.  So it is great to have them call today and say, “How did you do it? I thought it wasn’t possible.”  We always stressed that this was an issue of human rights, not an issue of politics. This bill called for respect and dignity for a workforce that has been deliberately excluded from the labor laws in this country.  So now, after kicking down the doors of Albany and breaking through some of the windows, we have found victory in the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.  We know that the fight is not over. We are meeting now with the Department of Labor, and we will be continuing this fight with the strength of the coalition that we have built.

Ai-jen: Thanks, Joyce. That was a great rundown of all the incredible work that went into making this bill possible.  When we look at it, It was seven long years of hard work, strategy, tactics, workers mobilizing, organizing with coalition partners, moving in sync together and building. When we look at the arc of those seven years, it really took the first two years to understand power in Albany and to understand the power that we needed to build in order to win. Then the following two years were spent actually building that power. Between organizing workers and building our coalition base, it really took a long time to solidify the power and the energy, the momentum and the buzz around this issue and this campaign.  And in the final years, it was really about leveraging that power: exercising and demonstrating our power and taking action and really putting our power in motion.

Through the course of that work, DWU’s leadership was key, but all of the organizations that are in the New York Domestic Workers Coalition were crucial.  Many of you have heard of DWU, but I don’t know if you have heard of many of the other organizations that are organizing domestic workers in the state of New York. They mobilized workers who led legislative visit teams, and they were a really vital part of this campaign. They included Damayan Migrant Workers Association, Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, Unity Housecleaners in Long Island, Cidado Global in Queens, Adhikaar in the Nepali community and the Beyond Care Childcare Cooperative.  There were efforts on many many levels.

I am now going to introduce Priscilla Gonzalez, organizer and the director of DWU to reflect on the lessons and some of the key challenges coming out of the campaign as well as opportunities moving forward.

Priscilla: Thank you so much for being on this call and for allowing us this opportunity to reflect on our experience in this campaign.  I wanted to start by adding a couple of other significant changes that the Bill of Rights has effected, not just for the domestic work industry but also in terms of opening up opportunities for workers in other sectors to fight for an expansion of rights. So in addition to what Ai-jen had mentioned, the fact that we were able to get paid leave legislated was really monumental because it is not something that is typically legislated or mandated by law. The Bill of Rights didn’t just set a precedent for domestic workers, but it also amended labor law in ways that can and will be significant for other workers to fight for an expansion of rights.  So, like Ai-jen was saying, the paid leave and the minimum of three days of paid leave per year and the day of rest, these are things that aren’t typically found in the law for most other workers.  These are benefits that are typically gained through contracts or collective negotiations and the fact that we got that mandated set a precedent for what responsibility the government has to ensure that people have the right to take a rest from work.  We also triggered the inclusion of companions and caregivers for the sick, people with disabilities and elderly in minimum wage laws.  Up until this time, companions have been excluded from minimum wage and overtime, and our Bill of Rights triggered their inclusion under the minimum wage act in New York, which is going to make a huge economic difference for people who are doing that labor.  The other thing that the Bill of Rights did was to set a legal day’s work at eight hours, which is a right that most workers in this country received decades ago. This is significant because it lifts up domestic workers to be on an equal footing with most other workers in this country. And it leaves open the space for us to go back to try to use that to make a difference for live-in workers who have to work way more than eight hours per day.

Of course, even though we made these huge advances, we didn’t get everything that we wanted. Our original Bill of Rights included so many other core benefits like paid holidays, vacation, sick days, notice, severance pay and more.  But, as Ai-jen mentioned, we did get the legislature to commission a study from the Department of Labor to determine if collective bargaining is viable in our industry.  In other words, is it possible for domestic workers to engage in the same process as other workers do to obtain benefits and to set standards, or will it require legislation?  I’m going to come back to this later but this also creates an opportunity for us to keep the movement going to set fair standards, not just minimum standards for all workers in our sector.  And we can’t say enough that the Bill of Rights was a significant step forward for gaining recognition for an entire sector of workers that, up until this point, have been completely invisible.  As Joyce and Deloris said, it has brought a whole workforce out of the shadows of their employers lives, out of the shadows of a long history of slavery and exclusion; this victory stands as justice for generations of racial and gender based discrimination.

As we’ve been talking about, this hard-won victory, that we finally won on August 31, 2010 when the governor signed the bill into law, came out of enormous sacrifice.  Workers lost days of pay to march and hold vigils, to hold these actions, to tell their stories, to urge the legislators to pass this bill which really we argued and argued stood as the only answer to the specific challenges that domestic workers face on the job. And it was a true social justice movement effort with unions and faith leaders and students and community based organizations joining together to lift their voices alongside domestic workers.  So this grassroots campaign that we built around this piece of legislation really gave us a context to build leadership among our base and to amplify the struggles of domestic workers in a way that we hadn’t been able to do before, to build meaningful relationships with allies who we never thought would be possible to build with and to build a whole movement dedicated to workers basic human rights.

Deloris spoke of how central workers’ stories were to the campaign.  We should never underestimate the power that our stories have to move people.  The Bill passed the Senate on July 1^st, and that was basically when we knew that we were very close to the finish line.  The Senate was the last hurdle, and the next step was to get both houses to agree on a single bill that the governor would sign into law.  When the bill was being voted in, senator after senator stood up and made speeches about how blessed and honored they were that domestic workers had made it possible for them to do the right thing. And on the day of the bill signing, Governor Paterson said that, most of all, he was grateful to the domestic workers who dreamed, planned, organized and fought for many years until they were able to see injustice undone.  So, for a moment, we got to witness this moment of genuine reflection among the legislators of “This is why I came into public service.”  And it was the grassroots movement around this campaign that made that possible.

