Today in Labor History—November 29

November 29, 1832 - Louisa May Alcott, author, nurse and abolitionist, was born on this date. While she was most famous for her book, “Little Women,” Alcott also wrote “Work,” an autobiographical novel that exposed the exploitation of women workers. (From Workday Minnesota)

November 29, 1870 – England initiated state-run compulsory education.(From the Daily Bleed)

November 29, 1934 – Retail workers at Boston Stores in Milwaukee launched a strike at the beginning of the Christmas rush. The strike was a united effort between three unions, including clerks, teamsters & building-service employees. An extremely cold winter and the store's willingness to hold out through the holiday season eventually broke the strike. For the next 60 years, none of the city's major department stores were unionized. (From theDaily Bleed)

November 29, 1999 - Thousands of activists, students, union members, environmentalists and others shut down the World Trade Organization (WTO) summit in Seattle. It was the first large-scale demonstration in the United States to protest the “corporate agenda” and “globalization” and the beginning of many similar protests, including the current OWS movement. The WTO protest, like the OWS movement, was effective at raising awareness of corporate greed while simultaneously promoting the delusion that, with a few reforms, capitalism and democracy would serve the needs of the people. (From Workday Minnesota)

An Open Letter from America’s Port Truck Drivers on Occupy the Ports

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 12, 2011 — We are the front-line workers who haul container rigs full of imported and exported goods to and from the docks and warehouses every day.

 

We have been elected by committees of our co-workers at the Ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle and Tacoma to tell our collective story. We have accepted the honor to speak up for our brothers and sisters about our working conditions despite the risk of retaliation we face. One of us is a mother, the rest of us fathers. Between the four of us we have six children and one more baby on the way. We have a combined 31 years of experience driving cargo from our shores for America’s stores.

To read the entire letter, please click here.

Where are the 99%?

Oakland Port protest November 2, (from Flickr, Brian Sims)

OWS attempted to shut down all of the West Coast ports from San Diego to Anchorage today. The OWS groups in all the major West Coast port cities agreed to join in the protest, as did Houston and even OWS groups in a few landlocked cities decided to participate by blockading Walmart stores.

While the action was ambitious, aggressive, and partially effective (several terminals in various cities were closed and their workers sent home for “safety” reasons, according to the San Francisco Chronicle), it suffered several substantial flaws.

The first problem was that OWS did not have the support of the unions. In fact, none of the unions officially supported the action, while some union members were outright hostile, claiming their unions hadn’t even been consulted by OWS. Many said they sympathized with OWS, but felt like this was attack on their livelihood rather than a direct hit on the “1%.” Others called the protest presumptuous meddling by outsiders (see here and here).

The fact that the ports sent workers home and did not try to have the police break the pickets indicates that they believe their employees will blame OWS for their lost wages and not the terminal operators. Furthermore, it suggests that they are willing to lose some profits for a day if it will help discredit and crush the OWS movement.

Even so, the pickets were not sufficient to shut down all the terminals at all the ports. In order to completely shut down a port the workers themselves must to refuse to work. Citizenry can picket and try to blockade the port and hope that workers will honor their picket. However, if the workers want to work and the police break the picket, the best they can hope for is a disruption or slow down. In contrast, if the workers refuse to work nothing gets done except by the few scabs who manage to squeeze past the picketers.

Clarence Thomas, President of ILWU local 10, in Oakland, said he wouldn’t cross the picket line and he thought his ILWU brothers and sisters would honor the picket, as well, since his local had a long and proud history of honoring pickets, even community-based ones. He also felt that the unions’ reticence reflected the conservativeness of their leaders, and not the sentiments of their rank and file.

All of this highlights the fact that neither the OWS movement nor the unions are doing much organizing. The OWS movement seems to think that all they need to do is put out a tweet or a facebook call, and thousands will understand their goals and tactics and readily join in. They claim they represent 99% of Americans, yet even at their strongest, they have only mobilized a tiny fraction of the 99% in any given community to show up to their encampments and demonstrations. In the case of the West Coast port shutdown, it was clear that many of those whom they claimed they were supporting (i.e., union members) didn’t understand or appreciate the support.

