Can California Dreaming Remain a Vital Part of the Future of American Labor?

Over the last decades in the most cynical hours in the latest nights of the seediest barrooms and meeting halls where organizers would inevitably gather to cry in their beer and gnash their teeth about the prospects for our movement and the legacy of our generation, we would still perk up our ears and gladden our hearts with hope when we listened to reports of work in Los Angeles.

We would do so with good reason.   Los Angeles had gone from a union free bastion 50 years ago, led by the Los Angeles Times and the world of Chinatown, to the place where the demographics and politics seemed to be coming together to create the shining union city rising like the waves on the Pacific Coast.  The LA MAP (Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project)  had offered a new way to frame and target the work.  The Los Angeles AFL-CIO had seemed to be a model for the future with its own organizing director, research department, and political program.  SEIU’s Justice for Janitors organizing campaign and its victory emboldened the city and the nation.  Immigrant, almost casual drywall workers were changing construction unions.  The largest union elections since the CIO drives enrolled hundreds of thousands of home healthcare workers.  There were organizing drives in hotels and hospitals; old CP organizers had pioneered public sector unionization and many of the locals continued to be progressive; resources were marshaled and spent; the labor movement was robust and confident; and mayors were made and broken.

Some of the romance and hope for the proposition that organizing in California, and especially Los Angeles, would lead the way for resurgence of the labor movement infuses the spirit and premise of Working for Justice: The LA Model of Organizing and Advocacy(Cornell UP, 2011), edited by Ruth Milkman, Joshua Bloom, and Victor Narro. If many of us did not believe this was true, or at least still possible, why would we give a second thought to a book that avowedly presents itself as offering a Los Angeles “model of organizing and advocacy?”  The book offers well executed case studies of organizing efforts among informal workers, like car washers and taxi drivers, who are among the constituencies that I firmly believe hold our future hopes, if we have any, as well as other essays on the National Day Laborers’ Organizing Network (NDLON) worker centers and HERE’s hotel drives that are strong enough that we were proud to reprint them as excerpts in Social Policy magazine.  Having done so, I am unabashedly a fan and advocate of the book as an invaluable learning tool for organizers and any others with an interest in rebuilding the labor movement and its allied trades in related endeavors of social change.  Ruth Milkman, Joshua Bloom, and Victor Narro’s work here deserves our appreciation and close reading.

Unfortunately one of the book’s challenges is that while the “promise” may be in California, the premise that a model is being built seems overstated.  At the most basic level a model is something that can be replicated by others.  A model could be picked up by energetic community, labor, immigrant, and other organizers and transplanted to other soil outside of Los Angeles and California.  A model must be sustainable over time.  Searching for models in Working for Justice is a treasure hunt at the other end of the rainbow:  we can see the direction to go, but it is pretty clear that we will not find anything once we get there.

This is an issue that is left over from Milkman’s earlier volume, L. A. Story:  Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U. S. Labor Movement (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006) where we were inspired by the similar stories of drywall construction (1992) and janitorial organizing (1990) and the new dawn coming in that California dreamscape brought to us by dramatic strategies by unions like HERE, SEIU, UFCW, and surprisingly even the Carpenters.  Unfortunately, we woke up later, and those stories turned out not to presage the future but to be isolated castles in the darkening sky after all.  In the introduction to Working for Justice the authors indicate that these essays date to that period and gestated until published in this volume.

One almost might read the two books as companion volumes of a sort.  Both speak to a sense of California leading the way.  Milkman’s L.A. Story is different, though, in that it concluded, among other things, that victory came from top to bottom with a model that owed more to the “art of the deal,” than to a sense of a workers’ movement gaining power.  Working for Justice almost seems to be the antidote to that earlier analysis, changing the emphasis from the top tier of union leadership and mechanics to the bottom level of advocates and non-traditional methodology and formations.  Sadly, the case made twice is no truer than the same story told once, regardless of the direction of the analysis, and time has shown that models are still nowhere to be found in either instance.

No sense in quibbling though.  The labor movement needs direction signals badly in our current death spiral, and, arguably, given the turtle shell tendencies of most of institutional labor, we are as likely to find the path to new paradigms in the work of advocates as any others.  Unfortunately, too often communications between union organizers and labor advocates is a one-way conversation, partially because these are not chats among equals sharing a common language given the different definitions of “base” and disparate resources.  Working for Justice tries to force them to sit at the same table and learn.

