I remember passing through Apollo and noticing a large industrial complex at the edge of town. Years later, I learned that this plant was owned by the Babcock & Wilcox Corporation, and it produced uranium fuel. Babcock & Wilcox, a global conglomerate, has been involved in nuclear-related industrial production ever since the Manhattan Project, designing, fabricating, and supplying components for nuclear power plants, ships, submarines, and weapons.

The facility in Apollo and another one in nearby Parks Township, initially built by the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) in 1957 and later bought by the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) and then by Babcock & Wilcox, closed in 1986. Left behind were contaminated land and water and sick and dead residents. Victims and their families sued the companies in the mid-1990s for damages suffered, and ARCO and Babcock & Wilcox were forced to pay $80 million to compensate victims for cancers and loss of property value. Sadly, by the time the lawsuits were settled, in 2008 and 2009, 40 percent of the claimants had died.

Meanwhile, Babcock & Wilcox declared bankruptcy in 2000 to avoid liability in thousands of lawsuits by employees subjected to asbestos, a substance that businesses have known since the 1930s causes cancer. As a condition of exiting bankruptcy, it set up a trust fund to pay asbestos claimants; the amount of money put aside was far less than the company would very likely have had to pay if it had faced those lawsuits.

Recently, nearly one hundred new lawsuits against ARCO and Babcock & Wilcox were filed by scores of people claiming that they got cancer as a result of exposure to radiation. A report to the federal court by an expert witness stated that the two companies “knew about worst-in-the-nation releases of radioactive materials that spanned decades, but opted not to do enough to protect neighbors from cancer-causing dust.” NUMEC showed an almost wanton disregard for safety.  “In the first few years, the company lost so much uranium—enough to build several nuclear bombs—that the FBI investigated whether someone was actually stealing the material and selling it to a foreign country!” At the Parks Township facility, which produced plutonium and enriched uranium, NUMEC buried radioactive waste in an open unfenced field close to where children played. It is implausible that Babcock Wilcox, with its many nuclear projects over a long period of time, did not know about the problems with the entities it was buying. Yet, it did nothing to protect its workers or the community. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,

A top official in 1974 viewed memos on the facility [which Babcock Wilcox bought in 1971] and wrote that if they were accurate, ‘we are guilty of gross irresponsibility in continuing to operate our uranium facilities.’ He threatened to shut them down, but the company didn’t stop making highly enriched uranium there until 1978, and it ended all production in 1984.

The actions of these corporations helped to destroy a town and its people, and it appears they knew what they were doing. They not only located a nuclear plant in a town, but then failed to shut it down when they knew that workers and residents were being poisoned. “ ‘A lot of people have lost not only their entire savings but their homes,’ due to the health effects and loss of property value caused by the plants, said Patricia Ameno, of Leechburg, who sued the companies in a previous round of litigation . . . . ‘Their families have been torn apart by illnesses and deaths.’” Ms. Ameno, whose body has been wracked by cancer and brain tumors, added, “I saw the town I grew up in … disintegrating, just like the bricks on that plant.” One of the persons who posted a comment on the Post-Gazette article noted that a 1999 piece in the same newspaper showed that one-sixth of Apollo’s population had some type of cancer!

I posted the Post-Gazette story on a facebook page dedicated to men and women who grew up in my hometown in the 1950s and 1960s. Most know about the Apollo plant. And they all lived in a town dominated by the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, which poisoned its own employees with asbestos and silica dust and whose now abandoned property is so full of harmful chemicals that it cannot even donate it to the town. Outside town, near the company-owned fields on which I used to play baseball, “waste lagoons” built by the company and fed by pipes that went under the river have been leaking “arsenic, chromium, lead, manganese, copper, zinc, mercury and other toxic compounds into the river.” Despite this, only two persons commented on what I posted. If a post concerns some ancient bit of trivia or the local hoagie shop, members of the group fall all over themselves to make some meaningless remark. But something so important is met with silence.

Sadly, a family member is a manager at Babcock Wilcox. I have always wondered how he could do this. The division of the company in which he works is knee-deep in the bowels of the military-industrial system. It “manages complex, high-consequence nuclear and national security operations, including nuclear production facilities and the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.” In others words, it is part of the U.S. war machine, making money by helping the government kill people, just like it killed people more directly in Apollo.

Thousands of people grew up in and near Apollo. They have learned what harm the corporations who employed them and their relatives and friends have done and continue to do. Men, women, and children were poisoned by that uranium fuel plant and that glass plant. Yet, for the most part, they ignore this, content to contemplate instead their “warm and fuzzy” memories, as one person put it on my hometown facebook page. And many hundreds of thousands of men and women work as managers for horrendous corporate criminals like Babcock Wilcox without ever questioning their actions. Perhaps this tells us something about what those who raise their voices in protest are up against. Including the plaintiffs challenging Babcock Wilcox. I wish them success.

Most people who come to Arches are unaware of all it has to offer. Visitors travel the paved roads and stop at various overlooks and points of interest, get out of their cars, and snap a few pictures. Energetic travelers take the trail up the slick rocks to see Delicate Arch, the image of which is on the Utah license plate. Some sign up for the guided hike in the Fiery Furnace, and some take the trail into the Devil’s Garden, to see the large concentration of easily accessible arches there.

We have the time to explore places we visit, so we have been able to locate, by trial and error and over several years, things the average tourist misses. On the one hand, this has given us a sense of superiority, of being “in the know.” But on the other hand, we have asked ourselves why what we have found isn’t made known to everyone who comes to the park. Why are there so few marked trails? Why don’t the rangers lead hikes to more places? Why are they collecting fees at the entrance stations when they have such remarkable outdoor skills?

Park officials might offer several plausible answers to these questions. They might say that the terrain at Arches is too fragile to have hordes of people walking around on it. This is desert country, and sand covers much of the ground. If left alone, organisms begin to form on top of the sand, making a “cryptobiotic crust.” This crust holds down the soil and creates the conditions that eventually allow plants, bushes, and trees to grow. Walking on it means its destruction, and its recovery takes hundreds of years. Better to keep visitors confined to the roads and a limited number of trails. Then, too, funding for our national parks is in short supply, limiting the number of rangers and ranger-led hikes and compelling rangers to work at the entrance stations. In addition, few Americans hike , so why devote resources to new trails and guided treks.

We can make good counter arguments. To find many of the interesting features in Arches, you have to tramp on the crust. In the absence of marked trails, people intent of finding some particular park wonder are going to make their own paths, creating so-called “social trails.” Rangers hate these, and talk as if they are tantamount to a capital crime. However, if the parks’ workers would just build more trails (a great jobs program for young people), with cairns to show the way, there would be far fewer social trails and the soil would suffer minimal damage. This could be accompanied by a campaign promoting hiking, both as the best way to see the park and as a great way to stay physically fit.

National Park funding is a problem, but the use of the available monies matters too. Large sums have been spent on overly large, elaborate, mega visitors’ centers and on paved roads and parking lots. Stop doing this. Money could be saved on maintenance if jeeps and off-road vehicles were not allowed to run amok on certain dirt roads that should be utilized solely as hiking trails. Local youth in need of jobs could be hired relatively cheaply to collect entrance fees. Further, money shortages could be imaginatively addressed. Park rangers and officials could initiate a public education campaign, in alliance with the tens of thousands of citizens who love the parks and want them to remain sanctuaries of natural beauty. Show the people the consequences of underfunding and develop a comprehensive program for park maintenance and improvement, arrived at through national, democratic public forums. This might be a good project for the Occupy movement: Occupy the National Parks! Tie the underfunding and deterioration of our parks to the parlous state of our environment.

Deeper roots underlie the problems in Arches and the national parks. Perhaps a recent post on The National Parks Traveler website tells us something about these. Those living in Moab, the article says, don’t go to Arches much (or to nearby Canyonlands National Park). Programs exist to teach young people about the parks, but these are in short supply and have little money. However, while it would be good to acquaint youth with Arches, what about the poorly paid adults working in the service industry? They will have neither time nor money to enjoy the parks. Go to any national park gateway town and you will see that the locals are run ragged serving wealthier tourists. Their job is to cater to the needs of others, and no doubt they soon enough develop an attitude of dislike for visitors, and this carries over to an indifference to the beauty that surrounds them. And what is true for the locals is true for most of the people in the United States. We have no guaranteed vacations, as many working men and women still have in Europe. Our wages have stagnated for forty years, and our jobs suck. If we manage to put together enough money for a short trip, it won’t likely take us to Arches. If somehow we do find our way there, we won’t have the time to get to know it. We will be happy to travel the paved roads, camera in hand, and to go to the visitors’ center to buy souvenirs.

Matters might be different if incomes and wealth were more evenly divided in the United States, if work was not such a burden and paid better, if we were not so insecure. Unfortunately, they are not, and this might be why, for most of us, more money and better care of our parks are not very high on our list of priorities.

 We were in a Wal-Mart in Richfield, Utah. The greeters at the door were an elderly man and woman. Both were in wheelchairs. At a grocery store in Colorado, an old man bagging groceries was so bent over that he could barely look up. In our travels, we have begun to notice a new phenomenon: the working aged.

We all know people who continue to work long past what most of us would consider a normal retirement age. My grandfather retired when he was sixty-five, but he kept working as a tipstaff for a local judge and later, at eighty, took a job keeping the books for an auction company. A recent article in USA Today was full of feel-good stories about octogenarians and even nonagenarians still active at work. Ninety-seven-year-old Al Churchill, who still works every day at the company he founded sixty years ago, says, “If I didn’t work? There’s no such thing. … Work is important, because without work, you’re nothing.”

Mr. Churchill’s sentiments are well and good, but something more is going on here. Saying that “without work, you’re nothing,” means one thing when you are the owner of a company or have a job as, say, a tenured professor at a university, but it means something else when you are an ordinary worker. Churchill owns the company where he goes to work every day. The professor has control over his labor. In addition, the power that Churchill and the teacher have overshadows the inevitable loss of “productiveness” that comes with age. The factory owner won’t be told by his employees that he’s not as in touch with things as he thinks he is. The aging professor can use those old lecture notes and tell the same awful jokes year after year, and then go take a nap in his office. He won’t be fired.

But suppose you are a factory laborer, a secretary, or a hotel room attendant. Your jobs are both physically and mentally debilitating, and you can never do as you please. Thirty years of such work, and you are probably closer to the grave than to a healthy old age of believing that “without work, you’re nothing.”  You were nothing when you were working.

There are many more ordinary workers than there are business owners and professors. Here is a chart from a previous blog post that provides some interesting data. Notice the types of jobs (and the pay) that are most common in the United States. Now imagine saying to yourself at age 65, “Boy, I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than stick with this job for as long as I can.”

 None of this would matter much if we were talking about isolated individuals like Mr. Churchill or the waiter I once saw on the Johnny Carson show who was 106 years old. However, some dramatic changes have been occurring over the past decade in the labor market activity of older Americans. Here are the basic facts:  

• The labor force participation rate (LFPR, the share of the labor force that is either employed or looking for a job) of those 65 and older had fallen to historic lows by the 1980s and early 1990s, but after that it reversed course and has continued to rise until the present. Between 1995 and 2009, the LFPR for older men rose from 17 percent to 22 percent and for older women from 9 percent to 13 percent.
• The labor force participation rates rose for those between 65 and 69, 70 and 74, and over 75.
• In 2008, half of working men 65 and older were working full-time, up from 38 percent in 1994. For women, the change was from 23 percent in 1994 to one-third in 2008.
• Surveys of those between 45 and 59 years of age indicate that a very high share of both men and women expect to continue working after they reach 65. This share is more than double the fraction of those 65 and older who are now working; therefore, the trend toward rising employment among the elderly will almost certainly continue.

