From Activism 2 Organizing

Black Friday solidarity with Walmart Workers in southeastern Massachusetts & Rhode Island.

Activism2organizing helped bring together community & labor activists to fight back against Walmart’s attacks on workers.

Volunteer community & Occupy activists, carpenters, students, Teamsters, seniors, teachers, grassroots organizations, and people of faith stood strong for Walmart workers! 100+ people were mobilized from Fall River to Seekonk to Swansea to Providence.  We delivered letters of support from the community demanding changes in Walmart’s treatment of workers, when we could (in Swansea we were rebuffed from even entering the mall). We held informational pickets and leafleted customers, we chanted and drivers honked their horns in solidarity.  We stood up for all workers across the supply chain around the world, as in one of our mike checks when we said:

Walmart workers aren’t just the people you see in stores,

They are sons and daughters, moms and dads, working hard to support families.

Walmart workers are in warehouses moving products across the country,

Walmart workers make products around the world,

Walmart workers have built the Walton’s economic empire.

We want all the work that creates the wealth of the Walton’s to be respected,

We demand change in how Walmart treats all their workers! 

In Providence, RI 50+ people were able to hold a strong presence inside the Walmart for nearly 30 minutes, doing informative mike checks, holding signs of solidarity, and reaching out to shoppers, the vast majority of whom were on our side! Exposing the Walton’s economic empire is a way to target the 1%. 6 Walton heirs own more wealth than 40% of the rest of the U.S. combined! Common sense dictates to most people that this is not fair.

Stay tuned for upcoming workshops to expand your organizing & to win larger victories.  Contact us on ways to build bigger actions around the issues you care about, and to schedule trainings for your campus, organization, or community group.

   

Intro: I was asked to write this related to the green scare but it’s still relevant today. This article was abridged and lost my references under “the racism and resources” segment about the need to recognize Islamaphobia, and how we need to fight U.S. imperialism which also provides tools for repression on the domestic front. http://www.earthfirstjournal.org/article.php?id=190

In the aftermath of the 2000 Republican National Convention, I was charged with multiple felonies and accused of assaulting several police officers, including then Philadelphia Police Chief John Timoney. I approached my case with the attitude that the only way to stop the attempts to criminalize me - and dissent in general - was to organize more effectively than the forces of the state that wanted to shove me into prison. Largely due to successful organizing strategies and community solidarity, I was acquitted after three-and-a-half years. Today, we face similar challenges and must adopt similar strategies in fighting those who wish to put our comrades behind bars and criminalize our visions.

Right now, the state is sending a message to radical environmentalists around the country. It is using its power in an attempt to dismantle our networks and neutralize our militancy. How will we use our power and resources to oppose this force? How are we going to frame our message? What alliances will we build to support our imprisoned comrades?

We can’t let intimidation and fear outweigh our commitment to solidarity. We need to challenge the armchair “radicals” who rationalize the conviction of our comrades as an inevitable result of state repression. Our success in achieving social and environmental victories - in this situation and all others - depends upon the ability of passionate activists to gain the support of ordinary people.

Lesson One: Do Not Focus on Guilt or Innocence

It is not legally or politically useful to speculate about or emphasize the innocence of those arrested. Building your support efforts around innocence is like building a house out of a deck of cards. You don’t want support to vanish if convictions are handed down or if those being supported plead guilty.

Lesson Two: Don’t Spread Fear and Paranoia 

Our security culture needs to be revamped, but we cannot let fear of repression or snitches inhibit aboveground work. Without much larger numbers of people participating in and supporting radical solutions to environmental and social problems, we will be easily contained and neutralized. Our own paranoia can close doors, and it feeds into the very marginalization that the state is trying to create.

This is not a new concern. Noted activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has said, “I remember in the 1960s when all the terrible things started to happen, like COINTELPRO, the movement became so shut down. Mistrust grew. People were reluctant to let anyone in. New people didn’t know how to join the movement; they were made to feel unwelcome. We have to build it to be stronger.”

Lesson Three: Your Support Does Matter

It’s easy to feel that our actions will have no impact on the ultimate outcome of a trial, but this is not the case. The support that I received throughout the five-year period between my arrest and my acquittal was essential to my own psychological wellbeing. Support groups can also aid with legal research, grassroots investigation and evidence gathering, which all help to strengthen a defense.

