The Occupy Strategy Lab of Organizing Upgrade is excited to share the thoughts of movement innovator and strategist Max Rameau. With his experience founding the Take Back the Land movement and advancing land-liberation and eviction defense strategies, Max is well positioned to provide some insight into how organizers can and should strategically connect with the Occupy movements. Over the last few months, Max has been engaged in strategic thinking, dialogue and planning with Occupy movements in Miami, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Wall Street. This article is part of a series in which Max explores the potential for movement building within the Occupy movements. Forthcoming pieces will address the Basis of Unity (between #Occupy and Liberate) and a proposal for a  2012 Spring Offensive.

The last few years have been hard for us: record foreclosures, high unemployment, drastic cuts in social services, and government actively doing the bidding of big business at the expense of regular people.

With a combination of bewilderment and frustration, concerned global citizens had asked one question over and again: when and where are people in the US going to rise up and take to the streets?

Turns out, the answer was September 17, 2011 on Wall Street.

Of course, for all it’s simplicity and elegance, that answer is not entirely accurate. Communities of color, albeit in smaller numbers and with less media, have taken to the streets for years around issues of police brutality and the impacts of the economic crisis, particularly gentrification, foreclosures and evictions.

Since 2007, The Take Back the Land movement has identified vacant government owned and foreclosed homes and “liberated” them by breaking in and transforming vacant houses into homes for families. Our objective is to transform land relationships to secure community control over land and elevate housing to the level of a human right. With the crisis deepening, many more organizations are liberating land or waging eviction defenses with increased success.

This one grand crisis, then, has elicited two very different responses, each strong and each relevant to its core constituency. With the combination of low-income communities of color and working and middle class whites taking to the streets, this society is on the cusp of a major social movement, the likes of which have not been experienced in the U.S. in more than a generation.

Far from homogeneous, this budding movement is evolving towards parallel, but interrelated campaign tracks: #Occupy and Liberate. The two look similar in many regards, but are distinguished by three important characteristics: composition, primary frame, and target/base.

1. Composition. #Occupy has mobilized mainly, though not exclusively, disaffected young and impacted working and middle class whites. Liberate is mainly low and middle income people of color.

2. Primary Frame. #Occupy’s primary frame is the economic system and the injustice it produces. Liberate frames issues in terms of land control and use (such as housing, farming and public space);

3. Target/Base. #Occupy targets those symbols, institutions and persons responsible for perpetrating the economic crisis–the 1%–through the “occupation” of public and private spaces, most notably New York’s financial district, the Oakland seaport and individual bank branches. Liberate’s base are the victims of the crisis, who are protected via land liberation and eviction defense.

Social movements are not single celled creatures on a linear path, but dynamic complex organisms with multiple moving parts, each responsible for a different series of tasks. Such a division of labor must be understood, appreciated and fully embraced. This movement is a complex organism with two tracks, and each track performs unique and critical functions.

Two intractable images of the housing crisis include the banks responsible for this financial mess and the homes from which families are evicted. This movement must take the fight to the banks, protesting and occupying them on their turf. Those same banks are occupying our communities, neighborhoods and homes. We must end that occupation through Liberation and eviction defense. The crisis simply cannot be resolved by choosing to fight on either one front or the other.

Not only must we both #Occupy and Liberate, but the chances of success for one-track increases exponentially with the actual success of the other. Therefore, the Occupy-Liberate dichotomy is not an antagonistic one; it is complementary.

We must occupy the 1% and liberate the 99%.

That is not the job of one organization, but the mission of everyone’s movement.

There is growing awareness of the two tracks, their characteristics, strengths and limitations. As we struggle to properly understand and define this relationship, we must resist the tendency towards two competing orientations:

The first tendency is to examine both tracks, note their size, frames and composition and conclude that each track actually represents its own separate and unique movement essentially unrelated to the other. The second, and polar opposite, tendency is to remark the similarities in approach and tactics and conclude the tracks are effectively identical and must be merged into a singular monolithic track. Both tendencies are wrong.

We must take care not to expect large numbers of Blacks, Latinos, indigenous, and other oppressed nationalities or immigrants, each with particular historic relationships to the police, to “occupy” banks and financial institutions. In fact, it is not clear that #Occupy could have succeeded if first executed by people of color. We must also resist the temptation to allow 1,000 young white kids to “occupy” historically people of color communities, still reeling from the more onerous occupation of gentrification. At the same time, we must find creative, effective and empowering ways to work together through parallel, supportive and even joint actions and campaigns.

While engaging the dual tracks in parallel actions is a prerequisite to building a holistic and powerful movement, it is not sufficient to guarantee trust and success. Two sets of actions, even during the same time frame and in the same city, will not result in an instant movement.

Forging these dual tracks into a cohesive movement with mutually supportive actions, requires at least three basic understandings:

1. Basis of unity. Why are we fighting and what are we fighting for? Do we want the same things or are we just doing the same thing in order to get to different places. What is the basis of our unity.

2. Framework of unity. How are we working together? How are decisions made? What do we do when one track disagrees with the other?

3. Next steps. What are we doing next? We propose a 2012 Spring Offensive.

We must Occupy to Liberate.

Max Rameau is a Haitian born Pan-African theorist, campaign strategist, organizer and author. He is one of the founding members of the Take Back the Land movement and is currently with Movement Catalyst, a movement support organization, providing campaign development and other support to social justice organizations. 

Approximately 50,000 people turned out to mass actions held during the Oakland General Strike on November 2nd, called by the General Assembly of Occupy Oakland at Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant plaza, and supported by dozens of community based organizations, unions, and activist groups. The actions shut down every major bank in downtown Oakland, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Chase, and then shut down the port, and in the process built solidarity beyond anything we have seen in the SF Bay Area since the days of the movement against the US war on Vietnam.

The call for this general strike mobilization came from the General Assembly at Occupy Oakland immediately following the violent police attack which razed the encampment and fired tear gas and rubber bullets into the peaceful crowd (inflicting a critical brain injury on young Iraq vet Scott Olsen) thus galvanizing the Occupy Oakland movement into the national and international spotlight. A petition started by Causa Justa :: Just Cause at the moment of the attack, and picked up by Moveon.org, garnered 60,000 signatures in support of the 1st amendment right of the Occupy Oakland camp, and against police abuse. A mere 24 hours after the police attack we delivered this petition to Mayor Jean Quan — 60,000 signatures from her base — with an entourage of community and labor organizations demanding that the police stand down. That night back out in the streets when the fences came down and the camp re-established itself with an outpouring of community support — with not a cop in sight — it was clear that the general strike was going to be a historic moment.

Occupy Oakland General Assembly while reclaiming the camp after the police raid and after forcing the police to stand down.

The answer to the General Strike call came from all over the SF Bay Area, from organizations, unions and groups spanning different sectors of the progressive movement, from unaffiliated individuals, and from an emerging formation knows as “Left Bay 99.” Left Bay 99 developed after a successful mobilization on 10/12/11 to “Foreclose Wall Street West”, which brought together Causa Justa :: Just Cause, UNITE/HERE 2850, Occupy San Francisco, The Ruckus Society, and dozens of direct action activists, unions, and community based organizations. That mobilization shut down Wells Fargo’s corporate headquarters in downtown San Francisco and, maybe even more importantly, left us all eager to collaborate again, and to continue building across sectors towards a movement of the 99%. [watch videos and read press coverage here]

Coming out of that mobilization, community organizers and activists came together to discuss what we could do to support Occupy SF and Occupy Oakland, and what we could contribute to those efforts.  We were involved in different ways, some as members of the general assembly and camps in each city, some in solidarity as grassroots organizations, and all in advancing demands of the 99%.  We believed that these emerging relationships were important for building a long-term movement for racial justice, gender justice, and for building an alternative to the plunder and suffering that the current economic order causes in our communities here in the US, and to communities around the world.

The exciting combination of seasoned organizers and newer activists formed into committees to advance the work.  Camp defense was a high priority, and we created a rapid response network that could mobilize people in the case of a police raid.  We leveraged relationships with elected city officials that organizations and unions built over the years to secure meetings with the Mayor of SF and the Mayor of Oakland, advocating in each meeting alongside Occupy campers for the right of the camps to remain, for an end to police violence and harassment, for the release of people who had been jailed unjustly during protests, and in support of the first amendment rights of protesters.  In addition to that, we formed an action committee that worked with campers to develop and carry out mobilization plans, and a communications committee to support those actions with media work, all of which came together as a major contribution to the general strike in Oakland on 11/2/11.

Our organization, Causa Justa :: Just Cause, was deeply involved in all areas of this work.  We called the first mobilization on 10/12/11, seeing lots of alignment between the critique of Walls Street and our bank accountability campaign work against Wells Fargo Bank. And as the momentum grew we continued investing time and energy, committed not just to our own campaign but to making a contribution to building a movement bigger than any one campaign or organization.

