End Israeli Apartheid to Give Peace a Chance

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Only urgent action that targets roots causes can prevent more deaths, injuries, trauma, and grief. The violence can end only with an immediate ceasefire and rapid steps toward equal rights for all.  

Emergency protest in San Francisco, Oct. 8, 2023. Photo by the Arab Resource and Organizing Center.

When I was a kid, every television station portrayed Native Americans as savages. Those who took their land using “guns, germs, and steel” were depicted as peace-loving bearers of civilization itself.

When I was a youth, I watched footage of General William Westmoreland, commander of the US military forces terrorizing Vietnam, saying with a straight face: “Orientals don’t place the same value on human life that we do.”

In the years since I’ve seen the same kind of dehumanization deployed against people resisting dispossession and structural violence from South Africa to South America and dozens of other places in between.

And always against Palestinians, when their existence was acknowledged at all.

Consolidated Core and Broader Support

Amid the explosion of violence over the last week, a host of voices cut through the racist blather typified by the latest from Israel’s Defense Minister: “We are fighting against human animals.” These clear voices explained what is really going on: the root of violence is oppression. Among them were Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), Jewish Voice for PeaceThe U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, left-wing Israeli lawmaker Ofer Cassif, and co-founder of the Progressive International Yanis Varoufakis.

These statements and the numerous demonstrations across the US bringing their message into the streets indicate the gains made by the Palestine solidarity movement over the past several decades. The ranks of those who have cut through all the attempts to obscure the real history of Palestine to target Israeli settler colonialism, the Israeli apartheid system, and the ideology of Zionism that supports it have grown substantially. 

Yet pro-Palestine activists have built support beyond this political core. A far broader layer of the population has been won to sympathize with the Palestinians as the oppressed underdog in the Israel-Palestine relationship even if they are not yet fully convinced of anti-Zionist politics. Exposure of the ever-more-blatant racism of successive Israeli governments—the current one is particularly nightmarish—and the settlers (that is, ethnic cleansers) on the West Bank has led to a surge of identification with the Palestinians among US people of color, especially African Americans. Sentiment among young people of all backgrounds has shifted: a slight plurality of millennials (42%) sympathize with Palestinians more than Israelis (40%). Sentiment among Democrats shifted in 2021 – 23 for the first time to favor Palestinians over Israelis, 49% to 38%. 

Champions of Palestinian rights like Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush now sit in Congress. And a broader layer of congresspeople and other elected officials speak out to varying degrees against Israeli brutality and sponsor legislation on that issue in ways that were off the table even just a decade ago.

9/11 Moment: “With us or with the terrorists” 

All of these gains have been made on the unfavorable terrain of US politics, where support for Israel has been promoted as a moral and political imperative by the guardians of imperial foreign policy, the powerful Israel lobby, and the fanatical, MAGA-linked Christian Zionist movement.  But now the hard-won progress is being rolled back by attacks that will likely intensify in the coming weeks and months. 

One establishment pundit after another has embraced the notion of “Israel’s 9/11.”  So once again the “with us or with the terrorists” barrage is being deployed against anyone who criticizes US Middle East policy or supports Palestinian rights. Every public figure who does so—from media personalities to college professors, and from celebrities to elected officials—can expect to face charges of anti-Semitism and “siding with terrorism.” Attacks will intensify against frontline activist groups like AROC, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and Students for Justice In Palestine, who have long been targeted with smears, sting operations, and phony legal campaigns.   

Elected officials who don’t toe the pro-Israel line are already being targeted. In the last election cycle the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) poured millions of dollars into efforts to defeat not just strong Palestine supporters but even those who seemed inclined to move in that direction. AIPAC recognizes that shifting sentiment around Israel-Palestine in the Democratic Party’s progressive wing poses the threat of support for Israel losing its current status as a “bipartisan” principle, which would be a huge blow to US complicity in Israeli apartheid. 

The upwelling of support for Israel in this moment poses serious political challenges for building Palestine solidarity, for defeating an authoritarian right that wants to use support for Israel as one of its battering rams to gain total power, and for contending with Biden’s terrible foreign policy. Republicans are Iran-baiting Biden and the Democrats; centrist Democrats are seizing another means of marginalizing progressives and Leftists; the progressive movement has long split over support for Palestinian rights. The fever of war is fueling religious nationalism at home and abroad.

Palestinians Will Bear the Brunt

Meanwhile the threat of even greater bloodletting looms, with more dead to mourn and wounded to care for on all sides, The Israeli government has already declared war, announced a total siege of Gaza, and is threatening massive military action. Palestinian civilians, who have borne the brunt of violence for more than 75 years, will once more be treated as either explicit targets or irrelevant collateral damage.  

So this time for us in the US to stand firm and go broad. Sustain the momentum of street actions and full-spectrum media messaging that targets the underlying cause of the current crisis. Defend every group and individual that gets attacked for criticizing Israel’s brutality—continuing to remind people that outrage against that brutality is not the same as anti-Semitism. Stay in or get in every public space no matter how uncomfortable where a voice speaking against racist dehumanization can find even a toehold. Engage with those progressives who equivocate whether out of simple backwardness or fear of Zionist bullying while building on whatever positive impulses they display. 

The immediate days ahead are likely to be very tough. The most strident Israel supporters claim to be moved by the death of civilians, but they reveal their true colors in declaring this a moment of “great opportunity“ to gain more power. But they have no program for the Israel-Palestine conflict except more killing and more subjugation. 

The demands for an immediate ceasefire, for an end to US military aid and overall blank-check support for Israel, for equal rights for all to replace apartheid – these light the road to peace with justice. Many who are not ready to support those demands today can be convinced to change their minds tomorrow; just as many who support these views today did not do so five, ten or twenty years ago.

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This piece was first published by Convergence who have allowed the Stansbury Forum to republish.

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Crazy

By

Fenway Park, home to the Boston Red Sox. Photo Creative License

I awoke to the excited buzzing of text messages from my sister who lives in New England, three hours ahead of my home in San Francisco. Family emergency? No, it was the happiest news a Boston Red Sox fan could imagine at the end of yet another dismal season. Chief Baseball Officer Chaim Bloom had finally been fired, after three losing seasons, this last being a furious race to the bottom of the American League East against the New York Yankees, who had to settle for second worst team in the division.

I ran downstairs, grabbed my Red Sox flag, and hung it from our front balcony. On Opening Day, with all signs pointing to an epically painful season, I’d hung it upside down to signal a Red Sox Nation in distress and now, finally, there was reason to fly it right side up in hopeful celebration. I went across the street to take a picture of it. A man from the landscaping crew that keeps the house two doors up looking like a spread in Fine Gardening approached me. He spoke with a Mexican accent. “Very nice.”

“No kidding!” I said. “Three long years, we’ve had to watch Bloom destroy the team and now, at last, he’s been fired.”

He cocked his head to one side. “Your house, Señora. It looks very nice.”

He was talking about the paint job. I should have left it at that, but in the delirium of myopic joy, it did not occur to me that the entire world had not stopped to honor Bloom’s departure. “The Red Sox. See the logo on the flag? Terrible executive, three losing seasons. He got fired today.”

“Oh, okay.” 

I can’t blame him for not sharing my happiness. There are many things not to understand about being a Red Sox fan, starting with why be a fan at all. This is a team whose history includes an 86-year drought in World Series championships, a condition believed to have been brought about by the so-called Curse of the Bambino, punishment to the team for selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1918. This is a team whose star pitcher, Pedro Martinez, during a bench-clearing brawl in 2003 grabbed the head of a 72-year-old Yankees coach and threw him to the ground. On national television. This is the team that has played Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline in the bottom of the eighth inning at every home game since 1997 because the best friend of the employee who chose game music that day had just given birth to a baby girl named Caroline. This is the team whose owners were so desperate to fill seats as this train wreck of a season ground to a halt that they designated a game in September as Barbie Night at Kenway – get it? Kenway? – and promised pink t-shirts to those in attendance. Even the team-paid on-air announcers were embarrassed.

It’s hard to explain. It’s like when you voice a deeply held religious belief to a friend and the friend turns to you, incredulous, and says, “You really believe that?”

One dreary February evening some years back, I was working late at my desk in San Francisco City Hall when the Jamaican custodian came in to empty the trash. He asked how my day was going. “Great,” I said, turning my computer screen around so he could see a photo of people standing knee-deep in snow waving at an 18-wheeler big rig. “It’s Truck Day!”

“What’s that?”

“Truck Day. The day the Red Sox equipment truck leaves Fenway Park in Boston to make the trip to spring training in Florida.”

“Oh, okay. It’s a holiday.”

“Well, in Boston it is. The fans stand on the street in front of the ballpark and wave good-bye to the truck.” I pointed to the photo as if that would make it all make sense.

It didn’t. “The players are in the truck?” he said.

“No, just the equipment. Bats and balls. Uniforms. Gloves. Sunflower seeds. That kind of stuff.”

“There’s nobody in the truck?”

“Well, the truck driver.”

His eyes narrowed. “But they wave to the truck?”

“Yes.”

“That’s crazy.” This from a man whose tropical island country has an Olympic bobsled team. You want to talk about crazy? “Why do they do that?”

Why, indeed? Because sports fans do crazy things. You may as well ask why Green Bay Packers fans don hats made to look like giant wedges of cheese. Why Los Angeles Angels fans clutch stuffed toy monkeys at games. What about those squares of terry cloth that teams throughout professional sports distribute for fans to whip over their heads to show support, as if just paying the exorbitant price of a ticket isn’t enough?

And that’s where the real craziness lies, in how much we spend being fans of teams owned by billionaires in sports played by millionaires. Take me, for instance. Admittedly, I could save a lot if I just embraced the Giants, but even after living here for forty-some years, I have never figured out the West Coast style of fandom, which seems to involve supporting your team only when it is doing well and coming home from a game smelling like you rolled in raw garlic.

To fully participate as a Red Sox fan living on the West Coast, here’s how it nets out: I must subscribe to Directv (basic package $183.92 a month) because it is the only provider that offers a regional sports package (another $13.99 a month) that allows me to watch NESN, the Sox’s official broadcast partner. That gets me the pre- and post-game shows, but to see actual games, I also need the MLB package ($149.94 for the season). Then, there’s the digital subscription to the Boston Globe, so I can read the coverage of the disaster I have just watched unfold the night before ($12.00 a month). 

