sindicalista

Mama said there'd be crises like these

2008-10-05T18:14:00.000-07:00

(If your Mama didn't, Marx and Engels sure did.)

A few good articles and blog posts about the financial crisis. The whole situation points in one general direction: a huge opening for socialist-minded social movements. We've got take advantage: both with a big vision and with broad and deep popular engagement and leadership development.

The Communist Manifesto Turns 160

No Deal

The Financial Crisis: A View from the Left

Obama's Bailout Strategy

Creative Destruction

Immigrant workers and the right to organize

2008-04-03T21:40:00.001-07:00

Kansas Senate wants to make it illegal for immigrant workers to join unions

Solidarity takes forever: a beginner's guide to building a global labor movement

2008-03-31T15:05:00.001-07:00

Because that's what we are: beginners. All the revolutions in the world--from 1848 to 1917 to 1959 to 1994--haven't prepared us for what it will take to build the movement we need to take on global capital. This smart article offers a brief history and an open-ended prognosis.

Bringing the raids to school

2008-02-18T11:40:00.000-08:00

I don't have an articulate reaction to this right now, just raw anger.

Student's deportation roils New Mexico town.

This is more like it

2008-01-17T20:41:00.000-08:00

Chinese worker protests increase as troubles mount, two reports find

Adding insult to injury

2008-01-12T11:01:00.001-08:00

Look who adopted the stretch of Interstate 5 that includes the infamous San Clemente Border Patrol checkpoint.

Choice quote from the LA Times article: "Caltrans spokesman Edward Cartagena said the Minutemen got the stretch of I-5 purely by chance."

Immigrant workers and the right to organize (latest installment)

2008-01-12T10:48:00.000-08:00

Rarely does a mainstream media account of a legal proceeding make the real battle lines so clear:

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation/story/372280.html

http://www.forward.com/articles/12439/

These articles describe a union organizing campaign in which the employer, a New York City slaughterhouse, actually took the position in a court of law that they didn't have to bargain with the workers' union because the members of the union--the slaughterhouse's employees--were illegal immigrants. Of course, this is the unspoken position of corporate America as a whole, but individual corporations are rarely so honest about their intentions, and the media rarely reports those intentions, preferring to present the immigration issue as a conflict between "American" workers and the "illegals" out to steal their jobs.

To top it all off, the slaughterhouse management equates the union's entirely peaceful tactics with terrorism.

This week's most naive headline

2008-01-12T10:46:00.000-08:00

Despite a decade of criticism, worker abuse persists in China
(from the International Herald Tribune)

What would it take?

2007-12-27T12:12:00.000-08:00

Freedom Road Socialist Organization has put out a strategy document that raises some very important questions about the tragic failure of the revolutionary left to build any kind of base in this country, and what it would take to change that. I find it refreshing in its honesty and its willingness to re-examine just about everything. The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a few of the points (and questions) that struck me:

Among the obstacles to the building of a real revolutionary movement is "a factor that often goes unmentioned: the lack of a sense of what it will take to actually build a movement that can challenge for power in the US. Specifically, a failure to appreciate the scale of organization that will be needed and, therefore, the steps necessary to bring such an organization into existence."
"What do healthy and accountable relationships between people’s movements and the organized Left—whether parties or small left collectives and cadres—look like? How do we rethink the relationship between a party and organizations of workers, neighbors, etc., including the relationship between a party and spontaneous action?"
"There is a constant need to revolutionize organizations. This need exists irrespective of the period. It includes leadership development (emphasizing working-class women of color and building organizational models where they can lead as women); the personal development of individuals..."
"Ultimately, we need to be thinking in terms of a party of hundreds of thousands of members. This means, among other things, that those forces committed to the building of a party must themselves have roots in progressive social movements and mass struggles."
"The Left cannot afford to sit back in the role of perpetual naysayer."

I believe these five points are deeply connected. The crux of the issue, as I see it, is that real revolutionaries must commit themselves in a serious way to organizing and must have a much deeper respect for the social movement organizations (which may or may not identify as explicitly socialist or revolutionary) that are developing working-class leaders on a large scale. Out of this respect must come a practical vision of how a revolutionary organization, whose members are working full-time in these social movement organizations, can help bring the social movements to another level.

Planet of slums -- right here in "el Norte"

2007-12-26T12:20:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine took these pictures of a trailer park/shantytown on an Indian reservation in Southern California, not far from the ocean-view mansions of San Diego. In the background of some of the photos, you can see the new four-star hotel and casino that has made the leadership of the once-destitute tribe very, very rich.

The residents of this shantytown are not members of the tribe--most are immigrants from Mexico who work either in the fields or in the casino. Some of the trailers shown in these pictures are casino workers' homes. My friend, an immigrant from Michoacán, grew up on this same reservation in a similar neighborhood that had no running water for years. Most of his family works at the casino. He used to work as a dishwasher and cook there, and now is a union organizer, helping to lead a statewide movement of casino workers.

Fetishism of the word vs. actually organizing the people

2007-12-26T11:45:00.000-08:00

Christopher Day's blog introduced me to this critique of Bob Avakian and the RCP (by a former key supporter). Frankly, I think the RCP is pretty irrelevant at this point, but this essay is very thoughtful, and its insights are relevant to anyone who worries about the fact that no explicitly revolutionary organization in this country has any kind of mass base. Although I'm not sure the author would agree with me, I think the implication of his arguments is that an irrational fear of "reformism" or "economism" holds many revolutionaries back from actually doing effective organizing.

The fact is, in order to build a base, a committed revolutionary is going to have to spend a hell of a lot of time talking to people, and spurring them to action, who aren't ready yet to embrace revolution. This is not to say the word "socialism" or "revolution" needs to be taboo, but rather that neither of these words, nor all the rhetoric in the world, will get someone over the fear they need to conquer in order to lead their coworkers out on strike against a multi-national corporation (for example). If this kind of rhetoric is all you got, the company's gonna win. If you aren't willing to take these kinds of conversations (those that don't center on revolution) seriously, you aren't going to lead any significant number of working or oppressed people in any signficant struggle.

Some might argue that these kinds of struggles are "merely trade-union struggles" that the "masses can do themselves" and that real revolutionaries shouldn't waste their time with such "non-revolutionary" work. But this is precisely the attitude that deprives would-be revolutionaries of the organization they need to make revolution anything more than a pipe dream. If you don't believe in digging in for protracted battles whose immediate aim falls short of overthrowing capitalism, capitalism is gonna win.

Frankly, I think a lot of the ideological opposition to "reformism" and "economism" masks a fear of getting one's hands dirty in the real struggles of real people, of getting into the trenches with no immediate way out and no clear path to victory other than blood, sweat, and tears.

In short, I think a lot of would-be revolutionaries are afraid of what it might take to learn how to organize. What do you think?

Which side are you on?

2007-12-26T11:37:00.000-08:00

Strange bedfellows: Venezuela, Iran, China, and Wal-Mart

2006-08-13T16:15:00.000-07:00

1. Hugo Chavez praises Iran; Iranian dissidents praise Chavez but question his alliance with their government.

Venezuela Signs More Deals during Chavez’s Visits to Iran and Vietnam

Extracts from an open letter by a group of University students in Iran to Hugo Chavez

2. Wal-Mart lets its Chinese workers join unions; American and Chinese trade unionists call it an empty gesture.

Wal-Mart: "The goal of China's unions is to build a harmonious society."

No labor shift seen at Wal-Mart

Wake Up WalMart (UFCW) Statement on Wal-Mart's Recognition of Labor Unions in China

Without Freedom of Association, will Chinese Wal-Mart Workers Be any Better Off?

Reform and revolution

2006-03-30T20:27:00.000-08:00

It is inherent to the nature of blogging culture that one's most passionate writing is sometimes posted on somebody else's blog. I've recently been engaged in a debate on a communist blog called Red Flags, and with my readers permission (don't all speak up at once), I'd like to repost my comments here. For the context, see this thread.

I.

I've been following the discussions on this page for a few months now, without chiming in. I tend to disagree with a lot of the tactical/strategic thought that is expressed here, but I am usually impressed with the level of discussion.

This particular discussion, however, is frustrating because so many people seem unwilling to engage with the fundamental criticism that Christopher Day (and leftspotter and a few others) are making, and have made in other ways in other threads. Regardless of what is meant by certain controversial terms like "instrumentalism" or "reformism," let's make it simple. There aren't enough anti-capitalist activists out there, the movement organizations that exist are too few, too small, and too weak. Nevermind whether communists should or should not be seen as "outsiders" or what level of "engagement" necessary to earn the "respect" of the "masses" (although Chris's points on these practicalities are quite valid, in my opinion). The main point is this: anyone who fancies him or herself a communist should be serious about building the power that will enable the working class to bring about revolution. If one is serious about this, there is no choice but to engage with the day-to-day work of recruiting activists and building new, bigger, stronger, and more militant organizations in workplaces, neighborhoods, campuses, etc. There's nothing wrong with selling DVD's or newspapers per se, but I don't understand why people don't get such a basic point: propaganda alone won't do it, we have to build POWER.