Some commentators have argued that the greater likelihood of the aged to be in the labor force is due to such factors as longer lifespans, better health, higher level of education, and the shift away from hard physical goods-producing labor toward less strenuous service work. These are no doubt reasons why some older individuals continue to seek employment. However, we were living longer and had better health during the decades when labor force participation rates were falling. Higher education is often associated with better jobs, ones that we might want to continue to do as long as possible. Yet, many jobs that require college degrees or more are not easily done by those of advanced years. I taught in a college where the teaching loads were heavy, and I know that I could not be a good teacher with such course burdens now, when I am sixty-six; I couldn’t bear them when I was fifty-five. Certainly, adjunct professors, who now teach most courses in some colleges and have to piece together classes at several schools just to make ends meet, won’t easily be able to keep working into old age. Nearly every Registered Nurse has a college degree, but the work is strenuous and the hours are long. What good will that degree do when the former nurse seeks other employment at age 70? As for service work, look again at the occupations in our chart. Not coal mining, but not very desirable work for the most part.  And plenty of service work is physically demanding. Ask a line cook.

The reasons why we are more likely to labor into our sixties and seventies and why so many middle-aged employees are planning to do so are not difficult to ascertain. First, wages have stagnated for nearly forty years, and workers cannot save enough money to guarantee income security throughout their lives. The typical household has retirement savings of just $90,000; at an interest rate of 3 percent, this is $2,700 per year. Second, employers are much less likely to offer and fund defined benefit pensions, in which an employee is guaranteed a certain pension payment each month after retirement. In 1992, 32 percent of workers had such plans; in 2007 this was down to 20 percent. Now, workers either have no pension plan or one with defined contributions, in which workers contribute part of their wages to an individual retirement account (some employers add a full or partial match). How much money is available at retirement depends on how well the financial assets purchased by the account perform. The recession of 2001 and the Great Recession of 2007-2009 wreaked havoc on these accounts, which given low wages, wouldn’t have enough retirement money in them in the best of circumstances. Third, low wages and insecure or no pensions helped to fuel, with the aid of the low interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve, the housing bubble and the explosion of household debt that fueled it. When the bubble burst, the net worth of working people plummeted, making them even less prepared financially for retirement. Fourth, social security retirement ages have been legally increased, and social security income replaces a smaller and smaller fraction of pre-retirement incomes. In 1981, the replacement rate was 52 percent; today it is 40 percent. It is estimated that this will fall to 36 percent by 2025. The long and short of all this is that millions of people will have no choice but to continue working as long as they are able.

Barring a mass political upheaval, the future won’t be very bright for us as we reach our golden years. Every scenario promises work deep into old age. The social security system might be completely privatized, in which case retirement planning will become a completely do-it-yourself enterprise. More than likely, privatization will take place piecemeal, with a series of partial privatization schemes preceding the ultimate demise of the program. If social security does survive, the retirement age will continue to increase and the benefits will get smaller. Benefits might be “means-tested,” that is, there will be an income maximum, beyond which a person will no longer receive or get only partial benefits. Once means-tested, benefits will be stigmatized in much the same way as public assistance. From this, it will be a short step to compelling people to work in order to receive social security payments. A friend of mine referred me to an article in the February 16, 2012 issue of the Guardian (United Kingdom), in which it is reported that: “Some long-term sick and disabled people face being forced to work unpaid for an unlimited amount of time or have their benefits cut under plans being drawn up by the Department for Work and Pensions.” Those ancient Wal-Mart greeters will have to work in those wheelchairs just to get social security. And if they need kidney dialysis, the machines can be hooked up to the chairs while they smile at the customers. Perhaps there will be a nonagenarian so disabled that all he can do is blink his eyes. Then some bright young technological wizard will be tasked to find a way to turn those blinks into labor.

Like lambs to the slaughter, we are being prepared for this bleak future by those who want us to be as economically insecure as possible: rich and powerful employers and their friends in the government they control. They tell us that the social security trust fund is broke (it is not) and can only be fixed if old people make sacrifices. They tell us that the elderly are greedy and want to get theirs while the getting is good and screw the young. When the average social security payout is $14,000 per year, this argument is almost funny. They tell us that since we are living longer, it is only fair that we work longer. They tell us that we have the right to control our own savings (never mentioning that if social security didn’t force us to save, we wouldn’t save at all). They tell us that we would earn a higher return if we invested on our own behalf, never pointing out that the only people who beat the market are U.S. congresspersons and those who are rich to start with.

All of this smoke and mirrors to keep us from thinking that what we need is more security not less, less work not more, time to think, and the resources to do whatever we please. These are the things that will make us “something,” not more years of wage slavery.

The problem with this way of perceiving racism is that it ignores the larger social structures in which individual attitudes are shaped. In his book, Inequality and Power: The Economics of Class, economist Eric Schutz suggests that as we make individual choices about all sorts of things, we, at the same time, make “social choices.” These structure the larger society, which, in turn, conditions our individual decisions. Our political system is a case in point. The United States was founded as a nation whose prosperity depended heavily upon slavery, which was the dominant mode of production in the southern states and tightly integrated into northern capitalism. The slave trade, the production of important commodities such as cotton and tobacco, the textile industry, shipping, construction, the manufacture of agricultural implements, and many other economic activities were intimately tied to slavery.

The slave economy was supported by a constellation of laws that maintained the entire oppressive system. Who enacted these laws? That is, were the “social choices” that allowed, defended, and maintained slavery made by everyone equally or were the choices of some weighted more heavily than those of others?  It would take someone more obtuse even than Mr. O’Reilly to argue that in 1789 there was political equality in the United States. Slaves had no political power, and even among those who were not slaves, women could not vote, and, in many states, whites had to own property to cast a ballot. Blacks in the north were nominally free but subject to extreme race and class discrimination. So politics was dominated by white, male property owners, who shaped the government decisively to serve their interests, including the institution of slavery. And by the time slavery ended, inequalities of income and wealth had developed to the point that this white, male, economically elite power was thoroughly entrenched and difficult to unseat. So what this elite wrought was also hard to change. Slavery ended, but the institutional setting in which it flourished did not.

Consider the conditions of black America at the end of the Civil War and especially after the end of Reconstruction in 1876. The slaves were freed but given no property, not even small plots of land so that they could feed their families. Without wealth or income, they had to fend for themselves. Federal soldiers protected them to a degree, but when the troops left, they fell victim once again to their white masters, who regained control of southern state governments and passed the Jim Crow laws that created a system of apartheid that dominated the south for nearly one hundred years. These states gave full sanction to white vigilantism, which stood ready to murder blacks who refused to succumb to white rule. Blacks were being lynched by white mobs into the 1960s. Through new laws that criminalized everyday activities, the white rulers of the south filled up the prisons with black men and women, and then contracted them out to white business owners, creating what a recent PBS documentary called “slavery by another name.”

If a group of people begin life with little income and no wealth, they are not likely to fare well economically. Modern research on economic mobility teaches us that it is not nearly as great in the land of opportunity as most people think. What matters most is how well-off your parents are, mainly how much wealth they have. The children of poor parents are a lot less likely to end up rich than those whose parents are rich. Perhaps as much as 60 percent of the parents’ income advantage is passed along to their children. This means that a person’s great-great-grandparents’ wealth confers an advantage upon him or her today. By the same token, the poverty of your great-great–grandparents will haunt you now. Compound this inter-generational income and wealth effect with the impact of slavery and the “social choices” that whites made, nearly all of which created a society in which former slaves and their progeny were marginalized and considered barely human. Here is how I put it in something I once wrote:

Imagine my own great-great-grandfather and suppose he had been a black slave in Mississippi. He would have been denied education, had his family destroyed, been worked nearly to death, suffered severe privation during the Civil War, and been considered less than human. Then in 1865 he would have been “freed,” to fend for himself and whatever family he had. No job, no land, no schools, no nothing. For twelve short years, he might have had some protection provided by the federal government against the murderous rage of white Southerners. But in 1877 even that ended, and afterward he would have been confronted with the full force of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. What chance would his children have had? How likely would they have been to catch up with their white overlords? Isn’t zero the most likely probability? His grandchildren might have migrated north, but again with no wealth and not much schooling. His great-grandchildren would have lived through the Great Depression. How much property would they have been likely to accumulate? Finally, through the heroic struggle of my ancestors and my own generation, I would have seen the victories of the civil rights movement, the desegregation of the schools, the end of lynchings, and the opening up of a few decent jobs. I might have been an auto worker in Detroit for a dozen years, but then in the 1970s everything would have come crashing down again.

Let’s return to the argument that both blacks and whites are, to one degree or another, racist. If this is so, then, other things equal, the respective racisms should more or less cancel out, and no particular social outcomes would be expected to occur as a consequence of racism. That is, race wouldn’t enter into the social choices Schutz writes about.

Can we put this notion of black racism and white racism canceling out to the test? Let’s look at data that describe certain important economic and social outcomes: income, wealth, jobs, poverty, unemployment, housing, life expectancy, infant mortality, and imprisonment:

1. Income: In 1947, the ratio of median black family income to white family income was 51.1 percent. In 2009, it was 61.4 percent. After the heroic struggles of the Civil Rights Movement and the enactment of numerous civil rights laws, this seems a small gain, barely higher than the 59.2 percent of 1967.

2. Wealth: When we have assets, we have some security against unforeseen problems such as illness; assets can be sold and some of them generate income. In 2009, the median net worth (all assets, including homes, minus all debts) of black households (a household is not necessarily a family) was $2,200, while for whites it was $97,900. Black median wealth was 2 percent that of whites. If we confine our data to median net financial wealth (assets include mutual funds, trusts, retirement and pension funds, etc.), black households had $200, while whites had $36,100, for a ratio of black to white of .0056. I always do a double take when I see these numbers. Nearly twice as many black households as white had zero or negative net worth (39.2 versus 20.3 percent).

3. Wages and Jobs: Black workers earn less than their white counterparts; black men, for example, earn less that three-quarters the wages of white men. The black-white earnings ratio is less than one for every level of schooling. Part of this is due to the fact that  blacks, no matter their level of schooling, are over represented in jobs with relatively low wages and under represented in higher-paying jobs. A report from the Economic Policy Institute tells us that “The average of the annual wages of occupations in which black men are overrepresented is $37,005, compared with $50,333 in occupations in which they are underrepresented.” Further, “A $10,000 increase in the average annual wage of an occupation is associated with a seven percentage point decrease in the proportion of black men in that occupation.” Another part of the reason for the relatively low wages of blacks is that they earn less money within the same occupations. A summary of data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that “In 2010, median usual weekly earnings of . . . White men ($1,273) working full time in management, professional, and related occupations (the highest paying major occupation group) were well above the earnings of  Black men ($957) in the same occupation group.” For women, the numbers were $932 for whites and $812 for blacks. Racial wage discrepancies exist in every occupational category. If instead of specific occupations, we look just at low wage work, we find racial disparities. About one-quarter of all jobs in the United States pay a wage that, for full-time, year-round work, would put a family of four below the poverty level of income. But for jobs held by black workers, this figure is nearly 35 percent.

4.  Poverty: The United States officially defines the poverty level of income as the cost of the Department of Agriculture’s minimum food budget times three.  It is a bare bones income, equal in 2010 to $22,491 (before taxes) for a family of four. In 2010, 46.2 million people lived in poverty, giving a poverty rate of 15.1 percent. This dreadful number, the highest in any rich capitalist nation, masked large differences by race. For non-Hispanic whites, the rate was 9.9 percent; for blacks it was 27.4 percent. 13.5 percent of blacks lived at less than one-half of the poverty level of income. For black children (less than eighteen), the incidence of poverty was 39.1 percent.