OWS is in essence a vanguardist movement: a small group decides what are the appropriate tactics and demands, and calls on everyone else to follow (or join in). The movement mushroomed from such a call on the internet by Adbusters to go out and occupy Wall Street. The sentiment that the rich are too rich and jacking the rest of us appealed to the majority of Americans for very good reasons: They are jacking us. But it is a big leap to assume that this, alone, is sufficient to get the 99% to take collective action.  

This is not Egypt, Tunisia, Libya or Syria, where people have lived under brutal dictatorships for generations. Most Americans still believe in the existing form of government and the prevailing economic system. They still believe that voting can resolve their grievances and that bosses create jobs and consequently financial security for us.

This belief is nowhere more evident than in trade union movement, where organizing has been virtually abandoned in favor of supporting political campaigns. If they were truly organizing their members, educating and mobilizing them, the unions would be able to launch massive strikes quickly and often. Taft-Hartley, which criminalizes General Strikes, would become insignificant because a well-organized and educated rank and file would see the power of a General Strike and would consider participating, even if their union leadership remained silent or oppositional on the matter.  This may explain why there was a 15% increase in absenteeism by Oakland teachers during the attempted General Strike last month (according to the New York Times): Oakland has numerous veteran organizers in their teachers’ union who have been calling for a General Strike since last April (see here for one example).

Organizing is a slow, painstaking process. One cannot simply call for a strike and expect 80-90% of the people to be on board. Yet if you don’t have this level of solidarity, the strike is unlikely to succeed.

Community organizing, which OWS needs to do if they want to get larger numbers of the 99% to join them, is very similar to union organizing. Contrary to popular misconception, organizing is NOT simply getting people to show up to a demonstration or picket. This is more accurately classified as “Mobilizing,” something that is much more effective if preceded by organizing.

A good organizer starts by making connections with individuals, listening to their concerns and grievances, supporting them and building trust. When possible, the organizer helps resolve some of the smaller grievances. A union organizer, for example, might help get a broken tool repaired or replaced. A community organizer might help an evicted tenant access the community resources or a pro bono attorney. This not only builds interpersonal trust, but it also makes the union or whatever the larger organization is seem like it has the organizee’s back, rather than simply wanting something from them.

Once a positive relationship has been developed, the organizer can start educating the organizee, easing them beyond their current comfort zone, encouraging them to take part in low risk collective actions, like wearing a button or t-shirt or joining in a picket. After this, once the organizee trusts the organizer and the organization and feels self-confident participating in low-risk actions, the organizer can educate and agitate further and encourage the organizee to participate in more aggressive and risky tactics like strikes, occupations and civil disobedience.

Obviously, the time required to get an individual ready and willing to participate in the more risky and aggressive actions varies from person to person, but could take months or even years for some people. Add to this the fact that a given organizer can only reach so many people per week and the fact that it is much easier to build trusting relationships through one-on-one meetings rather than by speaking to large groups.  

All this is to say that we have a long way to go before OWS or the trade union movements will be able to mount any sort of effective direct actions against the ruling elite. Of course, it would also help if there were some concrete demands associated with the actions. Protests can be fun, exciting and empowering and sometimes worthwhile for these reasons, alone.  But for all the commitment and risk involved, a lot of people are going to want to feel like there are some attainable goals that can be achieved through their efforts.

Sabotage, As American As Apple Pie

This Monday, on the public radio program Marketplace, host Kai Ryssdal mentioned that U.S. businesses will lose $1 billion over the next few weeks because of employees doing their holiday shopping on the internet at work instead of doing their jobs.

The OWS movement might learn something from this.

Their calls for people to stay home on Black Friday were not only ignored, but this past Friday ended up being one of the busiest retail shopping days ever.

My guess is that people have recession fatigue and desperately want to celebrate the holidays like they used to, whether or not they have jobs or economic certainty. They want this so badly that they are willing to risk their jobs by doing their shopping on the boss’ dime.