Lest this discussion remain in the abstract, let me offer some anectodatal evidence in support of Chris's (and my) criticism of the RCP. I am part of a sizeable clandestine organizition working in coordination with a large, progressive, mainstream labor organization to unionize thousands of low-wage non-union workers. In short, we are "salts" (or "submarinos" in Spanish, hence my screen name). Most of us "submarinos" are radicals of one stripe or another, and we view our work as an essential element of the class struggle. How can we overcome capitalism if the vast majority of workers are unorganized and cowed before the power of their bosses?

Our organization is far from uniform ideologically; we often argue over revolutionary theory even as we work well together in our day-to-day efforts. Like any movement organization, we have suffered from attrition, mainly because it's hard work and a lot of people just can't cut it. However, in the several years I have been involved with this organization, only two have left for explicitly ideological reasons. One was a liberal who decided she could be more effective by going to law school. The other quit more recently at the urging of his comrades (if they deserve such a term) in the RCP. They convinced him not only that he should spend time selling DVDs at anti-war marches (a questionable tactic in my opinion, but nothing that was inconsistent with our organizing work), but that in order to be a good communist he actually needed to quit our organization and leave his job in the middle of our organizing drive. Meanwhile, his fellow salts and hundreds of other coworkers are fighting to build an organization in the face of bribery, intimidation, and threats of dismissal and/or deportation.

How on earth does taking people OUT of the trenches in the heat of battle help lead us to revolution?

Let me close with a piece of wisdom from a revolutionary thinker whom many RCP supporters seem to have forgotten:

"The international movement of the proletariat toward its complete emancipation is a process peculiar in the following respect. For the first time in the history of civilization, the people are expressing their will consciously and in opposition to all ruling classes. But this will can only be satisfied beyond the limits of the existing system.

"Now the mass can only acquire and strengthen this will in the course of day-to-day struggle against the existing social order -- that is, within the limits of capitalist society.

"On the one hand, we have the mass; on the other, its historic goal, located outside of existing society. On one had, we have the day-to-day struggle; on the other, the social revolution. Such are the terms of the dialectic contradiction through which the socialist movement makes its way.

"It follows that this movement can best advance by tacking betwixt and between the two dangers by which it is constantly being threatened. One is the loss of its mass character; the other, the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back to the condition of a sect; the other, the danger of becoming a movement of bourgeois social reform." -- Rosa Luxemburg

II.

Repeater alleges that the argument put forth by Chris, leftspotter, and myself "completely rejects the concept and necessity of leadership." Apparently he's lumping us together with the infantile (to use Lenin's word) crowd of ultraleftists (who like to call themselves Trotskyists or anarchists) who are so turned off by any exercise of leadership that they try to sabotage, intentionally or not, any movement organization they come into contact with.

With all due respect, nothing could be further from the truth. I believe very deeply in the concept of leadership, and in my understanding leadership involves agency and initiative. Quite the opposite of the attitude that "the masses can and do [build unions, make banners, do grunt work] on their own." That's not leadership, that's complacency. In fact, Repeater unintentionally argues my point for me by adding the off-hand comment that "currently they don't do enough of it on their own." I can't believe any self-respecting revolutionary would want to just sit around and wait for that situation to change.

To clarify my point, I don't argue that salting is the only valid way to excercise leadership. I think there are many other ways to exercise legitimate leadership, which may be further from "the trenches." Salts, and other rank-and-file union leaders, often leave the shop floor to be full-time organizers, so as to teach other workers what they've already learned: how to fight the boss, how to recruit and train other workers into the movement, etc. It's important that conscious socialists be active at all levels of the labor movement and other social movements, from the shop floor to the elected national and international leadership. And some people are probably best cut out out to be propagandists or theorists.

Which brings me to my main point: what's most important is not the "validity" or "legitimacy" of communist leadership, but its effectiveness. And that, in turn, brings me back to one of Chris's points, about what it means to be "advanced." Repeater doesn't want all the advanced to be stuck in the trenches when they could be doing more effective work somewhere else. Well, there are different ways to be advanced. One of them is believing in socialism, or having the correct "line." In my (Ivy League) exprience, lots of student activists are pretty advanced in this way. But many of these student activists couldn't organize their way out of a paper bag. Which is to say, not that they couldn't make a banner, not merely that they couldn't conduct some kind of reformist campaign, but that they couldn't perform the most fundamental act of revolutionary organizing: recruit and train new anti-capitalist, working-class leaders in the face of the fear and confusion that charactize our world. The only EFFECTIVE (not to say "legitimate") way to find and recruit such leaders is through engagement in day-to-day struggles in the trenches. The whole point of salting is to take those of us who are relatively "advanced" in the theoretical sense, and put them into the trenches so as to learn from experience how to be an effective organizer (to become "advanced" in the practical sense). And the more effective an organizer is, the more leadership he or she is called upon to take.

My problem with ivory-tower theorizing is not that it's "illegitimate," but that it's ineffective and therefore an abdication of revolutionary responsibility. That's the point I was trying to illustrate with my anecdote about the RCP supporter who just walked away from trenches in the heat of the battle.

III.

Dear Real John,

I appreciate your long and articulate response. I will interpret the sarcasm and personal attacks that are sprinkled throughout as symptoms of "passionate intensity," which I admire and identify with.
I hope (perhaps in vain) that this discussion can be more than a mere rehashing of the same debate that has been had a thousand times before, in which you call me a reformist and I call you a sectarian and then we hate each other for ever after.

Let's be clear that, while terms such as "reformism," "revisionism," "economism," etc, may be technical terms, they can also be wielded as insults. The same way that for me to call you a "sectarian" or an "ultraleftist" (another Leninist and therefore supposedly "technical" term) would be an insult and would not serve to advance the discussion very far.

For example, you accuse me of "economism" and "revisionism." If by "revisionist" you mean somebody who is faking socialist sympathies for the sake of luring the working class into an insidious capitalist trap, then I emphatically deny the charge. If by "economism" you mean that I think building the labor movement is the ONLY legitimate movement activity, then I'm sorry you misunderstood my position, and I would like to clarify.

I admire and take inspiration from the civil rights and anti-war upsurges of the 60s, including those that had no connection to economic struggle or the labor movement. I also admire those that were simultaneously civil rights struggles and union struggles, such as the farmworkers' movement in California, the New York City hospital strikes led by the then-independent union 1199, and the Memphis sanitation workers' strike, which unfortunately has the distinction of being the occasion of MLK's assassination. (It's worth noting that at the time of his assassination, MLK was planning for a large-scale economic struggle, the Poor People's Campaign, which many believe is what made him threatening enough to assassinate.)

I admire radical community organizations such as ACORN and the Los Angeles Bus Riders' Union.

I also admire the many current variations of the squatters' movement, such as the landless workers' movement in Brazil, the factory occupation movements in Argentina and Venezuela, and (on a smaller scale) the South Central Farmers in Los Angeles. (Wait, am I a reformist or an anarchist? I'm so confused!)

That said, it is my tendency to be most inspired by the old IWW and CIO dream of "organizing the unorganized." As such, I place the most hope for socialist revolution (especially in the heart of imperialism) in the rebirth of a militant labor movement, and specifically in the current labor upsurge led by SEIU and UNITE-HERE.

Part of the reason for this tendency is emotional and psychological: I was affected as a child by my parents' work experiences, and my entry into radical politics was through a militant union that was leading an audacious and inspiring struggle on my campus while I was in college.

But I also have analytical reasons. I believe that most (not all) people have their most direct experiences with the oppression that is capitalism on the job, where they spend the majority of their waking lives, and by means of which they feed and clothe themselves and their children. I believe, therefore, that the labor movement has the potential to appeal to immediate self-interest but also to build class-consciousness, and even, in an era when unions are doomed to fail unless they organize across national borders, to teach internationalism. To appeal to non-activists but also train activists to be stronger leaders. (And I count myself, without a hint of disdain, among the student radicals who at one time couldn't organize themselves out of a wet paper bag.) On an extremely practical level, I believe the labor movement is uniquely structured so as to simultaneously confront the power of capital and build a sustainable organization with resources (capital) of its own, capable of carrying the struggle forward for the long term. In sum, for all these reasons, I believe that labor organizing provides the best opportunity for uniting a broad segment of the working class and creating a powerful, multi-ethnic, and international movement against capitalism.

If that's what you mean by "economism," then I plead guilty, but I would like to point out that I am in good company. Take, for example, the following quotation from a movement leader better known for his attacks on trade-unionism than on his admiration of it:

"The trade unions were a tremendous step forward for the working class in the early days of capitalist development, inasmuch as they marked a transition from the workers' disunity and helplessness to the rudiments of class organisation. When the revolutionary party of the proletariat, the highest form of proletarian class organisation, began to take shape (and the Party will not merit the name until it learns to weld the leaders into one indivisible whole with the class and the masses) the trade unions inevitably began to reveal certain reactionary features, a certain craft narrow-mindedness, a certain tendency to be non-political, a certain inertness, etc. However, the development of the proletariat did not, and could not, proceed anywhere in the world otherwise than through the trade unions, through reciprocal action between them and the party of the working class."

