This piece was originally published on Salon on February 2, 2012.

Arun Gupta, a New York writer and co-founder of Occupy the Wall Street Journal, covers the Occupy movement for Salon.

This interview by Sarah Jaffe was originally posted on AlterNet on December 22, 2011

Earlier this year, long before Occupy Wall Street turned Zuccotti Park into Liberty Plaza, Stephen Lerner, a longtime labor organizer with SEIU and mastermind of the Justice for Janitors campaign, wrote in New Labor Forum of “large-scale sit-ins, occupations, and other forms of nonviolent civil disobedience that must inevitably overcome court injunctions and political pressures.”

After the financial crash, Lerner headed up SEIU’s banking and finance project, organizing labor and community groups to fight predatory lending and other abusive practices by the banks. He has also been targeted by Glenn Beck for proposing debt strikes as a form of collective bargaining for homeowners and other debtors. Beck called him an “economic terrorist,” and he received death threats.

In a year when labor and working people became the focus for political protest in the U.S. and around the world — when a new slogan, “We Are the 99 Percent” captured news headlines and changed the way Americans talk about income inequality — Lerner’s words seem prescient. So who better than Lerner to discuss the year that was, the present situation, and the future of Occupy? AlterNet recently caught up with Lerner to talk about the targeting of Wall Street, debt strikes, organizing in America, and much more.

Sarah Jaffe: Reading your article at New Labor Forum, It does seem like you sort of predicted Occupy. How did you feel when it all started?

Stephen Lerner: I don’t know if I’d say I predicted it. A lot of us have been trying to figure out for a long time how we get out of the trap we’re in –we’ve been doing the same thing for a long time and it hasn’t been working.

But it’s an exciting feeling to see something a lot of people spent a lifetime hoping for –this kind of dramatic increase in activity that targets financial capital, those who really control the country.

The Justice for Janitors campaign was a campaign where the traditional way of organizing wouldn’t work, so we had to do something totally different. We organized people that everybody said were unorganizable–part-time, subcontracted, often undocumented workers.

There were many reasons why I think it worked, but one of them was that we had an analysis of who had power. In addition to the community organizing and the many different things the campaign did, the strikes and sit-ins, none of that would’ve worked if we hadn’t directed the campaign toward those with the greatest power—the people who controlled the real estate that janitors were cleaning.

The Janitors campaign was ahead of its time, or maybe another way to look at it is that it captured many tactics and strategies from the past and put them in one campaign. We combined the idea of rights at work, the rights of immigrants, race, the way we talk about inequality into a campaign that captured the idea of the poorest workers trying to win justice from the very richest people. We both won public support and had a strategy to lift people out of poverty.

We ran, starting in 2007 for a number of years, a campaign focused on private equity. It has been a growing part of how capital is organized. Workers and other organizations have to learn how to organize around it.

Similar to the ideas behind Justice for Janitors, we campaigned to pressure private equity companies, which are now six of the 10 largest employers in the country, to take responsibility for the companies they own and how they pay and treat their workers.

In the labor movement, as I wrote in the New Labor Forum article, we are constrained by the way we’re intertwined with the very people who are in charge of the economy. It’s not a criticism, it’s a reality. So Occupy has emerged as a third force, which has identified both who the bad guys are: Wall Street. Simultaneously, because it doesn’t have ties with them, it can go at them in a more direct way that has captured the popular imagination. They’re not constrained by historical relationships.

SJ: You wrote “unions are just big enough—and just connected enough to the political and economic power structure—to be constrained from leading the kinds of activities that are needed.”

SL: When I stress that this is the importance of Occupy, it’s not a criticism of unions to say that they live in the real world. That’s part of unions’ strength, and they’re winning real benefits and protecting members. That’s why we need something like Occupy that can do the things that unions haven’t been able to do in recent years.

You know, when you look back to the first organizing of the CIO, the sit-down strikes, they partly were able to do that because they had nothing to lose. It’s hard to imagine unions taking a similar level of risk right now because the very success of unions means that there are pension funds and buildings and assets to protect and a legal system that has dramatic penalties if campaigns have a real economic impact on corporations.

So what’s incredibly exciting is to go from the theory–there’s so many problems in the country, so many people are dissatisfied with what we have that we need something new, and it wouldn’t look like what we currently had. I guess you could say Occupy is sort of theory and practice meeting.

SJ: You mentioned the sit-down strikes and the old tactics of the radical labor movement that we haven’t seen in a while. And while unions do have a lot to protect, they’ve also been losing a lot of ground. The “Protect the ground you have” strategy hasn’t necessarily helped. As somebody who led one of the more radical labor actions of the last couple of decades, do you have some thoughts about that?

SL: It is a failed strategy—which I think most in the labor movement accept–to define your work and your plans and your strategy by defending a declining base. What I’m saying isn’t new, it’s been core to a lot of people’s thinking — that unions have become isolated islands.

The hard part is, what is a winning strategy? I think a key part of the winning strategy is a deep understanding of how the economy is transforming, figuring out how to engage and challenge those who are really dominating the economy.

On the Janitors campaign, we didn’t say this was a war with the cleaning contractor, we said this was a war with the people who control the industry. I think a big problem for a lot of us in the labor movement is that we’re ending up fighting the middleman, we’re fighting people who don’t have that much power instead of engaging those who are really controlling the economy.

SJ: Another thing you said in the article was that on the janitors’ campaign, your wins came when the whole community saw it as something that was about them, beyond the specific workers you were trying to organize.

SL: I’ll never forget in the 1990s, during the Century City police riot, when the police attacked strikers in Century City, one of the things that people in the Latino community again and again said is that “The police beat us up again and again in private; this is the first time that it was on film.”

The reason that people reacted, that there was such incredible support for the union after the police riot, is not that people became pro-union or cared for the wages of janitors, it’s that it became symbolic of how Latinos felt they were treated.

Where we had campaigns that have captured people’s imagination about the demands and needs of those workers, we become enmeshed with what people are feeling more broadly about the loss of wealth and power.

Everybody knows they’re getting zapped by banks, and what’s so good about Occupy is that it’s put that front and center. The fact that they were in Wall Street, I think everybody forgets. It was not Occupy a park somewhere, it was the fact that it was in the middle of the financial district. And I think on an intuitive level, people all over the political spectrum understand that those guys are at the center of how the economy is organized in a way that doesn’t work for most people.

SJ: It’s interesting because, again, a lot of people who consider themselves middle-class probably don’t think about standing in solidarity with janitors. But the 99 percent statement includes the janitors, includes teachers, includes kids graduating from college $60,000 in debt, includes literally everyone but the people at the very top. Do you think we’re seeing a new kind of class consciousness in this country?

SL: That is the brilliance of it, I think it captures so vividly how the country is divided.

If it had been rolled out as a result of polling or focus groups, I don’t think it would’ve caught on the same way as “We Are the 99 Percent” linked in people’s minds with people bravely and heroically doing something about “We Are the 99 Percent.”

I would say that is a really important point — that folks got arrested, were filmed, got pepper-sprayed, the attacks on people in New York City — all of that brought it to life in the same way that the Civil Rights movement, the sit-ins at the lunch counters did. It wasn’t that people hadn’t been saying for years, Jim Crow and segregation were wrong, it was the image of people being attacked for saying it..

