Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition: Keeping Hope Alive
By Kurt Stand
REVEREND JESSE JACKSON, born in poverty in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1941, was a member of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), taking part in the famed 1965 Selma to Montgomery march and later the Poor People’s Campaign. He was present with other SCLC leaders when King was assassinated in 1968. Jackson then moved to Chicago — where the Civil Rights Movement had been met with extreme violence — to establish People United to Save Humanity (PUSH) as both a force for self-health and racial/economic justice advocacy. A book could be written about Jackson’s lifelong participation in movements demanding peace, justice, and freedom. His passing on February 17, 2026, justly led to numerous tributes — even from those who were hostile to his politics.
Not enough attention, however, has been paid to the extraordinary impact of Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns, as well as the Rainbow Coalition as an organizational expression of those electoral efforts and the aspirations they embodied. Jackson was a national figure, of many years’ standing, in the fight for racial and economic justice. He was also a local figure — as he helped make DC statehood a national issue with a prominence it hadn’t received for many years — and was elected the District’s first “Shadow Senator” (alongside Florence Pendleton) in 1992 with over 100,000 votes. He frequently reminded audiences that DC statehood was amongst the original demands of the Civil Rights Movement.
Today, it is particularly important to recall how Jackson built upon the still-living legacy of the 1960s and ‘70s Civil Rights and Black Freedom Movement to give voice to those being silenced by the Reagan administration’s assault on egalitarianism, democratic rights, and working-class institutions. Jackson’s vision of a “Rainbow” celebrating the multi-racial, multi-cultural character of United States society presented an alternative to President Ronald Reagan’s exclusivist, racist notion of community — social Darwinian, one-against-all — and “greed is good” economics. The opposition between the two perspectives demonstrated two vastly differing models for our country: Jackson envisioned a society rooted in mutual support, while Reagan sowed division and economic devastation. This opposition is drawn even more sharply today, as Trump’s assaults on social good slash even deeper into social need and democratic values.
THREE SPEECHES: THE BREADTH OF JACKSON’S APPEAL
“My commitment as a presidential candidate is to focus on and lift those boats stuck on the bottom full of unpolished pearls. For if the boats on the bottom rise, all boats above will rise … The way I propose to do this is to build a new functional “Rainbow Coalition of the Rejected” spanning lines of color, sex, age, religion, region and national origin. The old minorities — Blacks, Hispanics, women, peace activists, environmentalists, youth, the elderly, small farmers, small businesspersons, poor people, gays and lesbians — if we remain apart, will continue to be a minority. But, if we come together, the old minorities constitute a new majority. That is how I propose to be nominated and elected President.”
Jesse Jackson Presidential Campaign Flyer, 1984
It is hard today to fully grasp the multi-faceted nature of Jackson’s challenge to established authority and his outreach to the excluded. His mixture of the spiritual and practical, his respect for the intelligence of his audience, and his awareness of what brought them out to a gathering embodied the democratic ethos of his campaigns. Remembrances of three speeches, each given in sharply different settings, may provide a glimpse of its scope.
The First Spech: During the 1988 Democratic presidential primary, Jackson gave a speech at the Bible Way Church in downtown Washington, DC. The enormous African American church, one with a long history of fighting against segregation and racism, was packed. Jackson’s sermon spoke to those in attendance of the dignity of all labor, the dignity of those who clean bedpans and pick up the trash, drive the buses and serve the food, raise children and care for the elderly, all those who do the hardest and heaviest jobs — often for the least pay. Or none at all. Standing in the rafters, watching those below and around me while listening, I could feel how his words resonated. He acknowledged the spiritual value of labor, of mutuality, of community as the bedrock of African American survival. He connected that acknowledgement with the political demand that the dignity of those who work should be accompanied by wages and rights sufficient to meet the needs and dreams of working people.
What we heard was a sermon in the form of a call to action.
The Second Speech: It was 1991, on the eve of the first Gulf War. There was a national Rainbow conference at a DC hotel — and it so happened that there were numerous soldiers staying there who were about to be deployed to Iraq. Jackson invited those young people about to go off to war to attend, for free, the fundraising gala held at the gathering’s close; many took him up on the offer. Roberta Flack sang that evening, including, appropriately, John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
Jackson spoke afterward to all present, but with words specifically directed to those who showed up in uniform — words expressed with deep respect for them without apologizing for the Rainbow’s opposition to the US invasion soon to be launched. Jackson stressed that the real war we needed to fight was against hunger, homelessness, and hatred in our midst; that the real needs were education, health care, jobs with a future here in our own country. I looked around and saw people listening attentively, absorbing what was being said. Addressing people who most needed to hear that an alternative is possible, Jackson defined the choices we have to make as individuals and as a society, expressing the values behind the program around which we were organizing.
The Third Speech: In the mid-90s, Decatur, Illinois, was a self-designated “class-war zone,” as industrial disputes were being waged simultaneously at the Caterpillar tractor factory, the Bridgestone-Firestone tire plant, and A.E. Staley — a corn milling subsidiary of global food supply conglomerate Tate & Lyle. The unions survived those fights, but all much reduced in size, strength, and conditions by the time they were over. Perhaps the bitterest struggle was at Staley: militant, well-organized, and determined workers were locked out for over three years. In 1995, a few months before a contract was signed that imposed the concessions that workers had been resisting (and allowed scabs to remain on the job), a last, large rally was held in Decatur as part of a final push to force the company to settle on honorable terms. Numerous union leaders spoke — as did Jackson. He honored the locked-out workers for their courage and integrity. He talked of the need for labor solidarity to spread more widely and sharply, and he talked about Nelson Mandela. About Mandela’s long years in prison and his commitment to endure even when victory appeared to be nowhere within reach. For those listening, the message was clear — this fight may end in defeat, but the war is far from over. Very different in style and substance from the speech at Bible Way or that directed at soldiers, his words struck home — for Jesse was speaking to people, not at them.
BUILDING A RAINBOW
“The Rainbow takes on many combinations. There are ideological rainbows; the Rainbow has a color dimension. The Rainbow makes room for the locked out, the rejected stones. There’s an age dimension to the Rainbow. It makes room for the very young and the very old. There’s another dimension. There are schools of thought … The Rainbow is a call to be progressive.”Jackson’s speech to the National Rainbow Leadership Conference, June 1984
Between the three speeches remembered above, one can grasp the essence of Jackson’s campaigns: linking ending US wars abroad with overcoming poverty, hunger, unemployment domestically; organizing on the principle that ending racial injustice and ending the exploitation of all working people are not separate issues, but are inextricably combined — part and parcel of all liberation movements, of all strivings for a democracy rooted in freedom and equality. From 1985 until the early 1990s, the Rainbow Coalition, a Black-led “movement of movements,” grew as an organization by building community and labor support for those ends.
Acting in tandem with Jackson’s election campaigns, the Rainbow functioned as part of an “inside-outside” strategy — working within the electoral system and mainstream institutions of society while simultaneously working outside those structures to create the basis for more fundamental changes, to transform power relationships within our country. But, while accurate, it is a little too pat to put it that way. Jackson articulated individuals’ right to take life in their own hands and change the conditions in which they lived, and that they had the power to do so as long as each and every democratizing initiative was part of a collective effort across all lines of division.
The Rainbow sought to become a popular organizational expression of the upsurge of activism that flowed in the wake of Jackson’s campaigns and public events. In the words of Jack O’Dell, a key advisor to Jackson, “the Rainbow Coalition represents the Peace and Justice movement for social change entering the electoral arena, as an independent force … [It] is a mass political movement, committed to the expansion of the definition and practice of democracy in our country, including the realization of economic justice. As such it has to be bold enough to perceive of itself as the historic replacement for the existing two-party system: one prepared to act as a dual authority.”
Working within the electoral system, within the Democratic Party, and within other established institutions is necessary, as Jackson’s campaigns made abundantly evident, in order to engage millions of people in the struggle for justice; people who do not ordinarily see political action as central to daily living, people whose widely varied voices, ideas, beliefs, and values are nonetheless as essential to social change as those of activists and organizers. It is equally necessary to work outside those institutions to change the political climate, the range of possibility, to widen what we can envision as possible, to realize in practice the potential of transformative possibilities — so that ending war and poverty, ensuring dignity for all are not pie-in-the-sky dreams, but hopes that can be realized in our lifetimes.
Washington, DC, provides an example of the way this process unfolded. Inspired by the growth of local Rainbows elsewhere in the country, activists from different Spanish-speaking communities formed a Latino Rainbow in DC composed of activists from Guatemala and El Salvador involved in the solidarity movements with their home countries, immigrant workers inspired by the Justice for Janitors organizing campaign then underway, as well as individuals responding to Jackson’s message of inclusion and struggle from other parts of the community. They organized to build support for Jackson during the Democratic presidential primary in 1988; they also worked to build ties between unionists and solidarity activists within Latino communities around the Rainbow’s domestic program, as well as opposition to US military intervention and economic exploitation south of the United States border.