No, that's not Andy Stern, that's Lenin. (It's from a chapter of "Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder" called "Should Revolutionaries Work in Reactionary Trade Unions?") Note that he considers an active and powerful union movement absolutely essential to the preparation of the working class for socialist revolution. Note also that currently, compared to the size of the global economy, the labor movement is miniscule to the point of being virtually non-existant.

Of course, Lenin also warns that unions tend to become parochial and conservative once they have established themselves. Anyone with the slightest familiarity with the history of Gompers' AFL or Meany's AFL-CIO knows about that phenomenon quite well. Don't assume, therefore, that I'm unfamiliar with the sobering history of the post-war CIO: the anti-communist purges, the merger with the AFL, the adoption of the Democratic Party's Cold War foreign policy, and the abandonment of the goal of organizing the unorganized. Without a doubt, that is one of modern history's greatest tragedies.

But the workers' uprising led by the CIO was not the only promising development that faded away or was co-opted instead of leading directly to global communism. All of the "reformist" movements I mentioned above fall into that category, but then again, so does the Russian revolution. Blaming a "revisionist coup" for the failure of the USSR is no more helpful than blaming George Meany for Walter Reuther's mistakes.

So then why did these movements fail? That's a good question, to which none of us, not even Bob Avakian, has a satisfactory answer. One could argue that the Cold War was the burial ground of both the CIO and the USSR, and that the USSR's attempt at "socialism in one country," and its consequent conversion into an imperialist power under the banner of socialism, was the mirror image of the CIO's absorbption into the American side of the Cold War. But I won't argue that for now, lest I aquire the label of "Trotskyist" in addition to the "anarchist" and "social democrat" labels whose burden I already bear. In any case, I'd prefer not to debate yet again whether capitalism was restored in the Soviet Union in 1924 or 1956.

As for the labor movement, I'll admit that I don't have the answer for how to make sure the organization I'm involved with is not co-opted in the future. That has a lot to do with organizational politics that have yet to take shape. But I'm not the first person to lack a clear road map to revolution. In the passage quoted above, Lenin calls for "reciprocal action between [trade unions] and the party of the working class."

Sounds like a good idea, but what exactly does it mean? And in a passage I quoted in an earlier post, Rosa Luxemburg posits that a revolutionary party "can best advance by tacking betwixt and between the two dangers by which it is constantly being threatened. One is the loss of its mass character; the other, the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back to the condition of a sect; the other, the danger of becoming a movement of bourgeois social reform."

Reciprocal action? Betwixt and between? Those are not exactly detailed marching orders, but they are, intentionally or not, eloquent expressions of the uncertainty faced by all revolutionaries who, to their dismay, still live in a capitalist world. To invoke the unquestionable genius of Bob Avakian or the "science of MLM" does more to obscure the situation than to light the way. I believe we can best navigate these uncertainties by exercising a little humility and by trying to build common ground with as many anti-capitalist and potentially anti-capitalist forces as possible. We may trip up along the way, but that's life. We'll have to learn from our mistakes. In the meantime, I'll be helping build a militant, growing, and internationalist labor movement, so that the working class might at least have a fighting chance.

And if this attitude makes me a Menshvik, a revisionist, or (God forbid) a liberal, then so be it.

Immigrants' rights and workers' power in Los Angeles and beyond

2006-03-28T17:08:00.000-08:00

The immigrants' rights march in Los Angeles on Saturday was by far the biggest and most beautiful demonstration I've ever been a part of. In any direction you looked, it was impossible to see where the crowd ended. The planned route simply could not contain the multitudes who showed up, and it has been widely reported that the march stretched out for two dozen blocks. I parked my car in Pico-Union, a working-class immigrant neighborhood across the freeway from the downtown business district where the march took place, and it seemed like every family in the neighborhood was on their way to the march; people just kept pouring out their front doors and walking down the sidewalk in white t-shirts, carrying Mexican, Salvadoran, or American flags. Sunday, a few thousand farmworkers from all over the West Coast took up the mantle of the previous day's Gran Marcha, processing from City Hall to the Los Angeles Cathedral for a mass in honor of Cesar Chavez. Yesterday it was impossible to drive a few blocks without coming across crowds of students marching through the streets, pursued by overwhelmed campus police officers. Even today thousands of students walked out of class and into the pouring rain.

About two and a half years ago, I attended a significant but modest rally on the lawn of Los Angeles City Hall to kick of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride. As the freedom riders moved east to Queens, they built a national network of previously isolated unions and community groups fighting for immigrant workers' rights, put the issue of immigration reform on the map, and kicked of the legislative battle that eventually would pit bills featuring a "path to citizenship" (McCain-Kennedy and AgJobs) against Sensenbrenner's HR4437, which would make felons out of all undocumented immigrants and anyone--from charity workers to neighbors to union organizers--who helped them stay in the country or simply refused to turn them in to la migra. That draconian measure, in turn, prompted at least half a million people to surround that very same City Hall lawn three days ago.

In other words, the Freedom Ride has snowballed, after 30 months of grassroots organizing and legislative jousting, into a massive uprising of immigrant workers, not only in Los Angeles, but all over the country. And I use the phrase "immigrant workers" for a reason. Despite the preponderance of Mexican flags, the march was at least as much about workers' rights as it was about identity politics. The most overwhelming message conveyed by the marchers' signs, chants, and casual conversations was "we're here to work, to give our families a better life, and we deserve respect for doing the work that keeps this country's economy moving." It's no accident that leaders of HERE were the main organizers of the Freedom Rides, and that SEIU picket signs were almost as ubiquitous as Mexican flags on Saturday. That wasn't just a bunch of Mexicans on the street over the weekend, it was the new American working class.

Can this workers' uprising be sustained? There is reason to believe it can. When Maria Elena Durazo, the head of UNITE-HERE Local 11 and the LA County Federation of Labor, spoke from the podium on Saturday (the same podium she had spoken from as the chairperson of the Freedom Rides two and a half years before), she refered to preparations for a paro nacional (national strike) in the hotel industry, most of whose workers are immigrants of one nationality or another. The goal of this year's hotel workers' organizing campaigns will be to capture the energy of this weeks immigrants' rights demonstrations and turn it into a powerful workers' movement.

"If this darkness came from light, then light can come from darkness"

2006-01-11T21:50:00.000-08:00

The title of this post is taken from a Mason Jennings song called "Drinking as Religion," a simple but beautiful song about a post-breakup bout of depression and self-sabotage. It's been in my head for a few weeks, but its meaning deepened for me after I read a couple of recent articles about the state of the labor movement. Broadly speaking, the articles tell us nothing we didn't already know, but both fill in some important details, and they are chilling and poignant reminders of how far our movement has fallen. Both also hold out hope for renewal, and they relate, indirectly but significantly, to the recent breakup of the AFL-CIO. The bottom line: the Change to Win program must succeed.

The most widely read of the two, a four-part series in the LA Times, astoundingly fails even to mention the growers' responsibility for the miserable plight of California's farm workers, but it's nevertheless an important wake-up call for the union and it supporters. It's a reminder of what happens to any union that takes its focus away from organizing, even a union associated in the popular imagination more with "social-movement unionism" than with George Meany-style, Cold War-era business unionism.

Farmworkers Reap Little as Union Strays From Its Roots, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

The other article, from the Monthly Review, takes as its jumping-off point Bush's victory over Kerry in Ohio. But it's about much more than swing-state electoral politics, it's a deep and compelling analysis of the state of the movement.

What Was the Matter with Ohio?: Unions and Evangelicals in the Rust Belt

Bolivia and beyond

2005-12-18T22:11:00.000-08:00

I've been busy organizing lately, with not much time for writing, but I can't resist telling the world about the smile that came across my face when I saw the news (from both leftist and mainstream sources) of Evo Morales' victory in today's presidential election in Bolivia. Not only did Morales win a plurality (which was expected), he appears to have unexpectedly won a clear majority, meaning he won't have to cobble together a coalition with conservative legislators in order to form a government. Perhaps the Bolivian social movements, which supported Morales' election but have been worried about the compromises his presidency might entail, can rest a little easier.

Despite the landslide victory, the new Bolivian majority will be far from uniform ideologically. The traditional socialist outlook of Morales' MAS (Movement to Socialism) party competes with indigenous nationalism, and there are tensions between the Aymaras (Morales' ethnic group) and the Quechuas, Bolivia's other major indigenous group. However, Morales is not wedded to the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy that Fidel Castro adopted in the heat of the Cold War, when an alliance with the USSR was a matter of necessity for an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist government stuck on a small island 90 miles from Florida. Morales appears to want to emulate Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, using the power of the state and the revenue from plentiful hydrocarbon reserves to give space and support to the grassroots social movements, rather than centralizing economic and political power.

Here's hoping the diverse social movements and leftist governments of Latin America (Chavez, Castro, Lula, et al), each of which has its own approach to resisting American capitalism, can continue to give each other the space to try different strategies while cooperating economically and politically to build a viable alternative economy that is just, equitable, and democratic and can resist pressure from Wall Street and Washington.

Morales' victory reinforces my belief that the main goal of North American social movements must be to organize broadly enough so that we may realistically demand that our society join the trend toward liberation building up to our south. (We won't be able to do this, however, without meaningful solidarity with the workers of China, since our imperial economy is actually inseparable from the manufacturing economy of China.)