While most are not doing this deliberately to undermine the profitability of their employers, it is a consequence of their behavior. Workers do this all the time in other subtle and not so subtle ways and for various reasons including dissatisfaction with the job, boredom and revenge. They do things like taking home office supplies, extending their lunches, surfing the internet and corresponding with friends via email. People sometimes pad their time cards or prolong their time in the toilet or at the coffee machine.

All of these are forms of sabotage and it is as commonplace as work itself.

The IWW (Wobblies) promoted sabotage as a tactic to help workers win their grievances at work, by slowing down efficiency and profit-making. Their propaganda often included the image of a sabot, the Dutch shoe that workers often threw into the looms during the 19^th century to slow down production. In fact, the word sabotage comes from sabot. The Wobblies used the word sabotage to include any tactic that slowed down efficiency, including deliberately slowing down production, working to rule, bungling duties.

Considering that the majority of Americans do not seem ready to join the OWS movement in the streets and encampments, nor do they seem ready to boycott holiday shopping, perhaps a better tact for the movement would be to follow the example of the IWW and call for mass acts of sabotage in the workplace.

For those who are lucky enough to have jobs and who can’t afford to lose them by playing hooky to join an OWS protest, there are plenty of things that can be done at work to gum up the machinery of capital and cut into profits with minimal risk. The options are virtually infinite with a little creativity and caution. Numerous examples can be found in Martin Sprouse’s book, “Sabotage in the American Workplace.”

Give the People What They Want—Educational Snake Oil and Teachers to Burn!

Burn, Teacher, Burn! (Image from Flickr, cdrummks)

A recent poll by the Los Angeles Times and University of Southern California has found that a majority of California voters want teacher evaluations made public and student test scores used in their reviews.

So what?

Does the public necessarily get or even deserve what it demands? Do we make employee evaluations public for nurses, doctors, firefighters, police, receptionists, retailers, insurance sales reps?

Teachers are already one of the most scrutinized, regulated and manipulated professions out there (most regulated, according to Assailed Teacher). They get reprimanded and sometimes even fired for “transgressions” in their private lives, like having political bumper stickers on their cars or posting  work-related gripes on their private Facebook pages, which is not much different than in the old days when they got fired if they got pregnant. Teachers have been reprimanded for expressing controversial comments or sharing controversial content with students despite their supposed academic freedom.

Unlike the above examples, teachers have very little control over student test scores, which are correlated far more with students’ socioeconomic background than with the quality of their teachers. Evaluating teachers based on their students’ test scores is like evaluating doctors on their patients’ blood pressure and blood sugar. In both cases, lower income people are much more likely to have undesirable results and the professionals who work with them are much less likely to be able to help them.

Another relevant question is what would the public do with this information? Demand the mass firing of all teachers at low income schools because their test scores were too low?

This would conflict with another recent public demand—supported by an ACLU lawsuit and court mandate in Los Angeles—that teachers at low income schools be exempt from layoffs.

If we did fire all teachers at low income schools or anywhere that test scores did not make the required arbitrary improvements, would the public then demand higher wages and an influx of funding for teacher training programs in order to recruit and retain “good” teachers, or would they accept the inevitable mushrooming of class sizes to 40 or 50 students?

Of course rather than demanding that “bad” teachers be fired, parents could use the data to pull their kids from schools with too many “bad” teachers, just as they might use similar data to avoid “bad” doctors. However, they can already pull their kids from “bad” schools and they already know which schools these are: the low income ones that tend to have the lowest test scores. Linking teacher evaluations to these test scores and publishing teacher evaluations does nothing to make this any easier or more effective.

The hysteria over “bad” teachers has the same source as the hysteria over “bad” schools:  fear mongering promulgated by the test publishers, educational management organizations, tutoring industry and other businesses that hope to capitalize on testing, accountability and the resulting punishments. The teacher witch hunt is further exploited by politicians and the wealthy who hope to distract the public from the major cause of the achievement gap—poverty and the growing wealth gap—problems the OWS movement is now shoving in their faces more effectively than the teachers unions ever did.