I think there’s been something brewing under the surface for a while. More and more people are disaffected, folks don’t know quite where to put their anger and their energy. Some people go to the right, some people embrace scapegoating, but what’s so beautiful about this is it’s not just “We are the 99 percent, it’s “We are the 99 percent and there’s something called Wall Street that’s a key part of the 1 percent.”

I still think that most people are not opposed to folks having money, I think we’re opposed to people having lots of money that they get unfairly. I think that’s a critical piece.

I don’t think people are mad at somebody who invented a product or founded a company. It’s that people see that Wall Street is not productive. Their wealth and their riches, they do not come through any normal means — they come through cheating and gambling and ripping us off, which I think troubles us in a different kind of way.

SJ: Last weekend at the Netroots New York conference you were talking about the multiple prongs of strategy that could help bring the crisis, as you said, back to the ultra-rich, who created it. You talked about foreclosures, student debt, shareholder activism. Can you talk a little more about those individual things and then how you see them fitting together?

SL: Occupy Foreclosure and Occupy Our Homes are a piece that I think is organically linked to the movement — it goes to the heart of a lot of what I think Occupy is about. Wall Street and big banks caused the crisis and that’s why people are getting thrown out of their homes. It’s a combination of physically defending people who are losing their homes but in defending those people, they’re challenging the power of Wall Street in a very real way. It’s a wonderful nexus of occupiers, people in poor communities, and established community groups. It’s tied to ongoing work.

Students, I think there’s three pieces to that. There’s the current situation, with the general cutback of education funding, which is central to how we ended up with such massive debt.

I think what’s really exciting on the student front, is that more and more students are tying the student activity directly to the 1 percent, to Wall Street, that is profiting off of their education.

“Move Your Money,” I think is a wonderful 99 percent piece. Moving money, individually is step one, the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve said “I don’t want to get robbed by big banks anymore.” What’s really exciting now is that in Minneapolis they’ve delivered 11,000 petitions to the school board saying that they need to divest from Wells Fargo. LA saw an ordinance proposed for responsible banking, getting people to move public monies, both to get them out of big banks but then also to put them in places that create jobs. It’s a simple fact that if you invest your money locally, it turns over into the local economy, while if you give it to Wall Street then 40 percent of it goes into compensation for CEOs.

That work all ties into the bigger principal reduction campaign.What we need to do is reduce people’s mortgages to the real value of the house, which would put an average of $400 a month in every homeowner’s pocket. It would create a million jobs if banks had to reduce principal to current value and address the $700 billion in negative equity homeowners have.

One of the untold stories of the financial crisis is the disproportionate impact on communities of color. So the fight about foreclosures, Occupy our Homes, and principal reduction is really about how to return the wealth that’s been sucked out of communities of color.

Then the final piece that we’re seeing more energy around is “occupy the shareholder meetings.” Increasingly corporations control our government, but corporations in theory have these meetings where decisions are made about their governance and their investment. People should buy shares and we should be visiting key executives, we should have demands of these companies, we should show up at the shareholders’ meetings and say we want a say in how the corporations that are running the country should be run.

So you add all those things together and they end up being the streams that when they flow together, they end up creating a mighty river which can win really fundamental and transformative change and in doing so set the stage for ultimately rebuilding the labor movement. Which is what we’ve done at other points in our history, to really confront corporate power—by occupying work sites.

SJ: Glenn Beck called you an economic terrorist for proposing debt strikes as a tactic, yet we’re seeing campaigns launched around debt strikes this year. What role do they play in the coming fight?

SL: Right around a year ago, I argued that corporations have always had a way, whether it’s through bankruptcy or walking away from deals or renegotiating, to get out of their debt. So what I said that got Glenn Beck so cranked up was, what if we as consumers, as workers, behaved in the same rational way corporations did? What if we said, ‘we’re not going to pay back debt, especially debt that we got tricked into having, we’re not going to pay it back until we get to renegotiate the terms?’

I think what was so fascinating about why the right-wing went so berserk, is that I really nailed their biggest fear, which is if regular people join together and acted in the same way corporations do, we could challenge their power.

SJ: I think the language you used was collective bargaining for homeowners or students or whomever the debtors might be.

SL: After the economic crisis, the banks are more consolidated than ever. The top five banks control something like 40 percent of all banking in the country. You have a tiny group of people who basically are making decisions that control all of our lives. So it’s a very simple notion: why don’t we bargain with them collectively? They like it when we bargain as individuals, but they work together. They all meet and decide they’re not going to reduce principal, and what chance do you have as one lone homeowner?

So one idea for students or homeowners is what we do with unions. It’s not that one person goes on strike — you say, “if we get a critical mass, we’ll go on strike.”

The key idea for homeowners – or it could be for students — is can you get a critical mass? I’m not going to do it by myself, but if millions of other people did it, then we’d say we want to negotiate a better deal, and we’d actually have a lot of power to do that. If we all refuse to pay at the same time, it would put enormous financial pressure on them.

SJ: In the New Labor Forum piece, you said “If our goal is to offend no one, we’re in danger of doing next to nothing.” How do we balance the need to build a real majority with the need for escalating tactics?

SL: It goes back to the need for different streams of work. I think we need ways that people can enter at their comfort level. That’s why “Move Your Money” is so exciting — it’s not that hard to do, it actually creates a wonderful discussion about what’s going on with wealth in this country, why in the world the Federal Reserve gave trillions of dollars of low or no-interest loans to the banks while cities and states then had to pay high interest rates to borrow it.

The key is that you’re doing many things on multiple levels simultaneously. Some of those are majoritarian tactics like “Move Your Money” or some, like the shareholders’ meetings, will really excite a lot of people. When people realize they can buy a share of Bank of America stock for $5 and go to a shareholder meeting, I think that will attract a whole other group of people. I think it would be a terrific mistake to think it was all about getting arrested. Most people aren’t going to do that.

But you want to continue to tap into that emotion, communicate to people that we’re not doing this just for fun, we’re doing this because it really is what the problem with the country is.

The principal reduction piece is how we talk about solutions. When you say to somebody, “If we wrote down mortgages to what they’re really worth, which is just what corporations do when they go into bankruptcy or they walk away from properties, it would put $400 a month into the average person’s pocket at no cost to anybody but the banks,” people will go “Wow!”

Those are the kinds of things we have to look at, and very consciously avoiding polarizing just for the sake of polarizing. It’s a delicate dance, I think.

One thing that is critical with all of this is the commitment to nonviolence. When people are willing to risk arrest, and where it’s around people sacrificing or doing something out of high moral cause, there is huge tolerance for that even among people who may not agree. The use of violence is devastating to the majoritarian concept. That’s a huge challenge for the movement, the commitment to nonviolence and how that permeates everything that we do.

That’s what we learned again and again on the janitors’ campaign. We did things that were massively disruptive, on the janitors’ strikes. The response was totally different, when it was poor workers who were willing to go to jail to try to make a better life than when somebody in a more traditional strike engaged in something that was thought of as violence, even against property.

SJ: When I told my Republican mother about Occupy Our Homes, and when I told her specifically the story of the family at 702 Vermont here in East New York, and she said “Yeah, I approve of that.” That story worked for her, the way things like the We Are the 99 Percent Tumblr, the Occupy Student Debt Tumblr, really impact people. I think we’re seeing more willingness on the part of people to share their personal stories now.

SL: I think what’s key about that, people have been raised to feel shame if they’re a debtor or they can’t pay their bills. We’ve had wonderful experiences where multiple neighbors get together, and nobody’s had a discussion with each other that they’re all on the edge of foreclosure, or that their houses were worth so much less than they paid for them that they were every day losing money when they paid their mortgage.

