There was a time when things looked and seemed different than the bleak and blurred picture of the present and future before us now. This is almost a running theme for this number of Social Policy.
Frequent contributor and longtime labor activist and journalist, Steve Early, shares some of the optimism of fifty years ago from his reunion with fellow students who were veterans of the idealist Antioch Law School with reflections on what happened and where we have landed now. Rob McKenzie inadvertently picks up that theme as a former UAW local leader as he tries to make sense of why the early advocacy of Walter Reuther for a community-union labor organizing model had such promising results, but didn't lead to widespread rethinking of labor strategy and union practice. David Thompson excavates the experience he and colleagues had trying to build exactly that kind of model and the results their work produced in Philadelphia. Thinking about where we are now in light of these three pieces should give us pause, as we look equally critically at where our work stands now.
None of these authors goes back as far as Dan Cantor does in an excerpt of his recent essay on fusion voting and the "two-party doom loop." How political life might be enlivened and more democratic, if we could revive the options that multi-party endorsements on shared ballot lines offered more than one-hundred years ago and continue in New York State and precious few others. Those were lessons from the real Populist Movement for today. Mike Miller in his review of the civil rights struggle in Holmes County, Mississippi, revives lessons from a more recent time seventy years ago, that we are also still grappling with in our own time.
The columns are of this time. Phil Mattera in a brilliant piece of work goes past the headlines in looking at a $68-million consumer settlement initiated by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with Colony Ridge over deceiving consumers on their flood insurance in Houston that was highjacked by the state of Texas and the Justice Department to deal with immigration without consumers receiving a dime. Drummond Pike connects the dots between the labor crises in agricultural labor, including vineyards, and the ICE deportation efforts and the lack of viable paths to deal constructively with the need for immigrant labor. John Anderson, similarly makes the case that climate change affects our base in multiple ways, including the way that costs are transferred to consumers in British Columbia for LNG exportation facilities, as the world burns. Gregory Squires breaks down the evisceration of HUD and fair housing protections by the current Trump administration. Finally, in Backstory, I argue that no one will be willing to take a bet on Trump's prediction that we will be in and out of his war in Iran in four or five weeks.
This is a solid issue, but, sadly, won't bring any more smiles to the readers than it did to the authors. We read and weep together, as we try to learn from our past in order to plot a better future and wring out hands about current events as we stand to oppose these policies.
Not long ago, workers in Philadelphia marred Whole Foods’ perfect unionbusting record and won the first representation election at any of their stores in the US. Baristas at so many cafes in Philly have organized with Workers’ United’s Local 80 that the city now has America’s highest union density in that industry.
Labor activists (me included!) are convinced that Philly's Local 80 and the Whole Foods victory can be traced directly to an experiment called Philly Workers for Dignity. We are also convinced that the lessons from this experiment’s successes and failures point to a viable path forward for the movement in this period of deep reaction. With the benefit of hindsight and additional organizing experiences, we’re convinced that the return on investment for this kind of organizing is unmatched.
Here, I present an account of what went right and wrong during Dignity’s life from 2018-2020. From there, I discuss our efforts to make sense of its collapse and the wider ebb on the left in that pivotal year. I then zoom out and make the case for several principles tested against the experiences in 30 organizing projects with which I am familiar, often intimately.
Read more: Our Movement Strategies Haven’t Worked– Here’s One That Does
For some years, as I've become part of the "grower" community producing wine grapes in Sonoma County, I've supported a local contest pitting the best vine pruners against one another. It's really a minor thing in the seasonal cycle of a vineyard, but I liked the idea because it was one of the few events that focused on those who work the vines. This farmworker population is one of the least understood while at the same time among the most marginalized in the "ag sector." Like other sectors such as non-union construction and meat processing, vineyard work is not for the faint of heart. Few jobs are year-round, as most of the work depends on how the vines are faring through the arc of a 6 to 8 month growing season, and when the weather will permit certain tasks to be undertaken. If it rains when you might otherwise want to prune, "sucker," or harvest, you risk damage to the vines if you don't wait for a dry spell, so you need a workforce that can be there when you need them. On-demand, if you will, but with a skill set that is undervalued and solely gained by mentorship. Send any fool down the vine rows to prune and you'll suffer the results.
The climate crisis is accelerating. Canada -like most countries-is locking in fossil fuel dependence while subsidizing large LNG projects controlled by private conglomerates. Environmental campaigns have struggled to match the scale and speed of these decisions, facing some of the largest forces the world has ever seen and pushing the planet-and all life- "toward the edge."
Sea levels are projected to rise between 30 cm and 200 cm by 2100-with 30 cm only if the world acts immediately and effectively, which is not happening. A 2 °C temperature increase would mean roughly a 60 cm rise, accompanied by stronger storms, submerging low-lying regions like Florida and Bangladesh. Seven hundred million people live in coastal areas at risk-and while lower Manhattan or parts of Florida may be protected by levees and pumps, millions in low- and moderate-income communities will be displaced or worse by the time my 8-year-old son turns 80.
Despite the bleakness, there will always be opportunities for organizers to win, probably more so after storms, floods, fires, rising seas, water shortages, and the ramping up of fascism. It is time for all those willing or qualified to lace up, work hard, set aside individual concerns, and build power while the sun shines. Organizations need to share power by developing partnerships and coalitions. They should continue to push boundaries, take strategic risks, and be adaptable to scale up and build power sooner rather than later.
ACORN Canada has been called upon by environmental organizations to connect energy campaigns to the fight against carbon. Our decades of work-including climate adaptation campaigns calling for max-heat bylaws-places us on the cutting edge.
Read more: NORTHERN LIGHTS - Climate Change Mandates Stopping LNG Expansion
President Trump headlined the news as I write today saying that his war on Iran in partnership with Israel's Netanyahu might last another "four or five" weeks. If we're lucky, and I sincerely hope we all are, by the time this issue reaches our subscribers' mailboxes and is posted on our website, this war will be over. I'm pretty sure not even the much vaunted "prediction" markets would take that bet as any certainty. In an era of "forever wars," this seems one that more easily than most could stretch on.
I write in the first days of what the New York Times refers to as his "reckless" adventure. Trump has offered no coherent rhyme or reason for his unilateral action. At times he has touted his interest in "regime change," something that the United States has proven to be notoriously bad at achieving. At other times, he wistfully expresses hopes that he can pull off a Venezuelan maneuver, where he ordered the military to extract the country's leader, and then makes nice with a successor, who will pay tribute in oil and pretend to be a US vassal. He says he has three or four potential successors in mind that he could back. Behind the scenes, he and Secretary of State Rubio seem to be pushing for a new leader in an effort to create a hat trick in Cuba. The fact that Iran has a population of 90-million and is larger than the state of Texas with a revolutionary history that is as embedded in religion, as it is in government, doesn't seem to have registered, giving some credibility to the Iranian response to his comments as "delusional." Trump is hoping for a spontaneous response in a country that is deeply divided, but that means nothing to Trump, any more than divisions in the US concern him.
