Organizing the Ignored, Forgotten, and Suppressed
By Kurt Stand
A Poor People’s Movement Action and Agenda
Inspired by a call to build a movement for a “resurrection of justice, love, truth,” as opposed to an “insurrection of injustice, lies, and hate,” a few thousand people assembled in Washington, DC, for the Poor People’s Campaign Assembly on Saturday, June 24. DSA members from Prince George’s County in Maryland were there, but it was clear that for many in this racially, socially, and age-diverse group, going to public protests was not a common occurrence.
Whether they had been mobilized by their church or union, whether they simply heeded the call and showed up on their own, they were serious about being there. As I wandered through the crowd toward the end of the rally, I ran into a group of hospital workers excited to be there, some coal miners who had come up from West Virginia just to be present, and many who sat on the ground listening (really listening) to the talks and nodding as they might in church.
As at other Poor People’s Campaign gatherings, the political message was not directed at institutions or organizations but at those who find themselves trapped in poverty, whose everyday existence is defined by the need to tread water to avoid drowning. And the message delivered was clear: those living in poverty are the “swing vote,” the ones who in their numbers and their moral strength can ensure the defeat of Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans in the upcoming elections.
As PPC Campaign co-chairs Bishop William Barber II and Rev. Liz Theoharis expressed in their opening remarks, the choice is not about personalities, as the media might have us believe. It is about focusing on those issues the media, and most politicians, ignore: the realities of the grinding poverty that is the fourth leading cause of death in society.
Their opening addresses also drove home the point that change comes from the bottom up, and rather than be distracted by whether people are liberal or conservative, left or right, people have to focus on the needs of those in our society who endure housing insecurity, food insecurity, and job insecurity. Politicians must address the needs of those who live paycheck to paycheck. We cannot accept a politics that “accepts” homelessness, hunger, and violence as immutable realities.
Values
A resurrection is a rebirth, building “from the ashes of the old,” if you will. And so the assembly called for “Moral Revival,” directly challenging Christian nationalism. Repairers of the Breach, the organization Barber founded and leads, stands for centering the language of morality by building a movement united across lines of race, class, gender identity, sexuality, ethnicity, and faith in opposition to those who claim that the preeminent moral issues of our day are prayer in public schools, abortion, and property rights.
The program of the assembly reflected those values. Big-name speakers were not on the program, the aim of which was to give voice to the voiceless. The speeches were divided into three cohorts: church leaders, unions, and impacted individuals. Each speaker had one-and-a half minutes, and the timing was strict; music would start playing the moment they reached the 90-second mark. This allowed many voices to be heard and forced speakers to come to the point quickly.
In their own ways, each faith leader, regardless of affiliation, spoke to a sense of oneness: that we are each other’s keepers. This stands in opposition to any institutional religion corrupted by nationalism, racism, the idea that some countries or people are superior to others, and in opposition to church doctrines that proclaim that women should be subservient to men.
By contrast, the language of universality used by the faith leaders was embodied in the political program of unity in support of social and economic justice, in support of peace and environmentalism. And contrary to the uniformity demanded by religious nationalists, this kind of unity embraces individuality and the sense of identity (or perhaps, better put, the multiple identities) we all have. This is an expression of the “Moral Fusion” that is central to the Poor People’s campaign and can be summed up in the biblical injunction “to do unto others as you would have done to you,” for our individual and collective needs are inextricable combined.
A secular expression of this is embodied in union solidarity. And it is impossible to understand the significance of the assembly without recognizing that it was a “Poor People’s and Low Wage Workers” Assembly. Numerous unionists were present – hospital workers from 1199 Service Employees; hospitality workers from UNITE-HERE; members of the Amalgamated Transport Workers who have been engaged in big fights in Northern Virginia and Washington, DC; members of the American Postal Workers Union; and government workers from federal (American Federation of Government Employees) and state, county and municipal (AFSCME) unions, and many others. A union officer would speak, followed by a rank-and-file member. Bound by the same time limitation as faith leaders, their comments focused on the importance of organization in lifting wages and the need to mobilize voters to protect those gains. Rank-and-filers especially stressed the critical importance of the work they do. Underlying their comments was the key point that raising those at the bottom benefits all working people and is the only pathway to equality.
Finally – and crucially – the people who suffer the most impact from poverty spoke from direct experience. A woman from Philadelphia told about watching the apartment complex where she lived and raised her children bulldozed by a developer who decided he could make more money by displacing people from their homes, a disabled women from Miami described her feelings after being told that she should lower her expectations and drop out of her college program, a man from Wisconsin described what it felt like to be denied needed medical coverage even though he had health insurance – and so it went, on and on. And the chant in response to each was, “We are the swing vote!”
Past to Future
This movement has been a long time in the making. Its direct antecedent was the Moral Monday civil disobedience movement in North Carolina that followed a Republican takeover of all three branches of state government. The North Carolina Republicans used that victory to launch an all-out assault on voting rights and other long-standing rights.
Every Monday, at the state legislature, Barber led mass civil disobedience sit-ins organized with faith-based, labor, student and other organizations. The issues ranged from defense of voting rights, to opposition to cuts in unemployment and Medicaid benefits, to support for abortion rights, and defense of public education. The movement opposed the death penalty, changes in environmental law, and bathroom laws stigmatizing transgender individuals. The broad coalition sparked similar movements throughout the South and was partially successful in halting the assaults on popular justice.
It laid the basis for the relaunch of the Poor People’s Campaign, Barber called for a Third Reconstruction, following the democratic advance of Reconstruction after the Civil War, and the progress made by the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. It was then, under Martin Luther King’s leadership, that the initial Poor People’s Movement was formed to tie demands for racial justice with demands for economic justice and democratic rights.
Some of us were reminded of the ongoing relevance of that history when viewing Love & Solidarity, which was screened at the Labor Heritage Foundation’s Bread & Roses series three days before the Poor People’s Assembly. The documentary was of Rev. James Lawson, who died about three weeks before the assembly. Lawson, an apostle of Mohandas Gandhi, worked with Martin Luther King to organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and in support of the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis in 1968, Lawson later relocated to California, where he worked with immigrant workers, including those engaged in a bitter organizing strike at the New Otani hotel in Los Angeles.
Lawson’s activism was rooted in the same conviction that motivates the Poor People’s Movement of today: love can be a source of power, and the roots of that power lie in the dignity of labor, for labor is what defines us as human. That labor should be well-compensated and its dignity respected as a fundamental right. Nonviolence at home also means opposition to militarism and war – as King recognized in the past, as Barber and Theoharis recognize today. Lawson served time in prison for refusing induction during the Korean War, opposed the Vietnam War, and stood in solidarity with the victims – and immigrant survivors – of our “indirect wars,” in Central America in the 1980s.
After the film, Linnell Fall, tri-chair of Maryland’s Poor People’s Campaign made these links explicit in terms of her own commitment and advocacy.
What Follows
Several thousand attended the assembly on a brutally hot day, vowing that the next step would be a “Movement” of people to the polls. The campaign seeks to register as many poor and low-income people as possible and organize them to vote in November.
And everyone reading this article, whether you were at the assembly or not, can sign on to the Poor People’s Campaign Pledge and do the following:
- Commit to working toward a moral public policy agenda
- Commit to waking the sleeping giant of everyday people who’ve been silenced by the fake populism of extremists and the compromises of so-called “moderates.”
- Challenge every candidate for public office to make clear where they stand on a just, loving, truth-telling agenda rooted in our deepest constitutional, moral, and religious values regarding the least of these.
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Jane McAlevey Tribute
By Peter Olney
The death of union organizer and strategist Jane McAlevey has prompted tributes to her passionate organzing training and guidance to pour in from around the world. I immediately heard from two German comrades who emailed in from their parental leave in Norway: ”The union movement around the globe lost such an inspiring person. Luckily so many people got to learn from her and she was able to change many things in the union institutionally. Our union work we do would be very different and much less successful if it wasn’t for her. Also, just for Germany speaking, we know she got a lot of young people motivated to join the union movement. Therefore we are very grateful and glad that we had her as a comrade.” [1]
The beautiful obituary in the NYT by Margot Roosevelt captures the twists and turns of Jane’s life and her contributions to organizing theory and practice. What is striking is that Roosevelt mentions that she interviewed Jane for the obituary in November of last year. I guess this is a common practice for obit writers to hook up with potential important subjects who they consider to be close to death. But it is also indicative of the fact that Jane courageously battled cancer for a long time confounding the judgments of her doctors who gave her a short lifespan, which they had to constantly modify as Jane kept keeping on, and continued to do trainings in person, on Zoom and appearing in a memorable Democracy Now radio show in April.
The little “c” in McAlevey stood for big time courage!
One side of Jane that I got to know was her passion for sports and the Oakland Raiders. We debated and reran the 2004 Patriot AFC championship victory over the Raiders in the Foxboro snow bowl. She called Patriots coach Bill Belichick, “Cheatacheck” for instructing the snow blowers to clear a clear path for Patriots kicker Adam Vinatieri to hit the winning field goal.
Jane was a jock and that stood her well in the union-organizing world that is still often dominated by a very macho culture. Many men bristled at Jane’s rough edges and found her aggressive tone and stance “difficult” and “not very nice.”
Jane was an avid recreational cyclist and started a riding club during her stint in Connecticut called “Hammer and Cycle.” My son and I rode the Marin Century with her in 2012. This is a 100-kilometer recreational road race in Marin County north of San Francisco where Jane was living. Jane kept up a running conversation throughout the rigorous ride. But the topper was at the end when she mixed up some margaritas and served them up to dehydrated riders. I got so looped I couldn’t drive back to San Francisco.
Jane was never at a loss for words or discussion of sports, politics and of course organizing. In 1996 when I was working on the Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project, a multi union organizing project with some kinship with Jane’s Stamford Connecticut Project, we rode down to Asilomar on the Monterrey Peninsula together for a training she was doing for SEIU Local 250. I rode with her and a friend. My friend was not accustomed to Jane’s non-stop conversation, and when we stopped to fill up the car with gas he got out of the car to get some relief from Jane’s monologue. Jane was undaunted. She promptly got out of the car and joined me at the pump and continued on with her topic.
