Activist’s Handbook: A Checklist For Change
By Steve Early
Randy Shaw’s Activist’s Handbook is a book with legs. First published in the early 1990s, it has now been updated as a guide to “winning social change” in the new millennium. If you’re a long distance runner in any U.S. social movement–or trying to figure out how to become one–this is the training manual for you and your team.
The appearance of a second edition from University of California Press has given the Bay Area author and community organizer a chance to expand upon the case studies he utilized in the initial edition, adding sections about protest activity not yet stirring two decades ago. The eclectic mix of older and new material makes the information and advice that Shaw dispenses even more useful to organizers of all types. His latest Handbook examines “new strategies, tactics, issues, and grassroots campaigns, and revisits whether activists have learned from past mistakes.”
The ground covered includes fights for better housing and tenant rights, neighborhood preservation and safer cities, affordable higher education, fair treatment of immigrants and AIDS victims, “sweat-free” manufacturing, gay and lesbian rights. The author also analyzes, in very ecumenical fashion, many different arenas for political work, including state and local ballot initiatives, legislative lobbying, running for office, direct action, litigation, and media campaigns.
One particularly helpful thread is Shaw’s exploration of how modern-day insurgents are utilizing “social media and other new tools to achieve their goals, and how new media can be best connected to traditional organizing and ‘old media’ strategies.” His chapters on “Winning More Than Coverage” and “Maximizing the Power of Online Activism” provide a thoughtful survey of how the PR terrain for public interest work has been transformed from its “pre-Internet days,” creating “enormous opportunities and formidable challenges.” Shaw reminds readers that “new-media tools do not change the activist rule that ‘media coverage alone is not enough.’” He warns against too much tinkering with a “YouTube video that few swing voters will see” or over-reliance on websites “that fail as a communication and mobilization vehicle” while “old school campaign tactics” are being neglected in the meantime.
TENDERLOIN ROOTS
Shaw is a lawyer (one of the good ones) and co-founder of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. Launched when he was a law student, the thirty-three year old THC is now San Francisco’s leading provider of permanent housing for homeless single adults. From a small store-front operation, that dispensed advice to tenants, the group has grown to a unionized (SEIU-represented) staff of nearly 250. THCers administer a range of innovative programs and services, while continuing to struggle against neighborhood gentrification and joust, when needed, with local politicians and real estate developers. Shaw also operates a lively on-line alternative news source and blog called Beyond Chron, which covers books, politics, culture, community organizing, and other subjects of interest to left-leaning residents of the Bay Area and beyond. (In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that I am a Beyond Chron contributor on labor topics.)
Drawing on his personal experience with THC-related campaigns, Shaw tallies up, in fairly candid fashion, the successes and setbacks of advocates for the homeless nationally and locally. He also devotes an entire chapter, with wider application, to the question of whether lawyers are “allies or obstacles to social change?” With a telling anecdote from early in his career, Shaw illustrates the sometimes problematic role of legal advisers–and union officials as well–in settings where direct action is in the offing: “As the demonstration approached, I observed a renewed sense of vigor and excitement among the hotel tenants…I also learned that the legal- aid attorneys had called a tenants’ meeting for the night before the demonstration. Apparently, the hotel owner was once again appearing reasonable and was now interested in negotiating. The attorneys, who had kept their distance from the proposed demonstration, felt that holding the event would jeopardize the possibility of a negotiated settlement.”
Anyone who’s ever had the rug pulled out from under them and people they were organizing, in similar circumstances, will find the denouement of this story to be quite familiar. While lobbying successfully to cancel the street protest, legal aid staffers downplayed the fact “that the landlord had so far agreed to nothing,” plus had a history of “promising compromise, only to renege.” The cancellation of the planned demo, of course, proved deflating for the tenants. As Shaw observes, “they were again reduced to passive participation in the ongoing drama affecting their lives. They had lost a sense of personal empowerment and, more critically, a sense of unity.”
Throughout the new edition of his book, Shaw does a consistently good job of categorizing, in general, what works and what doesn’t and why. For example, in his dissection of the strengths and weaknesses of the “tactical activism” of Occupy Wall Street, he praises Occupiers, far and wide, for having “the audacity to launch a national debate about income inequality that still shapes public attitudes about the nation’s commitment to economic fairness and equal opportunity for all.” Yet, despite the enduring brilliance of Occupy’s framing of the problem (aka “the 1 percent versus the 99 percent”), the movement itself became bogged down, he believes, in a defensive crouch. “Occupy’s preoccupation with preserving its public encampments reflected its shift from a proactive approach.”
In Oakland, where OWS succeeded in promoting a “general strike” that brought 10,000 marchers into the streets in November, 2011, its organizational culture was not always sufficiently welcoming of non-full-time activists. “A process that required people to attend meetings deep into the night did not work for those with family responsibilities or other work commitments, “Shaw notes. “In fact, it skewed decision-making to a small segment of ‘the 99 percent’ that had time to attend hours of outdoor meetings on work nights.”
DREAM: CAMPAIGN VICTORY
One of the Handbook’s most compelling new case studies involves the successful organizing by young immigrants after Congress failed to legalize the status those who came to the U.S. as children and ended up in college or seeking jobs, but still without papers. According to Shaw, proponents of the DREAM Act did not give up after broader immigration reform efforts stalled. Even when legislation to address their own precarious legal situation was thwarted in the lame-duck session of the still Democrat-controlled Congress in late 2010, they did not despair either. Instead, they escalated their direct action campaign, based on the calculation that they “could still achieve something close to the DREAM Act by appealing to someone who was depending on Latino votes to secure his re-election: President Obama.”
In June, 2012, DREAM Activists began to conduct sit-ins in Obama campaign offices in more than a dozen cities. Their goal was an executive order that would end the deportation threat for DREAMers, even though the risk of arrest greatly raised the stakes for those participating because they were now publicly revealing themselves to be undocumented. The “student activists willingness to adopt a ‘by all means necessary’ approach” had the desired effect on Obama. His administration unveiled a “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” program that implemented much of the DREAM Act administratively. This new policy grants work permits and a two-year renewable right to stay in the country to an estimated one million “young undocumented immigrants who can now live openly and work in their chosen fields.”
According to Shaw, there is plenty of room for optimism about the future of grassroots organizing—and not just among audacious DREAMers. “Today’s activists feel more confident because the Internet has exposed a vast world of social change activism that traditional media gate-keepers once excluded.” He cites several examples of progress being made, even if the ultimate objective has yet to be achieved, under the Obama Administration at least. He believes the gay rights movement should take particular pride in going from “pushing Democratic presidential primary candidates to back state recognition of same sex ‘civil unions’ in 2004, to getting President Barack Obama to publicly endorse gay marriage only eight years later.” On the environmental front, “green activists transformed a ‘done deal’ to build the Keystone XL pipeline into a national grassroots campaign and a litmus test for the nation’s commitment to combating climate change.”
Shaw sums up the formula for “overcoming all obstacles” in any electoral season or under any national administration, Democrat or Republican, as follows: “Create proactive agendas, establish fear-and-loathing relationships with elected officials, seek coalitions with ideologically diverse constituencies when necessary, strive to align the media with the cause, and understand how to use direct action and the courts” Most important of all, he reminds his readers “that neither politicians nor political parties are the prime movers for progressive change.”