Remember that the outreach we do for the defendant is crucial, since political trials are influenced by public sentiment. The judge in my case actually heard radio coverage of an event held by my supporters. The awareness that my supporters created diminished the power of my adversaries.

Lesson Four: An Injury to One is an Injury to All

The charges filed against individuals are meant to send a message to the rest of us. These cases are attempts to impede our collective ability to wage struggles against injustice. If we sit by and let repression build, it will weaken our ability to resist future persecution. We must set the course of history and prove that they can’t intimidate us. Together we are powerful.

We must ask ourselves: Are we creating a culture of resistance that romanticizes action but shirks solidarity? Those who rejoiced when Vail burned must now defend those charged with that action and others like it.

Some environmentalists and social justice activists are OK with the feds wanting blood from accused “ecoterrorists,” forgetting that this blood will be used to smear any movement that becomes a threat. The feds will use any convictions they gain to justify increased political repression toward the rest of us.

Lesson Five: Combating Marginalization

Besides attacking radicals and revolutionaries, repression attempts to squelch and sterilize dissent. The state knows that it is not our actions themselves that pose a threat to its power, but rather the possibility that non-activists will recognize radical action as something more than unconstructive, suicidal or impossible. Our enemies want to scare people away from participating in radical action and supporting radical solutions.

The authorities attempt to marginalize us, and they co-opt some of our demands to make us seem unreasonable. It is time for us to be honest: We need a lot more power than we currently have for us to succeed in stopping the environmental destruction and social injustice that surrounds us. 

We must strive to create the conditions that the state fears. We need to create more than radical niches and small communities of revolutionaries, rebels and insurgents. If we want to walk our talk, it is necessary to nurture broad-based links with diverse groups who will acknowledge connection to us and recognize that we have interests in common.

Lesson Six: Map Our Connections

When looking to build broader support, we need to map out our personal web of connections. This includes our ethnic and religious heritages, and the places and communities to which we are connected. Who can we mobilize? Who can support us?

Repression can be the time to reconnect with our family and friends on our own terms. When I was facing felony charges, I tried to remember all of the people and organizations that I had ever been associated with - I even contacted the folks that I had gone to high school with. We might be surprised where solidarity comes from.

This is also a great time to talk about ourselves - who we are, what we value and why. Inadvertently, my case turned me from a behind-the-scenes organizer into a spokesperson for the radical movement. By showing who we really are, we can turn the negative situation of repression into a positive outreach scenario.

Lesson Seven: Expand Our Base of Support Through Networks of Solidarity

Most people simply aren’t interested in “civil liberties” or “the right to dissent,” let alone the right to break unjust laws or to challenge the assets of exploitative institutions. This does not mean that we shouldn’t work to change the interests of the majority. But we should recognize that we can build broader support if we emphasize our tangible contributions to the community over our particular tactics.

This was the main thrust of the defense around my case. We highlighted the valuable contributions that I had made to the community and my ongoing commitment to organizing. Even if people did not believe that I was innocent, many supported me because they knew that the fight against landlords, as well as environmental and economic injustice, would be weakened by my absence. They knew this because I had worked with them for years to address these issues. By illustrating why jail would deprive the community of a valuable and constructive person, we were able to steer the focus away from the legal questions and the terrain of the state. Instead, we showed how the government would waste resources by imprisoning those contributing to the social good.

Many community organizations are descended from historical movements that, at one point, were marginalized and criminalized by authorities. The suffrage movement, the slavery abolitionists, the labor movement, ethnic and immigrant struggles for justice, and even those seeking religious freedom - all these movements have gone through times when they were painted as villains and violent troublemakers. We need to reach out to members of various organizations, and we must fight against political amnesia by reminding them of their past.

Our support work should also include a recognition of the repression faced by immigrants and people of color. We should build upon our common interest in eradicating and preventing the growth of the prison industrial complex. We should learn from the ways that restorative justice advocates have utilized economic issues as a way to reduce the popularity of expenditures for criminal injustice. We should highlight how more funding would be available for housing, health care and other services if the state were not squandering taxpayers’ money to persecute and punish activists.

One more way to bridge this gap is to emphasize the ways that repression maintains systems of oppression and injustice. Our challenge is to foster principled alliances with others who share a common enemy, so that when we are under attack, others will come to our aid. Many marginalized seniors and tenants, who never would have gone to a political prisoner event, showed support for me because they related to the way I was criminalized by the police. I learned that we gain a much larger base of support when we highlight the role of repression in maintaining common systems of oppression.