The campaign was also really meaningful in terms of keeping us in the media and keeping us in the public eye. It was a way for us to connect all of the legal cases that we had in support of individual workers to win justice against abusive employers.  It was a way to connect those cases to the broader struggle for systemic change through this piece of legislation.  So it gave us an opportunity to highlight the conditions and to draw attention to the legislation, to talk about the history of exclusion. In that way, we could actually start to change how people think about domestic work, how people think about women’s work, how people think about the work that immigrant workers do in this country and how critical it is to our economy.

All of that is not to say that this campaign wasn’t without its challenges.  With any effort of this magnitude, there’s going to be ebbs and flows, both in the movement that’s pushing the campaign and within the broader political landscape.  As Ai-jen mentioned, DWU is part of the New York Domestic Workers Justice Coalition that is made up of many domestic workers organizations throughout New York.  Throughout the campaign, there were varying levels of capacity. And sometimes our sister organizations had more capacity, and sometimes they had less.  DWU, as the coordinator and the lead on the campaign, had to move forward regardless because when you’re in the thick of it, you can’t afford to lose any momentum.  So, at every step of the way, we needed to figure out how we moved forward but not so far ahead that we left people behind. So our Campaign Committee was a really crucial way for us to share information and to ensure that everyone was staying in the loop. It was a space that was led by our members and open to our allies so that all of us could collectively brainstorm and keep the momentum going. Not every decision could be made by everyone at every single moment of the campaign.  So – at different moments – it was important to be able to have conversations about how decisions were going to get made and what were our expectations around that.  There were some critical moments in the campaign when we had to take provisions out of the legislation. We originally started with provisions for a living wage, for health care and for an annual cost of living allowance.  And we had to have conversations within the coalition about what it meant to take those things out.  In order for us to keep advancing, we had to be able to share information about what the political moment called for.  So those kinds of intense conversations were taking place, and they were challenging. So it was important that we held some basic principles at heart, like trust and solidarity, to hold the coalition together during those trying times. No one wanted to make the compromises or wanted to sacrifice anything in our bill. We wanted it to be intact, and we were all on the same page about that. But the political moment forced us to take some of these provisions out.  So we had to keep clear and hold on to the trust that everyone was working in the best interests of the sector, and we had to keep close to the principle that we all needed to treat each other well in the process and to ground ourselves in solidarity. We had to know that the process was going to be imperfect, but that – ultimately – we are all on the same side, working towards the same vision.

In terms of the political terrain, there were things that were outside of our control. One of the things that happened as we were nearing the end of the campaign in 2009 was a coup in the Senate.  Albany was essentially at a standstill for months.  All these pieces of important legislation were put on hold, including the Bill of Rights.  So what do you do when things that are outside of your control come in and throw you a curve ball?  We innovated. When those shifts happen, it’s important to stay focused on the goal and keep mobilizing. We kept up our actions, and we kept doing legal cases.  Eventually the terrain was going to shift, so we needed to keep the momentum of our movement going.  We need to keep everyone inspired and make sure that we were still moving forward so that when the terrain shifted back, we would be ready to hit the ground running with new allies and a bigger base.

The struggle is far from over. Right now, the Bill of Rights set minimum standards and set a floor.  We got domestic workers recognized as real workers for the first time in the history of this country.  We got the government to pass legislation that was about addressing a historic injustice; we got them to recognize that somebody’s home can be somebody else’s workplace and, as such, those workers need protection. So now we need to turn our attention to making sure that this struggle wasn’t in vain: that the Bill of Rights has teeth, that it gets implemented effectively, that employers are compelled to comply, that workers begin to experience a difference in their working conditions.  And because our mission is fundamentally changing the stats quo, we need to utilize the enactment of this new law and its enforcement to build more power.  And we can only do that through continued organizing.

So now, we have to build capacity to reach the newly-protected 200,000 domestic workers through a mass “Know Your Rights” campaign, and we are planning to totally re-shift our organizing and how we’ve been going about it. It’s a new moment for our work.  We are planning on setting up a program that trains neighborhood-based worker leaders to organize and to serve as resource people for other domestic workers. We are expanding our educational programs. We are establishing a clinic to coach workers through negotiation.  We are formalizing a partnership with the Department of Labor to make sure that they are enforcing the law effectively, that they are processing and handling our cases the right way, that they are reaching out to employers and workers. We are supporting our sister organizations in California and other states to advance similar campaigns.

With our employer allies, we are promoting respect and recognition and fair labor standards, not just minimum standards through an intentional process of education and dialogue. We want to raise standards in the industry, neighborhood by neighborhood by educating workers and getting employers to go beyond the Bill of Rights. We are essentially laying down the foundation right now to set a collective standard in an industry that is decentralized, where workers are completely isolated.  It’s a process that has to reflect the particularities of our sector.  We are still using this moment to have broader conversations, not just for domestic workers but for all workers for whom the traditional ways of getting rights on the job just don’t work.  We are sitting at the table, for example, with the AFL-CIO and to wrap our heads around collective bargaining and what it would look like for domestic workers.