5.  Unemployment: The official unemployment rate has almost always been about twice as high for blacks as for whites. Last month, these rates were 13.6 and 7.4 respectively. Double-digit unemployment rates are more common than not for black workers, a condition that would be unacceptable if it were true for white workers. Other labor market statistics, such as the underemployment rate (which includes involuntary part-time workers and those who want work but have given up looking), the employment rate (employment divided by noninstitutional population at least sixteen years of age) and the labor force participation rate (the labor force divided by the noninstitutional population at least sixteen years of age), all show racial disparities. In 2011, the underemployment rate was 13 percent for whites and nearly 25 percent for blacks.

6.  Housing: Homes are the most important form of wealth for most households. Not unexpectedly, there is a racial gap here too. Whites are 25 percent more likely to own homes than blacks. In addition, the current meltdown in housing prices has disproportionately hurt black homeowners. In connection with housing, it is useful to mention the recent study by the Manhattan Institute, which has received a great deal of media attention, that housing segregation has dramatically declined. The authors use a “dissimilarity index” as a measure of segregation and show that this has fallen. An Economic Policy Institute (EPI) evaluation of the study explains: “They find a national dissimilarity (or segregation) rate of about 55 percent for African Americans—in other words, ‘only’ 55 percent of African Americans would now have to move to neighborhoods with more non-blacks in order to evenly distribute the black population throughout all neighborhoods in their metropolitan areas. This is a substantial decline from the segregation level of about 80 percent in 1970.” Against the optimistic gloss that has been put on the Manhattan Institute analysis, the EPI authors make several salient points. First, a 55 percent segregation rate is nothing to brag about, and it will rise now that black homeowners in white neighborhoods have been experiencing so many foreclosures. Second, the dissimilarity index is a somewhat indirect measure of black and white interaction. By another measure, the typical black person lived in a neighborhood that was 40 percent white in 1940; today this has fallen to 35 percent. And even for the dissimilarity index, some of the decline is due to an influx of Asians and Hispanics into black localities, while another part of it is the consequence of the greater economic mobility of the black middle class. Poor blacks have been left behind, stuck in almost totally segregated areas, without jobs as manufacturing left town, and unable to follow jobs to the suburbs. The “high poverty” neighborhoods are home to 40 percent of all poor blacks (only 15 percent of poor whites live in such neighborhoods).

7.  Life Expectancies and Infant Mortality: There is no reason to expect that, other things equal, one group of people in a country should exhibit different life expectancies and infant mortality rates than another. In 2010, blacks could expect to live four years less than whites. Infant mortality rates are more than double for black than for white women. Perhaps one reason for this gap is that blacks are nearly twice as likely as whites to have no health insurance.

8.  Prisons and the Criminal Justice System: Here the racial divide is startling. Michelle Alexander calls what has happened to blacks here “mass incarceration,” which functions much like Jim Crow: a “tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status [of black Americans].” In 2010, 2,226,800 persons were incarcerated in the United States, and another 4,887, 900 were either on probation or parole. So, the United States has a criminal justice system population of over seven million people. Nearly 40 percent of this population is black; more than triple the black share of the U.S. population. At every step in the criminal justice system—arrest, arraignment, legal representation, plea bargaining, jury selection, verdict, sentencing, chance for parole, prospects after imprisonment—blacks fare worse than whites.

All of these things would lead us to reject the hypothesis that white and black racism offset one another. What is more, we would get the same results even if we conducted more sophisticated tests of this hypothesis. For example, black wages are lower than those for whites even if we factor out schooling, age, occupation, industry, experience, region of the country, and whatever else we think influences wages. That is, if we look at two groups of workers equal in all respects (same schooling, experience, etc.), the black group will have a lower average wage than the white group. The same result would hold for whatever variable we considered—prison sentences, unemployment, life expectancies, and all the others mentioned above.

We are left with an inescapable conclusion. Having a black skin, in and of itself, is a grave economic and social disadvantage, while having a white skin confers considerable advantage. That this is true today, 146 years after the end of the Civil War, after three constitutional amendments, the great civil rights movement, a large number of civil rights laws, and lord knows how many college courses and sensitivity training sessions is testament to the power and tenacity of discriminatory social structures.

What might be done about black-white inequality? Some left-wing writers have argued that race-conscious remedies, such as affirmative action, are bound to be divisive and should be abandoned in favor of class-based relief. Some people I know objected strongly when a friend of mine suggested that anyone serious about racial disparities should campaign for the abolition of our prison system. While these persons knew that prisons are a key component of our discriminatory social structures, “abolish the prison system” would surely be an extremely unpopular plank in a radical movement’s platform. It would have no chance and would just alienate whites and quite a few blacks from our cause. Better to fight for something like full employment through a public jobs program. This would have a wide appeal, and while it is race neutral, it would have a greater impact on black workers since they have much higher unemployment rates. A similar logic can be applied to national health insurance or low-cost public housing. The ideas is to fight for things that unite the working class.

The “unify the working class” strategy doesn’t seem quite right to me. If it is true that the social choices made since the beginning of the United States have created racist social structures and if these have yet to be eradicated, it makes sense to have as part of a radical program a direct confrontation with these structures. If we had a full employment jobs program, how would it eliminate the gap between black and white wages, unless at the same time it was aimed disproportionately at black workers? If we don’t aim to guarantee that blacks become leaders in our movements, then how will a full employment program or national healthcare or public housing be implemented so that they do not disproportionately benefit whites, who after all, hold the most leadership positions in all movements, radical and not. Even if we were to make every element of the criminal justice system nondiscriminatory, how could we make sure that the enormous number of black men and women enmeshed in this system now will be able to extricate themselves from it and become full and equal citizens, unless we have race-specific programs to help them?

Given the extent and depth of white privilege, racial issues have to be addressed and attacked head on. There is no easy way out. The working class will never be unified unless we once and for all confront the institutional racism that surrounds  us. Unity requires restitution for past and present damages. Nothing less will do.

One especially important opening is the possible alliance between those who are organizing OWS efforts and the labor movement. Workers are the 99 percent, and their organization as workers within the OWS framework could help to transform an uprising into a movement for a radical transformation of what is a sick and dehumanizing social system. Most OWS organizers, participants, and supporters are members of the working class, and thousands of rank-and-file union members have participated in and offered material aid to OWS. No doubt, the Wisconsin uprising helped prepare working people for OWS. Jon Flanders, one of the authors in this book, tells us that “A leading young trade union activist from this area went out to Madison slept on the floor, and came back inspired. Now he is marching to NYC from Albany with a group of Communication Workers of America (CWA).”1 What Wisconsin helped do was make workers less afraid to take action and better aware that much of the public shares their frustrations and anger. Now that OWS, which is broader than the labor movement in terms of the groups and individuals who support and have participated in it, has erupted, workers have seen that they have a place to go to vent their grievances and others who will support them in their struggles.

OWS encampments in various places have taken up specific labor struggles. New York City OWS protested on behalf of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters workers who handle the art that is auctioned at Sotheby’s. The art handlers perform a variety of tasks, which can include packing and crating valuable works of art, driving the trucks that deliver the art to galleries and auction houses, preparing condition reports, and photographing artworks. Sotheby’s, which has made record profits but wants major concessions from the handlers, locked the employees out in August 2011 and hired temporary replacements. The workers and their OWS supporters joined forces on Wednesday, November 9, when a major auction took place. The contrast between the picketers and the rich patrons could not have been more striking; it was a real-world juxtaposition of the 1 percent and the 99 percent.

So far, the most dramatic labor-OWS alliance took place in Oakland, California, where a massive march on November 2, part of a call for a general strike, shut down the Port of Oakland, one of the nation’s busiest. The International Longshore and Warehouse Workers (ILWU) has strongly supported the OWS uprising, and the occupiers have reciprocated. One of the demands the marchers made was in support of the ILWU dispute with the companies that own the new Export Grain Terminal at the Port of Longview in Washington:

The historic blockade of the Port Of Oakland on November 2nd by thousands of people is our response to what EGT has done to Longshoremen in Washington—we feel that an injury to the livelihood of the Longshoreman and their families who have been adversely impacted by your practices is an injury to all of us in the Occupy Oakland movement.

As EGT continues to move forward with union busting practices as well as repression and recriminations against the Longshoremen in Washington, we want you to know that Occupy Oakland will still be watching. We have done research on EGT and we know who you are. We know about a range of destructive capitalist ventures your company is involved in as the 1% both here in the United States and in countries like Argentina.

Let the shut down of the Oakland Ports by tens of thousands of protesters on Wednesday November 2nd be a strong message to you—when we stand in solidarity with Longshoremen, we mean it.

Hands off the Longshoremen in Longview Washington!2

There is another “shut the port” march set for December 12, 2011. [Note: This shutdown had mixed results. There were some conflicts between certain OWS groups and the ILWU locals]  In an interesting sidebar, ILWU Director of Organizing Peter Olney suggested that union hiring halls be tied to protests against foreclosures. Olney put it this way:

The New Bottom Line reports that in California alone there are 2,107,984 mortgages under water. Many of those drowning in debt and in danger of losing their homes are our union members. When our building trades leaders say that 40% of their members are on the bench they are talking about the 40% of their members most likely to face foreclosure. The link can be graphically made between unemployment and foreclosure by using our hiring halls for mortgage workshops and mobilizing centers for home defense. The dispatcher announces to the hall: “If you do not go out on a job you go out to a home defense.”3

The “Out of the Park and Into the Streets” demonstration called by Occupy Wall Street in New York City for November 17 was endorsed by scores of unions, and union members were enthusiastic participants. And around the country, students protesting conditions at their schools have been allying themselves with college employees and immigrant workers. In California, where campus police have responded to student occupiers with violence, including the infamous pepper spraying at the Davis campus of the University of California, students have begun to argue that campuses should become “sanctuaries” for undocumented immigrants, most of whom are workers.

A very heartening aspect of the developing OWS-labor bond is the active participation of young workers. In Baltimore there is a group called the Young Trade Unionists. One of its founders, Cory McCray, marched in the OWS actions in New York City on November 17 and was a part of the Maryland and District of Columbia AFL-CIO Biennial Convention that passed a resolution stating that its members should consider OWS sites the same way they treat picket lines and refuse to do work that undermines OWS, such as hauling away tents, equipment, and books when public officials decide to close OWS encampments. When asked about OWS and labor working together, he said:

I think they go hand in hand because the labor movement has always fought against the foreclosures, the high cost of education, the workplace violations, the large corporations . . . So many of the things that OWS are bringing to attention and putting to the forefront are always things that labor has taken action on. But right now it’s such a visible one because it’s very strategic and placed all across the country. Right now, the labor movement has a great possibility of having something come to fruition with the OWS movement. But I think that this is probably the beginning, that’s what it looks like. And it’s ready to come to something big. And when we do these types of things, we always are going to need partners. It’s definitely not only going to be labor. It’s also going to have to be the communities, the churches, LGBT, the minority factor. I think that it takes everyone as a whole to lift up the workers.4

On November 8, 2011, elections and referendums in various states seemed to confirm that the spirit of the Wisconsin uprising, energized by OWS, is bearing still more fruit. In Ohio, a bill that took away collective bargaining rights for the state’s public employees was overturned by referendum, by an astounding 61 to 39 percent margin. A virulent immigrant-bashing legislator in Arizona was defeated in a primary election, and in Iowa a special election saw the victory of a labor-friendly legislator, a victory that denied Republicans control of the Iowa senate.

Workers, simply as a function of their daily activities on the job, can do what no one else can—stop production and the flow of profits that are the lifeblood of capitalist economies. Nothing would shake the powers that be more than the threat of a militant, organized working class, ready to demonstrate, picket, strike, boycott, and agitate against every manner of corporate and political outrage, from unconscionable bank fees to unbearable student loans to the super exploitation of immigrants to wars to, well, you name it. And if students, the unemployed, the homeless, retirees, and other disenfranchised groups build alliances with workers, the 1 percent will be shaken to their foundations.

