“…But they don’t mind throwing a brick…”
It’s touching that there are still people in this world who care enough to riot. I first heard about France’s proposed “first job contract” law from some of the French scientists with whom I am working. They’re absolutely pissed off.
The law would allow employers to hire first-time workers under the age of 26, and, for the first two years of this job, have no obligation to provide benefits and can fire the employee at any time for any reason. American workers have a similar status when they are hired for the first job, and for their second, third, fourth and tenth up until the day they die. Unless they have a union contract, that is.
Where is our outrage?
McLaughlin is Presumed Innocent
In a very troubling development, FBI agents raided the offices of the New York Central Labor Council and the district office of Assemblyman Brian McLaughlin, the President of the CLC. McLaughlin has been President of the CLC for two decades, the third of three representatives of IBEW Local 3 who have headed the Council for the entirety of its 51 year history. His files were seized in connection to an investigation of a contractor, Petrocelli Electric, that did business with the city.
While McLaughlin’s tenure as President of the city-wide coalition of trade unions is open to criticism (McLaughlin is a skilled politician who has strived for unity in the labor movement; that unity has often been achieved through a lowest common denominator agenda that has precluded bold leadership stands), I have never heard any of his critics accuse him of corruption. To date, there have been no charges or allegations against McLaughlin or the CLC. The raid does have the unmistakable whiff of a politically motivated hatchet job. We should keep a critical eye on situations, as they develop.
“It’s Educational!”
I’m back from Amherst and I’m really excited. The Master’s degree that I’m working towards seems so besides the point. I hate the idea of ever having to stop going to ULA. The real value of the program is the ability to step back from my day-to-day work and see the forest from the trees.
I found the Labor Education class that I took to be a stumbling, fumbling frustration for nine of the ten days. This morning, however, I think I came to an epiphany, while I sat quietly and reflected on the readings and discussions. It’s too soon to tell, but it might have been a life-changing event.
We read a lot about Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School, the open learning center in the South that trained CIO organizers, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. In his book, “The Long Haul,” Myles talks about movement periods and organizational periods.
The movement period is when shit just happens because people are fed up and feel emboldened enough to take action on their own. For example, in the 1930’s, millions of people organized unions at their jobs. It is not an exaggeration that, all over the country, co-workers organized themselves, sat down, stopped production and then called the union office and asked, “Can you ‘organize’ us?” Today, however, we are clearly in an organizational period. We are working our asses off to try to preserve and build our existing union organizations. It’s very much official, legal and staff-driven. Organizers, like me and so many of my friends, go out to the shops to talk to workers and convince them why they should form a union. Even at our best, that model can only organize hundreds of thousands of people a year when we need to organize millions. We need workers to organize themselves.
Labor experienced a movement period in the 1930’s partly because of the Depression but largely because leftist rabble were well-educated by the Wobblies, the Commies, the Yipsels and the Debsies and well-placed throughout industry to educate, agitate and organize all those untold millions.
How do we replicate that organic learning that took place so that we can experience a new movement period?
The answer, I think, can be found in another lesson from Highlander: the Citizenship Schools of the civil rights era. The idea of the Citizenship Schools was remarkably simple: black citizens sit in the round and, drawing from their own experience and desires, teach each other to read and write in order to vote and be involved in the political process. At the end of each session, each participant could go out and teach the next class, allowing the program to multiply and grow as an organic movement, not as the project of a single organization.
We need citizenship schools for the workplace, with a long view for planting the seeds of the next movement period. This is not an original idea, and I can’t imagine that someone out there isn’t already doing this. If I find them, and they’re doing it well, I will join them. If not, my comrades and I should start something new. We are already having those initial discussions. I need to look and see what’s out there. I want to study the old Trade Union Education League. I need to check out Labor Notes and the Troublemakers School. I should look into Brazil and other Latin American education programs.
I want to find more people who are interested in moving in this direction to have more informal discussions and brainstorming sessions. In the meantime, as luck would have it, Hunter College is having a conference this weekend on popular education in New York City. I’ll be there for more field research.
In the Papers
Amherst is one of those funny, left-liberal college towns. The cover story of yesterday’s Springfield Republican had a hysterical sob story profile of some of the town’s poor maligned conservative minority.
“In Amherst, I can’t watch a production of ‘West Side Story’ but I can see the ‘Vagina Monologues’ at the high school and watch a junior throw up her arms like (Olympic gymnast) Mary Lou Retton and shout the c-word,” said fifth-generation Amherst resident Larry J. Kelley.
Meanwhile, back in New York, Newsday has begun trying to turn the public against next year’s citywide hotel strike. Our friend Kate Bronfenbrenner weighs in:
Hotel workers say they are not afraid to walk out. The last New York City hotel strike, in 1985, lasted 27 days. “This is a union that knows how to prepare a strike and knows how to win,” Bronfenbrenner said.