We’ve never been here before, and it’s daunting.  And we have the same capacity today as we did yesterday.  So what we have to do is to build power to make sure that this process is going to work and will yield what we want.  We want to be pushing the laws to apply to our reality.  We know best the brutal day-to-day conditions. We know what should happen, what kinds of policy need to be developed.  We need to strengthen collective bargaining and workers’ rights to reclaim the value of everybody’s human labor and to reclaim the human right to work with dignity and respect. We have built all of this momentum – locally, nationally and internationally – around this Bill of Rights campaign with the intention of bringing to light all the issues that concerned us.  We’ve mobilized all these people not only around the domestic workers struggle but more generally around what it means to work with dignity and respect in this day and age.  And we can’t lose that momentum right now.  So we’re in this place where we have to keep going, keep building on the ground so that we have more power to win more things that can really make a difference in our lives and so that we can ultimately start to see the level of change that we want to see in our society.

Ai-jen: Thank you so much, Priscilla, and everyone at DWU for your hard work and for your reflections and your leadership. Now I want to invite Saket Soni from the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice to offer some reflections.

Saket: I firstly want to congratulate everyone who was involved in this truly historic campaign, not only because it improves the lives and conditions of domestic workers but because it demonstrates real leadership for the entire sector of excluded workers and the entire sector of informal workers in the United States.  I want to talk a little about this victory and what it means for other excluded workers and reflect a little about the significance of it.  In June 2010, nine sectors of workers representing working class people came together at the US Social Forum and converged for an Excluded Worker Congress.  That afternoon we gathered together across many sectors and industries to dream of a huge expansion of the human right to organize in the United States and to dream about the future of a vibrant labor movement that is able to win dignity for workers in the United States.  The domestic workers victory in New York allows us to imagine all of that as a reality. Millions of workers in the United States are excluded from the right to organize and from collective bargaining, either by policy or by practice. And – as workers organize across sectors to come together to expand the right to organize, to win new rights and protections and to transform the labor movement – this victory shows us that all of these things can really be done.  I want to talk about why the Bill of Rights victory in New York is not just a domestic workers’ victory, but is a victory for all excluded workers.  Firstly, it’s important to note that all of the present exclusion from labor laws and human rights and dignity in the workplace have their roots in history. When the National Domestic Workers Alliance was founded in Atlanta, there was a workshop that many of us had attended called “Organizing In the Shadows of Slavery” which highlighted the way that domestic workers are excluded from present day labor law because of the history of slavery in this country. The New Deal legislation which mandates minimum labor standards (the Fair Labor Standards Act) got the votes from conservative Dixiecrats by excluding domestic workers and agricultural workers at the outset.  These were workers who – at the time – were predominantly African American, and Southern Democrats wouldn’t allow the Fair Labor Standards Act to go forward unless those workers were excluded. In effect, what the New York victory did was to overturn almost 100 years of exclusion.  It’s not just a policy victory in New York.  It’s a demonstration that a hundred-year-long exclusion of workers from collective bargaining, the right to organize and from human dignity can be overturned.  This is important because many of us refer to history in our work; many of us use it in our framing. Many of us use the historical fact of exclusion and the lineage of exclusion as a way to talk about our work, but the domestic workers have really shown that it is possible to build a campaign that really concretely overturns and reverses those hundred years of exclusion in this country.  If it can happen for domestic workers that means it can happen in many other sectors.  The second thing is that the political imagination of the domestic workers in their fight has made it possible for all of us to imagine vibrant grassroots fights with clear policy agendas that really change conditions for hundreds of thousands of workers in this country.  For anyone who has been at any of the actions in the last few years leading up to this victory, we’ve all witnessed the incredible vibrancy of the fight, the incredible vibrancy and creativity of the campaign, and it’s a very instructive organizing model that the domestic workers were leading a policy fight that directly impacted domestic workers, but they were also leading a moral fight.  They were leading many sectors of society, including employers, into a fight to really dignify life as a whole.

While the policy gains were gains for domestic workers, it was a moral victory for so many people – everyone from John Sweeney to allied employers and everyone in between. Each time they came forward, while they were fighting on behalf of domestic workers, you could really tell that they had made it their fight.  So that’s a second real lesson.

I think the third real lesson is – to some extent – still to be learned, but it’s really incredible that domestic workers overcame the problem of collective bargaining, given that they have hundreds of thousands of individual employers, by thinking about collective bargaining with the state instead of trying to enforce standards one employer at a time. The idea was to win collective bargaining form the state, in effect, and win the ability to expand rights and protections through an agreement with the state.

The negotiations that are now going to happen with the Department of Labor to envision collective bargaining are going to be instructive not only for domestic workers but also for many other sectors: farmworkers, guest workers and many others.  All of our sectors need to think about how collective bargaining will look.  It won’t look like it looked in the 1930s, the 1940s and the 1950s.  The global economy that we are in and the political climate force us to think about collective bargaining and human rights very differently.  Where collective bargaining is concerned, we are all going to need imagination to think about how it can work for our sectors. The fact that domestic workers have already won it and are beginning to define it and envision it will allow many many other people to follow.