However, if the embrace of OWS by the labor movement is an exciting prospect, it is not without its problems. United Auto Workers dissident Gregg Shotwell put it bluntly and directly when he said,

Occupiers should be wary of trusting union leaders who have consistently undermined, sold out, and betrayed every militant uprising or cry for more democracy in the labor movement. Most union leaders in the U.S. are wedded to the prostitution of social ideals. Every union in the United States is in thrall to the number one pimp on Wall Street, the Democratic Party.

Concession and compromise to the One Percent is the M.O. of U.S. unions. Rank-and-file workers should be able to see themselves in the bloody skull of Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen, struck dumb by Oakland police. Every day workers make heroic sacrifices to provide a dignified life for their families. Every day union leaders shoot down workers’ aspirations and incapacitate any chance workers have to shield their families from the latest act of economic terrorism.

Where is the union leader in the United States today who has the temerity to defy the capitalist oligarchy? For the most part, we don’t have genuine union leaders, we have corporate servants with union titles and six figure salaries. When U.S. corporations invested profits “Made in America” overseas, labor unions in the U.S. cut wages for new hires and blamed foreign competition. When U.S. corporations underfunded pensions, U.S. labor leaders forced retirees to make sacrifices.

The operable word for rank-and-file workers isn’t competition, concession, or compromise. The operable word is Occupy.5

One possibility is that labor leaders will try to co-opt OWS and fold it into the Democratic Party politics that Shotwell deplores. Already the SEIU, which predictably gave an early endorsement to President Obama, has begun an Occupy Congress effort. Blogger Greg Sargent describes the SEIU plan in a recent post:

One of the enduring questions about Occupy Wall Street has been this: Can the energy unleashed by the movement be leveraged behind a concrete political agenda and push for change that will constitute a meaningful challenge to the inequality and excessive Wall Street influence highlighted by the protests?

A coalition of labor and progressive groups is about to unveil its answer to that question. Get ready for “Occupy Congress.”

The coalition—which includes unions like SEIU and CWA and groups like the Center for Community Change—is currently working on a plan to bus thousands of protesters from across the country to Washington, where they will congregate around the Capitol from December 5–9, SEIU president Mary Kay Henry tells me in an interview.

“Thousands of people have signed up to come to Capitol Hill during the first week in December,” Henry says, adding that protesters are invited to make their way to Washington on their own, too. “We’re figuring out buses and transportation now.”. . .

One goal of the protests, Henry says, is to pressure Republicans to support Obama’s jobs creation proposals. More generally, the aim is to highlight Congress’s misguided obsession with the deficit and overall inaction on unemployment.

“We’re talking about it as an effort to take back the Capitol,” Henry says. “It would be great if we could build pressure that goes beyond the jobs act.”

Of course, Occupy Wall Street is distinguished by its organic, bottom-up nature and its critique of both parties’ coziness with Wall Street. Does a coordinated effort by labor and liberal groups to channel the movement’s energy into pressuring one party risk compromising the essence of what’s driven the protests?

Henry said she wasn’t worried about that happening, noting that Occupy Wall Street had created a “framework”—which she described as “we are the 99 percent”—within which such activities would fit comfortably.

“The reason we’re targeting Republicans is because this is about jobs,” she said. “The Republicans’ insistence that no revenue can be put on the table is the reason we’re not creating jobs in this country. We want to draw a stark contrast between a party that wants to scapegoat immigrants, attack public workers, and protect the rich, versus a president who has been saying he wants America to get back to work and that everybody should pay their fair share.”

But Henry added she salutes Occupy Wall Street for finding fault with both parties, adding: “We agree that on domestic social programs, we have not won the day with either party. And we are applying pressure to both.”6

Journalist Glenn Greenwald puts his disgust with SEIU in pointed terms. “Having SEIU officials—fresh off endorsing the Obama reelection campaign—shape, fund, dictate and decree an anti-GOP, pro-Obama march is about as antithetical as one can imagine to what the Occupy movement has been.”7

Besides co-optation, another problem is that organized labor has to confront legally binding collective bargaining agreements and a hostile labor law that usually prohibits various kinds of strikes and solidarity action. The ILWU, for example, has issued a statement saying, “To be clear, the ILWU, the Coast Longshore Division and Local 21 are not coordinating independently or in conjunction with any self-proclaimed organization or group to shut down any port or terminal, particularly as it relates to our dispute with EGT in Longview [Wash].” Members were advised as well that a public demonstration was not a picket line as defined by the collective bargaining agreement.8

Despite any and all caveats, there are many hopeful things going on that will keep the spirit of Wisconsin alive for the foreseeable future. This is especially true when we note that labor revolts are now worldwide and spreading. Those of us who have written for this book have, to use Gramsci’s memorable phrase, always had an “optimism of the will.” It might be time for an “optimism of the intellect” as well.

[Note: This esssay is taken from the Afterword to the new Monthly Review Press book Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back. The essay appeared in Counterpunch at http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/03/after-wisconsin/

Notes

1. http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/cy151111.html.

2. http://www.occupyoakland.org/.

3. http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=9663.

4. http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/nowak221111.html.

5. Gregg posted this as a comment on a members’ only Listserv.

6. http://www.salon.com/2011/11/19/.

7. Ibid.

8. http://transportworkers.org/node/2026. But see http://socialistworker.org/2011/12/08/organizing-for-the-port-shutdown for evidence that many ILWU members support a proposed port shutdown by Occupy Oakland.

Huey Long had faults, but he wasn’t in favor of the dog-eat-dog world that is the contemporary United States. Today, the people who say “you can be a millionaire” are the hucksters on television infomercials, hyping their “get rich” seminars, or the talking heads on Fox who declaim that we can all be rich (like they are) if we only work hard enough and have the proper amount of perseverance (like they did). If you want it bad enough, it will be yours, they tell us.

The United States is chock full of rich folks. We admire them immensely and wish we were like them. However, I think sometimes that we are still thinking in terms of Huey Long’s use of the word “millionaire.” We haven’t realized that a million dollars isn’t what it used to be. Nowadays, we have billionaires, quite a few of them. The infamous “Forbes 400,” a list of the 400 richest persons in the United States, had a minimum qualifying net wealth (assets minus liabilities) of $950, 000, 000 in 2009, which means that there were nearly 400 billionaires in the United States. The average net worth of the “400″ was $3.2 billion and the maximum was $50 billion.

A billion dollars is equal to 1,000 million dollars, so 400 billionaires is the equivalent of 400,000 millionaires. Suppose the a person with a billion dollars spends $10,000 every day and receives no interest on his money. Dividing one billion by 10,000 give us 274 years. That is nearly four, seventy-year lifetimes!

Net wealth is what a person is worth, in terms of money, at a particular point in time (in the United States, at least as far as the dominant culture is concerned, I probably could have skipped the phrase, “in terms of money”). Income, on the other hand, is money (or sometimes goods and services such as room and board, food stamps, use of a corporate jet, energy subsidies, and the like) that comes our way over some period of time. Common types of income are wages, rents, interest, dividends, profits of unincorporated businesses, social security, and capital gains. The time period we usually consider is one year. So I say that I was paid a certain number of dollars for my work as an editor in 2011. Or my social security income was so many dollars last year. My total 2011 income is the sum of all the money I took in that year.

A billion dollars in wealth is one thing.  A billion dollars in income is almost inconceivable. Yet, in recent years, some persons have made billion dollar incomes. It is possible that a few could get a billion or more just from interest on their wealth. Bill Gates once had an estimated fortune of close to one hundred billion dollars. Suppose that he was able to get a rate of return on the assets represented by this wealth of just 2 percent.  This would yield a yearly income of two billion dollars.

While using google to find information for this post, I came upon a New York Times article about the pay of hedge fund managers in 2009. The title is “Pay of Hedge Fund Managers Roared Back Last Year.” The Great Recession that began in December 2007 put a crimp in the style of the super rich as stock prices fell and the value of all the exotic financial instruments that these same people bought and sold imploded. But thanks in large part to the generosity of the Obama administration, those at the pinnacle of the income pyramid rebounded and are nearly as rich as ever. At the top of the hedge fund entrepreneurs was David Tepper of Pittsburgh. He used money in his hedge fund to make a large bet that the banks would be bailed out by the government and be saved from insolvency. His reward was a payment from his hedge fund to himself—managers of these funds typically receive a management fee plus a share of any gain in the fund’s assets—of four billion dollars in 2009. Noted financier and, according to Fox News, raving communist, George Soros was second to Tepper, with an income of $3.2 billion. Remember, this is income, not wealth. Tepper and Soros made these outsized sums in one year.

Suppose Tepper and his heirs spend $10,000 a day and again assume no interest on the $4 billion.  It would take 1,096 years to spend one year’s income. If they spend $100,000 a day, the income would last nearly 110 years.

Naturally, the super rich do not spend all their money. They save and use the saving to buy society’s productive resources—the capital that the rest of us rely on, by selling our ability to work to its owners. Then, with the power ownership gives them, they take from us the labor time that generates business profit. The profit not only increases their incomes and wealth, it also secures the power that allows them to do this in the first place. Money and its corresponding economic power support enormous and complex structures of political, social, and cultural power that maintain the entire exploitative system.

At the other end of the tremendous economic divide that characterizes the United States are the super poor. In 2010, more than 7,000,000 people had incomes less than 50 percent of the official poverty level of income, an amount equal to $11,245. It would take 355,713 years of receiving this income to equal Tepper’s four billion. To ask how much power those at the bottom have is to answer the question.

Any thoughtful person must know that the inequality that marks the United States stacks the deck in favor of those who have the most income and wealth. But the key to ending this inequality is not redistributing some of this from the rich to the poor. It is instead bringing to an end the entire power structure that makes capitalism tick and whose existence guarantees the continued subservience of most people to the wishes of the few. Because in capitalism, it is the poverty of the majority (of workers) that gives rise to the riches of the minority (of capitalists), and the reverse is just as true.

“Reality” is a misnomer since Gold Rush is both scripted and directed. The story line is straightforward. Several men from Oregon, suffering the impact of the Great Recession, pool their money and, with as much mining equipment as they can afford, head for the wilds of Alaska to prospect for gold. They lease a claim from an old miner, and set up shop next to a legendary prospector named John Schnabel, who has successfully found gold for decades and is still going strong at the age of ninety-one. Various subplots develop during the first season, which ends with the Oregonians poised for a big strike but forced by the oncoming winter weather to close shop and wait for next year. In the second season, they lose their lease to a man named “Dakota Fred,” who had been hired by the landowner during the first season to keep an eye on the original crew, who had a penchant for serious miscalculations and mistakes. The new season revolves around the conflict between the Oregon men, who have bought a new lease in the Klondike (several hundred miles from the first season site) and Dakota Fred, and the attempt by John Schnabel’s teenage grandson, Parker Schnabel, to take over the management of his grandfather’s mine.

As drama, Gold Rush is ridiculously bad. You keep asking yourself obvious questions. How did a group of men portrayed as economically hard-pressed and remarkably inept come up with the hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy or rent all that equipment, repair it when it so frequently broke, and purchase the fuel to operate it? How did they raise this money again, to buy better equipment, before the second season commenced? How did crew leader, Todd Hoffman, forget to do the paperwork necessary to maintain that first lease and thereby lose it to Dakota Fred? If Hoffman was able to secure funds for year two by selling part of his family’s small airport, why would we believe that he was down and out in the first place? Why would Hoffman’s partners believe that there was gold under the ground they had leased just because Hoffman’s father, who had mined in Alaska before, said he had a gut feeling that it was there? And so on.  I’ve had to suspend less belief watching Family Guy.