My last direct phone conversation with Jane was in 2022 when she was working with Amazon workers at the newly organized Staten Island facility helping them steel themselves for the company’s post election onslaught and preparing them to organize actions to win a first contact. She told me that she had been riding across the GW Bridge towards New Jersey and that she had a flat tire. How was she going to get home? She remembered that a Staten Island worker, a leader of the committee, lived in New Jersey. She also remembered he had a car big enough to transport her bike. She called him up and asked for a ride to Manhattan. He showed up, picked her up with the disabled bike and they argued organizing all the way to her apartment.
Jane was very loyal to her friends and valued friendship and rewarded it with margaritas and more. Her teachings will live on in her books, countless writings, Zooms, Videos and the deeds of her trainees. She was a formidable force and loyal comrade. I will miss her.
Bike on Jane!
[1] Hannah Nesswetter and Hauke Oelschlagel from the DGB, an umbrella union federation of 5.7 million members
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Choosing Our Opponent: Why I will work to elect Joe Biden
By Mike Johnston
Watching Joe Biden put the full force of our country behind Israel’s genocidal response to the horrific Hamas attack of October 7 has been a gut-wrenching experience for me as it has for huge numbers of Americans and people of conscience around the world. Across the US, Palestinians students and progressives have quickly built a robust movement in support of a ceasefire and divestment, using tactics ranging from university encampments to massive campaigns to withhold primary votes from Joe Biden. While some actions such as the pause in the delivery of a few munitions, public criticisms of Netanyahu, and the recent push for a brokered permanent ceasefire seem to show that our efforts have had at least some impact, our government is still pushing huge amounts of weapons to Israel and by and large standing by as civilians are slaughtered.
This has made progressives across the country question how they could possibly work to support Biden, given the horrors being committed daily in Gaza with our government’s support, not to mention his return to some Trumpian policies on closing the border. It makes total sense that so many of those among the young, progressives and people of color who were so key to Biden’s victory four years ago are loath to turn out for him this time. Despite the recent pressure for Biden to withdraw, that prospect seems extremely unlikely.
For me, it helps to go back to 1980, when much of the Left argued against supporting Jimmy Carter’s re-election race against Ronald Reagan, a position which I believe in retrospect was wrong. Carter was not the universally respected icon that he is today. After we had pushed Lyndon Johnson out of the 1968 race for his conduct in the Vietnam War we got, instead of a more progressive president, two terms of Richard Nixon. After Nixon’s administration collapsed in disgrace, with his vice president Spiro Agnew resigning to avoid prosecution on bribery charges, and Nixon himself resigning to avoid impeachment, 1976 gave us a Democratic president, the relatively conservative, uber-Christian, governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter.
Carter’s term was marked by a faltering economy, an energy crisis, and increasing tensions between superpowers. Carter’s conduct of his first term was, in a word, bad.
Domestically, Carter endorsed the Supreme Court’s racist Bakke decision outlawing the use of racial quotas to achieve affirmative action in university admissions. He pushed corporate tax cuts, rolling back pollution regulations, and weakening OSHA to “strengthen the economy”. His budget cuts overwhelmingly targeted minorities and the poor, slashing funding for food stamps, welfare, job training, and aid to the cities. He conciliated with religious fundamentalists who wanted to teach creationism in the schools.
Carter’s record in foreign affairs was no thrill either. He supported the bloody regimes in El Salvador and Iran, backed Israel in its continued expansion onto Arab lands, and declared the Persian Gulf to be within the US’s “Sphere of Influence” to be defended with military intervention if necessary. He was also a key architect of rearmament and speeding up the nuclear arms race.
“While Jimmy Carter was the point person for Democratic neoliberalism that gave us the Clintons, Ronald Reagan was amazingly effective in his two terms at slashing …’
It was not surprising that in 1980, when former California governor Ronald Reagan ran against Carter, many on the left argued that there was no meaningful difference between the policies of the candidates or the interests and ideologies that they represented and advocated non-participation in the election and that Reagan did not represent a concrete danger of fascism. At the end of this article are links to the League of Revolutionary Struggle’s position, published in Unity Newspaper, making that point. Much if not most of the organized left took similar positions as did the Communist Party USA, which ran a slate of their Chair, Gus Hall, and Angela Davis for President and Vice President.
The Marxist left were not the only ones incensed that Carter was the nominee. International Association of Machinists President William Winpisinger declared Carter “the best Republican President since Herbert Hoover” and led a walkout of 300 delegates from the Democratic convention to protest Carter’s nomination, and the choice between Reagan and Carter was later characterized by AFL-CIO head Lane Kirkland, who was far from being a progressive, as “a choice between Dracula and Frankenstein.”
In retrospect we were wrong, not to participate in that election. While Jimmy Carter was the point person for Democratic neoliberalism that gave us the Clintons, Ronald Reagan was amazingly effective in his two terms at slashing the safety net of the New Deal, mobilizing white supremacism as an electoral force, dramatically transferring wealth to a smaller and smaller fraction of US society, dramatically weakening the US labor movement through such actions as breaking the air traffic controllers’ strike, actively intervening militarily abroad as in secretly arming right-wing forces seeking to overturn the elected Socialist government of Nicaragua. For all of our legitimate criticism of Carter, his election would have presented us with a less dangerous opponent.
Today, now
Today, we face a somewhat similar choice, but the difference between our options is overwhelmingly sharper, and the potential outcomes are far more consequential. Clearly, Biden is not a change agent. He represents the liberal wing of mainstream capitalism. For all of the reasons laid out at the start of this article, and despite the ways in which his administration has moved on such issues as workers rights, student debt, climate change, etc., he does not fundamentally represent a positive direction forward for the people of the US or of the world. We have had to fight to get much of what we have gotten from his administration and if he is re-elected we will have to continue to fight. However, Donald Trump has already proven himself and continues to prove himself, an exponentially more dangerous threat.
Trump, as opposed to Ronald Reagan 44 years ago, legitimately represents a clear and present danger of fascism in the US and of disastrous impact on the world. I hardly think it necessary in this piece to make that point, as his advisors and handlers have been remarkably open with their “Project 2025” agenda about their plans to deport 15 million people. To crush the labor movement, and roll back environmental regulations. To shut down initiatives dealing with climate change by moving away from fossil fuels. To make the US a white Christian nation. To eliminate the Department of Education. To set women’s,’ and trans folks right to control of their bodies back decades further than was accomplished as a result of his last term. To remove tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with committed fanatics, and to eliminate by any means necessary the Marxist radicals whom they see as threatening the nation.
Of course, Biden’s recent disastrous debate performance has likely increased the chance that Donald Trump will win, and the recent Supreme Court decision granting virtually complete immunity to a sitting president for any violations of the law and constitution while in office makes the prospect of a Trump presidency exponentially more dangerous to the people of the US and the world.
Better Ground On Which To Fight
It is no accident that Trump’s election is supported by right-wing anti-democratic forces around the world. He has already moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, is now accusing the Biden administration of “abandoning” Israel. He has supported the extension of Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank, and some in his orbit have called for nuclear strikes to defend Israel. He proposes to bomb the cartels in Mexico and invade that country, if necessary.
We in this country have the privilege of selecting the most powerful person in the world, whose influence will impact billions of people who have no say in the election. We cannot afford to simply walk away from that privilege. If we sit this election out because of our righteous anger at Biden we, and the rest of the world, will regret it for generations because without our support Trump will win and will implement Project 2025.
Additionally, if we sit this out and Trump wins, it will clearly be far worse for the Palestinian population of Gaza and the West Bank. Trump has clearly indicated his support for the State of Israel extending sovereignty over the entire Occupied Territories and integrating them into a religious state. This ties into his evangelical Christian allies’ mystical vision of a new Jewish state and rebuilding of the temple as a precondition for their mythical apocalypse (in which, ironically, they believe that all but “true Christians” would perish, including the Jews).
If we defeat Trump in November, that means that we (and the Palestinian people) have better ground on which to fight, and that our movements and institutions will not be forced into totally defensive battles for survival. That is a far cry from saying if we elect Joe Biden, or whomever might replace him, we have won – but it is supremely important for us in the US and for the people of the world.
Defeating Trump would give us far more space to build a movement inside and outside of the Democratic party to support the people of Palestine and to move a Progressive agenda across the board.
There is a binary choice before us, Trump or Biden. Who would we rather have as our opponent?
…
The choice that isn’t: A communist view of the election Unity Newspaper (Vol. 3, # 19, October 10, 1980)
Thanks to my daughter Jessica Tully for content and editing help and to old Unity comrades and the OWG book group for content suggestions.
Election 2024: Block, Build, and Ceasefire!
By Jeff Crosby
A recent article by Fred Glass, “Words and History: The Trouble With ‘Genocide Joe” (Stansbury Forum, April 14, 2024) makes the essentially correct argument that defeating Trump and the New Confederacy that Trump represents requires a Biden victory – or, in the wake of the first presidential debate, a victory for another Democratic candidate if that should happen. Glass lays out some of the likely devastating impacts on our peoples of a Trump victory, both the immediate material consequences and the repression that will make building our movement more difficult. And as a historian, he explains how a divided left that missed the principal threat of fascism helped bring about Hitler’s rise, and more recently the election of Richard Nixon.
But he also makes wrong arguments for defeating Donald Trump in November. In opposing the term “Genocide Joe,” he condescends to and underestimates the Ceasefire movement. He also separates domestic and international issues in a metaphysical way that, coming from the belly of the beast, is objectively national chauvinistism.
Calling Out Biden for Genocide
Opposing the term “Genocide Joe” is a waste of time and comes off as lecture-y. Biden is the key supporter of a genocide, and it is fully accurate to say so. If we understate that, we lose all credibility with the youthful Ceasefire movement and cede ground to the sectarian line on November 2024 that Glass is arguing against. Variations of the sectarian line include abstaining from the presidential vote, casting a pure and symbolic useless vote for a third party candidate, or even accelerationism, i.e., “the worse the better”–the idea that, despite all the history that Glass cites, fascist authoritarianism will somehow bring about progress or even socialism.
Would those of us who ran through the streets in 1968 chanting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” have listened to some old folks lecturing us on proper language, like “Don’t call LBJ a baby-killer, it’s really the system”? Biden is the principal defender of the slaughter, the president, the Commander in Chief! To equate the use of the term “Genocide Joe” with Trump’s personal insults at his enemies, as Glass does, makes no sense. Biden is funding a genocide. This has no resemblance to calling someone “horse-face” or “Sleepy Joe” or whatever. Prefigurative politics—acting today in a way that mirrors the society we hope to build–doesn’t preclude calling a purveyor of a genocide what he is.