An underappreciated, yet critical, element of the Los Angeles story and the California dream for labor has rested on two foundations that are now increasingly shaky.  One at the very heart of the California dream, and the one that brought my grandparents there from bankrupt farms in the Dakotas, held that California was the land of riches with money enough for all.  The other hardrock underpinning this structure was the belief that the continued high density of unions in the state would give sufficient political heft and resources to weld something sturdy and unique from the public and private resources of the state.  Seismic change has now crumbled some of these foundations, given the multi-billion dollar financial crisis of the state, the teetering real estate market, and the continued decline of labor density.  The rest of the country outside of a couple of other islands in our stormy seas, just does not look, feel, or operate like this, making “models” even more difficult to duplicate.   Relatively speaking, being an organizer in California has too often been the organizing equivalent of the old saw about George W. Bush having been “born on third base and thinking he has hit a triple,” meaning there were advantages that were just assumed in organizing in California that in other cities and states were past the wildest aspirations.

Where else but in California could we even imagine finding the hope and tragedy of the United Farm Workers Union recounted by Miriam Pawel in The Union of Their Dreams:  Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement (Bloomsbury Press, 2009).   When everything was working, it was the stuff of movies, books, and, well, yes, movements.  Politics, charisma, Hollywood, religion, and the American agricultural dreamscape of climate, soil, and vast immigrant labor came together for a moment to win unthinkable victories, benefiting from the liberal politics, alliances, and special circumstances of California.  Few organizers have ever understood the chemistry of combining a mass base constituency with public and political support to leverage economic strength better than Cesar Chavez, as both advocate and organizer.

Yet, Pawel’s chapters on the purges leading to the fatal weakening of the UFW in the often rumored, rarely reported toxic brew of cultural contradictions, new age weirdness, and old fashioned power struggles and personalities, drunk on the dream and unable to resist its fascination even as it grew nightmarish and corrosive, are some of the saddest chapters on organizing any will ever read.   Despite the commonality of all stories of death, even organizational death, Pawel’s tales and those of the advocates, organizers, and leaders she followed in this story are also somehow both deeply human and uniquely Californian.  I would love to have known Eliseo Medina then as he emerged as an energetic, dynamic youngster in the fields!  On the other hand there is no way a non-Californian or someone from any other foreign country can even imagine the UFW experience with Synanon, the former alternative and controversial drug treatment center specializing in group dynamics and behavioral modification, or its impact in those crazy days on Chavez and his lieutenants.   What might seem in California as simply forward and far ahead to the rest of the world was simply far out.

Randy Shaw put the best spin on the hopes for the impact of the UFW on the organizing in California and beyond in his 2008 book, Beyond the Fields:  Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the Struggle for Justice in the 21^st Century  (University of California, 2008).  He argued strenuously, if not convincingly, that we should judge the UFW legacy not necessarily for what was left in the field, but more perhaps for the continuum in organizing that came out of so many organizers, boycotters, and others who were attracted to the movement and kept the flame burning.

In the same way, no matter how hard Steve Early tries, his book on the crazy internal conflict between SEIU’s healthcare local unions and their national union in The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor:  Birth of a New Workers’ Movement or the Death Throes of the Old? (Haymarket Books, 2011) is also inherently an only-in-California story as well.  His story is the ugly side of the top-down model Milkman observed honestly and somewhat sympathetically in L.A. Story, when some of the giant fabricated locals created by all of the wheeling and dealing began to unravel.  Unfortunately, that story is often submerged as Early struggles, sometimes half-heartedly, to find a balanced perspective in following dissident leader Sal Rosselli with his narrow vision of “contract standards,” who is not as as right as Early would like him to be, versus Andy Stern, then president of SEIU with his equally small program of “McMuffin contracts,” who is not as wrong as Early believes either.  Early is also smitten by his romantic version of the California dream.   He wants a happy ending and concedes that he would have never believed 20 years previously that the future of the labor movement might be on the shoulders of lower waged, home health and home day care workers.