But these alliances are strongest when they are well established. The day-to-day solidarity and organizing work that we engage in is a social insurance that can be harvested when under attack.

Lesson Eight: Racism and Resources

If we do not cite the ways that class and color affect our ability to get justice, then we perpetuate the myth that speaking “truth to power” is enough. In reality, access to resources improves one’s chances of countering the significant resources of the state.

We cannot expect to receive solidarity from oppressed communities if we don’t acknowledge and ally ourselves with their historic and ongoing struggle against forces of criminalization. Ignoring or denying privilege and racism will only isolate us further and play into the state’s caricature of the radical environmental movement as out of touch with the working class and communities of color.

In my case, I made it a point to acknowledge that the support and the resources that I received were helping me to fight injustice in a way that many could not. I spoke about the systemic injustice of the prison industrial complex: Many languish behind bars without support, lacking the resources to build their case, find witnesses and gather evidence. We should use our work against the repression of eco-activists to highlight these dynamics rather than obscure them.

Lesson Nine: Strategic Thinking

What does being strategic really mean? It means making a plan on how to achieve goals and monitoring your success along the way. It means learning from mistakes and thinking carefully about how to outwit - and out-organize - your enemy.

Just as the forces of repression try to isolate us from our support, we need to isolate them from their own base. In my case, we discovered that John Timoney - the cop who was charging me - had worked with the British Army’s efforts against the Irish Republican Army. We publicized this to the Irish Republican segments of the New York community - including the police - to divide Timoney from one of his bases of support. Through a combination of lobbying and disruptive tactics, we made Timoney unwelcome at police accountability conferences. By mobilizing community groups from multiple cities, we were even able to cost him his job as security consultant for the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

Lesson 10: Stopping Nightmares and Fulfilling Visions

In Uruguay, organizations like the Plenary for Memory and Justice confront and expose torturers active in the CIA-backed dirty war. When these organizations talk about justice, they do not just mean finding out what happened to their disappeared comrades. They are also working to fulfill their fallen comrades’ visions of freedom and justice for everyone. We need to stay focused and continue the work of those who are under attack by the state.

Success in achieving justice for our comrades and realizing our radical visions is dependent not only on our willingness to put our bodies on the line in direct action, but also on our ability to acknowledge that we can be crushed easily by the state unless we are constantly building and expanding our base of power.

Today’s nightmare for our locked-up comrades should be our wake-up call to re-evaluate and reinvest in our strategies for bringing our visions to fruition. By building networks of solidarity, talking about the community work done by our comrades, making connections with the struggles of immigrants and people of color against the prison industrial complex, and organizing the unorganized, we will be better able to counter state repression and create the world we are striving toward. If we do not, the future - for our comrades, ourselves and the Earth - is bleak.

Camilo Viveiros is a community organizer from Fall River, Massachusetts, who encourages radical activists to do more outreach and power analysis to develop revolutionary approaches to community organizing and popular education. He believes that repression can breed resistance but only if we strategize and organize. He faced more than 100 years behind bars if convicted of the charges waged at him by John Timoney.

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Introduction: As Occupy activists travel to Chicago for the NATO protests it is important to consider tensions between neighborhood organizing/long term organizing and national campaigns/shorter term actions. James Tracy and Amy Sonnie are authors of “Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times” (Melville House, 2011). It is the story of radical organizing in working-class white neighborhoods, the interracial movement of the poor, and the original (pre-Jessie Jackson) Rainbow Coalitions with the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and others.

Camilo Viveiros (CV): Can you share a story related to Chicago from your book that may inform activists who hope to gather people from around the country for upcoming national protests?

James Tracy (JT): The Chicago of 2012 is much the same as the Chicago of 1968 in one very important way: there are dynamic community and radical organizations that have been fighting what we now call the 1% for generations. Chicago has been an important part of every national progressive upheaval in the last century. Think of Haymarket, the Industrial Workers of the World and the Puerto Rican Independence movement, just to name a very few. If you are going to Chicago for the NATO protests, that’s wonderful. You are stepping into an event that may well turn out to be just as historical as the Democratic National Convention protests of 1968. But you should know the lessons of history and respect the local activists who have valuable experience.