Domestic and International Struggle: Two Sides of the Coin
The domestic (Biden good) vs. international (Biden bad) dichotomy Glass puts forth is inexact and counterproductive. In both arenas we are in a better position to win victories if Biden wins.
On the domestic front, those who support abstention or worse have to explain why it does not matter if Black people or students can still vote, it does not matter if women can decide for themselves if they want an abortion, it does not matter if Trump deports millions of immigrants in a fascist sweep, it does not matter if every environmental protection we have is lost, and taxes are again cut for the most wealthy, it does not matter if the Department of Education is eliminated and public education defunded and left to Christian nationalist zealots, it does not matter if all government employees are stripped of job protections, fired, and replaced by those loyal only to Trump, and so on.
And anyone who celebrates the union organizing victories at places like Starbucks or the election of Shawn Fain in the United Auto Workers (due in part to organizing victories among grad students) has to be honest that these would not have happened without the Biden appointed National Labor Relations Board forcing expedited union elections. This will disappear in a Trump presidency.
Chicago Teachers Union president Stacy Davis Gates had it right at a meeting during the Labor Notes conference last month: “I want things to be ‘less hard’ for people like me.” Under Biden, things will be ‘less hard’ in ways that matter if you are deeply committed to the welfare of our peoples. The things that are “better about Biden” are things that the social movements won, and that we can continue to expand upon going forward.
Turning to the international arena–is it true, as Glass argues, that domestic policy is “a different story” from international policy? To the contrary, with a Biden victory we have a better chance of influencing U.S. racial capitalism in positive ways around international as well as domestic affairs. For example, the Biden Department of Labor has acted promptly to support democratic union elections under the reformist regime of AMLO and the Morena party in Mexico, through the rapid response procedure in the U.S.-Mexico Canada Agreement that replaced NAFTA. Trump and the Republicans have promised to send more troops to the border and special forces into Mexico, and to “bomb the cartels”. Will an invasion of Mexico eliminate the billion dollar market for drugs in the United States, or stop the flood of U.S. made weapons into Mexico that arm the cartels? Is anyone confident that Trump won’t do what he threatens to do?
It was Biden, not Trump, who got U.S. troops out of Afghanistan.
The centerpiece of the abstentionist or third party or accelerationist argument today is of course Gaza. But here again the argument is wrong. We have a better chance of influencing Biden than Trump to end the carnage in Gaza.
The two political parties in the United States represent coalitions of different social forces, or social blocs. The Democratic and Republican parties have different social bases and respond to different pressures. Despite his protests to the contrary, Biden has begun to respond to his loss of support among people of color and young voters, where the rage over the genocide in Gaza is the strongest. So, for example, he is scrambling to forgive more student debt, and spoke at Howard University about “the poison of white supremacy.”
Biden is a traditional coalition builder in the U.S. goal of world domination, especially in his efforts to rebuild relations with Europe, as opposed to Trump’s erratic go-it-alone aggression and isolationism. So Biden has to be concerned about the splintering of support for the U.S. position and Israel’s well-earned position as a pariah state. UN resolutions and charges against Netanyahu and Israel from world courts matter. Perhaps most of all, the splintering of European support for Israel, such as the recent recognition of a Palestinian state by Spain, Norway, and Ireland, undermine U.S. dominance of the Western bloc. Diplomacy without action is words, but diplomacy is not nothing either; it has political impact.
Biden’s constant criticism of Netanyahu and the “pausing” of the delivery of large bombs is a small opening. His efforts to maneuver Israel into a ceasefire agreement that they originally supported is a more recent example. We need to kick down the door with powerful protests, whatever you choose to call the president.
Trump, on the other hand, is already attacking Biden for “abandoning Israel” and other Republicans have even called for nuclear strikes to defend Israel. Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and has promised to recognize Israel sovereignty over the West Bank, where Biden has initiated sanctions against a few of the most murderous of the 700,000 illegal Israeli settlers in that occupied territory. The Republican House of Representatives is trying to force Biden to reverse even his small gesture.
The white nationalist evangelical base of the Republican New Confederacy, now dominates the older big business groups and traditional fiscal conservatives of the party. This leaves Trump little room to create separation from Israel and the “end times” apocalypse the Christian nationalists long for in the Promised Land.
To separate the domestic and international the way Glass does leaves our position open to the criticism that we are willing to turn our eyes away from the Gaza genocide for the self-interest of getting a better NLRB.
Transforming Democracy and Independent Political Organization
Ours is a fight over terrain to build an independent working class movement by defeating the main danger at this moment. This means educating people around the basic concept of strategy, as an analysis and a practical effort to build a united front/social bloc to contend for governing power and ultimately state power. The “terrain” notion comes from founders of Black Lives Matter, among others. And the “Block and Build” formulation that has come from Convergence magazine is a good formulation: Block the MAGA right and build our independent political power.
The goal is not just to “Defend Democracy,” but to “Defend, Expand, and Transform” democracy, which requires a brutally honest and loud assessment of the actual state of democracy in the U.S., as explained in Liberation Road’s Strategic Orientation.[p. 6] This formulation is a Marxist one; it doesn’t simply defend “the democratic experiment called the United States” that Glass mentions, a phrase that covers multiple generations of sins.
A strategic understanding of social blocs and terrain is important. Defending material benefits that we have won from Biden or can win in a second term is important.
This does not mean making cold calls for the Democratic Party. It means developing our own independent political organizations that can fight inside and outside the Democratic Party, and inside and outside the electoral system. We vote our resistance, and we take to the streets. This certainly means marching against the Gaza genocide. It also means supporting the Working Families Party, or the Democratic Socialists of America, or the many local formations from the Carolina Federation to the Working Families in Chicago. Without that, the ‘Build’ part of ‘Block and Build’ is just a thought.
I grew up politically in the social movements of the late 1960s and ‘70s, stuffing envelopes for SNCC, trying to end the war in Vietnam, organizing unemployed people, and fighting for my union. The times were exhilarating in many ways, but strategy was often displaced by a comforting dogma. The contributions of social movement leaders and thinkers like Ella Baker of SNCC or Amical Cabral of Guinea-Bisseau or the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci were unknown or under-appreciated, and sectarian divisions were commonplace. The concepts of building a united front and independence for our forces within it were missing or underdeveloped.
Today a different and substantive struggle on the left is taking place, between a vaguely insurrectionist outburst and righteous personal outrage on one hand, versus a serious analysis of social blocs and a road to governing and political power for a Third Reconstruction. [p. 9] from those of us who are equally outraged–but want to win. How we carry out that line struggle may make the difference between a momentary challenge and a strategic challenge–an outcome that we will have to deal with for a very long time.
Yes, Biden is a war criminal. And yes, I am voting for him. For the material needs of our people, and for more favorable terrain to build a better world–including a Free Palestine.
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Originally published by Liberation Road
Election 2024: A Chess Move, Not A Valentine
By Rand Wilson
When I heard that Bernie Sanders was going to run for president in 2015, I became a “born again Democrat.” Through my experience of the Bernie campaign, I have completely embraced Tom Gallagher’s “Primary Route” political strategy of working inside the Party to move it to be more oriented to labor and the left.[1]
But being a Democrat doesn’t mean I always support the party — far from it. I’ve been a vocal critic of the conduct of both the national and state parties.[2]
Despite the Democrat’s progressive platform and rhetoric,[3] the party rarely mobilizes its huge base to win on key working class issues. Party leaders spend most of their time raising money from the well-to-do, and as the old adage says: “follow the money.” That’s to whom they are accountable.
So despite the party’s generally progressive platform, for far too long it’s been all talk — and no action. Working people are understandably fed-up, and it is that deep frustration that has brought us to the brink of fascism.
No daylight between the candidates?
It’s understandable that many fellow labor activists want to use the November presidential election to show their frustration with Biden’s foreign policy. The administration is supporting one of the most horrific wars of our time.
I came face-to-face with this sentiment at the June 2 Massachusetts Democratic state convention where I was an elected delegate from Somerville.[4] When I learned that DSA was going to hold a rally in support of a cease fire outside the convention, I was excited to take a break from the endless speeches and attend the rally.
Outside the convention was a small but dedicated group of DSA members marching in a circle with signs and banners calling for a cease fire in Gaza. I enthusiastically joined in on chants like, “cease fire now”, “stop the genocide”, and (with much less enthusiasm) “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
But soon the chanting shifted to “Don’t vote blue,” clearly aimed at support for Biden. I thought seriously, what are these people thinking? Who could possibly imagine that U.S. imperial foreign policy could get better under Trump?
Waiting for a pause, I shouted, “I’m voting for Biden!” Suddenly things got quiet. Although there were a few heads nodding, most of the protesters were shocked by a voice in support for Biden.
I went over to a long time union leader and labor activist I recognized and asked him about the chant. He said, “Voting for Biden doesn’t matter in Massachusetts because, it’s a safe state.”
“Yes, that’s true,” I replied. “But in this election, the popular vote will be especially important. If Biden wins, he’ll need a popular vote majority to help counter the ‘Biden and the deep state stole it’ narrative. And if — God forbid — Trump wins, we’ll need a popular vote majority to further discredit our outdated, undemocratic, and racist electoral college system while making the case that a majority of voters don’t support his election.”
My old friend disagreed, “That doesn’t matter because, in good conscience, how could anyone cast a vote for Biden who is responsible for genocide in Gaza?”
Later I spoke with a much younger DSA rally organizer. He told me, “There isn’t any daylight between the candidates. We gave the Democrats a chance, they blew it.”
Yes, the outrage on the left about Gaza is justified. But the “Never Biden, don’t vote Blue” responses I heard are concerning. Thinking of your vote as an act of personal consciousness misses the point. As I wrote with Peter Olney last March, in “Labor’s Political Dilemma,”[5] “Voting is not a valentine. It’s a chess move.“[6]
Pretending there isn’t “any daylight between the candidates” is a serious miscalculation of the moment we are in. Conditions for Palestinians will be made much worse with Trump and the left’s environment to influence foreign policy would be seriously diminished. People of color, immigrants, and other vulnerable folks are likely to suffer serious consequences if Trump is elected. I was tempted to say, “Your white, male privilege is showing!”
