Spokes on a Wheel: Some Labor Notes on Intersecting Struggles

Neighborhood organizing, maybe because it is currently En Vogue for many radicals, is usually not thought of within the context of America's history of social movements. We can look back to the radical anti-war movements of the 1960s, the direct action in the forests in the 80s, the post-modern struggles against globalization and international debt in the 90s, and everything before and in between. One of the best ways to think about these is to look back to another radical institution: the spokes council. In an effort to develop anti-authoritarian modes of organizing people have created a myriad of consensus-based models, often times reflecting a form of theater more than a real gun-in-the-hand organizing strategy. The spokes council was a way to allow all groups in a coalition or action to have a say. Here each group had a delegate, each delegate representing a “spoke” in the rotating wheel of conversation.

In anti-authoritarian circles, modes of oppression are often thought about in similar ways so as to avoid the class reductionism that often plagued the left through its connections with orthodox Marxism. Here the term intersectionality often chimes the best, where we can acknowledge that different forms of oppression may intersect, but can still remain distinct. Class, race, gender, sexual orientation, body type, age, and other elements can be a source of both personal and institutional degradation for people, and we should look at the existing culture of subjugation as a sort of “matrix” of these oppressions, where one does not necessarily take predominance, even if class if often the place where organized struggle takes place.

It is in the context of the recent Labor Notes Troublemaker’s School that these thoughts of intertwining struggles, strategies, and oppression began to come together. Inside the world of housing justice you have the same elements that you see in the rest of the intersectional world of attack. Class, race, gender presentation, sexual orientation, and the like all play into how precarious your housing is, if you are even lucky enough to have a place to sleep for more than a night. In this way we can place housing as one of the areas of struggle inside this matrix, one of the spokes in a wheel. The most important thing to do is to connect these struggles along common lines and find ways of using each other’s tactics as a course in how we can move forward in our own movement. With this our thoughts should often return to one social battlefield that has historically had some of the most measureable success: the labor movement.
Labor Notes, whose tagline has always been “putting the movement back in the labor movement,” has been coined as one of the most radical voices that is still allowed into the larger labor movement. At their Troublemaker’s School you found the sponsorship of almost every major union in town, which is not unusual for a city like Portland, Oregon. The majority of people in the room were union members who were sponsored by their locals, as well as a myriad of progressive and revolutionary groups who helped with workshops and tabling. The Industrial Worker’s of the World, We Are Oregon, Jobs With Justice, the International Socialist Organization, and others, made up a unique offering for an event that was so roundly propped up by big labor, both in attendance and in funding.

The morning plenary was intended to jump right into a discussion about on the ground struggles by union leaders, though the beauracracy was left behind. This began with Stephanie Luce, a labor professor from the Murphy Institute in New York City. Without a sugar coating, she jumped right onto the frightening times we have entered in this post-crisis world. Unpredictable wages and benefits. Precarious work and the permanent “part-time” workplace. The rapidly increasing gap in wealth. Employers have been working together to find ways to maximize their profits, and now its time that the unions finally get together in an effort to repel the current change to the American workplace.

"We see stagnating wages, sometimes falling wages. We’ve seen an increase in worker poverty. We have seen a dramatic increase in inequality in nations and between nations. Globally, we are seeing the rise of what we call 'precarious work.' This is all kinds of work where employers are shifting the risk of employment from the employer onto the worker. So that can be anything from a temp worker, informal sector worker, contracted out worker, seasonal worker, day laborers, people with low wages, no benefits, and no job security. This isn’t just an accident; it’s not just an inevitable piece of globalization. It didn’t happen this way. For the last thirty years employers have been working hard, they’ve been working together, to create a world in which they can pursue maximum profit with nothing standing in their way. One of the things standing in their way of maximum profit is workers, worker’s rights, and unions." (1)

While the workforce has actually doubled while job creation has not, and it creates a situation where regular workers are being pitted against one another rather than standing in solidarity. An example she gave was systems where nurses bid for jobs, and the position is awarded to the worker who will take the lowest wage. There are situations when retailers, often times “mall shops,” will actually hire 1,000 workers when only a hundred real positions are in place. This allows workers to never reach full-time status, to never have consistency in their workplace, and to make them incredibly dispensable if they ever were to fight to improve their conditions.