It is worth considering that simply dumping what you don’t like (e.g., “bad” teachers or traditional public schools) does not necessarily get you what you really want and can result in something much worse. Consider the Egyptians who dumped their dictator and got a military junta that has been slaughtering them in the streets for the past week. What are we getting when we dump the “bad” teachers and schools: elitist charter schools that loot school districts of scare resources while squeezing out minority, special education and low income students, and a growing achievement gap.

It is important to have an accurate understanding of what the problem actually is and a valid critique of its causes before an effective solution can be proposed. Since the data overwhelmingly shows that poverty is the biggest influence on the achievement gap, low test scores and low graduation rates, simply firing teachers and giving away the public schools to private educational management organizations cannot end the achievement gap, get all students to graduate on time or attain the status of Finnish and South Korean schools.

Tying teacher evaluations to student test scores will result in declining numbers of teachers, exacerbating the problems of overcrowding and student access to quality teachers. Many good teachers will lose their jobs simply because they were working with low income students. Others will refuse to work in low income schools because it could jeopardize their careers.

Making teacher evaluations available to the public serves no public good and could result in great harm, not only to teachers, but students, as well. Too many bad evaluations at one school could result in a mass exodus of those families with the time, resources and knowledge of the system to get their kids into other schools. This would result in some schools becoming even more segregated, even more concentrated with poor, immigrant and low-achieving students.

On a more sinister note, if the public is not satisfied with schools’ response to bad evaluations, witch hunts and vigilantism against teachers could result.

God's Approval Rating Is Down

According to the Harper's Index, only 52% of Americans approve of God's job performance.

The question I have is how 48% of Americans suddenly got the chutzpah to judge God in the first place. Has the OWS movement helped them to finally see that he is a member of the 1%? Have they given up their belief that he is omnipotent and infallible? Are they ready to occupy Heaven until he does a better job?

Today in Labor History—November 29

November 29, 1832 - Louisa May Alcott, author, nurse and abolitionist, was born on this date. While she was most famous for her book, “Little Women,” Alcott also wrote “Work,” an autobiographical novel that exposed the exploitation of women workers. (From Workday Minnesota)

November 29, 1870 – England initiated state-run compulsory education. (From the Daily Bleed)

November 29, 1934 – Retail workers at Boston Stores in Milwaukee launched a strike at the beginning of the Christmas rush. The strike was a united effort between three unions, including clerks, teamsters & building-service employees. An extremely cold winter and the store's willingness to hold out through the holiday season eventually broke the strike. For the next 60 years, none of the city's major department stores were unionized. (From the Daily Bleed)

November 29, 1999 - Thousands of activists, students, union members, environmentalists and others shut down the World Trade Organization (WTO) summit in Seattle. It was the first large-scale demonstration in the United States to protest the “corporate agenda” and “globalization” and the beginning of many similar protests, including the current OWS movement. The WTO protest, like the OWS movement, was effective at raising awareness of corporate greed while simultaneously promoting the delusion that, with a few reforms, capitalism and democracy would serve the needs of the people. (From Workday Minnesota)

The Not So Shocking Truth About the Crackdown on Occupy Wall Street

Image from Flickr, Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Naomi Wolf’s expose on the federal role in the crackdown on the Occupy Wall Street movement, “The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy,” has been making the rounds in the liberal blogosphere, getting replayed here and here, for example. In her piece, Wolf calls the violent crackdown on OWS protesters a “civil war” by the U.S. government against its own constituents. She believes that Congress is colluding with Obama to suppress the people they are “supposed to represent” and they are doing it because they have “started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth.”

In other words, Wolf sees a conspiracy by an upstart class of 1%-er wannabes to keep secret the fact that they are enriching themselves on the backs of the 99% so that the 99% will continue to vote for them and so they can continue their nefarious plot to become members of the ruling elite.

Of course there are numerous sinister and disturbing aspects to the crackdown, not the least of which has been its level of violence and the use of military hardware. But the violence is not unprecedented, as Wolf and others decry, nor even deadly.