With that checklist for change, and a wealth of accompanying detail about individual campaigns, there are few modern-day iterations of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals more instructive than Randy Shaw’s Activist’s Handbook. if you haven’t read Alinsky, consult his book first, then Shaw’s, and then, in response to all those urgent organizational appeals filling up your e-mail in-box, go out and “get active!”
Steve Early has been active in the labor movement since 1972. He is the author, most recently, of Save Our Unions: Dispatches From a Movement in Distress, from Monthly Review Press. He is currently working on a book about the impact of community organizing in Richmond, California. He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com
Some lessons from the Bay Area BART strike
By Warren Mar and Susan McDonough
Introduction:
Our attempt at this article was inspired by a brief analysis of the BART strike by Maria Poblet of Causa Justicia/Just Cause. We agreed with much of her global view that the strike was conducted under the current neo liberal agenda in this country of dismantling public services, at the same time blaming the inadequacy of those services on the public workers and their unions. In this article we would like to not repeat or focus of these points but home in on what the union(s) could have done better under these conditions – in particular SEIU 1021 – because we are more familiar with that union through our direct work with them in the past.
Why all public workers need to learn from the BART strike:
After a strike or any labor struggle, union summations often focus on how vicious the management was and how one-sided the main-stream media was in their reporting of the strike. Both these points were true during the BART strike, but this is the basis of our first critique. Unions need to ask themselves what they could have done better, regardless of the trying conditions. By its opening strategy, the union leadership appeared not to have expected management’s intransigence or that the mainstream media would immediately, foment public sentiment against them. Why would this be a surprise to any public sector union heading into contract talks today? Didn’t they read the news reports about what had taken place to public sector workers in Wisconsin and Michigan? Closer to home, three years ago, in liberal San Francisco, SEIU and other public workers were attacked with a referendum to cut their pension and health care benefits. Although public sector unions fought this back, a two tier system was created and newly hired SEIU 1021 members have a longer vesting period, and all members now pay more into their pensions. This was done through a compromise referendum offered to the voters as an alternative to the more reactionary one. Only last year, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee tried to decimate the lowest paid SEIU 1021 members, mostly women, by driving a wedge against comparable worth standards (equal pay for equal work) with male dominated classifications. The Mayor’s lay-off and furlough plan during the recession could have disproportionally fallen on women and minority members in classifications held by SEIU 1021. This unilateral move was stopped in court when a judge ruled that the mayor could not do this in the middle of a current contract and would have to wait until the contract reopens and bargain for this change. This may well be another fight deferred.
Public workers and reliance on politicians:
It is clear from the above that even the most liberal politicians and the leadership of the Democratic Party hierarchy have succumbed to the neo-liberal paradigm that public sector unions are to blame for deteriorating services and rising costs, including in mass transit. So who did SEIU appoint to lead the bargaining battle that would result in the BART strike? Josie Mooney, who served as Executive Director of the old SEIU 790 local in San Francisco before their merger into 1021. Mooney was an old school public sector union head who kept a regular table at one of San Francisco’s tonier restaurants near City Hall where she would meet political power brokers to get what she needed for her members, while returning coveted support for future electoral ambitions. SEIU 790 and 9 other locals in Northern California merged into one regional behemoth Local 1021 (now encompassing over 165 bargaining chapters and 54,000 members). Their BART members constitute only one of these chapters, albeit with one of the better contracts historically.
One of Mooney’s first acts after being rehired was to bring in her old ally, Mark Mosher (of Whitehurst/Mosher Media), on the campaign as a consultant. Mosher’s main work had been as a campaign consultant on most but not exclusively, Democratic Party campaigns. Most observers assumed his main worth was to get the legislators across the counties, who make up the Metropolitan Transit District governing BART, the state legislators and Governor Brown whom he and SEIU had helped elect, to support their cause, and push management into a reasonable and quick settlement. If this was his main worth, he failed miserably. Most legislators and Governor Brown read the political winds and either sided with management or did nothing at all, which amounted to the same thing, forcing SEIU and ATU into no option but to strike.
Where was the direct contact with the ridership and their constituents?
The leadership of 1021 did not prepare the public for the upcoming war. Mass transit riders were painted as collateral damage by the politicians and rather than blame management, most riders blamed the union. Why is this? If SEIU 1021 had done a sober organizing assessment of their members’ interactions and interface with the public including their own ridership they could have foreseen this outcome. Every public sector worker who goes on strike today must do this assessment. All public workers are being attacked today, but some have advantages the BART workers did not.
Police, firefighters, nurses and most teachers are generally looked at sympathetically by the public. Why? For one thing those we serve know us. They see us often when they are vulnerable and need something from our work. Our interface with the public is often direct and one on one. If they don’t have direct dealings with us, it is rare that a family member or friend has not. Even negative interactions are often off-set by the majority of positive ones and the most pro-management biased media cannot discount these inter-actions with our members.
How does the commuting public interact with BART workers? They don’t. One barely catches a glance of the train conductor as the trains speed into the stations and we jump on or off into the third, fourth or eighth car. There is no interaction with humans when paying our fares unless BART security officers are checking our passes, often an unpleasant experience. Even the maligned Muni bus drivers are more sympathetic because we often walk by them as we board the front of the bus. If we are regulars, we see the same drivers coming and going on the same route as our regular commute. We see can see them smile or frown and they are sources of information to new riders and lost tourist. We hear their voices as they tell passengers approaching stops and crowds to please move back to make way for new passengers, and we may even sympathize with their working conditions as we see bicyclists weave in and out of lanes, watch how they get stuck behind private Google buses and delivery trucks, double parked taxi’s and slam on their brakes for jay-walkers.
We have no idea what a BART conductor is doing or dealing with, the train just moves and stops. If management tells us it can all be done automatically by a computer program, we think maybe it can. We have no view of the conductor separated from the riders in his caged booth at the front of the train. Riders have even less knowledge of what mechanics, electrical techs, car cleaners or other workers do to keep the trains moving. These workers often labor in the middle of the night on the train tracks or in rail yards closed to the public. We have no idea how dirty, hard and dangerous their jobs are. We have no idea about the skills, training or education these workers have obtained through years both from BART and often before at technical colleges and other trade apprenticeships, before they crossed over to their BART jobs. Ironically an example of job safety reared its head when two strike breakers were killed during the strike while a train was on auto-pilot, exactly what management had wanted to do on a more routine basis in their proposed work rule changes.
“SEIU 1021 was aware of this history and public perception yet did not do the public education they needed to make their working conditions share common ground with the riding publics commuting conditions. This education should have commenced one full year before the start of bargaining. Better yet it should be done as a component of organizing their membership internally in a permanent program.”
The only contact the public has with a worker is with some of the BART station agents and this often is a negative experience because they seem to be the frontline bearer of bad news without any ability to fix problems. The toilet, escalator, elevator, change machine, ticket machine is out of order again; “sorry go to the other ones on the other side of the station”, seems to be their main message to most riders. They cannot dispense tickets, collect fares or make change yet are enforcers against gate jumpers, homeless squatters or just drunken sports fans who often take out any inconvenience on this sole BART employee they can see. Sadly, the second biggest safety issue on the table this year, besides the maintenance workers dealing with walking on the train tracks and dealing with the high voltage lethal third rail, is the lone BART station agent who has increasingly been assaulted by members of the riding public, who experience real or perceived slights from a transit system that over charges and under-serves them.
