From Company Town to Rebel City: Richmond, California Shows How Progressives Can Win
Rebel cities have long been laboratories for progressive policy experimentation. Specifically, the small Bay Area city of Richmond, California has stood out for its boldness. It’s now the subject of a new book by Steve Early, Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City, set to be released next Tuesday by Beacon Press.
A long-time labor activist and frequent writer for In These Times, Early moved to Richmond five years ago. After “thirty-two Boston-area winters,” the placid weather was more of a draw than the city’s vibrant urban reform movement, Early writes. But, naturally, he soon got involved and began taking notes, eventually producing a lively read—an intimate, warts-and-all look at how a small band of activists fought for and won a slightly better world at home. His book is a ray of hope for anyone wondering how to survive, and possibly even thrive, under Donald Trump and a hostile, Republican Congress.
Taking on Chevron
Richmond was once home to factories that built warships and automobiles. Today, what’s left of local industry is a giant oil refinery owned by the global superpower, Chevron. The deindustrialization of Richmond produced the usual urban problems: white flight, declining tax revenue, a corrupt government and a police force that behaved like an occupying army.
In 2004, an “unlikely group of Greens, Latinos, progressive Democrats, African Americans, and free spirits” formed the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA), and began to organize around environmental and good government causes. It grew into a political machine.
Party labels don’t appear on Richmond city ballots and all city council seats are elected on a citywide basis—a structure that’s advantageous for insurgent minority efforts to gain representation and build a reputation in government.
In its first election, the RPA managed to win a city council seat for Gayle McLaughlin, a Green. As councilwoman, McLaughlin championed city parks and pushed for more environmental regulation of the refinery. Two years later, she was elected mayor.
McLaughlin hired a good government city manager, who straightened out the city’s books, as well as a new police chief who retrained the city’s force to emphasize community relations and de-escalation.
The alliance also fought to make Chevron pay its fair share in taxes, eventually extracting an additional $114 million from the company. It helped negotiate a separate $90 million payout, along with new safety regulations and investments for the plant. In turn, that money was invested in parks, in youth jobs programs and in expanding the city’s workforce and services.
In spite of such successes, the RPA found itself under regular attack. Its members skewed older and whiter than Richmond’s diverse population. Machine Democrats exploited this fact by running African-American opponents against RPA-supported candidates. These hacks were routinely endorsed by state Democratic leaders like Dianne Feinstein, out of party loyalty. In a dynamic familiar to anyone who labors in urban union politics, the building trades and police and fire unions also opposed the progressive alliance.
Finally, and least surprisingly, Chevron spent $3.1 million in an unsuccessful effort to defeat the RPA slate in 2014. To put that in perspective, that’s more money than the company spent on every congressional race in the country for two cycles—combined!
From protest to policy-making
Richmond progressives also faced intense opposition from powerful real estate interests. The city made national headlines with its “Richmond Cares” plan to use its powers of eminent domain to help homeowners whose loans exceeded the values of their homes in the wake of the mortgage crisis and Great Recession that followed. “The banking and real estate industries,” writes Early, “wanted to strangle Richmond Cares in the cradle before it could become a model and precedent for other cities.”
Corporate interests sued to block implementation, and inundated the local airwaves with broadsides against the mayor and progressive councilmembers. In essence, the banks threatened a capital strike, warning that “lending for new home buyers will dry up, home values will decline, and neighborhoods will be hurt,” Early writes. Ultimately, the mortgage industry successfully lobbied Congress to prevent the use of eminent domain to renegotiate private mortgages. Such a bill was signed into law by President Barack Obama in late 2014.
Efforts to provide relief for Richmond renters were more successful, although no less contested. Located just 17 miles from San Francisco and connected by a train line, Richmond has seen an influx of new residents priced out of more expensive cities to its south. Newcomers were soon pricing out longtime Richmond residents, as rents were raised by hundreds of dollars a month, with no warning. Evictions spiked.
In July 2015, the city passed a package of rent control measures. They established a rent control board, capped annual rent increases to the federal inflation rate and established a just cause standard for evictions. The California landlord lobby responded by paying canvassers to mislead several thousand Richmond voters into forcing a referendum on the law. Although Early’s book went to press before the November election, the happy postscript is that Richmond’s rent control law was one of the many progressive ballot questions that won.