I'll have more thoughts later on specific campaigns that might advance these long-term goals. In the meantime, any ideas?

Counter-recruitment and the labor movement

2005-11-17T23:55:00.000-08:00

From the good folks at Upside Down World comes this article about the US military's preparations for intervention in Bolivia, should indigenous socialist Evo Morales win the presidential election next month. The article is mostly speculative, but given our government's history in Latin America, it would be surprising if the suspicions it reports were not true. In fact, I suspect the imperialist machinery would already be a little more on top of the situation in Latin America, were it not so bogged down in Iraq.

By fate or providence, I came across this article as I happened to be watching, out of the corner of my eye, an Army television commercial aimed at parents who might be nervous about letting their children enlist. The commercial urges weak-kneed parents to listen to their brave children and support their decisions to make something of themselves by turning themselves into cannon fodder.

The juxtaposition of leftist internet news and fascist television commercial gave me an idea about a couple of problems that had been nagging me for a while.

First, how can the American labor movement, which has a whole lot of organizing to do before it can be a real force in global politics, nevertheless be in solidarity with Latin American social movements and leftist governments that are threatened by our military? At this point in time, the American left simply doesn't have the power to stop our military from running roughshod over the rest of the world. All the marches in the world did not stop Bush from invading Iraq, could not stop the CIA from attempting a coup in Venezuela, won't stand in the way of military action in Bolivia, haven't closed the School of the Americas, etc, etc. Of course, this doesn't mean we shouldn't be in the streets, it just means that our first priority at this stage has to be building our base.

Second, how can the labor movement engage in political education without diverting too much of its precious energy from winning the short-term organizing fights it desperately needs to win, just to survive? This is a complicated question. It has to do with the balancing act every organizer performs every day: how to push workers' consciousness forward without getting so far out ahead of them that you lose touch. A union organizing campaign is nothing if not a crash course in the virtues of solidarity, but not all union members are ready for words like "socialism" and "revolution." The last thing you need in the middle of a bitter contract fight is to give the boss a wedge with which to divide the workers from each other or from the union leadership.

The first rule of organizing is to connect the union with concrete issues in the workers' workplaces and personal lives. Right now, besides low wages, unaffordable healthcare, disrespect at work, expensive gasoline, and skyrocketing housing prices, one of the major issues in many working class people's lives is the fact that their children are dodging bullets in Iraq. And therein lies an opportunity. While any good union has plenty of urgent items on the agenda for its monthly shop steward or membership meetings (such as leadership training and discussion of ongoing contract fights or organizing drives), time could be set aside for anti-war union leaders to give presentations and facilitate discussions on the following points:

1. The military takes advantage of working-class kids' lack of economic and educational opportunity to lure them into enlisting. It depends on these recruits to replace its casualties. Hence, the military's relationship with working-class kids is not unlike the boss's relationship with the workers: both try to take advantage of desperation. Having trouble paying for your kids' education because your boss isn't paying you what you deserve? As if that weren't bad enough, the army might come along and send them to Fallouja.

2. The Bush administration says it's fighting for freedom in Iraq, but it's working to undermine unions and deny workers' rights in Iraq and elsewhere. (Depending on the national origin of the union membership, leaders may be able to connect this point to workers' experience in their home countries. For example, the service sector in California is full of immigrants from El Salvador.)

3. There are ways to protect your kids from the military recruiters who hover around their schools like vultures.

In other words, unions can teach an internationalist and anti-imperialist lesson by focusing on concrete issues that will resonate with their members. This lesson can be taught in a way that is deeply respectful of the workers whose children are already in the military (or who have already died in Iraq), and which does not imply that belief in a certain ideology is a prerequisite for participation in union activities. At the same time, unions can contribute to the growing counter-recruitment movement, thereby making it more difficult for the military to maintain simultaneous offensives in Iraq, Latin America, and who knows where else. Little by little, maybe we can starve the imperialist beast.

Thanks to the hard work of US Labor Against the War, many local unions have already passed resolutions against the war in Iraq. The next step is for these locals to take this message to the members, and keep those kids out of Iraq (and Bolivia, and Venezuela, etc, etc).

Customer service in a post-capitalist society

2005-11-10T23:50:00.000-08:00

For those of us who toil for long hours every day as soldiers in the movement, our visions of the classless society we're working towards (whether or not we expect to arrive within our lifetimes) function either as a kind of escapist fantasy (it's easier to fantasize than it is to organize) or as a source of emotional sustenance, giving us the energy to keep going day after day. Either way, an organizer theorizing about socialism is not unlike an evangelist imagining strumming a harp in Heaven, a Jew thirsting for the land of milk and honey as he follows Moses across the desert, or a jihadist daydreaming about the forty virgins that await him should he die fighting the infidels.

This is not to say that it's useless to imagine what a socialist society would be like. For example, Michael Albert's concept of "parecon" is an impressively detailed account of how a non-capitalist economy would work. This kind of technical description is important because it helps reassure us that a non-capitalist society is indeed possible.

But organizers are not machines. Our hopes and dreams, not just our concrete plans, are what keep us going. For this reason, the emotional aspects of our socialist fantasies can be just as useful as the technical ones. Different fantasies will strike a chord with different people, but for me there's nothing more appealing than Marx's vision of the communist Renaissance man:

"As soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic."

This is the fantasy of the organizer who laments the fact that all those hours spent knocking on doors keep him from pursuing his artistic, academic, athletic, or other interests. Of the organizer who, when he was in college, could never decide what to study because too many course descriptions caught his eye. And it's a refreshing change of pace from the pseudo-scientific jargon a student of Marx routinely slogs through.

In this spirit, let's ask ourselves what it would be like to live in a socialist, anarcho-syndicalist, or any kind of non-capitalist society. Michael Albert tells us plenty about what it might be like to produce, consume, and allocate after capitalism, but what would it be like to live there? What's the non-technical, experiential description of the fantasy?

To narrow that question down a bit, let's consider what such a society would be like for workers in the increasingly dominant service sector. Whereas the American economy was once based on manufacturing jobs, which are perfectly compatible with socialism as long the goods being manufactured aren't being sold for private profit, more and more workers are performing customer service duties that put them at the mercy not only of their bosses but of their customers as well. One could argue that customer service is inherently incompatible with the kind of society we imagine, in that "customers" are an element of markets and "service" implies class division. But wouldn't people still eat in restaurants from time to time, or stop for a cup of coffee? Wouldn't people still travel, and therefore need to stay in hotels? Wouldn't we still need to call a "customer service" hotline for technical assistance with our computers or cell phones?

To resolve this dilemma, I'd like to make a distinction between "customer service" and "hospitality." Under capitalism, customer service workers are nice to, go out of their way for, and kiss the asses of their customers because their livelihoods depend on it. Every worker knows that if the customer isn't satisfied, he or she can complain to the manager and get the worker in trouble. (Sometimes such a complaint isn't even necessary; we all know that every call we make to a customer service hotline "may be monitored or recorded for quality purposes.") On the other hand, if a customer is rude or verbally abusive to a worker, there is usually little or no remedy. Anyone who has worked as a waiter, a cashier, a hotel desk clerk, or a customer-service agent knows how common this is, and every interaction between a customer and a worker is premised on this power imbalance.

Absent this power imbalance, however, it is perfectly unobjectionable to greet a traveller with a smile, or to pour a stranger a cup of coffee. That humane impulse, as distinct from the coerced politeness inherent in the customer-service ethic of the "hospitality industry," is what I would call true hospitality.

Alas, it would take a wholesale elimination of class divisions to replace the customer-service economy with a true hospitality economy, but if we're willing to be creative with collective bargaining, we don't have to wait for revolution to start moving in that direction.

As long as workers are struggling to make ends meet, wage and benefit demands will remain the backbone of most contract fights, but there is a long history of unions demanding and winning other kinds of on-the-job rights, from the basic "just cause" provision to complicated work rules. Many of these contract clauses have become part of the boilerplate union contract, but there is always room for innovation. For example, HERE Local 11 (whose membership includes a large percentage of Mexican and Central American immigrants) began to push for immigrants' rights language in its major hotel contracts during negotiations in the 1990s, winning the right for undocumented immigrant workers to take as much as a year off to return to their home countries, fix their immigration status, and return with full seniority rights. Since then other UNITE-HERE locals, and other unions, have followed suit.

These fights are important not only for the concrete benefits they achieve, but also as organizing tools. In order for union members to take ownership over their fights and their unions, they have to be fighting for what is important to them. Workers, after all, like organizers, are not machines, and their desires do not pertain solely to wage scales and benefits packages. John Wilhelm, co-president of UNITE-HERE, owes his first major organizing victory, the successful clerical and technical workers' strike for a first contract at Yale University, to this principle, and every organizer starting a new organizing drive should follow his example. Here's how the beginning of the campaign, which Wilhelm led as an organizer for HERE Local 34, is described in the book "On Strike for Respect":

"When the drive began officially in November 1980, Local 34's organizers believed that one of their first responsibilities was to stimulate discussion among the C&Ts about how a union could affect their work lives. They encouraged employees to abandon preconceptions about what unions do and how they operate. The organizers told the workers that Local 34 could be whatever its members wanted it to be, and could take on whatever issues the members cared about."