SEIU 1021 was aware of this history and public perception yet did not do the public education they needed to make their working conditions share common ground with the riding publics commuting conditions. This education should have commenced one full year before the start of bargaining. Better yet it should be done as a component of organizing their membership internally in a permanent program. Compare this with the California Nurses Association’s approach. CNA has been able to garner the most support in their campaigns when they have made the working conditions of registered nurses the quality care conditions of the patients left in their charge. The slogan “RN’s are patient advocates” was not an accidental slogan. They sent their member nurses out to talk at senior centers, community groups and anyone else that would listen about how hospital administrators cutting corners is not just about the nurses losing pay or working harder but forcing them to make mistakes, which they were unwilling to carry out, causing injury or death to their patients. CNA has worked on this for years and not just during contract bargaining and a large section of the public now believe this. In many polls on public perception of public workers registered nurses consistently ranked highest as most well liked and trusted. The only group with a higher ranking is firefighters.
Can we not imagine how different things may have played out in the media if BART employees were looked upon by the riding public as mass transit advocates? As advocates who wanted to build an efficient, safe, affordable, public alternative system of commuting to the grid-lock of private automobiles, and the privilege of the private Google buses that the 99% has no ability to ride on. Ironically this mantle is currently held by the President of the BART board of directors; Tom Radulovich, who took a hard line against the workers’ demands through much of the negotiations. He is the resident mass transit advocate and environmentalist. He has held this position for many years not only because he does believe in mass transit as an environmental option, but because the unions have conceded this mantle to him by not speaking out and claiming it for themselves. In another twist of irony the only person quoted against the new policy of allowing bicycles on BART trains at all hours was Antoinette Bryant, president of ATU 1555, representing the train conductors. She was cast as the dissenting voice against all the environmentalist and public transit advocates at the end of the strike.
In sum, one of the problems with ATU and SEIU’s public campaign was that they seemed not to have a vision of how to improve public transit or that they even cared about it. That how the BART system works was part of union’s vision too. We do not want to imply that health care workers or teachers have always paid attention to the concerns of those we serve, but we are getting better and our thoughts on how to make the systems we work under and the same system that serves the public has to be part of our discussion with the membership. Our contract demands including our working conditions must be related to what the public gets from us. A teacher’s working conditions are a student’s learning conditions is one of our union slogans, comparable to the one for the nurse’s mentioned.
Where was the media strategy?
More important, we need to have enough media savvy to bring our ideas to the public and the best people to do this is our working members. All during the strike the unions seemed not to have any communication strategy and the spokespeople who were paraded before the media seemed unprepared. Often the best quotes came from workers interviewed extemporaneously. There was no visible, planned, regular alternative outreach done directly to riders or what could have been a wider base of community support. Under this condition, the mainstream media’s bias was amplified.
Management became the spokespeople for the pain and suffering of the riding public during the strike. Many Democratic Party politicians and the mainstream media jumped on this bandwagon highlighting the inconvenience of the strike, overwhelmingly placing blame on the unions, subverting the recalcitrance of management which gave both ATU and SEIU no other option, forcing them to strike. SEIU did not do much educational outreach to their poorer union cousins in the private sector, who were often also part of their ridership. This was particularly disappointing because SEIU has a long history of good coalition work with community groups and collaboration with other unions and they could have easily done this, months in advance of the strike. With the funds they paid Mosher and Mooney they could have put tens of organizers and members on the ground to carry it out. Instead they went through the normal channels of strike support, from the Central Labor Councils and the California Labor Federation. These bodies are detached from working rank and file members, and sound bites from their leaders can’t be the only source of communication about a labor struggle, where direct sacrifice is required, in the cause of solidarity. In a last minute effort when the strike was already in full swing, some members of SEIU set up meetings with community groups through Jobs with Justice to discuss the issues of the strike with community members. This was a noble effort but too little, too late. If this outreach started earlier it would have spread beyond the usual suspects.
What Next?
The strike is now over and there’s a contract in place for a few years and it seems to be a fair contract, but came at a heavy cost; two dead workers and an unpopular strike. The worse thing the unions could do is to be lulled into inaction until the next contract. The war against public transit workers is still on. Management has already hinted about a fare increase and guess who the media and politicians will blame? Should we let the riders believe that a large fare increase, with no increase in service, is solely due to the SEIU/ATU getting a mildly decent contract? Politicians, with the backing of business and media are again clamoring for the prohibition of transit strikes, with no mention of binding mediation requirements to give the unions some impartiality, in top down changes. We hope that SEIU and ATU realizes that the war is not over and start retooling to deal with these attacks and mobilize all their public sector workers on constant alert. The attack to dismantle public sector services, including mass transit, has just started.
Next: A Tigers and A’s Toga Party?
By Hardy Green
Is there an irony that baseball teams representing Detroit and Oakland—both cities poster children for economic decline—have played two decisive games in Oakland’s “Coliseum,” a name evocative of the grandeur that was the Roman Empire? Perhaps that’s not as strange as it at first seems.
The Roman Coliseum was completed in A.D. 80 by Emperor Titus, on the site once home to the palace of Emperor Nero (he of the fiddle-playing while Rome burned). Nero’s legacy was, as you might imagine, a past that stadium-planner Emperor Vespasian (Titus’ father) wanted to flush down the memory hole. So he arranged for the building of an edifice even more imposing than Nero’s palace. In the Coliseum, some 55,000 spectators might witness humans fighting one another, mock sea battles, or animal hunts. In the inaugural games, over 9,000 wild animals were slain.
The humans involved—both gladiators and many of the spectators—might well identify with today’s citizens of Detroit and Oakland. After all, these were Rome’s underprivileged: slaves and prisoners of war filled the gladiatorial ranks, while plebeians were encouraged to spectate lest they decide that time might be better spent in rebelling against Rome’s 1%.
Oakland’s O.co Coliseum (the name is a trademark of retailer Overstock.com) is home to both the Oakland Raiders football team and the Oakland Athletics baseball club. The field and stands are regularly reconfigured to suit the type of event scheduled—meaning that it can hold some 35,000 baseball fans and 53,000 football watchers. Completed in 1966, the Coliseum is one of the older American stadiums. And its location would not be likely to attract many Roman Emperors—the O.co Coliseum stands alongside the noisy and truck-laden Nimitz Freeway. Although the Coliseum has enjoyed many successes, including three World Series victories for the A’s and memorable concerts by the likes of Marvin Gaye and Led Zeppelin, it fell into disrepair quickly after its construction, earning it the unflattering nickname of the Oakland Mausoleum. Today, in the words of one local columnist, the O.co Coliseum is “a concrete husk with few amenities and zero charm, a place most famous this year for the overflowing of its dugout toilets.”
The players on all the sports teams involved are the usual collection of healthy, young multimillionaires. But just who are the fans? Lots are ordinary folks, but among the followers of the bad-boy Oakland Raiders are gangsta wannabes who like to sport the club’s Long-John-Silver-in-a-football-helmet coat of arms. Rebels without a cause might gravitate to both the Raiders and the A’s owing to the rambunctiousness of former owners Al Davis and Charlie Finley, respectively. Davis repeatedly sued the National Football League; Finley wanted to use orange baseballs and once hired future rapper M.C. Hammer to be his club’s executive vice president. The A’s also enjoy a certain amount of geek-appeal, a residual effect of their early-2000s association with smarter-than-the-average-statistician “sabermetrics” expert Billy Beane, celebrated for his ability to recruit under appreciated ballplayers.
Detroit’s fans tend to be a more reserved lot. When Boston’s mayor said he’d like to visit Detroit in order to “blow the place up,” most Detroiters seemed to take the remark in stride. “Well, we do need a fresh start,” one Tigers fan remarked.