The Chicago-based groups in our book were very intentional in how they picked their targets. They organize against slumlords who had holdings in black, white and brown neighborhoods because these targets gave community members an opportunity to work with one another. It was a commitment to what the Panthers would later call intercommunalism. These kinds of tangible opportunities for unity are built when organizers first build a base and make deliberate choices to foster connections.

There will be choices for Occupy activists to make about where to put your energies. Why not choose to support the protests led by local Chicago groups fighting school privatization, health care access or housing displacement? These struggles are all being fought right now and outsiders would do well to ask how they can help. And if your protest turns into a war zone, realize that at some point, most of the visiting activists will receive a level of legal support often denied everyday people in a town notorious for police brutality.

CV: In the early 1960s, Students For a Democratic Society (SDS) created the Economic Research and Action Projects (ERAP), placing student organizers in poor neighborhoods. What are some examples of student-community alliances from ERAPs that worked? What are ways that students and community groups can make sure to monitor and foster reciprocal relationships?

JT: While many of the ERAP projects folded quickly, the Jobs or Income Now Community Union based in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood lasted the longest and evolved into two important organizations: the Young Patriots Organization and Rising Up Angry. These are the central stories we cover in our book. The alliance between students and poor residents had its share of issues, but it worked because organizers on both sides put hard work into understanding each other. It wasn’t about a single action or Rent Strike. They knew if they were going to go toe-to-toe with the Right for the allegiance of poor whites, it was about long-term building in the community. It’s also important to note that quite a few key organizers were students from working-class backgrounds, the first in their family to get through college. For them the student-worker debate felt artificial, they had their feet in both worlds. With so many of the access points to higher education closed off today, I’d imagine that the divide is actually more intense today than it was in the 1960s.

“The alliance … worked because organizers on both sides put hard work into understanding each other…it was about long-term building in the community.”

CV: Can you touch on the story of the founding of the original Rainbow Coalition in Chicago and how similar collaborations might be useful models for today’s activists? What are some of the lessons about forming alliances that are pro-organizing, that are diverse without letting any group dominate?

JT: The Original Rainbow Coalition included the Young Patriots Organization, the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Organization chapters in Chicago. Each group was expected to organize their own community, and come together in coalition. Former Panther Bob Lee told me that the Rainbow Coalition was simply a code word for class struggle in a movement that had been focused on race — for important reasons, of course. Our book details how the slow work of organizing across colorlines created the conditions where the Patriots (poor whites who used the Confederate Flag on their uniform) physically defended Lee from assault by the police and even ran armed security for the Panthers at events. It was their sustained organizing that made the insurrection possible, not the other way around.

“It was the sustained organizing that made the insurrection possible, not the other way around.”

The key to understanding this organizing approach is the concept of Self-Determination. Each group had the right to make its own decisions, but were simultaneously accountable to each other in a structured coalition.

CV: In your book Peggy Terry, a poor white organizer originally from the South, believed that “politicians stoked poor whites’ fears that any gains for people of color would come at the greatest loss to them.” What are ways working class organizers can shift narrow power analyses that define other oppressed people as competitors, and instead target those in power who pit us against each other?

JT: These fears come from somewhere tangible, because historically the ruling-class has indeed granted reforms in a strategic manner to divide and conquer poor people. The Black Panther Party demanded full employment, but the Nixon Administration came up with affirmative action. Now imagine what might have been done if the movement had been able to fully articulate a vision of what full employment for all would look like while honestly addressing historical inequalities and racism within labor? It would have been harder to convince poor whites that they were going to be tossed aside.

“…what might have been done if the movement had been able to fully articulate a vision of what full employment for all would look like while honestly addressing historical inequalities and racism within labor?”

CV: After the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 many anti-globalization activists went “summit hopping,” prioritizing going from one large-scale protest to another, not always spending the necessary time building local campaigns or supporting local organizing. As we face a series of national (DNC, RNC, etc.) protests in 2012, what are some lessons you can share about the need to work with local struggles and specifically for activists to recognize and organize in their own communities? What worked and what went wrong in Chicago related to the DNC protests in 1968 and how can we reflect on and avoid the same mistakes now? 