The rent control battle exposed a deepening rift between the RPA and the new mayor, Tom Butt. Butt, who the alliance backed at the end of McLaughlin’s two terms, favored a “supply side” solution to the city’s housing crunch and bitterly walked out on the council’s rent vote.
This kind of political growing pains is being experienced in almost every city where progressive coalitions have won more power in city hall. In the transition from protest to policy-making, alliances contend with the rising expectations of Left voters, on the one hand, and the dawning reality, on the other hand, that liberal allies may only be along for part of the ride.
“Showed what a little group of people could accomplish”
Appropriately, Refinery Town includes a foreword by Bernie Sanders. Before he became the de facto opposition leader against Trump, Sanders gave hope to a beleaguered and much tinier Left during the Ronald Reagan years, as mayor of the small Vermont city of Burlington. He’s now working with Our Revolution, the new national organization that spun off from Sanders’ recent run for the presidency, and is focused on the recruitment and training of local activists for down-ballot races.
Community activists who are just starting out could find examples like Richmond a bit daunting, which makes intimate, contemporary histories like Refinery Town so valuable. The first step, of course, is to find each other. The activists who would go on to form the Richmond Progressive Alliance first coalesced around a successful effort to block construction of an oil-fueled municipal power plant next to the Chevron refinery.
The next project they worked on was a year-long campaign to stop the police from harassing Latino day laborers at their morning meetup spot outside a local Home Depot. This campaign was also a success, and led to the creation of a day laborer association to improve safety and workers’ wages.
Organizing around these discrete winnable issues “showed what a little group of people could accomplish,” Early writes one founder recalled, and inspired the shift into electoral work.
[Originally appeared at In These Times.]
Review of Sarah Jaffe’s “Necessary Trouble”
Something is happening. Socialism is no longer a dirty word (the “S-word”), but something a sizeable portion of Americans tell pollsters is their preferred vision for society. It’s no longer an anachronism to speak of “the Left.” A brave and quickly organized movement for black lives has not only sparked a new civil rights movement but has gotten many of us to see the criminal justice system for what it is: the evolution of Jim Crow. Oh, and a hell of a lot more workers are striking than before.
There have been attempts to describe this emerging movement for social justice in book form before. The latest, Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt by Sarah Jaffe, is the best so far. The Nation Books publication was released Tuesday.
Jaffe, a freelance writer whose work has appeared everywhere from In These Times to The Guardian and The Atlantic, is a leading light in the new generation of labor and social justice reporters. It wasn’t that long ago that if you had a campaign you wanted to get in the press you had exactly two full-time labor reporters to lobby to convince them that your campaign was interesting enough to warrant fighting with their editors to get it in print.
Now our movement has a slew of journalists who dig deep and follow campaigns and movements over the long haul. The result is not just that good campaigns get press attention, but that movements grow and expand as people read about them and get inspired to join or do something similar.
Jaffe has a good eye for characters and a great ear for what they have to say, making Necessary Trouble a very engaging read. She weaves a narrative that connects the 2008 economic collapse to the outrage that gave rise to the Tea Party, the Wisconsin protests against Scott Walker’s union-busting agenda and Occupy Wall Street. The movement for black lives, the Occupy Homes protests against bank foreclosures, the occupation of the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago, student debt protests, the Chicago teachers strike(s) and the rolling strikes led by OUR Walmart and the Fight for $15, Jaffe argues, are all connected to a growing sense among Americans that the rules of the system are rigged against the working class—and doubly or triply so against workers who are black, queer, young, old, immigrants or women.
These movements are often “analyzed as if they had each happened in a vacuum,” she writes. “But in fact, as I followed them through the years, I would find similar patterns and even direct connections between them.”
The connections come, in part, to activists’ increasing understanding of “intersectionality.” That is, according to Jaffe, a term used by protestors to describe the way that people experience different forms of oppression (say, racism and sexism) as “intertwined, overlapping experiences.”
Intersectionality has become a mainstream enough concept that even Hillary Clinton felt the need to pay lip service to it on the campaign trail. “This generation,” notes City University of New York professor Ruth Milkman, “uses the word intersectionality as if it were a household label.” Jaffe makes a good case that this is a strength of the emerging movement.