Taking a cue from that initiative, a number of us formed a local Labor Rainbow encompassing DC, suburban Maryland, and northern Virginia. Our ranks included members, staffers, and elected leaders of different federal worker and teachers’ unions, from AFSCME, SEIU, the Machinists, and locals from other unions. This was not a coalition in the traditional sense of the word, of people representing different organizations — and we never aimed to replace existing union leadership or replicate the work unionists were doing within their own organizations. Rather, we were composed of people working to build support for Jackson’s programs and proposals within union membership.
Partly we sought to bring together local labor networks building support for the anti-apartheid Free South Africa movement and those opposing US intervention in Central America. Partly our goal was to build inter-union solidarity and strike support for local and national labor disputes, such as paper-mill workers on strike in Jay, Maine, and cannery workers on strike in Watsonville, California (and workers at Diamond Walnut in Stockton, California, whose strike was to last 14 years). Connected to this was our support for national legislation to ban the use of “permanent replacement” — i.e., scabs replacing fired workers in industrial disputes, as happened in Decatur and in countless other labor disputes at the time — which was a key element in Jackson’s platform.
We also worked to build support within our unions for the broader progressive agenda of Jackson’s presidential campaign and the issues he was highlighting. Among these were support for DC statehood, defending voting rights nationally and expanding voting registration, and for a broad progressive social agenda: to improve local public education, build affordable housing, establish a public health system, and protect and improve welfare benefits. These were, and are, all working-class needs as critical to working people’s lives as job protection, decent wages, and grievance procedures at work. All were and are issues that spoke to racial and economic justice.
Similarly, we were aiming to build understanding amongst unionists of the need for the nuclear freeze, the need to convert arms production to non-lethal industrial production, and the critical importance of union-based industrial policy proposals such as those put forth by the Industrial Union Division of the AFL-CIO, by the UAW, and especially the more radical vision of the International Association of Machinists. The IAM advocated direct union representation on federal economic planning boards, legislative measures to control the movement of capital, use of pension funds to reinvest in urban needs, and a jobs program to meet public needs.
Ultimately, we became part of the (more bureaucratic) District-wide Rainbow in DC while maintaining our autonomy (as did the Latino Rainbow). Other local Rainbow Coalitions were organized in Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties — each with a distinct character. Such initiatives took shape with different emphases and different structures throughout the country and expressed themselves around multiple issues — women’s rights, immigrant solidarity, Black women’s needs, environmental protection. Additionally, Jackson and the Rainbow stood openly for gay rights, something still uncommon in the 1980s; few in organized labor would publicly take such a stance, nor would any mainstream Democratic presidential candidate utter such words. Even more rare at the time, Jackson and the Rainbow welcomed support from the Arab American community and brought an unprecedented number of Arab Americans into the Jackson presidential campaign. And thus, too, Jackson recognized the justice of the Palestinian cause and stood as a voice for peace and justice in the Middle East.
This recognition that justice is indivisible was itself rooted in a long tradition of African American opposition to war and the linkage of the need to end racism with the need to see the human face of those killed in the US’s endless wars of aggression. This reflected the depth of the solidarity that was built into Jackson’s campaigns — how often he would tell the story of the Good Samaritan, talk of Joseph and Mary as homeless refugees, speak of meeting the needs of the least of us; Christian messages that were wholly and completely ecumenical.
ENDINGS AND NEW BEGINNINGS
“America is not like a blanket, one unbroken piece of cloth, one color, one character, one texture, one religion. It is more like a quilt of many patches, many pieces, many colors, many textures, many religions, many sizes. And yet everyone fits somewhere, everybody is somebody.” Jesse Jackson for President Campaign Booklet, 1984
A couple of years after our Rainbow’s promising beginning, much of the local activity we had been building began to dwindle. The Rainbow, built around Jackson’s presidential campaigns, only lasted a few years, as a national force, after his 1988 run.
The lines being drawn were evident at a 1991 Rainbow Conference in DC, even though it was well attended. About 800 people went to a labor breakfast, with local union members and national leaders present. Mainstream Democrats spoke at the conference, making clear their opposition to Jackson running a third time, making clear their distrust of the Rainbow as an independent force. For them, the issue was simple: a choice between Democrats and Republicans. Any attempt to raise issues of war and peace, any attempt to speak directly of racism, any attempt to advocate universal reforms such as national health insurance were dismissed as divisive and as providing an opportunity for Republicans to hold onto power.
Republican gains were all too often the product of the gap between the words of Democratic Party leadership and their deeds in Congress, where they acquiesced time and again to Republican initiatives.
AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer Bill Lucy — head of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and a strong supporter of Jackson — challenged that proposition. Agreeing that it was necessary to defeat the Republican nominee in 1992 and put a brake on the cruelty and destructiveness of the policies implemented by the Reagan and first Bush administrations, he also noted that winning an election was by itself not sufficient. Republican gains were, he argued, all too often the product of the gap between the words of Democratic Party leadership and their deeds in Congress, where they acquiesced time and again to Republican initiatives. The answer, Lucy stressed, was in the program and work of the Rainbow — building independent politics from below to address workers’ needs rather than those of corporations, building power from below to stop Republican reaction, to force Democrats to enact needed social legislation.
That evening, Jackson also directed his remarks to that challenge. The Republican reaction maintained its power by inflaming racial tensions and resentment toward women, he said, thereby inhibiting the ability of people to see their common interests. Jackson’s answer — and the answer of the Rainbow — was to open, not close, debate. It was not to ask those who suffer the most to keep silent, but rather for the Democratic Party, for our society, to allow for more democracy, more voices to be heard. Specific demands spoke to specific needs, be it the needs of a young Black teenager unjustly jailed, a farmer losing his land, a woman unable to secure an abortion or another woman subjected to forced sterilization, a trade unionist on strike, or an unemployed family seeking shelter — Jackson and the Rainbow argued that their concrete demands, when pronounced in unison, are the framework for fighting for the common good.
The rest is history. Jackson recognized that he would be unable to replicate his 1988 gains (let alone win the nomination) if he ran a third time; he recognized that a third-party independent run would be marginalized. Neoliberalism within the Democratic Party won out, closing down discussion, compromising on basic rights, putting in place programs that ameliorated some injustices while leaving an unjust system in place. Although Democrats in office were an improvement on Republicans, the fact is that Democratic weakness — the gap between promises and actions Lucy scored, the shutting down of internal debate Jackson decried — enabled Republican gains and led to the situation we currently face: authoritarian reaction without apology in the Trump administration.
The Rainbow’s failure was not only due to the power of its opponents. Its strength was its amorphous, open character. But that contained a weakness, for once the movement lost momentum (when Jackson was no longer campaigning for president), it was hard to maintain cohesion. More important, although the Rainbow was truly a broad-based organization with far-reaching support, it never developed sufficient roots within the broader public on the scale needed. It never reached organizationally those soldiers sent to Iraq, those churchgoers at Bible Way, those locked-out workers in Decatur. Jackson sensed that. When he moved back to Chicago from DC, he also reduced his commitment to the Rainbow, which ceased to be the vehicle for change it had been. But Jackson’s decision isn’t the substantive issue — putting the matter in another way, had the Rainbow built greater strength during its peak years, it may well have survived and thrived.
Life, however, is not about “what ifs.” It is about facing the present by building upon the legacy of the past. The aim of the architects of the Rainbow was to serve as a form of dual power — an independent, multi-racial movement rooted in communities and sections of working people facing the most intense forms of oppression — and to use that base to challenge constituted authority by working with elected officeholders, union leaders, and public personalities in all walks of life who are the other expression of public power. In such a scenario, those two forms of power are mutually supportive even when not fully aligned; they change public understanding, and they have the strength to bring about the structural changes needed to bring to fruition the vision Jackson so beautifully articulated.
Jackson’s presidential campaigns built upon King’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign (during the course of which King was assassinated), built upon the original Rainbow of the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and Young Patriots, built upon the 1972 National Black Political Convention. As Sheila Collins, an activist within, and chronicler of, the Rainbow, wrote: “almost all the top leadership of the Jackson campaign received their political education either in the Civil Rights Movement or one of the other movements generated by it — the Black power movement, the feminist movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the Chicano movement, the Native American movement, and various others.”
Likewise, today we can build upon the still living legacy of the Rainbow.
As our societal crisis deepens, the elements are in place to build a transformative movement broader than was evident in the 1980s. We can see that in the impact of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, in the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Summer Lee, Ayanna Presley, Pramila Jayapal, Greg Casar, Zohran Mamdani, Janeese Lewis George, and hundreds more; in the legacy of Occupy and the Black Lives Matter protests; in the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, the Working Families Party, the Poor People’s Campaign; in the mass actions and campaigns called by Indivisible, Move On, Our Revolution; in the movement to block Immigration and Customs Enforcement, from Los Angeles to Minneapolis; in the work to protect abortion providers and seekers and to safeguard trans lives; in union organizing by the UAW at auto plants, in nurses’ strikes across the country, in the actions by workers at Amazon and Starbucks; in the movement in solidarity with Palestine and now opposition to the war against Iran.