JT: It’s not an either/or proposition. Rising Up Angry built a strong base in Chicago’s neighborhoods over many years, but also took their members to important protests in other cities. They knew that going to the mobilizations against the war in DC could give their members a sense of being connected to something bigger, and that hopefully the movement would recognize the importance of working-class people in it. At the same time, these national conventions and summits have a very real and not always positive impact on local communities. While many people now recognize the 1968 DNC as the turning point for broad public acknowledgement that the police were out of control, many local activists skipped the convention altogether because they knew the level of brutality the cops were likely to unleash. They saw it every day. It’s a double-edged sword that national attention can come out of these events, when on the other hand the ongoing repression of local folks, especially in communities of color, never gets discussed. The questions for out-of-towners are: What can you do to limit negative impacts of mass protests on local neighborhoods, and how can you actually build with and listen to local activists before, during and after a convention?

“how can you actually build with and listen to local activists before, during and after a convention?”

CV: Thank you for bringing to light the myth that poor and working class whites are more likely to defend racism than whites with money. In your book you share another key organizing insight “that poor whites experience the benefits of institutional racism differently and, therefore class-based organizing must account for those differences without ever ignoring the race question.” What are ways we can counter classism in today’s movements?

JT: White supremacy is a complex system and it works on many levels, from financial advantage to psychological. But it is also a system that requires broad participation from all so-called white people, so why assume that the bulk of the responsibility for it lies on the backs of those who benefit from it the least. A poor racist might throw around epithets displaying their racism more crudely. A rich racist can just smile and benefit from foreclosures, offshoring and privatization. I don’t think we should try to measure the extent of damage done — racism is damaging no matter what its form — but class matters because power matters. And where power comes into play, we need to evolve smart organizing strategies and understandings. The groups we write about didn’t do everything right, but they saw a real need to address class, race and gender issues in tandem, pushing poor whites to re-examine who they blamed for their problems and pushing the Left not to ignore poor people’s leadership. This is just as relevant a lesson today. 

CV: Stemming from discussion and correspondence about your book, have you seen any shifts from white middle class people about the importance of white working class organizing with an anti white supremacist orientation? What are the core suggestions that you would offer activists and organizers as we look ahead for ways to build trust and relationships of respect in our diverse movements of oppressed people?

JT: Yes, when we first started discussing this book with other organizers and activists, I sensed a bit of trepidation from some self-identified white anti-racists about our intentions. I think it is obvious now that the book is not trying to unravel the good work they have done to create an understanding of how central white supremacy has been in destroying progressive movements. Intellectually, we are indebted to the work of people like Ted Allen, David Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and many others. Yet we’re firmly outside of the “white studies” canon and people of various classes have responded positively to what our books suggests: an interracial movement of the poor is possible, and it is also possible for it to be led by poor people themselves.

“…an interracial movement of the poor is possible, and it is also possible for it to be led by poor people themselves.”

James Tracy is a long-time social justice organizer in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the founder of the San Francisco Community Land Trust and has been active in the Eviction Defense Network and the Coalition On Homelessness, SF. He has edited two activist handbooks for Manic D Press: The Civil Disobedience Handbook and The Military Draft Handbook. His articles have appeared in Left Turn, Race Poverty and the Environment, and Contemporary Justice Review. http://www.jamestracywords.com

An Interview with Joe Burns, author of Reviving the Strike

at Lawrence, Mass. Bread and Roses Centennial April 28th, 2012

by Camilo Viveiros

Introduction: Many in the Occupy movement have called for a general strike on May 1st but most Occupy activists aren’t involved in labor organizations or organized in their workplaces. While General Assemblies may be somewhat effective institutions at reaching the agreement of assorted activists around future direct actions, workplace stoppages require the large scale participation of workers in decision-making structures. The interview below gives some organizing advice for those who have called the general strike. I hope that this interview will inspire Occupy activists to consider the difficult work ahead that is needed to build democracy in the workplace. We are the 99%!    

Camilo:  You’ve written this very important book Reviving the Strike that gives us a lot of insight about some of the challenges, but also the importance of strikes as a tactic.  Thank you for your work promoting the increased use of the strike as a tool to use building working class power.  In “Reviving the Strike” you argue that the labor movement must revive effective strikes based on the traditional tactics of labor— stopping production and workplace-based solidarity.  As someone who sees the strike as a vital tactic to achieve economic justice I want to ask you a few questions.

Right now Occupy and other activists across the country have been agitating for a general strike on May 1st.  Resolutions have been passed at General Assemblies around the country. 