Another concept that Jaffe emphasizes in her book is “horizontalism” in social movement structures. She defines the term as broad-based democratic decision-making without formalized leadership—where any member is free to speak out, propose and carry out a movement action.
“The ideal of horizontalism,” Jaffe writes “is connected to the sense that democracy, in this country, is failing, or perhaps, as some are coming to believe, that it never really worked.”
She points to Occupy Wall Street as the most obvious example of the movement’s horizontalism and experimentation with democracy. Occupy, I must say, never struck me as particularly new. It’s more like a welcome return of the Direct Action Network (DAN). Never a formal organization, the activist network was responsible for the 1999 Seattle protests that shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organization and went on to disrupt meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and the Republican and Democratic conventions.
The lack of elected leaders, the consensus decision-making with “blocking concerns” and “stand asides”—even the “spirit fingers” to silently mark agreement—all of it first appeared in the DNA of DAN. The fact that a decade and a half later we are still reinventing the same wheel suggests the need for some more permanent organizations.
Jaffe agrees. “The next challenge for the movements,” she writes, “will be creating organizations that last, that suit the needs of twenty-first-century troublemakers, that can be flexible and still enduring, that can overlap and connect up with one another and create more long-term plans for the future they want to see.”
There is a deep-seated aversion to formal organization on the Left. Part of it is, as Jaffe notes, the fear of a movement becoming dominated by “charismatic leaders.” But part of it too, I think, is charismatic leaders not wanting to deal with the indignities of democratic accountability.
I worry that Jaffe’s readers will take the word “horizontalism” and use it to justify and fetishize a lack of formal organization. A better word, I think, is one she quotes to describe the movement for black lives: “leaderfull.” That is a concept that doesn’t preclude dues-paying membership, elected committees and formalized leadership. It’s more about maintaining a culture where good ideas, speakers and writers that come “from the floor” are not merely tolerated but actively solicited.
Two good examples of leaderfull organizing that Jaffe highlights come from labor. In 2008, the workers at Chicago’s Republic Windows and Doors factory engaged in a sit-down strike. Their leaders at the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America union (UE) had proposed a small, symbolic civil disobedience action. The workers took that idea and ran with it—locking the bosses out and eventually winning their owed severance. They even got a shot at running the business themselves as a cooperative.
The second example was in 2012, when the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) struck against Rahm Emanuel’s giveback demands. Rank-and-file activists engaged in some pretty deep coalition building and picket captains were given wide latitude with how to conduct their protests. The result was a traditional union strike that got converted into a community protest against austerity and corporate “ed reform.”
There’s no shortage of formal structure and elected leaders in labor. And while the UE and CTU are obviously exceptional unions, leaderfull organizing is more prevalent (and certainly has more potential) than is commonly recognized.
To her credit, union activists and campaigns are described throughout Jaffe’s narrative as essential to a movement fighting for an end to injustice and inequality. But I’m slightly disappointed that she didn’t delve into the recent rise in strike activity. Many of these strikes—like at Kohler and Verizon—were big, visible wins for workers.
There’s been so much written about worker centers and “alt labor” that it’s beginning to skew the market for labor writing. Yes, there’s a lot of action in alternative models of worker organizing, but old (not so) Big Labor is also showing encouraging signs of renewed militancy. Activists will learn from each other by example, and books like this must connect the dots.
To that point, Jaffe tells a delightful and inspiring story about the first night that then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg attempted to clear an Occupy encampment at the newly rechristened Liberty Park, near Wall Street, because it had to be cleaned. Occupy activists spent the night scrubbing the park down and, at dawn, were joined by hundreds of union activists, in their respective union colors, to stare down riot police. Bloomberg blinked and ordered law enforcement to withdraw. Jaffe reports that a burly orange-shirted member of the Laborers’ union turned to her to say, “This is power.”
[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]
What Will It Take To Wake Up the ‘Sleeping Giant’ of the New Working Class?
The American working class has been dissed and dismissed. Our unions busted, our wages slashed, our homes foreclosed and our rents raised. We’re blamed for the rise of Trump, but otherwise do not exist in the media landscape.