But if the drama is weak, the values that the show upholds are awful. They reflect so much of what is wrong with the United States. First, there are the regular references to “the American Dream.” The men say that in the United States, a person can, if willing to take risks and persevere, strike it rich. This is given its typical political twist when combined with the belief that this is what made America exceptional. You can’t do such things in other, lesser countries. The Hoffman team portrays itself as a throwback to an earlier time when the United States was great, unlike the present when the nation is mired in crisis. Not for them the reliance of so many of their fellow citizens on government handouts. Nor the financial charlatan’s money-making magic. No, they are going to take that most elemental form of money, gold, right out of the earth, with their hands and machines. And they are doing this for family, God, and country. They regularly refer to their families as the reason they are in Alaska. They often form a circle and pray for success. They say that the whole country is rooting for them to succeed. Their examples will encourage others to chase the American Dream, and maybe the nation will right itself and be on top once again.

Second, the untrammeled pursuit of money is seen as an obviously good and natural thing, and the effort to get it is what matters and not the collateral damage that this might cause. The members of the Hoffman crew tell some hard luck stories. Their homes are about to be foreclosed. They can’t pay their bills. One man has such serious spine problems that he has to take heavy doses of morphine. If they don’t find gold, they will be ruined. If they find it, their problems will be over. Perhaps they should have read B. Traven’s novel, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or at least watched the movie, before beginning their quest. If they had, they’d know that the search for gold can corrode the seekers’ humanity, ultimately breaking down the social bonds of friendship and common purpose.

Todd Hoffman bickers with his father, and near mutinies against the two of them by the others seem always to loom. Dakota Fred and his son argue bitterly, and Parker Schnabel rudely attacks his grandfather. Everyone is separated from his wife and children, and it is hard to imagine that this isn’t taking a toll; we know that tough economic times warp family relationships. If these prospectors do find gold, they will squabble over how it is shared. Then, if they really strike it rich, isn’t it likely that they will just mindlessly spend it. The media are replete with reports of lottery winners squandering money. If these men are in their ordinary lives at all like they are presented on the show, money won’t make them kind, sympathetic, and happy human beings. They won’t make the world a better place.

There is another kind of collateral damage that is as startling to see as it is ignored on the show. Gold mining is ruinous to the environment, and what these men do to their surroundings is abominable. During the first season, some were foolish enough to bring spouses and children with them. The heavy equipment, the mud, the large water-filled ditches, and the general filth soon sent the families packing, but not before the husbands kill a black bear that came calling. According to Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources, an animal had entered the claim site, most likely after food that had been carelessly left out. Some time after this, a bear that was neither on the site nor a threat to humans was killed. Hoffman senior said afterward that he wasn’t a fan of bear meat, but this one was fantastic. One of nature’s most magnificent creatures is killed so that a bunch of fools can look for gold.

The dead bear was a minor environmental calamity compared to the natural habitat in which the fauna and flora live. Millions of gallons of water are drawn from streams and contaminated as they are used to separate the heavy gold from the rocks and dirt in which it is embedded. The rocks and dirt themselves are ripped out of the earth by machines after crude roads have been built and the surface trees and soil have been bulldozed. The debris is hauled away to create enormous mountains of waste, similar to the “boney piles” or “rock dumps” once so common in coal mining villages. In one particularly grotesque episode, the Hoffmans think they have discovered some virgin land on their Klondike claim, that is, ground that has not been previously mined. They believe this because there are large trees growing, and they (erroneously) assume that their size indicates an age older than when gold mining last occurred in the area. Elated, they break out the dozers and rip up the permafrost. This creates a muddy mess, which is simply dumped wherever convenient. It turns out that the land had already been mined, so all they did was ruin it once again. But not to worry; they had their claim tested with sample bores and then wreaked havoc on some more of their acreage. What is left when whatever gold there is has been recovered is a despoiled environment that will not soon recover, if ever.

The Alaskan landscape, like parts of the western mainland of the United States, is severely marred by mining. The Hoffmans decided to have the test bores done after Todd visited a large corporate mine, where the Dutch manager tells him that ground must be tested for gold deposits before clearing it. While Todd and the manager are talking, the camera pans the mining operation. A large hydraulic hose, which can develop enormous pressure, is being used to literally crumble an entire hillside, washing down a mountain of soil, which is then run through complicated sluice boxes until gold settles at the bottom. It was a scene right out of the infamous “Malakoff Diggins” near Grass Valley, California. There, water cannons called “monitors” destroyed the hills, and the waste water flowed into the Yuba River. This flooded towns downstream, including Sacramento, and hundreds of tons of silt entered San Francisco Bay. So severe was the damage that hydraulic mining was outlawed in the state, in 1884! Alaska, it appears, is behind the times. In fact, the show’s producers claim that the Gold Rush miners are in compliance with all Alaska laws, which only shows how pathetic are the environmental statutes of the United States’s last frontier. In any event, the Hoffman crew, Dakota Fred, and the Schnabels seem oblivious to what they are doing.

Capitalism relentlessly breeds antisocial behavior. It breaks apart all egalitarian and communal relationships—those that would be best able to help each of us cope with both individual and societal disasters. We are forced instead into “command and obey” relationships (in school, at work, vis-a-vis the government), those in which most of us are compelled to do things we might not choose to do if we could make free choices. We “connect” to one another as competitors, in a war of all against all. Eat or be eaten. Other people and the natural world come to be seen as objects to be exploited. We might like to act in a more humane manner, but we cannot.

All of this alienates us from both our fellow human beings and our environment. We are left to our own devices, to survive the competitive rat race as best we can. Those with power then promote the idea, in the workplaces they own and in the culture they dominate, that such an individual existence is good; it will create the best of all possible worlds. If we come to internalize this view, what is left for us except to do what those with power say we should do? We have, perhaps, been seeing recently, in the Occupy Wall Street uprising, the beginning of a revolt against the sad excuse for human life that modern capitalist society has forced upon us. But we have a long way to go. Gold Rush resonates with viewers because it validates what we have been taught to believe. Hard times may be here, but we are to blame. And it is up to each of us to find a way out of whatever trouble we find ourselves facing. If we act aggressively, take risks, and never give up, we will do well, and in the end, the crisis will be a blessing. We will be better off than ever and ready to participate on a grander level than ever before in the buying of goods and services that defines us as successful people. We might even strike it rich, and then easy street will be our new address. If others suffer as a consequence of what we do, if we kill a few animals and a few thousand acres of land, well, such is life. If we didn’t do these things, others surely would.

Frank Bardacke labored over this book for fifteen years. We can be grateful that he didn’t give up. This is the best history ever written of the United Farm Workers (UFW) and Cesar Chavez. It explains better than any other book how the UFW under Chavez’s leadership became in the 1960s and 1970s one of the most remarkable and successful unions in U.S. history but then crashed and burned so breathtakingly fast that by the end of the 1980s it had pretty much disappeared from the fields.  Bardacke relies on primary sources—letters, interviews, personal papers, archives, newspaper accounts, court and police records, his own considerable experiences as a farm laborer (He spent six seasons in the fields between 1971 and 1979. A minor political conflict with the union during the 1979 lettuce strike led to his blacklisting by both the growers and the union, and this forced him to take up other employment). In the main, he lets the record speak for itself, avoiding the apologetics or the rancor we typically find in books, articles, and reviews about the UFW and Chavez.

Several things set Bardacke’s history apart from everything that preceded it. First, he pays attention to the farm workers themselves, to their organizing history, the nature of their work, and the changes that have taken place in their industry. His descriptions of the skilled, difficult, and body-destroying work of harvesting lettuce, celery, broccoli, asparagus, and lemons are among the most moving and beautifully written parts of the book. They help to foreground the author’s demonstration that the organization of farm workers did not spring suddenly from the will of Cesar Chavez. As Bardacke shows with scores of examples, agricultural workers have been doing battle with their employers for nearly one hundred years. Their skills, the short time the growers have to get crops harvested, and the self-organization of the workers, especially those who toiled as part of  tightly-knit teams, all combined to create a sense of potential power, power that became reality when conditions were propitious.

Second, Bardacke delves into Cesar Chavez’s life in more depth than anyone ever has, giving him insights that are critical to an explanation of the historical trajectory of the UFW. Unlike most of the union’s members, Chavez’s parents owned a small farm and suffered sharp downward social and economic mobility when they lost it in 1939 and had to work in the fields. The anger he felt because of this was not the same as that experienced by another UFW stalwart and founder, Gilbert Padilla, who was born into a farmworker family, worked in the fields as a young child, and learned class consciousness as he lived his life. Padilla had a natural affinity with the workers that Chavez never had, and he was not nearly as anticommunist as was Cesar. Chavez also identified more as a Mexican-American (a Chicano) than as a Mexican. The first workers in the UFW were settled vineyard laborers and not migrants. Chavez had a lifelong antipathy for the unsettled Mexicans who soon enough comprised the majority of California’s farmworkers.

Cesar Chavez was also a devout and conservative Catholic. He embraced both the “social action” philosophy of Pope Leo XIII, which recognized certain rights of working people, and the strictly hierarchical structure of the Church. Under the tutelage of Saul Alinsky and Fred Ross, Chavez was able to blend his Catholicism with Alinsky’s community organizing techniques to become a master organizer, first in community action groups and then in his union. He came to believe with Alinsky and Ross that organizing could be taught and that the organizer was the critical actor in all efforts to build political power. At first, he also accepted the Alinsky position that the organizer had to be a disinterested outsider, who, once an organizational structure had been built, moved on to the next assignment. However, when his superior organizing skills helped build a core farm labor organization, he decided to remain as both the organizer and the leader. He thought that he could be both the disinterested organizing outsider and the insider running the union. As might be expected, this proved untenable. An outsider might be able to assess a situation objectively and offer useful advice and criticism to the insider. But when the two roles are combined in the same person, problems are bound to arise. Chavez, as an insider, could run the union, and Chavez, as an outsider, could criticize too. But when he began to identify the union with himself, who else inside the union could criticize him?

Most writers and commentators who have attempted to explicate the UFW’s history have argued that there was a sharp change in Chavez’s behavior after the union’s failure to win a referendum that would have built funding for the 1975 California Agricultural Labor Relations Act into the state’s constitution. Bardacke’s analysis of Chavez’s life, however, shows that there was a consistency to what Chavez did throughout his tenure as UFW president.

Third, Bardacke situates the union in the social, economic, and political flux of the period, from the first astounding union victories of the 1960s and 1970s, to the national and state shift to the right in the 1980s, when the union began its precipitous decline. The main factors here were the War in Vietnam and the crisis of liberalism this engendered, and the attack by mainstream unions on both the antiwar left and their own dissident rank-and-file. Chavez was the last great hope of the liberals who saw themselves as champions of the poor but who could not tolerate war protesters, militant and radical Black and Chicano civil rights activists, or workers who chafed at the boundaries enforced by liberal but autocratic union leaders. Chavez used his charisma, his leadership skills, and his Catholicism to build a fanatically dedicated band of volunteers (including hundreds of farmworkers who traveled thousands of miles to tell the nation their stories of misery and exploitation) and staffpersons that took liberal America by storm. People boycotted grapes; they gave money; they came to California to volunteer for La Causa. It wasn’t only the workers to whom Cesar Chavez gave hope.

Bardacke’s insights help make sense of  key events in UFW history. Chavez’s antipathy toward Mexican immigrants and his need to explain why certain winnable strikes failed might be reasons why the UFW waged a despicable war against “illegal aliens.” The union turned undocumented workers  in to the “Migra” and engaged in a vicious vigilante campaign along the U.S.-Mexican border. Bardacke tells us, “the union took action itself, fielding an extralegal gang of a couple of hundred people who policed about ten miles of the Arizona-Mexico border, intercepting people attempting to cross it, and brutalized the captives.”