Meanwhile, the cities themselves continue to rot. In Oakland, the unemployment rate this year has hovered near 12%, twice that of San Francisco. Your chances of experiencing violent crime in Oakland are double that of New York City. Detroit, of course, famously declared bankruptcy in mid-July. That city has come to epitomize urban blight: Just take a look at such recent documentaries as Detropia or the Motown scenes in Searching for Sugarman. One of the brightest ideas there seems to involve turning blighted urban spaces back into farmland.
Altogether, it’s enough to make one wonder just what Nero might say. (We’re talking about a man who had his mother executed and who burned Christians in his garden as a source of light.) Maybe—two thumbs up?
Retirement
By Gene Bruskin
Retirement
Is it in fact a change of tires?
Front and rear
Replacing the balding spots
With new tread
Pumping in fresh air
To get a better grip on the road ahead
Getting ready for some bumps
And preparing to gently apply the brakes?
Or, more bluntly
Retire
As in re-tired
Tired again
More tired
Or just plain tired
The gentle slowing down
Of mind and body
And mission
Looking back not forward
To the good old days
Loosening the thread
Reflecting on what was
And could have been
Breathing deeply and channeling sadness
Resting the body
Peeking gradually into the darkness?
Or perhaps a more dialectical view
A life lived
A new one emerging
The end approaching
As it always has
With no date certain
No known final curtain.
Here the bell tolls
But the phone doesn’t ring incessantly
The emails don’t intrude obsessively
The mind sheds the many tasks
For the few
The daily churn of meetings
And greetings
Constant revisions and decisions
The swirl of people
Good, bad and ugly
All this is let go
Passed on
Left behind
But then, can one imagine
A new roaring lion emerging
Unleashing a passion of righteous fury
A project so intense
It absorbs the quite enormous energies
Of one whose tires have bumped up against
Many curbs
Testing many proverbs
In unfamiliar territory
What if one gigantic session on life
Broke through the sadness and frustration
And new vistas were revealed
Magic with electricity and zest
With all the pizzazz
Of Jazz that rhymed
And raged
And the body and mind and spirit
Wheeled off into the sunrise
What about that?
Gene Bruskin
August 7, 2011
Raising Expectations
By Peter Olney
The result is many unions today are operating as ghost ships…
In the face of the kind of anti-union terrorism practiced by corporate America, there is no substitute for face-to-face peer reinforcement organizing
Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell) My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement
By Jane McAlevey with Bob Ostertag Verso Books 2012
Raising Expectations has been a controversial book on the labor left. Much of that criticism flows from the fact that this book covers some of the controversial history of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
SEIU positioned itself as one of America’s most dynamic unions in the late 1980’s by being willing to throw massive resources into large scale organizing campaigns, most notably the Justice for Janitors initiative, which successfully reorganized and organized a largely Latino immigrant janitorial workforce in many of the country’s largest commercial office building markets.
A disclosure note; I had the privilege of working on this campaign in the early nineties in Los Angeles where I was able to see the campaign’s strengths and weaknesses, that have since come home to roost. SEIU has been severely weakened by its overreaching arrogance in trusteeing its large California statewide health care Local 250 in 2009. Since then, Andy Stern, the mercurial former SEIU President, has left the union for the Board of Directors of a big Pharma company, and his hand-picked leader of the California home care workers union, Tyrone Freeman, is heading to prison after being convicted of massive corruption.
McAlevey is unsparing in her criticism of various factions in SEIU’s internal wars. It would take a whole issue of Social Policy, and a far more rigorous historian than I, to unravel all the SEIU history and subplots described in Raising Expectations. In this review, I will focus on two important contributions in McAlevey’s autobiographical work: her account of contemporary union organizing challenges and her emphasis on “whole worker organizing,” an approach I agree is necessary to help move the US labor movement out of its doldrums.
Organizing in Right to Work Nevada
A fitting moment for the publication of McAlevey’s bold recounting of her 10 years of hell raising on various US labor fronts was the Michigan legislature’s decision late in 2012 to make the birthplace of the United Auto Workers a “right to work” state. “Right to work” means that membership in the union can no longer be a condition of employment. Now there are 24 so-called “right to work” states in the USA. “Right to work” severely weakens unions, in part because unions have stopped talking and relating to their members on a daily basis. The anti-union princes of darkness have found a point of vulnerability in labor: our reliance on compulsory membership and dues check off. In non “right-to-work” states, membership and monthly dues payments may be a compulsory condition of employment. A union leader need not even talk to members to sustain the resources they provide. The result is many unions today are operating as ghost ships, financed with automatic dues payments but functioning with little connection and involvement from their membership. This leaves unions incredibly vulnerable; they’re unable to motivate members to organize nearby non-union workers; members are susceptible to reactionary political appeals, including decertification and “right-to-work” appeals from employer fronts.
The good news, as illustrated by McAlevey and others, is that some very strong union locals do get built in US “right to work” states because member participation is necessary to sustain the operation of the local. Members can’t be ignored, because without their dues the rent won’t be paid along with salaries of the union local’s leaders. The biggest chunk of McAlevey’s story is devoted to her work revitalizing the once dormant Service Employees International Union Local 1107 in “right to work” Nevada. Ten of the twelve chapters in her book tell the story of public and private sector organizing among health care workers in Clark County. These chapters are rich in detail and very evocative for any organizer who has experienced the highs and lows that McAlevey describes. She makes excellent observations on how to identify and develop leaders in the work force, how to move a large group of workers to action by escalating tactics that build their confidence, and how to tear down the invincibility of the boss. All this organizing, whether private sector hospital drives or contract campaigns in the public sector, shares the commonality of the need to engage with the existing members and ensure that they are signed on for the mission at hand. This involves the fundamentals of relational organizing; one on ones and deep worker contact. “Face book” and “open source organizing,” being recently touted as a new and more modern way to organize workers at WalMart, just don’t compare. In the face of the kind of anti-union terrorism practiced by corporate America, there is no substitute for face-to-face peer reinforcement organizing. In the four-year period that McAlevey describes, Local 1107 was able to achieve a membership level of over 70% in a right to work state. That high percentage of voluntary membership is a tribute to the intensive one on one work of McAlevey and her organizers.
“Whole Worker” Organizing
In describing a multi union AFL-CIO campaign to organize un-organized workers in Stamford, Connecticut, McAlevey points out “We found that it was actually important to replace community/labor with workplace/non-workplace in the everyday speech of our organizers and to talk about organizing whole workers.” What McAlevey highlights here is that those labor unions that are really in tune with the needs of their base can be powerful community organizations. They have softball leagues, turkey giveaways in the community, and countless other activities that stretch far beyond bargaining labor contracts. Many labor unions are more community rooted than many self described “community organizations” which are often funded almost entirely by foundations financed by liberal capitalists. But McAlevey went a step further and challenged the unions who were part of the AFL-CIO’s Stamford Organizing Project to engage in non-workplace struggles; what she calls “whole worker” struggles. She insisted that the Stamford Project make its first organizing drive a battle to save a public housing project inhabited by many members of the Service Employees local a battle they later won. It was a brilliant move that laid the basis for later victories in Stamford area workplaces. The unions won the confidence of workers by fighting for their immediate needs for affordable housing. With that victory and those lessons learned, facing employers became a lot easier.