But the working class is a sleeping giant that is beginning to stir and will soon instigate a great campaign for racial and economic justice, according to a new book by Tamara Draut. A vice president of the liberal think tank Demos, Draut’s previous book, Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30- Somethings Can’t Get Ahead, explored the how the high cost of college, housing and health insurance, combined with stagnant wages and made the usual milestones of adulthood increasingly out of reach for millennials.
Her new book, Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America, attempts to connect the dots between the struggles of those millennials and the politics of austerity, globalization and the massive transfer of wealth to the 1 percent that has reduced the living standards of almost all working families over the course of the last 40 years. It finds a strong sense of optimism in the recent increase in protest activity.
Draut spends a good deal of her narrative making the case that there is still a working class in “post-industrial,” “digital age” U.S.A. The heterogeneity of this new working class—no longer solidly white and male, if it ever was—along with media indifference and a cultural legacy of devaluing “women’s work” and disenfranchising immigrants and people of color renders it “invisible” to many.
Quantifying who is even in the working class, statistically speaking, is a notoriously hard thing to do. She consults with the dean of working-class studies, SUNY Stony Brook professor Michael Zweig, who uses federal occupational data to estimate that 60 percent of us comprise the working class. But most political surveys do not inquire into one’s relationship with the means of production, and so Draut uses educational attainment as a not-unreasonable proxy.
Not that Draut’s tome would fit within the mountain of punditry that emphasizes educational attainment as a cure for poverty. She eviscerates this “elite blind spot” that focuses on the “miniscule” sliver of new professional jobs while ignoring the “scads of new jobs being created in home health care, fast food, and retail.”
Draut is one of the few mainstream writers I’ve seen who has noted the fact that workers are increasingly rejecting the label “middle class” for themselves, while political and media elites still use the term as a shorthand for the ideal American lifestyle. Not noted—perhaps not known—is that when unions do internal polling on political campaigns, questions phrased around improving the lives of middle-class Americans perform significantly worse than identical questions that talk instead about “working families.” Workers hear politicians’ “middle class” campaign rhetoric as promises to give more breaks to people who are already better off than them. (Which probably isn’t that far from the truth.)
The largest class of people in the country demanding their visibility and raising expectations that they deserve more is the very definition of a sleeping giant stirring. Draut sees the “Day without Immigrants” May Day protests, Black Lives Matter and the Fight for 15 as the beginning of a new workers movement. The key, she says, will be working through the historical legacy of racism and sexism to make common cause between these three interconnected movements.
There is perhaps a little too much optimism in Sleeping Giant. After all, the last big May Day strike was over a decade ago at this point. The ground is undeniably shifting, opening up a space for more progressive demands, but it’s not moving all that fast.
Still, since Draut handed in her final draft of this book, millions of voters rallied have to a socialist presidential candidate who will rewrite the Democratic Party’s platform, and the workers at Kohler and Verizon proved that the remaining large industrial unions can still go on strike and win. So the time is right for books that speak confidently that a new workers movement is rising up.
Still, since Draut handed in her final draft of this book, millions of voters rallied have to a socialist presidential candidate who will rewrite the Democratic Party’s platform, and the workers at Kohler and Verizon proved that the remaining large industrial unions can still go on strike and win. So the time is right for books that speak confidently that a new workers movement is rising up.
But it’s not entirely clear who the audience is for Sleeping Giant. While she clearly advocates for more unions, Draut’s treatment of unions is a little too abstract.
The “real power” of unions, she writes, is that they “can amass significant resources to engage in voter turnout, agenda setting and issue advocacy.” That’s a think-tank view of unions. Anyone who’s ever been a part of a workplace job action that resulted in, say, a reduced workload or new safety equipment or got a disrespectful supervisor straightened could take offense at the notion that our “real” power is in our union treasury and checkbook.
Sleeping Giant seems best addressed to the Acela-riding political class: reporters and political staffers who need to learn that the working class still exists and that their “untapped political power” should be heeded. There’s a value to that. One thing that preceded labor’s great upsurge in the 1930’s, ever so slightly, was a rising tide of opinion among intellectuals and political actors that an increase in union power was necessary to stabilize the economy and shore up the Democratic Party’s base.