Our “margin of effort” will be key
Despite the horrifying situation in Gaza, the Biden Administration’s domestic achievements – particularly for labor — are considerable. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law,[7] the Inflation Reduction Act,[8] and the CHIPS and Science Act[9]investments in infrastructure and manufacturing has already provided for thousands of jobs. Beyond the new jobs and massive investments in infrastructure, other positive accomplishments like the Butch Lewis pension protection legislation[10] and NLRB appointments have strengthened the labor movement’s power.[11]
Indeed, as Peter Olney and I have written before, so much of the upswing in labor organizing and successful contract campaigns have been supported by the Biden administration’s pro-labor policies.[12] Biden walked the UAW’s picket lines during the successful standup strikes against the Big Three auto manufacturers. His appointment of Jennifer Abruzzoas NLRB General Counsel[13] who has aggressively fought for decisions upholding the original intent and purpose of the National Labor Relations Act to foster unions and collective bargaining.[14] The Board’s recent CEMEX decisionpromotes a streamlined path for workers to gain union recognition.[15] The Labor Department’s recent directive on what constitutes an independent contractor shines a spotlight on the phony and exploitative employment schemes of the giant gig platforms like Uber and Lyft.[16]
That’s why labor and the broader progressive community need to support Biden despite his support for the Israeli war against Palestinians.
Are the Biden Administration’s policies and investments enough to carry the majority of union members to vote for Biden? We sure hope so! However, despite the efforts of labor leadership, union members make their voting decisions based on competing sources of information and with concerns that transcend their economic life.
That’s why we can’t count on print, video, or social media to win working people to support Biden. It will take an unprecedented member-to-member, worker-to-worker, and face-to-face campaign. Winning this election will involve a massive effort to get people to recognize what political strategist Michael Podhorzer has often pointed out: While Biden’s poll numbers are dismal, in the end it will be a matter of “margin of effort, not the margin of error.”[17]
In addition to the GOTV work in key battleground states, I believe that the popular vote for Biden will also be critical because we need to show — as we did in 2016 — that Trump is not supported by the majority of voters despite the result in the electoral college. And of course, in addition to the presidency, it’s imperative that Democrats recapture the House by winning just a handful of seats. For instance, seven seats in California are possibly winnable for Democrats. If they are flipped, it would be the margin to retake the House.
Union members, like all Americans, are impacted by social legislation and attacks on democracy. They can be rallied to work for imperfect Democratic candidates to block authoritarians like Donald Trump. While it’s tempting to cast our votes based on emotion, leaving the door open for a Trump victory is too risky. Instead, let’s get out on the doors in the battleground states and congressional districts to defeat Trump and his ilk in 2024.
[1] The Primary Route: How the 99% Take on the Military Industrial Complex, Tom Gallagher 2015, https://tomgallagherwrites.com/the-primary-route-how-the-99-takes-on-the-military-industrial-complex/ Reviewed by Peter Olney, https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-primary-route-how-the-99-take-on-the-military-industrial-complex/
[2] “Why Our Revolution Is Fighting To Make The Mass Democratic Party More Democratic,” by Rand Wilson and Henry Wortis, originally published in Organizing Notes, newsletter of Our Revolution Massachusetts on Nov. 28, 2023. https://rand-wilson.medium.com/why-our-revolution-is-fighting-to-make-the-mass-democratic-party-more-democratic-8bf863d86a7f
[3] https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/
[4] https://massdems.org/takeaction-2/convention-2/
[5] Labor’s Political Dilemma, In These Times, March 27, 2024, https://inthesetimes.com/article/labor-2024-political-dilemma-biden-trump-gaza-election
[6] Quoting Rebecca Solnit:
[7] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/11/06/fact-sheet-the-bipartisan-infrastructure-deal/
[8] https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/inflation-reduction-act
[9] https://www.nist.gov/chips
[10] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/07/05/fact-sheet-president-biden-announces-historic-american-rescue-plan-pension-relief-for-millions-of-union-workers-and-retirees/
[11] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/who-we-are/the-board
[12] “Can Labor Seize Its ‘Movement Moment’? by Peter Olney and Rand Wilson, Convergence Magazine, April 7, 2023, https://convergencemag.com/articles/can-labor-seize-its-movement-moment/ and “Wake Up, Everybody! Midterms are Almost Here,” by Rand Wilson and Peter Olney, Convergence and The Stansbury Forum, February 25, 2022, https://convergencemag.com/articles/wake-up-everybody-midterms-are-almost-here/
[13] https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/the-nlrb-welcomes-jennifer-abruzzo-as-general-counsel
[14] See NLRA Section 1: https://www.nlrb.gov/guidance/key-reference-materials/national-labor-relations-act .
[15] https://www.nlrb.gov/guidance/key-reference-materials/GC-resources-Cemex
[16] https://blr.com/resources/dols-new-contractor-rule-bringing-big-changes-if-it-survives-challenges
[17] Podhorzer citations: https://substack.com/@michaelpodhorzer
From Italia: Behind the Curtain of The EU Elections All Is Not What It Seems
By Nicola Benvenuti
The results of the European elections on June 9-10 will have significant consequences for the political balance in the European Union: the majority of the European Parliament remains on paper with a pro-European orientation (the European Popular Party (EPP), the winners of the elections, the European Socialists, the liberals of Renew Europe) but the shift to the right, especially at the expense of liberals and greens, has been marked.
In Italy the electoral debate focused on national controversies and only lightly touched on European politics; in particular, the absence of the theme of peace as a political determinant of the vote was surprising, perhaps because pacifism is today a watchword especially of the radical right and of pro-Putin positions.
Abstentionism also increased: 49.68% of those entitled to vote voted, compared to 56.09% in 2019. In this climate abstentionism is not disinterest, it is dissatisfaction with what is offered, and voters are waiting for something that there still is not. Further assessments of the European political balance will depend on the composition of the European Council that will elect the President: the EPP has announced that it will re-nominate Ursula von der Leyen, but other names are also being mentioned, including Mario Draghi, past Prime Minister of Italy.
More disruptive consequences occurred in individual countries. In France where the rightwing LePen front leaped to 31%, outclassing President Macron’s party. Macron acknowledged the defeat, and dissolved the National Assembly the same evening as the results. The new elections will be held on June 30th: the victory of Jordan Bardella, face of the LePen front, is looming and the beginning of a long period of difficult coexistence between the Presidency and the government. Soon after Macron’s call for reelections left wing leaders, including the hard left France Unbowed (LFI), the Socialist, Communist and Green parties, agreed on an election alliance called the New Popular Front. However one swallow does not make it springtime! The “rassemblement de la gauche” is against LePen (and in fact being against has already worked in France, but in the presidential elections) … the problems emerge when one advocates for something. If it works in the political elections, that is, not only to block Le Pen’s path, but to build a government, it would be a miracle. The timeframes are really very tight and the divisions are marked. We shall see.
In Germany Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has become the second party (+5 points compared to the 2019 elections) behind the CDU-CSU centre, but ahead of Chancellor Scholz’s SPD which has already been tested by the disappointing results of 2019. Greensalso suffered a significant decline. The stability of the Scholz government is uncertain but no elections are expected until the natural deadline in the autumn of 2025.
Even in Austria the right reached 25.5%, while in Belgium the government resigned after the outcome of the vote. Going against the rightward trend, in the Netherlands the Labor-Green alliance stopped Wilders’ far-right. The question arises as to where France and Germany are going and whether they will go in the same direction or will they diverge for the first time since the birth of the EU?
A stalemate situation is emerging for the EU which has already demonstrated that it is unable to play an autonomous and incisive role in foreign and economic policy – exemplified by its inability to define an autonomous policy on the war in Ukraine. Several times the USA (and Trump in his own way) have signaled their intention to disengage from Europe (read push the Europeans to commit more to European defense) to dedicate the USA to confrontation with China. Already in the Mediterranean and the Middle East you can see the presence of the Russians, the Turks (Libya). Among the EU tasks to be faced there are also economic ones, like the green turn, closing the gap with the US on information technologies, energy policy, etc. To solve these problems more integration is needed (but the right wants less of it). On the military question, better coordination between European countries would perhaps be sufficient even without increasing expenses,just as the coordination of European finances would also be very useful for eliminating tax havens present in Europe. The EU urgently needs greater integration between the different countries on military and fiscal grounds, as well as the abolishment of the right of the veto which blocks every decision. Now Timothy Gordon Ash’s prediction from a few weeks agoof the strengthening of Greater Germany, even in the military sphere after the economic one, seems more uncertain.
The danger from the right is becoming more marked and and is shifting towards the West, whereas until a few years ago the right was rooted above all in former socialist countries. With it, the attempt to constitutionalize the European right began to make it attractive in a coalition policy: individual exponents of the EPP, even within the various countries (for example the Gaullist right whose president looks to an alliance with Le Pen, exponent of those forces and ideologies against which Gaullism was born and established itself), are already moving in this direction.
This context is reflected by the pro-Atlanticism and pro-European reliability of the Meloni government: while the outflanking of the Fratelli d’Italia on the right by the Liga – and in France by Le Pen’s Éric Zemmour – perhaps suggests that there are two right-wing parties, one with the more moderate Conservatives and one with Identity and Democracy more to the right. For the Liga their extreme right turn is almost suicidal to the point that its old founder, Umberto Bossi, openly disavowed it. Even if the candidacy of an openly fascist leader like General Vannacci, brought to the Liga by its leader, the shaky Matteo Salvini, 500,000 preferences (and maybe this is the real news). This explains the evident contradictions of Meloni: reassuring and reliable (in the Atlanticist sense) in foreign policy, but at the same time employing nostalgic identity politics internally. Positions she hopes will hold together the hard core of the party made up of violent and even criminal groups, not to mention its management group inhabited by former thugs, including collaborators with organzied crime.
