Fast Food Workers: Giving Juice to a Revived Living Wage Movement

A perspective from the South

Posted on Friday March 7th, 2014 by Jeffrey Lichtenstein

On the morning of December 5^th, 15 fast food workers and 30 supporters gathered outside the McDonald’s on Highland in Memphis, Tennessee. After some picket-line discussion of tactics and their risks, one worker, Reese, said “I didn’t come here to stand around outside, we’re taking over that store!”¹ In the blink of an eye, 45 people, mostly in their 20’s and 30’s, mostly African American men and women, piled into the McDonalds. Another worker, Lee, jumped onto a table, joined by others, to the swinging bass rhythm of chanting: “We can’t survive! On seven twenty five!” Then, riffing on Drake’s hit, we switched to something new:

We started from the bottom, now we’re here
Seven twenty five, just ain’t fair!

Workers on the clock bobbed their head and put hands in the air while we danced on tables and in between the aisles. After 5 minutes we rolled out and headed to another McDonalds on Elvis Presley Blvd where the same thing happened again. We added exterior signs and an adjacent highway to our temporarily occupied territory, and rocked even harder: after all, it was Elvis Presely Blvd.

We in Memphis were part of a much broader day of action, the “Fight For Fifteen,” focused for the most part in cities across the Midwest and Northeast. The Memphis workers, along with workers from Nashville, TN, Columbus, Missouri, St. Louis, MO, and Lexington, Kentucky, had voted on the strike two days before at a regional meeting in St. Louis. Community supporters from Organization for Black Struggle, Jobs with Justice, and other groups took the stage, one after the other, to pledge support to a movement that was “picking up where MLK left off when he was struck down.” When Memphis workers took the stage they did it in a bumping group of two dozen people. From the lectern they broke into a spontaneous chant: “What do we want? More money!” while Carlos, a leading Memphis striker, bellowed “This is history in the making! History in the making.” The decision to strike was passed unanimously, 96 – 0.

Low Wage Workers and Non-Majority Organizing

The strike was a big step forward for living wage work in this country, and low wage workers in Memphis in particular. Living wage fights have dotted the US for 20 years, usually as a demand on city or county governments (or sometimes on universities) to require that direct and contract employees are paid at least the cost of living. But for the last few decades, even when they were won, these fights happened within a broader tide of workplace defeat, and rarely received lasting attention, from the media or organized labor. In the south what few living wage fights there were faced sharp local opposition and hostile state governments. In Memphis, for example, a municipal living wage ordinance passed in 2006 was outlawed last year from the capitol in Nashville, where the gerrymandered representatives of white rural Tennessee are gathered in force.
Today, however, it seems the tide is turning. The spirit that was given voice across the country in the occupy slogan “We are the 99%” has taken hold of this concrete demand for living wages. Historically, US labor has had about as much success in the south as Napoleon did with the Russian winter, but with a living wage demand the fast food strikes have made vibrant inroads into Memphis, Durham, and Atlanta. A month before the Dec 5th strike, Obama strongly broke from his weak and nonspecific position on the minimum wage announcing he would support bringing the pay floor up to $10.10. Many other democrats, looking for something to campaign on this cycle and wanting to ride the tide, are making the wealth and income inequality their hot button issue. As more forces and people jump on the bandwagon the public presence of the Living Wage struggle will likely reach new heights, possibly surpassing the initial burst of activity 20 years ago. (Hopefully this wave of living wage struggle will be distinguished by its rootedness among workers in the shop, rather than community groups and advocates). What we as radicals have to figure out is how we utilize this moment to build class struggle and not simply electoral scaffolding for the Dems.
In Tennessee, this upsurge in non-majority low-wage fight back intersects with a long history of struggle by workers who face similar conditions. For 13 years TN public higher education workers, thousands of whom are paid less than the cost of living, and none of whom have a right to collectively bargain, have been fighting for living wages and growing their union, United Campus Workers (UCW). UCW itself has its origins in a strong living wage campaign dating back to 1999. Since its inception the union has grown to 1500 members, despite the nationwide decline in density, and in the last three years won more than $10 million in raises from the state of TN for low wage higher ed workers. Bearing with them this history of struggle, UCW leaders immediately recognized the important potential of the Fight For Fifteen (FFF). When the fast food strikes came to Memphis, UCW made up the overwhelming majority of organized labor solidarity; nearly every other union was conspicuously absent. The local United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) chapter, which does a lot of work to support UCW, made up the majority of student supporters. Community solidarity came in its greatest strength from Mid-South Peace and Justice Center and Workers Interfaith Network.

Having actively supported UCW for several years, and having been fortunate enough to be involved in the FFF since it came to Memphis, I have a vantage point that I hope can contribute to the lively discussion that has developed around its character and direction.

Who’s in Charge? The Staff-Worker Two-Way Street

In his article Opportunities Present for “Labor Left” in Walmart and Fast Food, Ryan Hill echoed some concerns that had been raised about the FFF events being staff-saturated and staff-directed to the point of depriving workers of leadership. Whether or not this is true of some Northeastern and Midwestern cities, where staff resources have been focused, I can’t say. But those initial strikes in the north catalyzed something here in the south which is markedly not staff-driven. Workers here caught wind of what was going on elsewhere and jumped at the chance to get involved. Staff organizers are scarce in Memphis, Nashville, Durham, and as best I can tell, in all the southern cities the FFF has taken root. In Memphis, workers are asked to take on a lot of leadership, including deep group building and strike planning, in addition to the more common public speaking and co-worker organizing roles. With minimal staff support, the Memphis Fight For Fifteen has established an extensive list of interested workers, a very strong core of worker leaders meeting regularly, and a vibrant network of community support. It wouldn’t be a surprise if folks in other cities around the south, who face economic and social conditions similar to those in Memphis, also leapt at the chance to join the fight. If it’s true that SEIU has saturated some northern cities with organizers, they wouldn’t regret switching some of those assignments to unorganized southern cities.
Ryan Hill also named some concern for the ability of these exciting upsurges to be transformed into the less sexy and more protracted work of long-term organization building. From afar, it seems like this has begun happening in Milwaukee, Chicago, and St. Louis. In Memphis, too, our fast food workers have begun taking strides to build themselves into a sustainable organization, and, coming from my experience with UCW, I find this extremely exciting. Hopefully it indicates a vision of long-term power building for the industry (or even the class!) rather than a plan for controlled mobilization followed by controlled de-mobilization aimed at winning specific legislation (Alinskyism!). If indeed it does, folks will find, if they haven’t already, that building new organization from scratch ain’t no cake-walk. Reflecting on our experience with UCW, a handful of challenges come into focus that it would perhaps be worth these emerging organizing projects keeping an eye on.

Challenges of Organization Building: Lessons from the Front

1. Tackling union myths. People bring with them preconceived notions about what a union is, and what it’s supposed to do for them. The reality is that neither in the fast food industry, nor in public higher education, are we situated to act like a business union, nor should wish to be. We’ve worked to meet this challenge by balancing the struggle to transform folks’ ideas about what a union is, with acting like the kind of organization folks expect (offering legal resource or other services, using Robert’s Rules, etc.) where possible.At the early stages of an organization’s growth, before it gets to the point of identifiably representing multiple social or economic constituencies, it can get type cast as something significantly smaller than it could become, as an organization for just one shop or just one type of person.
2. Building united fronts when we are weak. Folks in social and economic justice movements, conscious of being weak and poorly resourced, can frequently be jealous of their turf. When they see new organizing projects, it can show up as a threat to their particular little zone of power, rather than as an opportunity to grow the power of the whole class. But we’re too weak to exclude potential allies. Building united fronts with these folks without sacrificing your sharp political line can be very hard, but it needs doing.
3. Preventing burn out. It’s really hard to develop and sustain worker leaders in a way that doesn’t burn them out. The fight is hard and long, and often without much in the way of immediate material return. We have found that it really helps to have a long-term vision of deep social change to help push past the short term drain. That can look like building movement history and political education into the leadership development process and internal life of the organization. And it can also look like radicals with a long-term commitment to struggle choosing to rank and file jobs in the industry.Some folks who have a long-term vision of change see organizing as something only done by paid staff. In reality there is no shortage of folks willing to make a career out of social justice work. There isn’t enough money, especially in new organizing projects, especially in the south, to pay them all; nor should wish there to be. There is a host of limitations and contradictions that attend efforts to offer a radical strategy and politics from a staff vantage. What’s missing are folks with that long-range vision for massive social change who are willing to make their home among the working class; to get a rank-and-file position and organize shoulder-to-shoulder with workers.
4. Understanding the South to Organize the South! Ryan Hill, like others who have been writing about the fast food strikes, did not focus his comments on the potential of these strikes to be a spark in the much needed effort to organize the south, that region which has long been the Achilles heel of the labor movement. Unlike the north, the economy of the south was completely developed around the control and super-exploitation of enslaved African labor. The legacy of the plantation economy, despite the passing of time, legislation, and cultural and migration changes, still defines the region. The south is the place where the two necessary movements for transformation in this country, the movement of the working class, and the movement for Black liberation, can come together. While these strikes are an opportunity for movement building in the south, it will be no cake-walk.Again I hope it can be instructive to share some of the difficulties and lessons we have accumulated in the work with UCW.