People had this breakthrough when they’d say “You’re in that situation too?” Even on predatory and unfair loans, they don’t want to admit that they got suckered. People don’t want to say, ‘I’m an adult, I’m a smart person, and I didn’t see the trick in this.’ You hear people talk about penalties for early payments. Who in the world would ever think, “I get penalized if I make my payment early”?

People tell their stories in multiple forms, whether it’s online, in teams, watching videos, it gives that feeling of “Aha, it’s not me in isolation, this is something much bigger,” and I think it empowers people to take action.

SJ: We were talking at the beginning about the shrinking union base; can we rebuild the union base now that we’re no longer an industrial economy? Or are we looking at different kinds of organizing for the 99 percent?

SL: In a way it goes to the analysis question. Often when you looked at janitors one way, you’d say, well they’re all small work sites, there’s five people in the building at a time, there’s 10 people in the building, the employers don’t have that many workers, you’d say it’s hopeless. But really there’s a handful of real estate companies that control an entire city. You’re then able to think about the 1 percent.

I don’t know if there’s a country in the world that’s had a real progressive movement or the kind of change most of us believe in without a vibrant labor movement. And you can’t have a vibrant labor movement that just represents the public sector. It has to represent the private sector.

So I’m actually extraordinarily hopeful that what Occupy partly does is reawaken people to the fact that it’s not their fault that they have a lousy job, it’s not that they didn’t work hard. We’re awakening to a range of strategies and tactics, ranging from focusing on who’s really in charge to thinking about how nonviolent civil disobedience and occupations can really put financial pressure on those who are mistreating workers. And as we did with the janitors, thinking about whole geography of the industry to organize at one time rather than organizing in isolation.

When you look at labor history, you see that growth in organizing has never been incremental. There were times when there were bursts, when lots of good work paid off and it caught fire and grew far bigger. That’s the challenge for organized labor, to figure out what our relationship to these emerging movements is. How do we support them? And it’s key that they in turn are willing to do the things that unions may not be able to, that start to change the balance of power so workers can assert their rights.

SJ: Before Occupy, the first fight back in this country was in Wisconsin, around a collective bargaining bill. Not many would have thought that an attack on unions could have such a response.

SL: I think part of the reason Wisconsin and Ohio had the response is there were people to go after. These were government people, and you could un-elect them or change their behavior.

What Occupy has said and shown is that you can win the majority of Americans over to the idea, just as Wisconsin and Ohio could win people over to the idea that these government leaders were doing something bad. The key to the revival of labor is to convince the majority of people that big companies and Wall Street and bankers are doing something bad, so that when workers start to organize, it’s not seen as a campaign just for high wages for them, it’s a campaign that will make a more just, fair, and sustainable economy.

SJ: What do you see coming up this year? We talked about debt strikes, foreclosures, but is there anywhere else you see some forward motion that we haven’t discussed?

SL: I don’t think anybody should view a sort of holiday or winter lull in activity as a sign of anything. As people have said, movements ebb and flow, and whenever we look back, spring is the time that things take off again. It’s really important that people not say “Oh, everything was front page news and now it’s not.” People instead should be stepping back, saying, “In three months we did more than anybody imagined we could do, now it’s time to step back and figure out the next stage.”

To me when we marry our rhetoric and our actions, that’s when we both capture people’s imaginations but also develop the strategies and tactics that win.

In my head I always come back to this: it’s when words and acts mirror themselves that you then build real movements. If the Civil Rights movement had just said Jim Crow and all this are terrible and therefore we’re just going to do petitions, people would have said, that’s not sufficient.

I think we’re doing lots of great work, but it’s not sufficient unless when you add it all up it has the words and the tactics that really mirror each other in a way that really lets us challenge what’s going on.

Sarah Jaffe is an associate editor at AlterNet, a rabblerouser and frequent Twitterer. You can follow her at @seasonothebitch.

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.

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.  

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.

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 will be publishing the notes from their  stimulating dialogue in several sections over the next several months.  This month’s section focuses on the historical context that shapes the current exclusions of certain sectors of workers from labor protections and the right to organize and the ways in which the state and capital have used exclusions to divide and weaken the working classes.

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: Let’s get started with Smiley and Saket telling us a little bit about the Excluded Workers Congress: what is it, how did it come into being in the last year or so?

SMILEY: The Excluded Workers Congress came into being when several national networks including the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, the Alliance of Guestworkers and Jobs with Justice came together at the U.S. Social Forum this past year to pull together a people’s movement assembly to launch a new framework around the “human right to organize.”  We recognized that, over the past couple of decades, a lot of independent workers centers had formed to address the basic needs of workers who were trying to organize in the workplace but – for whatever reasons – couldn’t organize under traditional labor law. Some groups were just written out altogether, but – even if they were included in traditional labor law – they were just too many barriers to organizing. So we wanted to try to introduce this as a framework.  So we organized the Excluded Workers Congress to bring workers from all these different sectors together to talk about their innovative strategies and how we were trying to organize for dignity and respect and self-determination in our communities and in the workplace, despite these barriers to organizing.  The sectors that came together in that first big gathering included: formerly incarcerated workers, restaurant workers, farmworkers, workers from “right to work for less” states in the South, workfare workers, domestic workers, day laborers, taxi workers and guest workers.  They came together to talk about barriers but also to talk about the strategies we were using to organize despite the different exclusions.  After that gathering, there were a couple of follow-up strategy sessions, and it was clear that there was a need, that excluded workers had to come together to build power to try to expand the human right to organize for the long term.  There is a need, even from the standpoint of the traditional U.S. labor movement. This – in many ways – was an innovative approach that the labor movement needed; they  the “excluded workers” to be strong and powerful in order for the labor movement to survive in the United States.  We officially formed ourselves into a federation in September of last year at the AFL-CIO.  It felt like a historic moment because it was brought together allies from the traditional labor movement with groupings from the Excluded Workers Congress. We acknowledged that this is the direction we were going in and that we were going to expand the right to organize – whether it was through the National Labor Relations Act or something brand new.

SAKET: When we started thinking across networks about an Excluded Workers Congress, we were on the heels of the economic crash and the economic meltdown, and it seemed very clear that two things were happening.  First of all, millions and millions of people were seeing the real impact of the attack on the labor movement, including the attack on trade unions.  Our shared perspective was that the decline in wages was largely a result of  the attack on the labor movement in this country.  We also saw that we were in an era where workers organizing for dignity was framed as being bad for the economy, which is what happens in times of economic emergency. Similar to a post- 9/11 era where civil liberties are framed as a threat to national security, all of a sudden organizing of workers to lift their conditions became a threat to economic security.   When we came together, it was historic but it wasn’t totally new.  Sectors came into the Congress building on more than a decade of developing new forms of organizing that aimed to expand the right to organize for workers. The domestic workers talked about using the International Labor Organization as a tool. Day laborers talked about new forms of collective bargaining that they had innovated in day labor centers across the country.  Restaurant workers and taxi drivers shared their experiences. What was new was the coming together, and it was both a historic and an exciting afternoon. It was an electrifying experience.  Of course, the various sectors had been talking. We had been planning, and we were doing our best. But  there was a question of whether it would really work to bring these sectors together. And what we found was that 400 workers were in the room together, and it absolutely worked. It was an electrifying incredible experience where everybody came in with their own experiences, but everybody left bigger than they had come in.  Everybody left bigger and deeper.  Particularly significant was the presence of welfare workers, formerly incarcerated workers  and workers in right to work states from trade unions who were left out of collective bargaining. Most of these sectors primarily represented African American workers.  That was important because there has been a false equivalence between worker and immigrant over the last few years in our social movements, and we really broke through that to get to what it really means to be a workers trying to advance into opportunity and inclusion through organizing.  It was really a very pure feeling in the room.