The Long Haul
McAlevey’s book chronicles ten very rich years of hell raising, but she herself has moved on. She describes her own burnout and that of her fellow organizers, all brilliant young people who made contributions, but then moved on to other venues and in many cases other careers. These organizers are paid by the treasuries of national unions based in Washington, DC and have no real ongoing organic connection to the workers they are organizing.
Many other critics, including McAlevey, have cited this approach as a serious weakness that plagues modern union organizing, because young, outside organizers with little or no work experience have so little credibility with workers. This weakness is another symptom of the disconnected and disengaged membership in many unions that frequently hire successive waves of recent college graduates to work as organizers or business agents instead of developing leadership from among the union’s own ranks.
In her Epilogue, McAlevey notes that the two major social movements of the twentieth century, civil rights and labor, both got important resources from institutions that contributed leadership over the long haul; the Black church and the Communist Party respectively. “In both movements (Civil rights and labor) there were divisions within the institutional leadership over how much deep organizing to tolerate, but enough political space was created for a long enough period of time that the victories won are either still intact today or stood many decades before finally being torn down.” It took Harry Bridges and his band of left-wing agitators 20 years to build enough strength on the Pacific waterfront to ignite the general maritime strike in 1934 that led to a West Coast dockworkers union that is today’s ILWU. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union survives and prospers to this day because of the legacy of the Communist and labor left that McAlevey points to. Permanent revitalization of working class movements will require a similar long term and organic commitment of people and modern day institutions that have the roots and organic ties that McAlevey references in the Epilogue.
This last point raises an internal conflict within McAlevey’s account. Union organizing today is an extremely frustrating and difficult process, one that requires an ongoing commitment with plenty of reflection and critical thinking. Most successful organizers have invested decades of work to hone their craft and learn many painful lessons. But McAlevey has left union organizing work behind in favor of an academic endeavor. Since I did the same thing at one point, I can appreciate her decision, but I also hope she will consider resuming her organizing work at some point, because the long-term commitment is so essential.
“Raising Expectations” presents a vivid picture of life in the labor trenches. For those who have shared that experience it is a worthy read that will resonate on many levels. And for the uninitiated, it paints a graphic and compelling picture of the challenges facing U.S. organizers in the 21st century.
Peter Olney
Privilege
By Ivette Morales
I didn’t cry.
I kept it together,
They talked about class/social status,
I bit my tongue.
They talked about their privileges,
Their disadvantages,
It made me want to scream.
I kept my mouth shut.
It’s not our fault,
We are dealt the hand that Life gave us,
And with that we do what we can.
I don’t want to hear your pity,
Your guilt or your sorrow.
I don’t want to feel your pain.
I get sick just by listening to their guilt.
Their guilt means nothing to me,
They still have every advantage that I don’t.
They get to go back to their precious lives,
While I go back to struggling for money for mine
All they have to do is look in their bank account, and it’s there
While I stay up all night trying to figure out how my family is going to get through the week.
They say they understand their privilege,
But the truth is that they don’t.
They don’t understand the power that money has over someone,
They don’t understand what money means.
Money is security, a safe place to sleep,
It’s food on the table, a stable home,
A warm bed,
It’s the toys we never had as children,
The nice house we never got to live in,
It’s our own bed’s that we didn’t get to have.
Money is opportunity,
The chance to travel,
to see the world that we so desperately yearn for.
It’s seeing our parents happy,
Instead of crying,
stressful,
And depressed.
Money is education,
An education that we all deserve to have
But that we so rarely receive.
They complain that they have so much, and they wish they could share it.
I’m tired of listening to their complaints,
I don’t want to hear them talk,
I want to see their actions,
I want to see things done.
Django: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
By Stewart Acuff
“Django Unchained” shows all the sadism and inhumanity and evil and barbarism of what some once called the peculiar institution of American slavery. “Django Unchained” repeats what others have said about the existence of slaves,”She is my property and I can do as I please with her. ”
The movie also shows the absurdity and ridiculousness and cruel silliness and vapid nature of white, wealthy slavery culture.
Some disclaimers are in order. I am a southerner. Like many southerners my forefathers and foremothers include the Scots-Irish, Chickasaw and Cherokee Native People, and African-Americans. I am fortunate and grateful that the family tree split relatively recently within the memory of the living. I am a movie philistine and as an art form I have no business reviewing any movie. And, generally, I hate Quentin Tarantino’s work. I hate his typical gratuitous violence and seeming love of gore. I hate his total rejection of any Hollywood responsibility for the violence in our society.
But in this case, Tarantino’s faults serve him, the movie, and the movie-goer well. Slavery was every bit as horrible and more so than this movie shows. To Tarantino’s credit, he tries in one movie to demonstrate in every way possible the total lack of humanity in slavery–from gang rape of “comfort women” to allowing dogs to rip a runaway to death, to forcing men to fight one another to death, to the intentional splitting of slave families, to the forced hatred of one’s race.
This last consequence of slavery may be its most enduring. Some of the most racist among us are the closest to the race they denigrate. I loved my mother. Her eyes reflected part of a heritage from Sierra Leone. But when she told me Big Mama wouldn’t let her own brother dismount his horse in her yard and enter her house because he was too dark and Big Mama was passing for white , my mother said one side of our people were Black Indians, just very dark Indians. We all know Strom Thurmond raped or had sex with his family’s Black housekeepers.
Almost as importantly, “Django Unchained” shows the ignorance and stupidity of white slave culture from Leonardo DiCaprio’s character of an incredibly sadistic plantation owner who likes to put on the airs of a Parisian gentleman and demands to be addressed as Monsieur but who speaks no French to the overseers whose sport and entertainment is sadism.
I will leave it to others to talk about the things reviewers are supposed to comment on. What is important here is the reflection of our nation’s past. As great Mississippi novelist William Faulkner said, “The past isn’t over. It isn’t even really past. ”
I don’t know if or when America will ever get beyond its slavery past and the racism that served as its foundation. Clearly the modern Republican Party gained its base in the South with year after year and election after election of blatant and sometimes coded racism. Huge elements of our nation’s entertainment and “news” culture still rely on racism to attract viewers and listeners–Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and many others.
Progress is possible and we are making progress, but progress requires constant vigilance not only of our culture but of our own hearts.
We owe a great debt of gratitude to Tarantino for making this gruesome movie and telling the truth.
I Wish I Was in New OrleansKen Colyer’s Journey to the Birthplace of Jazz
By Martin Colyer
In 1952 Ken Colyer was a young would-be jazz trumpeter. His drive and determination to become a better musician led him to travel from London to the fountainhead of the style of jazz that he loved—New Orleans. He had no idea of how to make it happen or what he’d find when he got there, but his hunger outweighed the obstacles that stood in his path, and in October of that year he arrived there. Ken’s remarkably eloquent letters from New Orleans give a vivid impression of how things were in the early fifties before integration was permitted. It was a revelation for the young visiting white Englishman, made extraordinary by the affection he was shown by members of the black community. This momentous pilgrimage became the catalyst for the birth of skiffle in Britain, giving the world Lonnie Donegan, and kickstarting a phenomenon which led to thousands of youngsters (amongst them Lennon and McCartney, Jimmy Page and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards) picking up guitars, making tea-chest basses and forming groups. But before getting to Louisiana, a little background from Ken’s older brother, Bill…
Left to right: Ken and Bill Colyer
Bill Colyer: The same way that George Lewis and the New Orleans kids who grew up with those sounds from the cradle—Ken’s was the same sort of background; he’d got sounds in his head…
Bill Colyer was an obsessed jazz fan, sending off for records from the USA and hunting down jazz 78s, which in the late thirties were difficult to find. He joined the army in the early forties. When Bill was off fighting (at D-Day, and then on through France and Germany) his sister had written, telling him that his brothers were playing his records.
