Metro New York Labor Communications Council presents a discussion of today’s fight back and the coming together of natural allies.

Wednesday, November 16, 6-8 PM
Harry Van Arsdale Jr. Center for Labor Studies | SUNY Empire State
325 Hudson Street @ Vandam Street

PANELISTS

• Frances Fox Piven, Professor of political science and sociology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York
• Ava Farkas, Coordinator, Living Wage NYC Campaign
• Rev. Que English, President, Senior Pastor, Bronx Christian Fellowship Church; Bronx Clergy Legislative Roundtable; member, Faith Caucus
  Living Wage NYC Campaign
• Chuck Zlatkin, Legislative and Political Director,New York Metro Area Postal Union
• Julio Pabon, President, South Bronx Community Organization

MODERATOR

• Bill Henning, Vice President, CWA Local 1180

LINKS

• Download the flier and spread the word »
• Go to the Facebook event page »

Saturday, Nov. 5, 2011, 6:11 p.m. Oh, what a day to be in Ohio. Today was an absolutely beautiful day to be knocking on doors for an incredibly important cause. The temperature reached into the low sixties, the sun was shining all day, the colors of the fall leaves were peaking and the people were friendly. After landing in Cincinnati late Friday afternoon we headed over to the Ohio AFL-CIO campaign headquarters for a campaign briefing with the AFT campaign staff. There we met up with some of our brothers and sisters from NYSUT locals across New York State who have been out in Ohio for a few days. After getting a late dinner at a classic Cincinnati rib joint it was time to hit the sack in preparation for a few big days of campaigning.

UFT Parent and Community Liaison Nick Cruz signs a "We Are Ohio" pledge at campaign headquarters.

Saturday morning started bright and earlier for the nine of us from New York. After grabbing a quick breakfast we headed over to the IBEW office where over one hundred labor volunteers from across the country were preparing to knock on doors. This was it. This was ground zero for the labor movement in Ohio and the nation. This was where union members — from teachers to police to firefighters and municipal employees — were going to make their stand against the forces of corporate America who were trying to break the backs of working people. We were here to help fight back.

We broke up into teams of two and headed out to neighborhoods across Cincinnati. UFT Parent and Community Liaison Betty Zohar and I teamed up and took a list of about 100 voters who we needed to track down and secure their votes. By 11 a.m. we were knocking on doors in a middle class neighborhood in Cincinnati. These were the voters who we need to reach if we were going to preserve the rights of Ohio’s working people to organize and collectively bargain.

After knocking on six doors without reaching anyone, we found our first voter. And it was a good thing we did. The son and brother of teachers, he knew there was a big ballot question up for a vote and knew how he felt about it, but he was not sure how the voting worked on a question like this. Betty quickly explained to him the importance of voting no on Issue 2 if he wanted to repeal the anti-union, anti-working people, pro-corporate Senate Bill 5 which was passed earlier this year. He was thrilled to meet us and could not thank us enough.

It was as simple as that. The right of workers to collectively bargain was under attack and we were there to educate Ohioans about which way to vote if they cared about working people.

UFT Parent and Community Liaison Betty Zohar knocks on a door in Cincinnati.

For the next several hours we knocked on over eighty doors and spoke to over three dozen people. We met a teacher who insisted on hugging Betty when he heard we had traveled from New York just to help the people of Ohio. We met a little girl with long pigtails who was incredibly proud to tell us that she would vote no if only she was old enough. She assured us that she would make sure her parents voted no. We met a mom of two teenage boys who was not sure about how she was going to vote but acknowledged that she was confused by all the TV ads and misleading information. She thanked us for giving her a straightforward answer and promised to consider our position. Personally, I think we got her!

It was a long, long day. But it was a great day. We New Yorkers tend to take for granted what we have at home. We often forget how many of our brothers and sisters from around the county simply do not have the right to collectively bargain and are left voiceless. This is why we are here. The good people of Ohio need our help. We are all family and we must stand up together. Just like the cries of “We Are the 99%” — today, WE ARE ALL OHIO.

On Sunday we’ll get out there and knock on some more doors. And on Monday and Tuesday we will continue the fight.

But for now, I’m thinking about finding some more BBQ ribs!

My walk lists were my neighborhood guide.

More ominously, protesters in many cities now face the prospect of sustained police crackdowns, from the hassles of permitting and noise ordinances to the violence that erupted last week in Oakland. There, police used tear gas, flash grenades, and rubber bullets to attack protesters near city hall. One of those bullets fractured the skull of Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen, leaving him hospitalized in critical condition. Since then, Olsen has become the chief symbol of Occupy’s new reality: Going up against Wall Street, it turns out, is serious business. And the more serious the Occupy movement gets, the more official and near-lethal hostility it’s likely to encounter.