A. Police and Vigilantism. If you have developed your sense of police responsiveness doing political work in the north or west, your intuition is going to be way off pitch. The police will come after you a lot quicker, and a lot more harshly down here than in the north, where democratic rights are protected. (For example: During the entire Wisconsin uprising there were fewer than 5 people arrested, for doing things that included yanking cordage from the back of a TV van. In the following month seven protestors in Nashville were arrested for chanting in a Senate chamber.) The police are also more likely to just out and out kill Black people, or let vigilantes get away with doing it for them. This has, after all, been an A1 strategy of rich southerners to keep folks from organizing for the longest. (The Memphis Police Department alone has killed over 24 African American people since last February.)

The thorough dismantling and erasure of prior generations of organization and fightback, combined with abject destitution, can make people damn skeptical about building new organization. When folks are hanging on by a thread, and don’t see a slew of examples of how collective action is going to improve their lives, they can be understandably leery. The flip side, though, is that folks have little to lose (but their figurative chains!), and just a few examples of successful fightback can spark a wild chain-reaction. It happened when
the CP prioritized the Black belt south in the ‘30s, and when SNCC and others did the same in the ‘60s.

B. White chauvinism still runs deep. You’re going to need to ally with northern labor, and white southern liberals, but once the situation reaches a point where those other folks are positioned to get what they want, they they are probably going to try to sell your ass down the river. White chauvinism continues to be the single greatest obstacle to working class power in this country, and it ain’t no different today just because our president is Black. What to do about it, I don’t know, cause if we had that figured out we’d be living in a very different world. But what we try to do is keep from holding back struggle for the sake of white folks’ comfort level and struggle against white chauvinism and privilege; respect the rights of Black folks to have their own organization and at least equal access to leadership in multi-racial organization, and preach the power of a united working class movement built on the honest basis of real justice and equality.
C. This is church country. During slavery the church was the only place where masses of Black folks could meet, socialize, communicate (social, political), get educated (learn to read) plan and strategize without the prying eyes of whites. Before and after slavery, violent political repression forced some of the energy and spirit of resistance against white-supremacy into new forms of culture, both in and out of the church. This legacy is key today. So, you gotta get down with the church. And singing. And dancing. And guns. And lots of those things that get lampooned about the south. Your organizational culture isn’t going to look like it would up north. Its going to take its cues from that submerged history of resistance we call southern culture.
D. All the south is low wage! Getting paid minimum wage isn’t going to shock or get the sympathy of many folks. Thanks to the legacy of Jim Crow in the form of anti-worker law, the historic abandonment of the south by the rest of the labor movement, and a capital’s shameless strategy of locating low-wage industry here, hardly anyone has a union, and nearly everyone is broke. “You are fighting for $15? Shit, least you have a job.” It’s true this sentiment is increasingly common in the rest of the country as well. As workers lose pensions and health care, the most common response is, “If I don’t have it, why should you?” Even so, the universality of low wages in the south has the potential to resonate widely with all workers, not just fast food folks. The the Fight For Fifteen and for a union could unite hundreds of thousands of low-wage workers across sectors, link with new organizing at VW, Nissan, and Mercedes, and spark widespread worker fightback throughout the south. Honest.

E. Electoral work. There aren’t going to be quick electoral wins in the South. We don’t have progressive era ballot initiatives that make it possible to win many legislative victories. Our state legislatures, based heavily in the white rural zones, have taken to undermining progressive municipal legislation. The flip side is that struggle here could mean something really different than anywhere else. It could mean a chance for new organizational forms and initiatives: extending to union fights, but also linking up with the anger and outrage that erupted in response to the 21st century lynchings of Troy Davis and Trayvon Martin, and connect with exciting new projects like the people’s assemblies and the mayoral election of Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson, MS.
A labor movement that hopes to overcome its current morass, and become the weapon it can be, with a shot at breaking the back of neoliberalism and white-supremacy, needs to do plenty of things. Among them are:

1. Organize the unorganized, but especially that growing segment of workers that must rely on mass mobilization and creative pressure tactics rather than NLRB elections and legal bargaining strategies.
2. Build integrated strategies with the many organizations that make up the civic lives of workers outside the shop, as well as with the folks who consume that value produced by workers’ labor in the shop.
3. Fight for demands that generate concrete improvements in the lives of working people and, because they are not immediately winnable, call into question basic concepts of the economy.

A campaign that builds militant non-majority organization, and surrounds itself with communities of solidarity, to fight for living wages and a union, does all these things. The Fight For Fifteen is building this kind of campaign. And in Memphis and St Louis it seems also to be taking up further tasks that are likewise indispensable for a renewed labor movement: developing deep worker leadership, looking to link with the independent struggles for Black liberation, and, in the case of Memphis, organizing the south. We need 2, 3, many campaigns of this nature across the country, in and out of fast food. With heat of this long moment, combined with the patient committed support of leftists, we might could see it.
Jeffrey Lichtenstein is a union activist in Memphis, Tennessee.

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1 The names of workers in this stories were changed to protect their anonymity.

- See more at: http://freedomroad.org/2014/03/fast-food-workers-giving-juice-to-a-revived-living-wage-movement/#more-3186

Obama Administration Tries Again With Regulations Targeted at For-Profit Colleges

The well-intended regulations don’t do enough to protect students who are easy prey for for-profit universities. 

From ColorLines via Portside

by Julianne Hing, Friday, March 14 2014

After courts blocked the Obama administration’s prior attempts to rein in the for-profit college system, the Education Department is back again this week. Late Thursday the Education Department released a revised “gainful employment rule,” which judges schools based on the debt load they leave students with and seeks to crack down on schools that send students and graduates away with tens of thousands of dollars of debt they’re ill-equipped to repay.

“We want to protect students from enrolling in poorly performing programs that leave them with debt they cannot pay and a degree they cannot use,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, Politico reported.

Under the new proposed rules, the Education Department would cut off colleges’ federal student aid eligibility—which often serves as the backbone of revenue for for-profit schools that target low-income students and students of color—if schools fail to meet a certain threshold. Programs would fail if students leave schools with debt loads higher than 12 percent of their incomes and 30 percent of their discretionary incomes. If students have debt-to-income ratios between 8 and 12 percent, schools would be labeled as in “the zone,” and would be required to inform students that they could lose their aid at that particular school. If programs fail these tests two times in a three-year period or stay in “the zone” without moving out of it for four consecutive years their students would become ineligible for federal student aid, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported. The proposed rule will be open to public comment for 60 days.

As it is, for-profit colleges enroll just 13 percent of the nation’s higher education students, but are responsible for a whopping 46 percent of the nation’s student loan defaults, according to The Institute on College Access and Success (TICAS) (PDF). They enroll a disproportionately high number of students of color. As it is, in the 2010 to 2011 school year, the for-profit college University of Phoenix was the nation’s top producer of black baccalaureates.

The well-intended regulations don’t do enough to protect students who are easy prey for for-profit universities. “Rather than requiring failing programs to limit enrollment until they improve, the draft rule gives bad programs every opportunity to put more students at risk,” TICAS Vice President Pauline Abernathy said in a statement. “And it does not require schools to provide any relief to students who took on debt to enroll in programs that lose eligibility for federal funds.”

Toward the Development of Left Labor Strategy

Portside Date: March 16, 2014
Author: Bill Fletcher, Jr.
Date of Source: Monday, March 10, 2014

Organizing Upgrade

Preface: The following is what used to be termed a "struggle paper," i.e., a paper presented as an argument for a position. It is not presented as a final position, however. It is, instead, inspired by the content of the February Left Strategies web discussion on the labor movement. This paper does not try to present the ideal tactics or all elements of strategy. It does, however, attempt to identify--for purposes of discussion--issues and concepts for consideration in the development of a full-blown left labor strategy. Feedback is welcomed.

(1) The era of neo-liberal globalization has unsettled the labor/capital relationship in the capitalist world, particularly in the advanced capitalist world. It has brought to an end the period of the Welfare State and has replaced it with an all-out war of capital against labor. To put it another way, it has introduced into the global North much of what has been transpiring in the global South since the days of colonialism.