The last thing that I would say is that this has been a labor fight and a fight for domestic workers, but it has also been an extraordinary human rights fight.  For all of us who believe in a human rights frame, the work that the domestic workers did to link the victory in New York to the bigger prospect of the ILO is very instructive. You know, we all believe that we are participating in an international human rights movement, but there are some campaigns among groups of workers that really bring to light a human rights framework. While the work that the domestic workers have led in New York really allows us to reimagine collective bargaining and human rights locally, the work that you all are doing with the ILO allows us to really think about many of our sectors and the role they could play in an international human rights movement. And by that I mean not just a movement to change policies and change the law, but a movement to expand the right to organize so that workers can access those changes in the law.  What this fight has shown to us is that policy changes and human rights don’t really matter if workers don’t have the ability to access those rights. On all of those levels, I think that this campaign has been a remarkable leader in the excluded workers sector. In the months to come, as we learn more about how domestic workers are envisioning collective bargaining and as the work with the ILO unfolds, it’s going to be an incredible opportunity for many sectors to learn from the policy gains and the organizing model of the domestic workers.  Now that there is an Excluded Workers Congress that brings together nine sectors of excluded workers, there is a vehicle for that learning and a vehicle to institutionalize the lessons learned. We can bring them back to all of our work and move forward together to win new rights and new forms of collective bargaining for many different sectors of workers.

Many appreciations to Randy Jackson from the Inter-Alliance Dialogue for giving us access to the recording of this important call.

Welcome back to Fast Forum!  We pick a hot topic and ask 3 – 6 organizers from across the country to weigh in. Our hope is to draw out new ideas and to encourage new voices to take a stab at the freshest challenges facing our community. This month, Joseph Phelan, one of our editors here at Organizing Upgrade, pulled together a FastForum exploring the intersection of strategic communications and left organizing.

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MEDIA JUSTICE & JUSTICE COMMUNICATIONS:

BUILDING MEANING TO BUILD MOVEMENTS

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Malkia A. Cyril is the Executive Director and founder of the Center for Media Justice. With more than 15 years’ experience as a community organizer, policy advocate, and communications strategist, Malkia has led local and national campaigns for racial and economic justice and is the author of numerous essays and articles on media, marginalization, and movement-building. Malkia is the recipient of the Media Leader award from the Alliance for Community Media, the Emerging Leader award from the Media That Matters Film Festival, and other awards from the Media Justice Fund, Rock the Vote, and others; with appearances in Democracy Now, Hard Knock Radio, Breakdown FM, Free Speech TV, the documentary Outfoxed, the documentary Broadcast Blues, the SF Weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the New York Times, the Village Voice, and others.

Karlos Gauna Schmieder is an organizer and strategist from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Before joining the Center for Media Justice, Karlos worked for nearly a decade as a community and communications organizer with SouthWest Organizing Project (SWOP). As cochair of communications for the 2007 U.S. Social Forum, he coordinated media strategy for this groundbreaking event. He is also a former steering committee member of Grassroots Global Justice, resource ally with Right to the City Alliance and editor of Voces Unidas. Karlos is co-Chair of Progressive Communicators Network’s Leadership Council and co chair of communications working group of the 2010 U.S. Social Forum.

At the Center for Media Justice we believe that the human right to communicate, and therefore to organize and fight for a better future, should belong to everyone.

Unfortunately, in the context of the big money media environment of the U.S. and the dawning of Tea Party politics following the this year’s mid-term elections- the vast majority of voices are shut out of the public debates that shape the daily material conditions of their lives. Center-Left research and communications organizations have staked a color-blind poll in the middle of debates on race and equity, legitimizing a do-nothing approach when it comes to confronting racism in the context of wedge issues.

This has left us with not only a very real need to re-train a new generation of progressive organizers in the art of strategic communications for equity and justice, but also a public debate on race and equity dominated by regressive voices.

To be effective and to win campaigns, professional and embedded movement communicators working on justice issues must be offered new models and trained in strategies to confront and defeat wedge issues and build a powerful public voice.

“Justice Communications” is a new, participatory model for strategic communications innovated by such veteran communicators as Makani Temba-Nixon and Charlotte Ryan, and operationalized by the staff of CMJ.  Justice Communications integrates cultural change into all components of community organizing and movement building to echo a populist, values-based vision to reframe conservative narratives of governance, the economy, and race.

To build this kind of ideological power over the next 5 to 10 years, three critical steps are needed:

1.     Movements for justice need strategic, issue-based convening and relevant strategy tools to determine collective action meta-frames on critical wedge issues across the lines of issue and geography.

2.     Movement organizations must deploy professional and embedded movement communicators and use strategic opportunities to wage framing contests between Individualism and meritocracy vs. collective action and equity frames; Corporatism vs. the role of engaged, popular government and corporate accountability; and racist consumerism and poverty marketing vs. structural and institutional responses to advance racial justice and economic equity.

3.     Funders must invest in the building of movement communications infrastructure.  Our communications infrastructure and systems are woefully inadequate as we enter a communications cataclysm that has left even the most sophisticated communicators and organizers flatfooted and unsure of how to spend our communications collateral.

Our vision is a truly integrated approach to social, narrative, cultural and media change for 21st century media policy solutions, and communications and cultural strategies that ensure movements for justice have a powerful public voice in issues that profoundly affect our daily lives. Through strategic convening, strategic framing battles, and targeted resources- we can build a pipeline of leadership with the reach, skill, and capacity to make long-term impacts that ensure grassroots movements for justice have a powerful public voice.