Not counting the flag and the flagpole, that’s almost $2700 a year to watch Red Sox owners John Henry (net worth $5.1 billion), Tom Werner ($1.7 billion), and Sam Kennedy (a paltry $315 million) allow Chief Baseball Officer Chaim Bloom to trade away beloved home-grown talent, like Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts, while Chris Sale was paid $29 million and change to pitch eleven games in between injuries. $2700 a year to watch manager Alex Cora make the same post-defeat speech game after game. “Yeah, well, we were swinging the bats pretty well, but our pitching wasn’t where it needs to be.” 

The day after the 2023 season mercifully ended with the Red Sox in last place for the second year in a row, the ownership announced it would be raising ticket prices, already the highest in Major League Baseball, for the fourth year in a row.

How can that be? Won’t the season ticket holders refuse to renew? Won’t single ticket buyers stay home? Ownership isn’t worried about fan loyalty. Why? Because their jewel of a ballpark is one of the most popular for baseball tourists and fans of opposing teams who want to be able to say they saw a game at Fenway.  So what if the people who fill the seats are not Red Sox fans? In the craven collective mind of the ownership, it makes no difference who occupies a seat, be it a lifelong fan who has supported the team through thick and – mostly –thin, or a tourist. A ticket sold is a ticket sold. 

Feeling as I do, have I cancelled Directv and gone with a provider whose latest promotion will save me over $100 a month? No. Have I cancelled auto-renew on the MLB package? No. Will I stuff the flag in the darkest corner of my darkest closet or cut it into dust cloths? Of course not. Somewhere around the first week of February 2024, I will need it to announce to my neighbors that it is Truck Day.

Crazy.

Where Does Change Come From?  

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Introduction

Change comes from the top.  No, change comes from the bottom.  Like most either/or disputes, this one offers insights; it can also obscure what is going on “out there” in the world.  In the heat of the moment, in the passion of the times, such debates rage.  Those who are involved in social movements struggle from the bottom to get people in key decision-making positions at the apex of institutional power to make just decisions on policy matters, or to remove them or create new institutions.  

In the mid-1930s, CIO and Mine Workers Union leader John L. Lewis famously boxed President Franklin Roosevelt in by quoting him out of context, and telling millions of industrial workers, “The President wants you to join a union.”   FDR was furious, but he couldn’t repudiate Lewis because to do so would appear anti-union. Lewis used FDR’s popularity with workers to build at the bottom.

It is striking that there is often no mention of SNCC and or the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in Democratic Party celebrations of its civil rights and voting rights legislation of the mid-1960s.  

Almost 60 years ago at the 1964 Democratic Party Convention, the Mississippi civil rights movement forced the Party to adopt civil rights standards for the seating of delegations to the 1968 Convention.  But in a bitterly fought contest, the 1964 delegates refused to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegates or offer a 50/50 split delegation to it and the racist “regulars”.  

Establishment accounts tell how successful the challenge was.  Those who participated had an opposite view.  By 1968, MFDP Black delegates were only one quarter of the delegation to the Party Convention, and all the economic justice legislation it supported was left behind.

When we read histories of those struggles, the situational bias of authors becomes apparent because we have the benefit of various reports from differing perspectives.  That bias depends on whether the story is told from the point of view of those who sit in the halls of power or those who are the beneficiaries, losers, or objects of their decisions. 

From the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee “on the ground” view from the trenches in Mississippi, the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations only acted when they were forced to, generally minimally, and only decisively when The Movement created a crisis both within the Democratic Party at home and for the nation’s foreign policy in the cold war (talking democracy to emerging national liberation movements in the third world while African Americans couldn’t vote in the Deep South).  

In 1963, I sent a news story I wrote from Greenwood, MS to the Ghanaian Times.  It made the paper’s front page and put U.S. representatives there on the defensive.  Shortly thereafter, we were called from SNCC’s national office: “Great work.  The State Department just complained to us about the Greenwood story.”

It is striking that there is often no mention of SNCC and or the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in Democratic Party celebrations of its civil rights and voting rights legislation of the mid-1960s.  

Who Should Vote?

It was the decision by “The Movement” to bring illiterate and semi-literate domestics, day laborers, sharecroppers and tenant farmers to the registrar’s office that led to the elimination of “qualifications” from the Voting Rights Act (though no doubt supported by the Justice Department’s civil rights attorney, John Doar, who is one of the heroic figures of the period). 

As SNCC’s Bob Moses put it at the time, “You can’t deny Blacks an education then use their lack of it as the reason to exclude them from voting.” Martin Luther King, Jr. and the murdered young women at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church are properly remembered today.

This option, to this day, remains largely unexplored—one that recognizes both race and class as key factors that an organizing effort must take into account.

And if you want to fully understand how history is made, read the two classic “history from below” studies of The Movement—John Dittmer’s Local People:  The Struggle for Civil Rights In Mississippi, and Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, or some of the county and town studies, written by African-American and White writers, or of Unita Blackwell’s story of becoming mayor of Myersville in Issaquena County, or a biography of Fanny Lou Hamer, or of Barbara Ransby’s biography of Ella Baker.

Is Unity Possible Between Blacks and White Working Class People?

There’s an extraordinary story of breaking through White racism at the Laurel, MS Masonite plant in the mid-1960s, and how Masonite used race to divide its workers. In that situation, White former SNCC staffers Jack Minnis and Bob Zellner got Klansmen and Black workers to come together in a united effort. While they failed to defeat Masonite, they demonstrated a possibility for Black-White unity that lasted after the strike’s defeat. This option, to this day, remains largely unexplored—one that recognizes both race and class as key factors that an organizing effort must take into account.

Interestingly, Jones County was a rebel county during the Civil War.  As recounted in a current publication of the Jones County Chamber of Commerce (!):

At the beginning of the war, some Jones County men joined the Confederacy, but others refused until the draft was instituted in 1862. One of those was a farmer named Newt Knight. He refused to fight for a cause he did not believe in, although when he was drafted, he did serve as a hospital orderly.

Knight reached his breaking point when he learned that if a man owned 20 or more slaves, he could avoid military service. Knight, and the other poor farmers from Jones County, felt they were right when they suspected the war was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” At this point, Knight deserted and went home.

Knight banded together with other deserters and formed a renegade army which was based in the Leaf River Swamp. Their hideout, known as the Devil’s Den, was called home for over 100 Confederate deserters. They came out of the swamp to visit their families, work their farms and according to the stories, conduct raids on trains headed to and from Mobile. The men devised elaborate methods of communication and signals to alert them to impending danger.

History From The Bottom

Most of today’s celebrations of the civil rights movement give us history, “from the top.” Sixty years later, we should appreciate how Justice Department lawyers worked to defend and advance civil rights, and how LBJ twisted arms in the Senate and House to get votes. But 60 years later we should also be able to acknowledge their inadequacies, and the necessity of the demand for change created by The Movement as a lubricant for the engine of change. If we ignore pressure from below, we fail to understand these points:

While it may be true that the Kennedy Administration was interested in early, dramatic, and successful civil rights results, it is also true that the Kennedy Administration was overwhelmingly concerned with getting The Movement off the streets, out of the headlines, and in a position where it was manageable by…the Administration.

To acknowledge the FBI’s role in the film Mississippi Burning while ignoring the fact that the FBI systematically sought to undermine the civil rights movement is a gross distortion of history, that Bureau Director J. Edgar Hoover used his immense power to infiltrate and disrupt civil rights organizations, and that some FBI Agents leaked information to southern racists who tried to use it to destroy civil rights organizations and, in some cases, to murder civil rights leaders, organizers and activists. Hoover was hostile to The Movement, and sought to undermine it with every tool at his disposal.   

The Movement successfully challenged the very notion of “qualifications,” when it opposed literacy requirements for voter registration applicants. The Johnson Administration ultimately agreed with this challenge, but not initially and not without fighting it.   

The Same Perspective Fits Today

The change from the bottom/from the top question remains today. Nothing better illustrates the synthesis required to get beyond unproductive argument than the Teamster Union internal election of a new president and the union’s victory without a strike at UPS. A key role was played by Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), which supported James Hoffa, Jr’s challenger Sean O’Brien, supported the union’s UPS negotiating package, and held and continues to hold the leadership’s feet to the fire.  

Because the word “responsible” has come to have such onerous implications, I hesitate to use it here. But it is the right word.

TDU sees itself responsible for reforming the Teamsters Union and, more broadly, organized labor. That responsibility extends beyond any specific election or contract fight. Each election and contract is understood as an opportunity to both win in the here-and-now and build for the future. What I call “radical patience” is required; that’s the stance of the long-distance runner. We should by now recognize that our fight is a long-haul one, with gains and losses likely along the way.  

Keeping our eyes on the prize of social and political transformation requires what Saul Alinsky called “integrated schizophrenia”—a pragmatic, “lesser-of-two evils” understanding of current battles based on the historic experience that deep loses and setbacks don’t move our agenda forward, combined with a critique of the myth of American democracy and a vision of what a real democracy of freedom, equality, justice, community, solidarity, and continuing participation in real decision making by all people would look like. 

Keeping our eyes on the stars and our feet on the ground requires yet another dimension of that schizophrenia.  We must not only look at single battles or campaigns from the perspective of what is to be won, but also through a lens that asks, “What are we building?”  

History Is From The Bottom and The Top

As we both celebrate past victories and watch with frustration and anger as some of them are swept away in a new anti-Reconstruction period, we should remind ourselves of what Black Abolitionist Frederick Douglass said,

“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong, which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”

Frederick Douglass, “If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress” (1857

Sixty years ago, when President Lyndon Johnson concluded a speech for the Voting Rights Act with “And we shall overcome,” I was outraged. So were all my SNCC friends.  

I think I, and they, were wrong. We won a major victory: our movement’s slogan was now part of official national discourse. But being part of the national discourse is only half the battle. The other is keeping it part of that discourse and extending it so that the words become a continuing reality. Indeed, when we lost at the top—the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenges to the 1964 Democratic Party convention, and to seating Mississippi’s congressional delegation to the House of Representatives at the beginning of 1965—SNCC, already frail, began to unravel. Defeats do not build mass movements or organizations.

As another Abolitionist said,

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few…The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. The living sap of today outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continued oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by (uninterrupted) agitation can a people be sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.” Speech by Wendell Phillips, January 28, 1852 to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

Speech by Wendell Phillips, January 28, 1852 to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

What is a Labor Organizer?

By

Tools of the Trade

Organizing house meeting for the ACTWU. New York, New York 1991.
Photo Robert Gumpert

Soon after I retired from the ILWU in 2015 my good friend and comrade Glenn Perusek drafted me to teach organizing and bargaining at the Building Trades Academy (BTA), headquartered, and accredited at Michigan State University. 

