strategy and tactics

By Pamela Haines - Waging Nonviolence, February 3, 2023

Community wealth building initiatives are taking hold in cities across the world, strengthening worker pay, local economies and democracy.

A recent help-wanted ad for a laundry worker in Cleveland contained some unusual language, asking prospective candidates: “Have you ever wanted to work for a company that is 90 percent employee-owned? What about a company that offers a program to help you become a homeowner?” The ad went on to identify Evergreen Cooperative Laundry as the only employee-owned commercial laundry firm in the country, citing a commitment to building the wealth and careers of its employees.

Founded in Cleveland in 2009, Evergreen laundry lies at the heart of a movement that has now spread around the world. This attention to community wealth building is providing a 21st century model for Gandhi’s “constructive program,” which — along with nonviolent direct action — powered his overall campaign to overcome the political and economic oppression of colonialism.

The cooperative movement in the Rust Belt city of Cleveland has deep roots in community struggle for shared wealth. Its earliest origins are in the Mondragon co-op movement of the Basque Country in northern Spain, where tens of thousands of workers are organized into a vast co-op network that has flourished since the 1950s. Here in the U.S., when steel companies were closing down throughout the Ohio Valley in the 1970s — and moving to non-union, lower-wage regions in the south, and then overseas — a small band of activists promoted the idea of worker ownership.

By Crystal Huang, Jessica Tovar, Nora Elmarzouky, Ruth Santiago, and Al Weinrub - The Energy Democracy Project, February 2023

The energy systems in place today, in which energy development, control, ownership, and decision-making resides within Wall Street and corporate electric utilities, negatively impact the health and safety of communities, and fail to provide the energy needed to live, especially in the face of climate disaster.

A product of deep collaboration between grassroots organizations, the REFOCUS zine is a graphic tool meant to be shared with community, teams, and anyone interested in understanding the path towards energy justice.

Download the zine to learn how Energy Democracy work is connected from Alaska to Puerto Rico, and build a movement for energy democracy with your community! 

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By Jeremy Brecher - Labor Network for Sustainability, February 2023

Workers’ problems are not limited to their relationships with their immediate employers. How can they gain the power to affect the hidden decisionmakers who affect them both at work and in the rest of their lives? Two new books shed light on that question..

Books discussed:

•  Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor by Kim Kelly, Simon and Schuster, 2022.
•  The Future We Need: Organizing For a Better Democracy in the Twenty-First Century by Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta, Cornell University Press, 2022.

Kim Kelly’s Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor describes the heroic battles of workers to gain their rights and create a better life for all working people. It illuminates those who have often been left out of historical accounts, like “poor and working-class women, Black people, Latino people, Indigenous people, Asian and Pacific Islander people, immigrants of all backgrounds, religious minorities, queer and trans people, disabled people, the sex workers and undocumented people whose work is criminalized, and people who are incarcerated.” Many of them have been excluded not only from the history books, but from the self-declared “House of Labor” itself. This is labor history for the era of diversity.

Fight Like Hell not only recounts worker action in the past, it describes how these struggles are continuing today. Contemporary accounts range from the effort to win a union election at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama to recent struggles for equal rights for Black, LGBTQIA, and sex workers. Like workers in the past, such workers today have to put their jobs, their well-being, and sometimes even their lives on the line to win the most elementary rights on the job.

By staff - Earth Strike UK, February 1, 2023

The labour movement is facing a grave threat in the form of a raft of new and incredibly restrictive anti-union laws. These laws will make all-out strike action in several industries outright illegal and are designed to immobilise our movement.

Current anti union laws limit legal strike action to disputes between a specific group of workers and their employer over workplace issues, ruling out strikes over “political issues” or in support of other workers. The law also imposes a slow and bureaucratic balloting process and sets strict ballot thresholds. The new laws will also require unions in some sectors to break their own strikes and continue providing a minimum service level, set by the government.