And when we look at the enormous crowds who attended Bernie and AOC’s anti-oligarchy tour, we see today a potential for radical transformation. It is up to us to find a way to seize the opportunity by building, organizing, and cohering based on principles rooted in popular participation, not in lines drawn to keep some in and some out.
A path forward lies in putting all these elements together in a way that allows all parts to thrive. It is difficult to see in these dark times, indeed. But possible, yes. For as Jesse reminded us again and again: “Keep Hope Alive.”
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This piece originally ran in the Washington Socialist
Hidden. Buried. Lost. Forgotten.
By Lincoln Cushing
Clickbaiting history
It seems that the only way to attract readers to non-fictional narrative is to evoke intrigue and conspiracy. Even the venerable Atlantic magazine print version article titled “The Women of Avenger Field” changed their online version to “The Forgotten Female Pilots of World War II.”
In the social media sphere a persistent story line is about an ordinary person who subverted the standard way of doing things, came up with a clever solution to a problem, and then vanished from public knowledge. It’s an attractive trope, ostensibly honoring the “little people” whose street smarts ends up being better than conventional wisdom. But what happens when such a story, presented as fact, is false?
This February I received a baffled email from an education staffer at Richmond’s Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park: “We have had two inquiries from visitors about an incredible story – a welder named Bessie Hamill at Kaiser Shipyard 3 who developed a new welding sequence to solve the issue of cracking Liberty Ships.” Even with a corps of actual vintage WWII “Rosies” in the house the ranger had never before heard this.
I was the historian for the health care provider Kaiser Permanente and had worked closely with the National Park Service. The visitor center was the site of the WWII Kaiser shipyards and the birthplace of group health care in the U.S. I developed displays and interpretation on the WWII home front, a remarkable period of history and included many “forgotten” events and people.
Bessie’s story is not one of them.
Digging into it revealed that the source was a YouTube video “How One Welder’s ’Ridiculous’ Idea Saved 2,500 Ships From Splitting in Half at Sea,” later titled “This Welder’s Ridiculous Trick Let Them Build Warships in 5 Days Instead of 40” posted 10/23/2025. Its visibility was amplified by a 11/26/2025 article “The Woman Who Changed Welding” in a trade publication, MetalForming Magazine.
I was shocked at the errors in the video, and further surprised that the magazine carried the story without any evident fact-checking or research. MetalForming’s editor stood by his writer’s story, without explanation.
What was wrong with this story? Here’s the short version.
1. There’s no claimed YouTube authorship beyond “@WW2ColdSecrets” – no human claiming to have written the text or produced the video.
2. Statements about the problem are alarmist and incorrect. A key document that was not cited was the 1947 Final Report on a Board of Investigation to Inquire into the Design and methods of Construction of Welded Steel Merchant Vessels. Their review of the 4,694 merchant vessels built during the war, only 25 sustained a complete fracture of the “strength deck” or bottom. Of those, eight were lost at sea and two – including the Schenectady – broke in two but were not lost. And the human cost? A total of 26 lives were lost due to structural failures. The commission concluded that locked-in stresses did not contribute materially to the failure of welded ships.
3. Statements about “Bessie Hamill” the heroic yet unknown welder are unverifiable. No obituary, no interviews, no documents. Without those, where did this story come from? “She requested a meeting with facility supervisors” – how does @WW2ColdSecrets know that? Bessie’s shipyard supervisor’s commendation letter? Not shown. Years ago I digitized the Kaiser Richmond shipyard newspapers, and they are full of feel-good stories about workers and their innovations. Women welders were a featured item. Nothing resembling the Hamill story appears.
4. There are no footnotes, only sources unattached to statements. And those sources do not support the claims made. For example, “Oral History Collections, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley — Rosie the Riveter WWII Oral History Project” contains no references to “Bessie” or this sequence of events. “The SS Schenectady: Broken Ship, Broken Welds” (Naval Engineers Journal, 1990) by John Gamon Soucy does not seem exist; the only related article by this journal was from 1943 – “Structural Failure of The Tanker: S.S. Schenectady” Journal of the American Society for Naval Engineers, 55: 358-361
I even went down a rabbit hole with a blogger on X who also repeated the story. After a lot of correspondence “NFADLR” backed off, posting “There are a few historical women named Bessie Hamill (or similar spellings) in records, including some from earlier or later periods, but the welder associated with shipbuilding innovation is the one featured in these accounts. Some online discussions debate exact details or whether the story has been slightly mythologized over time, but the core narrative of a female welder’s welding-sequence insight aiding ship production is widely shared. Her story fits into the broader history of women in wartime industry and serves as an example of how observation and experimentation can drive engineering improvements.”
And there are other examples. A story was recently posted on the anonymously-produced social media site “Old American Life” with the title “The Typing Pool That Saved the Shipyard, 1943.” It’s another in the genre of clickbait history items, a cool and compelling WWII home front piece about forgotten heroes. Unfortunately, it’s pure fakery.
– It alludes to sabotage at the Kaiser Richmond shipyard, but the only known such act was this one.
– It tells about how a diligent typing pool worker recreated a whole Liberty ship blueprint from memory, hull #726. The problem? There is no record of such a ship from the Richmond, or any, shipyard.
– The photo is clearly an AI fake – note how the typewriters face the wrong way.
Why am I so disturbed by this? The “Typing pool” and Hamill stories should be uplifting and empowering feminist examples. The WWII home front was high water mark for women in the trades, with equal pay for equal work the law of the land. It was not perfect, and women were not treated well in many ways, but this fabricated narrative is speculative fiction posing as historical fact. I’m utterly baffled as to why these fake histories were produced.
On the other hand, the aforementioned Atlantic article about the Women Airforce Service Pilots, despite the title change, is an excellent example of serious journalism exposing real history that is actively being hidden from us. “The WASPs risked their lives flying for the Army. But for decades, the U.S. government refused to recognize their military service.”
The Atlantic article is by my daughter. Her grandmother Pat Perry flew military planes in the continental U.S. so that male pilots could fight in Europe and the Pacific, but they were not in the military. They were not treated well by the government then, or now. Anti-“woke” efforts have sought to erase them from our history.
Last year I asked the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force why their webpage “1946 Army Air Forces Historical Study No. 55: Women Pilots with the AAF, 1941-1944” 404’d, and was told “Our website is currently being migrated to a new server. In this process, some links may no longer be available until the process is complete. We anticipate full functionality in the near future.” It’s still not there.
Three stories about unsung women’s service during World War II, two vastly different approaches to journalism.
WWII propaganda encouraged citizens to be vigilant. It’s still good advice.
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A Working-Class Hero Is Something To Be
By Steve Early and Rand Wilson
Rutgers Labor Center Celebrates
Life & Legacy of Tony Mazzocchi
In 1948, the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills published a book called The New Men of Power, which examined the careers of post-war labor leaders who emerged from industrial union struggles in the 1930s. At the time, the author was hopeful that labor’s progressive wing—led by this new generation of trade unionists—would be a bulwark against war, militarism, and resurgent corporate power.
A decade later, Mills became a cheerleader for the emerging student movement because the “main drift” of organized labor and most of its officialdom in the 1950s was trending in a conservative direction. That was symbolized by the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) purge of left-wing unions representing a million workers. This paved the way for its mid-1950s merger with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) an alliance in which craft union influence was predominant.
One individual exception to this generational trajectory was the career of a World War II veteran from Brooklyn named Tony Mazzocchi. In the 1950s and 60s, Mazzocchi rose through the ranks of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers (OCAW), a union with then strong CIO traditions of rank-and-file activism and internal democracy. While Mills welcomed the revival of campus radicalism in his famous 1960 “Letter to the New Left,” mainstream unions were very hostile, then and later, to any migration of New Leftists from college campuses to unionized workplaces.
The stodgy, insular, cold warriors at AFL-CIO headquarters viewed the growing militancy of the civil rights, antiwar, Black Power, environmental, and feminist movements as a big political threat.
Only a few longtime working-class leaders welcomed Sixties’ activists into the ranks of labor. Tony Mazzocchi was one of the most influential among them. His personal mentoring enabled many former students to become more effective organizers, contract negotiators, strike leaders, and advocates for independent political action.
An Influential Mentor
In singular fashion, Mazzocchi developed a wide following outside his own union. As his biographer, labor educator Les Leopold explains, “Tony was a kindhearted soul with an earthy, self-deprecating sense of humor. Unlike so many people who rise to union leadership, he did not have an ego you constantly had to tiptoe around.” Those qualities alone made him the premier political mensch of the labor left, for four decades, until his death in 2002.
Nearly a quarter century after 2002
Nearly a quarter century later, several hundred friends, allies, and former co-workers of Mazzochi are coming together at the Rutgers University Labor Center on June 4-5, for an in-depth discussion of his life and legacy. (For schedule and registration information.) As recounted well in Leopold’s 2007 biography, The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor, Mazzocchi was both a role model and catalyst for progressive activism around multiple issues.
As an OCAW local president and regional leader in New York, legislative director in Washington, and later the union’s national secretary-treasurer, Mazzocchi managed to juggle day-to-day union responsibilities with a tireless commitment to civil rights, labor-based environmentalism, job safety reform, single-payer health care, nuclear disarmament, and union democracy. He was a leading architect of the fight for a federal Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) in 1972, warranting Leopold’s description of him as “the Rachel Carson of the American workplace.”
