Record heat waves across parts of the US and Europe, cascading indictments complete with mugshots for the Trump gang, US economy soaring while China’s sinks, Covid rising, and it’s not the end times, just the days of our lives. This issue is a mix of past and present, future talk and the wayback machine.
It begins with Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon reporting on the strange path US veterans have traveled from the forever wars to becoming a political issue in the 2024 election campaign. The putative Republican nominee, former President Trump, typically is trying to work the issue out of both sides of his mouth, claiming he’s their guy, despite cutbacks and privatization, lambasting VA workers and their lifesaving work. Going both backwards and forwards, Fred Brooks draws on the lessons he took from his youth and from his career as an organizer and canvass director with ACORN to his current duties molding young social workers at Georgia State.
Similarly, Professor Ahmed White and his book on the Industrial Workers of the World and their experiences one-hundred ago offer organizers and activists lessons in courage and persistence in the face of constant and extralegal repression. He exhaustively corrects any misconceptions that the attack that upended the organization was World War I by documenting the lawlessness of courts and police from their founding, making our organizing environment seem like a walk in the park. Chuck Collins, activist, author, and philanthropist takes a turn at fiction, if we dare call it that, writing of the work of an organizer looking back with a different twist than Brooks offers.
Our book reviews cover the waterfront, starting literally with Peter Olney, long time organizing director with the Longshore Workers, dissecting the new book on fabled ILWU leader Harry Bridges. Repression and constant deportation trials were part of the fight in his case, but Olney, drawing from the history, also shows the paths that needs to be taken by labor now. Jay Youngdahl, a labor lawyer for construction and other workers, former publisher, writer, photographer and activist, reviews a book on the role of construction workers, and minces no words about the underestimated value of the work and workers. Speaking of lawyers, James Mumm in his usual insightful review wrestles with the classic conundrum faced by many organizers in trying to make social change concerning lawyers and the law: obstacle or advantage?
Phil Mattera in his column argues we need to emphasize corporate accountability, not the PR spin from corporations on ESG. Drummond Pike says Biden by the numbers is not getting the credit – and popularity – he deserves. Gregory Squires critiques the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision and how universities need to handle race going forward. John Anderson…. . I finish in Backstory with a look at …
With the world in upheaval around us, it’s time to look for some perspective, drawing from the past, where the challenges where as great or greater, to find the strength and insights now to find the opportunities and forge ahead.
So Trump Makes Union Grievance Settlement a 2024 Campaign Issue
It’s rare that a union grievance settlement becomes a U.S. presidential campaign issue. But, thanks to the American Federation of Government Employee’s successful defense of workers unfairly dismissed by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Donald Trump is now running for the White House on a platform that includes firing “every corrupt VA bureaucrat who Joe Biden has outrageously refused to remove from the job or put back in the job.”
Highlights, Lessons Learned and Paying it Forward
Introduction
In October 1979, I was hired as a door-to-door canvasser in the Atlanta Georgia ACORN office. Over the next 10 years I field-managed and directed canvassing operations in Denver (twice); Columbus, OH; Chicago, IL; Oakland, CA and New Orleans. The following essay is a memoir of that experience including my path to finding ACORN, struggling to make quota but eventually succeeding, helping open the wildly successful Denver office, highlights from ACORN conventions, being arrested twice (once on purpose), skills developed and lessons learned, and my attempt to pay these skills and lessons forward in my current job as a professor of social work at Georgia State University. I begin with a few thoughts going deep into childhood and speculating on influences that helped shape my political conscience.
Having organized unions in communities and workplaces both domestically and internationally for decades, admittedly, I’m biased. Organized power in the hands of lower income families and lower waged workers is a critical antidote to poverty, arguably more effective than any number of other schemes or ideological advocation of uplift and education. Increasingly, the facts and reports from experts make my point not opinion, but gospel.
Economists looking at equity gaps regularly cite one of the key causal factors in recent decades has been the weaking of unions. Studies on education and the increase in the number of African-Americans with college degrees in the face of continued differential in earnings and opportunity underscore the fact that education without power reenforces the status quo, rather than making change.
If this has now become almost impossible to ignore in the United States, a developed country way ahead of the game, how is it possible that development and economic experts, politicians and so-called philanthropists, have not gotten the message as they look at narrowing the gulf between rich and poor around the world and between countries? Recent experiences have impressed this point to me over and over: fledgling efforts to build unions in precarious communities and workplaces are simply stalled for resources, even while millions and billions go into fancy offices, websites, and paychecks of staff and promotors of failing programs and bankrupt dogma.
In just the last few weeks in the United States, Netherlands, Germany, Sicily, Ecuador, and now Brazil, I have listened to one story after another of real kingdoms being lost for lack of horses.
In one meeting or conversation after another, I have visited with people making huge sacrifices of time and energy with little to no resources to change their workplaces and communities, even as their tasks and the lack of support make their labors seem Sisyphean and unsustainable. We met with a union of domestic workers in Salvador, Brazil with 2000 members facing an unorganized workforce of 150,000 in that city alone and an estimated 8 million in the country, whose most important question to us was where could they get the money to organize. In Sicily,
I met with volunteers in a cooperative trying to prevent demolition of their community who were ready to organize except for one problem: no money. In Germany, I met with a primary funder of community organization efforts around the world for more than fifty years who had money, but admitted to me that they were now getting less of it and would have to reduce their support, when they should be increasing it. In Ecuador, the largest labor federation and indigenous organization both reached out to me through common friends looking for help to raise the resources to build sustainable structures and programs and deal with governmental oppression.
Researchers, advocates, professors and others study these issues and make the case, but there’s no trickle down. It’s not even just the gap between rich and poor, either. Climate is the issue de jour, but volunteers trying to save biospheres in Brazil, lacked resources. Organizers seeking to force rural electric cooperatives to finally phase out coal and adopt alternatives along with real diversity and democratic governance, get compliments for the plan, but pennies, if that, to make it happen.
There’s no longer any valid counter argument that building power levels political and economic operating theaters, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, power concedes nothing without a fight, and in this fight the powerless are penniless in the face of pretend programs and plans, fighting with two hands tied behind their backs and dancing backwards in high heels.
Everyone asks me as I visit, “where can we find the resources?” I used to answer, jokingly, that it might take a “ski mask and a gun,” but after a meeting with forty people some years ago in Dublin, where I was surprised that rather than laughing, they were nodding in agreement, I had to drop that joke from my repertoire. Unfortunately, now I have no answer. I can only nod sadly in agreement.
WADE RATHKE is the Chief Organizer of ACORN International, Founder and Chief Organizer of ACORN (1970-2008), and Founder and Chief Organizer of Local 100, United Labor Unions (ULU).