The future of the labor movement, whether anyone likes it or not, might lie precisely in our ability, as argued by Needleman, Bloom, and Narro, to both organize and advocate for just such non-traditional workers as these home based workers, casual laborers, and others.  Who would have imagined that the future of organized labor is with informal workers and new organizing directions that speak to the 21^st century and not the great struggles, victories, and defeats of the 20^th century?  The many authors of Working for Justice that’s who!

Working for Justice does what we need more books on labor and the labor movement to do:  present ideas, document the cases, and let leaders, members, and organizers see if new models for a new labor movement can be built from the little we now have left as well as the millions standing before us, many of whom work in hybrid jobs in often informal, difficult settings and previously unimaginable situations who desperately need the labor movement.  As Working for Justice points out, it won’t be easy or necessarily successful, and as other books detail, it also will be messy, loud, imperfect, and sometimes heartbreaking, but out of those struggles might just come a new labor movement.  Certainly, that’s worth the fight, and it makes the California story still worth following, even as the fight moves throughout the country and hope springs eternal.

Wade Rathke

Wade Rathke is best known as Founder and Chief Organizer of ACORN from 1970-2008, and continues to serve as Chief Organizer of ACORN International working in 13 countries.

Rathke will be speaking at Youngstown State University on Tuesday, March 20, at 7:30 pm, in the Ohio Room at Kilcawley Center.  For more information on his talk, call the Center for Working-Class Studies, 330-941-2978.

Why the Food Justice Movement Matters

Last fall, I had the opportunity to interview Chris Hedges for my radio show, just after he’d delivered a powerful but incredibly discouraging talk about how Americans are becoming less able to think critically (based on his book Empire of Illusion) and how the Democratic party can longer be counted on to support the interests of working people (Death of the Liberal Class).  I asked him what he thought we ought to do about this depressing state of affairs.

His response: work on promoting locally-grown, sustainable agriculture.  Even though I serve on the board of an organization engaged in that kind of work, his response surprised me.

But lately –in part because of a terrific panel at the Working-Class Studies Association conference in June – I’ve been thinking about the potential power of food justice as an alternative to traditional leftist organizing.  I still believe in unions, but the American labor movement has been struggling for a long time, and much as I’d like to believe that unions can be the driving force for social justice, I simply can’t muster high expectations anymore.  I still believe that how we vote matters, despite knowing that many of those we elect either won’t or can’t do enough to support progressive policies.  I see more potential in the work of community organizers, though as the authors of Contesting Community suggest, such work is too often limited by public policy that promotes a neoliberal, privatization-oriented approach.

So what does the food justice movement have to offer that’s any different? Consider the definition of that phrase: food justice aims to ensure that the benefits and risks of producing, distributing, and consuming food are shared fairly by everyone involved and to transform the food system to eliminate inequities.  That’s a highly inclusive definition that encompasses everyone from the farmer to the tomato picker to the home cook and the corporation that sells canned goods or fast food.  That defines food justice as a cross-class, multicultural movement that engages in a wide variety of work on local, regional, national, and global levels.  The food justice movement includes efforts to create urban farms, community-supported agriculture projects (CSAs), programs focused on getting fresh produce to people who live in food deserts, protecting the rights of workers on farms and in restaurants, and challenges to corporate farming practices that endanger the ecosystem – and much more.

The nature of food ensures that much of this work is inherently hands-on and personal while also addressing systemic, structural issues.  Quite literally, food is for most people something we handle every day.  Projects like urban gardens and CSAs give consumers the opportunity to get our hands dirty.  Volunteers in urban gardens and CSA members who provide sweat equity to local farmers make concrete, physical connections with the source of their food.

Unlike unions (which are usually open only to those who work in a specific workplace), many food justice projects are open to anyone who wants to participate, and individuals can become involved on a variety of levels.  You can join a boycott, buy your produce at the farmer’s market, or volunteer a few hours at an urban garden or food pantry.  Here in Youngstown, the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative coordinated the efforts of dozens of local volunteers who visited the many corner convenience stores in the city last year.  The volunteers spoke with the store owners and looked at what was on the shelves.  They then created a map that clarified the location of local food deserts, identified problem stores that sold only junk food and alcohol as well as the few small urban shops that offered fresh produce and good-quality meats, and used that data to encourage the city to work with two national chains to bring full-scale grocery stores back to local neighborhoods.  No one had to pay membership dues, take a certification vote, or do anything but sign up to help, and anyone could attend the community meetings in which the campaign was planned and discussed.