HARMONY: I want emphasize the reason for the use this term “excluded worker” and to say it again in its most basic form, it means workers who are excluded either by name or by fact from federal labor protections and from the right to organize. And that happens through a range of exclusions, which we’ll talk about more during this panel.  Sometimes certain groups of workers are excluded by name in the law, sometimes workers are defined out of being workers by the law, and so on – for a range of reasons that are specific to different sector.   Those are the kinds of exclusions that happen on a technical level. But on a broader level, there are two different sources of exclusion that the Excluded Workers Congress has talked about. The first is that there is a history of racialized exclusion of certain sectors of workers in this country, historically that has primarily been an exclusion of Black workers and it has extended to all workers of color who have faced this history of racialized exclusion.  The second source of exclusion is the massive transformations in the global political-economic order that have made historical labor protections relatively irrelevant for the forms of workplaces and the workforces that exist today.  Models were developed that reflected the dynamics of the industrial era that do not reflect the conditions of work today. So that’s some of the context that the Excluded Workers Congress is responding to. Now I want to ask Professor Nadasen and Professor Piven to help us explore the history of exclusion and some of the contemporary transformations that have created these issues.

PIVEN: I want to try to stand the word “exclusion” upside down. I think that people we call “excluded workers” are in fact workers. Therefore they are, in a sense, included in the dynamics of labor markets.  But they are divided from the groups of workers that gained standing and protection and some rights to bargain in the labor markets. So it isn’t so much their exclusion as much as it is their categorical separation from the bulk of workers. Actually, in certain historical periods, it’s been the great bulk of workers who have not had standing to negotiate, but rather artisans of a particular kind who were organized and had standing. These division of workers into categories get naturalized at particular moments, partly because they are associated with racial or national characteristics and partly because they are associated with certain trades or certain skills. The division of workers into categories is perhaps the fundamental tool through which employers and their allies in government weaken the working class.  The reason is self-evident: as Western economies became more complex, more integrated and more far-reaching, the potential power of workers increased. Workers disruptions, worker strikes, when workers walked out and interrupted production, and the insolence and the difficulty in organizing the efforts of laborers who had such far-reaching reverberations – all of these forms of resistance enhanced the collective power of workers.  Workers had to be divided.  And we are all familiar in the United States with the basket-full of categories through which workers were divided, mainly with race and ethnicity, but that only begins to show us the nature and the tragedy of division.  There were also divisions based on race, ethnicity, gender, and skills.  I think that, in the United States, the most profound division has always been between the mass of workers who are considered to be the laboring class, the mass of workers who are considered to be independent workers and that other mass of workers who are considered to be “the poor,” as if they didn’t work.  And of course, they do work. This is a searing division of working people – and a division which has terrible effects in weakening workers and terrible effects in justifying the subjugation of the people who are called poor.

NADASEN: I am going to build on what Fran is talking about in terms of the important distinctions that have been created the poor and workers and among workers in particular. I want to talk specifically about the New Deal. Many leftists and progressives look at the New Deal as an important step forward, as progressive achievement for working people.  We know that the New Deal reforms that were instituted in the 1930s in the midst of the Great Depression were a result of worker protest and militancy.  The things that we think of as core labor protections – like the minimum wage, like the right to organize and bargain collectively, like Social Security – were a product of worker protest and worker militancy.  In that regard,  these reforms are a step forward for the rights of workers overall.  But  these new rights also solidified and created the categories and divisions among workers.  The New Deal essentially created a structured inequality among different categories of workers, institutionalizing differences among the working class. It essentially defined some groups as workers, and defined other groups out of the working class. A couple of other problems with the way that the New Deal was structured is that it tied benefits, primarily to full-time employment, so part-time workers are defined out of the category of who is a legitimate worker.  And it also tied most labor benefits to particular employers, so your employer would pay your Social Security tax and would pay part of your unemployment compensation.  If you had a right to organize, it was through a particular employer or a union based in a specific industry. These divisions, exclusions, and  categories were largely racially based. Agricultural workers and domestic workers were the primary occupations for African Americans in this period, and it’s not coincidental that they were denied labor protections.  The reason that those categories were excluded is because they were largely African-American. So these categories are based partly on racial divisions within the labor market.  It is also partly based on how work was defined. For many of the economists and labor leaders and politicians of the 1930s, work was equated with industrial employment–with factory workers–which was largely white and largely male.  Part of what is exciting about the Excluded Workers Congress is the way in which they are attempting to redefine and to broaden that notion of who is a worker, who is a legitimate worker and who can be included in this category.

HARMONY: Saket and Smiley, can you reflect on that history and on the political impact of the racialized exclusion of these categories of workers and the division between workers and the poor, how you think about that history and how that history impacts the work today?

SMILEY: I think both professors made some important points around the historic trajectory of the ways in which the working class has been divided particularly along racial lines.  I think that today what we are seeing throughout the country – with the Midwest as the epicenter with the attacks against public sector workers –  is actually a very divisive attempt to divide workers again. It’s not just a division between public sector workers and private sector workers, although that’s part of it.  For us, we also have to look at the sharp racist edge of that attack.  Legitimate work has historically been defined as being in the factories, as being very industrial, very white, very male. But the public sector has been a place where African Americans, in particular, have been able to gain a certain level of economic sustainability.  I believe that one in every five African American workers works for the public sector. In some ways, we were lucky to have had Wisconsin as the epicenter of the early attack because their majority-white public sector.  We could imagine that the police might not have been so gung-ho to support the workers in the Capital if the first attack had been in Atlanta or in Memphis. So it was helpful in some ways.  It made it clear that this was an attack against public sectors unions’ right to organize and to collectively bargain, and they didn’t allow it to be raised early on as an attack on “lazy, bureaucratic” workers and the other stereotypes they have used to define Black workers in this country.  So that’s something else that we have to look at and try to ward against and organize around. We need to try to maintain unity amongst working people in this particular climate.  Within the Excluded Workers Congress itself, we should clarify that we were founded before all of this started to shake up in the Midwest, before the elections, before the Right Wing and the Tea Party took power in particular ways and started being alot more aggressive in their attacks. Even within the Excluded Workers Congress, the sectors that are probably the least organized and that don’t have long-term national networks are sectors that primarily represent Black and African American workers. This includes the workfare sector, formerly incarcerated workers and the Southern right to work for less states.  We could argue that these sectors need stronger networks and higher levels of organization. There are a lot of reasons why they aren’t organized, but I think that objectively we’ve been put in this situation where we’re not organized. We’re definitely seeing the impact of that.  The Excluded Workers Congress is, in many ways, a forum to shift that dynamic.