Meloni’s right is also altering the 1995 Fiuggi [1]“turning point” led by the then party secretary Gianfranco Fini with the support of Silvio Berlusconi, to constitutionalize the Movimento Sociale Italiano (the predecessor of the Fratelli d’Italia party). Instead of acceptance, as happened at Fiuggi, of the legitimacy of the Constitution born from the Resistance, Meloni’s party aims to transform the foundations of the Italian Republic with a narrative minimalizing the relevance of the resistance and anti-fascism. And implementing an institutional architecture that hinges on a reform that would elect the President of the Council directly and (for opportunistic alliance reasons) on Northern League federalism. The Fratelli d’Italia party with 28.8% of the votes has progressed by 2% in percentage compared to the votes received in the 2022 elections but not in absolute terms. However, there is no doubt that the Meloni government has consolidated itself and, given that it is among the few successful governments, it is well positioned to become the linchpin of the political balance in Europe. Perhaps we will see the effects in the next appointments of European Commissioners. At the same time Fratelli also aims to federate the extreme right witness the rapprochement with Le Pen.
However, the party that experienced both percentage and absolute success was the Partito Democratico (PD) of the apparently “weak” leader Elly Schlein: with 24% of the votes obtained (up from 19% in 2022) It indicates a recovery of the party in all its traditional areas and in particular in large cities, where it conquered new capitals (administrative elections held together with the European elections), and in the south, where it benefited from the Cinque Stelle (5 Star) crisis and the reaction to the abolition of guaranteed citizenship income by the Meloni government and to Northern League federalism . It was surprising that with an electoral campaign based on a few watchwords, but with clear reference to social and labor rights[2], in just one year Schlein managed to get left-wing voters back on the move; especially since at the same time the mayors on the list for Europe also had personal success[3], representing the backbone of power within the PD.
The PD has now become the pivot power for every centre-left alliance, the so-called “wide field”, capable of competing with the right-wing alliance for the government of the country. It can contain the competition of the Cinque Stelle diminished to a modest 10% from the 17.1 in the previous European elections.
In Europe the Partido Socialista de Espana (PSE) , now part of Socialistas y Democratas(S&D), also held sway in elections in Spain and France. The Left list’s success was also moderate, in particular of the Green-Left Alliance with 6.7%. The image of the Italian citizen Ilaria Salis, in shackles and chains in Orban’s prisons in Hungary, not yet indicted, favored the unexpected electoral success of the party. Three days later Salis was released after being elected as a new member of the European Parliament for the Italian Green and Left Alliance . The 39-year-old activist was elected during her time under house arrest in Hungary, where she was on trial, charged for allegedly assaulting far-right demonstrators.
European Parliament lawmakers enjoy substantial legal immunity from prosecution, even if the allegations relate to crimes committed prior to their election.
More than 170,000 voters in Italy wrote Salis’ name onto the ballot in a successful bid to bring her home from Hungary, where she had been detained for more than a year.
In Italy it should be underlined that in contrast with the victory of the EPP, two personal parties – Matteo Renzi’s Italia Viva[4], and Carlo Calenda’s Azione, failed. Both were allied with Macron’s Renew Europe grouping but made no contribution to his stability because they did not reach the 4% quorum needed to enter the European Parliament. They were counting on the dissolution of the Forza Italia (FI) party after the death of Berlusconi, but the voters preferred the safe use of the faithful and not very brilliant Antonio Tajani of FI to two characters who, after an attempted alliance, split due to power conflicts.
The hope is now that the moderate components of the center can find credible representation that looks unambiguously towards the left and can complete their political offering in a political atmosphere that appears increasingly bipolar.
[1] Fiuggi is a small city in the Region of Lazio where the MSI convention was held in 1995
[2] Such as minimum wage seen with suspicion by the trade unions, defense, refinancing of public healthcare, aid for the poorest, increase in wages, support for schools, etc.
[3] De Caro, former mayor of Bari, had half a million preferences!
[4] In these elections allied with Emma Bonino on the United States of Europe
…
This report on the EU elections was translated from the Italian by Peter Olney. Any unclarity or awkward phrasing is the responsibility of the translator.
June 2 – Mexico elects Claudia Sheinbaum President – Despite problems, many voted in Los Angeles
By Joel Ochoa
On June 2, 2024 for the first time Mexicans living abroad were allowed to vote in person; and as in past elections vote electronically, or by mail. The Mexican government intended to use embassies and consular sites to accomplish this endeavor and had put the Instituto Nacional Electoral (INE) in charge of coordinating the procedural logistics. The Mexican diaspora is such that voting sites were established in the following cities in North America: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Fresno, Houston, Los Angeles, New Brunswick, New York, Oklahoma, Orlando, Phoenix, Raleigh, Sacramento, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Ana, Seattle and Washington D.C. and in Montreal, Canada.
The stakes were high. Mexicans were ready to elect the first woman president, (only the second in North America[1]), in their history and enthusiastically responded. Both of the leading candidates were women: Claudia Sheinbaum of MORENA and Xochitl Galvez of the Fuerza y Corazon por Mexico coalition. Unfortunately the INE was not prepared and what was expected to be civil celebration, turned out to be a great despoilment.
Here in the United States previously registered Mexican voters went to different consulates, by the thousands, hoping to cast their votes and waited up to nine hours in line with no water, food or toilets. At the end of the day the great majority of them didn’t vote because of the ineptitude of either the Mexican government, or the INE, or both.
At the Los Angeles Mexican Consulate on West 6th Street there were only 1500 ballots available; woefully inadequate for the thousands who came out to vote. Riots were avoided thanks to the intervention of leaders who had the courage to face a highly volatile situation. These local leaders had to tell irate and frustrated people to learn the lesson of the day, go home and prepare for the future.
Claudia Sheinbaum, the Mayor of Mexico City and the MORENA party of incumbent President Andres Manuel Lopez Orbrador won a smashing victory garnering over 58% of the vote.
[1] Canadian PM Kim Campbell, June 25-November 4, 1993
Platform Workers – The New Face of Solidarity
By David Bacon
On May 21 I went to the State Supreme Court Building in San Francisco at 350 McAllister. I went to witness oral argument in the case brought against Proposition 22, the state referendum that overturned Assembly Bill 5 in the 2020 election. Uber and Lyft and other platform/gig companies financed the referendum with $200 million in their effort to undermine the excellent provisions of AB 5 authored by then Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez of San Diego. AB 5 codified into law a previous Supreme Court case called Dynamex that established a very simple and solid three part test that determines who is an employee and who is a contractor. AB 5 if implemented and enforced would have made Uber and Lyff and other platform employers treat their workers as employees with the right to be protected by labor standards and the right to organize under the National Labor Relations Act.
Getting into the State Supreme Court chambers turns out to be much more difficult than getting through TSA airport security. First there is the usual metal screening then there is a second screening for phones and computers, which are not permitted in the chambers. I sat in the overflow room and watched the proceedings on live feed video. My own take and the opinion reflected in the legal press is that the State Supremes are going to basically uphold 22 which will probably lead to more legislative initiatives to bring justice to gig drivers and employees.
Before the hearing I met up with the President of Ride Share Drivers United, Nicole Moore and some of her members. After the hearing Nicole commented that it is a little disturbing to hear bright attorneys on the bench jousting with plaintiff and employer attorneys over fine legal points when the livelihoods of thousands of workers are at stake. The decision of the Court will be within 60 to 90 days of the hearing.
The Stansbury Forum therefore is proud to present interviews with Nicole Moore and leaders of platform worker organizing in Canada, Mexico and the United States.
The interviews and photos were done by David Bacon at a conference organized by the UCLA Labor Center – Global Labor Solidarity Program.
Hosted at the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor (LA Fed), in partnership with the and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung- Foundation-New York Office, this event took place on Feb 9-10, 2024, and builds on the Labor Center’s 18-year history of fostering global labor solidarity initiatives that can play a vital role in facilitating worker rights across the globe. entitled: “Worker Solidarity in Action: A Trinational Response to the US Mexico Canada Agreement”.
Peter Olney, Co-Editor of the Stansbury Forum
.
As part of efforts to foster cross-border labor solidarity, the UCLA Labor Center convened over 80 labor leaders and workers from the U.S., Mexico and Canada for the “Worker Solidarity in Action: A Tri-national Labor Response to the USMCA” summit held on Feb. 9-10, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. The present report, written by noted journalist David Bacon, conveys the main objective of the event–to foster transnational labor collaboration and to create a space for strategic discussions surrounding worker rights campaigns in communities across North America. This report was written, the interviews conducted, and the photographs taken by David Bacon.
Hosted at the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor (LA Fed), in partnership with the and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung- Foundation-New York Office, this event builds on the Labor Center’s 18-year history of fostering global labor solidarity initiatives that can play a vital role in facilitating worker rights across the globe.
Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, Project Director – UCLA Labor Center- Global Labor Solidarity
This is the fourth section of the report. Previous sections had contributions from workers and organizers in the maquiladoras, the auto industry, and in the domestic and home care industry.
On Valentine’s Day, just three days after the Los Angeles conference concluded, workers for Uber Eats, Deliveroo and other delivery apps in Great Britain went on strike, refusing to take orders and drive meals to the companies’ waiting customers. Like their coworkers in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, the UK drivers are not covered by the statutory “national living wage” of 11.44 pounds. The UK supreme court last November ruled that platform workers aren’t workers at all, in the face of an organizing drive by the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain that had signed up over 3000 members.
In an era where workers in one country can follow the actions of workers in another, in real time as they happen, the strike electrified platform workers across the Atlantic.
Los Angeles, California – 10 February 2024: Unions and worker groups from the US, Mexico and Canada in a conference to discuss ways to support each other. All images Copyright David Bacon
JENNIFER SCOTT
Jennifer Scott is a gig worker and the president of Gig Workers United in Canada. She lives and works in Toronto.
Our union started in early 2020 with the Food Stores United Campaign, at a European company called Foodora. This was an app like Uber. Workers wanted to unionize, so we helped them. We put in the papers for the certification of their union, and 89.4% of workers in Toronto and Mississauga voted yes. So we won and that set a precedent at the labor board.
Then the pandemic began and Foodora declared bankruptcy and exited Canada completely. But because of the worker power we built, we were able to get severance pay. The Federal government has a program called the WEP, for workers whose whose employers declare bankruptcy and are not not able to pay severance. We won a settlement of $4.1 million, allocated and divided among workers all over Canada.
After that, we had questions. Do we want to stop? Are we happy? Do we want our rights? What do we want to do? Everyone felt that obviously, we want our rights. After a few months of talking and thinking we figured out what we wanted to do. Workers came together and created Gig Workers United, saying, “Look what we have in common.”
No matter what city we work in or app we work on, whether we’re delivering by bike or walking or car, the problem is we don’t have our rights and we want them. That’s the end goal of Gig Workers United – to unionize.