That kind of work is necessarily local, as is much of the food justice movement, but the effort is also national.  For example, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United has branches in major cities and some states around the country doing research, organizing, and advocating on behalf of food service workers.  It’s a national effort with a local presence.  Among other things, ROC-U has documented the effects of the low wages and limited benefits of most restaurant jobs on local economies.   And while ROC-U focuses on organizing workers, consumers can also get involved by paying attention to the local organization’s protests and information and patronizing restaurants that treat workers well.

The ROC-U campaign highlights another important strength of food justice as an alternative political movement: it creates opportunities for consumers to connect with producers and distributors of food, and that often means helping people cross boundaries of class and race.  I see that with Grow Youngstown, the local group that I work with.  Over the past month or so, during my visits to the Fairgreen Neighborhood Garden, an urban garden in a low-income neighborhood on the north side of Youngstown, I’ve talked with colleagues from the university, local activists, people who live in the neighborhood, and women from a nearby residential program for homeless families.  Some have PhDs and some didn’t finish high school.  They are white and black, retired and still in elementary school.  Those interactions don’t just enrich my life.  They strengthen the community.  Since the garden was created, we’ve seen more families moving into the neighborhood and more interaction among those who live nearby.

At the same time, Grow Youngstown, like many food justice projects, relies on and encourages networking with others who care about the local community.  Over the last three years, we have collaborated with the City of Youngstown, the Northside Farmer’s Market, two area churches, a local synagogue, a nearby organic farm run by an order of nuns, the university, several neighborhood associations, the Rescue Mission, and half a dozen other local and regional organizations.  Food justice may focus on food, but it connects with issues like economic development, race and class inequities, education, vacant properties, and of course, environmental sustainability. In the process, we build our own capacity to pursue significant projects, and we work with other groups to develop, together, the networks, knowledge, skills, and experience to organize effectively on behalf of both the local community and broader regional and national issues.

Food justice accomplishes something else: by emphasizing alternative sources of food, it challenges the dominance of the corporate food industry.  I’m not sure how much difference that makes to ConAgra, ADM, or Kroger.  But it reminds us that we have economic alternatives.  What we eat and how we shop matters.

That opportunity is not limited to those with means. Fresh Moves, a mobile produce market retrofitted into a city bus, takes affordable fruits and vegetables into neighborhoods around Chicago that don’t have decent grocery stories.  Farmer’s markets around the country are now accepting food stamps.  At Grow Youngstown, the regular shares of our CSA and a grant from a local foundation subsidize the cost of weekly subscriptions for low-income families.  So while my family enjoyed the locally-grown berries, zucchini, cucumbers, onions, and herbs that I brought home last week, someone else’s family ate just as well for half the price.

But the value of this accessible, very modest, and truly pleasurable form of activism extends beyond the food.  It helps local farmers be more able to grow unusual crops in a sustainable way, with reasonably-paid farm workers.  It helps provide a paid summer internship for a  recent college grad and a job for the woman who manages the CSA.  It supports an urban garden that brings neighbors together, and it helps to build a social justice network that includes people working for change in practical ways despite all the frustrating, discouraging, sometimes overwhelming social and economic problems we face these days.  It may not be the answer, but it’s not just cucumbers, either.

Sherry Linkon, Center for Working-Class Studies

Now’s the Time: Organizing in the Face of the Class War

Despite inspiring and massive rallies and protest campaigns, the two most visible attacks on America’s working class – the anti-union bills in Wisconsin and Ohio – have both been signed into law.  While the attack on public sector unions is, in itself, just the latest salvo in an ongoing class war, its effects will go far beyond the workers directly involved.  These bills will lead to restructuring of a variety of public services, from education and home health care to government offices and police stations.