A key priority was to respect the suspicion of some Occupy Oakland campers that organizations wanted to come in and dominate.  We worked hard to maintain constant communication to campers and camp committees, so that our work would complement and amplify the camps’ work, while adding the much needed participation and perspectives of working class people of color and their organizations.  This was an experiment, and it was not easy.  It’s never fun to be called an “outsider” when you have been organizing in Oakland against the 1% for 10 years.  But people brought their most generous spirit to this project, a healthy sense of humor, and a commitment to building the relationships and trust needed to advance the movement.  An important part of building these relationships and trust is the fact that many of us are active participants in Occupy Oakland, attending General Assemblies, contributing to work committees, volunteering at the camp, and members of people of color and feminist caucuses of the camp. Activists from Arab, Muslim, and anti-Zionist Jewish communities, including members of AROC, PYM, and IJAN set up an “Intifada” tent, where overnight campers affiliated with LeftBay99 stay, and Causa Justa :: Just Cause set up a “Serve the People” tent where free know-your-rights information is provided to tenants and homeowners facing foreclosure, to immigrants encountering ICE, and where volunteers and ally organizations provide mental health counseling, referrals, and other crucially needed social services.

The outcome of this joint work was impressive.  On November 2 city workers, teachers, students, union people, elders, children, chanted, swayed and danced through the streets of Oakland. We roared, “We are the 99%” as we marched through downtown, with dozens of inspiring actions and contingents forming part of the celebratory day.

Causa Justa :: Just Cause helped organize a march to shut down the Big Banks demanding  a moratorium on foreclosures; and demanding banks like Wells Fargo stop investing in detention centers, dirty energy, and predatory payday lending.  The marches highlighted the responsibility these banks have for the economic crisis, called for them to pay their fair share in taxes, and highlighted Black and Latino families struggling to save their homes from foreclosure.  Given that both Oakland and San Francisco bank with Wells Fargo, there was also talk of the need for cities to divest from big banks and instead create local and community-based banking options.

“This economy does not benefit us, it benefits from us. It’s time to change that,” said Causa Justa :: Just Cause Immigrant Rights organizer Cinthya Muñoz Ramos. “Our communities are being pushed out of the economy, jobs, homes, and neighborhoods into prisons and detention centers as slave labor.”

At the State Building, teachers and youth demanded greater funding for education, and disabled people and homecare workers demanded greater funding for social services.  The children’s brigade started with story time at the public library, and carried signs reading “Don’t you dare steal my future!” and “Share!”

Labor had a strong presence, including the participation and endorsement of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, California Nurses Association/National Nurses United, Service Employees International Union and Oakland Educational Association.  The Alameda County Labor Council was also supporting, and served grilled hot dogs and hamburgers to protesters, in a delicious show of solidarity.

Maria Reyes, of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Mujeres Unidas spoke before the crowd, reminding us that immigrants are part of the 99% and have been waging the battle for fair treatment long before the Occupied movement kicked off.

“We take care of the 1 percent’s children and their grandparents and their elderly.  While we’re taking care of the elderly and their children, our children stay late at school or home alone and we come home from work frustrated because we don’t get treated right. That is why we want a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights so that we are treated fairly.”

Movement veteran Angela Davis spoke: “We do not assent to economic exploitation. We do not assent to global capitalism, to police violence, to corporate inequalities. We do not assent to the prison industrial complex… the eyes of the world are on our city.”

Following the bank marches people took to the streets again, shutting down the Port of Oakland,  the fifth busiest port in the US.  Jack Hayman of the ILWU stated in a press conference that the Longshoremen had stopped work on their own in the morning. The port was shut down. “The trucks with containers are backed up for at least a mile. None of the cranes are moving… and the rank and file of the Longshoreman’s Union did this on their own. The leaders of the union wanted them to work today, but they by and large are not working the port.” Thousands then marched to the port, shutting down the roads for miles around. By 6pm the Port of Oakland announced that “all maritime activities” had been shut down because of the sea of thousands of protestors descending on the port.

Dozens of protestors clambered up on cargo boxes and truck cabs as a sea of marchers could be seen coming across the bridge toward the port.

Oakland was the site of the last great general strike in 1946 when 130,000 workers refused to work in solidarity with 400 female retail clerks.

Dwight McElroy, president of the chapter 1021 Service Employees Union said, “Our city and our coworkers are taking furlough days, they are losing their homes. We have individuals having to choose between their mortgage and having their cars repaired. We need to stand in solidarity. America has caused a marriage between the occupy and labor movement — it’s something that should have come some time ago but it’s never too late.”

Hundreds of teachers and nurses came out as well. Sharon Blaschka, a nurse practitioner, and member of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United Union said, “I believe in the OWS movement. It’s been a long time coming. It should have happened a long time ago. The 1 percent count on the fact that we don’t have enough time to get out there and do something major because we have to support our families and they’re counting on that fact. I had patients today but I rescheduled all of them and when I called them to tell them why — they were excited about it.”

She added, “I also came with my family to support our family and our schools. The Oakland Unified School District is closing five elementary school, but yeah, we can drop a billion dollars on Libya. So, if we can drop a million dollars on the war then why can’t we drop a billion dollars into our education system?  Like they say, if you’re not outraged, your not paying attention.”

Said Nell Myhand of the day’s actions. “It was fantastic. This is the moment we have been working for — many of us for years and years,” said Myhand, who is Oakland Homeowner Clinic Coordinator for Causa Justa :: Just Cause, and fighting to keep her own home from foreclosure: “We get divided within our class. But we can see this dramatic shift when we start talking about the 99%. We can see the divisions that the top 1% capitalize on based on our differences in class. Well that’s over. We see the thing we have in common is that the banks are bankrupting all of us.”

The tone after the march was one excitement about what is to come, but there are many hurdles ahead of us.

Unfortunately, some media outlets focused on incidents of property damage instead of on the thousands of people who participated in the strike, and are intent on re-framing away from the demands of the 99%.

This serves law and order types in the city, including certain city council members, who have leaped in opportunistically, attempting to paint a picture of disorder and violence in order to advance their agenda of gang injunctions, curfews, and an overall increase in policing and decrease of rights.

And besides fighting back against these attacks on the movement, there are crucial conversations to be had within the movement now.  How do we continue building on this momentum?  How can we branch out from the camps to a much broader community-based resistance to the 1%?

There are two crucial components to this next phase:

One is to get clear on the US’s role in the international arena, since our government is the 1% to the rest of the world.  We must tie our local fights to the international sphere.  We can’t separate the lack of investment in affordable housing in Oakland from the massive investment in military occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We must make those links that will make our movement stronger, and grow our movement to the international scale, which the 1% operate in.

Two is to get clear on our demands. Only demands can help us win concrete changes that our communities so desperately need, and only demands will help us avoid co-optation.  Once we have demands, we can work with more mainstream or center forces, and benefit from their expertise and resources in policy initiatives that reflect those demands. Without demands, with the danger of co-optation looming, if our only reference point becomes the camps, then the possibilities to advance are limited.

With a strong set of demands, and a clear internationalist perspective, the 99% can continue to grow as a political force, have greater influence over the mainstream, and move one step closer to building a movement too big to fail.

by María Poblet & Rose Arrieta, Causa Justa / Just Cause

María Poblet is the Executive Director of Causa Justa :: Just Cause. She is Chicana and Argentine, and has more than a decade of experience in Latino community organizing. At St. Peter’s Housing Committee, María was instrumental in transforming a service provision model into a membership and organizing structure, and a grassroots leadership development and political education program. In 2009, she helped lead the merger between St. Peter’s and Just Cause Oakland that created Causa Justa :: Just Cause, bringing together the organization’s respective work in the Latino community in San Francisco and the African American community in Oakland into a single, regional organization for racial and economic justice. She has been a leader in movement building work at the grassroots, including the US Social Forum and the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance. Maria had the privilege of being mentored for many years by June Jordan, and was the Artistic Director of Poetry for the People before she fell in love with community organizing.

Rose Arrieta: With over 20 years of journalism experience from mainstream to community media. Rose has come on board to lead our organization’s communications work. She’s originally from Los Angles and her work has been inspired by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, the Chicano Movement, American Indian Movement, and lots of conversations around the kitchen table with her pro-union family.

One significant aspect of the relationship between community organizing and Occupy movement in New York City is the synergy between Occupy Wall Street and several community organizations that have been organizing around revenue issues for the past year.   This piece is a dialogue between organizers from two of the organizations – Community Voices Heard and VOCAL New York (formerly known as New York City AIDS Housing Network / NYCAHN) – that have been active in that revenue organizing. This organizing around revenue issues – which included a civil disobedience action at the Capitol on March 1, 2011, a Wisconsin-inspired overnight occupation of the New York State Capitol in late March and the May 12^th Mobilization on Wall Street – has put CVH and VOCAL in closer relationship with larger community organizations and labor unions on the one hand and, on the other,  with many of the direct action activists who helped to initiate Occupy Wall Street.  Since the occupation began in September, VOCAL and CVH have related to it in several different ways.  In this interview, CVH and VOCAL organizers reflect on those experiences and discuss their vision for how those relationships should unfold.