The main companies in Canada are DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Skip the Dishes, now owned by Just Eat. There’s also Instacart and Corner Shop, which was purchased by Uber. Our Members work on different combinations of these apps. We have a very loose definition of a gig worker, and it’s easy to be e a member.
In Canada they misclassify us as independent contractors. We know we’re not. Our work around organizing has to challenge the misclassification of gig workers, because that’s how apps get away with treating us the way they do. It’s why we don’t have basic rights and protections.
The debate over classification was a big part of the Foodora case and why it was precedent-setting. In Ontario, under the Employment Standards Act, independent contractors have no rights. But you also have dependent contractors, which is a form of employee. In the Foodora case we won because we were classified as dependent contractors.
At Foodora we had to certify a bargaining unit, and after that, workers voted democratically. Presumably if we filed a petition for Uber drivers, Uber would say that we’re not employees and we would have to fight that whole thing all over again. But the precedent has been set. The board looked at our case and at the relationship between the platform and the workers and made the right decision. So it doesn’t have to be as intimidating or feel as uncertain now as it might have in 2018.
Uber in any country always wants to control the narrative. That’s why a win for us on one app or even a win in one jurisdiction is is a win for all us. The companies all work together, and workers have to work together too. A victory at Foodora or the huge fight in California around AB 5, and then the Uber initiative, all affect workers in other countries.
In the UK on Friday WGB [the British gig workers’ union] organized what could be the biggest strike in the history of gig work. They shut down kitchens, with workers standing outside them saying, “We’re not picking up.” There are videos of McDonald’s with 50 or 60 orders lined up and no workers. They were declining orders.
The consequence of a work stoppage is that the algorithm pays workers more for orders. Where on average they paid £3 per order, at the end of the strike Uber was offering £71 per order. That’s amazing. As workers in Canada, we look at that and we’re like, “OK, let’s do that here.” It shows us strategies and tactics that can work.
We know that any app algorithm is sensitive to strike action. As workers we can manipulate that and have big wins. A strike like that not only sends a message to the boss. It also means that a worker who is working that night is going to get paid £71 an order. That might make me think twice about collective power. A great reason to go on strike.
I’m excited to build my family relationships with folks in in the US. Because of the pandemic and being precarious workers, it has not really been possible to travel a lot, so we don’t get to see each other. Being here is really meaningful for building those relationships.
The possibility might exist at some point that an action would take take place in the U.S., Mexico and Canada at the same time. Who doesn’t want that to happen? But what steps would have to be taken in order to get there? Like any aspect of organizing, it’s worker to worker. I talk with my coworkers, and my coworkers say, “I want to take action.” That has to happen every place, and people have to coordinate it. If we’ve got 50 new leaders and they want to take an action, how do we do that?
Presumably we’d have to find organizations with the same set of principles in other countries. I don’t think gig workers can organize in any way other than through rank and file, worker to worker organizing, whether it’s locally in our communities or across borders or global action. It is all rooted in workers.
As a gig worker, every day, all day long, when I’m working I am being confronted with orders – $3 for five kilometers, $3 for 15 kilometers. And I’m constantly looking at things and figuring out if the orders are good for me. Apps frequently send us emails that say, “Hey, we’re making a change in how the app functions and it’s going to be good for you and you’re going to like it.” But then what we see, and what we hear from workers all over the world, is that we fucking don’t like it. It’s not good for us, and we know what is and isn’t.
That that’s the core of organizing. The people who do the work know what needs to change. When we unite together, will know how to take action together. Folks who are not workers have a role to play, an important one. But our core belief is that nobody can change your life for you. You have to do it for yourself.
There’s a community of interest between people in very different industries. There are lots of reasons for us to connect together, but the most important one is that employers like Uber want to bring in regressive labor policy. That’s their end goal. It isn’t delivering food and it’s not about ride share. They want to drastically change what we think work is.
Apps and gig work is coming for all work. Gig work is about lowering employment standards and changing minimums to something that is not tenable, that harms people, that harms our community. Maybe somebody has a good job now. Maybe they have a union job now. But with gig work that won’t exist five years from now. So we have all the reasons in the world to work together.
As members of Gig Workers United we recognize that it is necessary to build relationships internationally with other gig workers. We’ll keep fighting and our relationships with each other can keep us going, can give us a hand when we need one. Now is a moment to start building that, so that a year from now, two years from now, when we need each other, we’re already connected.
NICOLE MOORE
Nicole Moore is a part time Lyft driver and President of Rideshare Drivers United, the organization of 20,000 drivers in California. RDU has a democratically elected Board of Driver Members, and members who pay dues of $15/month to be eligible to vote in the election of officers, held every other year. Today RDU has chapters in Los Angeles, San Diego and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Rideshare Drivers United started in the parking lot of LAX. When Uber started cutting our rates, we started talking to each other. Unlike other workers, we don’t have a big room or a water fountain where we gather. We gather at airports to pick up people. A majority of us are people of color and immigrants, so this gig model is impacting people of color more than other communities.
We did a couple of protests over some of the cuts and brought 50 or 75 people. But we knew it wasn’t enough to really make a change. We knew we had to build substantial power. So in 2018 we took signs and left our cars and organized mini strikes on the sidewalks at the terminals where passengers are getting in and out.
Then we decided we had to build bigger than just airport drivers. Not all of us work at the airport. At that time we estimated there were 400,000 to 500,000 drivers in California, so we needed to organize to scale.
One of our volunteers started helping us build an Excel list. Then we realized we could actually build our own organizing app to help us recruit through social media and other venues. We wanted to build an organization where we could really communicate with each other and build real relationships.
We decided that when we got to 2000 people in our organization, we would do our first public action as Rideshare Drivers United on January 30th, 2019, when the new Governor of California made the alarming conclusion that drivers should get together with companies to come up with a solution. Some of the larger labor unions were already trying to do this, but with no drivers in the room.
As drivers we knew the companies were getting ready to their IPO’s in 2020. They were slowly squeezing drivers to get more money, to look better for the investors. We were feeling it, getting less and less. So we said no. The the governor had barely been sworn in when we protested in front of his Los Angeles office. And instead of 50 people, we had 150.
We knew our organizing model, based on connecting as humans, was working. Lawmakers in Sacramento knew that these companies were fake classifying people as indefinite contractors, and the courts agreed. They passed a law, AB 5, that incorporated the ABC test for determining who is an independent contractor. It’s been used all over the country, so it’s not something radical.
None of us wanted to be employees of Uber, with a 40 hour work week and having to beg the boss for a vacation. Those are the things we associate with formal employment. The companies used that to feed us a line – that we wouldn’t have flexibility if we were not independent contractors.
We needed the state to help. So we threw down to support AB 5, but we expected pushback from our members. But instead they said, “Hell, yeah! These people are treating us like employees, so we might as well have the rights of of all the other folks to at a least minimum wage and unemployment insurance and workers comp.”
We had two gigantic strikes that year, the second right before Uber’s IPO. That one went global. We had people striking on 6 continents because everybody knew Uber was about to make a bazillion dollars. They had cut us from $1.75 per mile to $1.20 per mile to $0.90 per mile to $0.60 per mile.
It was getting worse and five thousand of us filed wage claims because we often weren’t even making minimum wage. But if minimum wage is just based on when I have a passenger in the car, there’s no minimum wage at all. If there are 10,000 drivers in Korea Town trying to pick up two passengers, everybody’s gonna make two cents. You have to look at all of the value of our time, wait time included. The state then ruled that they owed us $1.3 billion. That was huge.
When I hear people from the rideshare union in Mexico, or the platform workers as they call them, I think it’s wonderful that they’re they’re in the same struggles that we’re in. It’s so great not to be alone.
They have a legal system that does say they are workers with rights. But they also are fighting against unions that are trying to trade their rights for money and power. We have very similar fights here, so it’s very exciting to to talk with them. We have an international alliance of platform based transport workers and and have not been able to find a partner in Mexico. Now we have a union we feel we can work with.
Our deactivation report showed the violence, discrimination and and abuse drivers receive, and then we’re we’re fired or temporarily suspended by AI. We tell the company, “I wasn’t drunk. The guy told me he was going to get me fired and get a free ride, so I shouldn’t be fired. I haven’t had a drink in 30 years.” But we’re arguing with the chat bot. There’s no human in this process. Meanwhile we can’t pay our rent or feed our kids. The woman driver from Mexico was talking about the same thing.
We’re looking at global strategies to create standards for this industry. The ILO is doing that, but we want to make sure that drivers like us are in the room when those standards are set.
We’re fighting global organizations, global capital, that are working to destroy labor rights for everyone. And they’re going at it very deliberately and powerfully. It’s no joke. All of us will be deployed through AI or some kind of platform in the future for our work. For the last hundred years, since the industrial revolution, we’ve tried to build workers rights. If we start at zero with the AI revolution, we’re going to be in hell, a 21st century industrial revolution.
ZAIRA BARINO TOVAR
Zaira Barriño Tovar is the secretary for gender of the National Union of Application Workers in México. The union includes drivers for Uber, bicycle workers, and motorcycles that deliver food at home, as well as peoplewho deliver products for Amazon and Mercado Libre.
I have worked in these jobs and been paid badly. We do not have any benefits or rights. The applications have sold us he idea that we are our own bosses, that we are freelance partners, but in reality they don’t want to recognize us as workers, particularly as workers on digital platforms.
Mexican law regarding workers does cover people who work with transnational companies, but digital platforms do not recognize us as workers and or give us the legal benefits that this requires. The Federal Labor Law, although it talks about workers, does not consider us as workers either. The bad thing about this is that they are transnational companies that come to our country. set up shop, and don’t even give benefits to the workers.
In Mexico there is no law that defines us as workers or non-workers. Federal labor law doesn’t doesn’t recognize or deny us worker status. Outsourcing has supposedly been made illegal and disappeared, so digital platform companies are going against the law because outsourcing no longer exists. So we are demanding a reform saying that digital platform workers are recognized as workers..
This is a very masculine sector and women are only 10% of the workforce, but these 10% worldwide suffer a lot of gender violence. Sometimes you arrive at an address and you don’t know what will happen on the street because you are a woman. As Secretary of Gender, in October we had a meeting with women working on digital platforms on an international level. Colleagues came from Spain, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and other countries. We all wrote a letter to the ILO, asking for a report specifically on workers on digital platforms.