(2) Within global capitalism there are some major changes that have been underway. The dominant forces are represented by what Egyptian theorist Samir Amin has entitled the "Triad," that is, the USA, European Union and Japan. The principal enforcement arm of the Triad is that of the USA, sometimes acting in concert with other imperial powers. The Triad finds itself sometimes at odds with and other times in sync with the countries associated with the so-called BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). Yet even where there is contention, it does not match that which was a major feature of the international picture in the first half of the 20th century when the world was divided into distinct empires based in Europe, Japan and the United States.

(3) There are indications of the development of a transnational capitalist class, but such a class, though at this point largely limited regionally, has no state apparatus through which it is operating. There is, however, an immense level of cooperation between and among the global capitalist classes, particularly with regard to their relationship to global labor and efforts at limiting national sovereignty. [Note: By "national sovereignty" we are not referencing independence struggles of the past, but rather efforts by existing independent nation-states to actually operate outside of a neo-colonial and neo-liberal framework.]

(4) There have been major shifts in the nature of work and the nature of the working class over the last 40+ years. This has been the result of several factors, including, new technologies, global migration patterns, and the ideology and practices that accompanies neo-liberalism. With the breakdown of the Welfare State, there has also been the slow but steady demise of "eternal employment" within the global North, whereby a worker could assume that a job existed for all or most of their life. Companies have cut workforces to a core segment and the process of "contingent labor" has been introduced. This has meant that the periphery of most workforces are part-time, temporary and contract labor which largely corresponds to the notion of "just-in-time" production. It has also meant the growth of the structurally unemployed and a proletarianization of many professions.

(5) An additional feature of work and the working class has been the forcing down or back to the worker the various tasks and responsibilities that had, hitherto, been handled by the State or by full-time labor in the private sector (e.g., bank tellers). By way of example, people are expected to pump their own fuel, package their own groceries, etc., usually at their own expense or with the possibility of minor contributions from the State (or minor reductions in certain costs when it comes to the private sector).

(6) The reorganization of work has been accompanied by and frequently carried out through an attack on organized labor. In the USA organized labor was completely unprepared for this assault, largely because it believed that through purging the Left in the 1940s, that they had secured a place at the table of mainstream society. That turned out to be a fallacy.

(7) As the living standard has declined and organized labor has been attacked, the political Right has worked to enhance right-wing populism as an expression of popular discontent aimed, however, at segments of the working class and/or specific ethnic groups and women. Right-wing populism has come to be associated with acceptance of the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor/working class/etc., all of which acts as a racial code in order to neutralize white opposition to the assault on the Welfare State.

(8) In the absence of a coherent, visionary and 21st century approach to strategy, tactics and organization on the part of organized Labor, different forms of organization have emerged in various segments of the working class. This has especially included the advent of worker centers and what is sometimes referenced as "alt-labor" among immigrants and other excluded or marginalized sectors of the working class.

(9) The pauperization of much of the working class has resulted in fights around survival. This can include housing, jobs, healthcare, education, etc., which means that the targets of such struggles - when led by progressives - are frequently the State.[1] Yet, as the State cries 'poor', i.e., that it is out of money, much of the population has found itself believing that their demands cannot be met by the State. This has resulted in various responses, some of which are very reactionary, e.g., crime, some very individual focused, e.g., informal economy, and some collective, e.g., mass struggle, cooperatives. It has also presented a major strategic and organizational challenge to organized labor which, while having historically placed various demands on the State, has rarely found itself at odds with the State (on fundamentals).

(10) The net result of this situation is that progressive and left organizing within the working class finds itself operating on two separate, though related, battlefields. There are community-based struggles that range from efforts against the State to various self-help (cooperative) efforts. In those struggles there is a survival or social service side that must be considered, reminiscent of the "survival programs" that the Black Panther Party promoted in the late 1960s/early 1970s [e.g., free breakfast programs; sickle cell testing]. There are dangers and opportunities associated with this work. Survival programs can become an end in themselves, rather than a means to both service and reach a broad, popular base. On the other hand, as seen in the work of groups such as Sinn Fein (in Northern Ireland), such programs can be a component of the actual base-building that the Left needs to conduct, e.g., the anti-heroin efforts led by Sinn Fein in Dublin in the late 1980s.

(11) The other battlefield is in the context of the world of work. Work, however, is not to be understood as only formal and full-time. It includes those efforts, both formal and informal, to survive and in which individuals sell their labor power. In some cases, individuals may be offering services for compensation through the informal sector in order to survive. As a result, such individuals may not see themselves as workers but may, instead, see themselves as aspiring petty bourgeois. In other cases, they may see themselves as simply trying to survive. Nevertheless, the struggle in the world of work revolves largely around the struggle with the employer, whether that employer is the State or the employer is a private or semi-private entity. In this environment different forms of organization have emerged over time and will continue to do so. This includes traditional trade unions, but also workers associations. Where, as a result of neo-liberal policies, workers have been 'transitioned' into the status of 'contractors,' they may not legally have the right to unionize, but--as demonstrated by the NY Taxi Workers Alliance--they can form de facto unions that, in many respects, can operate much like a union even if they are not permitted to engage in collective bargaining.

(12) The structure of worker organization follows (a) function, (b) the nature of the industry, (c) ideological orientation and objectives. In other words, there is not one or other structure of worker organization that is 'ideal.' Rather, the structure must be determined by a combination of an assessment of the actual situation as well as a clarification of the goals of the organization of that specific sector of workers. It is in this latter sense that ideology is very important. The nature of the industry, it should be added, can have a profound impact on the consciousness of workers. If a set of workers have an identity as nurses, for instance, that may override the fact that they exist in a larger healthcare industry. This identity, therefore, becomes a site for ideological struggle, including the specific resolution of the objective of said organizing.

(13) Community-based workers struggles are as legitimate as any other form of worker struggles. They may be directly aimed at the State, but they can also be aimed at private capital (or both). In community struggles, however, class identity may be submerged by neighborhood, racial/ethnic, or gender identity. This means that a specific population engaged in struggles that are objectively worker struggles against capital (or against the capital-dominated State) may not see themselves as being involved in a "worker's struggle" since the prevailing definition of "worker struggles" are those struggles that relate directly to employment. This is a challenge for the Left, a challenge frequently ignored.

(14) The right to collective bargaining is under severe attack throughout the capitalist world, but particularly in the USA. Any suggestion that workers should turn away from collective bargaining because it is lost, is misplaced. The challenge is that the forms of collective bargaining must change, recognizing that certain sectors of the workforce are not legally permitted to engage in such efforts. Thus, collective bargaining may have to take more informal channels. The fast food strikes, for instance, regardless of certain conceptual weaknesses, are an intriguing way to engage in city-wide 'bargaining' that goes beyond any one particular employer. In other words, city-wide standards can be established. The Taxi Workers in NYC have worked to build up a framework along such lines.

(15) In the South, and increasingly everything south of the Canadian border, workers have been falling victim to attacks on collective bargaining and the right to organization in the public sector. Responding to these attacks must be centered first and foremost on the essential need for a public sector in a civilized society, followed by the right of workers to have collective bargaining in the public sector. The message of organized workers in the public sector must be a message that focuses on saving and changing the public sector in order to serve the public. When the unions are seen as champions of pro-people reforms in the public sector, they will tend to gain popular support (e.g., the Chicago Teacher's strike).

(16) The entire process of organizing has encountered significant challenges over the last twenty years. The atomization of life along with the growth of electronic communications processes has led to more indirect interaction between human beings. This tendency is toxic and anti-social. Nevertheless it has meant that it is often difficult to have face to face meetings and difficult to encourage 1:1 organizing and activism. Ironically the political Right seems to be far better at this than the progressives and Left. That said, the process of organizing must appeal to what Gapasin and others reference as "cultures of solidarity." There must be efforts to build community. This is true whether one is organizing workers in communities or workplaces. Labor organizations need to create cultural wings (note: actually re-create since this was frequently done in the past), reading groups, sports clubs, food cooperatives and other means for human beings to see one another and interact. It is in this process that creative tactics for mobilization and pressure will more than likely arise from among the workers themselves. Labor organizations need to be learning centers, i.e., they need to be loci of education where workers share their knowledge and gain new knowledge. They need to also be centers for the learning of democracy. Democracy is not only the formality of elected leadership but the process of making decisions and building power.

(17) Outside of the labor organizations themselves, building power involves the creation of strategic alliances that share a common goal in power. Organized labor in the USA has largely accepted that it is not only on the defensive but must remain on the defensive. This is a sure way to enter oblivion. Instead, a theory of the counter-offensive must be advanced. This necessitates the creation of a new 'identity' for the oppressed and disenfranchised, and taking the lead in the work towards such an identity is a critical task for the political Left. We must recognize that in building this 'new identity,' not all segments of the oppressed will accept this direction. There will be tugs and pulls towards narrow self-interest and other reactionary approaches.