SAKET: Well, I think that history plays out differently within different sectors but there are some broad themes.  I can share a few examples where worker experiences play out very starkly against a backdrop of history.  We organize guest workers and, for guest workers, these are workers coming in on temporary visas for short period of time, for ten months or so. They are legally tied to one employer.  They can’t work legally for anyone else; they are bonded to one employer.  They pay thousands and thousands of dollars to get the visa to come to work.  They usually live on company property in labor camps or in hotels and trailers that have been turned into modern labor camps.  When guestworkers in the South are telling their stories to the surrounding communities – especially African American communities – the history of slavery is very much present in the room. That history is a source of solidarity, but the point of looking at that history closely isn’t just to harken back to a previous era. It’s to really show how the political economy of race in these areas and industries hasn’t changed a lot, despite the laws on the books changing over the two hundred years. The political economy of race is still really based on a criss-cross of local, state and federal laws, on the ability to exert force and to make law enforcement an instrument of racial terror.  These things are very much still at play.  In a state like Louisiana or Mississippi, for example, there are two ways of being an immigrant worker – either you’re undocumented or you’re a guestworker.  If you’re undocumented, you’re illegal and you can be picked up and deported at any time. Your reality is shaped by laws that are very similar, if not the same laws as the anti-vagrancy laws and the Black Codes of the 19^th century.  For a guestworker, the only way to organize is to escape. We’ve staged many many very dramatic midnight escapes from labor camps. The reality of a guestworker who escapes from a labor camp is very close to the reality of someone escaping from a plantation or a manor and being subjected to the Fugitive Slave Act.  So to some extent, in some sectors, history is very present. On the other hand, there is another kind of history that is present which is the New Deal.  Both the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement were landmark victories for the progressive movement. In some ways, the institutions that were built through those gains stood alone in defending the gains they had won. The labor unions, the legal defense funds, all of these institutions that were built through that movement were built to protect the policy victories. But because poor and low-wage workers of color were largely not in leadership and didn’t have their own institutions, there was a gap between the policy gains and the ability of workers to build power out of those gains. So what I think is happening now is a new era of leadership among poor workers, particularly workers of color, to build out the institutions that will not be a “movement apart” but will join these movements to win and defend a new era of victories.

SMILEY: I wanted to respond to one other thing that Professor Piven said earlier in defining this issue of exclusion and excluded workers, given what’s currently happening in the country. This huge backlash of the Right wasn’t in the same sharpness as it was now.  In some ways, the Excluded Workers Congress really has to see what’s happening now as an opportunity to really broaden out what it means to be excluded by fact or by law.  So, for example, if Wisconsin public sector workers no longer have bargaining rights, how do we work with them? How do we coordinate with them in some way?  What’s our role in lifting up this issue of the human right to organize, a framework that hasn’t been lifted up yet?  And if we look around the country, there companies like Walmart which is the largest private sector employer in the United States. They have  historically kept workers from being able to organize.  So how are we talking to those workers about their right to organize for dignity and self-respect and for self-determination in the workplace?  We formed ourselves as a federation of “excluded workers” focused on groups that are either implicitly or explicitly excluded from traditional labor laws in the US, but we don’t want to close ourselves off from the broader contradictions that are happening in the country currently. More and more workers are being excluded from the right to organize today, and their fight is our fight.

WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM WISCONSIN?

Stephanie Luce is an Associate Professor at the Murphy Institute, City University of New York. She was a founding member of Progressive Dane/New Party and the Student Labor Action Coalition in Madison, Wisconsin, and active in the Teaching Assistants Association.

Like many people, I was glued to the news in early February, watching as the Egyptian people filled Tahir Square, demanding that Hosni Mubarak step down. By Thursday, February 10, the world watched anxiously to see if the story would end in bloodshed or victory.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the Governor of Wisconsin announced his “Budget Repair Bill” that would demand major cuts to social programs, and remove almost all collective bargaining rights for public sector workers in the state.  The next day, as Mubarak was resigning in Egypt and handing over power to the military, Governor Walker announced he was planning to mobilize the state’s National Guard to do the work of any state worker who protested his law.

According to journalist John Nichols, most statewide union leaders assumed they were defeated. After all, public sector workers are under attack across the country, and many states do not even allow them the right to collective bargaining at all. A similar bill had passed in Indiana only a few years ago. But graduate students and undergrad Student Labor Action Coalition members were paying attention and ready to fight back. On Monday, the Teaching Assistants Association (TAA) at UW-Madison organized a small march from the campus to the Capitol to oppose the bill. Protestors stayed at the Capitol, and the next day began lining up to testify against the bill at a hearing.  Their numbers grew quickly as other protestors joined them. Teachers began calling in sick and by Tuesday afternoon, and students from all Madison high schools walked out of class to march to the Capitol to support their teachers. Later that day Madison schools announced they would be closed on Wednesday since 40% of teachers had called in sick.

The protests grew, with tens of thousands outside of the Capitol, and hundreds more inside the Capitol, occupying the statehouse around the clock. People around the country (and even some in other countries) rallied in support of the Wisconsin protestors. Much has already been written about the next few weeks, including discussion of the 14 Democratic Senators leaving the state, to life inside the Capitol, to the resolution passed by the South Central Federation of Labor’s resolution regarding a general strike.

I will not go over the details of these past two months here but instead discuss current strategy and lessons for organizing.[1] While Wisconsin has captured our attention, the struggle there is going on around the country. Some of it has been going on for awhile, such as in North Carolina, where the Black Workers for Justice and United Electrical workers have been fighting for collective bargaining rights for public sector workers for many years. Some of it is more recent – including large rallies in support of Wisconsin, and protests against other state budget cuts and attacks on workers’ rights. Many activists report unprecedented turnout and spirit of these protest and solidarity events. People are also scared about attacks in their own state, and are also eager to be part of a movement that finally wakes up to resist the attacks.

Here are five lessons I think we can learn from Wisconsin:

LESSON 1: Mobilizing a Fight-back takes Organization

Why is it that the protests in Wisconsin grew so quickly, and so large? Social movement research tells us that we can’t really predict when an “upsurge” will happen. In fact, as political scientist Eve Weinbaum argues, all social movements begin with a lot of blips – many of which are failures. But what makes for a “successful failure” that helps lay the ground for a larger movement? As with the Mohamed Bouazizi setting himself on fire in Tunisia on December 17, there is no magic answer about what will eventually set off a much larger wave of protest.

But despite some claims to the contrary, the upsurges are not built from scratch on facebook and twitter. No doubt these are tools that organizers can use, but whether its Egypt or Wisconsin, the large-scale protests were built upon existing movement infrastructure and organization.

Madison is well-known for its hub of anti-war and student organizing in the 1960s and 1970s, and the city and state had a progressive tradition long before that. In the 1990s, Wisconsin unions and community groups built Progressive Wisconsin, a statewide independent third party connected to the national New Party.[2] The national public sector union AFSCME began in Madison, back in 1932.  Madison is also home to Union Cab, a worker owned cooperative founded in 1979; along with a community radio station and extensive food and housing co-operative system. UW-Madison is also home to the first graduate student union in the country – the Teaching Assistants Association, which won its first contract in 1970. In Milwaukee, Voces de la Frontera, a workers center, began in 2001 and played a major role in the 2006 immigrant rights protests across the midwest.  The Welfare Warriors has been organizing mothers and children in Milwaukee since the mid-1980s, producing a regular newsletter and fighting attacks on the poor.

The key point is that the structures of organizations were in place. While they are not all strong, they have access to resources, including contacts in the legislature, steward systems in the unions, long lists of contacts, and some independent media. Facebook is only useful if you have a lot of “friends” – and if your friends have friends. And if you and your friends have some history and trust around organizing. No one wants to show up at a protest and be the only person, so you need to have some faith that your networks will be there too.