Working Class Roots
Unlike many of his later fans who were middle-class baby boomers, Mazzocchi was shaped by his childhood experience during the Depression, followed by Army service in the Battle of the Bulge. He came from a boisterous, pro-labor Italian-American family in Bensonhurst, a Brooklyn neighborhood later known for its white working-class conservatism and residents with mob ties.
Mazzocchi’s two sisters and a closeted gay uncle were Communist Party (CP) members. Despite growing up in that milieu, Tony never joined the CP. As Leopold reports, Mazzocchi regarded “formal Marxism and its terminology to be too doctrinaire.”
He was more influenced by left-wingers with a popular touch. He actively supported Congressman Vito Marcantonio’s unsuccessful 1949 campaign for N.Y.C. mayor as an American Labor Party candidate. According to Mazzocchi’s biographer, the young World War II veteran “watched and learned how Marc carefully serviced his base, while also staking out radical positions. Not only did he care for ‘workers’ as a political category — he cared for his constituents personally.”
Mazzocchi took the same approach when he got a job at a Queens cosmetics factory in 1950 and became a union activist. Local 149 at Helena Rubinstein was then affiliated with the United Gas, Coke and Chemical Workers (which merged with the Oil Workers to became OCAW five years later). As a union shop steward, organizer, and eventually president, Mazzocchi tripled his local’s size. He built a strong cadre of shop floor leaders, started a book club and credit union, and sponsored a “vast array of social activities” that “combined to create a remarkable new spirit at work.”
As Leopold recounts: “In stark contrast with much of the labor movement in the mid-1950s, Local 149 championed the rising civil rights movement — even though its membership was 95 percent white.”
War and Peace
In 1957, Mazzocchi helped launched the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) to oppose atom bomb testing. His longtime involvement with SANE put him in touch with the “leading scientists, environmentalists, and activists who would later join him building an occupational safety and health movement.”
When the Rubenstein plant relocated outside the city, Mazzocchi’s membership became a force in local politics and a reliable source of strike solidarity in the suburbs. By the mid-1960s, Mazzocchi was mobilizing against job cuts at military contractors on Long Island with a union-drafted plan “to use defense workers’ vast skills to build public buses and subway cars.”
Aided by economist and fellow SANE activist Seymour Melman, this pioneering promotion of “economic conversion” won Mazzocchi a White House audience with Lyndon Johnson in 1964. That same year, he almost ran for Congress — a move thwarted by Democratic Party officials who looked askance at his peace activities and feared they would be redbaited along with him.
Mazzocchi’s aspirations for higher office were partially fulfilled, instead, within the 200,000-member OCAW. In 1965, he helped elect a new national union president, after a bitter struggle with top OCAW officials linked to CIA meddling in foreign labor movements. This victory made Tony the union’s legislative/political director.
Job Safety and Health
In that capacity, Mazzocchi linked emerging public concern about environmental pollution to the source of the problem — workplaces where OCAW members and other workers were exposed to toxic chemicals at much higher levels than anyone in surrounding communities. In the era before OSHA and the Environmental Protection Act (EPA), as Leopold points out: “There were no effective standards. There was no enforcement. The corporations ruled as absolute monarchs over chemical production, exposure, and regulation.”
At Mazzocchi’s initiative, organized labor began to shift its own focus, from a traditional emphasis on job safety (i.e. protection against injuries) to dealing with the long-term health effects of occupational hazards. His method involved rank-and-file consciousness raising and grassroots coalition building, outside the Beltway.
A high-school dropout himself, Mazzocchi recruited a high-powered network of medical researchers to provide documentation for lawsuits, reports, press releases, hearing testimony and investigative reporting. He regularly dispatched these allies to probe for the causes of job illnesses reported by his membership.
At the same time, he organized non-stop “road shows” that brought workers together with friendly experts and forced lawmakers to listen to both of them. Mazzocchi’s drive for passage of the Occupational Health and Safety Act in 1972 is a case study in building effective labor clout, albeit in an era when legislative gains were still possible even under a Republican president.
The Silkwood Case
In that same decade, OCAW tried to help rank-and-file whistle-blowers like Karen Silkwood in Oklahoma. She worked at a dangerous nuclear facility operated by Kerr-McGee and died under suspicious circumstances in a 1974 car crash. That occurred when Silkwood was on her way to meet a New York Times reporter–an interview arranged by Steve Wodka, a close collaborator of Mazzzocchi’s and now a contributor to Capitol Hill Citizen. (For more on that famous case, see Meryl Streep’s moving performance in the 1983 film Silkwood.)
As an integral part of what Leopold calls “the atomic-industrial complex,” OCAW dues payers in the nuclear industry proved to be Mazzocchi’s own Achilles heel. When he decided to run for national union president in 1979 and 1981, conservative opponents — critical of his “anti-nuke” politics and “incessant boat-rocking” — mobilized against him. In both hotly contested convention elections, he suffered heartbreakingly narrow defeats.
Tony confounded his foes, per usual, by making an unexpected political comeback. In the late 1980s he reconciled with Bob Wages, the last president of OCAW before it merged with the Paper Workers and then the United Steel Workers. Mazzocchi returned to the OCAW leadership as national secretary-treasurer again. This time, he used that post to promote worker education initiatives like Les Leopold’s Labor Institute and, with far more obstacles, a new labor-based third party.
A Party for Labor?
After four years of preparatory work, the Labor Party got off to a promising start in 1996 due to growing rank-and-file disillusionment with the Clinton Administration. Its founding convention in Cleveland drew fourteen hundred delegates, including rank-and-file activists, local officers, some national union officials, and labor-oriented academics like author and historian Adolph Reed, a speaker at the Rutgers conference in early June.
During the LP’s early years, Mazzocchi helped generate much of its labor funding and support, through relentless personal barnstorming around the country. Unfortunately, dreary and divisive left sectarian squabbles soon paralyzed some chapters. A substantive disagreement about when to start running viable independent candidates—and at what level of government– was never satisfactorily resolved.
After CHC publisher Ralph Nader, Tony’s longtime friend and ally, made his Green Party run for the presidency in 2000, the mainstream union backlash against alleged third party “spoilers” further complicated LP recruitment efforts. The authors of this piece and other “Labor for Nader” supporters did grassroots turn-out for Ralph’s famous “super-rallies” in Boston and other cities. But only two LP affiliates–the United Electrical Workers (UE) and California Nurses Association—officially endorsed his campaign, not the LP itself.
The electoral college (and Supreme Court-assisted) victory of George Bush in 2000 and resulting Republican attacks on labor tended to drive unions back into the Democratic Party fold. Other LP sponsors, including OCAW’s new parent organization, withdrew their support. In 2007, the LP folded its tent.
As two key LP organizers, Mark Dudzic and Katherine Isaac, summed up the experience five years later: “the prospect of breaking completely with the Democratic Party without an established alternative was too risky for even the most militant unions and remains the biggest challenge to any effort to build an independent labor politics.”
It should be noted that, even within the Democratic Party, only seven national unions, representing just a million workers, dared to embrace the pro-labor presidential primary campaign of Bernie Sanders in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was the leadership choice of the AFL-CIO, SEIU, and big independent unions like the National Education Association.
Mazzocchi’s Legacy
Tony didn’t live to see it but, two years ago, former local union president and strike leader Dan Osborn proved, without a doubt, that Nebraska is one state ready for a labor-backed independent candidate. After an unexpectedly strong showing in his 2024 U.S. Senate race against a MAGA Republican incumbent, Osborn is making a second run against another one this year, as the CHC reported in its February-March issue.
From MassCOSH in Boston to Work Safe in the Bay Area, local occupational safety and health coalitions which Tony helped foster, continue to support job safety and health fights. Antiwar agitation by U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW) and Veterans and Labor for Sensible Priorities still reprise the role played by the Vietnam-era Labor for Peace, which Mazzocchi supported.
Under Tony’s influence in the 1980s, OCAW sponsored a Boston Organizing Project, which placed “salts” in non-union workplaces. The much bigger 21st century successors to that effort include the SEIU-backed Starbucks Workers United, Amazon warehouse worker organizing efforts by the Teamsters, and the Rank-and-File Project, which has a multi-industry focus and helpers from DSA and Labor Notes.
The Labor Institute, an independent labor education and research project that Mazzocchi helped start in the mid-70s, continues to issues studies on economic inequality and provide health and safety training for unions, immigrant workers, and disaster clean-up crews.
Two key Labor Party demands—single payer health coverage and “Higher Ed for All”—the latter inspired by Mazzocchi’s own experience with the original GI Bill—didn’t gain enough traction in the 1990s. But both became a programmatic centerpiece of two Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020, as former California Nurses Association leader RoseAnn DeMoro will remind the Rutgers conference crowd.