SONDRA YOUDELMAN: Sondra is the Executive Director of Community Voices Heard (CVH) in New York State, a membership organization of low-income New Yorkers fighting to influence policy change around issues that affect low-income families.  She serves on the Boards of the Pushback Network and Grassroots Global Justice, and she is active in National People’s Action and the Right to the City Alliance.

HENRY SERRANO: Henry is the Lead Organizer of Community Voices Heard (CVH) in New York State.  He is also on the Boards of both the North Star Fund and the Progressive Technology Project.

JEREMY SAUNDERS:  Jeremy Saunders has been organizing in New York since 2001. He has worked at ACORN, Community Voices Heard and the North West Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition. He is currently the lead organizer for VOCAL New York, formerly the NYC AIDS Housing Network (NYCAHN), which organizes low-income New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS, the formerly incarcerated as well as active and former drug users.

CHRIS KEELEY: Chris is the Coordinator of the New Deal for New York Campaign, a collaboration of community organizations across the state of New York that are working collaboratively to lift up the need for new revenue raising and increased investment in job creation and critical social services.

JEREMY: VOCAL got involved in the revenue fight when our flagship AIDS housing bill – which would have ensured that 10,000 low-income New Yorkers who are living with HIV/AIDS would not have to pay more than 30 percent of their income towards rent – was vetoed by Governor Paterson. Paterson had been supportive of the bill, but he said he couldn’t approve it because it would cost too much, and the state couldn’t afford it during a crisis.  So then, we found ourselves stuck in these reactive fights to defend AIDS services in New York City. It was clear that these dynamics were only going to get worse – that we were going to end up focusing on defending a smaller and smaller pool of services – unless we fought on revenue issues.  So, on March 1^st of this year, VOCAL New York and CVH organized a big action in the hallways of the Capitol building to protest the fact that the government was cutting services for poor people at the same time as it was giving tax breaks to New York’s wealthiest.  Seventeen people were arrested that day, and it got a lot of attention. Everyone – from the media to the police to elected officials – said that they hadn’t seen anything like it in a long time.  That action put us on the map. It was what got us working with these larger community organizations, unions, and direct action activists. It helped to build towards the overnight occupation of the Capitol in late March and the May 12^th actions on Wall Street.  As we started to plan more and more actions together over time, we’ve built up good working relationships.

SONDRA: Community Voices Heard started getting involved in organizing around revenue and the big banks about a year ago.  Recovery funds were dying out very rapidly. Everything that we were demanding was based on a proactive plan that would require more money, but instead we were having to fight against budget cutbacks. We felt like we needed to move into working on revenue issues and to really think about proactive revenue fights and alternative taxation campaigns if we were ever going to be able to win and fund any of the stuff our members wanted.  At first, it was this weird wonky set of issues around taxes that seemed too disconnected.  It didn’t resonate well with our members.  Then, when the recession started to get talked about in the media, and there were tons of stories about inequality, our members began to react. “Recession?  It’s a depression!  And we’ve been experiencing this for years.  But at least people are talking about it now.” The fact that government needed to be forced to invest back in people and communities if we were going to turn things around was pretty clear to our members.  And, when government kept saying there was no money, that’s when the need to get it from the institutions and people that have more to give started making sense as something to work on. This recession put us in a moment where everyone needs the safety net, so we have a chance to build broader alliances around safety net fights.  However, our members had hesitancy about what it means to build that broader front: will our issues get lost?  When we fight for the broader safety net, our constituencies – like African American and Latino workfare workers – are not the main-ticket items that are going to get the press. But we knew we needed to build this broader fight around revenue if our issues were going to have any chance of winning.  So we started working on the revenue campaign, which made it clear that we needed to do statewide work, perhaps with some new partners.  It was during the May 12^th actions that our organizations met some of the people who helped to initiate Occupy Wall Street.  There were working relationships across our organizations and the activists, which has made it easier to integrate our work since it all exploded.

HENRY: There has also been a realignment of some of the other political forces that we’ve been working with: labor and some of the other community organizing alliances. Some of those   broader forces have been humbled over the last several years, and – at the same time – we’ve been growing, so we’re more powerful than we were in the past.  That doesn’t at all mean we have more people than they do, not even close.  But there’s a perception that we have power.  What was happening with some of those broader forces?  The former ACORN forces have been in a period of transition because they were attacked organizationally and shut down; they have been rebuilding.  The unions were humbled through the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) fight.  They tried to pass EFCA proactively and instead they had their collective bargaining rights shot down across the country.  Even Wisconsin – which is an important part of the inspirational narrative over the last year – was a reactive fight to defend collective bargaining.  Labor has had to reconsider what they have been doing.  At this point, union members have had to fight to defend basic quality of life issues, so it’s still a “self-interest” fight.  But what’s changing is that it can’t just be a fight for a narrow self-interest. Even a fight around self-interest has to engage broader issues because of the crisis.

At the same time, things started shifting internally. Our members’ sentiments started changing after Egypt.  We started to get calls from our leaders around these kinds of actions.  I’ve been organizing at CVH for ten years, and this was the first time that our members started talking openly about being willing to take arrests.  During a statewide strategy meeting, we talked about this spectrum of actions that went all the way out to more militant actions including civil disobedience. When we got to the point in the spectrum that talked about civil disobedience, at first everyone was silent.  And then one woman stood up and said, “We just need to go Egypt on their ass.” I saw a real change in the sentiment in the leadership during that meeting. They had been going through these long, slow struggles, and now they were ready to get more aggressive.  That was around the same time that we connected with VOCAL to start this statewide work around revenue.

SONDRA: So our work was shifting externally around our issues and we were shifting internally in terms of tactics. And there was a realignment of the groups that we were working with.  All of that positioned us to be players at a state level in a way that we weren’t before.  And then the Occupy moment happened, which opened a whole new amount of space. We were on this trajectory of building statewide power, and then suddenly there’s this massive shift in public consciousness that we could take advantage of.

HENRY: We have been working on issues related to revenue and the big banks for about a year now. In that work, we have been working on parallel tracks with the activists who initiated Occupy Wall Street, and our work intersects.  About six weeks ago, we started planning a week of action around the banks that was largely driven by labor, and then Occupy Wall Street pops up.  We’ve continued to work with them, and what they have been adding is scale and media attention.  For example, we had been planning this “Millionaires Tour,” and we expected to have about 150 people participate.  We got 700 people.   And, for the first time that I’ve ever seen, our action became a joke on Saturday Night Live: this guy who was playing Bloomberg started giving addresses to other rich peoples’ houses so they’d leave him alone. That kind of attention impacts our members.  Our membership has always felt isolated in their fights.  They feel solid in directing the actions and doing some incredible work, but they have always felt isolated and like no one pays attention to them.  And now suddenly the media is paying attention to us.  We have gotten more media hits than we’ve ever gotten.  That came under the banner of “Occupy Wall Street” but – when that banner comes together with our organizing – it can have a more tangible policy impact.  Occupy Wall Street…they aren’t trying to have a concrete policy impact, and I think that’s fine.  They bring general frustration about the bigger issues. I wouldn’t actually want them to put more structure on that or develop more concrete demands.  I would discourage them from taking on a specific issue or a structure.  What they bring is a different level of scale and media attention to a wide range of issues.

JEREMY: We had the same experience.  VOCAL went down to Occupy Wall Street with five members, and they had turned that into 300 people within 48 hours.  Our five members worked with a handful of Wall Street organizers to organize somewhere between 300 and 500 people to march to the District Attorney’s office and then to march on Cuomo.  We went down there that day because we had this leader from VOCAL who had participated in the OWS actions when they were trying to evict them. He got the shit knocked out of him by a cop, and his attack became one of the most prominent attacks by the cops because of how blatant and, probably more importantly, because it was widely captured on video. So we organized a march to the DA’s office calling for the investigation of all OWS attacks, an end to all police attacks and to demand the NYPD stop listing our leader, Felix, as wanted. Here was this low-income person living with AIDS who’s homeless and who is  a highly marginalized  person at the protest that day.  Just yesterday, we found out the charges have been dropped. After the DA action we mic-checked to the crowd that Gov 1%, Cuomo was going to get a “Gamechanger” award from HuffPo across town, so we led about 200 to 300 people across town to protest Cuomo as well.  There is just a huge shift in the kind of scale and an energy that you can mobilize quickly right now.

HENRY: That may start to change now that OWS doesn’t just want to be a “mob for hire.”  They don’t just want to show up to action to be there.  They may start organizing their own stuff and stop showing up at ours.  We’ll see.

SONDRA: That’s their strength, not ours. Our strength is not in having thousands of people in the streets or holding one big march. It’s consistent action around the public debate – whether that’s through media or hitting a target strongly or creatively enough to get attention.  You don’t actually need thousands of people to do that.