This is an important point because activists sometimes want to find some kind of technical solution or magic bullet to organizing, and while the internet and blogs can be useful they can not take the place of good old-fashioned person to person outreach and organizational structures.

LESSON 2: The Right-wing is Making this a Fight of a Lifetime

We’ve seen some outrageous maneuvering from the Republican Party and their allies to get this bill passed. This should not come as a surprise, but it is still shocking.

Most notably, the Republicans were furtive in their attempt to pass the bill. State Rep. Gordon Hintz (D-Oshkosh) first heard about the Budget Repair Bill from a radio ad from a Washington D.C. lobby group on Friday, February 11, and found out he was expected to vote on it only a few days later without public debate. When the Senate finally passed the modified bill they gave less than two hours notice.

After the Republicans passed the bill, a Dane County judge issued a restraining order on the bill, based on grounds that a conference committee had violated the state’s Open Meetings law. Despite the judge’s ruling, Walker went forward and published the law a week later and announced plans to implement it, including stripping dues check off and other unilateral measures.

There have been a number of other tactics the Republicans have employed.[3] This should help remind us that the opposition may stop at nothing to push their agenda. Just as organizers do during a unionization campaign, we need to be prepared to inoculate potential supporters – warning them of the range of tricks the opposition will likely try, including ones that are illegal. We need to be armed with our facts to counter their claims, but also anticipate their moves.

LESSON 3: We Have to be Bold

Because the right has been so powerful the left has often been timid, afraid of alienating “the middle” and losing everything. We temper our demands to sound “reasonable” but usually end up just ceding all ground. The protests in Madison did not start from a position of “reasonable.” Graduate students and public school teachers marched to the Capitol to demand to “Kill the Bill.” They didn’t wait to see what focus groups or polls said about their message. The head of the state’s largest police union defied orders to kick out the protestors at one point, saying that despite what the legislature told them, they knew the difference between right and wrong.

The solidarity was not just between unions. The protests against the bill were from workers angry about cuts to their health care and attacks on their unions, but also from thousands of people worried about the impact of the bill on public services overall. The repair bill, along with Walker’s proposed budget, includes a wide range of cuts, including on the state low-income health care program (Badgercare), school budgets, recycling programs and more.

Political analysts claimed that the November 2010 election results proved the popularity of the Tea Party in Wisconsin, and said it could be seen as a mandate for the Tea Party platform of smaller government. But those who marched on the Capitol building did not let that stop them. Instead, many signs and banners immediately framed the issue as one of basic rights and a defense of the public good. Protestors didn’t just oppose Walker’s plan, but asserted that “We are Wisconsin” – that public employees themselves, along with their allies, were the heart and soul of the state. In this way they did not start by ceding ground to the Tea Party/Republican mantra of smaller or no government. Public employees and their democratic rights were fundamental to the quality of life of all Wisconsinites.

Of course, not all participants took such a bold stand. Leaders of the large statewide unions immediately and unilaterally agreed to the fiscal concessions in Walker’s proposal.  Some national labor representatives came into town with a “script” to follow, and I heard a rumor that they were using polling numbers to guide their decisions. Some Democratic Party officials tried to get the protestors occupying the Capitol to leave so that others could negotiate a settlement. Later, some of the same Democrats tried to convince protestors to leave things to the hands of the lawyers pursuing legal challenges.

But the message here is that taking a bold stand can often build more support than pragmatic leaders might have you believe. If you base all your decisions on current attitudes, you don’t allow for the possibility of people changing their mind. The realm of what is possible can change quickly. When the Egyptian people used peaceful protest to topple a dictator one al-Jazeera reporter said in tears that suddenly it seemed as if anything was possible, from women’s rights to freedom for Palestine. If we believe that the white voters of Wisconsin are truly Tea Party supporters at heart, we close ourselves to trusting that they can learn and grow by struggling for their own rights, alongside their neighbors.

There is also a lesson for political leaders, and that is that you sometimes need to step out of the way of the members. The Wisconsin teachers unions urged members to go to the Capitol *after* the teachers themselves had started to do so in large numbers.  Jim Cavanaugh, president of the South Central Federation of Labor, agreed that members were out in front. He said even AFL-CIO president Rich Trumka saw this when he came to Madison. John Nichols says that the TAA lead the protests because they didn’t let anyone tell them they couldn’t fight back, unlike the rest of the unions in the state who believed the fight was lost.

The status quo is against us, and many of the rules are not in our favor. Building a fightback movement will require us to disrupt the status quo, to break the rules, and to take risks.

LESSON 4: Hold Politicians Accountable from the Left

While Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio are all dealing with Republican governors, there are plenty of Democrats elsewhere who are attacking on public sector workers. Notably, Andrew Cuomo ran for governor of New York based on the promise to reign in the unions. And on the national level, even with Democrats in the White House and controlling both houses, there were few gains for labor. President Obama only gave tepid support for the Wisconsin workers. The attacks from Republicans are more extreme in that they are explicitly trying to eliminate the right of workers to join unions, and they are proving that they are not even willing to negotiate. The Democrats have stepped up in places to defend workers’ rights to organize. However, few Democrats are willing to take the necessary steps to fix state budgets or influence the national agenda in a way that protects jobs, wages and benefits.[4]

This highlights the question of accountability. One thing that we learned in the third party work in Wisconsin and that the Tea Party seems to highlight is the need for a left pole. The work of politics is about negotiation, and even when we don’t want to compromise, the reality of politics involves compromise on a daily basis. When negotiating, you want as many tools as possible to strengthen your hand. Having a mobilized left pole that is ready to take to the streets is a tool that Democrats theoretically should want if they were serious about their promises. The other pole is big money and big corporations, ever hovering about with the threat of withdrawl. The left has no other way to counter that pole other than with people power.

Right after Obama was elected, the network of over 13 million volunteers that got him elected was converted into “Organizing for America” and put under the auspices of the Democratic National Committee. Non-profits, labor unions, and activists in D.C. were given ‘access’ to the White House through coordinated regular meetings, but under unilateral terms set by Obama’s people. The rules were clear: if you wanted to maintain access you needed to stay on message.

When the attacks against ACORN ratcheted up the White House remained silent – as did most of the left, and one of the largest organizations of people of color was quickly dismantled. Although ACORN had problems, it demonstrated throughout its history that it wasn’t afraid to take direct action and pose challenges to those in power, even if they were supposed to be allies.

Obama was never going to be a left-wing president but even under his own agenda, he and his administration quickly benched one of their greatest strengths: a large movement of people that could mobilize for issues they cared about, and would demonstrate the popular support for progressive reform.

It isn’t just Obama and the Democrats that missed this point. Many on the left worried too much about arguing with others on the left, trying to convince them of a particular point of view. Instead, I think we need to see the multiple perspectives as a strength.

When I was at UMass Amherst, students and faculty formed a group called The UMass Anti-War Coalition. We were opposed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and had a general critique of U.S. foreign policy and neoliberalism. Soon another group formed, called Students Against the War. This group was not necessarily opposed to wars other than the one in Iraq. There were some students very new to politics, and even some who had been in the military. They were not sure how they felt about Afghanistan. At first there was tension between the groups, but we soon realized that we could both be stronger due to the presence of the other group. We could both set up literature tables in the Campus Center and attract different people. We could promote some of the same events and sometimes do our own thing.