As Les Leopold, also a Rutgers conference organizer, points out, Mazzocchi always raised hopes and expectations by “conjuring up a labor movement that didn’t really exist, but just might.” And that “movement would be militant and green. It would bring about radical changes that would stop global warming. It would give workers real control over the quality and pace of work and over corporate investment decisions. It would champion the fight against militarism and for peace and equality. It would win free health care. It would dare to create a new political party to counter the corporate domination of the two major parties.”
In a period of declining union density and Trump-related defensive crouches, few union leaders today project anything like this expansive vision. The two-day event at Rutgers will begin with panels and workshops featuring speakers who worked with Tony or whose current organizing was inspired by him. It will also include a more “interactive, worker-centered, action-centered day of strategizing, learning from the lessons of the past and applying them to the present and future.”
The conference will officially unveil the Tony Mazzocchi Archive, to be permanently housed at the Rutgers Labor Center. It will feature, not just OCAW-related documents, but a wide-ranging oral history project, capturing the voices of workers influenced by the visionary leadership and pragmatic radicalism that Brother Tony personally embodied.
…
Mayhaps: May Day and the Rebirth of Labor’s Imagination
By Fred Glass
For many years I taught labor history at night to working students at City College of San Francisco. Since Bay Area workers and their unions had carried out two consequential general strikes (San Francisco in 1934, and Oakland in 1946), each semester I assigned my pupils an essay question: Is it possible—or even desirable—for our region’s workers, if faced with oppressive circumstances, to replicate those feats today?
My students’ essays appeared along a range of responses between two poles. On one end, no, not possible, even if desirable, due to changed conditions like suburban distances between home and workplace, along with the decline of union density. On the other, yes, both desirable and possible, because new communications technologies allow ideas and organizing to spread rapidly online, and labor’s steep decline means that workers are angry enough to make it happen. Few students in either camp thought it would be an easy lift, reflecting a general sense of limited horizons for labor-led progressive change in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries.
The 1946 Oakland General Strike was the very last one American workers had managed to put together, literally a lifetime ago. But metaphorically, post-January 23, 2026, we might now be onto a new calendar. In the wake of the powerful “No Work, No School, No Shopping” day that erupted in the Twin Cities, alongside a steady drumbeat of growing demonstrations and electoral successes against the Trump regime, there’s wind in the sails for mass action on May Day 2026.
Just in my neck of the woods many events have already taken place, and more are on the boards, combining planning, training and coalition building for that once-unpopular holiday, officially observed in one hundred or so nations across the globe, but not in the country that birthed it. I hear from a friend in Minneapolis that he’s been going to meetings attended by hundreds of people dedicated in a serious way to making May 1 another day of action.
We shouldn’t underestimate the significance of what happened January 23. In the midst of a brutal occupation by poorly trained, heavily armed troops operating with seeming impunity on behalf of their fascist mission of ethnic cleansing, the ordinary people of Minneapolis organized themselves to defend their streets, their democratic rights, their immigrant neighbors, and their idea of a decent society to demand “ICE out!”. Somewhere around 75,000 people showed up on a cold Minnesota winter day to freeze the gears of the local economy and the occupation.
It was pretty close to a general strike, and unlike all the other dozen-plus city-wide general strikes in American history it was waged not around an economic struggle between workers and bosses, but on behalf of a political idea, more like what happens every so often in other countries. Which is very much in the spirit of May Day.
Tools are there to be found
Doing such things will not suddenly become easier. The Minnesota circumstances are unique, with an unprecedented level of assault running into a recent baseline increase in labor-community alliance and activism. The ICE invasion reignited the embers of powerful alliance – building and union contract victories that peaked in 2024.
But every city has its own local history, culture and traditions of collective action, and despite the diminished capacities of the labor movement, the tools are there to be found — providing they are sought out seriously.
One hurdle is the legitimate fear of labor leadership over legal consequences for calling a general strike, forbidden by the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, a federal legislative backlash by the Republican controlled Congress against the 1946 strike wave. Unions can be fined, and labor leaders jailed for overtly calling for sympathy strikes. Thus while mostly supportive behind the scenes, unions were muted in their participation in the May 1 2006 “Day Without Immigrants” demonstrations and the November 2011 “Day of Action” in Oakland that shut down the docks and shuttered many businesses in support of Occupy Oakland’s call for a general strike.
January 23 in Minneapolis-St. Paul showed the general strike tactic is no longer solely in the rear view mirror.
Making distinctions
In Minneapolis unions and labor federations advanced the ball down that field without quite uttering the words “general strike”, although everyone was pretty clear what “No Work, No School, No Shopping” meant. Which brings us to the distinction between what Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch termed ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ utopias. Both contain the hope for something better than what we’ve got, and both can propose action to get us from here to there. But an abstract utopia fails to marshal full consideration of the many-sided realities that need to be navigated in order to arrive at a successful endpoint. A concrete utopia pays attention to what Marx was getting at in his Introduction to the Grundrisse when he noted that “The truth is concrete; hence, unity of the diverse.”
What didn’t do that? The cry immediately after January 23 by various individuals and organizations to replicate “No work, no school, no shopping” nation-wide a week later on January 30, which predictably fizzled, absent the hard work of analysis and organizing that produced January 23.
What did do that? In the background, helping to set the stage for Minneapolis, was United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain’s call—issued in 2023—for unions across the country to line up their contracts for common expiration on May 1 2028. Here was a call not to have a general strike, but to organize one. A concrete utopia is one that bridges the gap between the current unsatisfactory situation and the desired outcome with appropriate tactics, strategies, and inspiration—and above all, with a clear-eyed picture of and willingness to do the work needed in the timeframe needed to do it.
We may be learning that there is nothing like a dose of fascism to clarify the minds of labor and other progressive movement leaders. Besides all-but-calling a general strike, and getting onto the May Day train, unions around the country have been stepping up ‘tax the rich’ efforts at the state and local levels and signing onto coalitions supporting socialists running for office. Not everywhere, but you’ve got to start somewhere, and it seems to be starting. There are some 250 democratic socialists in office today in the United States, the most since the heyday of the Socialist Party in the early twentieth century, nearly all elected with union support. The imagination of the labor movement, perhaps not coincidentally mostly slumbering since the 1946 strike wave, is waking up.
The direct confrontation with fascism experienced in places like the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and elsewhere is not everywhere. Where it’s happening it’s real and deadly serious, on the wrong end of weapons wielded by our government against its own citizens. Fascists are occupying the federal government apparatus, and as they are wont to do, they are stripping it of its helping functions and shifting resources to the repressive functions. But the occupation is being contested. Civil society is the playing field, and democracy is still in play.
Mayhaps
May Day has always been about collective imagination—to be precise, workers imagining a new world, one in which they will be in charge. This act of collective imagining involves another pairing, not the same as but rhyming with the concrete/abstract utopias distinction: individual imagination and fantasy. In psychoanalytic terms, fantasy is a regressive and often self-destructive escape from reality, a defensive flight toward would-be omnipotent control, but only in one’s head. The ultra-left posturing that goes into a call for a general strike without regard to material circumstances is a good example. Imagination, by contrast, actively and creatively engages the work necessary to move from internal conception to making something actually happen — like lining up our contracts to expire on the same day, May Day 2028, with a timeline matched to the magnitude of the task.
Fain’s concrete utopia also rhymes with how May Day began. Following the execution of the Haymarket martyrs in Chicago, the Socialist International declared a day of commemoration, with demonstrations in every country for the eight-hour work-day, the cause for which the Chicago labor leaders were put to death. Wisely, the call did not impose a one-size-fits-all set of instructions, but instead suggested that each country assess its situation and determine what sort of demonstrations made sense in their own context. The results ranged from weekend marches to general strikes. In some places, over the years, the marches became general strikes, May First became a workers’ holiday, and the labor movement achieved the shorter workday.
For eight decades in this country we’ve done the weekend marches, not the general strikes, the door to which has been shut tight. The people of Minneapolis showed us something remarkable on January 23 — that with the work that accompanies imagination, it just might be possible to crack the door open and let the light through.
Minneapolis isn’t everywhere, nor should we expect it to be — like Mamdani’s victory could happen because it happened in New York, and New York also isn’t everywhere. But both events show us that something different is possible when collective imagination is fired by the vision of a better world, and the vision is matched with the work it takes to get there.
On May 1 2026 we’ll be testing how far along we are on the path to the mass actions necessary to push back the fascist tide. We should expect the results to be uneven, but we can learn from them and thus be stronger as we head toward the next rounds of struggle.
…
This piece originally ran in California DSA
“I Don’t Want Your Millions (Billions), Mister,” – Art and the Working Class
By Jay Youngdahl
Production and enjoyment of art is one of the constants in the human condition. From cave paintings, to the art of ancient Greece, to the posters from the Black Panther Party, all humans participate in art.
Unfortunately, contemporary art today is closely tied to the vagaries of capitalism. Museums are locations for the production of tax breaks for billionaires. “Fine art” is an asset class for speculation for those whose wallets are swollen with the harvests of exploitation of the working class. Determination of what is worthy to be exhibited and what is not is enforced by a neoliberal ideology which performatively lauds “identity” while ignoring class.
But outside of this ideological strait jacket much art making occurs in the working class. Often not recognized as such, training in art theory and history can reveal such art as important as any that is being exhibited in the galleries of New York City. Over the last few years, I have worked on bringing this to light.