Glenn told me to meet him in Las Vegas at the local union hall of the Heat and Frost Insulators Union (HFIA) and so began my teaching at the BTA. I confess that in 2015 I did not know what an Insulator was, but soon discovered that it is a crucial part of the construction process: the basic insulation of hot and cold pipes. “Sick buildings” are often the result of poor insulation work that leaves condensate to fester and create harmful mold. The symbol of the craft is the salamander that evidently thrives in heat and cold!

The beauty of teaching and training with the trades is that I knew nothing about construction work, except what my union electrician son teaches me, and I knew less about the organizing process and bargaining in the trades. Those deficiencies forced me to adopt a very participatory form of pedagogy. In other words, my job was mainly a facilitator finding talent and drafting students with expertise who could teach the group. Some students would purposely avoid me at lunch because they knew I was hunting for an unsuspecting instructor for the afternoon session!

As time went on, I taught more Insulators, Cement Masons and Plasterers, Bricklayers and Roofers. I also met some great working-class organizers and made friends with talented co-instructors. Some of the tools that I brought to the jobsite however were universal, and with this issue of the Stansbury Forum we want to start to share them with you, the reader and educator. Every organizing training needs to instill in the students a sense of esprit and pride in their work as organizers just as they have pride in their craft. So, installment #1 of “Tools of the Trade” is a little lesson in Greek, drawing on Aristotle entitled: “WHAT IS AN ORGANZER?”

What is an OPCMIA Labor Organizer?

Each one of you who have decided to become a OPCMIA Cement Masons organizer is entering a select lineup – Labor Organizers. If you go to Wikipedia and look up Union Organizer you will find this description:

“Organizers must be determined, charismatic, and persuasive individuals able to sway groups to action under trying circumstances when jobs are on the line.

Certainly this description must already make sense to you after the work you have done on job sites with members of the OPCMIA or non-union workers. But you have also discovered that being a good organizer is more than just being a charming and persuasive talker.

You are joining a lineup of esteemed historical figures like Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, Joe Hill, A Philip Randolph and Cesar Chavez. These are Americans who believed in sacrificing their own short-term self-interest and well-being in service of a larger objective of making working people stronger. You are part of organizing and welding individuals into one united fist that can successfully battle the one per cent (1%) in this country.

What a challenge! Did we take any course in high school or college in “Organizing”? Well no, but all of us have had experience in the art and craft of organizing prior to being tapped as an organizer. We have gotten our children up in the morning, fed them breakfast and sent them off to school. We have organized the guest list for our weddings and made sure the wedding party shows up on time. We have put together a recreational softball team and fundraisers for school programs. Maybe we have done safety training for the union or organized our cement or plastering crew. 

All of these tasks require thinking beyond ourselves, being accountable, and moving others into action. This is all organizing.

But labor organizing is different in a couple of crucial ways: First, we are talking about people’s jobs, their economic livelihood, the way that they support themselves and their families. Further this organizing does not take place without resistance, either because of fear or antagonisms. In our labor organizing we are challenging others to do something out of the ordinary, something that may involve risking employment, and confronting a powerful employer. 

Labor organizing is a mixture of art and science.

“… you don’t dazzle with lectures. You listen and learn from them and acknowledge their knowledge and insights.”

Let’s take it apart and look at the pieces. You are probably familiar with many of these ideas, but it helps to take the pieces of successful organizing, unfold them, and look them over.

Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, wrote an essay on Rhetoric, the science of moving and motivating people to act. What we would call good organizing. Here are three of the important pillars of successful organizing:

Ethos – Street Cred: A good organizer must win the trust and confidence of the audience – his/her co-workers. Being a trained cement mason, or plasterer, gives you a leg up on an outside organizer because you have shared in the work of the workers you are trying to move. They know that when you talk about work you know of what you speak, but you win trust by going beyond shared experiences. You win trust because you keep your promises. You win trust because you follow-up and deliver on answering questions factually. You win trust because you do everything, and more than what you ask others to do. Street Cred is not a static process, it grows as you do your organizing. Sometimes credibility comes from shared experiences. Sports have been a great “cred” builder particularly among male workers. It is often a way to connect with people’s lives when an initial approach is needed to win confidence.

Logos – Reason and Logic: You make logical arguments to the workforce. You present them with facts using verifiable sources and experts. But you don’t dazzle with lectures. You listen and learn from them and acknowledge their knowledge and insights. You take the power of their stories, reframe, and build on them to make your arguments. For instance, one powerful argument against so-called “Right to Work” is the story an organizer tells of watching the cars streaming across the Idaho state border to Washington state in the early AM. Why? Because those workers are coming to work in Washington from “Right to Work” Idaho. Wages are higher in Washington because unions are stronger. An observation that is worth a thousand quotes from experts.

Pathos – Emotion: A good organizer can move the workforce into action; into doing things that make us all stronger. There are many emotions that can kindle action. Fear of change can often be a motivator, when that change is a negative, an attack on living standards. That fear can become anger. Humor can be a relaxer in times of stress that can lead to greater collective will and openness to moving together. A good organizer opens the chest cavity, takes the heart in hand, massages it, and stimulates it into action for the common good. I will never forget attending a funeral for a worker from a warehouse in San Diego, California. Cesario had died because his employer had dropped him from health insurance in violation of the labor contract. Over his grave the workers resolved to avenge his death by fighting for a better contract. They struck the marine terminal the following week and conducted a winning 10-week strike in his memory.

The great Indian freedom fighter Mahatma Gandhi was a skilled organizer, and teacher. Great organizers are great teachers. But you are a teacher not in the way we think of the high school teacher standing and lecturing at a bunch of often-bored students. Our teacher/organizers share the life of the workers they organize. They are accountable and constantly tested by the workers to see if they are keeping their word and following through. Most importantly they are listening and learning from the workforce so that their ideas are refined and perfected in practice. 

Organizing is more than anything else a listening art. Ethos, pathos and logos all come from active listening.

You have joined an amazing group of historical figures, some famous many more unknown. It is a lifelong craft and art that constantly requires refining and updating of your skills to meet new situations and methods. Just as civil rights organizers in the South in the 50’s and 60’s took advantage of the telephone to spread their message of resistance and revolt, so today’s organizer uses the modern tools of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, TikTok. In today’s parlance, organizers are the influencers of the labor movement.

Congratulations. There is perhaps nothing more satisfying that helping your brothers and sisters to be an active part of improving their lives. But while what you do is for others, in acting for and moving others, you enhance your own life and well-being.

Solidarity Forever!

FROM SPAIN TO DELANO – THE RADICAL ROOTS OF FARMWORKER UNIONS

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We can’t talk about defending the human and labor rights of farm workers without talking about their history of organizing unions-and the efforts by the government to suppress them. Liberal mythology holds that farm worker unions didn’t exist until the creation of United Farm Workers in the ’60s and that the farm worker unions and advocacy organizations of today appeared out of nowhere, with no history of struggle that went before.

But in fact, during the 1930s Filipinos and other farm workers organized left-wing unions and huge strikes. According to Rick Baldoz, a professor at Oberlin College, “The burgeoning strike activity involving thousands of Filipinos in the mid-1930s occasioned a furious backlash from growers who worked closely with local law enforcement.”

The people who fought to organize unions in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s on the West Coast were the same people who fought for Spain-in the same organizations, like the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, and especially ILWU Local 37. Of all the efforts to organize farm workers, the ones that were closest to the International Brigades were those of the Filipinos during those years. And the forces that later went after the Lincoln vets were the same as those that went after the farm worker unions, using the same tools: blacklisting and deportations.

Baldoz gained access to the FBI files on one of the most radical of the Filipino leaders, Carlos Bulosan. “The fact that these partisans attracted the attention of federal authorities during the Cold War is hardly surprising,” he says. “Filipino workers had developed a well-earned reputation for labor militancy in the United States dating back to the early 1930s. That a considerable number of Filipinos (both from the U.S. and the Philippines) had volunteered for the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War… only added to the perception that they were immersed in international left-wing politics.”

In their history of Asian volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, Nancy and Len Tsou write: “At least 11 Filipinos went to Spain to join the International Brigades. Among them, several came from the United States. [Pedro] Penino was able to establish the Rizal Company, a part of the International Brigades named in honor of a Filipino national hero.” The Tsous name the following volunteers: Manuel Lizarraga, Artemio Ortega Luna, Enrique Almenar Gabra, Modesto Ausobasa Esteban, Dimitri Gorostiaga, Eduardo Miranda Gonzales, Pedro Penino, Carlos Lopez Maestu, Mark Fajardo, Servando Acevedo Mondragon and Aquilino Belmonte Capinolio.

A group of International volunteers in Spain (L-R): a seaman from Chile; Sterling Rochester (USA); Artemio Luna Ortega (Philippines); Juan Santiago (Cuba); and Jack Shirai (Japan).
Artemio Luna Ortega was born in the Philippines, 1901. He served in the Constabulary from 1922-1925. He immigrated to the US in 1927 where he worked as a draftsman after college. He was a member of the CPUSA and FAECT. He arrived in Spain on January 14, 1937. Artemio served with ALB at Jarama, Brunete and as a guard Villa Paz. He also the joined the GTU. His fate beyond Spain is currently unknown.

Bulosan had worked as a farm laborer since his arrival in the U.S. in 1930, but after his health was destroyed by his work he tried to make a living as a journalist. “Every word is a weapon for freedom,” the FBI reported him telling a colleague. In 1946, Bulosan wrote America Is in the Heart, a classic and moving account of life as a Filipino migrant farm worker during the 1930s. The FBI viewed the book as evidence of his Communist associations during the Cold War. Bulosan was hired by leaders of Local 37 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, Ernesto Mangaoang and Chris Mensalvas, to edit the union’s yearbook in 1952. Among its many appeals for support for radical causes, it urged solidarity with the Huk movement in the Philippines, against continued U.S. imperialist domination of its former colony.

Carlos Bulosan, a farm worker and later an acclaimed author, caught the attention of the FBI.

In the 1930s, Local 37 was organized by Filipinos who were the workforce in the salmon canneries on the Alaska coast. They were mostly single men, recruited to come to the U.S. from the Philippines. They were shipped to the canneries from Seattle every season, where they faced discrimination and terrible conditions. They organized Local 37 to change those conditions and forced the fish companies to sign contracts.