Over the last 30 years, many of the economic battles have been fought on a local or regional level, and in many cases, only the most-directly affected workers got involved. In Ohio, for example, struggles over deindustrialization and organized labor occurred primarily in steel and auto factories in the northern part of the state, making statewide organizing against economic restructuring difficult because many workers  were not directly impacted.

But things might be different this time.  In most states, new limits on public sector bargaining will affect people in every city and town, as well as people in very different situations – workers, students, the elderly, families with young children, and others.   That creates opportunities for organizing cross geographical boundaries.  Similarly, these bills create potential new constituencies as students, younger workers, women, and people of color recognize that they will be disproportionately impacted. While blacks comprise 15% of all adult workers, they are 18.5% of the public sector workers, and Ohio Policy Matters found that of the 700,000 Ohio public sector workers more than 400,000 are women. Women comprise an even higher percentage of teachers in K-12 education, especially in traditionally Republican suburban areas. As Natasha Vargas-Cooper noted in yesterday’s New York Times, this attack helps create the potential for coalitions that will link the traditionally weaker unions representing female service workers with the more respected safety workers unions, dominated by men.

The latest battle in the class war may even draw some unexpected allies.  In Youngstown, one the nation’s fastest growing technology firms, Turning Technologies, has withdrawn from the Regional Chamber of Commerce in protest of its support  of SB5, as have two other local companies.  All of which is to suggest that mobilizing around public sector ballot initiatives and recall campaigns could be both wide and deep.

Getting thousands to show up for rallies or write letters in the fever of the initial public sector skirmishes hasn’t been that hard.  Over the last two months, people have been angry, and they wanted to take action.  And while making the drive across the state to be part of a crowd of tens of thousands is a significant commitment of time and energy, it’s also exciting.  As the videos showing witty signs and costumes remind us, protesting can be fun and even aerobic.

But now is the time for on the ground organizing, and the work ahead will be less dramatic and in many ways much harder than showing up for a protest or writing a letter.  Going door-to-door to get signatures can be thought of as hand-to-hand combat where individuals have to be informed and ready to perform in a sometimes hostile environment. But it’s also essential to the political process, especially given the amount of money corporations and conservative business interests will be spending on political advertising to defeat repeal/recall initiatives.

To make matters worse, organizers will have to overcome the effects of the dashed hopes of the  Obama presidency.  As Chris Hedges writes in The Death of the Liberal Class, progressives understand that the party they once counted on to advance their interests has sold out to the big money that controls so much of the political process.  Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson review the political and policy decisions of the last few decades in Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, tracing how corporate influence has pervaded Democrat Party politics and caused growing inequality in America.

At the end of their book, Hacker and Pierson suggest several key elements for changing the trend toward inequality, including “facilitat[ing] broader participation among those whose voices are currently drowned out” and “encourag[ing] the development of groups that can provide a continuing, organized capacity to mobilize middle-class voters and monitor government and politics on their behalf” (303).  For decades, working people – including those who did not belong to unions – counted on the labor movement to fulfill both of these functions.

With shrinking numbers and new legislation limiting its capacity, the labor movement can’t do this on its own. Nor should it. While the laws being passed now focus on public sector unions, the war won’t end there.  In Ohio, bills are being proposed to ban overtime and institute “right to work” rules.  State budgets across the country and the House’s proposed federal budget all undermine support for working families and the poor, while refusing the challenge subsidies to business or to hold banks accountable for the financial crisis.  As we wrote last month, the working class is under attack on multiple fronts, and we need to stand together to fight back.

We need to build a movement that crosses boundaries – between public- and private-sector unions, the traditional working class of industrial, blue-collar workers and the new working class of retail and service workers, between the working class and the middle class, cities and suburbs, and among diverse types of organizations.  We need community organizers, churches, students, and others to work together.  In Youngstown, the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative has organized its 44 neighborhood groups together with labor unionists, community faith-based groups, local non-profits and social service agencies to form a revenue coalition to fight state budget cuts.

And much of that collaborative effort must focus on the political process.  In Ohio, opponents of SB5 have to collect more than 230,000 signatures to get a referendum on the ballot, and then we need to do everything possible to get people out to the polls.  We need to mobilize the kind of engagement in the political process that put Barack Obama into office.  As a popular T-shirt from 2008 stated, we need to “be the change.”  Neither Obama nor the Democrats have done it for us.  It’s our turn.