On February 13, 2026, I was able to open an exhibition “I Don’t Want Your Millions (Billions), Mister,” (running until April 11th 2026) at the Workers Art and Heritage Centre (WAHC) in Hamilton, Ontario. The theme of the show is the innate creativity of workers, and the commonalities that exist within the working class.
Through documentation of worker-made objects from union training and apprenticeship centres in Alberta’s oil sands, the high rises of New York city, the American Deep South, and locations in between, this exhibition showcases the creative expression of workers, recognizing their labor as art. It does so not from a journalistic or historical perspective, but through the lens of conceptual art.
The name of the show comes from a song written by a Harlan County, Kentucky labor activist, Jim Garland, in 1941. This song was sung in my home in my youth, and verses from it are interspersed in this essay. The core of the show emanates from worker training centers, apprenticeship schools. Sponsored by unions, I visited many of these taking photos in each. An historical outgrowth of concepts of guilds which have existed throughout the world, these schools teach skills which society needs taught. They are sites of social reproduction. For those in them, they impart a sense of pride and a concrete response to the insecurity of wage labor.
In my day job, I am a union and civil rights lawyer in the South. While I have represented nearly every union over my career, much of my legal work today is for the Southern District of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, I represent their Apprenticeship Fund which covers eleven southern US states.
The following is written in conjunction with this exhibition. All of life is nuanced, and this is especially important when considering art and considering the working class. Here I attempt to make a number of discrete points which were important to me in building this exhibition. None of these theses are fleshed out.
INTRODUCTION TO EXHIBITION
The pieces which comprise the show all began with the efforts of workers while in training and at work. I then applied my interpretation. To take one example, photographs entitled, “A Welder’s View, Numbers 1 and 2,” were taken from inside welding booths. To me, they represent what an apprentice welder sees of the outside world as they learn their craft.
A special piece in the show, “Workers’ Staircase,” is a large metal sculpture, constructed from materials used in contemporary building construction, The sculpture was built by three apprentices, working with their instructor, at the UBC Local 18 Training Center, in Hamilton. With the conclusion of the show it will move to the union hall. I provided a design that was influenced by a famous post-revolutionary conception of a Soviet Ukrainian artist, Vladimir Tatlin, known as “Tatlin’s Tower.” Though never constructed, Tatlin’s Tower was to be erected in today’s Saint Petersburg, and to serve as the headquarters of and a monument to working class political parties throughout the globe. While workers vary through historical time, location, and context, certain strands are permanent I believe.
THESIS ONE
The working class is eternal.
With precious few exceptions, this underclass has existed throughout humanity. It has subsisted in all locations, historical times, ethnicities, and genders. It has taken the form of human slavery in ancient Greece and the Americas as well as laboring over computer code in Asia and Africa.
Subject to oppression, exploitation, and discrimination, the fruits of their labor have gone first to the reproduction of itself as a class and second to those who have the power to exploit it.
Except for a few shining historical moments, this class is always in contradiction with their wealthy global citizens who have amassed assets and power.
This power to exploit is often physical. Also, the rules of governmental power uphold exploitation through the rules and regulations of the operative system. These rules, regarding the legality of collective action by workers, or the handling of debt, for example, ensure an exploitative web. This web is maintained by a professional managerial class, lawyers and financiers and judges, which serves those who benefit the most from this exploitation.
Dominant ideas and ideology taught in schools and the media are determined by the economic bases of society at the time. Ideologically, a systemic philosophy of “possessive individualism,” is lauded today, a phrase coined by the Canadian philosopher, C.B. MacPherson.
Those with the hard or soft power to exploit engage in a constant effort to split this class, an effort that is not always recognized by those who suffer from these efforts. In my youth in the southern US, employers encouraged activity of the Ku Klux Klan to split solidarity of white and Black workers in rural paper and wood products factories. Today, many of those plants are owned by Canadian companies who use similar tools to ensure their profits.
This same effort to split the working class is assisted by the denigration of many workers as being “deplorables” and by an ideology that seeks to weaken understanding of class by upholding certain gender and identities, even of the wealthy, over conceptions of class and of the struggles of workers.
I don’t want your millions, Mister,
I don’t want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.
THESIS TWO
Each class produces its own morality. Due to their lack of individual economic power, workers’ morality must stress the common good. Regardless of location, gender, race, ethnicity, or historical time, most of the global population shares a commonality of work.
To improve the lot of their lives, workers must practice “solidarity forever,” whether we like it or not. One must work with others, so the actions that come out of it must benefit your fellow humans and yourself. Individualistic endeavors in which all is competition. and for you to win, others must lose, is embraced by some, but for this class such a philosophy can only be transitory.
It is from this that the title of the show emerged. The love and humility in the song has always been an inspiration to me. It is an antidote to the individualism of “look out of number one” that has been the mantra of the global elite in my lifetime, as well as the Silicon Valley religion of the “joys” of disruption, to “move fast and break things.”
Workers are forced into finding their distinctiveness from work. There is pride in production, a wholesomeness. The pride of a clean kitchen after the lunch rush; the pride of a completed building by those who constructed it; the pride of recovery by patients in a hospital ward; the pride of a well-maintained family home which allows a wholesome family to function.
I don’t want your Rolls-Royce, Mister,
I don’t want your pleasure yacht.
All I want’s just food for my babies,
Give to me my old job back.
THESIS THREE
Art and labor, and art and workers and their class, are multi-layered concepts. This show focuses on one of these layers, art made by workers while at work, as part of their work. A short exposition of several other layers is useful.
Generally, the concept of art by workers or labor art, is often connected to labor heritage. Much of it celebrates and helps us remember struggles of the past. Rob Kristofferson and Stephanie Ross in their book “The Art of Solidarity: Labour Arts and Heritage in Canada,” argue that “labour arts and labour heritage are especially key to sustaining and valuing working people, and their communities and movement, in difficult times.” (P1) These authors see this labour art and labor heritage as illuminating and sustaining “the oft-hidden realities of working people, and their contributions to and aspirations for social and economic justice, equity, and inclusion that capitalist structures of domination seek to block out.” (P2)
These authors, like many others, have recognized that art is generally mired in the economics of art in contemporary capitalist society. The gallery/museum system in North America has become a plaything for performative action by billionaires and their families. Art exists and is produced in and for the market, with its financial exchange value reified as a Wall Street commodity. Art made specifically for this system even has its own name today, “Zombie Formalism.”
In contemporary art practice, as in other sectors of society, workers are being squeezed out of the field. ”Class Ceiling A Review of Working-Class Participation in the Arts Across Greater Manchester,” released in January 2026, documented that workers losing the ability to participate in the arts. They are being pushed out of theatre, music, and literature, a trend that has accelerated over the last few decades.
Much of what is called worker art is made by workers using traditional techniques. These include painting and sculptures often known as “outsider art” in the academic art canon. Some recognized famous artists were laborers prior to becoming fulltime artists, such as Jean-François Millet. Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century in Europe, depictions only of the wealthy and powerful, or those favored by them, were allowed as subjects in figurative paintings hung on gallery walls. In the 1850’s, however, French painters like Jean-Francois Millet and Gustave Courbet heroically anchored a turn toward “common” people when they scandalized the Parisian art establishment with their paintings of ordinary French men and women. For example, Millet’s painting, The Gleaners (Les Glaneuses), portrayed widows in the countryside forced to gather leavings in the fields to survive, combining skilled artistry with a political position favoring ordinary French people.
Representations of workers was a favorite topic of artists during and after the Great Depression of the Twentieth Century. Further, many artists have used workplace locations as a theme, including some work by Canadian painters known as the Group of Seven.
The show at the WAHC, however, asks the viewer to consider another kind of labour art. While worker’s art is often thought of as art produced by workers who are consciously producing art and craft, my point is that there is a subconscious layer to this too, in which the creations by workers are art. This layer can be accessed by artist and viewer alike. One hundred years ago the Soviet artist, Boris Aratov, wrote “it is in the factory and the workshop where the erosion of the distinction between workers (as culturally excluded) and artists (culturally privileged), individual ideas and collective creativity will be tested and challenged in practice, and the real work of a new egalitarian culture created.” I hope to add in the revitalization of this concept.
Work and workers produce art. This art I am presenting as art is produced in worker training centers, often wholly unrecognized as art by the viewer or even by the producer. When I showed my first album of photographs to Paul Jones, the lanky director of carpenter union training centers in Texas, he replied, “It looks like work to me.”
To be sure, these pieces are my interpretation, influenced by art history and contemporary art practice. Yet they could not exist without the underlying work and efforts of these crafts people. Pieces in show are vignettes – only some of many. I mean for the pieces in the show to be conceptual entryways for the viewer to consider the working class, as a class with deep meaning and talent.
I am influenced by the work of Fred Lonidier, a union leader and photography teacher from California. Lonidier, along with his fellow students at the University of California, San Diego Martha Rosler and Alan Sekula, translated the movements of the 1960’s into conceptual art. Lonidier’s exhibition “The Health and Safety Game,” premiered at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1976, and considered the horrific yet mundane injuries incurred by workers through a lens of conceptual art.
