Occupy Wall Street have helped invigorate and draw attention to
ongoing union campaigns, while unions have offered material resources and put thousands more bodies in the street for events like the October 5 march. But the organizers and participants of Occupy Wall Street have a delicate balance to strike—seeking on the one hand to avoid being co-opted or constrained by existing protest practices that have in recent years failed to spark a widespread movement on the left, while on the other hand hopefully taking advantage of lessons that others have learned the hard way. There's no clear and obvious line between wasting time and effort by reinventing the wheel needlessly and having innovation stymied because you believe experienced organizers when they tell you something can't be done. So it's particularly interesting to watch how the Occupy movement is making use of the resources and knowledge being offered by unions and established advocacy groups without surrendering the decision-making process.
Daniel Massey at Crain's New York Business reports that, by the time unions and other advocacy organizations were getting involved in Occupy Wall Street as organizations, staffers had already built relationships through their own personal involvement:
Staffers from some of the city's most powerful left-wing groups had been at Zuccotti Park in a personal capacity from the beginning of the protest and had established credibility among the protesters.
Relationships built by those staffers, including several directors of organizing for major unions, have proven crucial both to labor and the protesters. Labor has secured office and storage space for the protesters at union halls and helped them deal with community concerns about noise. When protesters felt they needed more black and Latino involvement in the movement, union organizers made introductions to outer-borough community leaders and even brought the Rev. Al Sharpton down to the park.
At the same time, the ties make it easier for unions to recruit protesters to attract attention to their campaigns. And they are drawing from the protesters' playbook, learning to be more flexible and creative and adopting increasingly militant tactics.
“Smart progressive institutions are figuring out how to work with the protesters on their terms, how to actually build something that's not co-opting the movement, how to work with it as it is,” said a senior Democratic political consultant.
In fact, at least one long-time union official had been calling for something very similar to Occupy Wall Street months (or more) before the protests started—yet his ideas are far more widely cited among Glenn Beck-type conspiracy theorists on the right than in friendly analyses of the Occupy movement. Stephen Lerner, formerly of the SEIU, has argued that because unions have a lot to lose—buildings and other assets as well as the day-to-day responsibility for workplace contracts and grievances and the ability of their millions of members to make a decent living—they are often cautious in their strategies for resistance and change. What's needed, he argues, is for an independent movement with less to lose, with unions working with but not exerting veto power over it.
Lerner laid out some of these thoughts recently in a piece in New Labor Forum, in which he argues for a movement-based model with three main principles:
Prolonging protest. We need to commit ourselves to the idea that intensive escalating activities—designed to challenge and disrupt unfair corporate abuses of power—are needed. These activities shouldn't be limited to one-day marches or rallies—they must go on for weeks, growing in size and intensity like the protests in Madison.
Weeks of creative direct action and activities. Just as unions escalate from one-day symbolic strikes to longer strikes that have a real impact, so must we expand from one-day marches and demonstrations to weeks of creative direct action and activities. There are two potentially overlapping ways to do this. The first is to build these kinds of longer and more involved protests around students and community groups that have the energy and willingness to take time off from their day-to-day lives to engage in more intense activity (which includes the risk of getting arrested). Secondly, unions must revive (and reinvent) the strike. [...]
Labor support without control. Unions need to help finance and launch these kinds of activities with the explicit agreement that they won't control or call them off because of outside pressures. There are national and local organizations with bases that can move thousands of people; but they lack the financial resources to do so on a sustained basis.
Occupy Wall Street is, at least at this point, a few degrees more independent of unions than Lerner had envisioned. The fact that people within the union movement were coming to the conclusion that something like this was needed, though, reinforces why staffers for unions and other advocacy organizations had been able to develop the relationships and trust that Massey reported prior to the formal involvement of their organizations. Hopefully, with their organizations now involved, those staffers won't shift from thinking strategically as individuals excited about the new movement to thinking as bureaucrats protecting institutions.
Ultimately, of course, the goals of Occupy Wall Street and those of unions or advocacy groups don't have to be identical; even less so do their strategies. Just as we benefit from having progressive Democrats in elected office and pressure on them from the outside, just as the Civil Rights movement benefited from having both boycotts and lawsuits challenging segregation, the war to wrest control of our economy and politics from Wall Street requires multiple fronts. That war is stronger if the people and groups fighting on different fronts respect and communicate with each other, but retaining an independence that allows for innovation and unexpected tactics is healthy.