We also need to take a page from the Tea Party.  Their efforts have contributed significantly to blocking the progressive possibilities of the 2008 election.  They succeeded by channeling their anger and fear into significant pressure on politicians.  We need to do the same.  That means we have to find the energy and commitment to keep on protesting, to challenge our elected officials – even those we think are most on our side – to truly represent us, and to get our share of the media spotlight.  We also need to keep in mind that despite the infusion of thousands of dollars from wealthy contributors, the Tea Party engaged in plenty of grassroots organizing.  We have to do that, too.  We need to be out there knocking on doors, talking with friends and relatives, gathering signatures for ballot and recall initiatives, and doing whatever it takes to put pressure on our elected leaders to support workers and our communities.

Here’s one place to begin: the National People’s Action “Showdown in Ohio,” May 16-17, to demand that businesses like J.P. Morgan “clean up their own mess.”  Join us in Columbus to show the world that the American working class isn’t going to back down.  And then go back to your neighborhood, your church, your gym, wherever it is you talk with anyone who might not be convinced, and tell them the story of how the rich are getting richer and the rest of us are losing our grip on the American dream.  Better yet, tell them your own story of how the war on the working class is making a difference in your community.

Sherry Linkon and John Russo, Center for Working-Class Studies

Unions: Getting Things Done for Workers

I have been a labor organizer for 11 years.  Periodically someone pronounces labor unions as dead or dying organizations, and we all put our heads together to think about ways to save them. Lately, I am much less worried about preserving this version of the labor movement. To me, preserving is about freezing in time and let’s be real: we are already starting to look a little moth-eaten. For most working people unions are something akin to a fairy tale character–either monster or superhero, depending your politics. Very few working-class people are now or have ever been members of a union.

Those unions that are left are under serious attack all over the county. It seems like the answer to those attacks can’t only be self-preservation. A movement of any kind is about moving–about being an instrument for change. It is about reflecting the people and struggle of today. I am very interested in figuring out how to make a labor movement that moves people forward. I keep coming back to a quotation from the late labor organizer and folk singer Utah Philips who defined a union as “a way of getting things done together that you can’t get done alone.” Nowhere in that definition is there a claim that there is only one way to get things done together. For that matter, the word “things” is open many interpretations.

During the last two months I have had little time to think about anything outside of the campaign I am working on here in Oregon. Workers who provide support for people with developmental disabilities are organizing for the first time to preserve the very programs that allow people with disabilities to exercise their civil rights and live independently. We have been visiting thousands of people to ask them what they feel needs to be done. The events in Wisconsin have broken through the bubble of campaign work and captured the imagination of organizers and workers alike. While the battle unfolding in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and elsewhere is partly about preservation, what has captivated me and others across the country is more than that.

Having a union is not the end goal. It is a means to an end, a tool for working people to have power over their lives and work.   Now someone is trying to take away the best tool working people have for getting things done together. While working people themselves know what they want to get done, Wisconsin has shown a way it may be possible. Instead of becoming mired in an attempt to work through acceptable channels and follow a “process” that would have likely ended in crushing loss, people in Wisconsin took swift and direct action to confront the decision makers who were trying to rob them of their rights. That is a compelling lesson for all of us fighting to build a worker movement.

Recently, when a member of the union I work for was asked why she was volunteering to visit with non-union workers on her day off, she said: “I want to do a difference in the world . . . if not for myself then for others.”  Let’s start there, by redefining the labor movement that way.  What we do as a labor movement is to ‘do a difference’ for working people. If we are serious about organizing the working class, then working people need to decide what needs doing. With so few working-class people in unions we need to go far beyond our membership to ask what needs doing and then really listen to the answers.  Let’s start where every union organizing drive should start: by talking to workers–employed and unemployed–about what they want to improve about their work and this economy.

A union has meaning when it is the expression of what working people want or need to do. What has become glaringly obvious in Wisconsin is that the system we are supposed to use to get what we need is mostly used against us these days. As a result, the labor movement needs to be an adaptable tool, molded to fit the task at hand. The demonstrations in Wisconsin speak to the potential power of people getting things done together and the need to display that power more.