(18) A discussion of labor is not complete without examining the question of the unemployed and underemployed. Changes in the process of work, with technology and neo-liberal reorganization, has meant that there has been an uneven but actual growth in the structural unemployed. This references the 'redundant' sections of the workforce. Entire cities fall into this category, e.g., East St. Louis, and segments of cities and counties. In the major cities, however, we are witnessing a racial and class cleansing. Thus, sections of cities that were at one point 'reserved' for the poor are now being cleansed and the poor are being driven to outer regions. While there has been some work among the unemployed and underemployed over the years, e.g., the work of the Philadelphia Unemployed Project, and more recently, some organizations associated with the Right to the City Alliance, organized labor has all but abandoned the unemployed and underemployed, except most recently with some of the retail organizing (e.g., UFCW's work around Walmart and the SEIU work around fast food). There are some creative efforts among the unemployed in Northeast Indiana, but this is the exception that proves the rule. It has been very difficult to gain foundation support for unemployed/underemployed organizing. This sector is largely written off an impossible to organize. Yet the key to organizing the unemployed is a combination of social service delivery, mass action, a vision of where and how jobs can be found (or created), and a cadre of dedicated activists who will anchor this work. The unemployed organizing of the 1930s, for instance, was not the result of spontaneous efforts but was rooted in the work of the CPUSA, socialists, Musteites and Trotskyists. In each case, cadre were dedicated to this work. This is an essential lesson. Given the nature of the sector, there will be tremendous turnover within the mass base.

(19) There is a special an essential role for the Left in this work. While there remain significant unanswered questions, e.g., the form and nature of national Left organization in the USA, it is the case that the niche that the Left must fill is at least partially clear. This includes:

• Worldview: More than a vision of the future, offering and teaching a worldview or framework through which workers can understand and, thereby, change reality is essential. Too many efforts rely on mobilization and inspiration as a means of sustaining our efforts. Worldview and framework are really at the core of sustaining and building our work. This means helping people to understand the nature of the system, the nature of the enemy, the nature and scope of our allies and potential allies, and the possible directions we can pursue towards victory (or victories).

• Social justice objectives: Labor organization, whether community-based or workplace based, must seek to establish objectives that are rooted in a conception of social and economic justice. Alinskyism in both community-based and workplace-based organizing, along with Gompersism in organized labor, has downplayed the broader notion of social justice, except in an abstract rhetorical sense. The objectives of our work must be transformational in two senses. First, the aim of the steady transformation of society. For those of us on the Left, that means ultimately confronting the Gorgon of capitalism. Second, the transformation of the masses who are involved in the larger struggle. In both cases this means establishing genuine class consciousness that is beyond a consciousness of trade unionism or even economic justice alone. It is, to borrow from the old man, the notion of the workers recognizing that they need to be the advocates for all of the oppressed, dispossessed, disenfranchised, etc. In the current era the matter of social justice must include the challenge of the environment and the survival of life on this planet. This challenge, we should note, will frequently pit the matter of jobs against the environment. The Left cannot fear this challenge and must recognize that this contradiction must be addressed directly. Addressing it is integrally linked to articulating the need for a different economy, i.e., that in the last instance, capitalism is antithetical to the future of humanity.

• The Left must lead in struggling against sectorial exclusivity. In the context of organized labor this can include the struggle against narrow trade or craft mentality. But this can also be a geographic matter where we are confronted with regional tensions frequently played upon by right-wing populists.

(20) The evolution of the US working class has also involved a significant shift racially, ethnically and gender-wise over the last 50 years. The response within organized labor, community-based organizations, and the Left has been uneven. Organized labor has increasingly recognized the strategic significance of Latino and Asian migrants and, in some cases, has entered into special efforts to organize and support such populations. At the same time, organized labor refuses to recognize the continued significance of the Black working class and African Americans generally. Organized labor has no strategy that is particularly focused on the Black working class. To some extent elements of this have also arisen in community-based organizing efforts. Many of the efforts to organize immigrants, for instance, have paid little to no attention to the construction of alliances with African Americans. The result has been an increase in tension as the Black working class has been economically marginalized and opportunities for economic growth denied. The workforce has additionally shifted dramatically at the level of gender. This has largely not translated into labor organizations--be they workplace-based or community-based--that are either majority female or have a significant female constituency, becoming "women's organizations." The 'voice' of women continues to be largely organizations and individuals rooted in the middle strata. In the cases of race, ethnicity and gender it is the Left and only the Left that has the historic responsibility to engage in efforts that can be understood as rooted in transformation and the battle for consistent democracy. This is not a struggle by a sector or for an interest group. It is a battle that is linked to the creation of a new identity among/within the oppressed. Alinskyists and Gompersists attempt to create such an identity by denying the significance of racist oppression, national oppression, gender oppression, homophobia, etc., and seeking, instead, some sort of idealistic unity at the level of economics or common demands. The Left must shatter such a framework and insist on a transformational approach aimed not only at the destruction of these various forms of oppression, but the construction of a popular, democratic bloc that can win and hold power. A bloc, by the way, that will ultimately need to take on the question of empire, but we shall leave that subject for a future paper.

[1] Such struggles are not always led by progressives, however. When led by the Right they can sometimes take on the State, but with the objective of eliminating another segment of the population or privileging one segment over another. An example of this is the notion of "not in my backyard" when it comes to environmental issues, whereby on neighborhood seeks to take action to protect itself at the cost of another neighborhood.

[Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a longtime labor, racial justice and international activist. He is an Editorial Board member and columnist for BlackCommentator.com [1] and a Senior Scholar for the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. He is the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and a founder of the Black Radical Congress.
Fletcher is the co-author (with Fernando Gapasin) of Solidarity Divided, The Crisis in Organized Labor and A New Path Toward Social Justice [2] (University of California Press). He was formerly the Vice President for International Trade Union Development Programs for the George Meany Center of the AFL-CIO. Prior the George Meany Center, Fletcher served as Education Director and later Assistant to the President of the AFL-CIO.
Fletcher got his start in the labor movement as a rank and file member of the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America. Combining labor and community work, he was also involved in ongoing efforts to desegregate the Boston building trades. He later served in leadership and staff positions in District 65-United Auto Workers, National Postal Mail Handlers Union and Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
Fletcher is a graduate of Harvard University and has authored numerous articles and speaks widely on domestic and international topics, racial justice and labor issues.]

Organizing Against Multiple Oppression in Our Time

How does class exploitation intersect with racism and hetero-patriarchy to sustain and reproduce capitalist rule? Are forms of oppression predicated upon race or gender necessary to capitalist social relations? How does our analysis influence our organizing? What type of organizing projects do we need to develop in 2014 that can take into account these insights?
Chaired by John Sharkey. Presentations by:

• Steven Tufts is Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Geography at York University and a member of the Workers' Assembly. His publishing and research are focused on labour union organizing and renewal
• Winnie Ng is the CAW-Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy at Ryerson University with a life-long commitment to anti-racism, the Canadian labour movement and to building broad social justice alliances across different sectors
• Ajamu Nangwaya, Ph.D. is an active community and labour organizer with over twenty years of working experience. He is currently an organizer with the Network for Pan-Afrikan Solidarity and the Network for the Elimination of Police Violence

Organized by the Education Committee of the Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly.

Below is the first of four videos.

View the other three videos in this series here.

Bernie Sanders: Save the Postal Service

Save the Postal Service

By:  Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)

The Wall Street Journal

Wednesday, March 5, 2014
 
The U.S. Postal Service is one of our most popular and important government agencies. It provides universal service six days a week to every corner of America, no matter how small or remote. It supports millions of jobs in virtually every other sector of our economy. It provides decent-paying union jobs to some 500,000 Americans, and it is the largest employer of veterans.

Whether you are a low-income elderly woman living at the end of a dirt road in Vermont or a wealthy CEO living on Park Avenue, you get your mail six days a week. And you pay for this service at a cost far less than anywhere else in the industrialized world.

Yet the Postal Service is under constant and vicious attack. Why? The answer is simple. There are very powerful and wealthy special interests who want to privatize or dismember virtually every function that government now performs, whether it is Social Security, Medicare, public education or the Postal Service. They see an opportunity for Wall Street and corporate America to make billions in profits out of these services, and couldn't care less how privatization or a degradation of services affects ordinary Americans.
For years, antigovernment forces have been telling us that there is a financial crisis at the Postal Service and that it is going broke. That is not true. The crisis is manufactured.

At the insistence of the Bush administration, Congress in 2006 passed legislation that required the Postal Service to prefund, over a 10-year period, 75 years of future retiree health benefits. This onerous and unprecedented burden—$5.5 billion a year—is responsible for all of the financial losses posted by the Postal Service since October 2012.

Without prefunding, the Postal Service would have made a $623 million profit last year. Excluding the prefunding mandate, the Postal Service estimates it will make more than $1 billion in profits this year. This is not surprising, since the Postal Service made a combined profit of $9 billion from 2003-06, before the prefunding mandate took effect.