But given that a union contract is between the workers and their employer, is it even possible for such creativity to address the problems inherent in the relationship between the worker and the customer? If we're willing to "abandon preconceptions," I think we'll find that it is. And my experience organizing customer-service workers suggests that we have no choice but to make such a leap, since many such workers go home after their shifts more angry at the abusive customers they dealt with that day than with their managers. Although they have the same problems with pay, benefits, workload, scheduling, and seniority as any other worker, their most deeply felt complaint about their employer often has to do with their managers' failure to back them up against the customers who make their lives miserable.

Fortunately, there is some precedent for addressing one kind of abuse that workers suffer at the hands of their customers: UNITE-HERE Local 26 has organized around some unique contract language in its contracts at major Boston hotels, with the aim of defending workers against sexual harrassment perpetrated not only by managers and coworkers, but also by guests. "A Troublemakers Handbook" quotes local president Janice Loux:

"'We took a pretty radical position on it,' says Loux, 'that if a case is substantiated, then the person is terminated, whether it be a manager or a worker. And if it's a guest then we demand that they be barred from that hotel permanently.'"

It's not a huge leap from there to more comprehensive contract language designed to allow workers to demand respect from their customers. Employers often tell their customer-service workers that, although it's their job to take care of upset guests, they don't have to put up with abusive guests. In reality, workers know such assurances are just empty promises, designed to improve morale. But why not call the boss's bluff? Why not call for contract language stipulating that workers not be disciplined for walking away from abusive customers, or putting them in their place, politely but firmly? And that when the abuse rises to a certain level, whether it's blatant sexual harrassment, threats, outright yelling, or even violence (all of these things really happen), the customer be kicked out of the establishment?

Such a demand carries a great deal of potential, not only to improve the lives of customer service workers, but also to occasion constant organizing and mobilizing (not only when the contract is up, but every day) around fundamental issues of dignity and respect. Such fights would have the effect not merely of ameliorating the poverty in which non-union service-sector workers are currently trapped, but also of chipping away, slowly but surely, at the nature of capitalism itself.

In the great industrial uprisings of the 1930's, workers won not only basic economic gains, but also the right for their bodies to be respected, to be treated as people rather than parts of the machine. These rights became the complex health and safety regulations we have today. Insofar as customer-service workers are part of a different sort of machine--not the physical machinery of a factory, but the social machinery of our service economy--shouldn't our spirits, not only our bodies, be respected?

[Update: just a day after I posted these ruminations on socialist hospitality, this article about a worker-run hotel in Argentina showed up on the front page of LabourStart.]

Parecon in Venezuela?

2005-11-08T19:30:00.000-08:00

Anyone interested in imagining alternatives to our current economic and political system, and in how such alternatives might be put into practice, should take a look at this article, which has been published online both by ZNet and Venezuela Analysis.

It's by Michael Albert, founder of ZNet and the author of "Parecon" (short for "participatory economics," a conceptual economic system based on a multi-layered federation of workers' and consumers' councils). He is essentially an anarchist and is very critical of "socialist" systems based on central planning (including not only the USSR but also Cuba), but he gives what I take to be a very tentative endorsement of what's going on in Venezuela. It's a long article, and the whole thing is worth reading, but here are some interesting tidbits:

"Just two years ago no one would have believed a worker managed factory was possible but now there are over 20."

"We were told by the oil ministry officials and also by trade unionists and others how in Venezuela, like in Argentina, there was a movement, just getting up to speed, to 'recuperate' failing or failed workplaces. The difference was that while in Argentina this occurs against the inclinations of government, in Venezuela the government welcomes and even propels it. Indeed, the government has now assembled a list of 700 such plants and is urging workers to occupy and operate them on their own."

"She reported Venezuelan Chavista unions having links to the 'AFL-CIO in California, some grass-roots unions, and the antiwar movement,' but not with the national AFL-CIO 'because they are still giving money to those imposing old bureaucracy and fomenting coups.'"

For background, see the Parecon website, Venezuela Analysis, Upside Down World, and my own posts of Ocbober 19, October 25, October 27, and November 4.

South American savages say mean things about polite US president as he tries his best to create jobs and spread democracy

2005-11-04T21:48:00.000-08:00

This is not a media-criticism blog, but I've been paying a lot of attention to the Latin American left these days, so today's Los Angeles Times article about the anti-Bush protests in Argentina just cried out to be torn apart.

Check out the first sentence:

"A hemispheric summit to promote job creation and the spread of democracy throughout the Americas opened here Friday..."

The matter-of-fact way the authors (Patrick J. McDonnell and Edwin Chen) present this--how can I put it politely?--deeply controversial view of the purpose of America's international trade policy says it all, but more fun is on the way. For example, paragraphs two and three let us know what a violent bunch these anti-American protesters are:

"A group of about 200 hard-core protesters attempting to breach the security cordon around the meeting site clashed with riot police about six blocks from the hotel where President Bush and other heads of state were meeting.

The protesters, some covering their faces with clothing, hurled rocks, set fire to a bank, and broke windows on more than a dozen shops, authorities said."

It's a pretty run-of-the-mill description of violent left-wing protests, but I'd like to call additional attention to the cute little phrase hiding at the end: "authorities said." This is one those phrases mainstream journalists say with out even noticing it, the way valley girls say "like."

Concerned readers should be aware that, as in most such violent protests, "police were forced to use tear gas to disperse the crowd." Pobrecitos.

Meanwhile, a more complete description of the protest is buried further down the page:

"Earlier in the day, tens of thousands of protesters marched peacefully if boisterously through the streets of this city...

Most of Friday's protests, which involved more than 30,000 marchers, according to unofficial estimates here, were peaceful but intensely anti-Bush..."

You know those Latins, boisterous and intense. I guess it's not surprising, then, that their leader would be "fiery populist" Hugo Chavez, as opposed to the more civilized American president:

"'Well, I will, of course, be polite,' said Bush, striking a conciliatory note, when asked how he would react if confronted by Chavez."

By the way, those Latins are also confrontational. That's why they say such outrageous things about their political opponents. For example, Bush "was lampooned in banners hoisted aloft as a vampire, devil, and war-monger." Silly savages, there's no such thing as war-mongers!

"Dying of hunger in a supermarket and not daring to open a tin of sardines"

2005-10-27T21:41:00.000-07:00

Last week I posted an article about self-management at a factory in Uruguay. Here's another article, which focuses on Venezuela but also mentions factory occupations in Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Puerto Rico, and Panama. The upshot is that these occupations are no longer isolated incidents, they're part of a movement across Latin America. [Update: here's another and another about Venezuela's effort to create an international organization of worker-occupied factories.]

For as long as I've kept this blog (three whole weeks!), I've maintained that the most urgent task at the moment for the American labor movement is to organize, organize, organize. That is, to bring into our movement the 90% of American workers who don't even have a union yet. Not that we shouldn't have a vision for the future (that's what this blog is supposed to be about, after all), but that there's no point in pretending we can take a shortcut to socialism.

Of course, "organize, organize, organize" is what CTW is all about. But CTW has been faulted for planning to organize only the 50 million American workers whose jobs can't be shipped overseas. I think this is a reflection of respect for the jurisdictions of AFL-CIO unions, and a recognition of CTW's current limitations, rather than an expression of disdain for manufacturing workers. Still, the question remains, what are we gonna do with what remains of the American manufacturing sector? (Given that concessions, concessions, and more concessions are not an acceptable answer.)

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'll say that part of the answer to that question is, "organize, organize, organize." For example, the UAW could get serious about organizing the foreign-owned plants in the South and about building international solidarity in the auto industry.

But for workers in factories that are closing, organizing a union (or strengthening the union they already have) isn't really an option. Is there no way for these workers to be part of the movement? The wave of factory occupations across Latin America provides a tantalizing answer to this question. This is easier suggested than organized, but these workers have nothing to lose but their pinkslips.

Here's a quote from the article I linked to above:

"[A Venezuelan union leader] also explained the destruction of Venezuela’s manufacturing industry. According to figures he gave, in 1999 there were nearly 12,000 manufacturing companies in the country, but now the figure was less than 7,000, which meant a loss of more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs. At the same time 90% of Venezuela’s companies were in the service sector. This extreme situation was due to the fact that 'capitalists are no longer interested in production' when they can get much quicker returns through speculation."

Sound familiar?

In South America, workers are increasingly responding to this situation by occupying and operating factories that otherwise would be abandoned. Wouldn't that be a better option than passing by the shuttered textile mill every day on the way to your new job at Wal-Mart?

The birth of a new labor federation

2005-10-25T17:43:00.000-07:00

(In Venezuela.)

The AFL Should Stop Attacking and Learn Something: Venezuela's National Workers' Union

Hope in Southern Louisiana

2005-10-24T19:05:00.000-07:00

The Nation has a good article this week about Cajun country's grassroots response to Hurricane Katrina. The whole article is worth reading, but here's a choice bit:

"So what does it all mean?