HENRY:  We should take the relationship between our work and theirs as far as it goes. We shouldn’t try to decide what they’re going to do. It’s a different constituency with different class issues and different racial issues.  I’m not big on critiquing Occupy Wall Street for being a bunch of white people. White people should do these kinds of things. They have specific issues.  They’re 63% of this country. Yes, they are entitled in a way that we will never have among our membership. But that kind of entitlement isn’t bad.  We could use more of it. They are more entitled in their demands and in their approach to confrontation. Right now, white people are the majority while we’ve always represented a strong minority. You’re going to approach politics differently when that’s the situation.

JEREMY: There is a certain level of absurdity to people – including progressive groups – saying things like “Wow. This is amazing. We’ve never seen anything like this before.”  Organizers have always known that if you did crazy shit, you’d get media coverage.  Earlier this year, we did this occupation in Albany, and we got a ton of media. We’ve shut down the Capital. Other organizers have taken over highways and shut down cities. Another part of the absurdity is how much people forget when these kinds of militant actions have happened before.  Like ACT-UP marching down the street with a dead body, or the May 1^st immigrants rights march or the time when Justice for Janitors took over the freeways in Los Angeles. The World Trade Organization demonstrations and the FTAA protest in Miami were also good examples of a moment when there was strong (though usually off the record) labor-activist support and collaboration. There’s such a forgetfulness on our part, to read this moment like nothing like this that has ever happened. There’s been an anger in this country for a long time that we’ve seen explode in a number of ways. It may have been stifled but that doesn’t mean that we should forget about it.

SONDRA: There are some things that are different about this moment though.  I think that occupying a physical space for an extended period of time adds a new element. Of course, not everyone is focused on occupying that space. There are many community organizers and leaders that are going in and out of the physical occupation over time. But it’s significant that they have created a space where people can go and – just by going – they can feel like they are part of a movement, whether they sleep there for a month or go down there for an hour.

HENRY: We’re looked at as part of the political system.  They are looked at as organic.  The fact that they don’t have an issue is an advantage.  We say, “We want money for public housing.”  They are saying, “I’m angry at our government.”  That’s great.  They should do this broad messaging and visioning stuff. We can do the policy stuff. That’s fine. They can take care of organizing on emotion; we’ll organize on policy. We have to keep doing our own very specific policy and campaign work.  No one else will take that on, and the issues of our constituencies will get lost.  The best way to interact with the Occupy movement is that we need to occasionally interact with each other, connect in specific moments around specific actions.

SONDRA: It would be stupid to reorient everything around Occupy Wall Street. And it would be stupid to not realize that we can’t do the same old thing in this moment.  It’s a fluctuating environment. We need to keep our focus on the place where were trying to get to, keep our eye on where we’re headed in terms of building power for low-income families (like we’re focusing on a point far in the distance) and be ready to navigate reality as it changes and shifts.   My hope is that this moment helps us shift that long-term vision to the left.  That’s my hope for Occupy: to shift everything to the left. Occupy Wall Street creates a moment when we can push for more around policy, more in terms of our demands. If we need to do anything with respect to Occupy Wall Street, it’s to push them to make sure to keep pushing. Because even the radical organizing groups have been limited to fighting around crumbs.  We don’t need them to consolidate into a 501c3 and consolidate their issues into specific demands.  They need to do what they’ve been doing: to focus on the public discourse and create a climate where it’s not crazy to call for bigger things.

JEREMY:  My general feeling is that this collaboration is great and needs to continue. When it comes to our organizations’ involvement I do have concerns. I’m worried that this can detract from all ongoing work that has major impact on our membership/constituency. We’re being asked by progressive allies, funders and a few OWS work groups to engage in various ways, like meetings, actions and so on. We want to stay connected. We want to continue to find moments where we can support each other, but we have to realize that the amount of time we dedicate to OWS takes away from other work. There’s just no way around that.

We’ve got to keep doing our work. We can’t let go of the campaigns we’re working on, which are all about addressing specific issues impacting our membership that others aren’t going to take up (and don’t necessarily need to) like the AIDS housing bill or changes to welfare. At the same time, we have to find moments to connect with and support Wall Street with our members when it’s around issues that we both support. This has been happening pretty well. We have to think about building a core team of people from OWS who want to help support and build community organizations that haven’t been able to grow to scale in the past because they lack a broad base of volunteers. There’s a number of OWS protesters who’ve shown that they’re willing to dedicate time and energy and want to support building stronger grassroots organizations.

I’ve heard this continued call by the progressive community, prior to OWS, to get out of our silos, to build collaboratively, to build a broader movement. We at VOCAL feel like we’ve done that in a serious way. We’ve gotten out of our silo, dedicated serious time and resources to fighting for a fair economy. We rarely ask for our agenda to be included, because we realize it’s not the space for that and that there are moments to put that to the side for the larger cause and to accept that we’ll have to fight for our specific campaigns on our own.  We get a small amount of resources to do this work, and it often doesn’t feel mutually beneficial. It often feels like we’re being asked to take action by much larger, better-resourced organizations, without recognition of our ongoing work. I don’t mind joining coalitions, breaking out of silos, and I don’t even mind others not taking on our issues, but it has to come with some acknowledgement of what’s at stake and why some of us may feel hesitant to drop everything to “join the 99%.” I think this is a moment when those dynamics can start to change and – regardless – we know that we need to throw in on the fight around the economy.  So we’ll be down there.  We just hope it will play out differently this time.

HENRY: The next step is that we have to open up the political opportunities for our membership, so our membership can get more engaged in this sense of entitlement that happens at OWS. OWS is hungry to have conversations with the communities that we work with. We haven’t gotten our members down there enough to have interactions so they can engage and help to move what’s going on down there. In some ways, staff may have even acted as a barrier for our members going down there. It could be important to figure out how to engage our members in the organic process down there.  Our members have been fighting in their individual lives forever, and they’ve been fighting collectively with us for a few years. But being down there will give them a sense of being part of a much larger movement.  Our leaders have experience in direct action, in campaigns, in not being intimidated by people in power. The people down at Occupy Wall Street could benefit from that. And our members could benefit from this sense of entitlement.

CHRIS: Getting members to go down to Wall Street is an important part of the political opportunity.  Occupy Wall Street is seen as the anchor for the broader Occupy movement around the country.  If we can build relationships and they acknowledge the members and leaders of the community organizations that have been part of this fight for a long time, Occupy Wall Street could serve as a model for other occupations in other cities and help build some important relationships.

At a time when states and cities are fighting back austerity measures, organizers in Chicago are flipping the script! Instead of asking policy makers to stop making cuts, they are exclaiming ‘Show me the Money’!  Taking up the #Occupy moment, Grassroots Collaborative Executive Director Amisha Patel sits with OrgUp editor Sushma to discuss a recent victory: an agreement with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel to return $60 million in social services for the People.

Q: This year marks historic outburst and outcries by the American public against budget cut backs and austerity measures. From February’s uprising in Madison, Wisconsin to #OccupyWallSt mobilizations last week, people are coming out of the woodwork.  Why now?

A. The housing collapse in 2008 finally signaled to the mainstream that something is wrong with this system, though people of color and poor communities have known this for some time.  The Right took hold of the narrative and used the moment to connect with the squeezed white middle class, and moved them with anti-government rhetoric that built on resentment and frustrations that had finally boiled over.

Progressives, however, have increasingly broken through.  And what’s done it has been bold direct action grounded in long-term grassroots organizing that captured the sentiment of the majority.  The 2008 winter occupation of Republic Windows by UE rank and file workers did just this.  So did Mohamed Bouazizi in Jan 2011.  The takeover of the Madison statehouse continued this work.  Occupy Wall Street, and the birth of hundreds of acts of resistance, is yet another continuation.  This isn’t to say that the conditions for each of these efforts are the same, but they all point to the sparking power of direct action that directly confronts the corporate agenda, particularly when organizations and movements of people are ready to sustain the momentum with clear demands that speak to majorities of people.

In Chicago, we have been strategic about how to move direct actions around our organizing campaigns.  We have effectively built upon the national attention of Occupy Wall Street, and the effort is grounded in local organizing.  Through a broad community and labor coalition, we organized a march of 7000 people in October to protest two conventions of the financial elite.  We followed the mass action with days of planned actions and civil disobedience, generating tremendous coverage and effectively changing the narrative.

Q. While many movements are criticizing the cutbacks and spending cuts, some Chicago organizations tried another tack.  You flipped the script. Instead asking to end cutbacks, you called for increasing revenue generation. Where did this idea come from and how did Chicago’s decision makers respond? 

A.Grassroots Collaborative groups and our allies have been fighting for more revenue at the state and local levels for years.  This stems from a shift in strategy as the economic crisis became justification for the right to slash the public sector and services to low-income communities.  If we continued to have a reactive fight against cuts, we would be pitting ourselves against many other equally critical programs and services.  For us all to win, we need to expand the pie.

