NOVEMBER 15, 2011 Good-Bye To the “Middle-Class”?A Lesson for Labor From Occupy Wall Streetby STEVE EARLY
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has given our timorous, unimaginative, and politically ambivalent unions a much-needed ideological dope slap. Some might describe this, more diplomatically, as a second injection of “outside-the-box” thinking and new organizational blood.
Top AFL-CIO officials first sought an infusion of those scarce commodities in labor when they jetted into Wisconsin last winter. Without their planning or direction, the spontaneous community-labor uprising in Wisconsin was in the process of recasting the debate about public sector bargaining throughout the U.S. So they were eager to join the protest even though it was launched from the bottom up, rather than the top-down, in response to headquarters directives from Washington, D.C.
This fall, OWS has become the new Lourdes for the old, lame, and blind of American labor. Union leaders have been making regular visits to Zuccotti Park and other high-profile encampments around the country. According to NYC retail store union leader Stuart Applebaum, “the Occupy movement has changed unions”—both in the area of membership mobilization and ”messaging.”
It would be a miraculous transformation indeed if organized labor suddenly embraced greater direct action, democratic decision-making, and rank-and-file militancy. Since that’s unlikely to occur in the absence of internal upheavals, unions might want to focus instead on casting aside the crutch of their own flawed messaging. That means adopting the Occupation movement’s brilliant popular “framing” of the class divide and ditching labor’s own muddled conception of class in America.
Them and Us Updated
In his 1974 memoir and union history, United Electrical Workers co-founder Jim Matles reminded readers that labor struggles are about “them and us”—or, as OWS puts it, “the 1 percent” vs. the “99 percent.” Unfortunately, most other unions have long relied on high-priced Democratic Party consultants, their focus groups and opinion polling, to shape labor’s public “messaging” in much less effective fashion. The results of this collaboration have been unhelpful, to say the least. Organizations that are supposed to the voice of the working class majority have instead positioned themselves–narrowly and confusedly–as defenders of America’s “middle class,” an always fuzzy construct now being rendered even less meaningful by the recession-driven downward mobility of millions of people.
As SUNY professor Michael Zweig argued in his book, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best-Kept Secret (Cornell ILR Press, 2000), labor’s never ending mantra about the “middle class” leaves class relations—and the actual class position of most of the population–shrouded in rhetorical fog.
Zweig points out that the working class in America today looks quite different than the blue-collar proletariat of the last century, which leads many to believe that differences in “status, income, or life-styles” define where they stand on the economic and social ladder. But “the real basis of social class lies in the varying amounts of power people have at work and in the larger society….The sooner we realize that classes exist and understand the power relations that are driving the economic and political changes swirling around us, the sooner we will be able to build an openly working class politics.”
As Zweig would agree I’m sure, labor’s “framing” not only lacks the clear resonance of that employed by the new anti-capitalist campaigners of OWS; “one of the great weaknesses” of the standard union view of class “is that it confuses the target of political conflict.” When the working class disappears into an amorphous “middle class,” not only do the “working poor” (a mere 46 million strong) drop out of the picture, but “the capitalist class disappears into ‘the rich.’ And when the capitalist class disappears from view, it cannot be a target.”
Well, thanks to OWS —but not most unions—that target is back in view. As a result of Occupation activity, there is now a far more favorable climate of public opinion for waging key contract fights at Verizon and other Fortune 500 companies.
A Corporate Pig Roast in Albany
During the two-week strike by 45,000 Verizon workers in August, union PR people issued leaflets urging support for the CWA-IBEW “fight to defend middle-class jobs.” This characterization of strike goals enabled Verizon to run newspaper ads claiming that the $75,000 a year or more earned by telephone technicians made them part of the “upper middle class”—and thus, apparently not worthy of sympathy from customers or members of the public whose jobs provide family incomes closer to the national or regional average.
By late October, Verizon technicians, who are part of a reform movement in CWA Local 1101, had marched through lower Manhattan in solidarity with OWS and along with NYC teachers, teamsters, and transit workers. Similar links between occupiers and Verizon contract campaigners developed in Boston.
Meanwhile, in upstate New York, members of CWA Local 1118 held a “corporate pig roast”—right around the corner from “Cuomoville,” the OWS encampment in downtown Albany that has so annoyed the state’s Democratic governor. At this OWS-inspired event, Verizon workers invited occupiers (more used to vegan and vegetarian fare) to join them. They were also brandishing new signs, with a far better, more universalist message: “We are the 99 percent!”
Interaction like this, between OWS and union rank-and-filers, has been mutually beneficial in many other places. On the labor side, Occupation activity has been a much-needed source of new energy and ideas. Lets hope that union members can keep pushing labor’s communications strategy in a more resonant OWS-influenced direction. If they succeed with that objective, more substantive and harder to achieve organizational change could be next on the agenda.