We have been a registered union for 3 years at the federal level. We also have sections in the States of Mexico and Colima, and in the city of León. In Tijuana, we are close to organizing a new one. We have an organizing committee there, and sent a delegation from Mexico City to help. We want to start ones in Monterrey and Guadalajara, which are two of the largest cities.
But although we have recognition under the law, we do not have the right to bargain collectively. And since the companies do not recognize us as workers, we cannot force them to sign a collective agreement. Our most important demand is that those companies sit down to negotiate with us, and that the Government of Mexico requires them to do this.
The most important thing for us is to reach 30% membership, to be able to make a demand on these companies and represent the majority of the workers. The most important is Uber because it has a super dirty, anti-union history. This was discovered by prosecutors in the Panama Papers.
Although we have 30% of the workers, which is the normal legal requirement, who knows if they are going to comply. We thought when our membership hit 30%, that Uber and other companies might create white unions. Then we could fight this by organizing to remove those unions, as other colleagues have done. At Audi there was a protection union, but the workers all got together and got it out. So we can do that if we have to. But we have to come together as workers to fight them.
Companies are looking for a special organization that is not a union, they call Decalogue. And this decalogue says that we are not workers, that we are service providers, that they pay us fees, that our job is at their mercy, and that we are only protected from accidents during delivery time. Obviously that would be terrible. The companies hold these organizations’ money. But many people are waking up and saying “No, I am a worker, I work 12 hours, I provide the motorcycle, the car, the bicycle, so I need them to give me benefits.”
We tell them, first of all, that they have to recognize themselves as workers. As a platform worker, we ask, “Do you have accidents? No one protects you if you die. No company is going to be responsible for you. You provide the money for spare parts and gasoline. Don’t you think we have rights as workers?” Then you say, “Well, if I provide everything, I deserve the rights of a worker.”
There is another union, but we call it a yellow union, one that is with the company. They pretend they are on the side of workers, but in truth they are charros.
Some of the people who work on digital platforms are migrants in Mexico. Today we have a humanitarian problem of Haitian migrants, and many of these Haitians are working on digital platforms. Recently in the news a young Haitian who was hired by a construction contractor died and the company did nothing. We want to make this stop. Our fellow migrants are vulnerable, far from their country.
There are also a good portion of LGBT women and some gay men as well. They are victims of homophobia and discrimination.
We have relationships with similar groups of platform workers in other countries. We coordinate with groups in Argentina, Spain, Colombia, Uruguay and Brazil. We also work with groups from other unions.
MUHAMMAD EJAZ BUTT
Muhammad Ejaz Butt is the general secretary of the I-Taxi Worker Association of Toronto, and President of the Toronto Limo Driver Association. He is also secretary of the 20-country International Alliance of App-Based Transport Workers.
We have filed a complaint against Uber and those unions that have made under the table agreements, first in UK, then in US, and now in Canada. In any country, unions must recognize the drivers, the gig workers, not just deal with the companies. Any organization of Uber workers should be an organization run by the drivers themselves, 100%.
Uber used to terminate any account for a driver at any time. Now, if a driver has lost his position he can contact with the UFCW without being a member of that union. Then they will arbitrate the case. However, last year fewer than 1000 people registered as members under that agreement. The union doesn’t show clearly the advantages and disadvantages of that agreement. That is why I resigned from UFCW.
In our organization, there are four points to our program. First, drivers need a minimum wage, so we would accept employee status if it gave us opportunities and rights like regular employees, including union rights. Second, we need a minimum shift of nine hours that includes waiting time. Sometimes Uber will give a driver only 3 hours. The minimum wage should apply to all nine hours.
Third, Uber has to stop deactivating the accounts of drivers for small complaints. Sometime a customer is not right or he’s drunk. So we want fairness in deactivations. Last, and most critical, Uber must be transparent. If I pick up customer and drive from A to to B, Uber will only show me what I get. They never show me how much they charge. The Uber agreement says they charge me 25%, but maybe they are charging 40% or 45%.
One day soon they will come to the table and agree with us.
Canada has already decided that by 2030 vehicle emissions must be zero and the vehicles must be electric. That will be a big expense for drivers like us. Auto workers and drivers need to talk together about this, and here we’ve been able to start.
CRYSTAL ROMERO
Crystal Romero is the press secretary at the LA County Federation of Labor. She formerly worked as an organizer with the port truckers campaign of the Teamsters Union.
Organizing port truck drivers at the ports of LA and Long Beach has always been an uphill battle, because they have been classified as independent contractors, rather than being recognized properly as employees. Unfortunately, the majority of the trucking industry seems to believe that truck drivers are independent contractors, despite the law and numerous cases before the NLRB and other tribunals, which have stated that drivers are employees.
The ABC test established the criteria for determining what constitutes an independent contractor, and what constitutes an employee. But there’s disagreement even among the drivers. We need a lot of education to prove to the drivers themselves that they actually are misclassified employees. Even among the drivers it’s always been an uphill battle to get them to recognize that their employers are taking advantage of them.
Employers often just choose to ignore AB 5, so we’re still seeing active misclassification at the ports, which makes organizing a battle. A trucking company will claim, “no, no, no, these guys are not employees.” So you have to fight out the employee issue, and ask for an NLRB union election.
Drivers make abysmally low rates. They’ve got to do multiple loads a day in order to break even. Some truck drivers actually make a negative income, and owe the company money. They are responsible for purchasing the trucks themselves. Each costs a quarter of a million dollars, and the drivers have to pay the taxes and insurance. Maintenance, tires, gasoline, all of that comes out of their own pockets. Essentially drivers are paying to work for multi-billion dollar global companies like Amazon.
A lot of positive changes have taken place, however the transition deadline to zero emission vehicles is going to be a huge barrier for a lot of misclassified truck drivers. How can we expect a low wage worker to finance a half-million dollar electric truck? A lot of the problems of the past are going to come back to haunt us if we don’t address misclassification now.
I talked about the combination of passing laws and legal actions with Mexican gig workers. Gig workers there know that they’re getting the short end of the stick, despite a few saying they’re good with what Uber is doing. A big difference is the willingness of a lot of app drivers to recognize the problems and confront them head on.
Here we’ve had 30 or 40 years of deregulation, and the ideology of the independent contractor has really taken hold in the trucking industry. That is not as present in the app-based drivers today, so that’s certainly a difference. But in all of these cases the problem is to get workers to establish their own agency, and get people to say, “Yeah. I’m a misclassified employee. I do have rights.”
Legal action and political action could be an answer for the situation in Mexico, or one of the answers. Still, even here we’ve passed a wonderful law, but we still have billion-dollar corporations that skirt it. There are no real mechanisms of enforcement, or ways to keep these companies accountable that actually affects them in their pocketbooks. That’s an issue that we see across the labor movement. So it’s not the full strategy. I think it’s just two prongs in a multiple prong approach.
In Mexico they are looking at organizing unions specifically for gig workers. Independent unions are part of the solution for them – rideshare and driver unions that can cater to the needs of these workers in a much better way than a very large union representing many different industries.
There’s value in everything though. When you align with a very powerful union, like the Teamsters, you know you have more political clout. But I think one of the wonderful things that we’ve learned here is that we’re all doing similar work. We all have very similar demands, and we’re all fighting these battles in our respective jurisdictions. So how much more powerful could we be when we start really joining forces?And Uber continues to be enemy number one to workers everywhere.
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Muscle Memory
By Robert Gumpert and Peter Olney
Organizing takes grit and perseverance. In September of 2005 the George W. Bush US Park Service awarded the Alcatraz concession to Hornblower and dislodged the longstanding operator, Blue And Gold. Blue and Gold is union as are all the other ferry services in the Bay Area. Since 2005 the Alcatraz City Cruises have been non-union. Finally in September of 2022 the Inland Boatmen’s Union of the Pacific, the maritime division of the ILWU won a National Labor Relations Board election 52-11. The union was certified and began negotiations. To date there is no labor contract and on Saturday morning, May 25th about 50 workers – deckhands and captains walked off the job on an Unfair Labor Practice strike protesting the company’s stalling tactics in bargaining; 36 meetings and no contract.
“The cat is out of the bag and now the workers have muscle memory,” said ILWU Northern California Organizer Evan McLaughlin. He explained that once workers take strike action for the first time and feel their power and impunity, the company is now on warning that their operations are constantly under threat of disruption. Management got wind of the strike early and brought in managers to operate the ferries on an emergency basis. Scabbing resulted in some docking issues and delays.
The President of the SF Board of Supervisors, Aaron Peskin, joined the raucous picket. Peskin has announced his candidacy for Mayor of The City. He has been a constant supporter of the Alcatraz workers and the IBU. The workers picketed from 8:30 AM until 12:30 PM.
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Good news from the U.S.: the “American Lessons” from the Labor Notes Conference 2024
By Salvo Leonardi
On Friday PM April 19 I was scheduled to chair a Labor Notes workshop on “Organizing in the Construction Industry” I entered the designated hotel meeting room and approached the table in front to begin set up. I heard a vibrant Italian speaker and engaged with him. Turned out it was Salvatore Leonardi from the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro – CGIL. He had been a panelist for a discussion of international trade union solidarity. Later I met up with him in the lobby of the O’Hare Hyatt as he headed to Chicago to explore labor history and blues clubs. His solid knowledge of both genres really impressed me. His appreciation for the Windy City was amazing, and I vowed to stay in touch and meet up with him on my next visit to Italia. Soon after my return from Chicago Salvo posted an article he had written about Labor Notes. The article was impressive for its reflections from the perspective of one of the most advanced labor confederations in the industrialized world. I thought it should be published in the USA. The Forum is proud to publish the article in English. And of course, we thank Salvo for permission to publish and his excellent translation. Peter Olney, Stansbury Forum co-editor
“American Lessons” From the Labor Notes 2024 Conference
In recent times there is great ferment on the American trade union scene and it is full of energy and optimism. After decades of setbacks, defeats and disappointments, the world of work in the USA seems to have taken another path, changing the ideological range and organizational practices of the old accommodating “business unionism”, and consequently going on the offensive. This occurs on the basis of a tactical and strategic plan, which has been at the center of US trade union planning for some years, under the banner of a radical, bottom-up social movement unionism, the echoes of which we too have felt in Italy in terms of “organizing” and union reform, for example.