The mandate allows the antigovernment crowd to proclaim that the Postal Service "is going bankrupt." Their solution is to slash hundreds of thousands of jobs, close thousands of post offices, eliminate hundreds of mail processing plants, end Saturday mail, and substantially slow down mail delivery.

In the House, Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) passed a bill through his committee that would do all of these things. The bill would drive more customers to seek other options and will lead to a death spiral—lower-quality service, fewer customers, more cuts, less revenue and eventually the destruction of the Postal Service.

In the Senate, Sens. Tom Carper (D., Del.) and Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) also passed a postal reform bill through the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. While not as destructive as the House proposal, the Carper-Coburn bill could lead to the loss of about 100,000 jobs, allow the Postal Service to eliminate six-day mail delivery, substantially slow down the delivery of mail, and lead to the loss of more mail processing plants and post offices within the next few years.

There are much better ideas that would strengthen, not destroy the Postal Service, and they are in the Postal Service Protection Act that has been introduced by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D., Ore.) in the House and by me in the Senate. The House bill has 174 co-sponsors. The Senate bill has 27 co-sponsors.

First, prefunding must end. The future retiree health fund now has some $50 billion in it. That is enough. This step alone will restore the Postal Service to profitability.

Second, the Postal Service should have the flexibility to provide new consumer products and services—a flexibility that was banned by Congress in 2006. It is now against the law for workers in post offices to notarize or make copies of documents; to cash checks; to deliver wine or beer; or to engage in e-commerce activities (like scanning physical mail into a PDF and sending it through e-mail, selling non-postal products on the Internet or offering a non-commercial version of Gmail).

A recent report from the Postal Service Inspector General suggests that almost $9 billion a year could be generated by providing financial services. At a time when more than 80 million lower-income Americans have no bank accounts or are forced to rely on rip-off check-cashing storefronts and payday lenders, these kinds of financial services would be of huge social benefit.

It is time for Congress to save the Postal Service, not dismantle it.

Mr. Sanders is an independent senator from Vermont.

100,000 Oregonians get continued help from "Heat and Eat" program

Statement from Department of Human Services (DHS), March 11, 2014:

Today, Governor Kitzhaber directed the Oregon Housing and Community Services Department (OHCS) and DHS to continue the “Heat and Eat” program to prevent a cut in food benefits for the approximately 100,000 Oregon households that participate in the program.  

Recent media coverage about changes coming to SNAP as part of the new Farm Bill passed last month have focused on the Heat and Eat program. This week many states begin implementation of the Heat and Eat program changes called for in the Farm Bill. As you know, Oregon has a Heat and Eat program and for the past several weeks, we have been reviewing options and reviewing comments from stakeholders.  

Currently, DHS can qualify a SNAP applicant whose utilities are included in their rent for the energy assistance program known as Heat and Eat.  Participation in Heat and Eat program enables Oregon to give the SNAP applicant the full Standard Utility Allowance (SUA), which increases the amount of food benefits received each month.

Heat and Eat is funded by OHCS and is administered by DHS. Moving forward, the two agencies will develop a plan, with Community Action Partnership of Oregon, to implement the Governor’s decision.  That plan will be shared with you at the earliest opportunity. 

Thank you for all your hard work to connect people with the food benefits they need to be healthy.

Bridging the Chasm between Environmental and Economic Justice: A Conversation with Bill Fletcher and Bill Gallegos

Interviewed by Anne Lewis | The Rag Blog | February 11, 2014

Steelworkers President Leo Gerard said about the choice between a clean environment and good jobs, “You can have both, or you have neither.”A rift exists between those good trade unionists who fight for decent jobs and a just economy, and those good environmentalists who fight for a planet where all human beings can be healthy.
In the Appalachian coalfields, the same corporations who deliberately keep non-coal jobs out of the region and blast the mountains apart for greater profits lie to mining communities that the reason for layoffs is the Environmental Protection Agency’s so-called “War on Coal.” An eastern Kentucky retired miner writes, “I prefer dirty coal over ‘Christmas in Appalachia’ pity,” not recognizing greater options.
And so three activists decided to have a conversation about jobs and the environment. Bill Fletcher is committed to economic justice and working class solidarity. Bill Gallegos is dedicated to the environmental justice and climate justice movements. Anne Lewis is a documentary filmmaker with deep interests in labor and environmental justice.
We decided not to hold back from material and political divisions, or from the imagination that has built concrete experiments for unity.

Anne Lewis: You’re coming at this from different angles than the usual talk about jobs and environment. Bill Gallegos, describe the difference between environmental justice and mainstream environmental groups.

Bill Gallegos: The environmental justice movement emerged from the struggle for equality and self-determination of oppressed communities of color. Our focus is on addressing the disproportionate pollution burden borne by communities of color and poorer white communities. Native Americans, African Americans, Latina/os, Asian Pacific Islanders, and working class whites often live near freeways, power plants, toxic waste sites, oil refineries, rail yards, chemical plants and other major sources of pollution. So our base is among working class people of color and working class white folk (in coal country especially). The strength of the environmental justice community is very close to the ground and at the local and regional level where they have achieved many victories over the last several years – closing down coal fired power plants, stopping oil refinery expansion projects and the build out of natural gas power plants, creating local clean energy projects, developing urban organic farms, and so on.
Many of the major big green groups like the Sierra Club and the World Wildlife Fund have a conservation history, seeking to preserve or develop parks and natural spaces. Their base is largely white and middle class, and their orientation has mostly been legal advocacy and lobbying especially at the federal level. The green groups recently invested huge amounts of resources in an unsuccessful effort to pass federal climate and energy legislation. One of the central features of this legislation was a pollution-trading scheme that would have allowed industrial polluters to avoid reductions at the source if they purchased pollution permits or created offset projects, for example planting trees in Mexico or some other place. The idea is that the trees would eventually absorb enough carbon to “offset” the emissions from, say an oil refinery in California. The environmental justice community is strongly opposed to pollution trading because it had failed in Europe (levels of emission actually increased); would do nothing to stop the harm to people in communities near the source; and often displaced local peoples in the Global South from their land. The environmental justice community reached out to the green groups to discuss our concerns around pollution trading and other problems with the proposed federal legislation. The green groups dismissed our concerns with little serious consideration of the evidence we presented or our proposals for alternative ideas to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
While there are examples of local collaboration between environmental justice and green groups, major problems continue to characterize this relationship. The green groups receive more than 95% of all foundation monies allocated for environmental work. They tend to pursue top-down lobbying and legal strategies, which leads them to unacceptable compromises because they do not want to jeopardize their “relationship” with elected officials or agency regulators. And most green groups continue to support problematic climate policies such as pollution trading, natural gas as a replacement for coal, and offset programs. The environmental justice community unanimously opposes these policies.
At this point everyone agrees that there is no real chance of achieving federal climate and energy legislation because of opposition from the Republican right wing. This means that the game is now local and regional, which is the strength of the environmental justice community. This creates a new opportunity for the environmental justice movement and the green groups to collaborate, but this collaboration will require the green groups to recognize and accept environmental justice leadership, work with the philanthropic community to address the problem of funding inequality, and re-think their failed policies like cap and trade. There are efforts to build this type of collaboration and I am optimistic that real change could happen.

AL: Bill Fletcher, is there a comparison in the relationship between big labor and economic justice with the relationship between big green and environmental justice?

Bill Fletcher: First, I don’t think that one’s approach or attitude towards economic justice necessarily leads one to a progressive position on the environment. There are a lot of trade unionists who are very good fighters, are into class struggle, but are weak or silent on the environment. So I don’t think there’s a one-to-one correspondence.
When you look at what we know as organized labor, you have institutions much like the big greens that Bill Gallegos described, that were constructed as a result of decades of struggle. They reached a certain pinnacle and then feared they’d lose their legitimacy if they didn’t, among other things, jettison the left – which they did in the 1940′s.¹ Since then organized labor has retreated in the vision of its role in society. At the same time union membership has fallen precipitously. A metaphor that I frequently use is that of the man who jumped off the Empire State Building and as he was passing the 40^th floor he was overheard saying, “So far, so good.” That’s essentially organized labor.
Every percentage point that we drop in membership, most of the leadership says, “We’re still standing, we’re still here.” Even when they let out the cry, “Well the ground is coming up fast,” it doesn’t translate into the sort of transformation that’s necessary. And a large part of that transformation has to do with the relationship of the union movement to other social movements including but not limited to the environmental movement.

AL: Bill Gallegos, as someone who’s involved in ecological justice how do you view economic justice?