In 2008, we spearheaded a coalition called the Campaign for Illinois’ Future that brought together over 130 groups to fight for an income tax increase.  By launching a hunger strike that included an 87-year old neighborhood leader, we wrested attention away from the corruption-focused media circus surrounding ex-Governor Rod Blagojevich, to the dangerous state of Illinois’ budget and its impact on women and communities of color.

Our work addressing revenue in Chicago came from a power analysis we led with 20 key labor and community organizations immediately following the election of Mayor Rahm Emanuel in Spring 2011.  Consensus emerged that the ultimate power of the Mayor lies in the corporate power that elected him.  We realized that we could no longer keep running issue campaigns that did not reframe the corporate agenda.  So, we developed a strategy to move campaigns for revenue that targets city subsidies (Tax Increment Financing dollars) meant for blighted communities.

On the eve of the Mayor’s inauguration in May, the Grassroots Collaborative held our first action on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), who received $15 million in our TIF dollars to renovate their bathrooms.  Last year, the CME posted a profit of nearly $1 billion dollars, yet took our tax dollars away from our classrooms and our libraries so they could install golden toilets.  It’s a message that resonated powerfully with the broader public.

On Oct 16, 2011, one week after introducing the RBO, Mayor Emanuel agreed to declare a 20% TIF surplus, sending $60 million back to our public services.

From the beginning, Mayor Emanuel repeatedly rejected the idea of declaring a TIF surplus.  The Collaborative’s strategy was to do a series of creative, public actions that captured our message powerfully and shifted public support against corporate welfare.  We held a Bake Sale for Billionaires, we held class on the sidewalk outside the CME, and conducted a Corporate Welfare Tour via trolley through the streets of downtown.

Meanwhile, we introduced legislation that directly challenged Mayor Emanuel on the TIF Surplus.  Called the Responsible Budget Ordinance, our legislation calls for a 50% TIF surplus declared, and would return hundreds of millions of corporate slush money back to our struggling schools, parks, libraries, and City.

On Oct 16, 2011, one week after introducing the RBO, Mayor Emanuel agreed to declare a 20% TIF surplus, sending $60 million back to our public services.

We continue to push for our 50%, but this victory is significant for several reasons:

- We forced the City to move significant dollars from what has become a downtown corporate slush fund to our neighborhood schools, parks and libraries, bringing revenue into public services at a time when most cities are cutting back

- We changed the narrative.  Even Crain’s Chicago, our right-leaning business journal, wrote articles in support of our position against the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and reader comments overwhelmingly supported our position as well.  This resulted from a key columnist taking interest in our Bake Sale for Billionaires action at the CME – it was a clever message that resonated with him and readers and put us on the radar

- In a time of regular defeats, it is critical that we claim this victory to grow momentum, acknowledge the reform achieved, and continue building.  Our low-income, majority Black and Latino leaders are energized around this work, are constantly developing their skills and knowledge around taking on the corporate agenda, and are forceful advocates for taking on corporate power and winning a people’s budget.

Q. We are rumored to be on the precipice of a double-dip recession.What new strategies do you see union and community organizers taking on in the face of such possibilities? 

We’re at an interesting moment with the national and international attention that Occupy efforts have brought to what’s not working with capitalism, but the conversations still must be deepened.  We do this by looking at 1) history, 2) participation, 3) collaboration, and 4) theory/imagination.

History. I was at a gathering a few weeks back to mark the release of a new book on Gale Cincotta.  The room was full of movement leaders active in that era.  Some remarked with dismay how little things have changed from the 70s to present time – that the signs protestors carried back then could be carried at an Occupy march today.

A different perspective is that we must know what we’ve done before to understand how we have arrived at the moment we are in.  Cincotta’s march on the American Banker’s Association preceded Take Back Chicago’s march on the ABA by 30 years.  It failed to ignite the movement she had hoped for, yet 3 decades later, Occupy Wall Street exists.  Its worth considering how many of our “failures” are actually instead sparks with the potential to ultimately shift the paradigm.  Maybe if we knew that, we would never stop trying.

Participation. As organizers, we must continually deepen our leadership development work – and get to the place where people of color and working class leaders are deeply connected with one another, because we cannot take on the oppressions we’re up against if we’re in silos, or tokens at press conferences.  The Collaborative has worked steadily to move beyond superficial engagement with our leaders, as we have tired of waging great multi-year campaigns that don’t lead to greater capacity or connection at our base.

We must be in connection and in deep community so that we can undo the internalized effects of the classism, racism, sexism, homophobia, colonization, genocide, and every other form of oppression.  We must sustain and grow spaces of learning and engagement that create real space for grassroots leaders to grow themselves as they grow the work.  We must recognize that getting our minds back is just as key as creating good policies and transforming structural inequities.

Collaboration.  Labor and community efforts could lead to work that is both deep and at scale, but only if both are open to learning from each other and innovating new strategies.  We must continue to articulate what we are for, and not simply what we’re against.

The current structures and frameworks for most labor unions and community organizations do not support this work.  It requires us to go beyond the union contract, and the measurable objective of the policy win.   Community Unionism sees that the decriminalization of youth of color, the defense of public housing, and the end to sexual violence are economic justice issues.

In Chicago, issues of turf remain strong 40 years after the death of Saul Alinsky.  Recent work though has pushed against the traditional barriers to movement building, creating shared platforms, analysis, and strategies for change.  The Grassroots Collaborative has played a useful role in this effort.  We organized 2600 people from 25 community organizations to create a citywide push for a people’s agenda during the muni elections.   We followed this with a People’s City Council meeting that brought together 19 aldermen and 1600 energized community leaders and rank and file workers taking on the corporate agenda.

Theory. Imagination. As the economy continues to worsen, the question emerges: what are we doing now to prepare to rebuild society, and how will we create a world that supports the liberation of all people?  What are we doing to make sure that low-income people and people of color not only survive the collapse, but are the center of building anew?

We must work with our leaders on their early experiences of poverty, racism, sexism etc, because as the economy worsens, feelings of discouragement and hopelessness will continue to get kicked up.  We must do this work ourselves as well.  We are still figuring it out ourselves at the Collaborative, but it seems that if we want to imagine another world is possible, let alone build it, we must undo the effects on us of the current one.

The power of telling our stories grounded in smart analysis has shifted the sense of what is possible in this city.  There is more work to be done.  But taking on the corporate agenda to win revenue for our communities has grown our power significantly, and has helped to finally begin to shift the narrative.

Amisha Patel serves as the Executive Director of the Grassroots Collaborative, a community-labor coalition working to win racial and economic justice in Chicago and Statewide.  This follows six years of work at Service Employees International Union Local 73, where she organized hospital employees and Head Start workers, as well as worked in coalition with community organizations to fight against school closings and to win more resources for parks in communities of color.  She worked for five years doing arts-based violence against women prevention programming in communities of color in the Bay Area.  The documentary that her youth created, Young Azns Rising! Breaking Down Violence Against Women, screened in numerous film festivals and won the Asian Emmy for best documentary.  

Amanda Devecka-Rinear is a lead organizer at National People’s Action on the “Make Wall Street Pay” Campaign.  National People’s Action is part of the New Bottom Line. Check her out on twitter:  http://twitter.com/#!/AmandaNPA

There is a difference between knowing a thing can occur and having the faith and belief that it is on its way.   Occupy Wall Street has shown me a faith I didn’t remember I had, despite years of knowing.   Not only years of knowing but also years of organizing.  I was part of struggles in New York City with City University of New York students who fought to keep city and state money flowing toward educating young students of color rather than jailing them; and with Bronx residents fighting to learn and build new schools in one of the most overcrowded and neglected districts in the city.  Over the last several years, I’ve been involved with organizing across the country. I’ve seen everyday Americans stand up against predatory bank practices, Wall Street’s greed, and corporate influence on our democracy. Through all of this I believed that we could change the world, but that we would need to build the necessary movement to do it.

Now, Occupy Wall Street has ushered in a new inspiration and a new wave of possibility.  We need to support Occupy Wall Street, whether by sending supplies, being part of an “Occupy” in our town or city or supporting the “Occupy Wall Street Journal.”   And we need to continue organizing in our buildings, on our blocks, in our churches and our work places.  We must, each in our own way, match this moment and escalate our commitment and tactics.  Our vision for immediate change must be broad, powerful and significant.  And Wall Street must pay us back!

How We Got Here:

When I was part of fighting for a quality education in NYC, the fight was over how the city was allocating the money.  And just like today, politicians claimed to not have enough to spend on education.

And my mother just lost her job a few months ago.  She taught for the past 8 years at a community college in Ohio.  Several teacher positions in her department  were slashed by administration because of the state revenue crisis in Ohio.   Some things never change.