Mark Krasnoff thinks Ville Platte is the shape of things to come: southern Louisiana getting its interracial act together to take on its colonizers and rulers. A small, wiry man with the build of a dancer or gymnast, he is an actor (most recently in a prophetic FX network TV drama, Oil Storm, about a category 6 hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast) and a stunning bilingual raconteur. He is also the Che Guevara-cum-Huey Long of Evangeline Parish. His beat-up pickup wears the bumper sticker LOUISIANA: THIRD WORLD AND PROUD OF IT."

Democracy and leadership in the labor movement

2005-10-20T19:16:00.000-07:00

Heated debates about union democracy often center on a false dichotomy between strong union leadership and meaningful member-centered democracy.

A recent thread on the Working Life blog is trying to get past this dichotomy, but I fear we're not all the way there. I commend Jane Slaughter of Labor Notes (which publishes some of the most strident voices on the "pro-democracy" side of this confused debate) for emphasizing that democracy is not about "what looks democratic on paper" but rather "what will make the union more powerful against the boss." But from there she slips back into the same old dichotomy, by claiming that the Change to Win union leaders believe "that what makes a union powerful is very smart officers and staffers carrying out a well-thought-out plan" as opposed to the engagement of the members, as though the two were mutually exclusive.

The way I interpet the message pushed by Andy Stern of SEIU, John Wilhelm of UNITE-HERE, and Bruce Raynor of UNITE-HERE (I don't know much about the personal philosophies of the other CTW leaders, or the organizational cultures of their unions) is that we need to involve and engage more workers in our movement (especially, but not only, the 90% of workers who don't even have a union), and that the only way to do this is to have smart, committed leaders carrying out a good plan.

I can't repeat this too many times: a good plan carried out by good leaders is by no means mutually exclusive with membership involvement. To involve the membership effectively takes a lot of money and time. That's not a reason not to do it, it just points to the fact that it requires (you guessed it) good leaders with a good plan. Does this mean all those "smart officers and staffers" have to be college grads? Of course not. In my experience, many of the best organizers and strategists are straight from the rank and file. But should we exclude energetic, idealistic Ivy Leaguers who want to make a difference? Why on earth would we? It's damn hard to find a good, committed union organizer, and it doesn't make sense to close any doors. (Some of us, by the way, are both college grads and rank-and-filers.)

My experiences with UNITE-HERE and SEIU have taught me that strong leadership and membership involvement are not in conflict with one another--neither can exist without the other. In the locals I've worked with, the job of every organizer (some of whom are from the rank-and-file, some of whom are progressive college grads, some of whom are both) is to recruit and train rank-and-file leaders--as organizing committee members, chief shop stewards, etc. Mobilization is important, of course, but it's secondary, and good mobilization is simply a reflection of good leadership development.

Nor, as I've said before, is membership involvement mutually exclusive with the large-scale external organizing that CTW has in mind. In fact, in order to organize a lot of workers into our unions, we're gonna need thousands of rank-and-file leaders out in the field, teaching their non-union brothers and sisters how to stand up. Keep in mind that it takes very strong leadership to convince union members to spend their time and their dues money organizing non-union workers. That's the type of leadership Stern, Wilhelm, and Raynor have distinguished themselves by providing.

Finally, I'd like to nominate Maria Elena Durazo as the leader whose story perhaps most neatly embodies the way democracy, leadership, and power go hand-in-hand. In the late 80s she led a Labor Notes-style reform candidacy in HERE Local 11 in Los Angeles. The president of the local at the time was a white guy in a majority latina union who was more interested in protecting his own little domain and providing services to some of the more privileged members (banquet waiters) than in involving the membership or organizing anyone. He went so far as refusing to translate membership meetings into Spanish.

The race was close and, because there were allegations of fraud, the votes were never counted and a trusteeship was imposed by the international. Of course, the first instinct of Durazo and her supporters was to oppose the trusteeship as vehemently as they had opposed the old regime. But once they got to know the trustee and his staff, they realized that they were part of a small but growing progressive faction of the HERE international. They were, in fact, close associates of John Wilhelm. This was several years before Wilhelm was elected president of the union.

Durazo worked with some of the experienced organizers from the international to continue the internal organizing work she had begun during her campaign. They started recruiting an organizing committee and actively recruiting and training stewards for the first time in the local's history. After the trusteeship ended, Durazo was elected president. The cooperation with the international continued, and so did the hard work. The local started waging militant contract fights, and they started organizing non-union hotels and food-service contractors in the LA area. Meanwhile, they helped transform not only that one local, but the entire LA labor movement (the trustee, the late Miguel Contreras, moved on to become the leader of the LA County Federation of Labor, and Local 11 was always one of the strongest affiliates) and the entire international union (many organizers who have helped turn around other HERE locals were originally trained in LA). Most recently, Durazo and the Local 11 staff led the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride and a successful city-wide contract fight, the main objectives of which were to maintain free family health insurance and to line up the next contract expiration date with other HERE locals around the country. In these times, to accomplish those goals was a major victory. Stay tuned this year and next year for a lot more external organizing and a nationwide contract fight against the major hotel chains. Local 11 enters these fights as a model for the entire labor movement both in terms of rank-and-file leadership development and in terms of its committment to organizing the unorganized.

My main point is this: it took strong leadership to turn around a local that had a history of discouraging membership involvement; it took a special kind of farsighted, mature leadership to work with Wilhelm rather than trying to compete over the contested turf; and it will take even stronger leadership, not only from Durazo but also from hundreds of worker leaders, to win the huge fights that the local (and the international) have coming up in the near future.

Worker self-management in Uruguay

2005-10-19T22:32:00.000-07:00

This is a good story:

Without a Boss: A Worker-Run Textile Factory

What's the ideology of the CTW leadership?

2005-10-18T20:42:00.000-07:00

To be perfectly honest, I'd rather talk about organizing strategy than ideology. It's not that I don't think our vision for the future is important, it's just that, given the current state of affairs, the question that's really looming in my mind is "how on earth are we going to build a movement?" That's the type of vision that matters most to me right now.

But there are a lot of young radicals out there in the labor movement (myself included), and it's understandable if some of us stop in between housevisits to wonder, "what's next?" And I don't mean the next housevisit, I mean, after we organize the millions of workers that CTW is supposed to organize, what are we going to do with our power?

The syndicalist in me would say "just keep organizing." That is, if we reach 30% union density (a la the CIO in the 30s and 40s), let's go for 50%. If American workers are organized, let's do whatever we can to support labor movements in other countries. I think the capitalists will always have the edge on us as long as the majority of the world's workers are unorganized.

But let's just say that in our lifetimes we have the chance to replace capitalism with something else--can we trust the leaders of our unions to do the right thing? More to the point, if Stern et al have a choice, ten or twenty years from now, between keeping up the fight and adopting the "collaborationism" of the Cold War AFL-CIO, what will they do?

First of all, given the direction in which Stern has taken SEIU, and in which he has been rather forcefully pushing the entire labor movement lately, it's hard for me to imagine him becoming another George Meany. And his declaration that SEIU will never merge back into the AFL-CIO seem to indicate he doesn't want to repeat the mistake Walter Reuther made (and later regretted) when he merged the CIO with Meany's AFL.

But what does Stern believe in? Is he a comrade in the fight against capitalism? I'd like to suggest that we'll never really find the answer to these questions in his public statements. As the leader of a relatively large union in a pathetically small movement, he's not in the position to call the question, "capitalism or socialism." None of us are. The position he (and the rest of us) can and should be asking right now is, "are we gonna organize on a massive scale?" Stern and the rest of the CTW leadership have made that the question of the hour in the American labor movement. In any case, we should all be judged more on what we do than on what we say, and Stern's success in building a vibrant, growing union ought to speak for themselves. (No, SEIU's not perfect, but it's successes are pretty damn inspiring.)

But let's say we're still worried about the decisions he might make in the future. How can we get inside his head, besides being one of his close personal confidants? For what it's worth, the only time I saw Stern speak in person (at my old local union hall in Connecticut), he was fantasizing about calling a general strike for universal healthcare. But I suppose that doesn't prove he's not a "bourgeois reformist." So let's parse a few choice bits of his speech at the CTW founding convention, and see where they lead us:

1. "We pledge today that ALL of our Federation’s actions, ALL of our efforts, will be for ONE fundamental purpose: to ensure every that American, and every American's hard work, will be valued and rewarded – not just the shareholders and executives."

This is good old-fashioned class agitation, although not explicitly anti-capitalist.

2. "We pledge today that no one -- that no one who works full time -- will be poor anymore."

I hate to break it to ya, folks, but under socialism we're all gonna have to work full time.

3. "We pledge to create a new political movement. Not about Democrats and Republicans or left and right, but what’s right and wrong for American families."

Ok, I wish he would just go ahead and say the "new political movement" is a movement of the left, but let's face it, to most Americans "left and right" refer to the two sides of partisan politics in Washington, neither of which gives a damn about the average worker. This quote is really about declaring political independence, thereby reversing one of the mistakes of the Cold War AFL-CIO. And it should be noted that he's not talking just about endorsing vaguely "pro-labor" Republicans every once in a while. He's talking about "creating a new political movement." That suggests a long-term political strategy, the details of which, we must assume, have yet to be worked out.