Until 1949, Local 37 had been part of the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) farm workers union, the United Cannery, Agricultural and Packing House Workers of America. From 1936 to 1953, the U.S. labor movement was split between the left-wing CIO and the rightwing American Federation of Labor. In 1949, as the Cold War started, the CIO expelled nine unions, including UCAPAWA and the ILWU, because of their left-wing politics and often Communist leaders.

At the height of the McCarthyite hysteria more than 30 members of Local 37 were arrested and threatened with deportation to the Philippines. Raymundo Cabanilla, a former CIO organizer, named names to the FBI, identifying fellow labor activists, including Ernesto Mangaoang, as Communists. Eventually Mangaoang’s deportation case was thrown out by the courts. He argued that he couldn’t be deported, given that he was a U.S. “national” when he arrived in Seattle in the 20s. “National” was a status given Filipinos because the Philippines was a U.S. colony at the time. Filipinos couldn’t be considered immigrants, but they weren’t quite citizens either.

Meanwhile, the Federal government tried to bankrupt Local 37 by forcing the accused workers to pay high bails and lawyers’ fees. Union leaders were so tied up in legal defense that a conservative faction took control of the local. That group held it until it was thrown out in the 1980s by a new young generation of radical Filipinos, two of whom, Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes (a former farm worker) were assassinated.

UCAPAWA (renamed the Food, Tobacco and Agricultural Workers) was destroyed in the 1949 purge of the CIO, and the Filipino local in Seattle was taken in by Harry Bridges’ union, becoming ILWU Local 37. It survived, and today is part of the ILWU’s Inland Boatman’s Union.

Today, 52 years after the historic 1965 Delano grape strike, it is important to reexamine this history, especially the radical career of Larry Itliong, who headed the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC). Itliong not only shared leadership with Cesar Chavez but actually started the strike. He had a long history as an organizer.

Labor leaders Larry Itliong (left) and Cesar Chavez (Right) at the Delano Grape Strike (Source: CAAM.org

Itliong was Ernesto Mangaoang’s protégé. In the late 1940s, he was Local 37’s dispatcher, sending workers on the boats from Seattle to the Alaska salmon canneries. After the salmon season was over, many Filipinos would return home to California’s Salinas and San Joaquin Valleys, where they worked as farm laborers for the rest of the year. In the segregated barrios of towns like Stockton and Salinas they organized hometown associations and social clubs. Itliong used these networks to organize Filipinos when they went to work in the fields. Along with Chris Mensalvas, at the time Local 37 president, Itliong organized a strike in Stockton’s asparagus fields in 1949.

Once the left-wingers lost power in the union, however, its conservative leaders stopped its farm worker organizing drives. Still, in the early 1950s Filipino farm workers continued to organize. Ernesto Galarza (author of “Merchants of Labor”) started the National Farm Labor Union, which struck the giant DiGiorgio Corporation, then California’s largest grower. In 1959 the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) was set up by the merged AFL-CIO. After hiring Itliong as an organizer because of his history among Filipino workers, AWOC used flying squads of pickets to mount quick strikes. In 1962, it struck the Imperial Valley lettuce harvest, demanding $1.25 per hour.

The grape strike started in Delano on September 8, 1965, when Filipino pickers walked off the fields. Mexican workers joined them two weeks later. The strike went on for five years, until all California table grape growers were forced to sign contracts in 1970. The strike was a watershed struggle for civil and labor rights, supported by millions of people across the country, breathing new life into the labor movement and opening doors for immigrants and people of color.

Filipino workers on strike (Source: Harvey Richards Media Archive)

California’s politics have changed profoundly in these 52 years, in large part because of that strike. Delano’s mayor today is a Filipino. That would have been unthinkable in 1965, when growers treated the town as a plantation. Children of farm worker families have become members of the state legislature. Last year they spearheaded passage of a law that requires the same overtime pay for farm workers as for all other workers-the first state to pass such a law.

The 1965 Delano grape strike did not, however, start in Delano. It was in the Coachella Valley, near the Mexican border where California’s grape harvest begins, that Filipino workers struck the vineyards that summer. They won a 40¢/hour wage increase from grape growers and forced authorities to drop charges against arrested strikers. The Coachella strike was organized by Larry Itliong. After the grape harvest moved north to Delano, he and the Filipino workers of AWOC walked out again.

The timing of the 1965 strike was not accidental. It took place the year after Galarza, Bert Corona, Cesar Chavez, and other civil rights and labor activists forced Congress to repeal Public Law 78 and end the bracero contract labor program, under which growers brought workers from Mexico under tightly controlled, almost slave-like conditions. Farm worker leaders acted after the law’s repeal, because once the program was ended growers could no longer bring braceros into the U.S. to break strikes.

The Delano strike was a movement of immigrant workers. To organize farm labor, both Filipinos and Mexicans wanted to keep growers and the government from using immigration policy against them. In ending the bracero program, they sought instead immigration policies favoring families and communities. In the 1965 immigration reform they established family reunification as a basic principle of immigration policy. This enabled thousands of people, especially family members of farm workers, to come from the Philippines, Mexico and other developing countries.

The Delano strike was not spontaneous or unexpected. It was a product of decades of worker organizing and earlier farm worker strikes. Many Filipino workers in Coachella and Delano were members of ILWU Local 37 in 1965, when the grape strike began. Every year they still traveled from the San Joaquin Valley (where Delano is located) to the Alaska fish canneries. Through the end of their lives, they were often active members of both Local 37 and the United Farm Workers.

Cold war fears of communism were strong in the 1960s-one reason why the contributions of Itliong and the Filipinos were obscured. The strike in Delano owes much to Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Gilbert Padilla, and other Chicano and Mexican leaders who came out of earlier community organizing movements. But the left-wing leadership of Itliong, Philip Veracruz and other rank-and-file Filipino workers was equally important.

Chavez willingly acknowledged that the NFWA hadn’t intended to strike in 1965. The decision to act was made by left-wing Filipinos, a product of their history of militant fights against growers. Their political philosophy saw the strike as the fundamental weapon to win better conditions. And it was a decision made by workers on the ground, not by leaders or strategists far away.

Growers had pitted Mexicans and Filipinos against each other for decades. The alliance between Itliong’s AWOC and the Cesar Chavez-led National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) was a popular front alliance of workers who had, in many cases, different politics. AWOC’s members had their roots in the red UCAPAWA. NFWA’s roots were in the Community Service Organization (CSO), which was sometimes hostile to Communists. Yet both organizations were able to find common ground and support each other during the strike, eventually forming the UFW.

Fred Abad and Pete Velasco, Filipino veterans of the United Farm Workers and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee. (Photo by David Bacon, Special Collections in Stanford University’s Green Library)

Strikers in Delano developed close friendships. Cesar Chavez’s son Paul recalls the way the older Filipino men looked at him and other children of Mexican strikers as their own family. Most of the Filipinos were single men, because anti-miscegenation laws prohibited them from marrying non-Filipinas, and the immigration of women from the Philippines was limited until the late 1960s. In the wake of the grape strike, the UFW and scores of young activists from California cities built a retirement home for them in Delano, Paolo Agbayani Retirement Village, to honor their contribution.

Philip Vera Cruz, a Filipino grape picker who became a vice-president of the UFW and later left over disagreements with Chavez, wrote during the strike’s fourth year: “The Filipino decision of the great Delano Grape Strike delivered the initial spark to explode the most brilliant incendiary bomb for social and political changes in U.S. rural life.”

Philip Vera cruz, a Filipino grape picker, was one of the initial leaders of the Delano Grape Strike

Liberal mythology has hidden the true history of the grape strike’s connection to some of the most radical movements in the country’s labor history. The contribution of that generation of Filipino radicals, including some who went to Spain, should be honored- not just because they helped make history, but because their political and trade union ideas are as relevant to workers today as they were in 1965. Those ideas, which they kept alive through the worst years of the Cold War, led to a renaissance of farm worker organizing that is still going on.

This article was first published in “The Volunteer,” February 27, 2018: https://albavolunteer.org/2018/02/human-rights-column-from-spain-to-delano-the-radical-roots-of-farm-workers-unions/

“A World in Common” – A Review of the TATE photography exhibit

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As those of us who have spent a lifetime trying to use photography as an (albeit imperfect) instrument of change, the reflection that the medium itself was originally central to the European conquest of others is an irony that cannot be ignored. Or unseen.

It is these historical representations that Tate Modern’s show, A World in Common, seeks to confront and engage with. This is the gallery’s first major exhibition that explores contemporary photographic practice from that continent reimagining what Africa is, was – or might be – as seen through the eyes of some of its own artists.

Comprehensive in scope and featuring a mixture of photography, video and installation, it exposes work from thirty-six artists delineating narratives from an enormous, almost unimaginable territory that is at turns recognisable, unfamiliar, thrilling and baffling in equal measure. It is a noble aim but ultimately its breadth is also its weakness.

The show opens with George Osodi’s stately portraits of Nigerian Queens, Kings and Gods, that uncomfortably (and presumably unintentionally) echo the class basis of imperial monarchical rule in a visual language that is redolent of Victorian portraiture.

Indeed, by and large the show leaves open the question of who has the power to record the lives of others and here it is largely the gaze of Africa’s new urban middle classes that replaces a Western one. That said, the interiority of that gaze undeniably expresses what Jennifer Bajorek has referred to as “the urgency of African and Black futures.”

It is to those complex and myriad futures – and to the aesthetic of Afrofuturism (first coined way back in 1993 by Mark Dery) – that the show tries to point. Which is all the more confusing when the (white) Spanish photographer Christina de Middel’s imaginative fiction, Afronauts (about the Zambian space project) is included on the walls. Kiluanji Kia Henda’s ephemeral installations in the Namibian desert to

comment on Luanda’s construction boom is questioning but it is Kiripi Katembo’s Un Regard (2008-13) using dreamlike puddle reflections of Kinshasa that is a real showstealer. These imagined sets contrast with the of ‘counter-histories’ of Lazhar Mansouri’s Portraits of Aïn Beïda (c.1950s-70s) and Santu Mofokeng’s The Black Photo Album / Look at Me (1997) asks different (and sometimes tricky) questions about historic self-representation.

It is the show’s engagement with Africa’s spiritual world however that is the most dense and beautifully ambiguous. The spiritual remembrances especially in Khadija Saye’s in this space we breathe (2017), explore and re-enact the profound rituals in her own mixed faith background. This (literally) haunting work from Saye, a young

Gambian-British artist who perished in the Grenfell fire at only 24, reminds us what a talent that shone brightly and was lost. Em’kal Eyongakpa’s Ketoya speaks #1, (cluster II), 2016 – photographs of Cameroon’s sacred lands (a site of significant resistance to German colonialism) is a darkly haunting document of struggle and memory. Maïmouna Guerresi’s Sufi inspired work, M-eating – Students and Teacher, 2012 couldn’t be more different – full of colour and geometry but equally engaging.