BG: The environmental justice community sees itself as part of a broader movement for social justice and recognizes that economics underlies a lot of the problems in our communities – environmental problems, problems with the educational system, problems with housing, with health care, persistent and widespread poverty, under employment, unemployment, and the lack of real economic opportunity. Economic justice is easily the number one issue in our communities. There’s an understanding that we need to address this problem even as we’re trying to address the problem of environmental racism.
Awareness of the climate crisis has stimulated alternatives – what people call the green economy. It’s a very loose term and means a lot of things to different people, but the idea is there’s a new emerging economy with the potential to address this systemic problem of poverty and inequality. Some in the movement have said that we need to look at the whole continuum of an economy and make sure that every element of that continuum benefits our communities. An emerging economy needs an educational infrastructure, research and development, a business infrastructure, an employee infrastructure, the whole range of professionals and engineers and blue-collar workers. Since a lot will be publicly supported and funded, we have to fight so that the educational infrastructure doesn’t end up in the suburbs with wealthier white kids learning all there is about state of the art ecological economy, so that we’re not limited to solar panel installation or energy efficiency audits, so that our community has the opportunity to become environmental engineers and environmental architects, our small businesses are included, and alternatives like worker-owned cooperatives are based in our communities.
Who is going to benefit from this emerging economy? Is it going to look like the Silicon Valley where the 1% benefitted and a lot of low wage women of color received very few benefits and a lot of environmental harm? We don’t want to see this green economy be a sweatshop economy. We’d like to see it be a unionized economy, a high wage economy, a high benefit economy, one with strong health and safety regulations and environmental controls. We can only do that if we can build a partnership with our sisters and brothers in labor.

AL: Bill Fletcher, the term just transition has been thrown around a lot. What does it mean and how do we begin to get there?

BF: I think that the challenge is to talk aboutalternative economic strategies. So if you’re in a mining region for example, what happens if you close the mines, what happens to the miners? We need to win people over to an alternative economic strategy. Now this is really difficult. It’s much easier to have reactionary responses – anti-climate justice or right wing nostalgia. It’s a community organizing challenge in the broad sense of community organizing. Let’s look at the state of West Virginia. What kind of an economy are we going to try to build in the State? What does it mean in terms of the sorts of industries introduced? What does it mean in terms of job training?
There are very few unions who are prepared to engage in that discussion. The United Steelworkers of America’s alliance with the Mondragon Cooperatives of the Basque region of Spain is an example of an alternative economic development strategy. I’ve heard discussions about taking over abandoned plants. But this has to go much broader.

AL: You mention the steelworkers. What else seems to be offering hope in terms of modeling, particularly in this country?

BF: The Amalgamated Transit Union is under new progressive leadership and they are attempting to build alliances with community based organizations. A key environmental struggle is around public transportation and they want to engage in that. That’s not the way the leaders or the members have tended to look at the union and so ATU President Larry Hanley is calling on them to think differently about their role.
At the same time, as we see in Keystone Pipeline debate, the problem is being defined as jobs versus the environment. Traditional union people often feel that the environmental movement is insensitive to the jobs crisis. There is some truth to that but, as I’ve said to people in the union movement, “You’ve got to breathe.”
Just the other day, I was in a planning session with some unions that were talking about the construction of an incinerator that was a polluter. The main focus of attention was whether the incinerator was going to be built with union labor or non-union labor. And I posed a question, “What difference does that make if it could have devastating environmental consequences for people living there.” They nearly ran me out of the room, “ Fletcher, how dare you say what difference does it make. We want union labor.” I was saying in response, “Yeah, yeah we want union labor but I’m asking this other question. What are the ramifications of building this incinerator right in the middle of poor communities?” Few people wanted to respond to that question.

AL: How are you going to move that one forward?

BF: Ultimately there are decisions that can’t be made by staff people or well-intentioned outsiders. Elected leaders are going to have to make decisions and it’s not an easy answer, it’s a discussion. There needs to be discussion about the consequences. If there was union labor to build concentration camps would that be okay? Let’s talk about what’s being built in the case of this incinerator. What are the social consequences and doesn’t the union have an obligation to speak up about that?

AL: It seems like there’s a big split between unions as well. The National Nurses Union takes a very different position from the building trades.

BF: Well in part it’s easier for them. That’s why I don’t make light of this difference. The building trades, by definition, are workers that build things or knock things down in order for things to be built. That’s not the role that nurses have.
If nothing is being built, then you have thousands of people who are sitting around. It’s one thing for a leader of nurses, public sector workers, and so on to say that the union must speak out on these incinerators, but it’s another when you are leading the laborers’ union or the carpenters’ union or the electricians. Things become very complicated and we cannot make light of that. Think about it for a second. We are saying that we need leaders in the building trades to speak out against construction projects—such as the incinerator—that, by the way, could actually put a significant portion of their members to work if it’s built.
My point is not that this should be avoided but that we should understand the stakes. We need to think through how to not only win over leaders, but how to win over members of unions that are directly affected by environmental decisions.

AL: Bill Gallegos, how would you respond? How would you begin talking to people in labor who are directly impacted in terms of jobs?

BG: It’s going to take quite a long time because at the national level labor does not fully understand the climate crisis and is not ready for its political consequences. The possibilities that exist now are on the local and regional level. I’ll give you some examples.
In Los Angeles there’s an organization called the L.A. Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE). It’s not an environmental justice organization; it works around jobs and the economy. But they developed two significant projects with the Teamsters Union. One is called the Clean and Safe Ports Campaign.
The Port of Los Angeles, which adopted the LA Clean Truck Program in 2008, has:

• Banned more than 10,000 late-model, heavier polluting trucks;
• Provided nearly $200 million in port subsidies and leveraged more than $600 million in private investment of 10,000 clean diesel and natural gas fuel trucks; and,
• Reduced diesel pollution by approximately 80%.

The L.A./ Long Beach port complex is the busiest in the United States and handles 80% of the trade from the Pacific Rim within the U.S. The port is expanding – it’s going to double in size – and the expansion of diesel truck traffic will primarily affect poor black and brown communities along the Alameda Corridor. The Teamsters and LAANE formed a campaign to help these (independent contractor) truckers clean up their vehicles, placing the cost of greater energy efficiency on the shipping companies, and allowing the truckers to become employees of the companies. It was an enormous environmental benefit. There was a benefit for the truckers because they had been responsible for everything – the trucks, the upkeep, the insurance, fuel costs – while the shippers got a free pass. But as employees of the shipping companies, they could join the Teamsters Union.
This is an example of how a social justice organization and the labor movement came together and found common interests. For the Teamsters it was unionizing these truckers; for LAANE it was creating good jobs and helping the environment.
Then LAANE began a second campaign with the Teamsters to restructure the waste disposal industry in Los Angeles, which creates enormous environmental impacts primarily in poor communities of color, and is largely a sweatshop industry. The Teamsters and LAANE launched the campaign “Don’t Waste LA” that will result in the consolidation, unionization, and environmental cleanup of this industry.
This is how change is going to come. It’s going to come from local efforts, grassroots efforts that become a model. So we don’t just talk about just transition. We can actually say, “Here in the ports of Los Angeles, this transition is happening. Here’s the impact and the benefits. It’s not a concept anymore. In the waste industry in Los Angeles, this just transition from dirty horrible polluting industry to a much cleaner industry and a union industry is happening.” We need to draw lessons from best practices and think about how we can spread those efforts throughout the country – even as we work at the top to have a good conversation with the AFL-CIO leadership.

AL: Bill Fletcher, why do you think the conversation at the top is so difficult?

BF: I actually think that a lot of the problem is directly related to the elimination of the left in organized labor. I don’t mean that the Left has always been good on environmental issues. We have had plenty of economic determinism and climate avoidance in the Left. But I think that the failure of organized labor to consider options outside of traditional paths has made it especially difficult for mainstream labor to embrace the messages from the environmental movement and climate justice.

AL: I can see that cutting both ways. It’s true of labor. It’s also true that in the mainstream environmental movement that the lack of a Left has made it difficult for people who were working class. In other words, it’s hard for coal miners to think friendly towards the mainstream environmental movement because there’s the question of class base.

BF: Well I think that that’s true but I think at the same time the number of coal jobs, miners’ jobs, have been steadily dropping for the last 50 years. That’s not because of the environmental movement. Instead, the environmental movement has served as a convenient target for reactionaries and right wing populists to explain away the use of new technologies in mining that have lessened the need for miners. So the question in West Virginia really calls upon people to look very differently, in fact very radically (although it doesn’t seem that radical anymore) at forms of alternative economic development.

AL: Bill Gallegos, do you see these alternative economic models as a way to deal with climate justice? Are they going to get us there?