THESIS FOUR
When I began photographing union training centers, I presented them as zines, with each zine focusing on a specific location. My zine, “1901 Susan Drive,” features a training center for carpenters and millwrights in Arlington, Texas. In it I included an essay entitled, “The Democratic Working-Class Possibilities of Art.” Ideas from that piece are included in this essay.
As discussed above one of my influences in producing this exhibition was the explosion of artistic methods in the revolutionary period in the early decades of the Twentieth Century. In the early years of the Soviet revolution, the issue of workers and art was on the front burner in a society which expressed its dedication to worker well-being and agency. An artistic socialist alternative, bringing art into factories and workplaces, was advocated by leaders in the artistic community. Arvatov, an avant-garde artistic activist, promoted the conscious implementation of art into factories in the young Soviet state. Artists would be part of the industrial process, working alongside production workers, as do those with other skills such as logistics, shipping, and accounting.
Recently published in English, Arvatov’s 1926 book “Art and Production” encouraged an artistic movement called “Productivist Art.” He wondered how artists, with their skills and attention, could contribute to the building of a new society by supporting collective processes of industrial work. Arvatov, his translators wrote, believed that “artists should subordinate their technical skills to the greater collective discipline of the labour process and the workshop. For it is in the factory and the workshop where the erosion of the distinction between workers (as culturally excluded) and artists (culturally privileged), individual ideas and collective creativity will be tested and challenged in practice, and the real work of a new egalitarian culture created.” (Art and Production, translated by John Roberts and Alexei Penzin.)
Arvatov and his contemporaries attempted to separate the division between art and life. They examined materials in a new way, arguing for a “culture of materials.” Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism.” Christina Kiaer (2005)
There are many ways to consider this conception of the relationship between art and working life, and mine is one which emanates from this tradition.
We worked to build this country, Mister,
While you enjoyed a life of ease.
You’ve stolen all that we built, Mister,
Now our children starve and freeze.
THESIS FIVE
A number of pieces in the show could be called “conceptual art.” Why use techniques of conceptual art for presentation in this exhibition?
The French painter Fernand Leger wanted access for workers to fine art. Leger observed that the problematic issues in art came from our economic system, not from the art itself. Because the poor and working classes must use their time and labor power to produce enough for the reproduction of their lives, working inside and outside of their living spaces, little time existed for this pursuit. Art’s main problem, Leger argued, is that regular people cannot fathom it; anyone without an academic art degree who has visited a conceptual exhibition in a big city art museum or gallery has experienced this feeling. “One of the most damaging charges that can be made against contemporary modern artists is that their work is accepted only by a few initiates. The masses cannot understand them.” The issue for working people, Leger argued, was not their inability to grasp the concepts and beauty in the art but that an economic structure of work allowed workers little time to gain access to the works or to contemplate them. “Everything is organized to keep them away” from galleries and museums, he wrote.
In addition to Leger’s argument, it is my intention to encourage an expanded way of seeing. Conceptual art can do this.
One way to show the philosophy of this exhibition is to show the relation of workers’ spaces and my manipulation of their work art to the artistic canon. The sum of writing about art history is not simply an endeavor to support art as a function of an exploitative system. Many interesting concepts and much beauty have arisen from it. So, one attempt of this show is to show relations between such high art and my presentation of art from working-class locations. I nod to the artist Michael Asher and his “institutional critique,” and New York’s “abstract impression,” and everyday working-class objects.
Workers are taught there is little beauty in what they make. Most know differently. They are proud of the beautiful buildings in which they hang the dry wall and wire the rooms. They recognize the beauty of a well-adjusted turbine in a power plant that serves their community. But thinking of additional ways to consider their tools and their labor, is a goal of this show.
THESIS SIX
In a somewhat controversial move, I did not include individual portraits of workers in this show. There were several reasons for this. To begin, there are extraordinary photographers and artists who have done important portraits of workers for centuries. While I have taken such portraits, I felt I had little to add.
Such portraits of workers generally focus on individual workers in sympathetic poses or highlights important struggles in which they feature. A number of struggles are part of this show, but showing the class as a class will limit the number of individual portraits. My goal was to show the commonality and collectivity of workers, as a group. This is not to understate the beauty and dignity of depictions of individuals workers.
Further, today too many emphasize difference within the working class, and try to elevate identity over class. This is a mistake. In this cultural period, with the social media mantra of “look at me, look at me,” individualism is the coin of the realm. It is antithetical to the solidarity of the working class. Working with groups of white, Black and Hispanic workers in the south, my personal experience is that once a struggle begins, these differences of identity fade away. The focus on the unity of the class and the contradictions of being with a boss who has an identity similar to yours become clear.
As a writer on labor issues for years, one of my most cited article (thought in a negative way), contains my view that shoehorning the struggles of workers into a narrative of individual rights eviscerates solidarity. Given the predominance of the “human rights” framing in our progressive struggles today, this view is not a popular one.
For this show my attempt is to lead our eye away from individual portraits which can lead our concentration into individualism. Here, I am influenced by the philosopher of photography, Alan Sekula. Coming out of an artist grouping at the University of California, San Diego with Martha Rosler and Fred Lonidier, Sekula works are under appreciated.
According to Sekula, the celebration of abstract humanity featured in individual portraits of workers becomes, in any given political situation, the liberation of the dignity of the passive victim. This is the final outcome of the appropriation of the photographic image for liberal political ends; the oppressed are granted a bogus subjecthood.
Real “subjecthood” comes from an understanding of class, not from a performative rendering of “The Family of Man.”
CONCLUSION
These are “high concepts” and “everyday” labor.
So, I don’t want your millions, Mister,
I don’t want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.
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Onsen Again – A Growing Addiction
By Peter Olney and Christina Perez
On our second trip to Japan in 2025 we discovered the “onsen”, the baths. It quickly became an addiction and we frequented the baths at least five times in our second visit. Nelson even toured us to the base of Mt Fuji and a resort where we could bathe hot and cold in natural spring water and look at snow covered Fuji. Coming home we thought we could maybe find a comparable spot in Japan Town in San Francisco. Kabuki Spa is a fine venue on Geary in the heart of J Town, but the cost is prohibitive at $50 a visit vs. the 1200 Yen price tag in Tokyo. ($7.50)
This visit we started to get a little more sophisticated about the bathing culture. First of all “Onsen” are technically mineral spring fed natural waters . “Sento” are public baths in urban areas with heated and cooled tap water. Nelson introduced us to a wonderful Sento in Hachioji that has a shuttle bus that leaves from the Southside of JR Hachioji Station a 15-minute walk from our house in the neighborhood. We easily doubled our Onsen visits during our stay this March.
This time I was not surprised and “shocked” by “Denki Buro”, the electric baths. On our previous visit I had wandered into a denki buro pool and received a jolt that I feared might kick off my A Fib heart condition. This time I avoided these baths and learned the Kanji symbol that labels them. The baths run a current from 3 to 10 Volts and have been around since the 1920’s. Many Japanese folks consider them very therapeutic to treat muscle pain and improve circulation. See “Shocking baths of Japan” by Alice Gordenker The Japan Times May 19, 2014
I will limit myself to the challenge of the cold baths. The super cold bath is set at 8.5 Centigrade about 47 degrees Fahrenheit. That is my tolerance when I do my cold plunge at Ocean Beach here in San Francisco. Then from the cold there are many warm options some of them sitting outside and soaking on chaise lounges bathed in hot water, or dunking in large pools while gazing at the open sky which is especially beautiful with a full moon, starry constellations, and in winter falling snow.
The Kabuki Spa in SF chastised me for conversing with my wife. The Japanese Sento/Onsen is very social and crowds of young people whoop it up. Several men were in the baths carrying their newborn babies. My wife Christina reports that small groups of women and girls speak freely in the women’s section.
The locker room culture is somewhat of a throwback to (Peter’s) college athletic days, a very comfortable place. I (Peter) have to suppress the urge to snap a towel at someone!
In the women’s Onsen mothers and daughters, and little girls finish off their Onsen with 10-20 minutes of facial mask, plus full body massages. Then it’s back to the main lobby for additional R&R on giant tatami mats where friends and family are sprawled out reading, resting, and spending additional time together.
Year around the whole experience is pure comfort for the whole family.
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Jazz in Japan – Our Cultural Atonement
By Peter Olney and Christina Perez
The month of March was chosen for our trip to Japan for our son Nelson’s graduation on March 12th. Nelson graduated from the Nihon Kogakuin College of Hachioji. The ceremony was massive with 1500 students graduating from vocational schools ranging from Manga to Masonry. Half of the graduates were women. Nelson graduated from the electrical program and has begun work at a Japanese electrical capital equipment manufacturer. We watched from the balcony with the other parents and when the ceremony was over and the students convened meetings by program we left to return to our home near Hachioji Station.