The last piece, JulianKNXX’s In Praise of Still Boys, 2021 is an extraordinary finale that combines poetry, film and music that unites the artist’s memories of growing up in Sierra Leone, war and slavery. Narrated by his mother in her native Krio, it fittingly imagines a stepping-off point, both physical and psychic from a past that is open and yet to be imagined.

A World in Common is on show at London’s Tate Modern until January 14th 2024.

About the author

Stuart Freedman

Stuart Freedman is an international award winning photojournalist living in London. He has published 3 books, the most recent of which is a study of the most London of institutions, the Eel, Pie and Mash shop. "The Englishman and the Eel" is published by Dewi Lewis. In 2023 he was award his doctorate in history. View all posts by Stuart Freedman →

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We Shall Overcome

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Left: Women’s March on Washington, 2017. Right: Protesting Trump immigration rules, San Francisco, 2017. Photos Robert Gumpert

I haven’t read anything in a long time as important as Crispin Sartwell’s “Can Jelly Roll Heal the Broken Soul of America”. Here are excerpts:

“Jelly Roll is a recovering addict whose life has been riddled by drug-related loss…

He openly swears, drinks, smokes weed and has a history of criminal convictions and substance-abuse problems.

He hasn’t become a star in spite of those things, but because of them.  And that popularity is as revealing about the condition of the American soul as it is about the artist himself…

[He sings] with a gospel-and-rap-inflected brand of country that plumbs the depths of addiction, regret, grief and helplessness…

[T]he show [is] “a 12-step meeting, a revival, and a party all at once.”…

In a country riddled with crises — the opioid epidemic, mass incarceration, the mental health crisis and gun violence among them — Jelly Roll’s music is an expression not just of musical tastes, but also of a desperate national hunger for healing and recovery…

Even as I struggle from day to day, it’s good to know I’m not the only one still desperate for reconciliation and connection.” 

From:  Can Jelly Roll Heal the Broken Soul of America? New York Times. July 23, 2023.

To those lines, he could have added the other cultural, economic, political and social issues of our day.

From childhood memories, I think the late 1930s American Communist Party through World War II–marred deeply by support of the Hitler-Stalin Pact and sectarianism in relation to the rest of “the left”– may have captured what Sartwell and Jelly Roll are talking about:  a crisis of the spirit.

During my lifetime, the early student movement at UC Berkeley, in the campus political party “SLATE” (I was first chairman), the United Farm Workers of America (I was co-director of its Schenley Liquor Boycott) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—“Snick” (I was a full-time “field secretary” from early 1963-end of 1966), each expressed a spirit that touched the soul.

In several-day marathon-long staff meetings, more than a hundred Snick field secretaries engaged in intense debates that threatened to divide the organization.  In the wee-small-hours of the morning, when reconciliation seemed impossible, one of us who was Black would rise and start singing “We Shall Overcome.”  We would all get in a circle, cross our arms, hold the hand of the persons on each side of us and, slightly rocking side-to-side, and join in the singing.  We realized there was something bigger in what we were doing than any single issue that faced us.  Until the mid-1960s, that spirit governed Snick’s operation.

I see hopes for a renewal of that spirit in much of the new labor organizing bubbling up from the bottom at Amazon, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, and other workplaces, and the Teamster Union preparation with its membership for UPS negotiations.  

I see it in some of the community organizing now taking place in the country.  

I see it in some of the electoral campaigns waged by “progressives” and other reformers.  

I see it in the campaigns against climate pollution, racism, sexism and others.

The crisis of the spirit prompted by endless greed and vast inequality of wealth, status and power, war, looming environmental disaster, and hostility to and discrimination against “The Other” shall be overcome–  

Or we will die as a nation.

Auto Workers Have Big Demands for the Big 3

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Ford workers with Local 551 in Chicago attended packed strike training classes in early August. Photo: UAW.

The clock is ticking toward September 14 at midnight, when the Auto Workers’ contracts with the Big 3 automakers expire. The new leaders of the UAW have come out swinging, and in quickly growing numbers, members are stepping up to prepare for a strike.

The agreements cover close to 150,000 workers at Ford, General Motors (GM), and Stellantis.

In early August President Shawn Fain presented a list of “the Members’ Demands” to the companies, calling them “the most audacious and ambitious list of proposals they’ve seen in decades.” These bargaining goals are aimed at undoing concessions extracted by the companies from previous union administrations since before the Great Recession. A major goal is to ensure that the transition to electric vehicles is not used to further undermine auto workers’ standards.

Entering this round of bargaining, the Big 3 have reported a combined $21 billion in profits in the first half of 2023. This comes on top of profits of $250 billion over the last 10 years. “Our message going into bargaining is clear: record profits mean record contracts,” Fain told UAW members on Facebook Live August 1.

Instead of the UAW’s past tradition of targeting just one auto company in bargaining, then basing contracts for the others off that model, Fain warned all three companies to consider themselves targets, keeping them guessing about which one may ultimately be struck—or whether union members might walk out at all three. In 2019, 49,000 UAW members struck GM for six weeks.

Among the demands Fain presented are:

  • Eliminating tiers on wages and benefits, plus double-digit raises for all
  • Restoring cost-of-living adjustments, which were suspended during the Great Recession
  • Restoring the defined-benefit pension and retiree health care for all; workers hired since 2007 have neither
  • Increasing pensions for current retirees; there’s been no increase since 2003
  • The right to strike over plant closures
  • A “working family protection program.” If the companies shut down a plant, they would have to pay laid-off workers to do community service work.
  • Making all current temps permanent employees, with strict limits on the future use of temps
  • Increasing paid time off

PROTECTING ELECTRICAL VEHICLE WORKERS

The union is simultaneously pushing to improve conditions for electrical vehicle (EV) battery workers employed at joint ventures between the Big 3 and South Korean firms. A letter signed by 28 Senators urged the companies to fold these battery workers into their master agreements with the UAW. “These are highly skilled, technical, and strenuous jobs,” read the letter. “It is unacceptable and a national disgrace that the starting wage at any current American joint venture EV battery facility is $16 an hour.”

The companies say these proposals are too expensive and threaten their competitiveness, especially when they are ramping up investment to convert to EVs. Fain says this argument ignores recent history: “When the Big 3 say the future is uncertain and the EV transition is expensive, remember that they’ve made a quarter of a trillion in North American profits over the last decade and have poured billions of it into special dividends, stock buybacks, and supersized executive compensation.”

Pay for the Big 3 CEOs rose by an average of 40 percent since 2019, with GM CEO Mary Barra alone raking in $29 million in compensation in 2022. “We know our members are worth the same and more,” said Fain.

MORE TRANSPARENCY

Fain was elected in March on a slate backed by the reform movement Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), on a platform of “No corruption, no concessions, no tiers,” ending 70 years of one-party rule in the UAW. He is not only pushing a more militant approach in bargaining but also promising more transparency with the members.

“Bargaining’s not a one-person show,” Fain said. “Those days are gone, and gone with those days is the false belief that union contracts are solely won by the president.”

This time around, Fain has had particularly harsh words for Stellantis, the parent company of Jeep, Ram Trucks, and Chrysler formed in 2021 through a merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot. “I have been shocked to see how one company in particular is trying to lowball and undercut us,” he said on Facebook Live August 8.

Fain said concession demands included removing a cap on temps and cutting vacation for new hires—and then he dumped Stellantis’s proposal in the trash.

Past UAW leaders bargained behind closed doors, never organizing members to pressure the Big 3 and declining even to reveal specific bargaining goals. Leaders sometimes called major strikes last-minute to soften members up to accept lousy offers.

Nonetheless, UAW members kept alive a wall-to-wall culture of honoring picket lines.

MEMBERS IN MOTION

This year, some old-guard regional directors and local officers are refusing to promote the contract campaign—calling it a UAWD plot. But Fain’s assertive and open approach has encouraged members—and some skeptical officers—to jump into the fight
.
On Facebook Live August 15, he said, “I’m asking rank-and-file activists all around the country to do everything you can do to get organized in your plant…Our national Organizing Department is putting together weekly virtual trainings that will walk you through how to organize actions at your workplace.”

Fain specified getting out a big strike vote, putting signs in car windows, and—taking a page from the Teamsters’ book—parking lot rallies and practice pickets. Besides strike votes, none of these tactics has been used by the UAW for many decades.

In addition, UAWD is encouraging members to spread information and spirit through “10-minute meetings,” in-person meetings at work with a group of co-workers.

At Ford’s big Chicago plant, 500 members of Local 551 attended two-hour strike training classes in early August, organized by members and local officers. Nearly 100 volunteered as strike captains.

Before the class got started, some members showed each other videos of Fain’s demands on their phones: “46 percent raise by the end of the contract? That’s right on.” Members cheered when local officers repeated the threat to strike all three companies at once, if needed.

The training raised ideas for escalating pressure on Ford before expiration, with inspiration from a video of “practice picketing” by UPS Teamsters. One of the biggest applause lines came from a facilitator’s suggestion to “do no favors for managers!”

Members’ fighting spirit came out fast in questions. Assembly worker Wayne Davis asked, “How do we get others ready to endure as long as it takes?”

Originally published in Labor Notes

The Terrible Emptiness of “Oppenheimer”

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The blockbuster movie leaves out the real story’s main characters: New Mexicans

This piece was reported and first appeared in Searchlight New Mexico

Young Bernice Gutierrez with her aunt Rita Prudencio, in Carrizozo, New Mexico. According to Gutierrez, Prudencio had cancer twice. Courtesy Bernice Gutierrez

Bernice Gutierrez was eight days old when a light 10,000 times hotter than the surface of the sun cracked open the predawn sky. No one in south-central New Mexico knew where it came from, or that the tiniest units of matter could be split to unleash such energy. Nor could they know that when the cloud that followed bloomed some 50,000 feet into the sky, it was surrounded for the briefest of seconds by a blue halo, the “glow of ionized air,” as the Manhattan Project physicist Otto Frisch described it. 

The impacts of that unholy halo were all too apparent in the years after, when her great-grandfather died of stomach cancer. One person after another would receive their own wrenching cancer diagnoses — 41 people in her immediate family, spanning five generations. Every one of them had lived in the Tularosa Basin and within 50 miles of the Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb, nicknamed “Gadget,” was detonated on the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert.