BG: It’s going to be tough. The Climate Justice Alliance had a labor organization that joined and then pulled back because they got pressure (I think around Keystone). So there were folks who wanted to be part of this, wanted to engage, were very progressive, had great ideas and little by little they started to pull back.
We need to get into this with our eyes open. Twenty years ago we would have been able to talk to a whole range of folks who had caucuses and leadership – folks on the left who were in the steelworkers, who were in the autoworkers, who were in a number of other industries. We don’t have that now.
We’re going to have to look at creating alternative economic models even as we’re working for a larger social transformation. We need to say, “Look, here in northern Arizona, the Navajo Nation, there is a model of cooperative economic development that’s working,” even as we’re building up our forces to take this to scale. What I hope is that the brothers and sisters inside of labor who are fighting for the perspective of social justice unionism can make some headway, and within the climate justice movement those of us who recognize the strategic importance of this relationship with labor can confront some of the understandable pessimism that exists in the movement about whether this is doable.
I’ll give you one example. When we were trying to stop Chevron from expanding its refinery in order to refine dirtier grades of crude oil in Richmond, which would have had huge greenhouse gas emissions and also would have added to the poisoning of the black, brown, and Laotian folks who live near that refinery, the building trades tried to physically intimidate our members. They raised a really nasty campaign – nasty enough that Chevron didn’t have to do it. So this is a bitter experience for folks. But as much as we need to stand up to that and criticize that kind of behavior, we still have to look at the long term. We need to support the folks in labor like Bill Fletcher and Fernando Gapasin and others who are ready to fight for transformation on the inside.

AL: Can you tell us more about what’s going on in the Navajo Nation?

BG: The Navajo Nation is the largest Indian nation in the U.S. and it’s a very poor economy. Unemployment rates are 70%. A lot of the small towns and villages on the reservation don’t even have access to water because it’s piped to Phoenix and Scottsdale for golf courses and resorts. But the Navajo Nation does have 10,000 jobs related to the coal industry – mining production, transport, and a large coal fired power plant that provides energy, among others, to the Department of Water and Power in Los Angeles.
There has been a big campaign to get the LADWP to end its coal contracts and to convert to clean energy. And they’ve agreed to do that. They’ve said, “We’re going to end our coal contracts with the power plant in the Navajo Nation in Arizona by 2025 and also with one in Utah.” The plan is instead of replacing that coal with clean energy, with solar, to replace it with natural gas. The Black Mesa Water Coalition , which organizes in the Navajo Nation is saying, “No! This should be a clean energy project and this project should reflect the way we get off dependence on the coal industry. We should become a solar, wind center for Arizona and for the country. Let’s replace this coal-fired power plant with a solar project. We’ll keep the contract with the LADWP so we keep people working.”
The Navajo Nation has identified three other areas for creating a viable people-centered economy. One is the wool industry – spinning, creating textiles and rugs. Others are agriculture and what’s called ecotourism. So they see clean energy, wool, agriculture, and ecotourism as the pillars of a viable economic infrastructure in the Navajo Nation – so it won’t be dependent on coal or casinos.
They’ve worked out an idea for just transition. They’ll need large investments – where do you get the investments for this kind of infrastructure without compromising and without selling your soul to Wall Street. There are a lot of problems that they’ll need to solve. But I think this small group of people in the Navajo Nation are doing outstanding, pioneering work addressing the ecological crisis, the economic crisis, and looking towards creating a democratic local economy – and mostly women in leadership of that project.

AL: How does this connect to economic transformation, to socialism? How does it begin to address the vast environmental problems that this capitalist economy has created?

BF: Bill Gallegos and I were talking several months ago about the right wing and climate denial. There are different sources of climate denial. One form is that of bizarre religious explanations. Another is a feeling of being so overwhelmed by the extent of the crisis that it’s easier to simply deny that it exists – much like other things that people deny. And a third is that many on the Right truly understand that in order to address climate, you have to address the economy. That’s not what many mainstream environmentalists accept, but the right does understand. And given that large swath of the right wing is prepared to be genocidal and make millions of people redundant, they can afford to be in denial. They’re not prepared to address what really needs to happen in terms of changing the economy – the solution really does come down to some kind of fundamental socioeconomic transformation.
The problem with some folks on the left though is that they describe the extent of the catastrophe and then they jump to, “Well therefore we need socialism.” And while the conclusion is correct, I think we have to understand that getting there—to socialism—is a process of ongoing struggle through various stages. Some of those stages are going to involve battles for structural reforms that address or attempt to address the environmental crisis even while capitalism continues to exist.

BG: Every environmental justice organization talks about helping communities understand the systemic roots of environmental racism. They talk about it but it’s very difficult to do in practice. You get so caught up in the demands of your immediate campaigns that people have had a difficult time integrating political education. There really is a need to understand the lived realities of working people of different cultures and nationalities for the environmental justice community and for other movements as well.
The environmental justice community needs to make a very intentional effort to link the economic and ecological crisis, to reveal the root causes of those crises, and to stimulate a conversation about is there a better way, is there a better way that we can live in this country.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is an internationally known racial justice, labor and global justice activist and writer. He is the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum, a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of “Solidarity Divided,” and the author of “They’re Bankrupting Us – And Twenty Other Myths about Unions.”
Bill Gallegos is a long time activist with roots in the Chicano Liberation Struggle and a leader in the environmental justice movement. He is the author of two major articles on Chicano Liberation: ”The Sunbelt Strategy and Chicano Liberation” and “The Struggle for Chicano Liberation” He is a member of the Climate Justice Alliance.
Anne Lewis is a documentary filmmaker whose films include: On Our Own Land (DuPont-Columbia award), Justice in the Coalfields (Gold Plaque, Intercom), and Morristown: in the air and sun about factory job loss and the rights of immigrants. She serves on the executive board of the Texas State Employees Union TSEU-CWA 6186.

1 The Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 let loose a wave of repression of trade unionists. This was part of the Cold War as conducted in the USA.

- See more at: http://freedomroad.org/2014/01/bridging-the-chasm-between-environmental-and-economic-justice-a-conversation-with-bill-fletcher-and-bill-gallegos/#more-3152

 

ALWAYS FIND HOPE IN STRUGGLE

Angela Davis on Prison Abolition, the War on Drugs and Why Social Movements Shouldn’t Wait on Obama

From Democracy Now! March 6, 2014

For more than four decades, the world-renowned author, activist and scholar Angela Davis has been one of most influential activists and intellectuals in the United States. An icon of the 1970s black liberation movement, Davis’ work around issues of gender, race, class and prisons has influenced critical thought and social movements across several generations. She is a leading advocate for prison abolition, a position informed by her own experience as a fugitive on the FBI’s top 10 most wanted list more than 40 years ago. Davis, a professor emerita at University of California, Santa Cruz, and the subject of the recent documentary, "Free Angela and All Political Prisoners," joins us to discuss prison abolition, mass incarceration, the so-called war on drugs, International Women’s Day, and why President Obama’s second term should see a greater wave of activism than in his first.

Watch Part 1 of this interview.
Watch Part 2 of this interview.

War vs. Diplomacy: Uncovering the Real Debate in Washington

“War vs. Diplomacy: Uncovering the Real Debate in Washington”

 

The Lane Peace Center and Community Alliance of Lane County are co-sponsoring a forum featuring Phyllis Bennis on “War vs. Diplomacy: Uncovering the Real Debate in Washington”, Thursday, March 6th, 7 pm, at the Lane Community College (LCC) Downtown Center, 101 W. 10^th Ave in Eugene (Oregon).

The forum will open with a live stream presentation from Washington D.C. by Phyllis Bennis. Bennis is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, where she directs the New Internationalism Project. She will emphasize that instead of rushing to war, we can choose to make diplomacy work. http://www.ips-dc.org/staff/phyllis

Stan Taylor, Director, LCC Peace Center and Jane Cramer, Associate Professor, UO Political Science Dept. will lead a discussion with Ms. Bennis after her talk.

The event will be live streamed at: http://www.lanecc.edu/it/media/live-streaming

You are invited to attend in person or by live stream. The event is free but donations will be accepted to help pay for the event.

Sponsors: Community Alliance of Lane County, Lane Peace Center, WAND, Veteran’s for Peace, U of O Political Science Department, U of O International Studies Department.

To request disability-related accommodations that will facilitate your full participation in this event (such as Sign Language interpreting, Braille, electronic text, visual describer), please contact Disability Resources at least one week in advance: (541) 463-5150 (voice); 711 (relay); Building 1, 218; or disabilityresources@lanecc.edu

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The Healthcare Movie: showing in Silverton, Ore. March 4, 2014

Date:		Tuesday March 4, 2014
Time:		6:00 pm - 8:00 pm (GMT+00:00)
Location:		Silverton Grange Hall
Notes:		Silverton screening sponsored by the Silverton Grange, Silverton People for Peace, Main Street Alliance of Oregon and Health Care for All Oregon. The Healthcare Movie, narrated by Keifer Sutherland, explores the health care system in Canada: how it came to be, how it works for ordinary Canadians, how it is paid for, and how it compares to its American counterpart. The Healthcare Movie provides the real story of how the health care systems in Canada and the United States evolved to be so completely different, when at one point they were essentially the same. Most people under the age of 50, in both countries, are not aware of the intensity of the political struggle that led to the universal medical care system in Canada. Nor are they aware of the public relations campaigns, still active today, that have been prevalent in the United States since the early 1900 s to dissuade the public from supporting national health care. For more information, visit: http://silvertongrange.wordpress.com/2014/02/21/the-healthcare-movie/

AFL-CIO To Put ‘Laser Focus’ On Raising Wages

The labor movement has a new driving message for its legislative, educational and political work that should resonate with most American workers, especially those who have the least: Your pay is too damn low!

