Place: North America

[Reply to Bill Balderston's article, "Occupy Oakland and the Labor Movement."]

     I am going to focus my remarks on section 2 of Bill Balderston's article, which he subtitled "The Battle of Longview". Bill and I have very different views of the outcome of this battle, and what that outcome is likely to mean.

Charles J. Shield’s biography offers a detailed life of the writer, his strengths and weaknesses, both as an author and a person. The major thrust of the Shields biography is to present Kurt Vonnegut as two different people, the writer and the private person. A nephew told the biographer:

It is generally agreed that Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was a response to decades of economic inequality in the United States. However, to focus only on the national dynamics of U.S. capitalism is to neglect the global role of U.S. economic imperialism since the 1970s and the resistance that developed in the global South to specific instances of that economic imperialism. This paper will consider how imperialist policies promoted by U.S. sponsored agencies and activities engaged in by U.S. corporations’ elicited acts of resistance.

Jefferson Cowie is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University and a leading scholar of labor and class in the United States.

Dance among the standing cars,
Each suit will blow his horn…
Let’s make them doubt the system
To which they were lately born.

         I have read many analyses of the failure to recall Gov. Walker in Wisconsin, and I am astonished that not one even mentions American industries either outsourcing or just folding their tents because they are unable to compete with foreign companies. Steel is an example of the latter: many steel workers now work as greeters at Walmart.

         Surely this is an important cause of labor’s sad decline. Industrial capitalism has given way to finance capitalism, as everyone knows.

     On January 31, 2012, the Republican majorities in both the Indiana Senate and House passed "right-to-work" legislation, riding roughshod over both the Democratic minority and tens of thousands mobilized workers and their allies. Indiana thus became the first new "right-to-work" state since Oklahoma, which became one in 2002—and a possible harbinger of more defeats for organized labor to come.

A sociologist tired of—if not ill-suited for—academic life and one of that generation of proper New Leftists committed to organizing or reorganizing the industrial proletariat as a necessary prelude to the much anticipated Red revolution, I hired in at a Midwestern steel mill in late summer of 1977.

Various realist political pundits have suggested — only half-jokingly — that the Nobel Peace Prize should be given to the atomic bomb, since in their view it was nuclear deterrence that prevented the Cold War from turning into a world war.[1] But historian Lawrence S.

Means-testing benefits that everyone is entitled to receive has become popular with conservatives these days. Conservatives have called for means-testing unemployment benefits, Medicare, and Social Security.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, or "Snick") came out of the sit-in movement that began on Feb. 1, 1960 in Greensboro, N.C. Its founding convention was at Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C. April 15-17 that year. 200-plus-delegates representing student civil rights organizations at 52 colleges and high schools attended.

Labor historians have detailed how the structure of the workplace, the cultural aspects of community, and spatial patterning all impact class consciousness. From coal mining that paradigmatically has the workers living in the hollow and the bosses on the hill to the ethnic enclaves of steel town where different nationality/ethnic groups each occupied their own distinct neighborhoods with taverns, union halls and churches, socialization matters.

There isn’t a working person alive today who hasn’t idly fantasized about taking control of their lives at work. For many, this is probably just a fantasy about tossing their boss out a window or poisoning their coffee, but others have a more expansive vision of challenging the system of control that gives you an arrogant, unqualified stooge to squeeze the life out of you in the first place.

The Occupy Movement shows the potential to reinvigorate the labor movement and pull together the working class in a strong fight against the austerity measures being carried out across the country. However, the partnerships between the myriad organizations involved in fighting austerity are tested by cultural differences, divergent interests, and competing visions. In Chicago, the coalition between Occupy, labor, and community remains active on a number of fronts despite these challenges.

The relationship between the Occupy movement and segments of organized labor, in their varied institutional and ideological forms, has been a source of much speculation on the left. While there have been strong linkages created in other cities such as New York, many see this interaction as most focused in the East Bay (Oakland, Berkeley) of California. This article is a personal account of the growing dialogue between the labor movement and the Occupy organizing as seen by someone heavily involved in attempting to build these linkages.

Labor unions have traditionally claimed to speak for the American working class. Occupy claims to speak for the 99%, for the working class and then some. The claim by both the unions and Occupy to speak for working people simultaneously lays the basis for cooperation and sets the stage for conflict. The two forces could not be more different.

         It has become fashionable, especially among conservatives, to portray public employees as lazy and inefficient, as compared to private sector workers who are touted as hard working, efficient, and cost effective. In this invective, all public sector workers are lumped together— teachers, police, firemen, welfare workers, Social Security workers, etc.

"Every generation needs a new revolution"
Thomas Jefferson

"The most dangerous thing is to create a system of permanent revolution."
Vladimir Putin

On December 4, 2011, the labor movement, the left, the academy, and the historical profession lost a leader and friend.

Teacher unionism was born more than a century ago, in Chicago. Teachers in Chicago are once again leading the way by authorizing a strike over the policies that are destroying public education in communities across this country – and the globe. In a letter to education activists, Pauline Lipman, a professor at University of Illinois, Chicago, describes the background to the strike and explains why Chicago teachers deserve support from anyone who wants good schools for all kids:

     That appears to be the Democratic Party’s takeaway from its humbling defeat in the Wisconsin recall election. That and the ever familiar lament that workers no longer seem capable of voting consistently in their own financial interests, consistency in this case meaning in solidarity with embattled public sector workers and their unions. 38% of households with union members voted for the incumbent, as did a majority of non-college graduates. Walker carried the 10 poorest counties in the state by a 13% margin.