Similarly, Chavez’s need to maintain support from his liberal and Catholic bases provided rationales for an emphasis on boycotts even when strikes were succeeding and boycotts had outlived their usefulness. This also provides context for his numerous fasts and pilgrimages, some done when it might have been better for him to focus more directly on negotiating contracts and building direct worker power. The union’s successful strikes were often roughly and violently waged, belying the nonviolent ideology that played so well with liberals. The boycotts played out far from the fields and featured farmworkers trained to make potential supporters feel guilty enough to contribute money and refuse to buy the growers’ grapes and lettuce. The pilgrimages and fasts made Chavez appear to be a modern-day Gandhi, suffering selflessly for the poor and oppressed.

Chavez’s commitment to conservative Catholicism and the aforementioned hostility to immigrants meant that he could not countenance the establishment of union locals. He callously fired and blacklisted the heroic local leaders (skilled Mexicans who were vegetable workers) of the 1979 lettuce strike who had the audacity to believe that the union belonged to the workers and were willing to defy Chavez at a national UFW convention. Like Leo XIII, Alinksy, Ross, and most liberals, he was virulently anti-communist and was forever claiming that communists were sabotaging the union. This helped justify the many purges of staff. Anyone who challenged Chavez’s authority could be denounced as a red (and at the same time blamed for whatever went wrong in the union).

Bardacke does not argue that Cesar Chavez was insincere in his beliefs. His fasts and pilgrimages would help purify himself and his union. He believed in poverty and sacrifice. A union that aimed just at raising wages and winning benefits for the members was not enough for him. He always insisted that the union had to be subordinate to a larger movement based on poverty and sacrifice. The union’s finances were even organized as a collection of nonprofit entities, some of which did not depend on member dues for survival; these could continue to exist if the union failed and they could provide funds for a farmworkers’ movement.

He wanted a movement of workers and staff, living cooperatively and self-sufficiently, with a strict set of rules, like a religious order. As Miriam Pawel reports in her book, The Union of Their Dreams, Chavez had his confidant, Chris Hartmire, look into the possibility of starting a new religious order. He often neglected important union business as he investigated one utopian community after another.

One such community brought the union no end of trouble. Cesar had known Charles Dederich, the leader of Synanon, for many years. Synanon began as a successful drug addict rehabilitation community, but Dederich gradually turned it into a cult-like organization. He used a technique known as “the game,” a group therapy exercise in which participants were encouraged to be completely honest with one another and were free to point out, with vehemence if necessary, the faults of any other participant. The idea was that the game would break down the defenses of newly arrived addicts so that they could begin to rebuild themselves mentally, emotionally, and physically, and, having regained their health, no longer use drugs. Inside the game, each person was an equal. Outside it, everyone lived in a controlled, hierarchical environment.

Chavez was attracted to the game and to the collective and authoritarian structure, and he began to use the game with his staff. He said that it was a good way for people to air out interpersonal grievances and build a stronger community. But, staffers never attacked Chavez in the same way they attacked each other, and the game was often used as a convenient way to rid the union of “troublemakers.” Remarkably, the farmworkers, themselves, never knew about Synanon (or much else about the UFW’s bureaucracy). As knowledge of the union-Synanon connection began to filter out to the public, Chavez had to dissociate himself from Dederich. However, a lot of damage had been done: staffpersons were purged, others quit in disgust, and many steadfast supporters lost interest in the union.

When the economic and political environments in which the UFW operated were favorable, as they were in the 1960s and 1970s, Chavez’s strengths helped to build a committed staff and a zealous band of supporters across the country. They also assisted farmworkers and the communities in which they lived to use their inherent collective power. Bardacke shows that there were many union farmworkers who were earnings wages comparable to their counterparts in auto plants and steel mills. Their power on the job grew so greatly that on some ranches foremen had almost no authority at all. In retrospect, troubles were brewing. Talented and devoted staff were fired or quit, and they could not always be easily replaced. Chavez’s unwillingness to delegate authority often meant that the union was badly administered: financial records were in disarray; necessary work didn’t get done, including timely negotiating of contracts and processing of grievances; and the members were not encouraged to take control over what was presumably their union.

Matters came to a head in the 1979 lettuce strike. More than any other UFW strike or boycott, this one was dominated by rank-and-file leaders. Just when it was poised to rout the growers, a feat that would almost certainly have put the union in a position to greatly expand its membership and power, Chavez pulled the plug on it, pushing instead for a boycott and eventually allowing a decent but, given what might have been, inadequate settlement. He followed this with what can best be described as a vendetta against the newly empowered local leaders.

The union never recovered from what should have been its shining moment. Not long after, the political climate shifted sharply to the right, empowering the union’s enemies. A cohesive, well-administered, and democratic union might have survived and continued to grow. One weakened by purges, mismanagement, and autocratic rule could not. Today the union is little more than a collection of “social service” entities (what remains of Cesar’s “movement”) that more than one commentator has described as rackets run for the enrichment of Chavez’s relatives.

The story of the UFW and Cesar Chavez is complex and compelling. Trampling Out the Vintage tells it with skill and clarity. I have been studying this story for more than thirty-five years, but I learned something on nearly every page of this book. I got excited all over again when I read about the early years of struggle and victory, and I again got upset and angry when I read about what happened later.

I have been traveling around the western United States for ten years. Everywhere I go, I see that tremendous business profits are made on the backs of poorly paid and overworked Mexican laborers. I have read that not many of them, including those who plant, cultivate, and harvest our crops,  know of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. This didn’t have to be so. The UFW could have become central to the lives of all poor workers, and  it could have been the catalyst for the rebirth of the entire labor movement. Herein lies the tragedy so magnificently chronicled by Frank Bardacke in a book that is certain to become a classic of U.S. working class history.

*A shorter version of this review appeared on the Labor Notes website at http://labornotes.org/blogs/2011/11/cesar-chavez-and-enduring-poverty-farmworkers

The Occupy Wall Street Uprising and the U.S. Labor Movement: An Interview with Steve Early, Jon Flanders, Stephanie Luce, and Jim Straub

by

Farooque Chowdhury and Michael D. Yates

The Occupy Wall Street Uprising has taken the nation by storm, beginning in the Financial District in Manhattan and then spreading to cities and towns in every part of the country and around the world. The anger over growing inequality and the political power of the rich that has been bubbling under the surface for the past several years has finally burst into the open. Suddenly, everything seems different, and a political opening for more radical thinking and acting is certainly at hand.

One especially important opening is the possible alliance between those who are organizing OWS efforts and the labor movement. Workers are the 99 percent, and their organization as workers within the OWS framework could help to transform an uprising into a movement for a radical transformation of what is a sick and dehumanizing social system. Most OWS organizers, participants, and supporters are members of the working class, and thousands of rank-and-file union members have participated in and offered material aid to OWS. And recently, OWS encampments in various places have taken up specific labor struggles, while labor OWS contingents have spearheaded other concrete actions. These have included OWS Atlanta support for people facing foreclosures, New York City OWS protests on behalf of workers at Sothebys, and, most dramatically, OWS Oakland’s massive march that shut the Port of Oakland. An “Out of the Park and Into the Streets” demonstration called by Occupy Wall Street in New York City for November 17 has been endorsed by scores of unions.

Workers, simply as a function of their daily activities on the job, can do what no one else can—stop production and the flow of profits that are the lifeblood of capitalist economies. Nothing would shake the powers that be more than the threat of a militant, organized working class, ready to demonstrate, picket, strike, boycott, and agitate against every manner of corporate and political outrage, from unconscionable bank fees to unbearable student loans to the super exploitation of immigrants to wars to, well, you name it.

However, if the embrace of OWS by the labor movement is an exciting prospect, it is not without its problems. United Auto Workers dissident Greg Shotwell put it bluntly and directly when he said,

Occupiers should be wary of trusting union leaders who have consistently undermined, sold out, and betrayed every militant uprising or cry for more democracy in the labor movement. Most union leaders in the U.S. are wedded to the prostitution of social ideals. Every union in the United States is in thrall to the number one pimp on Wall Street, the Democratic Party. Concession and compromise to the One Percent is the M.O. of U.S. unions. Rank and file workers should be able to see themselves in the bloody skull of Iraq War veteran, Scott Olsen, struck dumb by Oakland police. Every day workers make heroic sacrifices to provide a dignified life for their families. Every day union leaders shoot down workers’ aspirations and incapacitate any chance workers have to shield their families from the latest act of economic terrorism.

Where is the union leader in the United States today who has the temerity to defy the capitalist oligarchy? For the most part, we don’t have genuine union leaders, we have corporate servants with union titles and six figure salaries. When U.S. corporations invested profits “Made in America” overseas, labor unions in the U.S. cut wages for new hires and blamed foreign competition. When U.S. corporations underfunded pensions, U.S. labor leaders forced retirees to make sacrifices.

The operable word for rank and file workers isn’t competition, concession, or compromise. The operable word is Occupy.

In order to assess the connections between OWS and the labor movement, we conducted email interviews with four labor activists during the first two weeks of November 2012. Collectively, our interviewees have spent many decades agitating, organizing, negotiating, writing, and teaching on behalf of the working class. Steve Early worked as a New England–based organizer and international representative for the Communications Workers of America between 1980 and 2007. He is the author of Embedded With Organized Labor (Monthly Review Press, 2009) and The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor (Haymarket Books, 2011). Jon Flanders is a railroad machinist, past president of his IAM local, co-chair of Railroad Workers United, a cross-craft caucus of railroaders, and Trustee of the Troy Area Labor Council, AFL-CIO. Stephanie Luce is an Associate Professor at the Murphy Institute, City University of New York. She was a founding member of the Student Labor Action Coalition in Madison, Wisconsin, and active in the Teaching Assistants Association. She is the author of Fighting for a Living Wage, and co-author of The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy and The Measure of Fairness as well as many articles and book chapters on low-wage work, globalization, and labor and community organizing. Jim Straub has been active in the anti-war, global AIDS treatment, and labor movements for more than a decade. Since 2004 he has worked for the US union of healthcare, building service and public sector workers SEIU, in Ohio, Nevada, Los Angeles and Washington state. He lives in Tacoma, Washington.
[Note that the interviewees were able to choose which of our questions they answered. So each question has not been answered by each interviewee]

Chowdhury and Yates (hereinafter C&Y): What are your impressions of the OWS Uprising?

Stephanie Luce: Occupy Wall Street is the moment we’ve been waiting for. It isn’t perfect and it is often messy, but it somehow has become the message and movement to unite hundreds of organizations and tens of thousands of isolated individuals who have been suffering in the worsening economy and feeling alienated and demoralized.

In the past decade, labor and left leaders have been scrambling to find the thing that would catch on: national networks, new slogans, targeted campaigns. Some had limited success but nothing seemed to click. Why this?

I’d argue that one reason the OWS has flourished is precisely because it wasn’t coordinated and imposed from above. There was no consultant hired to “message” the movement, no mass produced signs and t-shirts. Those who joined the initial occupation on September 17, and probably everyone who has participated since, have felt some ownership of this movement.

Jon Flanders: The occupation movement represents both a generational shift and a
beginning of much broader class consciousness in the United States.

Generational, because for the first time, a movement has emerged that is not led by boomers of the anti-Vietnam War era. After the initial huge outpouring of opposition to the Iraq war, everything quieted down, despite the best efforts of experienced organizers who thought that history would repeat itself. Instead, it became clear that the young people did not see this war as an issue for them, partly because there was no draft, but also because they were preoccupied with getting a start in life in an increasingly difficult economy.