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DISPATCHES FROM THE

CLIMATE CRISIS FRAMING BATTLE

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Patrick Reinsborough has been involved in campaigns for peace, the environment, indigenous rights and economic justice for over twenty years.  In 2002 he co-founded the smartMeme Strategy & Training Project (www.smartMeme.org <http://www.smartMeme.org> ) as a vehicle to explore the intersections of social change strategy, the ecological crisis and the power of narrative. Recently smartMeme has been supporting North American climate justice organizers in developing framing and messaging strategies. He is the co-author of Re:Imagining Change—How to Use Story-based Strategy to Win Campaigns Build Movements and Change the World <http://www.smartmeme.org/book> (PM Press 2010). Patrick spends his time fighting for a better world, parenting, playing music for his friends, and wandering through the urban wilds of San Francisco.

As movements around the planet mobilize to counter the effects of climate destabilization on their communities, cultures, and ecosystems, a framing battle of global significance is underway.

In the climate fight, as with so many other struggles, the heart of the framing battle is naming the problem, since how we define the problem determines what solutions are possible. To varying degrees, governments and multinational corporations around the world have acknowledged the crisis and they claim they are working to address it. However, they present the climate crisis through a reductionist lens as merely a problem of too much carbon in the atmosphere while ignoring the underlying issues of justice, equity, and humanity’s relationship with the Earth. This framing allows exploitation of the crisis to justify escalating the very policies and practices that have pushed the planet to the brink. Essentially the world’s richest countries and companies are co-opting environmental rhetoric to put a PR friendly “green” face on the same old politics of unlimited economic growth, resource thefts and corporate exploitation.

Meanwhile the ‘official’ climate movement has been dominated by a loyal opposition of largely northern, policy, and access-oriented NGOs who, although (mostly) well intentioned, have failed to reframe the debate or address the root causes of the crisis. But increasingly as more global movements begin to unite under the banner of climate justice, there is a different story to tell. The terms of the debate are being reframed from seeing the climate crisis as an isolated issue, to understanding the disruption of the climate as merely the most visible symptom of a much larger problem: our global system of growth-addicted, fossil fuel-driven, corporate capitalism that is undermining all the life support systems of the planet.

When this deeper framing of the problem is accepted it becomes clear that we will never re-stabilize the climate without addressing the roots of the problem. This means acknowledging the Global North’s historic responsibility for the problem (“climate debt”) as the first step towards fundamental shifts to our economy, political systems, and cultural assumptions. This is why one of the over-arching and unifying messages coming out of global movements fighting for a just response to the climate crisis is “system change NOT climate change”.

However, as people’s movements around the world ramp up their organizing in the lead up to the next round of United Nations negotiations in Cancun there are a number of dangerous frames––control myths––that must be challenged.

Control Myth #1 Only The Market Can Save Us!

In this case a global carbon market that effectively privatizes the atmosphere, justifies massive land grabs and further commodification of forests, soils, and grasslands. Two hundred years of ideology have bestowed the “invisible hand” of the market with debate-shaping qualities of alleged efficiency, fairness and power. This is a familiar narrative to many of our movements fighting privatization and displacement but we still need better, shared strategies to reframe the myth of the market.

Control Myth #2 Technology Will Save Us!

Hand in hand with the story of the all-powerful market is the obsession with techno-fixes. Techno-fixes masquerade as solutions but just distract us from making the fundamental changes that are needed. The assumption that some benign “experts” will provide new, innovative technology to solve the problem justifies continuing unsustainable policies while removing people’s agency from the frame. More and more climate techno-fixes are being proposed: from overt lies like “clean coal” and “climate ready” genetically engineered crops to terrifyingly disruptive, untested new technologies like synthetic biology and geoengineering.[i] Beware!

Control Myth #3 Climate Is Too Big An Issue: Only Governments Can Save Us!

The debate has been overly focused on global and national policy while social movements and community-based responses are left out of the frame. Many mainstream environmentalists have even argued that any global emission reduction agreement (regardless of how weak or unfair) is better than no deal. Variations of this narrative have been used (particularly by the U.S.) to evade historic responsibility and blame China, India and other developing economies for blocking an international deal. Certainly a global agreement is important, but the reality of the scale of the climate crisis is that we need transformative action in all sectors of society.

Given the wide-ranging implications of the debate, climate is an essential arena for our movements to develop more holistic narratives and shared frames that mutually reinforce efforts across different sectors and struggles. At the heart of this framing battle is the emerging climate justice movement led by frontline impacted communities, indigenous movements and environmental justice organizers.

Climate justice framing is challenging the control myths above (and many more) by refocusing the issue on the core problems of fossil fuel addiction, the ongoing legacy of historic inequities and the need for systemic change. At the center of the evolving narrative is the role of community-based solutions in stewarding a just transition towards a society that is both sustainable and just. As different movements like migrants rights, reproductive justice and organized labor articulate the connections between their struggles and the climate crisis there are many opportunities to experiment with applying and broadening climate justice framing.

With the historic adoption of the Cochabamba People’s Agreement on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in April there is now a powerful new narrative emerging that unites ecology, justice and social movement action. This platform offers a potent counterpoint to the corporate driven, false solutions of the United Nations process. Most importantly it offers an invitation to organizers everywhere to connect their issues with this multi-faceted struggle to transform our world. In the words of one of the key slogans uniting movements in the lead up to the COP-16 meeting and beyond: “grassroots organizing cools the planet!”

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ORGANIZERS ARE STORYTELLERS

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B. Loewe comes out of the Chicago Worker Center movement<http://latinounion.org> and is currently supporting the National Day Laborer Organizing Network<http://ndlon.org> in communications to turn the tide from the fear-based backwardness of Arizona policies to a world that recognizes and respects our human rights. B. recently served as a field organizer for the US Social Forum<http://ussf2010.org> on the belief that big crises require big demands that come from movements beyond any one organization.