STEVE EARLY is a former national staff member of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) who has been active in labor causes since 1972. He is the author of The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor (Haymarket Books, 2010, a contributor to the forthcoming, Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back, from Monthly Review Press.
NOVEMBER 15, 2011
Good-Bye To the “Middle-Class”?
A Lesson for Labor From Occupy Wall Street
by STEVE EARLY
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has given our timorous, unimaginative, and politically ambivalent unions a much-needed ideological dope slap. Some might describe this, more diplomatically, as a second injection of “outside-the-box” thinking and new organizational blood.
Top AFL-CIO officials first sought an infusion of those scarce commodities in labor when they jetted into Wisconsin last winter. Without their planning or direction, the spontaneous community-labor uprising in Wisconsin was in the process of recasting the debate about public sector bargaining throughout the U.S. So they were eager to join the protest even though it was launched from the bottom up, rather than the top-down, in response to headquarters directives from Washington, D.C.
This fall, OWS has become the new Lourdes for the old, lame, and blind of American labor. Union leaders have been making regular visits to Zuccotti Park and other high-profile encampments around the country. According to NYC retail store union leader Stuart Applebaum, “the Occupy movement has changed unions”—both in the area of membership mobilization and ”messaging.”
It would be a miraculous transformation indeed if organized labor suddenly embraced greater direct action, democratic decision-making, and rank-and-file militancy. Since that’s unlikely to occur in the absence of internal upheavals, unions might want to focus instead on casting aside the crutch of their own flawed messaging. That means adopting the Occupation movement’s brilliant popular “framing” of the class divide and ditching labor’s own muddled conception of class in America.
Them and Us Updated
In his 1974 memoir and union history, United Electrical Workers co-founder Jim Matles reminded readers that labor struggles are about “them and us”—or, as OWS puts it, “the 1 percent” vs. the “99 percent.” Unfortunately, most other unions have long relied on high-priced Democratic Party consultants, their focus groups and opinion polling, to shape labor’s public “messaging” in much less effective fashion. The results of this collaboration have been unhelpful, to say the least. Organizations that are supposed to the voice of the working class majority have instead positioned themselves–narrowly and confusedly–as defenders of America’s “middle class,” an always fuzzy construct now being rendered even less meaningful by the recession-driven downward mobility of millions of people.
As SUNY professor Michael Zweig argued in his book, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best-Kept Secret (Cornell ILR Press, 2000), labor’s never ending mantra about the “middle class” leaves class relations—and the actual class position of most of the population–shrouded in rhetorical fog.
Zweig points out that the working class in America today looks quite different than the blue-collar proletariat of the last century, which leads many to believe that differences in “status, income, or life-styles” define where they stand on the economic and social ladder. But “the real basis of social class lies in the varying amounts of power people have at work and in the larger society….The sooner we realize that classes exist and understand the power relations that are driving the economic and political changes swirling around us, the sooner we will be able to build an openly working class politics.”
As Zweig would agree I’m sure, labor’s “framing” not only lacks the clear resonance of that employed by the new anti-capitalist campaigners of OWS; “one of the great weaknesses” of the standard union view of class “is that it confuses the target of political conflict.” When the working class disappears into an amorphous “middle class,” not only do the “working poor” (a mere 46 million strong) drop out of the picture, but “the capitalist class disappears into ‘the rich.’ And when the capitalist class disappears from view, it cannot be a target.”
Well, thanks to OWS —but not most unions—that target is back in view. As a result of Occupation activity, there is now a far more favorable climate of public opinion for waging key contract fights at Verizon and other Fortune 500 companies.
A Corporate Pig Roast in Albany
During the two-week strike by 45,000 Verizon workers in August, union PR people issued leaflets urging support for the CWA-IBEW “fight to defend middle-class jobs.” This characterization of strike goals enabled Verizon to run newspaper ads claiming that the $75,000 a year or more earned by telephone technicians made them part of the “upper middle class”—and thus, apparently not worthy of sympathy from customers or members of the public whose jobs provide family incomes closer to the national or regional average.
By late October, Verizon technicians, who are part of a reform movement in CWA Local 1101, had marched through lower Manhattan in solidarity with OWS and along with NYC teachers, teamsters, and transit workers. Similar links between occupiers and Verizon contract campaigners developed in Boston.
Meanwhile, in upstate New York, members of CWA Local 1118 held a “corporate pig roast”—right around the corner from “Cuomoville,” the OWS encampment in downtown Albany that has so annoyed the state’s Democratic governor. At this OWS-inspired event, Verizon workers invited occupiers (more used to vegan and vegetarian fare) to join them. They were also brandishing new signs, with a far better, more universalist message: “We are the 99 percent!”