"The threat to our work is the employer’s ability to pit us against one another. The employer’s ability to make us think that we have to fight each other for jobs. That’s the threat to us, and that’s the thing we need to focus on. How are employers dividing us, and how can we prevent their power to do that. So what do we do? As we are looking around the world we are seeing more and more examples of unions that are willing to work with other unions and community allies together towards these new strategies. The strategy that is not based on excluding, but including. If we include our labor movement to be the whole world, the whole community, then we have more power. (…) We have seen the increase in what we call 'community benefits agreements.' This is where people come together in the community and say, 'We need jobs, living wage work. We need union work. But we need to do it together as a community, not pitted against one another.' So what we do is build these alliances and say look, we all have shared needs. We all want jobs. We all want a living wage. We all want environmentally sustainable development. We want childcare. We want parks. We want housing. Let’s do it together. And let’s demand that our cities fund those kinds of development." (1)

The interconnectedness and commonality working people had became the central theme, and was constantly discussed as the issues at play we seen in and outside of the workplace. Sarah Chamber, a leader from the Chicago teacher’s strike and one of the union members to develop the labor-community solidarity projects, stood strong on the unity that comes from fighting for schools and for teachers simultaneously. Currently they are facing fifty-four school closures, a hit list that would be devastating to the most economic desperate regions. This is not even to mention the massive layoff that will take place. She pointed out that the conversation has changed, however, and the dialogue is not about pitting individual schools or teachers against each other. Instead, even parents are talking about occupying the schools and protecting them entirely, which is the kind of mentality that only comes from a bottom-up style of organizing that involves the community in a labor struggle. (2)

The workshops make up the real meat of the conference, and they are geared towards breakaway groups and the real development of workable strategies rather than the abstract theory of an academic lecture. The current Director of Labor Notes, Mark Brenner, did a workshop on how to beat apathy within the rank-and-file union membership, while there were also tracks on how to create effective communication materials and how to “fight back” in the deteriorating world of education by uniting teachers and parents. The session on organizing temporary and part-time workers was particularly interesting given the new trend towards the permanent “temoraryization” of the workplace, especially in areas such as higher education or physical labor. The difficulties here are obvious since workers often don’t know each other, they aren’t always in their position long enough to do a traditional union organizing campaign, and they often lack solidarity with the full time workers. The discussion had input from people who had organized in their own special working situation, which ranged from Wal-Mart workers who had organized in the recent Wild Cat strike campaigns and a Portland IWW member who had organized around wage theft. Together people worked on ideas to create effective organizing strategies that could both help in individual situations, as well as create a long-term praxis for attacking the precarious workplace. To start you need to find solidarity with the full time staff. This will often include as one worker-organizer said, “You get full time workers to care about part-time workers by getting part-time workers involved in full-time problems. “ This meant that it is important to have part-time workers integrated into the actual issues of the workplace. This means locating issues that affect both the part-time and full-time staff, which can create solidarity through a shared experience. Often times the same wage problems are at play in both sectors.

The situation for college professors was addressed specifically, which is incredibly important as a new class of heavily indebted graduates is trying to start their academic careers. All colleges are attempting to offset costs by hiring fewer tenure-track faculty and instead contracting adjunct faculty at a much lower rate. These positions are often negotiated each term, leaving them without benefits and stability of any kind. This is especially problematic considering the kind of debt most people with terminal degrees are carrying around with them. One thing that was discussed was how difficult it is for full-time faculty to have part-time faculty in their department since those people are often very low-paid and without as much experience. What this generally means is that entire departments are having less experienced faculty, which could generally lower the quality of education and the prestige of the entire department or field. Instead, it benefits them to look to hire more full time faculty, giving those adjuncts the opportunity to work towards a tenure-track position where they will be much more prepared and will care more about their position. Instead, many adjuncts are forced to teach many more courses than a tenure track professor at several different universities. One tactic that could be used is to discuss with full-time faculty a demand for a raise freeze until the part-time faculty is up to the same per-class rate. What this does is eventually make it less profitable to hire part-time faculty, and the departments will usually be forced to hire more full-time faculty rather than go through the adjuncting process. They also pointed out that many adjunct faculty work part-time at several state and community college, which all technically have the same employer. There is a growing grievance that may say that working multiple part-time positions for the same employer, the State, should grant them full-time status and the same kind of benefits. No matter what the profession, the important thing was always to speak up about your concerns and to make sure you get to know your fellow workers.

As the keynote and workshops continued, one thing became central to the discussion: connectivity. This meant connecting the different issues that affect the union membership. Seeing where the economic and social issues were. Finding ways to create campaigns that advance the kind of struggles that the union movement has always been centered on, but doing it both inside and outside of the workplace. The most interesting example of this came from Angela MacWhinnie from We Are Oregon. This project was started as a joint venture from SEIU Locals 503 and 49 as a way of moving into the communities and taking the same strategies that won in contract battles into other sectors. The idea here was to organize the unemployed, fight wage theft, and to organize against foreclosures. It is the last one that they have become best known for as they have arranged some of the largest eviction watch campaigns we have ever seen, and worked with groups like Unsettle Portland (a Take Back the Land local) and the Portland Liberation Organizing Council on direct action to stop foreclosure. This was an unexpected turn from one of the largest unions in the country, and can mark as one of the most important intersections between struggles to come out of big labor.