4. "We pledge today to revolutionize our failing health care system that is sapping America’s competitiveness, and stealing worker’s pay raises with it. . . if not now -- at the dawn of a new century -- if not now after witnessing the shame of Katrina -- if not now at a time when America’s economic leadership is being tested, then when?"

Some people get uncomfortable when labor leaders use words like "competitiveness" and "America's economic leadership," and understandably so. But let's look at the context. Rhetoric about the healthcare system "sapping America's competitiveness" refers to the impending bankruptcy of GM and many other American firms that have high healthcare costs due to the goverment's failure to provide universal health insurance. It's part of an attempt to build a national consensus in favor of single-payer healthcare. Stern isn't explicit, but the logical conclusion of his comments is that capitalism isn't working. Which brings us to the last line of his speech, "if not now, at a time when America's economic leadership is being tested, then when." Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but read this as an observation that conditions are ripe for organizing, because American capitalism is in crisis.

5. "We pledge to ensure that in this new global economy, 'workers of the world unite' is not a slogan, but the basis to build global unions."

Theory and praxis, people, theory and praxis.

In the end, it sounds to me like Stern is "tacking betwixt and between" the two dangers of reformism and sectarianism, just like Rosa Luxemburg recommended. And, most importantly, he's doing everything he can to advance the "day-to-day struggle." Let's learn from him, and follow his example.

Some headlines I noticed today

2005-10-17T17:09:00.000-07:00

1. The consequences of not organizing:

General Motors and Union Reach Agreement on Health Care Costs

The failure to stand against concessions represents an abdication of leadership on the part of the UAW's top officers, but the concessions themselves are symptomatic of a much deeper abdication of leadership that goes back decades: the union's failure to organize the non-union plants in the south, failure to participate in a large-scale effort to organize the unorganized in other industries, and failure to develop meaningful international solidarity in the auto industry.

Walter Reuther (who wanted to retain the strategic organizing center of the CIO when the AFL and CIO merged, but was overruled by George Meany) must be turning in his grave.
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2. Immigration, the Minutemen, and working in the fields:

MODEST PROPOSAL: Minutemen, grab your hoes and march north

This one speaks for itself.
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3. Basing Iraqi democracy on Floridian and Ohioan democracy:

Vote Totals Under Inquiry in 12 Iraqi Provinces, Panel Says

Come to think of it, don't all of these headlines represent the consequences of not organizing? Let's get out there and hit the doors.

Let's make the Deep South an example for the rest of the country

2005-10-15T16:53:00.000-07:00

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?

Having it all figured out: organizing, vision, and the anxiety of the perfectionist

2005-10-14T12:43:00.000-07:00

An anonymous commenter (the first comment on my blog! thanks!) wrote: "we must continue organizing, no doubt. But what kind of world are we going for, and how are our every day efforts linked to that vision?"

Well, to quote a famously indecisive, and infamously unsuccessful, crusader for justice, "that is the question." Rosa Luxemburg phrased the question this way a century ago:

"The international movement of the proletariat toward its complete emancipation is a process peculiar in the following respect. For the first time in the history of civilization, the people are expressing their will consciously and in opposition to all ruling classes. But this will can only be satisfied beyond the limits of the existing system.

Now the mass can only acquire and strengthen this will in the course of day-to-day struggle against the existing social order -- that is, within the limits of capitalist society.

On the one hand, we have the mass; on the other, its historic goal, located outside of existing society. On one had, we have the day-to-day struggle; on the other, the social revolution. Such are the terms of the dialectic contradiction through which the socialist movement makes its way.

It follows that this movement can best advance by tacking betwixt and between the two dangers by which it is constantly being threatened. One is the loss of its mass character; the other, the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back to the condition of a sect; the other, the danger of becoming a movement of bourgeois social reform."

I believe the labor movement and allied grassroots community organizations are the best day-to-day tools available to us. And I'm attracted to Michael Albert's vision of Participatory Economics. But I'm turned off by anyone who claims to have this problem all figured out. If anyone had the path to a better society all mapped out, we'd be there already.

My favorite thing about Luxemburg's phrasing of the question is that she acknowledges, in a very deep way, the difficulty of answering it. She also acknowledges the impossibility of maintaining perfect control over the direction(s) the movement(s) take(s):

"That is why it is illusory, and contrary to historic experience, to hope to fix, once and for always, the direction of the revolutionary socialist struggle with the aid of formal means, which are expected to secure the labor movement against all possibilities of opportunist digression."

Here's the moral of the story, as far as I'm concerned: let's not get our undies all in a knot over assumed or actual imperfections in the leadership of our unions or other organizations. Let's not let our anxiety about the future course of these organizations hold us back from putting our all into building the union today.

Of course, we can learn from past failures: the Soviet Union, "communist" (capitalist) China, Allende's Chile, the Paris commune, the anarchist takeover of Barcelona, etc, etc. But what can the American left learn from current struggles in other countries, such as Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, and Mexico, that appear to be working, at least for now?

Check out this article about the labor movement's relationship with the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela.

Business as usual ain't gonna cut it

2005-10-12T23:41:00.000-07:00

This just in from Working Life: "In case you've wondered what's up at Northwest since the strike by mechanics, the situation has gotten even grimmer. Now the airline is going back to court to try to use the bankruptcy code to get rid of its union contracts."

Prop 75, Northwest, Delphi, SoCal supermarkets, public employees in Indiana and Missouri. The list goes on and on. How long will it take for everyone to realize that business as usual ain't gonna cut it?

Despite the shortcomings of automatic dues deduction (sometimes used as a crutch in lieu of creating real worker organization), I hesitate to find a silver lining in the coming starvation of the California labor movement's political program. Nor can we put a positive spin on the devastation of thousands and thousands of union members' livelihoods.

But whether we win or lose the present battles, I hope they snap us out of our denial. An advertising blitz (funded by dues checkoff) may save our asses this time. And some of our strikes (such as Boeing) may stave off concessions, proving that militancy still has no substitute. But unless we organize the unorganized, here and abroad, we're gonna lose the next battle if we don't lose this one. Before long, unions like the IAM, UAW, and USWA may simply cease to exist. Let's not wait for that to happen before we decide to do something different.

P.S. There is obviously no consensus that Change to Win represents "something different," or at least something that's different in the right way. Some people think it has mostly to do with money or egos. But I firmly believe that Change to Win is about more than saving money on per-caps. I believe it represents a (still too small) segment of the leadership of our movement that really is hearing the wake-up call. My belief is backed up by my experience with SEIU and UNITE-HERE. We'll have to reserve judgement on how committed the UFCW, Teamsters, and Carpenters are. But we gotta have faith. And I intend to spend the rest of my life making that faith real.

Some comments on the state of the labor movement and other current affairs

2005-10-11T20:30:00.000-07:00

Consider them notes toward a manifesto.

Fighting concessions, universal healthcare, and organizing the unorganized

[Originally posted at Working Life, 10/11/05]

Before the split, the New Unity Partnership and the Change to Win Coalition consistently advocated for the AFL-CIO to take the lead on a campaign for universal healthcare. Here's an excerpt from the "Restoring the American Dream" proposal:

"Labor must take the lead in a campaign to unify the broadest number of working people, capture the imagination of the nation, and build a broad coalition to win affordable, quality health care and retirement security for all. National health care is the central jobs and economic security issue of our era. Social Security and defined benefit pension plans are under assault. The ideas of health and retirement security are at the heart of the American Dream. The labor movement needs to build a mass campaign to win affordable health care and retirement security for all."

As a former SEIU staffer, I know that there have been conversations in the international and some of the locals for years about leading a movement (possibly culminating with a general strike) for universal health care. (As the largest health care workers' union, SEIU is in a uniquely good position to lead this fight.)

To their credit, the AFL-CIO and many member unions have adopted more or less the same policy position as the CTW, but there's one thing missing: a serious committment to, as the above proposal reads, "unify the broadest number of working people" in pursuit of this policy. As long as the wage-and-benefit packages of airline workers, auto workers, steelworkers, supermarket workers, etc, remain isolated exceptions to the general rule of low wages and meager benefits for working people all over the country and around the world, they will continue to disappear. These tiny islands of privilege will continue to be overwhelmed by the category-5 hurricane that is contemporary capitalism. As long as the UAW doesn't organize Toyota, Nissan, Hyundai, BMW and the rest in the South, as long as the UFCW doesn't organize Wal-Mart, as long as nobody builds a truly international organizing and collective bargaining program to raise standards worldwide, all of our benefits will be vulnerable.

Don't get me wrong, I think the UAW and other unions facing massive concessions should lead militant actions in defense of their hard-won standards. After all, those standards were achieved through militant action decades ago, and SEIU and UNITE-HERE have shown recently that militant action can preserve, and even win for the first time, fully employer-paid family health insurance for traditionally low-wage service-sector workers. Maybe sit-down strikes at Delphi would help kick-start a large scale movement for universal healthcare.

But it's worth noting that SEIU and UNITE-HERE's recent victories have come in the context of an overall organizing strategy designed to put them on the offensive, while other recent fights (the Southern California supermarket strike, all the airlines, the UAW at GM and Delphi) have been purely defensive. In order to fulfill the vision "affordable health care and retirement security for all" the strategies demonstrated by SEIU and UNITE-HERE in limited segments of their industries must be put into action all across our global economy. That's what Change to Win is all about.