If a union is a tool to get things done, then we have often been going about this all wrong. We don’t need to run around convincing people about the virtues of unions, we need to start with workers’ experience. We need to find out what can’t get done without coming together and create a labor movement that gets it done.

Angela MacWhinnie

Angela MacWhinnie has been a union organizer for 11 years and currently works with SEIU Local 503 in Portland, Oregon.  She is also a member of the Working-Class Studies Association.

Movement Building and Political Organizing

The Democratic ground game in the 2008 election is unlike anything we’ve seen since 1948 – or, given the role of the internet, maybe ever. A week before the election, the focus is now exclusively on traditional Get Out The Vote (GOTV) activities. But the larger, longer-lasting impact is that organizing skills and attitudes are now back on the American scene, with the potential to transform more than just one election and to build a broader working-class movement for social and economic justice.

Though Barack Obama’s approach to political organizing deserves the lion’s share of kudos for the scale of the effort in 2008, labor and community organizing has been building capacity for more than a decade – schooling people in the organizer’s craft, developing rank-and-file leaders, and spreading experience of the power of organized collective action.

The labor movement “turned the page” in 1996 when the New Voice leadership of the AFL-CIO made a major rhetorical and financial shift to developing a new generation of union organizers who are cross-trained in organizing labor-community coalitions as part of organizing new members. Unions increased their efforts (and budgets) to organize new members, with disappointing results thus far, but they also staked out a political program independent of the Democratic Party even as they organized more effectively within the party to advance their issues. Unions have spent a lot of money on a variety of new approaches to political organizing, but the main drift has been away from endorsing and funding candidates to year-round political education and activism on legislative issues that affect union members and their neighbors.

This year the labor movement concentrated on member-to-member political education with an emphasis on one-on-one contacts at work, at home, and on the phone. And as exemplified by a late summer speech by AFL-CIO Vice-president Rich Trumpka, they are directly addressing racial ignorance, fear and outright racism among their own members. This is now supplemented by a new organization, Working America, that has enlisted nearly 3 million nonunion workers to become politically active in both electoral and movement activities. Begun in 2004, Working America is now active in fourteen states, from Colorado to Virginia. The group’s activist blogs provide a taste of what they’re doing.

Community organizations are focused on electoral politics as never before, but not simply for its own sake. As exemplified by the best-known national network of such groups, ACORN, registering and turning out voters are just part of a larger process of organizing and mobilizing for local campaigns on living wages, affordable housing, environmental justice, and a wide variety of local issues. What’s new here is the breakdown of the traditional wall between political and “nonpartisan” community organizing.

Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is widely (and justifiably) praised for building organizational infrastructure everywhere. This involves funding DNC staff in all 50 states, instituting more rigorous (and more Washington-directed) candidate-selection processes for Congressional and gubernatorial races, and much else. But as Bob Moser has been reporting in The Nation for the past two years, the DNC’s 50-state strategy also means linking community, labor, and faith activists with emerging Democratic politicians and activists who are progressive by the standards of their locality. Though the DNC’s primary purpose may not be to build grassroots organizing capacity, its renewed presence reinforces and encourages the grassroots organizers who are already there.

Finally, Barack Obama has brought a community organizing approach to politics that purports to be building not just to win an election, but also to hold elected representatives accountable as they govern – at all levels, including his.

Camp Obama has trained hundreds of organizers, who have in turn trained thousands of rank-and-file leaders in various localities. Like many of Obama’s field staff, Joy Cushman, head of the Obama Organizing Fellows program, comes to politics from an apprenticeship not in GOTV operations, but in community organizing. According to Cushman, the Obama field effort is focused on finding and developing authentic community leaders not just as volunteers for canvassing and phone-banking, but to lead the effort in their areas and to integrate election organizing with their existing activism. The goal is to nurture a network of leaders who will continue working for progressive political efforts at the local and state as well as the national levels. For more about this, see Zack Exley’s “The New Organizers.”

What happens after next week’s election is anybody’s guess. But today’s working-class organizers do not expect to wait passively and see. Electing sympathetic politicians is part of building a social movement, but not the most important part. Organizing and mobilizing at the grassroots is. And now there are a whole lot more people doing that.

Jack Metzgar