"My experience of community campaigning with unions is often that we think of community and unions as two parallel organizations, and we campaign together… Its more helpful to think of the idea that unions actually exist in the community, and we are in relationship with the community all the time, whether we’re intentional about that or not. And so when we turn the spicket on and off for community campaigns, sometimes we have really “unintentional” relationships, when we are not being 'intentional' about it, that are not that helpful when building long-term community work together. So, how do we think 'intentionally' about community relationships and not just have it be about a specific, current worker campaign. But also, it felt like, and I think a lot of folks in the room have already said this, that we were doing lots of stuff in trying to organize worksites and fight for contracts and stop boss attacks, that we weren’t changing enough things for enough people to feel like enough was happening for working class folks. So we thought, 'How do we just try this a different way for a little bit and see what can happen.' We start to think about the attacks we have been experiencing, and we say the labor movement’s been under attack but its also the whole community of folks that share our economic conditions are under attack. That these attacks are happening in our worksites, they are happening in our neighborhoods, they are happening all over the place. " (3)

The hope was then to create a community group that could begin to create a unity in economic and social struggle that did not have the clearly defined barriers that normally defined the labor movement as of late. The goal was then to work towards and expansive organization that could address the related issues that took place outside of the workplace.

"We wanted to talk about really big visions, not just think about the little box we have been put in and kept in in the labor movement around 'these are the things you can do and can’t do.' These are the things you can demand and can’t demand. These are the people you can work with and can’t work with to build movement and struggle. We wanted to try and explode that box and talk about the type of direct action we aren’t supposed to talk about, and work with the people that maybe we’re not supposed to work with but share our economic conditions. And to really think about how we explode the climate or organizing, whether that organizing ends up being directly related to union organizing drives or not. So really trying to engage with working class communities and raise the possibilities of organizing. Raise what’s possible to achieve through organizing, and excite folks about organizing…(When we started) People really thought that this was maybe not the best idea, maybe not the best use of resources, and maybe we were just skunks that were trying to do a bait in switch. Like we would have all these great ideas about direct action and then we would drop all that and then just want to talk about Obama later, or something like that. Lots of people faced us with those kinds of fears and concerns when we started, and that was a huge challenge. To start to build those relationships and to start to take that on, and to think about how we develop trust. How do we try to create enough openness and transparency and inclusiveness in the way we are going about stuff, and how do we open ourselves to being self critical about the reasons people were hesitant about why we were doing this work in the first place." (3)

This kind of internal discussion has been very important to people that have been normally suspicious of large unions participating in social movements, especially when unions like SEIU like to flood organizations around elections and then pull back once Democrats have been elected. The union bureaucracy has often been firmly entrenched in the world of electoral reform at the cost of organizing and worker participation, which is why this approach to organizing can be marked as a possible step forward both for SEIU and the labor movement as a whole.

"The exciting stuff was really seeing what united folks, and what really took shape, and seeing how many different folks really came together and brought excitement, creativity, and ideas about how we could do this organizing work. Part of that was building work around foreclosure and eviction, starting with a committee of foreclosure fighters that included people resisting in their own homes as well as folks that were supporting their resistance. And now (we) have thousands of folks who support that work, as well as hundreds of people who have signed up to be a part of the rapid response network, and have put their bodies on the line to help support people to stay in their homes. (3)"

What does this intersection really look like, rather than these mammoth organizations simply throwing money and staff time at community organizing? To look at this is to look at the core of the union movement, beyond the liberal sell-out to the Democratic Party and the politics at the top.

A union, at its center, is when workers come together for a common end. They want to have safer working conditions. Better wages. Real benefits. Control in their workplace. Individually, they do not have much power when confronting those who wield the capital and scheduling pen, but together they have the ability to completely shut down an institution by withholding labor. Or, to go even further, to take over that shop and boot the boss out onto the street. To take it over. As Portland Wobblie Tim Acott says in Think Over:

"When we come together on the job to address our common problems with the shared strength of our common action, we are doing something. We’re not talking about it, though that’s important, and we’re not seeking publicity and making a big show of it, though those things can be valuable in their place. We are acting on it. Doing. We are the subjects, to put in grammatical terms, and the problems is our object, up which we, in common activity, act to change. That’s action. Verb." (4)

For this direct action to be successful it has to be built on that common respect between the workers, that solidarity. It is that solidarity, that network of common support between workers, that is the union. The institution that works within the workplace to organize is simply a tool to give formal structure, but the actual union is in the common experience between the workers. It is the understanding that when one worker is subjugated, we all share in their pain. When this develops in a workplace a union is already present, the card simply gives it a name.