Opal Tometi is a community organizer in Arizona. She recently earned her Masters in Communication Studies with an emphasis in Rhetoric and Advocacy. She is currently organizing and working on strategic communications with Alto Arizona, PUENTE and other migrant justice groups in Maricopa County.

Organizing is the process of retelling our lives with ourselves scripted as the protagonists instead of objects in an unjust world who’s future is up for grabs. If our inactivity is a result of being told that we don’t deserve better and that there are no possible alternatives to the world we’ve inherited, organizing tells us our personal problems are not ours alone. They are social. There are solutions. And we can be the ones to solve them.

 Simply put, organizers are storytellers. The stories we decide to tell and how we decide to tell them shape our consciousness and shape how we engage in our world. Thus strategic communications is not about the magic bullet phrase we utter nor is it about having the most communication technologies at our disposal. Strategic communications is about asking ourselves: what narratives are powerful enough to pull the wool from people’s eyes and expose that the emperor has no clothes.

For the migrant rights movements, we find ourselves suffering because of the confines of the stories we’ve been telling and that are being told about us. Our recent organizing approach has woven a web that sought to exchange enforcement for legalization via “comprehensive immigration reform.” And now, without legalization, all immigrants are seen as criminals. To undo that fiction and rebuild a powerful proactive path to legalization, we have to reframe the debate. We’ll have to find ways to tell the story of the global economy that links unemployed workers in the US with displaced workers from the global south, the story of the threat to democracy that criminalization plays, and remind ourselves of the story of history’s long arc toward justice. Just as it takes a long look forward to remain optimistic in these troubled times, it takes a long look at history<http://altoarizona.com/videos.html#featured> to understand and communicate this moment in its proper context.

In Arizona we know too well what compromised messaging and inaccurate storytelling can do, however it has caused us to be more resolute in not only our storytelling, but also our <http://goog_1251661410> truth telling<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFA_qUh0pQw&feature=player_embedded> in the face of a reality that becomes less real every day. The road ahead is long and arduous, but rather than be embittered, we know that we can be organizers and storytellers, strategic communicators that reveal the truth about the inherent dignity in each of us, the interdependence we share, and laugh along the way<http://blog.altoarizona.com/blog/2010/10/sea-captains-learn-babies-make-bad-anchors.html> to winning.

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NARRATIVE STRATEGY &

STEPPING UP OUR GAME

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Doyle Canning is co-director of smartMeme, a strategy and training center that amplifies the impact of grassroots organizing with the power of narrative. She is co-author of Re:Imagining Change – How to Use Story-based Strategies to Win Campaigns, Build Movements, and Change the World (PM Press, 2010), and has collaborated on framing strategies with groups like Student/Farmworker Alliance, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Indigenous Environmental Network, and SCOPE. Doyle lives in Boston where she practices yoga, walks her dog, and dreams of one day having a garden.

While the first Tea Party convention, with its 600 attendees, was covered extensively on every major network, the US Social Forum, with over 12,000 people, was largely ignored by the establishment media. Of course, there are many structural reasons for this. But we’ve got to be honest with ourselves that when it comes to the shaping the conversation in the mainstream media, we’ve got to step up our game. There is a critical gap in many grassroots organizations between great organizing on the ground, and getting the message out on primetime.

In the big picture, we are losing the Battle of the Story for this historical moment to regressive forces. There are cultural conversations happening now about the role of government, race in the US, the market’s implosion, the ecological crisis, and so much more. And, with a few exceptions, we’re not the ones commenting on talk shows or stealing the headlines on Sunday.

Our movements sorely need more media and communications capacity – and that means money, skilled people, time, and tools. But the heart of the matter is much deeper, and much more difficult. What we really need is a coherent narrative.

Narrative is at the very heart of strategy, and is what truly defines a social movement as a social phenomena. Narrative is the set of frames that define the ways in which we imagine and understand who we are, what we want, and where we’re going. It is the story that we believe in, and that we co-create in a movement building process.

In order to succeed in creating systemic, transformative change, we need to build infrastructure to develop shared narrative strategies, and spaces for forging symbols, memes and messages that can capture the imagination of the people and motivate action. This means taking our story seriously, and bringing strategic rigor, discipline, and creativity to a sustained conversation across sectors.

Luckily, I have no doubt that we’ve got a good story. In fact, we have plenty. Tales of struggle, liberation, resilience and reconciliation are as old as time. Our task now is to unearth these gems and polish our narrative until it shines brighter and sounds better than what’s currently on offer.

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ACCELERATING THE TRAIN TOWARDS JUSTICE

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Sangita Nayak is currently serving as Freedom Inc’s communications consultant, a racial justice agency in Madison. Her forte has been in coalescing effective organizing and communications networks. Over the last dozen years, she has organized for working rights at 9to5 National Association of Working Women, for Gulf recovery through the Katrina Information Network (KIN), for corporate influence transparency at the WHO through the Network for Accountability of Tobacco Transnationals, and for refugee access to local services through the Hmong American Women’s Association. She has consulted and facilitated workshops for numerous groups in relation to strategic communications. She has also facilitated several gatherings for the Progressive Communicators Network, and is serving as co-chair on their board.