But things are different now. Since Wall Street and the Big Banks crashed the economy in 2008, one thing has become crystal clear: It is Us versus Them.  As Occupy Wall Street says so brilliantly, we are the 99%.   Money, wealth and stability are flowing from our families and communities directly to the 1%, and they would be happy to drain us dry.  Wall Street’s dangerous loan products targeted at African-American and low-income communities are at the core of what crashed our economy.  In the aftermath, they continue to foreclose on families, sometimes without even being the mortgage holder.  They leave tenants in foreclosed buildings in terrible conditions.  There are over a million people who live in homes now that are worth less than what they owe the banks.  The 1% continue to be on the winning side, no matter which side it is.

One in ten Americans cannot find a job.  And the job crisis that already existed in rural and urban communities is only deepening.   In September the national unemployment rate for African-Americans reached 16.7%.  And we know the problem is deeper than these numbers show.

And then there are the cuts.  Almost every state in this country is facing budget problems in part because of politician’s undying solidarity with corporations and the wealthy 1%; refusing to tax them and rather make us pay through cuts in services.  And states that don’t have it so bad are using this political moment to push a political agenda of attacking unions and cutting much needed services.

Bank of America is introducing $5/month  debit card fees.  Big Banks finance predatory payday lenders.  They borrow from the Federal Reserve at an interest rate of less than half a percent and then lend to corporations that charge us 400% or refuse to negotiate toxic swap deals with cities and institutions like the Chicago Public Schools, or State of Illinois.   They don’t pay taxes or fees on properties they’ve foreclosed on and pass those costs on to the former owner or the city.   And they can drop unregulated and unlimited cash in donations to elected officials and candidates.  We’re in an era of “pay to play” politics, and it’s our money they’re using to continue to screw us.

No Party Can Save Us:

Republicans are unabashedly pulling for team Wall Street.  Democrats are not doing anywhere near enough for us.  Although bolder policy and legislation, like the Financial Speculation Tax, could go a long way toward helping our communities, we cannot legislate our way out of this crisis.  Wall Street and corporations are absorbing nearly all of the profits and passing on nearly all of the costs and risks to the rest of us.  And like we say at National People’s Action, ‘That ain’t right!”  The crisis we’re facing today is a jobs crisis, a crisis of democracy, and a crisis in our economy.  This system is only working for Wall Street, not the rest of us.

We Need to Get Our Money Back:

No really.  We need to get our money back.  We have got to take back what they took from us and what they continue to take from us.  There are a number of critical ways we can do this together.  First, we can take our money out of banks like Bank of America, Citibank, and Wells Fargo and move it to a local credit union or bank.   Though this is an individual action, we can do it in a coordinated way and create a public narrative online about how we are doing this.  New Bottom Line will be launching a website in the next week or two where you can go on and tell us what you did.  So there will be a place to count and keep track. Share why you moved your money and how much you moved.  We want to keep track of how much everyday people are taking back from these banks.

Many of us don’t actually have that much of our own money to move.   Wouldn’t it be lovely to move bigger chunks of cash?  What about where you work, worship, or go to school?  Where do those institutions keep their money?  What about your town, city or county?  Where do you all keep your money?  After pressure from People Improving Communities though Organizing in California, the City of San Jose California moved nearly 1 billion dollars from Bank of America because they weren’t doing enough to prevent foreclosures in San Jose.  What if that happened in 100 cities?  What if that happened in 100 cities before the end of the year?

Their damage to our communities continues to cost us.  When a bank forecloses,   that family loses their home and whatever savings they invested in their property.  But taxpayers have to cover the cost of the foreclosure.  After foreclosure, banks often let their foreclosed properties fall into terrible condition.  These are dangerous eyesores and continue to drag down the property values of their neighbors.  Like Springfield, Massachusetts and Cincinnati, Ohio, local governments can pass ordinances that force banks to file a cash bond to foreclose, prioritize mediation, and take responsibility for their foreclosed properties.

And last but not least, Wall Street can pay taxes just like we do.  Smoke?   Pay taxes.  Eat out?  Taxes.  Drink?  Taxes?  Engage in speculative activity that drains our economy?  Taxes – not really.  A Financial Speculation Tax would be a less than one percent tax on short-term speculative activity – the kind of financial transactions that helped create the crisis – and it would generate billions of dollars of revenue.  For ordinary investors the cost would barely be noticeable.  Some estimate an FST could generate up to $150 billion a year in tax revenue a year off of Wall Street traders’ activities.

It’s Going to Take All of Us: 

Whoever you are, whatever you do, you will be part of turning things around.  The hundreds and thousands of people that are part of the growing movement to Occupy Wall Street, it’s up to you.  The hundreds and thousands of people that are part of community organizations and organized labor who are working to move your churches’ money, for dignity at work, to fight big bank backing of payday lending, who are doing civil disobiences in bank lobbies with families facing foreclosure refusing to leave until they get their loan modified, it’s up to you.  And it’s up to you, designers. You, photographers. You, writers. You, musicians. All of you who have been showing us the truth and telling us the story of this struggle. It’s up to you.

As the weather turns colder, we’ll see greed in the whites of Wall Streets eyes.  They’ll award themselves another record year of bonuses and compensation around December as a reward for their profits and the harm they’re causing the rest of us.  Our state and city budget fights will begin again with no relief in sight.  Let this be a spring like we haven’t seen in years as all together we fight for our families, jobs, homes, educations, and democracy.  Time to for Wall Street to pay us back.

Willie Baptist and Jan Rehmann recently released a new book, titled Pedagogy of the Poor: Building the Movement to End Poverty, which is now available for purchase. Following are some excerpts from Chapter 1 “From the Cotton Fields to the Watts Uprisings: Interview with Willie Baptist (I).”  

Willie is a formerly homeless father who came out of the Watts uprisings, the Black Student Movement, and working as a lead organizer with the United Steelworkers. He has 40 years of experience organizing amongst the poor including with the National Union of the Homeless, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, the National Welfare Rights Union, the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, and many other networks. Willie serves as the Poverty Initiative Scholar-in-Residence and is the Coordinator of the Poverty Scholars Program.

Jan Rehmann (JR): Willie, I will not enumerate all your activities here, nor your manifold writings and responsibilities. Let me confine myself to just a few selections. As a youngster, you were a black student organizer in Los Angeles and worked closely with the local branch of the Black Panther Party; you then became a national organizer of the Union of the Homeless (1986–1991); then the director of education of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (1991–2005); a lead organizer of the March of the Americas (1999); cofounder and lead organizer of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign; co-coordinator of the University of the Poor, since 1999; and, from 2004 onward, scholar in residence at Union Theological Seminary, with the mission to inform students and faculty about the realities of poverty and the experiences of the poor, not only about their plight, but also about their fight and insight.

Let’s transition to the interview. Willie, you were born in Corsicana, Texas, in 1948, and when you were five, in 1953, you immigrated with your family to Los Angeles. From then on, you grew up in Watts, one of the poorest neighborhoods not only of Los Angeles but of California. In 1965, when you were 17, you got involved in the famous Watts uprising, and this involvement awakened and politicized you. Would you like to tell us something about your family, and how you folks lived in Corsicana, Texas?

Willie Baptist (WB): I left Corsicana at the age of five—that was more than half a century ago—that’s a long time to remember what happened to me at that early stage of my life. But there were certain things that struck me that I still remember—the main one being the prevalence of child labor in the planting, chopping, and picking of cotton. My parents, like other parents, would fashion cotton bags for children, and we’d be out there in the cotton field picking along with our parents. That was a very excruciating effort, especially for children. If you’ve ever experienced the cotton plant, the cotton fibers grow within a hard prickly shell, called a boll, that constantly pierce your skin as you attempt to separate the fibers from it. This excruciating activity has left an indelible impression on my brain. There’s nothing romantic about it. Plus the dire heat there in that area—upwards of 110 degrees, even in the shade.

JR: Could you inform us of the role of the cotton economy and its impact on poverty?

WB: I wanted to have people look at the map here [Fig. 1.1]. This map shows the area of the South, the so-called Black Belt, in which cotton was planted, chopped, and picked. When people refer to the Black Belt today they usually think in terms of black people, where they reside. While it’s true that this is where you had the enslavement of the bulk of African Americans, what “Black Belt” originally referred to was the soil. A major geological feature of this region is the deposit of black alluvial soil left by the Ice Age thousands of years ago. It’s a soil rich with mineral nutrients, which makes it conducive for cultivating the rigorous cotton plant. The high grade of cotton and the conditions that it required in terms of mineral nutrients could only be produced in this swamp laden, mosquito-infested area called the Black Belt. I think this is very important to understand if you’re going to understand the requirements of production.

For years, especially after the early merchant period of United States development, the cotton crop contributed the most value to the economic system. On into the 1860s, on the verge of the Civil War, you have tremendous profits being garnered from this crop, alongside other Southern crops—rice, sugar, tobacco—but “cotton was king.” The North participated in the process in terms of procuring the cotton and helping to distribute it worldwide. The cotton industry became the base of the first major industrialization of the worldwide economy. The end of the Civil War and the end of one human being owning another human being—slavery—did not end the fact that 55% of the world’s highest grade of cotton, the most lucrative cotton, was produced on less than 5% of the earth’s surface.