I am not saying that the difference in positions did not matter, because they do. And I am not suggesting that we do not engage in debate about politics and strategy on the left. But instead of focusing so much energy on trying to persuade one another, we need to spend a lot more time talking to the millions of people that do not usually engage in political organizations and actions. Instead of spending hours crafting statements about why Obama supporters were delusional, or setting up panels to debate Obama supporters, left groups with a critical perspective could have spent more of their time building networks of people who were ready to mobilize about the particular issues they cared about (such as stopping the war or getting single-payer health care). Instead of trying to keep left voices and critics out, or denounce those who didn’t support Obama as sectarians or racists, Obama supporters should have recognized that they might need some of these critical voices down the line to keep Obama accountable to his promises. This is what has happened with the Republican Party and the Tea Party but the Democrats and the left do not seem to be able to get this lesson.

To take the fight national we need to accept the range of voices in the fightback. This will include Democrats, such as the Wisconsin 14 who left the state to block a vote. It will include left organizations that call for general strikes and direct action. It will also include activists who press for immediate reforms. This range is a strength not just in the sense of diversifying our base, but because we build in mechanisms of accountability. This range lets us focus on the pragmatic goals of defense, but keep alive the longer-term vision of alternatives.

It would be a serious mistake to put all our hopes on the Democratic Party as a way out of the budget crisis and undermining of labor rights. No doubt many on the left will focus heavily on the 2012 elections but it is crucial that we get serious about accountability. Even where a Democratic candidate may have the best of intentions, they will not be effective in office without large, vocal and independent social movements in the streets.

LESSON 5: Our Movements have to be Inclusive

One of the Wisconsin fightback was inspirational is because it was so broad. While the trigger point for many was the attack on collective bargaining, the protests were about more than that. The protestors at the Capitol didn’t just talk about their unions, but about a whole way of life in Wisconsin. Teachers rights were connected to students learning. Public sector bargaining was attached to the bigger vision of democratic rule.

Unfortunately, too many of our unions have become narrowly focused on the immediate needs of their members. This makes sense, as no one else is looking out for most workers. But we need to see our labor struggles as community struggles, and vice versa. This is so because workers are residents and consumers and parents; it is also true because our ability to get affordable housing or child care affects our ability to go to work and do our jobs. At the same time, unions are the largest democratic working class organizations in the country, with the most resources. Most people have very little power in most aspects of their life except for potential power in the workplace, united with co-workers. This kind of power can help us win improvements in the workplace but also, possibly, in broader society.

The campaign by Memphis sanitation workers was about the right to form a union and engage in collective bargaining, but it was also about civil and human rights. Workers asserted that their work mattered, and that they mattered, to their community. Many in the community supported them, agreeing that workers rights were necessary for creating a just society [anyone who hasn’t done so yet needs to read Going Down Jericho Road by Michael Honey, and to see the documentary At the River I Stand].

Our unions need to think boldly, about their demands and their organizations. They need to find ways to allow members to lead. They need to use their power to push for greater changes that will affect whole communities. Specifically, this could include unions uniting to push for increased corporate taxes, closing corporate loopholes, or reregulating financial markets. These are the kinds of demands that can address budget deficit problems over time, improving conditions for public sector workers and public programs.

In addition to a broader vision from unions, we need to make out movements inclusive in other ways. Wisconsin is 89% white. It is clear that the Wisconsin protests were overwhelmingly white compared to the US population overall, and many of the videos and recall commercials seem to highlight the “average white American.” I remember when I was active in Progressive Wisconsin I would sometimes be challenged at meetings around the country by people who asked, “why are you organizing in a predominately white state?” My answer was: “that is where I live, and that is where a lot of white people live.” If I was working for a national organization trying to decide where to send organizers and resources I would not choose Wisconsin. But when people already live in a place, why shouldn’t they be organized? And shouldn’t white people try to organize other white people into a progressive movement rather than see them in a right-wing one?

But it is also true that Milwaukee is ranked the most segregated city in the country, and the history of Wisconsin politics is heavily laden with racialized attacks on people of color. The national welfare reform laws got their start in Wisconsin under Governor Tommy Thompson. People often talked about the “generous” social programs in Wisconsin that attracted “people from Chicago” (meaning, black people). As an African-American airline employee said to me when I was recently in the Milwaukee airport, “there is a certain racial undertone to these attacks on public services – and the people of this state voted for that when they voted for Walker.”

While I am happy to see white people organizing around a progressive fight-back, we will do this potential movement harm by not acknowledging the racial dynamics at play in the formation of the policies and the impact of attacks on the public sector. African Americans are disproportionately employed in the public sector, and people of color are more likely to use a range of public services. Nationally, we need to be clear that people of color need to be in leadership positions within this movement if it is to grow.

Similarly, the Wisconsin protests have been framed by some as “middle class,” or an effort to save the middle class. This framing is antithetical to many of us on the left who realize that to have a middle class supposes there is a lower class – a working class, the unemployed, the disenfranchised. “Middle class” terminology suggests an accepted and acceptable position in the ladder of a capitalist economy. This is a problem we have in a number of our movements that can be pulled into defending rights for certain groups because they are “deserving” – such as “hardworking immigrants,” “working families,” or even “full-time workers that deserve a living wage.” This language can be exclusionary and create divisions between those who work for pay and those without employment; those who have “done everything right” versus those who “messed up.” It also restricts us to defending the status quo rather than building for something different. I think the moment is there to expand our message and demands. We are fighting to defend the notion of the public good, full labor and civil rights for all, and a world where work is fulfilling and rewarding. We are fighting for a democratic society in all aspects, and where our economy is centered around human need. We are for fighting collective problems with collective solutions.

We cannot accept the lure of framing our demands as those that play best with focus groups or those that highlight only the most “respectable” parts of our movement. This will only serve to divide us and then weaken us, and to limit our dreams.

Responding to the Recent Attacks

Drawing on a long history of worker struggles, and yet spontaneously responding to Walker’s all out attack, Wisconsinites took over Capitol Square in Madison. Beginning with over a thousand people on the first day, the crowds of teachers, students, public employees, union members, health justice groups, racial justice groups, firefighters, off-duty police, families, and impacted community members, reached over 100,000 people on Saturday February 26th, and joined in over 20 days of protest. Hundreds of people slept inside the capitol each night in the first two weeks, creating a strong community of resistance and support.  On Feb. 27th when faced with threats of arrest for remaining in the capitol 800 protesters remained to keep the building open for another day.

Much of the transportation to the Capitol, and coordination in the space was done by unions like MGAA and the TAA, but there was a nearly immediate broadening of the struggle beyond the “traditional” labor advocates AND radical organizations. Wisconsin community groups saw unions joining and fueling the fight in a growing battle of resistance to the Walker Agenda. There were more targets on more backs, and union families joined the working poor families and no-wage workers, as the legislative agenda threatened all of us.

What could have easily become a political struggle between Democrats and Republicans, fueled by “special interest” money and lobbyists – with some token membership protests and lobbying – became bigger than just the unions and parties. From the floor of the rotunda the push/pull pulsing of the protestors – the joy, music, and spontaneity of the crowds – could not be contained into the tired tactics of business unionism with its over reliance on electoral politics and legislative solutions. It could not even be defined by our experience as “protests.” But during those few, but very long and delirious weeks of rallies and sleep-ins in the capitol, the intensity of resistance proved as surprising as inspirational. It has surprised all of us because so much that we took for granted about class and race politics in Wisconsin, about this nation, unions, and radical activism was being rewritten in action.