Grassroots organizing and strategic communications should be resourced in tandem to grow and deepen our work and advance the struggle. If organizing gets people on a movement train, then strategic communications should accelerate and fuel that train for justice.

Communications should help identify and invite more audiences that organizers need to win the battle for the short and long haul. It can also help identify the tracks, or ways of moving, so the organizing has greater impact. In tandem with people-centered organizing, communications assists by amplifying messengers and exposing targets, so that more and more people jump on the movement train.

Today, we face dangerous narratives from the opposition’s communications that seem more like an air assault then a train. One of these messsages is that our communities are destroying themselves. That narrative includes a certain inhumanity about communities, that justifies a denial of services. Rebecca Kleefisch, Wisconsin’s newly elected Lieutenant Governor, captures that attack in her comparison of marriage in gay communities to marrying a dog. We’ve also seen this narrative in how the Hmong community in Wisconsin face a media bias that domestic violence is a cultural norm.

This narrative about our communities asserts that our communities should be changed if not destroyed.  It is fundamentally linked to this nation’s white supremacy and it must be challenged by our growing movement train through thoughtful and well-funded strategic organizing and communications work.

When we offer visionary narratives, we continue to directly expose the communication of white supremacy and Patriarchy. For instance, Freedom Inc. in Madison, WI regularly exposes the racist lies about Hmong and other communities in relation to preventing violence. And after the recent deaths of LGBT teens, we mourned and supported the families of the victims while we challenged the notion that white communities were the only communities suffering.  LGBT communities of color continue to get ignored and silenced–no one mourns our lost. This deeper and liberating narrative all possible when strategic communications is on the train with community organizing.

Though many of the crises our communities endure were not created by us, we must assert our role in creating solutions to our health, economy, and environment–by looking at the age-old practices and remedies in communities of color.  We must drive solutions that respect the wisdom of people across the life span. Our communication and organizing is part of this narrative working to create a healthy society, honor the history of our ancestors, knowledge of our elders, insight of women as well as the dreams of our youth.

In 2006 and again in 2008 I wrote pieces inspired by friends and colleagues working on the ground predicting the coming Immigrant Apartheid. In 2006, I laid out that a set of institutions was developing to ensure that immigrants, non-citizens specifically, “would permanently have less rights than citizens.”

In 2008, I elaborated, “This emerging apartheid would use the criminal justice-, prison-, and deportation systems – and any other system – at its disposal to make lives of immigrants – both legal and undocumented – as hard as possible. What we would see, whether we won reform or not, would be more arrests, more raids, more detentions, and more deportations. In sum, more destruction of our communities.”

There is nothing joyful about saying “we told you so” for a third time.  Whenever I write about immigration, I wish that I could write a different conclusion, but I can’t.  I remember first walking into a detention center in 1999 and thinking to myself, “this is one of the worst things I have seen in this country being done to people by this government.”  I sometimes bitingly joke with my friends that I miss 1999.

Fast forward to 2010, to the surging popularity of Arizona’s SB 1070, to conversations among previously “supportive politicians” to basically de-naturalize the citizen children of undocumented immigrants, and it seems like the most we have won since the huge immigrant rights protests 2006 is the stalling of full-blown apartheid.

But I think it may be possible to delineate where and why we are losing.

1. Fighting the expanding immigration enforcement system-the linchpin of Immigrant Apartheid-has always taken a backburner to the greater dream of Comprehensive Immigration Reform.  As a close colleague of mine has pointed out, Arizona’s SB 1070 would have never become so popular if Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his 287 (g) agreement with ICE (an agreement that gives local police enforcement powers) were not allowed to go unchecked.  Groups in Arizona have been organizing against Arpaio and the 287 (g) program for years, but were never given the outpouring of support they needed until after SB 1070 was passed. Florida was the first state to sign a 287(g) agreement in 2002.  But 287(g) programs are just the tip of an ICEberg (get it?) known as ICE ACCESS.  Most of the programs under ICE ACCESS have been operational for at least since I started doing this work.  But there has always been a tendency within the immigrant rights movement to think the bigger more important fight was for Comprehensive Immigration Reform as opposed to local battles, enforcement battles or local enforcement battles.  At the same time, ICE grew its reach into communities by pushing its ICE ACCESS programs in every corner of the country, until a program like “Secure Communities”, for example, made it into every county in Florida. The rationale was always that Comprehensive Immigration Reform would fix these other systemic problems.  But that was never really true.  Which leads me to my next point.

2.The Grand Compromise was never grand and never a compromise.  In the immigration reform fight, there was always this implicit understanding of a compromise between increased enforcement and a path to legalization.  In the process, I feel like our side often conceded important arguments on enforcement.  For example, the repealing or reforming the basic pieces of the 1996 Immigration laws-the strictest immigration laws in decades-whether it be mandatory detention, mandatory deportation, restricted judicial review, 287(g) and expanded local enforcement, has often been left out of the immigration reform debate entirely.  The idea that thousands of people dying at the border is a bad thing has been largely left out of the policy debate.   When I say debate, I mean the debate amongst policymakers that are crafting the parameters of the debate.  Because the immigrant rights movement has always had a vibrant and vocal debate about these issues.  But enforcement policy sort of came out of what lawmakers and the successive presidents from Clinton to Obama thought they could get away with. So what we have year is more enforcement without a roadmap or pathway to  legalization.