Bill Colyer: I get home with all this gear—your kitbag (there’s your whole life in your kitbag) and your rifle and your five rounds of ammo—and I chastised Bob [the middle brother] and then I was going to belt Ken, and all of a sudden I thought, “Hold on.” I said, “What records did you play?” I was knocked out. He’d done the Sleepy John Estes; he got into the blues records. The names, they’re all legendary: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Red Nelson, Champion Jack Dupree and many more. Well, it turned out that Ken had mainly played all my blues 78s, the Brunswicks and the Vocalions. What would he have been then? Twelve years old and he’s already steeped in this music. He had heard them played by me—that’s probably why he picked them out—but for the twelve weeks I was away, the ones he’d been playing were the blues records. What a grounding he was getting.
Post-War, Bill and Ken both joined the Merchant Navy, and travelled widely.
Bill Colyer: I’d been playing with Ken all that time in the Merch. Seven days a week when he came off duty, he went down to his cabin and practiced, played his horn. The chippie [carpenter] would be on a guitar they bought in Canada, the baker would hold his guitar and pluck the bass string and I would be on wire brushes on a stainless steel kettle and a suitcase.
On one trip, Ken landed in New York and sought out a jazz club, where he was told: “If you stick around ’til about one-thirty, Oscar Peterson usually looks in after he has finished his hotel job.”
Ken Colyer: I had never heard of Oscar Peterson, and I doubt if anyone else had in England at that time, as he was a Montreal boy and about the same age as myself, around nineteen. I was sitting sipping my beer when a man came in wearing an expensive-looking gabardine. The barman knew him and they started talking. The man did most of the talking. From the gist of the conversation it appeared that a gang were after his blood. “I’ve been to the police for protection but they won’t. So I’ve brought my own protection.” With this he reached inside his coat and produced a .45 automatic. The bartender quietly said, “Now put that away and calm down. They are not going to come for you here.” The man said something else and left. Time went by and they opened up upstairs. I went up and sat at a table and ordered another beer. Girls began turning up—they were dancers in the floor show. A slim, dapper, well-dressed Negro arrived. “Snookums!” they all cried. He was the star singer of the show. He made a dramatic entrance with the lights dimmed down and a white spotlight. It was very effective. He did some patter then went into Shine. He said he was now going to do a number that had made him famous sometime in earlier years: Brown Boy, Chocolate Boy. He was very good and got a big hand.
As I was having a drink I noticed that there was a hush in the place. A whisper rustled round the room: “Oscar’s here.” I looked around and then saw this giant of a Negro walking toward the bandstand. They all greeted him warmly. The pianist immediately left the piano and the front line got off the stand. Oscar sat down at the piano, looked over at the drummer and Cheekum. Then the place started to rock. He was powerful and used both hands, all ten fingers. The rhythm section was swinging superbly. As he warmed up, his massive frame leant further over the keyboard. The atmosphere was electric. “You see them fellows standing behind him?” someone said. “They’re all pianists trying to watch his hands.” I had never heard piano playing like it and the place was in an uproar after each number.
Bill Colyer: Ken brought a 78 back of Oscar doing two Albert Ammons numbers. Of course, he started as a boogie man, a real left hand. Ken was on leave and he and I walked round Charing Cross Road (London), where there was a load of music shops, to take this record round and rave about it, but none of them were interested. That really hurt me and Ken because by then we were deep jazzers and we’d heard this piano. We had some good piano players here, but nothing of that stature. So there’s Ken, only into his teen-age, hearing all this, and he knew all the names because I would tell him personnels. I was a bible. I knew every personnel; I was a walking mine of information; that’s why I ended up in that first jazz store.
Ken’s trumpet playing was improving and he joined The Christie Brothers Stompers, a band that, in Ian Christie’s words played “all the good places. Sunday nights in various towns where they had cinemas—films during the week, then they’d have a concert on Sunday. We were very big in Liverpool. We played the Cavern before those guys with guitars came in. Ken played the music that we thought was New Orleans jazz better than anyone we could speak of—that kind of style. He played like, let’s say, Mutt Carey. He could play all that lovely shakey stuff. Exciting, kind of vibrant.” But Ken was getting dissatisfied. One of the band, Ben Marshall, said that “Ken felt he had taken a wrong turning down the road to the ideal band that he had in his head” and, some three months after joining, Ken said he was leaving to rejoin the Merchant Navy in the hope of getting to New Orleans.
Ken Colyer: The brief brilliance of the Stompers was short-lived. I was down in the dumps, Everything’s Wrong, Ain’t Nothing Right (Lil Armstrong). We had been getting the American Music’s recorded by that marvellous man William Russell—Bunk Johnson is the greatest teacher I have ever had. Then I thought: These men were still playing in New Orleans—they weren’t that old—they must still be playing, so the logical thing was to get there while they were still playing.
I checked into the visa business. The problems were insurmountable. Unless you were a man of means, you had no chance. The only way I could think of at the time was to rejoin the Merchant Navy and somehow or other find a boat that took me to New Orleans. The big snag was very few British boats went to the Gulf ports. They were looking for crew for the Empire Patrai which was sailing out of Mobile, Alabama—that’s near enough, this is as near as I’m going to get. I made my decision.
I went to the Victoria Docks to see about getting signed back on the pool. The Seamen’s Union reared its ugly head. I went to the union office. I tried to argue that I had been a member of the NUR and the MU for some time, but with the “brotherly love” that these people have for the workers they said I would have to pay the back dues from the time I had left the Merch up to the present. Bill helped me out and I paid up and got reinstated.
Ken Colyer, in the “merch”
After a while I thankfully got a standby job on the Port Lyttelton. The guys gave me a farewell session at Cranford and I took the train to Newcastle, getting aboard the ship in the early hours of the following morning. The Lyttelton was to me a brand-new ship. She was a motor ship built in 1947 and very civilised compared with some of the tubs I had sailed on.
This was the start of a succession of ships that would take Ken to the Empire Patrai in Mobile.
Ken Colyer: The weather was fine and we sailed back to Mobile for another cargo. I had some New Orleans phone numbers… Somebody had discovered a phone book in the Westminster Public Library [in London], and had made a note of all the men he knew. Among them was Doctor Edmond Souchon’s. I thought it worth a try and [when we docked in Mobile] phoned him from the Seamen’s Club. He was
Ken Colyer’s notebook
completely bewildered as I tried to explain to him who I was, and how I came to be in Mobile. Eventually he told me there was to be a session at the International House, Gravier Street, if I could make it. Mobile is about 160 miles from New Orleans and I didn’t know how long it would take to get there. When we finished work I got ready as quickly as I could… then went to the Greyhound Bus Station.
It took longer than I expected to get there, and part of the session was over when I got to the International House. Doc was a nice fellow with a bluff, hearty manner. He had played guitar with the Johnny Wiggs band. Paul Barbarin’s band was there with Kid Howard and Albert Burbank. Richard “Abba Labba” Maclean on bass was the most powerful man I had ever heard, playing with a big tone and plenty of drive. I was in a daze. I had finally made it. It had been a long haul but I was finally there talking and listening to the men.