When you boil this syndicalism down to its core it doesn’t seem at all like it has to exist only in a workplace, or that your 9-to-5 is the only place you can find solidarity to struggle. Out in the neighborhoods these same elements are crucial if there is to be any sort of effective defense against a foreclosure or any other kind of fight for justice and equality in our living situations. Once I receive a foreclosure notice I could attempt to stay in my home despite the odds, but there is no force on my side other than my voice and personal will. When I connect with my neighbor there are two of is. If I connect with the whole street there may be thirty. With the whole block there will be100. The neighborhood, maybe a 1,000. Now the forces that would remove me, the bank with the support of the police, have to come up with a community movement that has the power to literally defy them. To possibly reverse the decision and, if taken to the limit, to create the kind of lasting institutions like we have in the labor movement that have the power to completely change the way that housing property functions.

If these patterns of syndicalism, the organized solidarity of the people, can be successful in the workplace, then why can it not be tried in the neighborhood? Today there are several tenant syndicalist project in place in the form of apartment unions where tenants come together to negotiate with the landlord, the boss of the living quarters. These have not been as flashy as some of the other direct action movements, but in some ways may have even more successes. It is not about rejecting movements like Take Back the Land in favor of tenants unions, but instead looking at those key elements and trying to replicate them in the larger movement building. If a neighborhood is going to successfully defend itself against a large-scale assault by the banking class then it will only do so by having a core solidarity between neighbors and the impetus to bargain together. No house will be safe on its own, but many together are a fighting force. This can even go beyond housing to other fields, such as healthcare, ecology, anti-war organizing, and more. Likewise, these neighborhood organizations, once powerful, can actually jump into related struggles. A neighborhood can fight to keep out environmentally destructive corporations, deforestation, or nuclear power plants. It can come together to save public health clinics, or to defend itself against police persecution and racial profiling. This is a fighting force that can win by sheer strength of numbers and mutual aid. From all the greatest strikes in history we can see that working people can completely change the nature of the game by banding together, so why can we not employ the same concept to the other spheres of struggle? If we are going to transfer short-term defensive actions in neighborhoods into a long-term revolutionary movement, we are going to have to create permanent structures of solidarity that are going to bring this syndicalism to the rest of social life.

The struggle is going to again take on a counter-legal strategy in direct action, which has been foundational to the approach of groups like Take Back the Land and Occupy Our Homes. The simple fact that it is illegal to house a homeless family in an empty, bank-owned home is a stark arguing point that points out the paradox of the current system. Union strategies, when taken to their logical conclusion, share this same challenge to conventional legal frameworks. The National Labor Relations Board process, which is the legal entity that handles labor law and regulation, is built with the employing class in mind, not organized labor. As we are seeing with the emergence of strikes in places like Wal-Mart and McDonalds, the legal framework is incredibly narrow. Repeated short strikes are illegal, as are solidarity pickets for more than 30 days by a union without filing for a union election. This essentially bars solidarity actions between a union and an unorganized group of workers attempting to fight in their workplace. Beyond this there are a myriad of restrictions about interactions with workers, union elections, effective long-term strategies, and the like. At the core of the union, which is what we are talking about, these rules are almost antithetical to actual organizing that sees direct action as a core element of building worker power. As Joe Burns points out, a new strategy has begun to emerge as unions support the self-organization of workers in industries that were conventionally seen as “unorganizable” by much of big labor.

"This strategy focuses on building organization inside the workplace, rather than on rigged National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election process. By strategically striking, a group of activists can convince their co-workers that fighting back is possible, raise publicity for their struggle, and pressure employers into granting concessions. It’s a very traditional strategy, reaching back to a time when a union meant people coming together. With advantages of a fresh perspective and strong community ties, these emerging forms of worker organization represent the new hope for the labor movement." (5)

As we have seen the decline of the labor movement over the last three decades, a new direction is needed to reclaim the core elements that make a union more than just a contract factory for negotiations.

In this same way we can see that the elements that connect labor and housing justice are still important since illegality and direct action play a component in both. It may seem more difficult since there is no government agency touted with respecting the rights of neighborhood organizations, but as we know this only came into being because of the massive rise in organized labor and it is often used to make unions impotent rather than to ensure their prosperity. The same basic issues are at play since the most effective strategies remain illegal across the board, and both rely on direct action to make each other feel empowered in their respective sector.