As they sort out what to do next, the Occupiers might take a page from the history of American labor, the only social movement that has ever made a real dent in the nation’s extremes of wealth and poverty. For more than half a century, between the 1870s and the 1930s, labor organizers and strikers regularly faced levels of violence all but unimaginable to modern-day activists. They nonetheless managed to create a movement that changed the nation’s economic institutions and reshaped ideas about wealth, inequality, and Wall Street power. Along the way, they also helped to launch the modern civil liberties ethos, insisting that the fight to tame capitalism went hand in hand with the right to free speech.

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The One Percent appears to be a tad bit irritated by the UFT’s support for the Occupy Wall Street movement. We were one of the unions who took the lead in organizing the October 5^th rally and march which brought out thousands of New York’s working people to express their solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. UFT President Mulgrew has been at Zuccotti Park a number of times, speaking to the assembly, and was joined by AFT President Weingarten on one occasion. Our headquarters are a few blocks away from Zuccotti, and we have provided space for meetings of different groups supporting OWS. We have also given over a major section of our street level space to storage for OWS, for donations of materials and supplies sent to them and for the stowing of personal belongings on the morning when Bloomberg threatened to “cleanse” Zuccotti. This was the space that the building inspectors suddenly needed to inspect.

Oh, and last weekend, we sent forty sandwiches left from our conference for charter school educators over to Zuccotti. I had not thought much of that donation until Fox Business Network senior correspondent Charles Gasparino called the UFT on Monday. It seems that Gasparino had visited Zuccotti over the weekend and decided that it was a haven for communists. And he had witnessed the masses at Zuccotti eating our sandwiches. Why, he demanded to know, was the UFT providing sustenance to violent revolutionaries? Confronted with the results of Gasparino’s crackerjack investigative reporting, I decided that it is time to confess. Yes, I authorized that sandwich smuggling operation.

Now New Yorkers are not particularly concerned with how those in the pay of Fox and parent company Newscorp spend their time, at least not until we learn that they are illegally eavesdropping on the telephone conversations of families who lost loved ones on 9-11. But can someone explain to me the purpose of spending public funds to do inspections of the UFT headquarters, and in having the police spy on who comes and goes from our building?

We do know that New York’s leading representative of the One Percent and the tenth wealthiest American according to Forbes Magazine, one Michael Bloomberg, is not so happy with our support of Occupy Wall Street. Referring to what the New York Times identified as “public sector unions,” Bloomberg opined that “their salaries come from the taxes paid by the people they’re trying to vilify.” Now Bloomberg travels in different circles than most of us, but he seems to know some educators I never met in 27 years of teaching in New York City public schools: teachers named General Electric and Bank of America, who paid no taxes this year, and teachers named Citibank, Goldman Sachs and AIG, who were given billions of dollars in bailouts out of taxes paid by New York City public school educators, among others. Indeed, all the teachers I know actually pay taxes, and have never been the beneficiary of billions of dollars in bailouts. Bloomberg’s world seems to be an alternative universe, in which black is white and white is black. And isn’t there a bit of the blurring of public office and private interest in the person of Michael Bloomberg when city building inspectors and police appear at the doors of a union that supports Occupy Wall Street?

For the record, we always thought that the reasons why the UFT supported Occupy Wall Street were not difficult to see. As a labor union and as democrats, we have deep concerns about the economic polarization of American society that has taken place over the last three decades, resulting in the growing disappearance of the middle class and corporate dominance of our political culture. We watched the unfettered greed of the One Percent send this nation into the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression,  leaving the Ninety-Nine Percent of Americans bearing the burden of the economic hard times. Meanwhile the One Percent continues to profit, with its forty percent share of the national wealth growing.

And Occupy Wall Street also strikes close to home for us. Over the last decade, public education, teachers and unions have increasingly come under attack from the One Percent. Of the top ten wealthiest Americans identified by Forbes Magazine, nine, including Michael Bloomberg, have been involved in political campaigns against public school teachers. Just consider the roster of those who have set out to strip away the rights of teachers: Walton (Wal-Mart), Murdoch (News Corp), Gates (Microsoft), Broad, Robertson, Icahn,  Fisher (the Gap), Langone (Home Depot), the Koch brothers and Bloomberg. And just think of the wealthy hedge fund managers and Wall Street speculators who are the money and the power behind organizations such as Democrats for Education Reform and Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academies. Our own experience as teachers gives a particular resonance to the slogan “We are the Ninety-Nine Percent.”

The Daily Show‘s bread and butter is its effortless exposure of the rank hypocrisy of Fox News — at this point, for Daily Show writers, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Here (at the 3:20 mark) Sean Hannity is shown praising the “quintessentially American”-ness of Tea Party protests in 2009, then declaring yesterday that the Occupy Wall Streeters “really don’t like freedom.”