Ken Colyer letter to Bill Colyer, Friday, 10 October 1952, 1.50 pm: Am taking a flying visit to New Orleans, will get hell for it, as the boat’s due to leave at any time—but I guess it’s worth it. Just talked to Dr. Souchon on the phone again. I am going to meet at Journalists’ reception at International House, Gravier Street. George Lewis Band will be there, and another
New Orleans: Ken sits in with the George Lewis band, colour bar not withstanding.
New Orleans: Newspaper with news of Ken Colyer’s arrest and jailing.
group. Will give you results of trip as soon as I can… Doc Souchon was irascible but lovable. He blew hot, he blew cold. He was an eminent figure in New Orleans and a practising surgeon. He showed me great kindness at times. He took me round the old historic places. The ruins of Spanish Fort, where Armand Piron used to play. Bucktown, which he assured me was really wild in the early days, and several other places of interest. Where Mahogany Hall had stood. Doc remembered his young days well. He said he was a heller until he knuckled down and studied medicine. He remembered King Oliver in New Orleans and also heard him in Chicago. He maintained that the band was never as good in Chicago as it was in New Orleans. He saw Tom Brown’s Band off on a northern trip before the O.D.J.B. went north. He remembered booking Jelly Roll Morton’s band for his college dances. He said they had to treat Mr. Morton with respect, even then. Jelly would take no truck from anyone.
Lizzie Miles, New Orleans 1958. “Best wishtes to Ken Colyer who plays my kind of music”
In London. Left to right: Ken Colyer; Alex Korner; Lonnie Donegan; Bill Colyer (on washboard); and Chris Barber on bass.
Thanks to Ken’s widow Delphine, Chris Stotesbury, Kay and Tony Leppard of the Ken Colyer Trust, Mike Pointon and Ray Smith.
Useful Links:
Ken Colyer: here, here and here
The book “Goin’ Home: The Uncompromising Life and Music of Ken Colyer” can be ordered from you local bookstore.
Marikana, South Africa
By John Womack
A brief note on the following post: In October of last year Peter Hall wrote a piece for us on Marikana and what it might mean for South Africa. HIs piece has been receiving a number of comments. Then about two weeks ago John Womack sent us his thoughts and while I posted them as a comment, we at the Stansbury Forum felt his response really warranted a post of his own and it follows below.
Hall’s thoughtful, informed reflections on the Marikana massacre last August make several enlightening points that we who are not South Africans (or South Africanists), but who are for the governing “tripartite alliance” (the ANC, COSATU, and the SACP), need to study to understand better how to support it. Of his points I think the two most important for us at the start are (a) that the ANC tends not to the left, but to “the centre” of South Africa’s “political spectrum,” and (b) that the mightiest economic forces in the country, great foreign mining companies, have created a hellish labor market, with hellish social consequences, on which see, e.g., http://www.bench-marks.org.za/research/rustenburg_review_policy_gap_final_aug_2012.pdf. It was from these conditions, as Hall writes, that the raw conflict among workers in the platinum minefields broke into the slaughter at Marikana.
I have to observe that his precis of the article he cites (above, Bezuidenhout, Chinguno, von Holdt) misses a significant turn in the article’s explanation of the conflicts among workers in platinum mining. The article, brief but highly interesting on industrial relations, the structure of work, and the technically strategic position of drill operators in platinum, makes clear that the conflicts among workers were not originally and have not been essentially between “rival” unions, the established National Union of Mineworkers (the biggest union in South Africa) and a new Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union. The conflicts have come rather from wildcat strikes, especially among migrant workers, over wage differentials and housing, and they began months before Marikana. The NUM, defending collective contracts, has mostly tried to stop them. The AMCU, essentially a corporate operation to break the NUM, has either instigated them or rushed into them to lead a charge against the NUM. There is now a rivalry, but it is between an established national industrial union (with many problems) and a capitalist movement to use justified labor grievances (which it has provoked) for its own subversive purposes.
This awful episode leaves much to study. More than any other event in South Africa since 1994, it has cast terrible, ever brighter light on the contradictions not only in the government that the ANC-COSATU-SACP alliance forms, but also between these organizations and within each of them. It is therefore now critical that we who from abroad support the alliance keep in mind certain points that South Africans (and South Africanists) may not make because they take them for granted.
Here I would make six points. Hall suggests a couple of them, but I want to give them a different twist. The others I do not see in his reflections, maybe because he takes them for granted, or maybe because he does not think they are right or worth making. Anyway, here they all six are, as briefly as I can make them, some obvious to South Africans (and South Africanists), but probably none I believe obvious to most US American readers, and hopefully all helpful to the tripartite cause:
1. The ANC, the COSATU, and the SACP, though in alliance, are very different organizations, with different origins, histories, forces, constitutions, membership, programs, directions, and trajectories. And none of them has ever been the kind of tight machine each has sometimes (for good or ill) pretended to be, or the dictatorship their enemies have usually represented them to be. This is most true of COSATU, since from the beginning of the mining industry in South Africa to date it has like a pack of bloodhounds sought migrant labor for its live productive force.
2. The “tripartite alliance” involves overlaps and cooperation among the organizations and among their members, and it constantly promotes “unity.” But it remains an alliance, really, despite the hopes and propaganda for “unity,” more in the nature of the deal among the UK, the USSR, and the USA during World War II, than a definite bloc, like the old Labour Party in the UK, or an indefinite bloc, like the present Democratic Party, NOW, AAJ, and AFL-CIO in the USA. It started and remains a combination of political organizations (only the SACP actually a political party) with different bases, in different positions, and after different goals, but each judging it in its interest to maintain as much cooperation as they can, because the various alternatives to the alliance would almost certainly be much worse for all three and for their country’s exploited people.
3. Hall seems to me too innocent in his statement of “hope for a democratic South Africa.” The tripartite alliance is explicitly for “the national democratic revolution” in South Africa, but this is impossible for US Americans to understand if they think they have the “democracy” that the ANC-COSATU-SACP is struggling for. Most US Americans for South African “democracy” are badly in need of a good South African education in the meaning of “democracy” there. US American culture fosters an Easter-Bunny, Carl-Sandburgian notion of “democracy,” of natural popular harmony, folkish anthems, “middle-class” dignity and contentment, happy Rousseauvian communities, equality of “opportunity,” individual and collective rights (no duties), freedom of “choice,” and all resolved in “free and fair elections.” I know not everybody here carries this confused notion. But from long, bitter experience I know it is the dream from which the great majority of US Americans come, which they find it hard to get over, when they awake to discussions of “democracy,” in the USA or elsewhere. Typically, a honest discussion between US American friends of a “democratic national revolution” elsewhere and the fighters for this revolution, in a country in Latin America, say, or in Africa, who do not imagine how shallow typical US American notions of “democracy” are, has been a dialogue of the deaf, or better said, a dialogue of the mutually uncomprehending. And over the last 15 years it has grown much worse, as Washington has adopted the vocabulary and some tactics of “democratic revolution,” for New York’s purposes. South Africans who want “the national democratic revolution” in South Africa have (among many other tasks) to teach their would-be friends in the USA to overcome US political ignorance, provincialism, delusion, and presumptions about “democracy”–and to recognize and discredit Washington’s “democratic revolutionary” operations. The core of the problem is the typical US American ignorance of what class, class in the socialist sense, means for democracy. This, I think, is the ignorance that in particular COSATU and the SACP should not try to use, but to overcome and dispel, insofar as they have any influence in the USA.