Wisconsinites know there is so much in the budget repair bill and budget, hurting so many communities beyond unions. For example the education implications in this budget mean teachers not only face the loss of collective bargaining, but families in Milwaukee face the loss of Title 1 funding to pay for the children’s public education. Milwaukee Public Schools School Board President Michael Bonds stated expected budget cuts will be so severe, that “The education we know in Milwaukee will no longer exist.”

Along with education, Wisconsinites face the loss of Medicaid and BadgerCare. The Tea Party agenda and this budget repair bill allows for the gutting of our state health care system. By allowing for reduced eligibility and benefits in BadgerCare, the million people on that system in Wisconsin are under risk of losing health services. We cannot allow the shifting power of determining eligibility to the Department of Health Services behind closed doors. The Save BadgerCare and Save Medicaid coalition voiced this in the media, while youth at the Capitol occupied to save their families BadgerCare access.

Another current fight for poor communities, and an example of how conservatives use Wisconsin as a testing lab in the war against people of color, is increased incarceration. A study done by Mother Jones Magazine shows that Wisconsin’s Black population is 6% but it’s incarcerated Black population is 48% . While this budget repair bill has been moving, the State Senators passed a bill passed against documenting police stops as evidence of racial profiling in WI. They have also drafted a AZ copy-cat bill that would enable more discrimination of drivers.

Strange Alliances

The alliances at the Capitol have been as unexpected as an army of the dead. For example, the WI Police Association slept in the space to keep the occupation continuing. The firefighters also slept in and marched through the Capitol with bagpipes to support the protest, everyday during the occupation. During it’s closure, hundreds of firefighters, who had rallied with protesters, demanded in.

These temporary alliances are matched with deeper and growing alliances between more radical flanks of labor and labor strongholds. Community organizations like Freedom Inc. have had more of an opportunity to meet with labor and see a broader agenda. Unaffiliated activists in this popular uprising have stayed connected, and are continuing this social justice movement.

In order to deepen the “movement” – in this the popular uprising against neoliberalism – activist organizers need to think about alliances and action. First, alliances: the relationship between unions and communities of color is still alienated, despite the high levels of unionization among certain groups. Communities of color, who aside from a few leaders, are still marginalized within Wisconsin’s labor movement.

The release of Walker’s full budget proposal, though, has revealed what communities of color long expected – a renewed attack on their rights and assets. The interests of labor and the interests of people of color have long been seen as synonymous (evidence the activism of CLR James, or the League of Revolutionary Black Workers), though not always practiced that way by the white leadership of unions. This must change, and broader, community oriented organizing and direct action collaboration with communities of color is necessary to strengthen emerging alliances.

Challenge and Opportunity

With unions in the lead, there was a need to intervene on the racial, patriarchal tendencies of the labor movement. Organizations like Freedom Inc have organized queer youth and other youth of color, from the Southeast Asian and African-American community, into this movement. In doing so, we support collective bargaining, and our agenda for jobs and life-saving services. We have been joined at the Capitol by other youth groups, such as Urban Underground from Milwaukee.

Freedom Inc. youth spent nights at the Capitol, and were a daily presence during the occupation. Freedom Inc.’s banner flew high, calling for the defense of workers, and life-saving services like BadgerCare and FoodShare. Part of the challenge is that no matter who is on our side at this moment in time, we must still make the time to deal with our histories. While we are in solidarity at this time on many fronts, the fact remains at there is much work to do to repair the hundreds of years of oppression of racially marginalized communities by institutions with deep racist policies and agenda, such as the criminal justice system (who used the police as front line soldiers).

How does one sleep on the same floor with someone from the same system who unjustly/violently arrested them just a few months ago? Do how you feel safe being in the same fight? How do people who traditional don’t have voice now work with people who need their voice? How do we engage the unemployed in this battle for good jobs? These are all question that Freedom Inc folks, and many communities impacted by this bill, must deal with.

Freedom Inc has also been challenged to create a rally within a rally. How can we work to create a voice within the bigger voice? How do you tell unionized people of color who are silenced/invisible at their own union meeting to come and support the “movement rally” when they have never felt supported within their own union? These are questions we must answer to Hmong and Black people we speak to.

We also are matching a response while educating more of our own people about the issues. It is a challenge to do the deeper analysis of why we must now work together, when relationships still must be built. But doing nothing and standing with no-one is worst than not standing up at all. Do you stand with people who have no idea or don’t care after this bill—what your quality of life is going to be like if your essential life saving services are cut—or do you say I rather not stand with folks who don’t care about me?

So while supporting the Capitol efforts is critical, community organizers have double duty to make sure this work is engaging the most impacted by this bill. Freedom Inc continues to outreach in the community about what this bill means. We realize that many families impacted by Medicaid/BadgerCare, and other cuts to life-saving services, may not be at the protests.

We are all fighting for a quality of life. For some it means saving their union job, for others it means the future of public education.  For some it means their subsidized low-income home, some it means their health care or food stamps—others life threatening free transportation to medical appointments.  The stakes are high and the WI Gov.’s budget has been call “revolutionary” by policy wonks because it puts everything on the table for elimination–food, shelter, and medical care.  At the end it is all the same…we all want the right to basic human rights –and the right to “bargain collectively” for a better and just life.

This is why many chose to fight and protest the Walker agenda. Freedom Inc. joins this fight because we have no option but to fight. We have been fighting since we can remember. Our hope and expectation is this epic fight in Madison for working families, and all families, forges new alliances and builds a powerful new force yet unseen.

Confirming the power of the people in this epic battle happening in WI is that the outcome is largely unpredictable.  It is out of the hands of the Governor, the Unions, and 14 Senate Democrats who are still out of the state.  There are too many moving parts (democracy) and the undercurrent shifting the various “big players” is the impressive level of prolonged public engagement.

Putting this movement in fuller perspective will have to be the work of a longer piece, and understanding what is going on here from an organizer’s perspective will have to be an endless process of research, history, memory, and reflection. With events rapidly changing each day, organizers must make the time to reflect and share analysis with each other. Keeping our eyes on the grassroots – and adequately understanding what that term refers to – will be like keeping our eyes on moving targets. Sharing, mapping, critiquing, and writing will help us grasp the changes that are happening and respond with radical solutions that point us toward the Wisconsin we want, not just a temporary victory over legislation.

We understand different communities will have different targets and solutions, and there is not just one way to advance a people’s agenda. As long as we stay in community and remain accountable to the people and impacted communities, we will keep moving Wisconsin forward.

Kabzuag Vaj is the  Co-Executive Director of Freedom Inc. Freedom Inc. Is a Madison-based non-profit organization that began organizing within a community of Hmong youth. Starting as the Asian Freedom Project in 2000, it created youth-led collective learning groups to gather on issues impacting their daily lives and to create opportunities for popular education. FI’s mission, to end violence against women and children, challenges the conditions that prevent freedom and  includes topics of violence against women, racism, economic and health justice.

Lee M. Abbott is a graduate student and instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is co-president of the Milwaukee Graduate Assistants Association. He is currently engaged in the struggle to protect collective bargaining rights and against the cuts to Wisconsin’s public sector and community assets. Lee moved to Milwaukee in 2005 from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he grew up and was involved in student, community, and environmental justice organizing at Louisiana State University and in the surrounding neighborhoods.

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

Who are Excluded Workers?

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

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

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

The Rise of a New Workers Movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Formation of the Excluded Workers Congress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking Forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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