Our good friends Chizuro and Mizuyo had arranged for front row seats for us that evening at the Sometime jazz club 7 PM show The club is located in Musashino, Kichioji and we got there from our house on the Chuo train line. The Trio’s official name is Samurai-Be-Bop and the players include Tomoharu Hani on piano, Yoshihiko Natani on bass and Sonosuke Imaizumi on drums. We loved their music and interacted with them after the show.
We found the whole experience very emotional because the contrast between the artistry of these musicians, influenced of course by a cultural form exported from the USA, stood in stark contrast to the barbaric acts of the US Empire. The bombing and ongoing war with Iran had begun the day we left for Japan. And being in Tokyo you can never escape the fact that the US firebombing of the City on March 10 of 1945, immediately killed more Japanese than either of the horrific A-Bombs dropped in August on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is partly why the Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi was left speechless by Donald The Barbarian’s joke on March 19th about the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor.
At the Sometime session we were fortunate to meet and interacted with a young American named Adam Smith who has been living in Tokyo for 12 years and is a practitioner of “Gypsy Jazz”. “Gypsy Jazz” refers to an acoustic guitar, often called a Selmer-Maccaferri guitar, designed for increased volume and the punchy swing sound popularized by Django Reinhardt – himself a Romani gypsy native of Belgium. On March 15th we went to hear Adam and his cohort of Gypsy jazz musicians at The Den, a music club in Koenji.
What a night! A total of 8 musicians from various countries all stepped on stage to play the “gypsy” guitars. This was a multinational scene from France, Taiwan, Japan, China, Singapore and the USA that produced some of the most dynamic music we had ever heard.
Upon further investigation we have discovered that the first jazz to arrive in Japan was not imported by Americans but by Filipinos in the 1930’s. But obviously the American occupation from 1945-52, which shaped so much of post war Japan, influenced the music scene greatly. For those interested in the shaping of post war Japan culture and politics, Embracing Defeat by John W. Dower is a wonderful read. And jazz aficionados who visit Tokyo can take cool comfort in the fact that there are over 100 jazz venues in the metropolitan area. We have so far only visited three: Sometime and The Den on this visit, and the Blue Note Tokyo in 2025.
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Uniting Beyond Parties
By Stewart Acuff
Hemingway advised writers, write the truest sentence you can.
Here’s mine.
The No Kings Movement’s three huge mobilizations this year, each surpassing the other, is:
Outside our two homeland wars, the largest, broadest, deepest, mass collective action against fascism, tyranny, dictatorship, and christian nationalism ever in our history!!!
The protests of millions each were folks swarming, overwhelmed in joy and found freedom. They are actions of love and anger and frustration and hope and faith.
As one of those at the grassroots in a red state who was articulating this strategy as soon as the votes were counted, these protests are very strategic.
They are the organizers fail safe: face to face communication, on the street, side by side, sign waving together. Month after month, week after week, day after day we showed our neighbors that we would resist, giving many the courage to step out themselves. In fact, our pressure has helped those with much more power to start using that power to stop Trump.
I live in West Virginia. The GOP boot on our throats. But in this last year we have had unbelievable success creating Movement activity as small as 12, and as big as 3000.
From a lifelong union organizer perspective, teaching people to act together in concert is the first, and hardest part of moving folks into action for change.
Early on, we rallied around the issues, targeting them strategically. One of our earliest was a rally at Harpers Ferry Park was to stop the park service from removing “unpleasant” reminders of slavery.
Immediately afterwards we raised the issue of the Musk Assault on Workers. We drew dozens of pissed off federal workers, raising worker and union rights.
When Stephen Miller got his way and ICE went ape shit everywhere, we mobilized to support our neighbors and immigrant families. Our protests were aimed at ICE, against cooperation, and part of the mass humanizing of immigrants and Brown people.
I grew up in West Tennessee around folks who are now MAGA. I know them. I know they hate gas prices and inflation. But they love machismo.
This pedophile problem of the president is sickening his supporters, so we call out pedophile protectors. We never stop reminding them that their cult leader is the lowest level of man in their own cult judgement.
Now we’re focusing on the Iran War because it could be the most horrific abuse of power in American history.
We have focused on the issues that people were ready to move on — “Voting with their feet”, as we once said at ACORN.
We have cast the widest net possible to bring everyone we could to the fight. Although elders like me may outnumber younger people, we are in large part led by the youngest amongst us.
We strategically decided not to build longterm structure and organization in favor of allowing for the most possibilities for the explosion of movement.
Together we, everyone part of any of this, have created Movement that will protect, save and cover all our dreams for a just and loving homeland.
We are educating millions on the fundamental inadequacies of our current government and system. We are teaching solidarity, opening minds and hearts for other people based on that foundation.
Our presence as neighbors and loved ones on the streets of three West Virginia small towns challenging weekly, even daily the president they once loved and followed, could be the most revolutionary action possible.
Uniting beyond parties as people of action, justice, peace and compassion, in praxis on the ground where every conflict is settled, maybe making the most of opportunity while protecting our possibility for a just future.
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Together Against the Far Right March
By Robert Wallis
While “No Kings” rallies took place across the U.S. on March 28th, in the UK on the same day hundreds of thousands of people marched through London in opposition to war, racism and fascism.
Britain still has a real king but, as a constitutional monarch, he has far less power than the wannabe one in America. As Trump continues to commit war crimes, in tandem with Netanyahu, there have been only feeble attempts to stop him from inside the U.S. government.
The London march brought together different groups who are both opposed to the war in Iran as well as to the existing regime in Tehran. These groups highlighted the connection between the attack on Iran with the war in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, and now also Lebanon, as part of a Greater Israel project. Protesters in London included the Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the Holocaust Survivor Descendants against Gaza Genocide.
And with upcoming British local elections in May, an additional focus of the protest was Nigel Farage, leader of Britain’s far-right Reform Party. Farage led the Brexit campaign. Reform is anti-Europe and strongly anti-immigrant, mirroring MAGA in the States. It currently leads in many opinion polls, putting them ahead of the Labour Party. Although national elections won’t be held for a few more years, local ones in May could be a harbinger of things to come, as with the Midterms in the U.S.. It remains to be seen whether Britain will make a sharp turn to the right just as the U.S. might be moving back in the opposite direction after two years of a Trump second term.
Can mass demonstrations make a difference this time, where they haven’t in the past?
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“Do mo arigato gozaimasu” – No Kings in Tokyo!
By Peter Olney
My wife, Christina Perez and I spent the whole month of March in Tokyo visiting with our son, Nelson who graduated from an electrical program at the Tokyo University of Technology in Hachioji. Our visit was filled with amazing experiences and there is a lot to reflect on. I will do so in future “Tokyo Takes”. But fighting Trump fascism takes precedence so I will report on the No Kings event I attended in Tokyo on March 28th.
Photo: Susan Wolfe.
Being in a time zone 16 hours ahead of Pacific time I thought I would be in attendance at the first No Kings rally, but it turns out an old college friend, Jeremy Bluhm, organized a No Kings in Sydney, Australia which is 18 hours in advance of Pacific time.
The rally I attended was held at 2:30 PM in Shimokitazawa right outside the train station of the same name. The neighborhood has a reputation as being a “bohemian” spot featuring small music venues, trendy shops and theaters. Democrats Abroad, an official overseas wing of the national US Democratic Party, organized the rally. When I emerged from the train station there were about 250 participants singing and chanting. I had announced my intention to go to the rally to a forum at Zenroren on March 16th. Zenroren is the second largest trade union federation and traditionally aligned with the left. I was pleased to see that Zenroren Secretary General Kurosawa Koichi was present at the rally with a red T-shirt declaring No War in English and Japanese.
The Japanese are absolutely not supportive of Trump’s War on Iran that began February 28th, the day we left for Japan. The country was roiling as Prime Minster Takaichi prepared to visit Trump in Washington DC on March 19th. The Constitution mandates that the Japanese Defense Force be used as its name suggests rather that as an aggressive military ally to Donald Trump. Even though Japan depends on the Middle East for up to 95% of its oil – 70% coming through the Straits of Hormuz -the public was opposed to even the deployment of mine sweepers to the Straits of Hormuz. Trump did not help himself in his meeting with the PM when he jocularly suggested that the Japanese should not be dismayed by his surprise attack on Iran given the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. His remark left the right-wing Premier speechless.
Zenroren has been a leading force in the peace movement, and I received many questions about the US peace movement at my presentation. The Secretary General is a stalwart peace activist, and I had earlier seen him at a labor rally on March 5th holding a banner denouncing the war on Iran.
For me it was a no brainer that the No Kings rally would want to hear from this distinguished warrior for peace and justice. However when I asked the organizer from Democrats Abroad that I be allowed to intro him to the rally, she politely told me No that would endanger their tax status as part of the official Democratic Party. I respected her wishes.
However when it came to solicited audience participation where rally attendees were given the floor to describe their efforts to defeat Trump, I stepped forward and identified myself and explained ILWU efforts in the upcoming mid terms to flip the House of Representatives. My remarks were met with rousing applause.
Suddenly SG Kurosawa jumped forward and delivered a spirited agitational burst in Japanese that was received with great applause by the expats in the audience who spoke Japanese. Many approached him after the rally concluded to say, “Do mo arigato gozaimasu” Thank you very much.
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