Gutierrez was one of a group of downwinders, including Mary Martinez White and Tina Cordova, cofounder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, who watched the movie “Oppenheimer” together when it opened. In one scene after another, New Mexico’s landscapes unfurled — all painfully beautiful and all, it appeared, empty and unpeopled. 

In New Mexico, we have lived in the blind spot of a national narrative for eight decades, repeated once again in this box office hit. Over its exhaustive three-hour run-time, it managed to avoid mentioning what we here have been sharing with loved ones at kitchen tables for decades: the violent evictions that took place on the Pajarito Plateau to build Los Alamos, the Pueblo and Hispanic men and women who did essential work for the Manhattan Project, or the thousands of New Mexicans affected to this day by the Trinity test. 

To watch J. Robert Oppenheimer’s character instead create and destroy in the state’s big, beautiful and ostensibly barren lands is to deny the presence of so many people whose lives were indelibly transformed by the dawn of the atomic era and continue to be shaped by the juggernaut that is today’s nuclear industrial complex.

Oppenheimer, the son of a wealthy businessman, had come here as part of a cultural moment. He hiked, rode horses and camped. He stayed at a dude ranch in Pecos. He fell in love with and then changed New Mexico forever.

“I am responsible for ruining a beautiful place,” he would later confess.

The film, Gutierrez said, skipped blithely over the ruin. “They leave out the fact that in those isolated areas lived ranchers whose lands they took away and who were never compensated for it.”

The blast was so hot it liquified sand and pieces of the bomb into hunks of green glass. Lead-lined tanks were dispatched to take soil samples at ground zero as fallout cascaded across 46 states. Ash fell from the sky like snow for days afterward, contaminating cisterns, acequias, crops, livestock, clothing and people. At the time of the detonation, 13,000 people lived within a 50-mile radius.

Bernice Gutierrez. Michael Benanav/Searchlight New Mexico

‘Love-struck’ with the beauty

Oppenheimer initially arrived in New Mexico among a wave of smitten travelers. Artists, writers, dancers, anthropologists, museum boosters, health seekers and at least one psychoanalyst (Carl Jung), all had come as well-to-do tourists in search of the ineffable — landscapes, light, exotic cultures, “a patch of America that didn’t feel American,” in the words of writer Rachel Syme.

Long before he became the father of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer was “love-struck” with the stark beauty of New Mexico, as Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin wrote in “American Prometheus,” the biography upon which the movie is based. He would later lease and then buy a home in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains with his brother, Frank. Like so many others, he’d been mesmerized by the West.

New Mexico and the Southwest had long been lodged in America’s psyche. Landscape painting and photography pictured this new and alien frontier to incoming settlers and tourists as early as 1848, the year the United States annexed the region from Mexico. The art forms ended up serving the nation’s gospel, Manifest Destiny, by portraying “uninhabited” landscapes open to settlement. At the same time, U.S. forces brutally removed Indigenous peoples and others of mixed descent from their ancestral lands.

That aesthetic was at work in “Oppenheimer,” a movie that not only played up the romance of the landscape but also made it appear that the atomic bomb test only affected an elite group of scientists watching raptly in cars and bunkers.

View of the bunkers that housed cameras and data instrumentation at the Trinity Site where the world’s first nuclear bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. Photo by Kenneth L. Brockway, U.S. Army. Courtesy of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, negative 059382

“That’s the thing about the white supremacist imagination, right? They create alternate realities for our lives and communities and we have to live with the consequences,” said Mia Montoya Hammersley, an environmental attorney and member of the Piro-Manso-Tiwa tribe whose ancestry includes the earliest stewards of the Tularosa Basin, where the first bomb was detonated. 

“This narrative that New Mexico is this empty barren place, people still really buy into that and believe it.” 

At the time of the blast, nearby towns like Alamogordo, Tularosa, Carrizozo and San Antonio were home to farmers, ranchers and railroad workers. The Mescalero Apache Reservation sits just southeast of the Trinity Site. The entire region was once an epicenter of commerce between the Pueblo communities of Northern New Mexico and northern Mexico, said Diego Medina, the historic preservation officer for the Piro-Manso-Tiwa tribe. “Tribal communities have existed within that stretch of land between the Salinas Basin and the gypsum mounds of White Sands in central New Mexico for thousands of years,” he told me.

It’s a chronicle that Medina painted recently in a mural entitled “long has the light wandered to lay itself upon you.”The 23,000-year-old fossilized footprints uncovered at White Sands National Park, 60 miles from the Trinity test, are depicted on one side; on the other, there is an endless trail of ancestors.

Diego Medina, tribal historic preservation officer for the Piro-Manso-Tiwa tribe, at the 17th-century church of San Gregorio de Abó, at Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument. Michael Benanav/Searchlight New Mexico

‘Hard on the heart’

In the film, security wire is unrolled into fences, a 100-foot steel tower rises up against the parched summer ground and the world’s first nuclear weapon is assembled. Later, after a monsoon nearly derails the test, and the bomb is just about to detonate, Oppenheimer says, “Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart.” 

Then comes the blast, near silence and the sound of Oppenheimer’s labored breathing. Many interminable seconds later, the shock wave hits like a riptide. But we are largely only shown the impact on Oppie — first his elation, then ambivalence and later, after Little Boy and Fat Man are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, guilt. He realizes that arms control is needed and so begins another chapter of his career and eventual public downfall.

There is nothing to suggest during any of that storytelling that New Mexico was essentially poisoned, its residents never warned, evacuated or educated about the health hazards of the July 16, 1945 Trinity test.

“It was,” as artist Medina put it, “a great act of desecration.” 

Some geologists propose that this moment marks the start of a new epoch of geologic time, the Anthropocene. In New Mexico, it marks a new epoch of our own — when we became a nuclear colony. We are the only “cradle-to-grave” state in the nation, home to uranium mining, nuclear weapon manufacturing and waste storage. Two of the nation’s three weapons labs — Los Alamos and Sandia — are located here, and some 2,500 warheads are buried in an underground munitions complex spitting distance from the Albuquerque Sunport.

The landscape south of Abó, approximately 45 miles north of the Trinity Site. Michael Benanav/Searchlight New Mexico

Los Alamos National Laboratory is currently undergoing a multi-billion-dollar expansion to create plutonium pits on an industrial scale — the “new Manhattan Project,” as Ted Wyka, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s field office manager, recently said in an aside before a media tour. Wyka told me he imagined himself in the role of Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project; LANL’s current director Thomas Mason was his Oppenheimer, he said. 

The film gestures obliquely toward a future world irrevocably changed by the spectacle of nuclear military might. That future — our present — is now a global arms race. 

Los Alamos, 80 years later, is a full-fledged city, “a model community” and an “atomic utopia for Postwar America,” as one history reads. The release of the film has only primed the town for the onscreen rehabilitation of its paterfamilias. 

One can see the Oppie mania inside the lab, too, where Oppenheimer photomontages are emblazoned across the walls of LANL’s badge office, its new Employee Training center and a corridor in Technical Area 55 that leads to where plutonium cores are hewn. At a city park, Oppenheimer and Groves have been memorialized in bronze, a paean that might survive a nuclear winter, should the worst come to pass.

7-8: L) Statues of Oppenheimer and Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves in Los Alamos. R) The intersection of Trinity and Oppenheimer drives in Los Alamos. Photos Michael Benanav/Searchlight New Mexico

Trinity Drive, just down the road, was one of the first streets to be named in Los Alamos. Other thoroughfares are named for local tribes: Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Jemez, Tesuque, Nambe, Navajo (not to mention Enewetak and Bikini atolls) — as if having a street named after them could undo the damage the weapons complex wrought on Native lands. 

“You question, why are they up there in our sacred mountains? Why can’t we go fishing up there anymore? Why can’t we collect our pottery clay there anymore?” said elder Kathy Wan Povi Sanchez of San Ildefonso Pueblo, thinking back to when she was young. “The secrecy of the atomic bomb creation also kept a lot of our people in harm’s way because [the lab] wouldn’t tell us when the experiments were being detonated,” she continued, recalling how explosives were tested in surrounding canyons. “They didn’t want people to know what they were doing.”

It wasn’t until the late 1940s or so that “the Pueblos realized that this thing at Los Alamos was a permanent incursion into their world,” said Dmitri Brown, a Tewa scholar who writes about the history of the Manhattan Project and whose great-grandfather worked as a carpenter at the secret lab. 

The Pajarito Plateau, a constellation of sites that includes Tsankawi and Tsire-eh among many others, is still considered an ancestral home, Brown continued. “This is a place where you came from. This is a place where you can go back to and feel and see and breathe what your ancestors felt and saw and breathed.”

A view of the Rio Grande Valley from the road into Los Alamos. Michael Benanav/Searchlight New Mexico

And yet, in the film, there are only two references to Indigenous peoples. In the first, Oppenheimer is selecting the Pajarito Plateau for the Manhattan Project. The second arrives after the U.S. decimates Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A scene in the oval office shows a crass Harry Truman asking Oppenheimer what to do with the site now that the bombs have been dropped. 

Oppenheimer’s response? “Give it back to the Indians.” 

Instead, the nuclear arms race was born. Los Alamos grew from 200 to 12,000 in a matter of a decade. Today, it’s 70 percent white, has the nation’s highest percentage of PhDs per capita, and is among the wealthiest cities in America. This most rarefied place stands in stark contrast to its surrounding Indigenous and Hispano communities, some of whose residents still work in some of the most dangerous jobs at the lab. 

“They don’t talk about how New Mexicans did the dirtiest jobs, how we were part of building the roads and the bridges and the buildings. And then, when that was completed, they sent us into the dirtiest jobs inside of the labs handling radioactive waste,” Tina Cordova said in a panel discussion after a showing of the film at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe. 

“They also didn’t depict the women that they bused up there, Native women and the Hispanic women that literally cooked every meal, cleaned every house, changed every diaper, and made every baby bottle.”

What remains is a persistent belief that the creation of atomic weapons ended World War II and made for “one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time,” as a plaque near the Santa Fe Plaza reads.

Totavi, a former post office and historic waystation for workers at Los Alamos. Michael Benanav/Searchlight New Mexico

No reckoning

There is no rule that says cinema must be accurate. “All art is useless,” Oscar Wilde once proclaimed. Its purpose, he said, is not to “instruct or influence.” 