So far, no one has been killed by the police at OWS protests, though hundreds of workers and activists were killed by the police in other protests and strikes over the past 130 years.  In the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, for example, 10 workers were shot dead by militias just in Maryland and 20 more in Pittsburgh. Many others were killed and injured by militias, police and federal troops in other cities, too. There were numerous other labor struggles in which labor activists were shot and killed by police, militias, private security or vigilantes, on behalf of the bosses (e.g., Homestead, Everett, Columbine, Ludlow, the Battle of Virden, the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903-4, the Battle of Blair Mountain). There were also the massacres of the 60s and early-70s, like Kent State, Jackson State, Southern University and Orangeberg, and the political assassinations (e.g., Fred Hampton, Bobby Hutton, members of MOVE).

Wolf also complains about how the movement has been infiltrated by local and federal law enforcement and vigilantes, while local police responses have been coordinated by the feds. However, none of this is new either, while the “organized and coordinated by the feds” angle isn’t even necessarily true. COINTELPRO, HUAC, McCarthyism and the Palmer raids were all federally-coordinated police responses to domestic activism and infiltration of movements is so routine that one would have to be very naïve to think their political meetings and protests were free of infiltrators and provocateurs.

In order to get to the bottom of this “unprecedented federal coordination” of attacks on the OWS movement, Wolf asked OWS what their message was. Within 15 minutes she received 100 responses. The number one demand was “get the money out of politics.”

This is hardly radical or revolutionary and cannot be the reason for the suppression of the movement. In fact, the demand to reform the political system indicates that they accept and embrace the existing political order. It presumes that the system is inherently good and did, or would, serve the interests of the 99% if only it weren’t so corrupt. Indeed, the goal of reducing the influence of money in politics is such a mainstream idea that it has been sought by mainstream politicians and 1%-ers like John McCain and Russ Feingold.

Their number two demand, according to Wolf, is that the banking system be reformed, by implementing new rules to prevent fraud, for example, and restoring the Glass-Steagall act. Again, this is hardly radical or revolutionary and indicates that they embrace the existing economic order, including the 1%’s right to be much richer than the rest of us. Banks can still exist and make money by exploiting labor; they just need to follow the law.

While none of this is revolutionary, radical or even a remote threat to the hegemony and wealth of the ruling elite, the rich do not want to give up any of their wealth or power. When the rabble rises up, even with modest demands, it is like an uppity housekeeper or an insubordinate employee. The proper response is to aggressively discipline them or else they might get bigger ideas and their contagion might spread. What if OWS decides that banking and political reforms aren’t enough? What if they decide to elect a bunch of greens or demand higher wages or free healthcare for all? What if they manage to organize a real General Strike?

The Shocking Truth is that biggest threat may not be what the OWS protesters are currently demanding, but the sympathy they have garnered among the rest of Americans. According to Michael Moore, 72% of Americans want to increase taxes on the rich. While Moore is not the most trustworthy source, the point is that average Americans are pissed off about their declining wealth, material security and chances of being able to retire in comfort (or at all), and the OWS movement feels to them like the best expression of this angst. They do want the wealthy to pay more in taxes and they want that extra revenue to rejuvenate their schools, parks, libraries and other services.

However, they seem to also want another New Deal, or something like it, and this would really set the rich back.  Under Roosevelt, the marginal tax rate increased to 94%. The corporate tax rate increased from 12% in 1931, to 40% in 1942.  New rules regulating banking, including Glass-Steagall, were passed, that nominally restrained their ability to make profits. The Wagner Act (NRLA) was passed, which nominally restrained employers’ ability to interfere in unions and labor organizing.

It also resulted in a massive increase in government spending on public works, which put people back to work and income into their pockets. This, too, the wealthy cannot stand, as it would require a realignment of government priorities away from subsidizing the wealthy and their businesses and toward subsidizing the 99%.

However, it is just plain absurd to say that this is all about Congress trying to keep the public from learning their dirty little secret and helping them to become members of the 1%. Most members of Congress were already members of the ruling elite well before becoming members of Congress. They came from jobs as CEOs, bankers and large-firm attorneys. And the public has always known that they were enriching themselves further while in Congress. This is probably why their approval of Congress has been so low for so long. With the exception of a blip in 2002, the Congressional approval rating has consistently been less than 40% for the past 36 years.