Democracy, trusteeship, and building a movement

[Originally posted at Working Life, 10/4/05]

Many have criticised the CTW unions, especially SEIU, for a lack of internal democracy. The evidence often has to do with SEIU's increasing tendency to have large statewide locals (the idea being that members can't control their local if they live in San Diego and the "local" headquarters is in Sacramento), and with SEIU and UNITE-HERE's history of imposing trusteeships on locals that don't get with the program.

But it doesn't make sense to have a one-shop, one-local setup (as in the UAW and some other unions) when your shop is a restaurant with 30 employees, or a home-healthcare situation with 1 employee and 1 client. It's not the ratio of shops to locals that matters, it's the level of member involvement, and if a large local with a lot of resources is the structure that best facilitates member involvement and rank-and-file leadership development (and a commitment to organizing the unorganized), I'd rather have that than a supposedly "rank-and-file" local that operates as a dues-collecting, concession-granting machine. (The UAW's concession-granting tendencies, their narrow-minded zeal to line up with their employers against environmental rules that would benefit the entire working class, and their half-assed approach to organizing the foreign-owned plants in the south make them, in my mind, the perfect example of a biz union.)

And, for that matter, if a trustee is the most capable of mobilizing the rank-and-file around a progressive organizing program, it's very appropriate that the trustee should be elected president. For example, until a few years ago HERE Local 1 in Chicago had one of the worst contracts in the industry, despite relatively high density (around 60%), because the leadership was a little corrupt and very lazy. It was the epitome of business unionism. There was a local rank-and-file reform movement, but it was tiny and had exactly zero chance of ever taking power. So the international sent in Henry Tamarin as a trustee, with a mandate to recruit rank-and-file leaders (for the first time in decades) and get ready for the city-wide contract negotiations. They built a huge committee and took an overwhelming strike vote, and the hotels buckled, resulting in the best contract the members had ever seen. Now the local is doing large-scale external organizing for the first time in who-knows-how-long, and they're getting ready to take part in a national fight against the major hotel chains next year (along with Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Sacramento, Toronto, and Hawaii). Oh, and they've been on strike at the Congress Hotel (the one hotel that didn't except the master contract last time) for over a year. Somewhere along the line Tamarin was elected president, and thank goodness.

"Staff-driven social movement unionism" vs. "business unionism"

[Originally posted at Working Life, 10/4/05]

In the course of the discussion over the current crisis in the labor movement, the term "business unionism" has been thrown around a lot, sometimes applied (surprisingly, to me) to SEIU and UNITE-HERE. Marc Brazeau posted an articulate and thoughtful comment at Working Life, addressing this issue, and making a distinction between "business unionism" and "staff-driven social movement unionism."

Piggybacking on Marc's terminology, and in response to a poster calling himself "Joe Hill" who opined that "staff-driven social movement unionism" is an oxymoron, I'd like to argue that, in fact, the distinction between "staff-driven" and "worker-driven" or "worker-centered" social movement unionism breaks down as long as the staff is doing its job right. In other words, as long as the staff's job is to recruit and train worker leaders, and as long as this is reflected in the fact that the staff is composed largely of people who cut their teeth as rank-and-file leaders themselves, then what exactly is the difference? And what is this blanket aversion to union "staff" all about? Whether they come from the militant rank-and-file or from radical student-organizing or community-organizing backgrounds, let's respect hard-working, honest union staffers (and almost everybody I've met in various CTW locals fits that description) for what they are: dedicated, full-time union leaders.

(Full disclosure: I am currently NOT a union staffer, though I dedicate a significant amount of my time to volunteer organizing work with a CTW union. A few years ago I was fired as an organizer by a different CTW union, so I suppose I could be bitter, but I'd rather focus my ire on the real enemy.)

Hurricane Katrina and organizing the South

[Originally posted on Marc Cooper's blog, in response to his post on the future reconstruction of Mississippi's casinos, 9/28/05]

Marc, thanks for throwing in that little bit about "living wage guarantees for casino workers," but how 'bout a little in-depth reporting. We all know you like to go to Vegas, and we all know you like to report on the the struggles of our country's most down-and-out workers (such as grape pickers in the Central Valley), so why not hop on down to Mississippi to see what's up with all the casino workers who've been left with neither job nor home?

Believe it or not, the workers in Tunica, MS, up in the delta near Memphis, unaffected by Katrina, have organized a union and are in negotiations for their first contract. (They got a significant assist from their sisters and brothers in Atlantic City, who pulled off a very successful strike last year against the very same companies that operate the casinos in Mississippi.) The workers down in Biloxi were in the process of doing the same before their workplaces got blown out of the water.

But your question--"Under what conditions should the thirteen Mississippi casinos wiped out by the storm be allowed to rebuild?"--is not idle speculation. The fight for economic justice in the casinos was already going on before the hurricane, and it should only ramp up now that the inequality and outright failure of the current system have been laid bare.

For that matter, why stop at the gaming industry. Now that the entire Gulf Coast economy needs to be rebuilt, let's rebuild it right, and let the Deep South be an example of justice for the rest of the country (imagine that!). I'm stuck here in LA, doing my own organizing. Why don't you go give us the play-by-play on the battle of Biloxi.

Internal and external organizing and rank-and-file leadership

[Originally posted at Working Life, 9/28/05]
[Reposted here]

As an activist who has been involved in various ways (staff, volunteer organizer, student organizer, etc) with three different locals of CTW unions, I'm having trouble understanding why many commentators assume there's a conflict between rank-and-file democracy and Change to Win's approach to large-scale new organizing. I can't speak for every CTW local, but I can speak for UNITE-HERE Local 34 (Connecticut), UNITE-HERE Local 11 (Los Angeles), and SEIU 1199 New England when I say that large-scale efforts to organize the unorganized are not mutually exclusive with energizing, mobilizing, and training rank-and-file leaders. In fact, they ought to go hand in hand.

In the unions I have worked with, most of the staff organizers who are supposedly "parachuted in" are actually members of the union. They are housekeepers, bartenders, cooks, dishwashers, bellmen, front desk agents, etc, who have learned how to organize in their roles as chief shop stewards and are now spending twelve or more hours a day recruiting and teaching other workers to do the same.

Whether they are doing "internal" or "external" organizing, every organizer on our staff spends all of his or his time doing what we call "building committee." In internal organizing, this means we have recruited and trained a group of shop stewards who are trained to handle grievences and lead shop-floor actions to resolve day-to-day issues. It also means we are constantly recruiting and training a large organizing committee covering every department, shift, nationalaty, clique, etc., capable of mobilizing large numbers of members for demonstrations, local political campaigns, and strikes. And it means more of the full-time organizers' time is freed up to work on external organizing.

External organizing is much more difficult because the fear levels are much higher, but it essentially works the same way. Without a strong committee, we don't win campaigns. Do we also use various kinds of corporate campaigns to pressure companies to recognize the union? Of course we do, because without winning campaigns, we aren't doing right by our strong committee, and it doesn't get bigger, and it doesn't have the power to affect the power relationships of our economy.

To all of you complain that in CTW campaigns "only a small portion of the workforce is involved," by all means go out there and work on getting more folks involved. We'll all be better off for your efforts.

An idea about Wal-Mart organizing and solidarity with Chinese workers:

[I hope to expand this into a full proposal in the near future, but comments are welcome in the meantime.]

1. Make connections with independent labor organizations in China, and pick out some key workplaces in China based on (a) their significance in the Chinese labor market and (b) their relationship to WalMart.

2. Start noisy, public militant-minority mini-campaigns at WalMarts around the country, along with the types of community alliances that the UFCW has already built in communities where they've tried to keep WalMart out (such as Inglewood, CA).

3. Do slow, careful, underground organizing at Wal-Mart's distribution centers. Don't let the boss know we're there, or who the rank-and-file leaders are, until we've already got a strong organization.

4. The mini-campaigns at Wal-Mart stores around all over won't build a majority, and they won't bring the company to its knees, but they will be a big headache. Once this headache has gotten bad enough, and if all goes according to plan, we may can really call the question by (a) shutting down distribution centers and (b) shutting down major suppliers.

Welcome sindicalistas

2005-10-04T23:43:00.000-07:00

This is an organizer's journal on union organizing, movement politics, and long-term vision. It is for fantasizing about future strategies and debating current tactics. I'm using the Spanish word "sindicalista" partly because it resembles the English word "syndicalist," meaning a believer in syndicalism or anarcho-syndicalism, a brand of anti-capitalist ideology with which I loosely identify, but mostly because it translates most literally to the word "unionist" or "trade unionist."

This journal is emphatically not a sectarian message-machine. It is for honest discussion among people who share my passion for organizing for a better society. In spirit I am a socialist, an anarchist, a social democrat, a democratic socialist, an anarcho-communist, a pareconist, a poet, and all sorts of other things, but I belong to no party (nor do I rule out belonging to a party at some point in the future).

As I post my observations, reflections, ideas, and rants, please chime in. And please spread the word.