But “Oppenheimer” does, in fact, have the power to influence. For better or worse, this blockbuster has already been seen by millions of people around the globe, many of whom knew little or nothing about the history of the atomic bomb. The film, widely hailed as brilliant and thought-provoking, is perhaps the one and only time they’ll be exposed to the story. With just a few seconds of added footage, the movie could have given some context. It could have filled in the blind spot and acknowledged the people who lost their lives or lost family members. But the reckoning never came.

Oppenheimer bound us to the bomb. His story is our story — the tale of a borderland that became a tourist mecca that became the nerve center of the Atomic Age. 

At the movie’s crescendo, the Trinity detonation, I heard women in the theater sobbing. 

Gutierrez, White and Cordova, all three on the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium’s steering committee, left the film no less resolved. Days after seeing the movie, Gutierrez was back at work, researching all the infants that died the summer of the Trinity test. Cordova was busy writing about the movie and pushing for compensation for New Mexico’s downwinders, her mission for the past 18 years. And White had helped organize a photography exhibition in Las Cruces on the legacy of Trinity from a local perspective. 

The movie’s over, but the battle goes on.

Searchlight New Mexico is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that seeks to empower New Mexicans to demand honest and effective public policy.”

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO WIN POWER FOR WORKERS?

By

A review of Labor Power and Strategy, by John Womack Jr., edited by Peter Olney (co-editor of the Stansbury Forum)
and Glenn Perusek
PM Press, 2023, 190pp with index and notes

Silicon Valley electronics worker. Mountain View, California, 2001,  Photo:  David Bacon

Half a century ago I got a job in a huge semiconductor plant, long before the internet.  In Silicon Valley’s factories we tried to organize a union, arguing that this industry sat at the heart of the U.S. economy.  If workers in it had a strong union, we believed, we could use our power to change the world.

Perhaps the industry thought so too.  From the start, its titans were committed to keeping workers in their factories unorganized.  When Robert Noyce, cofounder of Intel, famously declared, “Remaining non-union is an essential for survival for most of our companies” we knew he was talking about us.

They’d brought together 250,000 workers in a single valley. What if we began to organize from plant to plant, we asked, much as autoworkers did in Detroit decades ago, and asserted sweeping demands not only for ourselves but other workers as well?  By targeting this strategic industry, might unions have been able to provide a bulwark against the loss of much of labor’s power over the following decades?

Of course, this did not happen. Most of us were fired and I was blacklisted.   Mass production of semiconductors left the valley in the 1980s, first to plants dispersed around the U.S. southwest, and then to the Asian Pacific rim.  These are the factories that produce the silicon integrated circuits, or chips, at the heart of the material basis of modern life – computers, cars – you name it.

Today a huge percentage of the western world’s chips are fabricated in enormous factories belonging to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, located in three Taiwan cities – Hsinchi, Tainan and Taichung.  The U.S. government, especially the military, worries about this.  What could happen if China goes to war with Taiwan and they’re destroyed or captured?  Or might the supply get cut off if a civil uprising brings to power a new government, not as U.S. friendly as its current one?

The unspoken fear, as old as the industry itself, is that the workers in these plants might organize themselves and want to change, not just their wages, but the output and who might be destined to receive it.  Losing control of the fabricating plants for the most sophisticated microcomputers would render the U.S. defense complex extremely vulnerable, and over time, perhaps paralyze its weapons systems.

It is an old fear because it reaches back to the creation of Silicon Valley itself.  At the beginning of the electronics age, from the early 50s to the mid-80s, the first manufacturers of integrated circuits were recipients of cold war Defense Department subsidies.  Starting in Bell Labs, where William Shockley, the theorist of African American inferiority, invented the solid state transistor, the companies produced the chips in a vast complex of factories extending from Santa Clara to Mountain View, at the southern end of San Francisco Bay.  

Those semiconductor factories are long closed, but now the United States is eager to find a way to entice the industry to bring them back.  The recently-passed CHIPS Act, a landmark giveaway to huge electronics corporations, will subsidize the building of semiconductor plants in the U.S.  Arguing that their construction is an issue of national security, the CHIPS Act is trying to reinvent the past.

But if new plants will again be built to produce semiconductors in the U.S., might there be another chance like that missed in Silicon Valley’s early days – to organize the workers as they go through the doors, when these factories open and the production lines start?

* * *

The workers in chip factories hold a lot of potential power.  Increasingly sophisticated machines in an intensely automated production system require adept labor to keep them running.  Without it the factories stop.  What might those workers use their power for, if they knew how to win and use it?  The creation of a democratic, progressive and powerful workers movement in the heart of capitalist technology could not only change their own conditions.  It could push forward anti-corporate politics, and even become an engine of social transformation.  

In Labor Power and Strategy John Womack devotes a lot of his thinking about labor strategy to questions of technology and its impact on workers.  It’s too bad the book was published just before the CHIPS Act made the question of the strategic position of semiconductor workers so immediate for labor organizers.  If there was ever a convincing demonstration of the strategic importance of certain industries, the CHIPS Act has given it to us.  

Womack would certainly argue against the prevalent idea that the plants are so automated that they won’t really need workers, or that organizing them is not vital.  Instead, he would perhaps apply to this situation his general conclusion that a change in the organization of production opens a window for workers:  “The workers who can get into the change – the earlier the better – can imbed themselves in it, lock into the training for it, take part in working out its defects … so that they soon know better than the company’s engineers… how the whole system functions … how things go together for the system’s production – and so how to take them apart.”

In Labor Power and Strategy Womack poses goals and strategies that seem almost unrealizable at a time when the percentage of workers belonging to unions declines every year.  His arguments echo our own debates in the plant decades ago, ones going on in U.S. unions almost since their origin.  Over the course of a series of interviews with labor veterans Peter Olney and Glenn Perusek, he holds that some industries are critical to the functioning of modern capitalism, and that workers in those industries therefore have the potential power to force radical change on the system.  Labor, he charges, must direct more of its resources to their organization.

With responses from a series of prominent labor organizers and activists, Labor Power and Strategy also raises many challenges to Womack’s provocative thesis.  From Bill Fletcher Jr. to Jane MacAlevey, respondents argue for concentrating on those workers already the most active, even if they’re not in strategic industries. But Womack comes right back at them – some workers can shut the system down, while others cannot.

* * *

Womack’s journey to his conclusions has been a roundabout one.  A leading scholar of modern Mexican history, he wrote a seminal study of revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, as well as a book and articles examining the role industrial workers played in the Mexican Revolution.  He looked especially at the state of Veracruz, where these workers helped the revolution emerge victorious, and then wrote some of the world’s most advanced social and labor rights into the revolutionary constitution.

In Labor Power and Strategy he looks at capitalist production generally, contending that some industries are key to its functioning.  He suggests that by analyzing the specifics of how work is carried out, workers can exercise their power to disrupt it.  It’s almost reminiscent of the Wobbly idea of sabotage, or the Communist and Socialist contention in the 20s and 30s that the industrial organization of the working class, able to shut down huge factories, was the route to political power.

Womack’s argument looks at winning power in three general contexts – systemic, strategic and tactical.  He begins on the large, systemic scale by asking why workers need power – to what end?  He is a revolutionary – that is, he believes the system of capitalism must be replaced, and even looks, at two points in the book, at the experiences of the two major socialist revolutions of the 20th century – the Soviet and Chinese.  What made those workers and their peasant allies aware of their power, he asks, and willing to use it?

Those revolutions are so different from the situation facing workers in the present-day U.S. that they seem almost irrelevant.  However, by starting there he introduces two key questions.  How have revolutionaries, committed to the centrality of the working class to social transformation, developed flexible strategies that incorporated, and even depended on, the action of other sections of societies already in ferment.  And the related question is that of consciousness – that true social revolution depends on working people gaining a knowledge of themselves as a class, and then the ability to act on it.

But Labor Power and Strategy is not a book of history.  Womack, and the ten veteran organizers and activists who answer him, argue over labor strategy in today’s world.  They range from the UAW campaign at Nissan’s Canton, Mississippi plant, to the Smithfield meatpacking drive in North Carolina, to Walmart and the Fight for 15, and especially to Amazon.  His interviews with Peter Olney and Glenn Perusek, in which he lays out his strategic framework in the first part of the book, are intended to provoke a rethinking of how the labor movement goes about winning power.

Through detailed examination of the way their place in production gives workers leverage, he develops a broad analysis of the way industrial workers are linked together by the “technical relations” of production.  These are the key functions carried out by different groups of workers that enable, for instance, a chip factory to produce its semiconductors.  Those relations, in turn, are a source of power if workers know how to use them.

In Labor Power and Strategy he speculates about the way a detailed analysis of Amazon’s delivery system could identify those points where it’s vulnerable to worker action, or how workers in logistics (that is, transport of goods) and communications (from phone to internet) might build a power base.   In Womack’s view, not all workers have this power – only those in industries critical to the overall function of capitalist production.  He is not necessarily nostalgic for the organizing drives of the CIO in the 1930s that built powerful unions in auto, steel, textile and other industries – but his arguments react to a common assumption that industrial workers are no longer important, and that in modern production there are so few they don’t count anyway.  

Workers critical to the functioning of the capitalist economic system, he holds, have a potential power that other workers do not.  In an era when train derailments and the slow movement of cargo across the docks have impacts that ripple through the whole economy, it’s clear that some workers, like those in the logistics industry, can clearly affect the whole system.  

Crane operator, member of the ILWU, moving containers to and from a ship in the Port of Los Angeles. Los Angeles, California 2000  Photo: Robert Gumpert 2000

Womack is not arguing against organizing sectors that are not strategic.  Workers in other areas organize heroic struggles and sometimes challenge capital directly and effectively, as teachers have done in Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities, winning undeniable political power as a result.  But without the leverage to stop the system from functioning, he asserts, the gains are lost over time.  It is a basic Marxist argument.  “Without work producing value, there is no surplus value,” he contends, and therefore “power over production, the power to produce or strike production, is the working class’s specific, essential, radical, critical power.”

* * *

But will organizing strategic industries reverse unions’ decline in numbers and political power?  And since much of the organizing that workers have done in recent decades has been in areas like retail (think Starbucks or WalMart) or caregiving (from healthcare to domestic work), is Womack saying that workers’ actions here are not strategic?  Rather than ignoring or dismissing these questions, Womack, Olney, and Perusek invite organizers to respond.