The question remained after the war: How you still procure this valuable crop without slavery? The answer took the form of sharecropping, a semi-slave form that lasted into the 1930s. As W. E. B. Du Bois has shown in his excellent study “Black Reconstruction in America,” the temporary attempts to create a true “abolition democracy” in the South were soon undermined and defeated by an alliance between the industrialists of the North and the Southern planters—”the appeal of property in the South got the ear of property in the North.” The economic elites of the North needed to get that cotton. They had used black people as a battering ram in terms of Reconstruction in order to beat back the political influence of the planters, to set the stage for Wall Street and railroad capital to penetrate that area and take advantage of that lucrative crop. Black labor was again reduced to unlimited exploitation, and the old plantation politics of dividing the poor along color lines and having the poor blacks policed by poor whites was reinstalled.

The system of slavery demanded a special police force and such a force was made possible and unusually effective by the presence of the poor whites. . . . It would have seemed natural that the poor white would have refused to police the slaves. But two considerations led him in the opposite direction. First of all, it gave him work and some authority as overseer, slave driver, and member of the patrol system. But above and beyond this, it fed his vanity because it associated him with the masters. Slavery bred in the poor white a dislike of Negro toil of all sorts. He never regarded himself as a laborer, or as part of any labor movement. If he had any ambition at all it was to become a planter and to own “niggers.” . . . The result was that the system was held stable and intact by the poor white.

In the map of poverty in the United States [Fig. 1.2], you can see that the former areas of the cotton crop along with the former areas of the slaves coincide with the highest rates of poverty. There is a concentration of poverty in the South as a whole, but the Black Belt area of the South has the highest, longest, deepest area of poverty still to this day. You can see in the wage system that the white worker in the South makes less money than the black worker in the North. The white worker in the South makes more money than the black worker in the South, but he makes less than the black worker in the North. There is a tremendous wage differential that reflects the continuity of poverty coming from slavery.

 Figure 1.2

JR: Now, what happened, when the mechanical cotton picker was put to work on a mass scale? Did this affect your family?

WB: In the early 1940s International Harvester successfully tested the commercial mechanical cotton picker, which was soon produced on a mass scale. It could outpick fifty sharecroppers, rendering our labor superfluous, both black and white. As a result millions of black and white sharecroppers were turned off the land. Some of the poor whites had the option to get into the textile industry, but most of the blacks did not. This gave rise to what has been called the Great Migration out of the South [Fig. 1.3]. Some estimates have it that in the second wave of the Great Migration between 1950 and 1970, 11 million migrated, including about 4 1/2 million blacks. This map shows the earlier period, between 1916 and 1930, but the patterns are the same. You can see how the streams of movement developed. The people from the Carolinas and Georgia basically went to Philadelphia, New York, Newark. Out of Mississippi, they went straight up to Chicago. They call Chicago “Up South Down South.” The reason you have Blues coming out of Chicago is that a lot of it comes out of that plantation area in Mississippi. Because of the racist housing covenants and other similar measures the Great Migration of blacks found themselves concentrated into the inner-city ghettoes. Whereas Southern poor whites were more dispersed.

 Figure 1.3 

I came out of the Black Belt—Navarre County, Corsicana; we migrated to California. Because of the fact that my father had been involved with casual labor in cotton production and other jobs that surround that economic activity, there was this whole effort to try to find a better and more secure living standard for the family. In 1953, the whole family spent that last year picking cotton. After it was all said and done we had $100 and we were able to purchase a jalopy. We made our way to the West Coast by way of this jalopy through Dallas, then on Highway 20 to Los Angeles. My uncle and my auntie had moved there earlier and encouraged us to come, saying there was much more stable employment.

JR: How did you and your family experience [the Great Migration]?

WB: One of the things that I noticed as I was coming up in Corsicana, which was primarily rural, is that our family and other black folks were very scattered. Our churches were very small. We had a very isolated community. When we were picking cotton we lived in a shack that belonged to the plantation owners. We knew the other black folks that were around, and we saw white folks, too. But for the most part, I didn’t see the kind of concentration of black folks until I moved into Watts, a community in South Central L.A.

Urban churches in L.A. were much larger than churches in the plantation areas of the South. I went to Paradise Baptist Church, a huge church to me. Seeing all these people—the concentration of black people—that’s the thing that I remember from that age. Looking back on it, you can see how the Klan’s influence was effaced, because the Klan is not built for that kind of concentration of black people. What I noticed was that the fear of the Klansmen ceased to be a factor. The Klan’s position in terms of control and intimidation was taken over by the police. That kind of concentration could only be managed by a standing police force. A lot of the Klansmen became policemen. Because of the economic conditions in the Watts ghetto, the relationship between the police and the black youth was very tense all the time. I remember that any time we had an encounter with the police, it seemed like every policeman was a southerner. He had the southern accent, and I don’t care how many times you gave him your name, your name was “nigger.” Those were the kind of encounters we had and which eventually ignited the uprising.

My father worked as a dishwasher for a while, went to different kinds of casual labor, finally got into the construction trade and worked himself up. Both my mother and my father only went to the 8th grade, so for him to pursue that and get that kind of promotion was a significant accomplishment. But it was only over time, after I was grown up and out of the house. My mother worked as a domestic laborer for some rich white folks in Beverly Hills. When we first arrived we went from one relative to another until we could finally settle into a home. We kept moving from one home to another. I remember we were living in and around the train tracks.

JR: How would you describe the social conditions in Watts that finally exploded in the uprising in 1965? Was it a revolt out of poverty and unemployment or primarily against the unremitting racism, especially at the hands of the police? Or both together?

WB: At that time I thought it was only the issue of race. But on further reflection, you could see that at the same time as blacks were coming into the area a process of automation developed in the various industries and services, not only in the L.A. area but also throughout the U.S. economy. When the economy was restructured, blacks were among the first fired. That’s when the slogan “last hired, first fired” evolved. Because we were among the latest immigrants to arrive in the region, we were “last hired” into these plants, and when they restructured, especially when they developed new technologies, we were the “first fired,” since we represented the unskilled and semiskilled laborers. That’s where African Americans predominated, so we were laid off temporarily and often permanently; so you had concentration of unemployment especially affecting the youth, with unemployment rates reaching 70% among the black youth.

That environment was ripe for this kind of police relationship that was constantly antagonistic and would frequently erupt in some form. There were a lot of rumors, many of them true, about what police had done. There were cases of girls as young as 15 that were taken into the back of police cars and raped. There were a number of stories where African Americans were asked to get their identification and when they reached into their pocket to get it they were shot in cold blood, dead, under the pretext of having been reaching for a gun. There were bad relationships, but underneath that were the economic factors of unemployment.

One night I was hanging outside and fell asleep next to a tree. I was woken up by this helicopter from the LAPD 77th precinct. The whole street lit up like daytime and I was surrounded by all these policemen who were yelling, “Nigger, get up,” and “Nigger, wake up.”

And I said, “What’s up, man?”

They said, “Get the hell up,” and “What are you doing here?”

I asked, “What did I do officer, I live just across the street. What did I do? Why are you calling me all of these names?”

And they said, “Shut the fuck up,” et cetera. “They called into our office saying you had robbed something.”

I said, “I didn’t rob anything, I’ve been right here. I live right across the street.”

These are the kinds of incidents that created rage within the community. These incidents ignited the movement.

In terms of what happened in August of ’65, the rumor we heard was that the uprising was incited at Nickerson Gardens housing projects, where there was a concentration of unemployed youth and people on welfare.

So the night the riots started, this younger man Frye was pulled over and told to walk the line. He said he didn’t need to walk the line. They had a little scuffle. His mother came out of the project saying they shouldn’t mess with her son. The police ordered her to stay out of the way, but she refused. She insisted on them leaving her son alone. One of the cops took his baton and hit her in the stomach with it, and the rumor that went around was that she was pregnant.

Stories of that went throughout the community and you had something like 60,000–100,000 people hitting the streets after hearing about the incident. Within a couple of days, the police force was paralyzed. The police basically operated on the principle that became famously discussed in relationship to the Rodney King incident: You concentrate a whole force against a small force. That’s basic military strategy. When there was some kind of bust the police would assemble in a vacant lot in the area and then ascend on one spot at the same time. When you have 60,000–100,000 people on the street at one time, that nullifies the police strategy. So they brought in the National Guard.

JR: How did you yourself relate to the uprisings?

WB: As a way of protecting me and my brother, my father had started a Little League baseball team, and that saved my life. People I grew up with went through and sustained a lot of death over time as a result of going to Vietnam and also because of street activities. I was involved in a baseball Little League and I went on through intermediate, into senior and semi-pro. That’s where I got my name, Willie. At that time Willie Mays was the man, so if you played baseball and your name was William, Wilbur, or anything that suggests Willie, they’d call you Willie.