Class conscious, because the realization finally sank in for the young ones that things were not going to get better, that in fact they were dealing with a corrupt and rigged political system that had no place for them, except as indentured debt slaves. The initial awakening was in Wisconsin, now it has spread countrywide, and the class genie is out of the bottle.

C&Y: Do you think that the Chicago factory occupation (United Electrical Workers) and the Wisconsin uprising were important precursors of OWS? If so, how?

Steve Early: OWS is a very worthy successor to the Wisconsin uprising (and UE’s 2008 plant occupation) and will be long remembered even if it leaves no other historical footprints than its brilliant popular “framing” of the deepening class divide in this country.

Jon Flanders: Yes, they were both important, Wisconsin more so I would say. Although
in the long run, perhaps the factory occupation will be more important, since to really have an impact on power, workers must weigh in. Wisconsin had more influence with capitol. A leading young trade union activist from this area went out to Madison, slept on the floor, and came back inspired. Now he is marching to NYC from Albany with a group of Communication Workers of America (CWA).

Jim Straub: I do not think the Republic Windows occupation was a precursor. Honestly I think that event was significantly overhyped by leftists who projected their own fantasies onto what was essentially a very small, marginal struggle, by a left-wing union that unfortunately has practically no members left.

Wisconsin, on the other hand, I think was a very remarkable mass uprising; I spent a month there working on the struggle for SEIU, and it was among the greatest experiences of my life. I think Wisconsin’s eruption may go down in history as being the decisive thing that helped stop the Republican’s attempt to essentially abolish what remains of labor unions at this moment in America. We all owe the “cheeseheads” a debt of gratitude for that.

I am not sure how much it is a precursor though—Wisconsin is a very particular sort of state, with a deeply ingrained tradition of progressive politics, active public sector unions, and a distinctive regional culture that values people pulling together for the common good. For instance, I often warn people that if the Republicans win the presidency next year and pass a Wisconsin-style bill nationwide, I do NOT think there would be forty-nine big eruptions in the rest of the country similar to the one in Wisconsin. In that sense, we should all thank the Republicans for making such a foolish choice of a location to have their showdown against the unions.

However, I think you could say this: the enthusiasm a large portion of the public has shown for both the Chicago Republic Windows action, and the Wisconsin uprising, is part and parcel of a sense of anger about wealth inequality and the erosion of the middle class that has been building for some time but which has not been addressed by anything in mainstream politics. That same growing sense of unease is, I think, behind the surprisingly high public support for OWS.

C&Y: Have rank-and file union participants and supporters of OWS been active in OWS as visible union members or simply as concerned citizens? Is there a difference between leadership and rank and file support for OWS?

Stephanie Luce: In the early days of OWS, there were a number of union members who participated. They were not representing their unions, but a number of them identify strongly as labor activists. A few of those people were members of Transport Workers Union Local 100, and they were instrumental in getting their union to come out in support of OWS a week and a half into the occupation.

As the movement has flourished, we’ve seen a large number of union members get involved. Some come on their own time and sit at the union table in the park. Some are in working groups. Some come to bring supplies. But when there are specific actions or marches, we also see people participating as union members, such as the October 5 rally and march, or the black/brown unity march sponsored by the Coalition of Black Trade Unions and other AFL-CIO affinity organizations. Union members showed up on the morning that Bloomberg threatened to kick out the protestors to clean the park. Union leaders and staff have been present at these events too – sometimes leading delegations, and occasionally their on their own.

Steve Early: During the two-week strike by 45,000 Verizon workers in August, union PR people issued leaflets urging support for their “fight to defend middle-class jobs.” This characterization of strike goals enabled Verizon to run newspaper ads claiming that the $75,000 a year or more earned by telephone technicians made them part of the “upper middle class”—and thus, apparently not worthy of sympathy from customers or members of the public whose jobs provide family incomes closer to the national or regional average.

By late October, telephone workers, who are part of a reform movement in CWA Local 1101, had marched through lower Manhattan in solidarity with OWS; similar linkage between occupation activity and the IBEW-CWA Verizon contract struggle occurred in Boston. Meanwhile, in upstate New York, members of CWA Local 1118 held a “corporate pig roast” several weeks ago—right around the corner from “Cuomoville,” the OWS encampment located in downtown Albany (where vegan and vegetarian fare prevails over pork).

At this OWS-inspired and related event, Verizon workers were brandishing new contract campaign signs with a far better, more universalist message: “We are the 99 percent!”

Jim Straub: In terms of the first question, a little of both. In any active union, you have a handful of very active activists, who would be involved in left protest politics no matter what; when these folks participate in their various left activities they often make a point to make their union membership a visible part of who they are. I would bet you have some folks like that who have been hanging out at the occupation camps, going to assemblies, etc. And then if you checked everyone sleeping over at the occupations, I’m sure you’d find a few people who are union members in their work life. But like I said, the larger portion of union member involvement has been more limited—going to one of the big OWS affiliate march with their union contingent, etc.

The original New York City Wall Street Occupation was planned by folks from the protest-oriented radical left, without early involvement from unions. I think most expected it to have the small, limited impact that the average left demo does (I know some of the early organizers from years back). However, social media videos of NYPD officers attacking the demonstrators gave it wider exposure, and when its message against wealth inequality and the finance industry got out there, it struck a chord with the public in general.

When this happened and the demonstration blew up, many of the more active unions got involved, to different degrees depending on the city and the union. For instance, in New York City and many other cities, the unions have mobilized thousands of members to big marches connected to the OWS; in a number of cities activists from unions have been integral part of the organization of the actual occupation camps; and in many other places, the unions provide assistance by donating food and tents and tarps or otherwise. For example, my friend Heather is helping run the food kitchen at OWS in New York, and just texted me that SEIU’s big powerhouse healthcare workers’ union there, 1199, donated 500 chicken dinners and brought members down to help serve. Another example is Pittsburgh, where some people I know at the SEIU local there have been using their personal time to mobilize the people at the occupation camp to do protests at various banks, and have been working to broaden the appeal of the camp beyond its mainly subcultural youth participants.

The situation I know best is here in Seattle. My local, SEIU 775, has mobilized a few hundred people four times for demonstrations at the occupation; we donated a lot of ponchos and tents; and we used our good relationship with Seattle’s mayor to intervene a few times and try to negotiate for him to let the tents stay up (ultimately unsuccessful). We probably have a handful of activists who’ve been involved at the occupation camp and general assemblies, but only just a few. One thing I would note is that while the OWS message is resonating with average working people, the occupation camps and general assemblies are much more geared to subcultural youth and hardcore leftists; I suspect for all of labor’s involvement in the ways I described above, there have still been very few actual union members camping out and hanging out at the occupations.

One thing I would like to point out that isn’t common knowledge: the union I work for, SEIU, is known in the United States for being one of the few unions still able to organize and grow, even in the private sector. But ironically, for the past year, we have directed a lot of the resources we normally put into new organizing, into a campaign we call “The Fight For A Fair Economy.” This has involved canvassing working-class neighborhoods and organizing lots of protests in lots of cities around economic issues in general. Anyway, there is some humorous irony in the fact that SEIU has been expending all this organizational resource and effort into trying to spark an upsurge of economic anger in politics, and then along comes some protesters occupying Wall Street, and they have the success SEIU was trying to generate! Anyway, we haven’t been jealous or whatever and we basically have just folded our Fight For A Fair Economy protest activity into the Occupations all over the country. Who knows if our own efforts were part of laying the groundwork in public sentiment for the enthusiasm over OWS? Regardless, I think you could say that it’s a rare moment of unions and the radical protest left having perfectly converging goals that result in success for all.

C&Y: What role has the leadership of organized labor been playing in the OWS uprising?

Steve Early: As reported in the New York Times on Nov. 9, 2011, union leaders have been making regular visits to our new Lourdes—aka Zuccotti Park—and similar high-profile camping sites around the country. Earlier this year, they were jetting into Cairo-by-the Lake in Wisconsin (aka Madison) in a similar quest for an infusion of young blood and “new energy” out there. I’m personally a little skeptical about what miraculous transformations are likely to occur among the organizationally old, blind, and lame of American labor, as a result of either pilgrimage. RWDSU president Stuart Applebaum claims that “the Occupy movement has changed unions,” both in the area of membership mobilization and “messaging.” See more thoughts below on OWS’s helpful influence in the latter area. As for mainstream unions suddenly embracing greater direct action and militancy by their own rank-and-file, that kind of changes usually comes from the bottom up, not the top down.

Jim Straub: Most active, progressive-oriented unions have supported the Occupation protests to varying degrees, which I think reflects the leadership’s enthusiasm that finally someone has managed to put the issue of wealth inequality front and center in the public eye.

Among the rank and file, well, I think it would be difficult to generalize accurately about rank and file workers view of OWS. Many I am sure are simply unaware—the U.S. public remains deeply depoliticized, without a present-day tradition of mass struggle or collective action improving standards of living. However, opinion polls have shown that roughly a majority of respondents in the United States today have a positive view of OWS and agree with some of the message. I would strongly suspect that that percentage goes way up among poorer people, urban people, people of color, women, and progressives. And the portion of union membership that is dynamic and growing is among those demographics. So I think we can infer that, to the degree that union members are aware and interested, there is significant support for the OWS. I can tell you that in my own day-to-day work as a rep for a nursing home workers’ union, two times a member has brought the topic up to me unsolicited and talked about how great they think it is. One of those times, the worker’s views were that he was excited the unions were getting involved in the Occupy Wall Street, so that “it didn’t just look like a bunch of hippies.” I think this was a very telling comment—in the United States, the public often sees left protest as being for countercultural types, rebellious college students going through a phase, etc, and when protesters seem for whatever reason to be culturally different from average working people, it plays into this stereotype and limits the ability of the protest to grow.

C&Y: How can OWS and organize labor best interact? What about selective strikes and similar actions? Do you think that rank and file movements in unions could be strengthened by OWS? Can unions learn anything from the way OWS is structured?

Stephanie Luce: One of the amazing things about OWS in New York has been the degree to which organized labor has come on in support, and been able to intersect some of its own organizing with that of OWS. There is a long way to go, but this level of interaction seems remarkable to me in this city where unions have been known to be insular and not good at working with others. Unions have already contributed support in a variety of ways: offering money, food, medical training, supplies, meeting space, storage space, and publicity.

And OWS has participated in ongoing labor activities, from the campaign to get a contract at Verizon, to supporting locked-out Teamsters at Sothebys. Public sector unions have been fighting to extend the millionaire’s tax in New York, and on October 11, 2011, the 99 percent and unions joined together for a march against the millionaires and billionaires.

The general assembly, consensus model has drawbacks. It can be used poorly in ways that allow a small minority to block consensus, and control decisions. With large groups of people, it can be possible for small cliques to develop and function in non-transparent ways. But the same can be said for our other models of functioning—notably, traditional union structures.

Despite its weaknesses, the Occupy model can provide tremendous inspiration for rank-and-file unionists. It has worked so far to allow “ordinary people” to feel they are participating in democratic decision-making for the first time in their lives. They have seen how it’s possible to develop an idea and run with it, working to organize with others to make their vision a reality. The horizontalist model is new for many union members, and will take some work to learn and develop, but is a tool that can strengthen movements.

OWS provides another important lesson for unions, which I think expands on the UE fight at Republic Windows and Doors, and the fight back in Wisconsin. The lesson is that we should not be afraid of “the public.” Unions have been spending millions of dollars on consultants, polls and focus groups to craft a careful message that will play with the public. But the messages that come out of these tend to be ones that people have been hearing in the media and from politicians. They tend to be conservative, backward looking messages, and not ones that push people to new ideas and greater possibilities.