They can have their reasons for wanting unions, and we’ll always have ours.
The book falters a bit as well when it comes to the “Blueprint for a Better Deal” it advocates. Draut correctly notes that while the demand for a $15 minimum wage was immediately derided as unrealistic, the high bar that the demand set, combined with workplace action, quickly opened up a space that made a range of wage raises politically possible. Curiously, though, her programmatic proposals are safe, moderate, vetted. It includes paid sick and family leave, universal pre-K, tuition-free public college, card check for union organizing and overturning Citizens United.
I’ll take it all, but this is the stuff of a white paper, not a political manifesto. These are transitional demands that have a snowball’s chance in hell in the short term, and that, once the sleeping giant is fully woke and pressing a campaign that looks more like a mass strike wave, would hopefully be traded-in for much more ambitious demands.
Still, Sleeping Giant is a worthy entry in the contemporary progressive canon that should inspire more debate about the world we have to win.
[This article first appeared at In These Times.]
Bernie Sanders Wasn’t Our First Socialist Mayor: Remembering Milwaukee’s Socialist Party History
As the country’s politics take a right turn, an unlikely progressive wins office as mayor of a major U.S. city. In an era marked by conformity and the primacy of business interests over the common good, he has the temerity to call himself a socialist. Both locally and nationally, his example serves as a beacon of hope for the waning left and a lightening rod of criticism for the resurgent right. His fundamental decency and fealty to the democratic process and the public good see him continually reelected, with most voters regarding him on a first-name basis. He goes on to run a quixotic campaign for President.
If this sounds familiar to fans of Bernie Sanders’ career, it should. But I am describing Frank Zeidler, the socialist mayor of Milwaukee who served three terms from 1948-1960. When the producers of the television series Happy Days wanted to cast a nostalgic look back on the supposedly placid 1950s, they chose to base their sitcom in Milwaukee. Of course, no mention is made that not only is the mayor a socialist, but the state’s junior Senator is the demagogic anti-Communist Joseph McCarthy.
This is a history that’s been hiding in plain sight, given focus by a new book from the University of Illinois Press’ Working Class in American History series. Conservative Counterrevolution: Challenging Liberalism in 1950s Milwaukee, by Tula A. Connell, explores the record of a socialist administration in an era that is popularly thought to be when Americans definitively turned against socialism and abandoned urbanism.
But there was, nevertheless, a right turn in the 1950s, and Connell’s book is a vital study of the roots of modern American conservatism. The election of Scott Walker and the battles over his anti-union attacks and the subsequent recall effort revealed to many outsiders the extreme polarization that have marked Wisconsin politics since before Zeidler and McCarthy shared the stage (A polarization that can be seen in Tuesday’s primary results, where Wisconsin Democrats went strongly for socialist Bernie Sanders and Republicans chose Ted Cruz because he is more reliably conservative than Donald Trump).
Connell’s history documents how Milwaukee business and suburban interests inveighed against the expanded role of government in as an attack on “American free enterprise” and used racial demagoguery to peel off voters from the New Deal coalition. This local right-wing pushback became part of a national network that gave rise to Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan. If Wisconsin DNA is so central to modern conservatism, then today’s polarization of national political discourse was seemingly inevitable.
The public good or the virtue of selfishness?
Milwaukee was an early stronghold of the Socialist Party, furnishing the party with wins for mayor, council, state legislature and even a seat in Congress. In city government, they emphasized honest government and effective public services. Critics on the party’s left derided them as “sewer socialists.” The Milwaukee Socialists wore the term as a badge of honor.
Although, to this day, the Socialist candidate can draw upwards of 20% in first round balloting in Milwaukee’s non-partisan mayoral elections, Zeidler’s election was something of a last hurrah for the party. He ran as part of a liberal coalition and benefited as much from name recognition (his older brother’s tenure as mayor was cut short by his WWII casualty) as it did lingering voter loyalty to socialism.
But his record in office nevertheless contributed significantly to the city’s socialist legacy. Milwaukee’s stock of public housing was expanded dramatically; a lucrative new channel of newfangled television broadcasting was reserved for public education programming; and the city’s tax base was preserved through an aggressive campaign of suburban annexation.