When the Watts uprising took place my father was concerned not only about me but also about the other players in the team and their parents. He made an effort to keep his sons from getting out there and getting into the fray and getting killed or something like that, as well as calling to make sure other people on the team were cool. He tried to keep me under wraps, but he had to go to work during the day and I snuck out on two days. At the first occasion, I went out to an area just watching stuff. You could see the situation just turning upside down in the midst of all this danger, the looting, sniping, the police play and stuff like that. You had this kind of festival atmosphere. At the corner this wino was drinking some Ripple or something like that—a bottle of very cheap wine—with a bag on top of it, and he directed traffic. I’ll never forget that. People identified places where they had bills they couldn’t pay and they would take the furniture and clothes from those stores.

Another day while my dad was working my friends came by and said, “Hey, man, come on out here. We’re having fun.” I didn’t want to be a poop-butt sitting home protected by momma, so I found my way out there. When I got out there I acted timid—I wasn’t trying to die out there. I saw tanks going up and down the community. I saw the sheriff’s department riding in long car caravans with their shotguns sticking out the windows to intimidate people. When we got to the area where some of the looting was taking place, we were trying to size up what we were going to do and before we knew it, here come the helicopters, like from Vietnam or something—that was all we could think about. The helicopter started chasing people with the microphones out saying, “Stop what you’re doing,” and “Freeze,” so we got the hell out of there. As we ran, my group split up and went all different ways, and I unluckily got caught with some other brothers that the police were able to round up by way of the helicopters. They pointed machine guns at us and had us get down with our face in the ground. I will never forget that experience. If that don’t wake you up to the social realities that this thing involved more than just your own individual situation, I don’t know what will. That this is a situation of the society and its military forces having to come down on a community left an indelible impression on my mind and helped shape my understanding today about the social character of these struggles we are currently involved in.

Here, authors Amy Sonnie and James Tracy discuss their forthcoming book, Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times, which explores radical organizing among working-class white communities during the 1960s-1970s (now available for pre-order).

Amy Sonnie is an activist, educator and librarian who has worked with U.S. grassroots social justice movements for the past 17 years. She is co-founder of the national Center for Media Justice.

James Tracy is a long-time social justice organizer in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the founder of the San Francisco Community Land Trust and has been active in the Eviction Defense Network and the Coalition On Homelessness, SF. 

Let’s start with the basics.  Can you give us a brief summary of what Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power is about?

Amy Sonnie (AS): The book shares the stories of poor and working-class whites who found common cause with the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the Sixties and Seventies. They organized in white slums and industrial centers, and they also evolved a version of feminism relevant to poor women’s lives. In Chicago, we look at JOIN Community Union, The Young Patriots and Rising Up Angry; in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood we share the story of October 4th Organization; and in the Bronx we introduce White Lightning. Together they represent a kind of “political family tree,” unique but influenced by each others’ work.

Some of the groups shared members, and we tell their organizational stories through the lens of their leaders and participants. Some were in well-known groups like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), but most of these organizations and individuals have never been written about. Many people have heard of the Young Patriots – poor whites from Appalachia – who formed an alliance with the Black Panthers and Young Lords called the Rainbow Coalition. But we asked, “How did the Rainbow Coalition come to be?” The book takes a longer view of the “rainbow politics” that inspired that alliance and that continued even after government repression decimated groups like the Panthers and Patriots.

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.

Blocking Highways! Blocking Hallways! How do we build a workers (and unemployed people) movement in the United States? Lessons from Argentina

Paul Getsos is a widely recognized expert on strategy development, organizing, leadership training and community power-building. Paul has extensive experience working at the national, state and local level. He has been a lead staff person on two national campaigns focused on jobs and unemployment and health-care reform, as well as a key strategic partner representing Community Voices Heard (an organization he co-founded) on national welfare reform, TANF re-authorization and global justice issues. He is also the co-author of Tools for a Radical Democracy. The following is reflection written by Paul Getsos on in early March when he was in Argentina studying unemployed movements, seeking for transferable lessons for U.S. based organizing.

The main objective is easy. Stop the normal operations of society. No business as usual.  Stop the means of production be it the flow of products and services or the ability of government workers to go to work.

It is simple. We need more localities, cities and towns in the United States to erupt in protest, civil disobedience and militant action demanding jobs, unemployment benefits, no cuts to poor and working people. We need working and middle class people to demand taxes on the rich and corporations and to bear the costs of education and basic services and community needs for all.

We do these things and then we can beat back the current right wing attacks and begin the long term work of  building a mass based left progressive movement that takes on corporate power and the politicians who feed at the trough of corporate contributions and then heed their will and demands.

In Argentina where the unemployed movement has been organizing for years, workers without jobs block streets to stop the transport of goods and workers.  In Albany, workers who want jobs and under-employed poor people who need government support block the halls to the State Capital. In Wisconsin, tens of thousands rally at the State Capital to preserve worker rights.

Blocking highways, blocking hallways. Marching on capitals.

Disruption of the normal flow of business is the tool that is most available to workers who have no jobs or those who are under attack.  It is the tactic that those who are part of the labor market, but who are not actively working, have at their disposal as workers. Employed workers strike or engage in slow-downs. Workers faced with firings and layoffs occupy factories. Workers without jobs block the transfer of goods, services and other workers. Its the tool that is at their disposal to force those with both economic and political power to answer to their demands.  If its jobs, cash assistance, food, or education, these tactics are key to reinforcing the identity of those without jobs as workers who are still part of the labor market.

When the hundreds of people from Community Voices Heard and NY VOCAL held banners across the entrances to the State Capital and forced state workers to take another path, they were echoing the actions of workers without jobs in La Plata, Argentina. Here 1200 people took over the main highway two weeks ago to demand that the federal government release millions of pesos for jobs programs in the state.

The protests in Albany and in La Plata included those without work, low-wage workers, students, working class supporters and retirees who saw the importance of working on this issue.  In La Plata, the two local union affiliates sent hundreds of people along to block the highway in solidarity with those seeking work.

I have been studying social movements of unemployed workers and the poor here in Argentina for 3 months. I have been meeting with organizers and leaders who have worked since the mid- 1990′s on these issues, and talking to workers and poor people themselves.

In all the various movements and organizations I have talked to,  there are four main points that those who seek to build a movement in the United States should think about when organizing around the issues of jobs, benefits and services for the poor, working and middle class.

These points are:

1. Organize people as workers and have a clear “working class identity.”

People do not want to identify as unemployed or even poor.  People are workers. Some with jobs, some without.  Some don’t have enough work to sustain themselves or to save for the future.  Some are not making enough at 40 hour a week jobs. By starting from this common identity as workers – you lay the ground for keeping people involved in political action and your organization or movement, even when they get a job.

Also it is important to redefine what a worker is and what working class means, both within your organization and as you talk about your movement to people outside of your organization. When you engage politicians, corporate targets, new members or the press use the language of working class identity for everyone that is not benefitting from the economic restructuring of society.

2. Build a Multi-Sector Movement.

Every organizer and leader I have met in Argentina told me that the thing they learned is that a multi-sector organization and movement is critical for winning enough power to win.  While it takes work, the importance of both getting people of each sector to work together on a common issue and supporting each others struggles is the key for building a strong movement.  Students, union members, retirees, welfare mothers, and workers without jobs, are all key to building enough power to take on corporate power and conservative political interests.   An example of the importance of building these multi-sectoral organizations and movements, is that when the state starts to crack down and repress the movements, broad based support will help to neutralize the repression.  When politicians work or make offers to divide and conquer the interests of each group, it will be easier to maintain a united front and have mutual support. For one another struggles.  The tactics of pueblados, when entire neighborhoods or towns go on what is essentially a general strike to support militant actions and protect the participants of these actions  against state repression is the most important result of multi-sector organizing here.

3. Organize at the local neighborhood level and engage in easy fights to win things that people say they need.

Working at the local level and building organization in the neighborhood  helps to get people working cross sector because they will ultimately work on and win things that will impact the whole community. They will learn  and understand the power of working together.  In the process of this work, they will build relationships and accountability with their neighbors. When the work, meetings and campaigns are based locally, they will more likely turn out their friends, families and neighbors to mass actions, increasing the scale of the movement. By achieving local wins, they will stay involved in the longer battles.

4. Invest the time and energy to engage in deep democratic processes and political education.

By building organizations that are democratic and rooted in the base and where community level decisions inform the larger movement, you can keep people involved for the long haul. Make sure community members are informing the campaign and making decisions about demands and tactics. Have clear organizational structures that include representation and participation from the base at every level of the larger organization.

When engaging in the work at all levels, make sure political education and critical analysis is a key component of the work. Maintain and articulate a vision beyond a single demand and one that has a vision for the world we want to build.

These are only some of the lessons from Argentina,  but these are the key ones, where people from every movement and organization agree.

These are points that might be useful to consider to those who seek to build organizations and movements that seek to address the challenges of the new economic realities in the United States, attacks on unions and workers, a jobless recovery, and attempts to dismantle the already bare boned social safety net that exists for those without work and in need.