This direct action has been especially effective in combating wage theft, an area where conventional union structures have been ineffective at dealing with outside of their closed shops. In the part-time worker workshop they again mentioned this, with one immigrant worker telling this story of stolen wages and manipulation by drug addicted bosses. Along with the help of a local worker’s center and the Portland Solidarity Network he is seeing his wages returned to him, a result that came clearly from the threat of exposure and resistance by groups of people that extend far beyond the employer’s pocketbook. This same kind of “solidarity network” is replicated throughout ground-up unionism and neighborhood organizing, and once we acknowledge that things like wage theft and fraudulent foreclosure are related issues we can find the ability to make our networks of affected people grow even larger. One example of this connectivity is how often wage theft is incurred by people who are housing insecure, two things that are targeted directly by solidarity network support.

The network is going to become critical, as the need for the intersectional “spokes council” may be the model for how to deal with the coming anti-austerity movement. After the sequestration of 2013 we are seeing public budgets slashed roundly, and these cuts are inevitably to be felt by people in the lower socio-economic spheres in areas like their workplaces, healthcare, and housing. While labor and housing struggles are rightly locating their work and direct action in their specific locations, the workplace or neighborhoods, they will need to connect in solidarity to paint a larger picture of anti-austerity work. This culture of budget cuts and the deflation of the social safety net can be felt in almost every area of the country, even supposedly liberal areas like Portland, Oregon. At the recent Portland Budget hearing, hundreds of people packed the room to tell the Mayor and City Council that they will not tolerate a ten-percent budget cut in all government programs. This would directly affect programs like public housing, which is already grossly underfunded as it is. Representatives from a number of unions as well as the People’s Budget Project and the newly formed Solidarity Against Austerity Committee brought in signs and banners, as well as their voices, in a show of united support against these cuts (6).

When we look to our organizing history we should appreciate the broadness of the different struggles that we can draw inspiration from, and labor has one of the most transformative records of any American attempt at class power. The issues that are at play in the business and trade unions are the same that can be said of many of the non-profits that deal with housing insecurity and homelessness, and we can try to counter this by replacing the service-model with a solidarity based model of action. In this way we can find a direct connection with democratizing elements within the labor movement, and to tie in with them in the larger fight for social justice. We Are Oregon is not the only example of a union going out into the community, but it is one that really shows that these projects can tap into the kind of radical community building missions that people have in their own anti-authoritarian spaces. Unions are not simply the “left-wing of capital,” but were marked as one of the most successful spokes of this larger wheel against oppression. It is up to us to build even stronger movements among the other spokes, and to connect them up in solidarity whenever possible. We can look at the elements that have made the union movement successful, and the garbage that has cost some of its revolutionary potential, as strategic guideposts for how we can be successful from blockade to blockade. This does not mean we should accept them as they are, but acknowledge them as a powerful working class institution that needs to be democratized and connected to active struggle. This could mean engaging in dual-unionism by associating with radical unions like the Industrial Worker’s of the World, or working within them in projects like Teamsters for a Democratic Union.

The conference continued with workshops on reviving the strike as a tactic, how to use rank and file democracy to strengthen union efforts, and how we can come together in the anti-austerity movement. Each component of this drives home the central point that there are certain things that we should be expecting from our unions and from our community organizations: the ability to work together. The struggle works across sectional lines and has many fronts, and if we are going to be successful then we need to learn from each other and find ways to stay connected.

Footnotes
1. Luche, Stephanie. (2013, April). Beyond Bargaining. Speech presented at the 2013 Labor Notes Troublemaker’s School, Portland, OR.
2. Chambers, Sara. (2013, April). Beyond Bargaining. Speech presented at the 2013 Labor Notes Troublemaker’s School, Portland, OR.
3. MacWhinnie, Angela. (2013, April). Beyond Bargaining. Speech presented at the 2013 Labor Notes Troublemaker’s School, Portland, OR.
4. Acott, Tim. Think Over: An Introduction to the Industrial Workers of the World. (Eberhardt Press), 15.
5. Burns, Joe. “A Strategy Based on Strikes Means Breaking the Law.” Labor Notes, April 2013, 6-7. (Of course I had to cite an article from Labor Notes in this one!)
6. Vorpahl, Mark. “Opposition Grows Fierce to Austerity Cuts in Portland.” Occupy.com, April 4, 2013. http://www.occupy.com/article/opposition-grows-fierce-austerity-cuts-portland