Carey Dall, who spent 15 years trying to transform the Brotherhood Maintenance of Way, a major railway union, points out that 85% of logistics workers in the U.S. already belong to unions, yet they are often unable to use their power even to help themselves.  President Biden made their weakness apparent simply by prohibiting a national rail strike.  The west coast longshore union has mounted one-day strikes to protest the Iraq war and refused to unload cargo from apartheid South Africa and prewar militarist Japan.  But in general logistics workers have not been a bulwark defending coworkers in the U.S. or abroad in their hours of need.  

Katy Fox Hodess challenges Womack another way.  Looking around the world, she cites examples of dockworkers who are unorganized and weak, or where their power was defeated by the privatization of the docks and their replacement.  And in fact, the vulnerability of strategic workers is painfully clear in the U.S. labor movement.  In 1981 the air traffic controllers, whose work operating airports is equally central, were replaced by military personnel ordered into the towers by President Reagan, who sent PATCO’s leaders to prison.  For most union activists the PATCO strike marked the legitimation of the permanent replacement of strikers.  Yet the lesson here also is that standing alone, their control of critical operations was insufficient to protect them.  

Hodess then gives two examples of longshore unions that successfully used their associational power, that is, the strength of their organization itself and the links created with other workers around them.  Positional power, she argues, also depends on organization, ties with the surrounding community, and the consciousness of the workers involved.  

Lest the reader think of this as idealism divorced from reality, working-class culture shines through the twelve photographs contributed by noted labor photographer Robert Gumpert.  He’s been at it a long time.  Among his earliest images are those of a painter high on the cables of the Bay Bridge and a striking Greyhound bus driver and his son, in what was an iconic union battle in 1983.  A 1986 image presents the idled rail cars and dark remains of what was once one of the country’s largest industrial facilities – Pennsylvania’s Aliquippa Steel Works.  The modern working class is represented on the one hand by shouting Los Angeles janitors and the other by a crane operator high above Long Beach, moving the boxes that are now the lifeblood of global shipping.  The amazing photographs are vivid reminders of that the book is discussing real human beings, not just debating power and strategy in the abstract.

* * *

The argument for the centrality of industrial manufacturing workers is hotly debated throughout the book.  Jane MacAlevey lays out the reasons why the women-led healthcare and education unions are the ones in the U.S. labor movement most active in organizing.  They’ve created solidly-organized unions, and coalitions beyond their own members, to defend public education, adequate healthcare, and political rights in general.  

Bill Fletcher argues for recognition of the potential of workers located in sites of struggle – where they are already actively organizing and battling the system.  In looking back at the failure of the CIO’s Operation Dixie, he asks how history might have been different if the labor movement had concentrated, not on big textile mills, but on public workers in the wake of the Memphis garbage strike where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.  

And how should labor respond when workers, not in theoretically strategic positions, ask for help in organizing and strikes?  Jack Metzgar asks, “Are union organizers supposed to warn such workers against this folly or attempt to direct their hope and courage in the most fruitful directions possible in a given situation?”

Some respondents do agree with Womack. Gene Bruskin, who headed the organizing drive at the enormous Smithfield pork packinghouse in Tarheel, North Carolina, gives perhaps the best example, one of the few successful efforts in recent years in very large privately-owned plants. He describes the battle waged by African Americans in the livestock department, where pigs enter the facility for slaughter.  These workers discovered that by sitting down they could stop the plant, force the company to make concessions, and ultimately inspire the rest of the 3000-person workforce to take the union drive to its conclusion.  

It was not just positional strength that won even this battle, however.  Earlier, Mexican workers had learned to slow and control the devastating line speed, and then stopped the plant twice in defense of their rights as immigrants.  After they were driven from the plant by immigration raids, Black workers took up the workplace-based struggle for civil rights.  The link between positional power and political movements, as workers in the plant saw them, won their victory when combined with broad outside support.

Yet unanswered questions in this debate revolve around race and sex – the unity of the working class.  Fletcher says, “Race and gender are not identity questions.  They speak to a specific set of contradictions and forms of oppression that are central to actually existing capitalism.”  Struggles against that oppression are “sources of strength and renewal.”  

Janitors marching with a coalition of many unions during first day of the labor sponsored 3 day march “Hollywood to the Docks”.  15 Ap. 2008, Los Angeles, CA.  Photo: Robert Gumpert 2008

Given that people of color and immigrants will make up a majority of the working class by 2032, according to the Economic Policy Institute, are they strategic in their own right?  While the organizing efforts of immigrant farmworkers, janitors, construction workers and others have not occurred in industries held as strategic, they are responsible for most of the actual growth of unions in states like California over the past three decades.

They have also forced radical activists to analyze more deeply the central role of the migration of labor in today’s global economic system.  Whether this system could survive without labor migration, and whether migrants themselves therefore have a strategic role in changing it, is not just a theoretical question.  It is one emerging from working-class upsurges in many countries.

A sober and historically accurate assessment of the farmworkers movement would have provided an entry point for examining this question, since it has played such a fundamental role in the position of Latino and Asian immigrants in the history of the U.S. labor movement.  Some forms of oppression and control, like the labor contractor and contingent labor systems, were developed first in relation to the work of immigrants in agriculture.  Workers’ responses, going back even to the Wobblies and the depression, contributed some of the country’s best labor organizers and radical activists, from Dorothy Healey and Larry Itliong to the young people who learned their first lessons about working class organization in the fields, and then used them to transform many unions.  The Chicano civil rights movement and the immigrant rights movement both have roots in California fields.

The concentration of Black workers in steel and auto was a reason many radicals saw those industries as central to building a movement for fundamental social change.  In the wake of the divestment of capital from those industries domestically, are the areas of the economy where workers of color, women and immigrants are concentrated the key to social progress in the same way?  Many organizers of domestic workers, janitors, and others would certainly say so.  In the book the movements of these workers are sometimes referred to as those of the “most oppressed,” in distinction to movements of workers who may earn more, and even have unions, but work in strategically powerful positions.  

Both Fletcher and Womack try to find a bridge across this divide.  Womack describes a culture of comradeship and Bill Fletcher a culture of solidarity – either could be a way to overcome the tendency to pit one against the other.

* * *

One element of labor organizing that needs more attention is the structure of the workers movement itself.  Who is going to implement the various strategic ideas put forward?  In the 1930s, the movement to organize the big mass production industries didn’t depend so much on paid organizers as it did on the willingness of ordinary workers to begin organizing themselves, forming unions and starting the era’s labor wars.  What workers did have were Communist and Socialist parties, and a long history of popularizing the ideas of a socialist alternative to the existing capitalist system.  Even those organizers drafted onto the staff of emerging unions were often militants who gained their political understanding in the parties of the left.

Many of the respondents talk about the labor left, that is, the inchoate group of people in the labor movement and working class organizations who self-identify as left in their politics.  In the pre-cold war era, however, the left in labor was organized into parties, which gave it political strength and influence far beyond its actual numbers. Today’s situation is very different.  Political parties on the left in the U.S. are small, and don’t play the same role in the mass education of workers.  

The labor movement itself is fragmented organizationally, so that each union basically pursues its own course independently.  The movement has great difficulty acting as a cohesive class organizer, as it does in other countries.  The current French strikes are seen with admiration by U.S. union officers who can’t conceive of the same thing happening here.  A monolith labor is not.  

All of the respondents voice the need to change U.S. unions structurally, in order to implement the strategic ideas they debate.  Since a clear direction is necessary, Olney and Perusek might have invited participation from the United Electrical Workers, the stalwart left pole of U.S. labor.  The UE recently revisited its long held set of principles for democratic unionism, and it is hard to imagine a large progressive labor movement that is not committed to them.  The UE’s five principles include aggressive struggle against the boss, rank and file control of the union, political independence, international solidarity and uniting all workers.  

Union organizing today depends on staff organizers, yet the existing labor movement will never have enough of them to bring the hundreds of thousands of workers into its ranks every year needed to stop its shrinkage.  Raising the percentage of organized workers in the U.S. workforce by just one percent would mean organizing over a million people.  Only a social movement can organize people on this scale.  

The labor movement needs a program which can inspire people to organize on their own, one which is unafraid to put forward radical demands, and rejects the constant argument that any proposal that can’t get through Congress next year is not worth fighting for. Workers will fight for the future of their children and their communities, even when their own future seems in doubt, but only a radical social vision inspires this kind of commitment.  

Harlan County, KY 1974:  UMWA on a 13 month strike at Brookside mines and on the picket line at Highsplint mine.  Robert Gumpert 1974

How are the workers, in the positions where the technical relations of production potentially give them power, going to become politically conscious – able and willing to use that power?  The contributor who speaks to this problem most directly is Melissa Shetler, a protagonist of the popular education movement founded by Paulo Friere:  “To think strategically, union members [and workers without unions too – ed.] must learn to identify and interrogate the assumptions of the status quo.”  Shetler rejects education as a process in which those with knowledge “educate” those without it.  “We must engage workers in collective action in which they are valued, heard, and able to leverage their power,” she says, describing a participatory and egalitarian process.  Perhaps this is one answer to the “how to” question about building the culture of comradeship and solidarity.

Peter Olney interviewed Womack at a cafe called, appropriately, The Foundry.  The book’s intention, in his hopes, is to develop a commitment among labor left organizers to concentrate on organizing Amazon, and to stimulate a debate over strategy that might succeed.  As the book appeared, the mainstream press carried articles about a division in the leadership of the new union that won the first union election, at a distribution center on Staten Island.  Chris Smalls, the drive’s leader, has gone on to push organizing and elections at other Amazon distribution centers, trying to create a larger movement able to challenge this giant.  The workers haven’t been well organized however, and the elections held have been lost.  Meanwhile, at the Staten Island facility another part of the union wants to concentrate on winning a contract, even by organizing a strike.  They brought in Jane MacAlevey to help, but she was forced to leave by the internal union disagreements.  

The strategic debates in Labor Power and Strategy aren’t just discussions far removed from action on the ground.  Is Amazon strategic?  Which workers are the key to defeating the corporation?  What tactics should they use?  Labor Power and Strategy’s participants have made a valiant attempt to steer workers and unions in this country into uncharted territory.  Instead of muddling along as it shrinks in numbers and power, they together make a powerful call for labor to change course and concentrate its strength. The radical answers of earlier eras are here combined with new thinking appropriate to changes in what is still the world’s most powerful system of capitalist production.  

Whether the ideas of Womack and the organizers will be tested and applied, in the network of Amazon hubs or the building of new semiconductor plants, is not certain.  There is no unanimity, not a surprise in a fractious movement.  But debate is certainly welcome and needed.