Organized Labour and the Occupations Movement
Samir Sonti
The B u l l e t / Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 564
Chicago police arrest members of National Nurses United, and tear down their first aid tent at Occupy Chicago. [Photo:National United Nurses.]
Staying Power?
However, while an inner-core of participants may remain for months, with time the size of the direct occupations will likely wane and media attention will slowly gravitate to more profitable ventures. The travesty that unfolded in Wisconsin over the past ten months should serve as a painful reminder of that inevitability. And though the moment’s political salience may briefly persist, it will be fleeting unless anchored in something more durable than a demonstration, throwing into sharp relief the need for a level of organization that can sustain and expand upon the Occupy energy.
Years of Struggle
Here the civil rights movement, which is often invoked in relation to OWS, is instructive. Unmentioned in most grade school lore on the subject, the struggle for racial justice grew out of a deeply rooted organizational apparatus that had been constructed through decades of diligent labour and community organizing. Rosa Parks was a seasoned activist who had been trained at the legendary leftist organizing academy, the Highlander Folk School, and Martin Luther King Jr. owes his beginnings to veteran trade unionists who recruited him. No miracles initiated this historic fight; it was planned and executed by individuals and their organizations who through years of struggle in pursuit of concrete demands had cultivated powerful bases of support in specific communities.
Only through following this long-term organizing approach can OWS begin to harness the anger and energy it has made visible and translate it in into a dynamic, class-conscious movement. And only the labour movement has the experience and organizational capacity to take on the challenge. Weakened though they may be, and with all the limitations of their sedentary bureaucracies, unions are still the most democratic membership organizations in the United States, with established activists and infrastructures in cities across the country that possess the practical skills and resources necessary to carry on the fight, particularly when it becomes less visibly exciting. Though union density has precipitously declined in recent decades, still today millions of people have experienced real improvements in their lives through workplace struggles led by existing labour unions, a much larger and more representative cross-section of the population than is likely to turn out at any “Occupy” event.
It’s important to remember that historically, organized labour has been the most effective vehicle for challenging economic inequality; it is an empirical reality that when unions are weak wealth concentrates in the hands of the few, and when they’re strong it is at least a bit more evenly distributed. A recent study demonstrated that between 1973 and 2007 private sector unionization decreased by over 75 per cent and inequality increased by 40 per cent. In this spirit, OWS might best be considered as an opportunity to push the mainstream labour movement toward a more aggressive organizing strategy and, hopefully, an alternative political vision.
Rank-and-file militants in a variety of unions have engaged in this grueling project for decades, with some successes and many setbacks, and perhaps the most encouraging feature of OWS is the space it might create for more work of this sort. However, an opportunity is only as valuable as the concrete steps taken to capitalize on it, and unless the strategic thinking needed to orient and initiate that process begins in earnest, this wave of activism will likely join the recent anti-globalization and immigrants’ rights demonstrations in the annals of modern left history while neoliberalism continues its plunder unscathed.
A number of unions have taken up the OWS mantle and some inspiring labour-community partnerships have grown out of it. The New York City Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 was an early supporter, and even went to court to prevent police from ordering union drivers to bus arrested demonstrators to jail.
Samir Sonti is a graduate student at Cornell. He has worked for SEIU. This artilce first appeared on the Viewpoint Magazine website.
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