In 2023, more than half a million American workers went on strike, winning average wage increases of 6.6%. These are just some of the concrete examples of this phase of change:
- The recent sensational victories against the three auto giants (Ford, GM and Stellantis)
- The unionization of a large plant in the anti-union deep South (Volkswagen of Chattanooga, Tennessee)
- The paralysis imposed by actors and authors, until victory, in the world of Hollywood
- The unionization of 10,000 employees in 400 Starbucks coffee shops, as well as among the warehouse workers and drivers of UPS and Amazon, in Staten Island (NYC)
- The 25% wage increase in fast food restaurants in California
- Various victories of educators and academic workers
Part of making this possible – to give them their due – is this peculiar network “Labor Notes”(LN). Both an editorial and political-union elaboration, LN was born in 1979, on the initiative of a group of trade union militants and radical left socialists. It first took the form of an information and struggle magazine, publishing some handbooks, two being “Secrets of a Successful Organizer” and the “Troublemakers Handbook”. The latter handbook was a text that the current President of the renewed automotive workers’ union (UAW), Shawn Fain, has defined as nothing less than his secular “Bible” as an activist, inspiring him in the radical renewal with which he first climbed the ranks of the organization, and then guided it – in these last two years – towards goals that would have seemed unthinkable, until now.
But Labor Notes is also a Conference that is organized every two years, with continuous and exponential growth between one edition and another. April 19-21 saw as many as 4,700 grassroots delegates and trade union officials converge on a big hotel in Chicago from all over the United States. There was also representation from various other countries, including some of us – from FIOM and FDV-CGIL – brought together to discuss, exchange experiences and ideas in almost 300 workshops on trade union and industrial relations topics. This was a very interesting format due to its extremely pragmatic, operational, horizontal and decentralized character. Aimed at achieving maximum valorization and comparison between fighting practices conducted, mostly in single production units, it was a search for the most effective and successful tools and methods. The key to this grassroots unionism lies in the connection that can and must be built between organizing – understood as the ability to represent the unorganized – conflict, and collective bargaining aimed at an agreement truly full of improvements reflected in wages, and general working and living conditions. The workshops began with short keynote speeches and many concrete experiences shared to be passed on to network and establish contacts.
With just a couple of moments in plenary, at the beginning and at the end, the conference was a very dense program that lasted late into the evenings. Moments of leisure, and musical or theatrical performances, produced an atmosphere of great effervescence, because of the extraordinary presence of young and very young people. Children and grandchildren of that “Other America”, which has now powerfully returned to the international political and media scene, thanks to the pro-Palestine mobilizations on many university campuses. The keffiyeh was, even in Chicago, a dominant symbol placed on t-shirts and organizational jerseys: UAW, Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) or teachers, flight attendants, Amazon, UPS or Starbucks employees.
“How to overcome the apathy of your colleagues?”, “Overcoming workplace divisions”, “You can’t do it all yourself: learn it, do it”, “Planning for a strike”, “Before, during, and after negotiations: step-by-step strategies”. These were just some of the titles of the many workshops that each participant could choose to go to and listen and speak out in. They often sang in the halls of the Hyatt Hotel, and sometimes it almost seemed like attendance at a session of collective self-awareness, as when a workshop discussed “What to do when your union breaks your heart?”. But there were also presentations about history, as in the workshop about Socialists at work, or on the legendary figure of Walter Reuther, leader of the UAW during the “Thirty Glorious” years, from 1946 to 1970.
What was striking, at least from an Italian viewpoint, was the almost total lack of speeches and debates regarding the current political situation. Both with respect to the Biden presidency – which had initially proclaimed itself to be the most pro-union since Lyndon Johnson’s times, and which was supportive of the autoworkers during their three-week strike – and with respect to the risk, although clearly perceived as catastrophic, of a new Trump victory. Politics, conventionally understood, was simply the great absentee of the three days in Chicago. The reason can probably be found in the idea – typical in the USA – that workers and their union representatives must first know how to do it themselves. Meaning being able to face and seek the solution to their problems with their own strength, without placing too many expectations on the policies of “friendly” governments or diverting forces and energies into an unequal clash with hostile executives. The structurally decentralized character of the U.S. state, as well as of the trade unions and North American industrial relations, has evidently contributed to this. Collective action has always had to deal with the deliberate cumbersomeness of the procedures for accessing representation in the workplace, and – above all – with the virulent hostility of employers to union recognition, representation and collective bargaining.
There are many States where, in the name of a misunderstood (and legally sanctioned) “right-to-work,” employers can do everything they wish to ostracize requests for representation and strikes, including the systematic use of scabs. The bosses are therefore the first and true target of trade union action; and only secondarily does state power become the target. The inter-sectoral dimension: class, gender and race are intertwined. Yet research, discussion and mobilization are not dispersed in a thousand streams but are, as they say, “focused”, on the concrete possibilities that the trade union movement can realistically translate into conquests. A well-known orientation, however, since the times in which Selig Perlman, Samuel Gompers or Walter Reuther defined the theoretical outlines for the AFL-CIO. This had significant repercussions also on the Italian trade union scenario, traditionally skeptical in its left-wing towards that “trade unionism”, stigmatized by Lenin, to be ideologically weak (more job consciousness, than class consciousness). This theory was learned and translated by the greatest master of Italian labor law, Gino Giugni, who had discovered it in the 1950s, during his Fulbright at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. With his special doctrine on collective autonomy and auxiliary legislation, as the 1935 Wagner Act, which inspired the Italian Workers’ Statute of 1970, largely edited by the Giugni, at the time adviser of the socialist Ministry of Labor. Today that old and classic “voluntarist” matrix lives again in a radical sauce, as it did in our “hot” 70s keeping its distance from those bureaucratic and collaborationist encrustations that we had known at the time when Marchionne of FIAT, in Detroit, embraced the UAW leaders and extolled their virtues and exemplary values to their Italian colleagues. A piece of that UAW union leadership – let it be said here – came to an end following scandals and convictions for the corruption of having exchanged concessions for personal gain at the expense of workers.
Today the UAW wins again and does it in a big way as beacon of hope offering a model for everyone. The union proclaimed, and successfully concluded, three weeks of strike:
- With resistance funds capable of covering 500 dollars a week, for each striker (when will we reflect on this instrument profitably used by many unions abroad?)
- Increases of 25% in four and a half years (+11% immediately)
- Re-introduction of the so-called “COLA” (cost-of-living-adjustment)
- End of the two-tier regime, depending on professional seniority
- Increase in the starting hourly wage, from 16.25 dollars to 22.50
- And even a reimbursement of 110 dollars a day, lost during the strike pickets.
The agreement passed with large majorities in all the plants that voted on it. Victories, in trade union matters, are fundamental and contagious. “We have finally ended 40 years of concession bargaining. It’s the best contract of my entire life”, testifies an elderly GM union officer. The success against the Big Three of the automakers sparked a chain reaction. With a roar in the room, on Friday the 19th of April, the news of the victory in the vote, held at Volkswagen of Chattanooga, was welcomed, with 73% in favor of finally allowing the union to represent the 4,300 employees of the plant, after two attempts failed in the recent past.
In Chicago there was a large representation of trade union delegations from various countries; obviously Mexico – around fifty workshops were in Spanish, because of the strong presence of Latino workers. There were also significant delegations from Japan, South Korea and Europe: Unite, from the United Kingdom, the secretary of the German ver.di in person, Yanira Wolf,together with various exponents of IG Metall and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. The Swedish IF Metall was there to talk about the strike at Tesla (did you know that that union has one and a half billion euros – you read that right – in strike funds?) Italy was represented by the CGT and, for the CGIL, a delegation from FIOM and your author, for the Fondazione Di Vittorio (the CGIL institute of economic and social research), to report in an international workshop on a series of experiences of struggle carried out by the CGIL, in recent years.
The speech given by Michele De Palma, General Secretary of the metalworkers federation (FIOM-CGIL) aroused great interest, and enthusiasm. He spoke in the final plenary on Sunday morning, about our common struggles alongside the star of the whole event, the UAW’s Shawn Fain, who closed the conference. His rise to the presidency of the UAW, two years ago, was made possible thanks to the campaign of its most radical faction: the Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD). Their rejection of any bureaucratic and collaborationist drift, their promotion of militancy and democracy from below, and an offensive strategy, produced a foundational strategy that did not take long to produce its fruits. Starting with the contract for the Three Bigs Fain’s pose and prose are all a tribute to the class imagery of his people. And, in those rooms, he pronounces highly effective phrases, which warm the heart and generate a contagious enthusiasm. The concepts, already expressed in recent speeches reported on in the “Labor Notes” magazine sounded more or less like this:
“We are here to put an end to business unionism, endless concessions, union corruption and the shackles that have bound us. I have said many times that negotiating good contracts leads to good success, even on an organizational level. These are two things that go hand in hand. From this point of view, our strike was not only against the “Big Three”. It belonged to the entire working class. And it is proof of one thing: that the working class can win. It can change the world. We don’t win by playing defensively or by always just reacting to things. We don’t win by being nice to the bosses. We don’t win by telling our members what to do, what to say, or how to say it. We win by giving working class people the tools, inspiration and courage to stand up for themselves. From this point of view, I think, that the working class represents the arsenal of democracy, and that the workers are the liberators”.
When Shawn Fain finished his remarks, paraphrased above, the big hall of the hotel was rocked by a chorus of applause and chants at the end of this heartfelt speech. In the end he proposed to organize a united general strike on May 1, 2028; date on which the UAW collective agreement with the automotive “Big Three” will expire.
Yes; the data on unionization do not show any significant changes, union density remains a modest 10% only thanks to the strong contribution of public employees (33%) – and there could be serious repercussions if a Trump election were to result in an entirely pro-employer composition, within the crucial National Labor Relation Board (NLRB). But for now that audience of fierce and enthusiastic trade union activists enjoyed this moment of unexpected successes, after the many, too many disappointments of the past years.
There is a beautiful sunrise in Chicago, we will soon see whether it is the sign of a new and lasting spring for the American trade union movement. Let us hope that these recent conquests will speak and reverberate here in Italy too for the work and the fight that awaits us. But here in Chicago, we have seen conference methods which, due to the organizational format and – above all – the content of the approaches, it would be useful for us to scrutinize by adopting the best spirit of comparison and mutual and emulative learning.
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