No focus group would have come up with the “message” of a plant takeover in Chicago. And no poll would have predicted that a mass teacher walkout and citizen take-over of the Capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin was a wise public relations strategy.

Instead, the labor movement has been trying to frame itself as “reasonable.” Top union leaders in Wisconsin stated emphatically that they were “only asking for the right to collective bargaining.” The same is true with the Verizon strike in August, where union leaders said they were on strike “for the right to bargain.” Unions and labor coalitions declare that they are just trying to save the middle class, or reclaim the American Dream: nothing radical, nothing confrontational.

OWS turns that idea on its head, and within a few weeks, with no consultants and no polling, asserts a very bold and expansive “message”: we are the 99 percent, we are in a class war against the 1 percent, we demand public space, we demand the right to protest, we want another world. OWS uses images that link its fight with the Arab Spring, suggesting that our fight is a fundamental struggle for democracy and basic human rights. These are bold, visionary demands, and ones that ignite the public imagination.

Steve Early: See Verizon-related examples of positive interaction at the rank-and-file level above. Yes, the model of more democratic decision-making, direct action, civil disobedience is very helpful. It shows how collective activity can be organized differently, with staff and full-time officials running everything—or trying to. Real challenge will be transferring OWS approach to the traditional arena of union struggle.

I think one labor leader quoted in the New York Times today really nailed that challenge well. Said Los Angeles Central Labor Council’s Elena Durazo:

The question is: can the labor movement or the occupy movement move its message about inequality down to the workplace, where workers confront low wages, low benefits, and little power? Can we use it organize workers where it really matters, in the workplace, to help their everyday life.

Jim Straub: I think the interaction has been pretty good. About strikes, we should remember that given the extreme weakness of U.S. unions, most unions can’t win a strike in defense of their own immediate needs, much less leverage their strike power to advance larger political goals. Given that unions now represent something like 12 percent of the workforce, and are having extreme trouble in a good portion of that 12 percent, I think it would be a silly and potentially disastrous miscalculation for us to try to use strikes to advance political goals. Strikes are inherently divisive both among members and the public in general, and give an opponent aid in tarnishing your reputation and even legal grounds to dissolve your formal collective bargaining status. Labor needs to rebuild to something like 25, 30 percent before it can start using mass strikes as a useful political weapon again.

In terms of unions learning from the OWS structure, I guess it depends what you mean by OWS structure. If you mean the large group assemblies, using some version of modified consensus to make decisions and “mic check” and all that, I would say, definitely not. I spent many years in such meetings when I was an activist in various left groups, and I can say from my experience, it is the worst most counterproductive form of decision-making or organization-building in the world.

Jon Flanders: Both OWS and labor need each other. OWS needs labor’s muscle; labor
needs the creativity and energy of OWS youth. And, of course, mutual aid works; witness the labor mobilization that kept Mayor Bloomberg from shutting down OWS, and the aforementioned solidarity actions by OWS with locked out Teamsters.

I think a real test in New York City will come around a possible transit strike. The president of TWU 100 has said they will make no concessions if New York does not re-instate the millionaires’ tax. Cuomo will not back down on this, so some kind of confrontation seems inevitable. Here we will have the confluence of a workers struggle very much tied to the OWS agenda vis-a-vis Wall Street. We can only imagine the scenes that might unfold in NYC if the subways and buses stop running and people are forced to walk to work. There will be plenty of chances for workers and OWS activists to interact and work on targets of opportunity.

C&Y: Given labor’s ties to the Democratic Party, are there reasons for OWS to be distrustful of organized labor’s support for OWS?

Stephanie Luce: Many people—including some rank-and-file union members and union staff—are wary that unions will try to channel OWS energy into electoral work. Polls show that a large number of OWS participants are disgruntled Democrats, moved to action out of disappointment in Obama. But OWS has been a truly democratic space. In this sense, it will be hard to coopt the movement without some serious internal organizing. While union leaders have control over where they put their own energy and resources, the same is not true in the Occupy movement. If they propose an action that people don’t want to do, no one will show up.

Steve Early: In his 1974 memoir and union history, Jim Matles, a founder of the UE, reminded readers that labor struggles are about “them and us”—or, as OWS puts it, “the 1 percent” vs. the “99 percent.” Unfortunately, most other unions have long relied on high-priced Democratic Party consultants, their focus groups and opinion polling, to shape labor’s public “messaging” in much less effective fashion. The results of this collaboration have been unhelpful, to say the least. Organizations that are supposed to the voice of the working class majority have instead positioned themselves—narrowly and confusedly—as defenders of America’s “middle class,” an always fuzzy construct now being rendered even less meaningful by the recession-driven downward mobility of millions of people.

As SUNY professor Michael Zweig has argued in his book, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best-Kept Secret (Cornell ILR Press, 2000), labor’s never ending mantra about the “middle class” leaves class relations—and the actual class position of most of the population—shrouded in rhetorical fog. Zweig acknowledges that the working class in America today looks quite different than the blue-collar proletariat of the last century, which leads many to believe that differences in “status, income, or life-styles” define where they stand on the economic and social ladder. But “the real basis of social class lies in the varying amounts of power people have at work and in the larger society….The sooner we realize that classes exist and understand the power relations that are driving the economic and political changes swirling around us, the sooner we will be able to build an openly working class politics.”

As Zweig would agree I’m sure, labor’s “framing” not only lacks the clear resonance of that employed by the new anti-capitalist campaigners of OWS; “one of the great weaknesses” of the standard union view of class “is that it confuses the target of political conflict.” When the working class disappears into an amorphous “middle class,” not only do the “working poor” (a mere 46 million strong) drop out of the picture, but “the capitalist class disappears into ‘the rich.’ And when the capitalist class disappears from view, it cannot be a target.”

Well, thanks to OWS—but not most unions—that target is back in view, big time. So now, even some union officials are racing to catch up with a grassroots movement that has provided a far more favorable public opinion context for waging key contract fights like the ongoing CWA-IBEW battle with Verizon.

Jon Flanders: Certainly union leaders are hoping that they can corral some of this energy into 2012 political campaigns. They were successful in doing this in Wisconsin, with the less then inspiring recall effort. Now however, they are up against the reality that the occupiers, probably in their majority were supporters of Obama, are now deeply disappointed and no longer believe that elections mean that much. I seriously doubt that they can win many of them to be campaign foot soldiers. Instead I suspect that occupations will morph into new direct actions, like opposing evictions, strike
solidarity etc.

Jim Straub: Haha, I think the unions would love to have as close of ties to the Democratic Party as most leftists allege. They no longer have much juice at all with the Dems. I look at it this way: in the United States, we have a center party and a far-right party. Attempts to start other parties have met with roughly zero success, and our political structure makes smaller parties fairly useless. So because the far-right party will absolutely attempt to wipe them out of existence (as in Wisconsin and Ohio last year, for instance), labor goes to great efforts to try to make sure the center party beats the far-right one. Is the center party also part of our problem? Certainly. After all, some of what has been so popular about OWS is it is attacking finance, which the Dems cannot do because they are if anything more owned by the financial sector that the Republicans. But at the end of the day, I don’t think anyone has a good plan for how to deal with the problems our political system poses for the left and for unions.

One thing I would point out, though, is that from polls that have been done of the attendees at Occupy protests, we have learned that a large portion are left-leaning Democratic voters who are unhappy with their party, and who say they want OWS to pull the Dems to the left just like the Tea Party has pulled the Republicans further right. I think that would be a good goal.

C&Y: How do you see OWS unfolding? Can OWS continue to expand without the active involvement of organized labor?

Stephanie Luce: OWS continues to surprise and amaze me, making it hard to predict where it is going. Every day it seems possible that the movement will die, given police brutality and political crackdowns. There are infiltrators and provocateurs, and serious debates about direction and strategy. There are internal problems related to living in tight quarters and having to learn how to self-govern in communities of strangers. The cold weather is brutal.

Yet the movement keeps going, and expanding! In many cities, the Occupations have begun to intersect with already existing organizations and activism, such as fights against foreclosures and tuition hikes. Even if the Occupation camps themselves dwindle, it is hard to believe there is any going backwards from here.

The labor movement will not be able to revitalize itself by coopting OWS. It will only benefit if it remains flexible and open, allowing the energy of Occupy to pull the labor movement to the left, to more radical demands and more militant tactics. Occupy must serve as a home base to unite seemingly disparate struggles, providing a larger narrative and maintaining a more revolutionary vision of how to do politics and how to rebuild the world. We’ve been failing in our struggles in part because we’ve been atomized, leading unions to believe that they can focus energy on a contract fight to “save the middle class,” while ignoring the growing poverty among their unemployed neighbors. Unions believed they can change the world by turning out voters to elect labor-endorsed candidates who then build more prisons and allow more deportations.

For many decades, the left has been without a competing vision for the world. With the supposed triumph of capitalism we had nothing to point to as an alternative. Occupy encampments have their challenges, but as people do the hard work to communicate and work together, to feed and care for one another, to learn how to collectivize space and self-govern, perhaps they can provide some reality to the slogan “Another World is Possible.”

Steve Early: The Occupation movement has been unfairly but predictably criticized in the mainstream media for having an ill-defined political agenda and no clear path to institutionalizing its struggle against longstanding abuses of corporate power in America. While all that gets sorted out in its free-wheeling “general assemblies around the country, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has already given our timorous, unimaginative, and often politically confused unions a much-needed ideological dope slap, as noted above in discussion of pre- and post-OWS “framing” of key labor struggles. Organizationally, OWS would do well to attach itself—and that’s already happened in places like Portland, Oregon—to Jobs with Justice, the “action faction” of the labor movement most capable of interacting productively with more amorphous student/community forces.

Jon Flanders: Occupations will have to reach out to workers if they want to become
truly powerful. Right now, they are attracting some young workers and getting them excited about direct democracy, something that is sorely missing in most unions. Workers who are not hanging out with Occupations will need to see concrete acts of solidarity coming their way, as the Teamsters at Sotheby’s in New York City have done.

Jim Straub: I don’t know that OWS needs to continue expanding. It was a protest wave that succeeded far beyond anyone’s hopes, and has shown us that there is a hunger out there in America for somebody to stick it to the banks. But at some point camping out in these particular places will outlive its usefulness as a visibility tactic. I don’t know what will be the next big protest wave, but I know we will need one to resist the coming demands for austerity and cutbacks. Is it important that whatever happens next be called “occupy so and so” and include campouts and such? Maybe, but also maybe something else.

We on the left have a weakness for getting stuck on something if it seems to work once. For instance, after the anti-corporate protests against the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999, the entire U.S. left threw all its energy into attempting to shut down other meetings of trade bodies for the next five years, with a declining rate of success and relevance.

I think most cities will have their police clear the protest camps out of the visible downtown locations over the next couple weeks. Those encampments that remain will dwindle in the cold weather and eventually be abandoned. Eventually, the fickle public majority that has expressed support will move on. The pattern of the protest-based left in the United States seems to be that every few years, the left is part of an eruption of protest around an issue that captivates a large portion of the country in a dramatic way, and then recedes without having left behind any ongoing organization. The anti-corporate globalization protests of 99-01, the antiwar protests of 04, the immigrant protests of 06, Wisconsin and OWS in ’12. Who knows what the next one will be, but I bet it will erupt in two to four years.

Regardless, my own opinion is that we need to rebuild the ongoing, day-to-day institutions of a mass left, like the labor movement. So I spend a lot more of my political energy trying to help grow the power of the union for which I work than going to protests anymore. But it was been a wonderful thing, in Wisconsin and then during the occupy thing, going to some great inspiring protests again. I hope these upsurges come more often and with more intensity.

C&Y: Thank you all for your remarks. We think that readers are going to find them of great interest.

This post first appeared in mrzine at http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/cy151111.html