There are a lot of new activists that have joined the Occupy Movement, some never having had any organizing experience or labor organizing experience.  Could  you share some of the examples of creative ways that newer activists and established labor activists can think about this coming year, maybe toward next May 1st or toward the remote future of how people can embrace new creative strategies to organize toward strikes involving larger numbers of folks.

Joe Burns:  First of all, I think the fact that people are talking about this strike and the general strike is a good thing because it starts raising people’s consciousness about where our real source of power is in society, which is ultimately working people have the power to stop production because working people are the ones who produce things of value in society.  On the other hand, if you look back through history about how strikes happened, how in particular general strikes happened, what you’ll find is that they’re organized in the workplace by organizers organizing their co-workers.  And that’s really the key aspect here.  If you look at how most general strikes in the United States have come about, it’s because there’s been strike activity in the local community, people have built bonds of solidarity.  And then, let’s say one Local goes out on strike, they put out an appeal for other Locals to help them, and then eventually it breaks out beyond the bounds of the dispute between just them and their employer and becomes a generalized dispute between all the workers in the city and the employers in the city.  So it really happens as part of a process of solidarity being built step by step.  

“It hasn’t really happened where people have put out a general call saying let’s strike, let’s do a general strike on this day. “ 

It hasn’t really happened where people have put out a general call saying let’s strike, let’s do a general strike on this day.  

One of the things that I focus on in my book, is the need to refocus on the strike.  And to do that, that really takes workplace organizing in both union and non-union shops, where people go in and do the hard work of talking to their co-workers, forming an organization, and ultimately walking out together.  I think it’s scary to do, to strike, to ask people in these isolated workplaces to strike all by themselves makes it very difficult.  

“…people go in and do the hard work of talking to their co-workers, forming an organization, and ultimately walking out together”

Camilo:  What do you think it would take to actually organize, to bring back the capacity to have a general strike in the United States?

Joe Burns:  In order to have a general strike I think we need to have a workers’ movement that’s based in the workplace.  If you look at, in the early 1970’s there’s a good book called Rebel Rank and File that a number of folks edited and it’s got articles.  It’s really about how the generation of 60’s leftists, a lot of them went back into the workplaces and did organizing, and that in the early 70’s there were tons of Wildcat strikes which aren’t authorized by the union leadership.  Some of them, like the Postal Strike of 1970 involved 200,000 postal workers striking against the federal government, in an illegal strike.  But that didn’t happen just by itself, it happened because people went in to their workplaces and organized it.  So, how are we going to get a general strike in this country?  I think it’s going to be because we redevelop a labor movement or a broader workers’ movement that’s based on the strike.  I think the efforts of Occupy for the class-based sort of thinking will help in that.  Ultimately, though, I think we need at some point to devote our attention to the workplace, because the workplace is the site of where the strike and struggle need to generate from.  

Camilo:  During the takeover of the capital building in Wisconsin some folks speculated that what should have happened is that public sector workers who were under attack should have gone on strike.  But in some ways public sector workers are even more restricted around strike guidelines than private sector workers and so they have less right to strike.  What are your thoughts around public sector workers who are really bearing a large brunt of the attack on labor over the last year, and what would the challenges be to building the solidarity necessary to consider strikes of public sector workers?

Joe Burns:  I think what you find studying labor history is that even though strikes were illegal up until 1970, Hawaii became the first state to authorize a legal strike, regardless of that workers struck by the hundreds of thousands, public sector workers in the 1960’s.  And in fact the laws giving them the right to strike were done after the fact, and they were only passed because workers were striking anyway and legislatures decided to set up an orderly procedure to govern strikes.  So what you find is hundreds of thousands of teachers striking throughout the 1960’s, and that’s really how public employees built their unions.  And they did it in the face of injunctions, so a judge may order them back to work and start jailing leaders, but like in Washington state in a rural community all the teachers showed up together, everyone who was on strike, and told the judge to arrest them all.  And the judge backed down because it didn’t look good.  

So that’s really how we won our unions to begin with in the public sector, in the 1960’s, so when you fast forward to today and look at strikes in the public sector, when you look at Wisconsin in particular, clearly the Wisconsin teachers is what really kicked off the whole Wisconsin battle.  They organized calling in sick, and two-thirds of Madison teachers didn’t show up to work and that’s what really kind of fueled the beginning of the takeover of the capitol, along with the grad students and so forth.  So it was based on a strike.  Some people wanted that to expand into a general strike, but that really wasn’t going to happen unless the people most involved which were the public employees, took the lead on that.  And they chose, and made a strategic decision after four days to go back to work and fight by other means.  I think that’s the strategy that they wanted to do and that made sense for them.  