4. Most of the commentaries I have read (including Hall’s) on the Marikana massacre omit consideration of the forces most dangerous to the tripartite alliance and its three parts. These are the US government, the British government, and the Israeli government, a foreign tripartite alliance, serving great New York-London corporate interests. Since 1994, behind their expressions of friendly support, respectful questions, and democratic, humanitarian concern for South Africa’s “national democratic revolution,” whatever the honesty or sincerity of individuals inside or apart from these governments and cooperating private agencies, Washington, London, and Tel Aviv-Jerusalem have been waging a war of low-intensity (like that in Central America in the 1980s-90s) against the South African tripartite alliance and severally against the ANC, COSATU, and the SACP. These organizations have plenty of problems of their own making. But the foreign triple alliance through its operations in South Africa adds to their problems and aggravates them at every opportunity. And on this strength, that is, on the opportunities it gives to foreign business in South Africa, the mining companies can deliberately scheme to divide the ANC, subvert and destroy COSATU, and totally isolate and finally evaporate the SACP. (Consider their public promotion of the AMCU before the Marikana massacre, for examples: http://www.miningweekly.com/article/emerging-amcu-mine-union-favours-competitive-coexistence-joseph-mathunjwa-2012-06-06; http://www.miningweekly.com/article/new-amcu-mining-union-on-recruitment-drive-2012-06-07; http://www.miningweekly.com/article/joseph-mathunjwa-2012-08-03.) If it is impossible to understand the hellish conditions in which the South African poor try to get jobs, work, and survive, without taking into account the mining industry and its enforcement of migrant labor, it is impossible to understand the frequent, manifest, miserable difficulties of the ANC, COSATU, and the SACP, without taking into account the foreign triple alliance’s constant war on them.
5. To begin to understand the problems of South African tripartite alliance and of its three parts, especially the problems of COSATU and the SACP, we here have to recognize the tremendous, endlessly complicated difficulties of having the responsibilities of a national government professing leftist inclinations in the face of greater powers foreign and domestic, the difficulties of honestly (never mind dishonestly) trying to make changes leftward happen, but not being able to do it, the inability to force the changes on greater powers that do not want them. What do you do? Do you hold onto positions that it would be a plunge most probably into oblivion or martyrdom to abandon, and in those positions keep trying, despite all the frustrations and disappointments and factionalism and subversion, to stay true to some laborite or socialist goal? Or do you take your chances on unarmed protest against right-wing ANC elements, protected by state security? Or do you try armed revolution, against the foreign triple alliance and South African state security? Or do you just quit? I do not mean that to recognize these difficult questions is at once to understand them, much less to have an answer for them. I know they require terrible debate. I know too the debate could be eternal, so useless. But if there is any course worse than eternal debate, or making honest mistakes, it is ignorance of the difficulties, indifference to them, flippant disregard of them.
6. My last point is, in learning more about South Africa, its injustices, the structural reasons for the miseries of its working classes, and the struggles there for the exploited, we can learn more about the rest of the world, including the USA, so that we could better struggle for justice and against exploitation here, which would do much good for such struggles elsewhere.
“Just Cause”: Isn’t it time for all workers to have some job security?
By Rand Wilson
During World War Two, employers were prohibited from raising wages because of wartime Wage and Price controls. With labor in short supply, employers and union leaders sought ways around the government limits and agreed to new health insurance benefits as an alternative to increased compensation. Thus was born our odd system of employer-based health insurance.
That seemed like a good idea at the time because union leaders could achieve through collective bargaining what had been elusive through government reform: health security for their members.
Over the next thirty years or so, health insurance benefits expanded. As more and more workers were covered by private insurance plans provided through their employers, the urgency of winning broad political reforms diminished and labor backing to win universal coverage faded. Our failure to expand the health benefits achieved through collective bargaining to the entire working class eventually left union members in a vulnerable position. At a certain point, union health benefits for the relatively few union members were far more generous than what most workers had. Faced with out-of control health costs employers sought to make cuts and throughout the 90s and 2000s union members increasingly were not able to defend them.
The final result is the very mixed result of ObamaCare, a plan that is sadly not universal and now is actually being used by employers to attack so-called “Cadillac Plans.”
“The United States is alone among industrialized countries in allowing at-will employees to be terminated for arbitrary reasons.”
That lesson shouldn’t be lost as we face what I predict will be the next collective bargaining battleground: the job security provisions of union contracts, including the “just cause” clause.
Instead of waiting for such an attack, we should seize the opportunity to champion passage of “Just Cause” standards into state laws. It’s a labor law reform proposal that will appeal to all workers while putting employers on the defensive.
It’s long overdue. The United States is alone among industrialized countries in allowing at-will employees to be terminated for arbitrary reasons. Governments such as France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom require employers to have a “just cause” to dismiss non-probationary employees. Just cause appeals to basic fairness, just as due process does in court.
Just cause marks the dividing line between employees with job security and “at-will” employees. At-will employees have no job security: they can be fired for a mistake, an argument with a supervisor, a critical comment about the enterprise or management, taking a sick day, a complaint about working conditions or pay, or involvement in outside political campaigns* – all activities that just-cause covered workers can take part in without worry.
One state has passed a law. The Montana Wrongful Discharge from Employment Act was passed in 1987. Applicable to non-union non-probationary employees, it prohibits discharges without good cause, allows workers to sue for up to four years of back pay, and provides a method for workers to recover attorneys’ fees. Despite fear-mongering by opponents, the Big Sky state’s robust economic growth has not been affected. Statutes in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands also prohibit termination without “good cause.”
Winning “just cause” legislation would certainly not be easy. But building a movement to win it offers union leaders and activists an opportunity to champion an issue that would benefit all workers and also help union growth. Short of state or federal legislation, local unions, CLCs (Central Labor Councils) and workers’ centers could seek to enforce a just cause standard through workers’ rights boards and / or community pressure.
A “just cause” campaign would potentially engage working people at many different levels. One can imagine communities declaring certain areas, “Just Cause Zones” and fighting to enforce it as a community standard with employers. Other supporters could be involved using the proposed legislation as a “litmus test” for labor support in electoral campaigns. Still others could be involved in holding hearings on the importance of achieving a “Just Cause” standard and lobbying for passage with city councils and state legislatures.
If “just cause” campaigns succeed, workers will have more security to participate in union campaigns. Union leaders and organizers will be able to make the point that they are experts at enforcing just cause protections and can provide representation at hearings etc.
Even if campaigns for just cause do not succeed, millions of non-union workers will learn about the concept (especially if campaigns are based on ballot referendums) and the increased security it could bring to their lives. By popularizing the “Just Cause” concept, more workers may respond by thinking, “If we can’t get this important protection through the legislature, let’s get it by forming a union!”
Meanwhile, if employers do seek to roll back the just cause articles in our contracts, union members won’t be in the same position we were with the attacks on health care. Instead, we will have laid important groundwork to win broad public support and the employers’ attack can be parried, perhaps even used to strengthen the broad campaign.
Imagine the labor movement leading a campaign to win Just Cause protections for all workers. The sooner we get started the better!
Readers interested in learning more about the Just Cause standard should read Robert Schwartz‘s new book, “Just Cause: A union guide to winning discipline cases.” The book lays out seven tests that are the guiding principles for discipline and discharge in most union workplaces. With reform, those same standards could apply to everyone. More info got to Work Rights Press
*As reported in Think Progess. Or this Examiner.com piece titled “Report: Multiple CEOs and businesses threaten workers over Obama’s re-election“.