3. We have succeeded in moving leaders but leaders have lost their luster.  The immigrant rights movement has done a remarkable job moving major institutions and the leaders of those institutions to their side.  Whether it be church leaders, business leaders, or labor leaders, the immigrant rights movement has been impressive on this front.  However, and this is an educated hunch (not empirical), I think that while we have been able to move these leaders, the political climate (that we often have no control over) has become so volatile that winning leaders hasn’t led to winning the hearts and minds of the people that would typically listen to leaders.  People are really angry right now for a lot of really good and bad reasons.  And people form all sides of the political spectrum are openly and actively challenging even their most well respected leaders.   If you just look at the struggle that politicians (John McCain), religious leaders (name a Bishop, any Bishop), and other leaders have had to go through to maintain their relevance and credibility, it is startling.

4. Communications, communications, communications.  I feel like the immigrant rights movement has gotten really good at communicating to elected officials, to immigrants themselves, and to people that nominally care about immigrants.  However, we have not been able to effectively communicate to people that are legitimately on the fence or falling off the fence to the other side.  I will give you one example.  The whole “immigrants are good for the economy” stuff.  I don’t care how good the numbers are, a lot of Americans, even those that would believe it when we are not in a recession, just don’t believe it.  If you work in the construction or restaurant industry, it is really hard to believe that.  I could write a whole article on how our message framing has alienated some folks in African American communities.  We have to be able to communicate the idea that both immigrants and non-immigrants are hurting right now and it is neither’s fault.  As organizers we know that exploitation is the problem.  Exploitation hurts immigrants, hurts non immigrants, and pits us against each other.  How do we communicate that in a way in which we don’t sound like commies?  The way that the other side has one message “what part of illegal don’t you understand?”, we should be just as effective at saying “what part of exploitation don’t you understand?”  Plus I feel like we haven’t been as good at fighting xenophobia and racism WHILE showing that we are feeling other (read citizen) people’s pain.  To put things in perspective, there are citizens literally killing themselves and their families because of this economy.  Why would folks treat the “other” (read immigrant) any better than they are treating their own families in this economy.  We all know that any economic problem citizens feel, immigrants often feel more, but just demonstrating empathy in messaging may move mountains for us.

Reasons for optimism

Although, the road ahead for the immigrant rights movement is really rocky, it is still by far the biggest and most organized social movement in the country.  With every loss, it gets smarter and its organizers become more conscious of the root causes and their solutions.

1.  Arizona has made everyone think local and think enforcement.  After SB 1070, real attention is being focused on local enforcement, on ICE’s reach into our communities, and into the spread of anti-immigrant legislation at the state level.  The energy isn’t just filtering into the fight against SB 1070 in Arizona, there are literally pitch battles being set up in state’s trying to replicate SB 1070.  It feels like EVERYONE is trying to understand ICE ACCESS, 287 (g) and SECURE COMMUNITIES.  And I truly believe that different sectors of the immigrant rights movement are finally getting a grasp on how Immigration Enforcement happens and how to stop it.

2.  Uncovering the truth.  Secure Communities, ICE’s flagship enforcement program seemed like a bullet proof vest.  A program that purports to go after the most “dangerous criminal aliens” seems too hard to fight, especially when ICE is aggressively marketing it as the best enforcement program. In fact, in Florida our first attempts to fight Secure Communities ended with ICE marketing heavily to editorial boards, winning them over, and effectively casting us as “sympathizers for violent illegal aliens.”  But it seems like the shell is slowly beginning to crack.  And it seems like it has touched a nerve with ICE.  The information of what ICE’s flagship program really means in communities is slowly starting to get out and raise eyebrows.  It is too early to declare victory yet, but the fact that news outlets that thought Secure Communities was great months ago are now asking questions is really good news for our work.

3.  No more Mr(s). Nice Immigrant.  This year marked a turning point for immigrants and civil disobedience.  I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say that January alone probably had more acts of civil disobedience than all of the immigrant rights movement last year.  Since then, from sit-ins, to mass arrests, to flash-mobs (something I think I am too old to know about), the tactics in the immigrant rights movement are getting more direct and more confrontational.  To be clear, there is also a greater desire to specifically target the Obama administration to do more to protect the rights of immigrants.  I believe the press is making the outcomes look better than they really are, but it has had some pointed results.  Not least of which is virtually forcing the administration into a lawsuit against SB 1070 as its popularity has increased.

4.  It’s the Latino vote stupid…No matter how much anti-immigrant hysteria is drummed up, it ends up creating diminishing returns for the politician or party that is anti-immigrant.  On a personal level, I have always been skeptical that voters had the electoral power to improve the lives of people who don’t have the right to vote.  However, with the notable exception of Joe Arpaio, anti-immigrant politicians have ignored the Latino vote to their own detriment.  In Florida, Attorney General and gubernatorial hopeful Bill McCollum switched from denouncing the idea of an SB 1070 in Florida to actually authoring a Florida version of the bill that is probably worse.  In the process he alienated much of the Latino Republican leadership and his new found crusade probably cost him the nomination.  There seems to be a trend amongst anti-immigrant politicians of ignoring the Latino vote, but the Latino vote seems to have a real ability to punish anti-immigrant politicians.

Subhash Kateel has been organizing immigrant communities for over ten years. He was the initiator of the detention and deportation work Desis Rising Up and Moving and of co-Founder of Families For Freedom in 2002. Besides facilitating some of the most sought after know your rights trainings in the South East, he is an avid watcher or right-wing social movements and pushes the left to take notice. Currently he is a statewide organizer with the Florida Immigrant Coalition.