Interaction like this, between OWS and union rank-and-filers, has been mutually beneficial in many other places. On the labor side, Occupation activity has been a much-needed source of new energy and ideas. Lets hope that union members can keep pushing labor’s communications strategy in a more resonant OWS-influenced direction. If they succeed with that objective, more substantive and harder to achieve organizational change could be next on the agenda.
STEVE EARLY is a former national staff member of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) who has been active in labor causes since 1972. He is the author of The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor (Haymarket Books, 2010, a contributor to the forthcoming, Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back, from Monthly Review Press.
NOVEMBER 15, 2011
COUNTERPUNCH
by SUSAN GALLEYMORE
What a welcome relief the Occupy movement’s trend of “leaderless” groups! True, this seemingly contradictory concept is difficult to absorb in a culture the promotes a leadership style that models the strongest, loudest, most persistent, and most vocal monopolizing the microphone – both physical and its cultural equivalent.
But, as Americans know well, repeat something often enough and it becomes part of the cultural vernacular. So, despite the difficulty politicians, media, and many Americans have in grasping this new paradigm, Occupy movements across the country continue as leaderless groups.
After the Oakland camp’s most recent tossing by police word-of-mouth convened about 1,000 people at the main library to strategize. Then they marched the four blocks back to City Hall for the 6 p.m. General Assembly.
There are refreshing and humorous moments at GAs when a random person from the crowd hops the line of speakers, commandeers the mic, and rambles on about the CIA commanding “us all through the fillings in our teeth”, that we’re at the “end times”, or that aliens are watching from outer space and waiting to invade. Then, the mic is retrieved, gently, and GA business continues.
Last night, the group reiterated its commitment to non-violence; anyone unable or unwilling to practice non-violence will be escorted, gently, from the group. It also consensually agreed that Saturday, November 19 is the next major gathering in Oakland for those aching for a different system of governance, society, and relationship to one another.
These peaceful and informal GAs belie the myths perpetuated by local government and the media about epidemics of violence at Occupy sites.
Then again, the movement is exposing other cultural myths and morality tales for what they are, too: formulas for shaming generations of wage-earners into silent compliance.
Presidential hopeful Herman Cain recently reiterated a classic: “If you’re not rich, don’t blame Wall St, blame yourself.”
Variations on the theme include:
The rich have what they have because they “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps”.
“God” shows His approval of the righteously hard-working by endowing them with material wealth.
The unemployed have given up or are too lazy to seek jobs.
“The American Dream” is there for the taking by anyone willing to work for it
Education ensures success.
The planet is a treasure trove of natural resources for bold risk-takers to tap.
Indeed, even the myth that police maintain social order for business is evaporating in the face of reality.
Jesse Smith lives in downtown Oakland and, at first, he was skeptical of the Occupy movement’s manifestation in his neighborhood. After he reconnoitered, talked with Occupiers, and understood that they echoed his grievances about our country’s direction, he joined the camp’s business liaison group.
Yesterday, he stood in the sunshine at the police barricades erected after the police raid early that morning and explained that the business liaison group had surveyed some 100 businesses in a 2 block radius around City Hall.
“We collected data that no one else seems to have: around one third of the business owners report neutral impact on their business by the occupation; another third, owners of convenience stores and pizza joints, report a positive impact – business has gone up; the rest, places negatively impacted, are the attractive retail outlets that tend to be chain stores.”
Most business owners note that the police actions are “the only detriment that they experience to their bottom line.” They say their vendors call and ask them, ‘Is it safe to come to downtown Oakland?’ There’s an impression outside of Oakland that there’s been a need for a constant police line and that raids and violent police actions are imminent. This, if anything, is what is killing commerce here.”
Dorothy King is the owner of the sixty-year-old Oakland-based family business Everett and Jones barbeque.
“People say small business owners in Oakland suffer because people don’t spend money here. No, if the small business owners who live and work in Oakland suffer it is because the big banks take our money out of our community and do not invest in our city.”
In the sunshine, a protester near Jesse Smith patrolled the police barricades behind which municipal workers picked up debris from the for-now demolished encampment. One side of the sign he carried urged, “Mayor Quan, City Council, how about a little imagination?” The other side read, “Re-Occupy asap.”
Judging by how the majority of people conduct themselves in Oakland these days, peacefully and with determination, it is only a matter of time before the latter comes true.
Susan Galleymore is a former “military mom” and a radio host, writer, and author of Long Time Passing: Mothers Speak about War and Terror. Contact her at susan@raisingsandradio.org.
