Let's make the Deep South an example for the rest of the country
It has become a mantra among progressives that Hurricane Katrina did not create, but merely laid bare, the gross injustices long suffered by residents of the Gulf Coast. It is, after all, the Deep South we're talking about. But what are we going to do about it, now that the cities and towns of that region have been reduced either to rubble or to a soggy, moldy, rotting mess?
Let's review, first of all, the situation that Katrina found when she arrived:
1. A service economy dominated by low-wage, non-union, tourism jobs, either in New Orleans hotels or Gulfport/Biloxi casinos.
2. Massive environmental injustice due to an abundance of oil drilling and refining, a bad habit of wetlands destruction, and a failure to invest responsibly in infrastructure.
3. Racial injustice left over from slavery and Jim Crow.
Sounds like a microcosm of contemporary American society, no? And our political and economic elite have responded with a cute little demonstration of what they'd like to do to the rest of the country: Bush has already suspended prevailing-wage, affirmative-action, and environmental regulations and handed out no-bid contracts like candy to his best corporate friends. What's more, the New Orleans business community wants to rebuild the city without all the poor people.
The good news is that there's already some organizing going on. Even before the hurricane, UNITE-HERE was organizing casino workers in Mississippi, having won organizing rights via last year's strike in Atlantic City. And a few years ago there was a mostly unsuccessful project called HOTROC to organize the hotels in New Orleans.
In the immediate aftermath, community organizations have been sprouting like mushrooms after a good rain. Community Labor United, a seven-year-old local community organization, has put together the People's Hurricane Relief Fund & Oversight Coalition. ACORN, a national organization based in New Orleans, has been organizing refugees in Houston, Baton Rouge, and elsewhere, and is launching a Hurricane Survivors Association to fight for the right of return and a fair reconstruction process, along the lines of their "Proposal for Hurricane Katrina Recovery and Rebuilding" and Naomi Klein's article "Let the People Rebuild New Orleans." A broad group of civil rights and labor organizations have formed NOAH (New Opportunities for Action and Hope) to fight for fair employment practices during the rebuilding, and the AFL-CIO and Change to Win Federation have both set up worker-assistance centers and training programs to reach out to workers in the region.
Can these groups can get strong enough fast enough to defeat the right-wing reconstruction agenda in the short term? That remains to be seen. But what is certain is that Katrina has provided us with an unprecedented opportunity to mount a long-term campaign to organize the South. Yes, the problems were there long before the hurricane hit, but there's never been as much national attention on them as there is now. Not since the Great Depression has the failure of American capitalism to serve the needs of the people been so obvious to so many.
Nor has there ever been so much opportunity for unions to make connections with the workers of this region. All those Ninth Ward residents fighting, via ACORN and other organizations, for the right of return? Those are the same folks who work for minimum wage in the hotels.
The mainstream media's attention span is notoriously short, but there will be a lot of public money rebuilding the Gulf Coast for a long time, and with public money comes an opportunity for public attention (and campaign leverage). The casinos in Mississippi will all have to be rebuilt, and, as Marc Cooper has pointed out, they're gonna be asking for a lot of favors from the state government. We need to make sure those favors come with conditions.
In short, we've got the raw materials for worker organizing, community organizing, and public pressure, on a scale we haven't seen in a long, long time.
With all this in mind, the community organizations and unions operating in the wake of the hurricane ought to work closely with one another and set high goals: the right of return, local hiring and living wages in the reconstruction industry, affordable housing, community oversight over the oil and chemical industries, investment in renewable energy and other infrastructure, protection of wetlands and public oversight over real-estate development, good public transportation, and, above all, the right to organize in the hotels and casinos that dominate the region's economy. This last demand will enable us not only to improve the conditions of low-wage workers in the region, but also to build permanent organizations that can carry the fight forward, and then carry the Gulf Coast's example to other parts of the South and the rest of the country.
There is some recent precedent for this kind of organizing. UNITE-HERE and SEIU have built labor/community alliances that have led to both organizing rights and "community benefits agreements" in Los Angeles, Connecticut, and elsewhere. This strategy could be replicated at a whole new level in New Orleans and Mississippi, but only if somebody makes it happen. Any ideas?
posted by submarino @ 4:53 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Great post! You say "the community organizations and unions operating in the wake of the hurricane ought to work closely with one another and set high goals", and you present a comprehensive list of what those goals should include. But I think that there is a more significant challenge here, and that is to present the ideological framework that makes those goals both desireable and coherent—an ideology that asserts the fundamental truths the progressive viewpoint discerns. I would list five such truths:
1. The objectivity of reality. We understand the world through clear-eyed investigation, using the methods of science to test propositions and reveal flaws in our arguments. Faith, as it's defined by current right-wing ideologies—i.e. trust in an invisible power accessible only through private revelation—has no place in developing strategies to address such objective problems as energy dependence and environmental degradation.
2. The autonomy of the individual. Every individual human being is an autonomous being, capable of accepting or rejecting, cooperating or resisting, agreeing or disagreeing. Human beings are not reduceable to a workforce, to homo economicus, to a racial or class profile, to a genome, or to any other abstraction that denies that fundamental autonomy.
3. The authority of the collective. Human beings form collectives, each of which determines normative behavior within the realm of experience over which it asserts authority. By participating in such collectives, individuals have the responsibility to participate in defining those norms and to accept them in their own lives.
4. The responsibility of the citizen. The largest collective to which most of us belong is the state, along with its subset jurisdictions. As members of that collective, we have the responsibility to obey the norms established in law, and also the responsibility to work to change those norms when they oppose principles 1-3; that last responsibility extends to a responsibility to resist the state and to participate in revolutionary activities if the state loses its moral authority or is captured by tyrannical forces.
5. The obligation of the state. As the ultimate source of civil power, the state is the ultimate guarantor of individual right; it has an obligation to protect every responsible citizen from attack by foreign powers, from harm by accidents of nature, and from imposition by other citizens who have have accumulated great wealth and power.
That list represents my best thinking. I would accept any set of principles that could provide a coherent foundation for progressive action. But I believe that the failure of progressive thinkers to develop such an ideology and present it persuasively and cogently is responsible for the failure of the progressive movement to maintain the edge it gained in the '30's and '40's. Its concentration on tactical goals and its abandonment of ideological rigor, for example, led the labor movement to make its disastrous accomodations with the steel and automotive industries that (a) prevented the movement from maintaining its sensitivity to those who were indentured to the rising service industries, and (b) led the industries thus accomodated up to and past the verge of bankruptcy.
Merely tactical goals, as comprehensive and well-stated as they might be, will not be sufficient to create lasting change in the way we do business, the way we govern ourselves, the way we cooperate with one another to maintain our mutual well-being. Those purposes demand an ideology that is clear, that demands agreement, and that is strong enough to provide a foundation for those tactical goals.
LOS
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