Zeidler’s annexation agenda was particularly crucial for Milwaukee, and represents a road not taken for too many other post-war cities. The combination of white flight, highway construction, suburban development and tax breaks for mortgage interest is a uniquely American tragedy that left great cities blighted and broken down. Zeidler refused to accept that suburbanites could just cut themselves off from responsibility from the wider society. His office organized over 300 annexation votes that incrementally expanded the city by more than 35 square miles. Zeidler’s preferred method to win these votes was through education campaigns about the benefits of pooling resources and the efficiency of Milwaukee government, but he was also not shy about engaging in water wars. Suburbs that insisted upon independence were denied Milwaukee city water and sewer services, among other benefits.
Of course there was a backlash. The suburbs sued, right-wing elements pushed state legislation to make annexation more difficult while some townships merged to form “cities” of their own to forestall annexation by Milwaukee. An “iron ring” of rich suburbs encircled Milwaukee, ultimately producing the same racial tensions and defunding of public services that plagued other American cities.
In fact, much of Zeidler’s agenda was vociferously opposed by a rising right-wing movement. This subject is the heart of Conservative Counterrevolution. Author Tula Connell calls the post-war consensus around full employment and living standards that rose with productivity “a mirage” and documents how modern conservatism “was not newly generated in the 1950s or 1960s but rather represented a resurgence of a deep current in America’s history.”
It is perhaps not surmising that it was small and mid-sized businessmen who first chafed at the New Deal, and were in the vanguard of right-wing opposition. Conservative Counterrevolution’s bête noir is William Grede, who operated a Milwaukee area steel foundry that he (of course!) inherited from his dad. Grede was a viciously anti-union boss, who took the then uncommon step of hiring permanent replacement scabs when his employees went on strike in 1946.
Grede served a term as the president of the National Association of Manufacturers, and, according to Connell, “had a fundraising finger in nearly every organization that challenged perceived encroachments on free enterprise,” including Americans for Constitutional Action, the National Association of Businessmen and the John Birch Society. His philosophy – which can be efficiently summed up by the title of the book he never finished writing, The Virtue of Selfishness – remained far outside the mainstream of Republican policymaking during his lifetime. Today, his brand of selfishness has utterly captured the GOP, thanks in part to the deep pockets of odious men like the sons of Grede’s Birch Society co-founder, Fred Koch.
Although Grede’s and others’ opposition to Zeidler’s public housing program was rooted in a fear of “creeping socialism” and a desire for private profit, his opponents resorted to the most base racism in order to win voters over. His opponent in his third and final election, Milton McGuire, waged a demagogic campaign that focused on the rising number of African-Americans moving to the city. McGuire accused Zeidler of placing billboards throughout the south, to attract new black residents with promises of low cost public housing. Zeidler won re-election handily, but had decided that his third term would be his last.
“The greatest living American”
Zeidler was succeeded by Henry Maier, a conservative Democrat who won office by race-baiting his opponents. His administration abandoned public housing construction, slow-walked civil rights, responded to 1967 riots with a law and order agenda and consolidated power. He remained in office for an unprecedented seven terms. By 2002, research showed that Milwaukee’s racial disparities were the worst in the nation.
One of the reasons Frank cited for not running for re-election in 1960 was his frail health. He was always in poor health, and yet he somehow lived to the ripe old age of 93. He even ran for President as the standard-bearer of the reconstituted Socialist Party in 1976! It was in his capacity as the party’s chairman emeritus that I had the pleasure of getting to know Frank. I always found it fascinating to visit Milwaukee while Frank was still alive; it was a bizarro world where the Socialist Party’s leader was revered as a statesman and warmly greeted as a neighbor. To whit: when I was doing press for the party’s 100th anniversary conference in 2001, a reporter for the Journal-Sentinel asked me what socialists in other parts of the country thought of Frank. I answered that most of us think he’s a really great man. The reporter naturally heard that as “the greatest living American” and put it in the story, embarrassing Frank slightly.
With the racial strife and economic decline of the city that came later, it’s not hard to see how Milwaukee residents look back on the Zeidler years as, indeed, happy days.
[This post first appeared at In These Times.]