Camilo:  With union density not at its peak what are the some of the opportunities for non-union organizations to use striking as a tactic? What are some of the lessons we can learn from the Wildcat strikes of the 70’s, and how can we have enough flexibility to try to go beyond the stranglehold that Labor law has on workers’ organizations right now?  

Joe Burns:  I think there’s been a lot of good movement in recent years to look at different forms of worker organization beyond the traditional unions.  So you’ve had workers’ centers, you’ve had various alternative unions, the IWW and so forth, all looking at how do you organize particular groups of workers.  The question that all of them eventually run into is, you can have your alternative form of organization but ultimately it’s a question of power, and do you have the power to improve workers’ lives.  And to do that traditionally, that’s been at the workplace the ability to strike or otherwise financially harm an employer.  So I think part of what moving forward we’ll see with the revival of the workers’ movement in this country is a lot of coming together of these different forms of organizations, embracing tactics such as the strike.  And really some of them are the best situated to do it, because they don’t have the huge treasuries and buildings and conservative officials that you find in a lot of unions.  

“…ultimately it’s a question of power, and do you have the power to improve workers’ lives.”  

Camilo:  So, what would your advice be to a non-union Occupy activist who maybe voted for a general strike during a general assembly, or who wants to see a general strike come to fruition at some point, what would your suggestions be for those activists that are out there who are seeing the need for this tactic to be embraced.  

Joe Burns:  I think go into your workplace.  The strike and strike activity needs to be rooted in the workplaces, and if it’s based on people outside of the workplace calling on people to engage in strike activity, that’s not going to work.  Not saying you need to just bury your head in some local place, you need to have a broader perspective and broader activism, but if you really want to see a general strike, go out and organize workers, your co-workers or however you want to do it to build forms of organization in the workplace.

Joe Burns is staff attorney and negotiator, with the Association of Flight Attendants/ Communications Workers of America and author of Reviving the Strike. http://www.revivingthestrike.org/

Camilo Viveiros has been a multi-racial economic justice organizer for over 20 years.  He has developed organizing trainings for the Occupy movement www.popularassembly.org and does campaign and leadership development, popular education, strategy and direct action trainings for grassroots groups. http://activism2organizing.org camilo@activism2organizing.org

Have you felt frustrated by our inability to win demands and reach our goals?

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How can we build our capacity (POWER) to achieve our vision?

Do you want to learn and share lessons from grassroots organizing?

Social change work may incorporate different approaches (self help, service, electoral, advocacy, mobilization) but grassroots organizing is the most effective way to build collective power to shift power relations. We need to define the difference between activist approaches and organizing strategies to avoid paternalistic recruitment efforts and make sure that our organizing efforts go beyond rhetoric and events- or tactics-focused activism. Join the discussion on ways we can expand our social movements by moving from activism to organizing. Share and learn from lessons from grassroots organizing to win our short and long term goals.

We will explore how different theories of change approach issues, while highlighting ways to transition from activism to organizing in order to fulfill our vision for justice.

Is your organization or community interested in bringing this workshop that shares community organizing lessons with activists to your community? “From Activism to Organizing” supports activists and social change organizations to foster participatory strategy/power analysis and collective campaign development, expand base building, and increase organizing capacity to win short term goals and achieve our long term vision.

Contact: camilo@activism2organizing.org

Camilo Viveiros works on immigrant worker issues and multi-ethnic/multi-racial economic and environmental justice organizing with students, youth and seniors in New England. Presently he is the community organizer for the Bristol County Chapter of Mass Senior Action Council as well as working for the UMass Dartmouth Labor Education Center. He is also on the board of RESIST.

Born to immigrant parents, Camilo was raised in the working class immigrant community of Fall River. He has been involved in work for social justice for virtually his whole life. Over the years he has organized for unions of the homeless, welfare rights unions, against the prison industrial complex and many different issues. He has a backround in tenant, youth and congreation-based organizing and gained national media exposure in 2000 when he was arrested during demonstrations at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Four years later, after a national campaign, www.friendsofcamilo.org, he was acquitted of all charges.