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka put it less colloquially this week than the New York gubernatorial candidate who once ran on a single message: "Rent is too damn high." Organized labor will put “a laser focus on raising wages,” Trumka told reporters in Houston at the start of the winter quarterly meeting of the federation’s executive council.

Whatever the words, the case for action is strong. Wages have stagnated for all but the rich for more than a decade and fallen for low-wage workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a leading research institution on labor markets. Adjusting for inflation over the past four years, hourly wages for workers in the bottom 30 percent have fallen an average of 68 cents an hour.

Those trends, mirrored by the top 1 percent capturing 95 percent of all the new income growth following the end of the Great Recession, explain why inequality is growing, according to University of California, Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez.
However, as Trumka notes, the general public, as well as leaders from “the Pope to the president,” have begun to express outrage over inequality. A minimum-wage boost has been increasingly on the U.S. agenda, with a $10.10 federal minimum proposed by Congressional Democrats and supported by Obama. Although the AFL-CIO is promoting the $10.10 minimum, Trumka says he favors a “living wage” standard set around $17 an hour, indexed to inflation.

Read the rest of this article here.

Truthout Interview with Richard Wolff

Richard Wolff: Enterprise Structure Is Key to the Shape of a Post-Capitalist Future

Wednesday, 26 February 2014 09:33 By Leslie Thatcher, Truthout | Interview 

Richard Wolff talks about "The Shape of a Post-Capitalist Future," his entry in the new anthology Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA, and his conviction that making the transition from capitalism to socialism requires a deliberate critique of capitalist workplace organization.
Make a contribution to Truthout and receive Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA. Click here.

Leslie Thatcher for Truthout: What motivated you to choose (of all things!) "corporate structure" in your search for a "powerful, attractive and credible vision of socialism?"
Richard Wolff: Chiefly because the internal organization of our workplaces has been so badly undervalued and thus so little transformed in and by socialist practices. This was true not only in the efforts to establish actual socialism but likewise in the theoretical and political projects for transition from capitalism to socialism.

Human beings spend most of their adult lives - the central parts of most days of most weeks - at work. How their work structures their interactions with other people (their interdependencies, interactions, freedoms and responsibilities) are crucial to everything from daily personal life to politics, culture ... everything. Socialists have focused on changing ownership of means of production - from private to social - and on changing the mechanism of distributing resources and products - from market to planning. Those foci meant that the internal organization of workplaces was neglected and/or treated as a secondary matter of what technology and efficiency require, something largely independent of the transition from capitalism to socialism.
I am convinced that to make the transition from capitalism to socialism requires a deliberate critique of how capitalism organizes its workplaces. It likewise requires a deliberate specification of how and why socialism organizes its workplaces very differently.

"Marx stressed there that a central dimension of capitalism that he wished to see transformed was 'exploitation.' "

To drive the point home, let me add two further and closely interrelated considerations. First, most of the "actually existing" socialist experiments to date unraveled in part because they never transformed the organization of their workplaces. They more or less replaced private shareholders and boards of directors with state officials and they more or less substituted planned distributions of inputs and outputs for market exchanges. What they did not do was to radically alter the internal organization of workplaces in a specifically socialist way. Second, by a "specifically socialist way" I mean pretty much what Marx specified in Capital. Marx stressed there that a central dimension of capitalism that he wished to see transformed was "exploitation." By that he meant the capitalist organization of the workplace. In that organization workers add more value by their labor than the value paid to them (wages, salaries) for that labor. Capitalists appropriate that "more," or what Marx called "surplus." To squeeze as much surplus from the workers as possible, capitalists control and make all the key decisions: what, how and where to produce and what to do with the surpluses they appropriate from the workers.

A transition to socialism would thus require the transformation of capitalism's exploitative internal organization of enterprises. In other words, the transition to socialism requires that workers not only produce surpluses, but also themselves appropriate and distribute them. Workplaces stop being conflict-ridden confrontations of two different groups of people - employers and employees - and become instead cooperatives in which the same people who produce the surpluses also - collectively and democratically - appropriate those surpluses. Workplaces are reorganized into workers self-directed enterprises (WSDEs). In WSDEs, workers (rather than capitalists) decide what, how and where to produce and what to do with the surpluses their labor generates.
Imagine a socialism for the 21st century that included among its central goals the democratic transformation of the workplace, a dramatic advance beyond the major 19th and 20th century versions of socialism.

Read the rest of this article here.

Climate activist events in Corvallis and Portland, March 7 and 8, 2014; Actions and Info

The Pacific Northwest as Fossil Fuel Export Corridor

Friday, March 7, 2014

7:00 pm

Corvallis Benton County Public Library 

Dan Serres, Conservation Director of Columbia Riverkeeper, and Laura Stevens of the Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign will talk about more than 15 plans proposed and moving through the permitting process.

These projects will develop port and storage infrastructure to enable the transshipment of a huge volume of coal, oil and natural gas by train and pipeline through Oregon and Washington to markets in Asia. 

Sponsored by:  League of Women Voters, Mary’s Peak Group of the Sierra Club, 350Corvallis, Act on Climate, Sierra Club Salem Beyond Coal Task Force, Climate Justice Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Corvallis, Natural Step Ministry Team of First United Methodist Church.  

Peoples’ Hearing to Oppose Coal Export

Saturday March 8, 2014

Noon-2 pm

Pioneer Courthouse Square, 701 SW 6th Avenue, Portland, OR 97204 (map)

A Peoples’ Hearing and aerial photo action (form an outline of the state of Oregon with 300 other people!) to oppose coal export. This is a family friendly event! Sign making stations and play areas will be onsite. Bring a stroller and join the stroller brigade at the front of the rally! Testimony from children and youth will be prioritized at the People’s Hearing.

Governor Kitzhaber's Department of State Lands (DSL) has a big decision to make on Ambre Energy’s Morrow Pacific coal export terminal and they have until April 30 to make it.  The Dept. of Environmental Quality recently issued three permits to Ambre Energy’s Morrow Pacific coal export terminal; we do not want DSL to follow suit.

RSVP to the rally here 

For more information contact Laura Stevens at laura.stevens@sierraclub.org

 

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MORE INFO and  ACTIONS:

 

Keystone XL:

Learn more about Keystone XL with fact sheets & reports from NRDC

http://www.nrdc.org/energy/keystone-pipeline/

 Megaloads:

Send letters to Oregon Department of Transportation demanding that citizen concerns be taken into consideration before granting permits for megaloads on Oregon roads.

See Coal March http://www.coalmarch.org/megaloads/ for information about Megaloads and advice for writing letters and where to send them.

Please send a copy of your letters to Jim Powers in Albany, OR JimVsCO2@gmail.com so activists working on this can keep track of the campaign. 

Events in Albany and Corvallis March 3-4, 2014

Monday, Mar. 3, 2pm:  Until the Rulers Obey: Voices from the Latin American Social Movements

Albany Main Library, 2450 14th Ave SE, Albany

The editors will present their book which brings together interviews with more than 70 people in 15 countries who embody the upsurge of change in Latin America today. Followed by discussion and dialogue with the audience. Refreshments. Info: 541-926-7070

Publisher’s book info sheet: http://www.pmpress.org/productsheets/pm_titles/until%20rulers%20obey.pdf

Tuesday, Mar. 4, Noon & 7pm:  Until the Rulers Obey: Voices from the Latin American Social Movements

Noon at OSU, Milam Hall 319

7pm at the UUFC, 2945 NW Circle Blvd

Join Clif Ross and Marcy Rein, editors of the new book, Until the Rulers Obey: Voices from Latin American Social Movements in a discussion of the "21st century's most powerful wave of change."  Their book brings together interviews with more than 70 activists in 15 countries who embody the upsurge of change in Latin America today -- voices from indigenous peoples, the rural and urban poor, youth, workers, women, LGBT communities, and more.

-- Noon in Milam Hall 319, OSU, sponsored by the Anarres Project for Alternative Futures.

-- 7pm at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 2945 NW Circle Blvd., sponsored by the Corvallis branch, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Social Action Group

Publisher’s book info sheet: http://www.pmpress.org/productsheets/pm_titles/until%20rulers%20obey.pdf