Another highlight is a clip of one eloquent protester being interviewed by a Fox News reporter (around 1:50):

After 30 years of having our living standards decrease while the wealthiest 1% have had it better than ever, I think it’s time for maybe, I don’t know, some participation in our democracy.

[UPDATE: That activist is Jesse LaGreca and the NY Observer has video of the rest of his interaction with the Fox News producer.]

The segment also does a nice job summarizing the criticism mainstream media outlets have heaped on the movement for what they see as a lack of a clear message, demands or proposed solutions. To those talking heads, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff says, “You don’t get it.”

Are they ready to articulate exactly what that problem is and how to address it? No, not yet. But neither are Congress or the president who, in thrall to corporate America and Wall Street, respectively, have consistently failed to engage in anything resembling a conversation as cogent as the many I witnessed as I strolled by Occupy Wall Street’s many teach-ins this morning [...]

Anyone who says he has no idea what these folks are protesting is not being truthful. Whether we agree with them or not, we all know what they are upset about, and we all know that there are investment bankers working on Wall Street getting richer while things for most of the rest of us are getting tougher. What upsets banking’s defenders and politicians alike is the refusal of this movement to state its terms or set its goals in the traditional language of campaigns.

That’s because, unlike a political campaign designed to get some person in office and then close up shop (as in the election of Obama), this is not a movement with a traditional narrative arc. As the product of the decentralized networked-era culture, it is less about victory than sustainability. It is not about one-pointedness, but inclusion and groping toward consensus. It is not like a book; it is like the Internet.

Occupy Wall Street is meant more as a way of life that spreads through contagion, creates as many questions as it answers, aims to force a reconsideration of the way the nation does business and offers hope to those of us who previously felt alone in our belief that the current economic system is broken.

And as Stewart says near the end of the Daily Show segment, “If the people who were supposed to fix our financial system had actually done it, the people who have no idea how to solve these problems wouldn’t be getting sh*t for not offering solutions.”

• Photo gallery of UFTers at the Oct. 5 rally and march »
• Video of UFT President Mulgrew addressing the crowd »

At 4:30 p.m., members will gather near the UFT banner in Foley Square. Marchers will step off at 5 p.m. from Foley Square and head to Zuccotti Park, where they will be welcomed by the Occupy Wall Street protesters who have created an encampment to denounce corporate greed and the grossly unequal distribution of wealth in this country. Their rallying cry: “We are the 99 percent.”

View the march route »

Occupy Wall Street »

We Are the 99 Percent »

Today President Obama said some things that very much needed to be said. He said we need to focus first and foremost on creating jobs, and he laid out a plan for doing just that. He said that asking millionaires like Warren Buffett to start paying their fair share in taxes is not class warfare, but simple math. He said Social Security does not contribute one dime to the deficit and Social Security benefits must not be cut. He said drawing down from Iraq and Afghanistan would save $1.1 trillion over 10 years, which the Super Committee could use to avoid any cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. And he explained once again how budget surpluses under President Clinton turned into budget deficits under President Bush: through two wars that were never paid for, tax cuts for wealthy people that we couldn’t afford, and the effects of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression that was caused by a failed economic philosophy that Republicans in Congress are now trying to revive.

We call on Congress to immediately pass the President’s proposal for job-creating investments, to ask the wealthy to start paying their fair share, to focus on the true causes of our long-term deficits, to reject any cuts to Medicaid or Social Security or Medicare benefits, and to stop scapegoating federal and postal employees and retirees for problems they did not cause.

Workers in the private sector had used the strike as a tool of leverage in labor-management conflicts between World War II and 1981, repeatedly withholding their work to win fairer treatment from recalcitrant employers. But after Patco, that weapon was largely lost. Reagan’s unprecedented dismissal of skilled strikers encouraged private employers to do likewise. Phelps Dodge and International Paper were among the companies that imitated Reagan by replacing strikers rather than negotiating with them. Many other employers followed suit.

By 2010, the number of workers participating in walkouts was less than 2 percent of what it had been when Reagan led the actors’ strike in 1952. Lacking the leverage that strikes once provided, unions have been unable to pressure employers to increase wages as productivity rises. Inequality has ballooned to a level not seen since Reagan’s boyhood in the 1920s.

The rabid anti-union, anti-worker stance of some of today’s conservative governors and legislators makes Reagan’s position on workers’ rights seem downright nuanced.

In the spring, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin invoked Reagan’s handling of Patco as he prepared to “change history” by stripping public employees of collective bargaining rights in a party-line vote. “I’m not negotiating,” Mr. Walker said. By then the world had seemingly forgotten that unlike Mr. Walker, Reagan had not challenged public employees’ right to bargain — only their right to strike.

With Mr. Walker’s militant anti-union views now ascendant within the party of a onetime union leader, with workers less able to defend their interests in the workplace than at any time since the Depression, the long-term consequences continue to unfold in ways Reagan himself could not have predicted — producing outcomes for which he never advocated.