In response to this threat Earth Strike UK and Free Our Unions organised a demonstration outside the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the government department responsible for both environmental and trade union policy. There was drumming, chanting, banners, and we heard from workers from across numerous industries who explained how current anti-union laws affected them and the threat posed by these new ones. Following the demo, we held a small assembly to discuss in more detail the challenges posed by all anti-union legislation and begin to develop a strategy of resistance. During the meeting we discussed 3 questions. Here are some of the outcomes of that discussion.

Question 1. What are the most important ways in which existing anti-union laws hinder workers’ struggles and the Labour movement? How will the proposed new laws do so?

By Jeremy Brecher - Labor Network for Sustainability, February 2023

For the past year I have been researching and writing about initiatives around the country to implement the core ideas of the Green New Deal at a community, state, and local level – what I call the “Green New Deal from Below.” I have discovered hundreds of projects, policies, programs, and new laws that embody the principles of the Green New Deal at a sub-national level. But as I begin to tell people about what I am finding, I often get a response that I could paraphrase as “The Green New Deal – isn’t that just last-decade’s fad?” That is often followed with the question, “What’s left of the Green New Deal?” That’s the question I address in this Commentary.

Green New Deal – the Backstory

The Green New Deal is a visionary program to protect the earth’s climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice, and eliminating poverty. Its core principle is to use the necessity for climate protection as a basis for realizing full employment and social justice. It became an overnight sensation with a 2018 occupation of Nancy Pelosi’s office by the youth climate movement Sunrise supporting a congressional resolution by newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calling for a Green New Deal. A poll released December 14, 2018 by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that 40% of registered voters “strongly support” and 41% “somewhat support” the general concepts behind a Green New Deal.[1]

Soon after the occupation of Pelosi’s office, a wide swath of public interest organizations endorsed the Green New Deal, which also instantly became a prime whipping boy for the Right. Its core ideas were embodied in legislation by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edwin Markey, which divided the Democratic Party into pro- and anti-Green New Deal factions. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden convened a Unity Task Force that included Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the head of Sunrise, which came up with a plan incorporating many elements of the Green New Deal but eschewing the name. Biden called his program Build Back Better, and after the 2020 elections this became the nomenclature of Democratic Party and allied climate, jobs, and justice programs. A broad coalition of organizations called the Green New Deal Network, for example, developed and promoted an extensive legislative program, described on its website as “in line with the Green New Deal vision,” which it dubbed the THRIVE Agenda.[2] Supported by more than 100 members of Congress and 280 organizations, the THRIVE Act was introduced in Congress in the fall of 2020.

By Zara Ashan, Clair Brown, Lena Gonzalez, Eddie Iasaacs, Steve Ongerth, and Carlos Davidson - Fossil Free California, January 31, 2023

By Lauren Bianchi - Labor Notes, January 31, 2023

For two years, teachers and staff in my workplace, George Washington High School, helped lead a community campaign to stop a hazardous industrial metal shredder, General Iron, from moving a few blocks from our school.

Repeating a historic pattern, city officials facilitated General Iron’s planned move from the wealthy and white Lincoln Park neighborhood where it had operated for decades to the working-class, majority Latino Southeast Side.

Our campaign won a major victory when we pressured Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Chicago Department of Public Health into denying the final operating permit for General Iron. It took years of mobilizing, street protest, and a month-long hunger strike to force the mayor to do the right thing.

The experience of Chicago Teachers Union members in the #StopGeneralIron campaign highlights the power of union members when we stand shoulder to shoulder with environmental justice activists to demand safe living and working conditions.

By Usufruct Collective - Usufruct Collective, January 14, 2023

The following is a DIY template for a liberatory Points of Unity for social movement groups and popular organizations. The following “Points of Unity Template” is designed to be tweaked and adapted to relevant conditions and variables of groups (including but not limited to the specific kind and functions of a group you are trying to form or assist). It is not a “one size fits all” kind of document, but something designed to critically engage with and reflect upon when starting or participating within a social movement group or popular organization. 

The following “Points of Unity Template” refers to various shared practices of a group– shared practices that relate to process and goal orientation as well as form and content of a group. Such shared practices do NOT require a shared ideology among participants for participants to sufficiently agree with them in the context of group form and functions. Accepting shared qualities of a group that some ideology (or ideologies) would approve of is distinct from a group being an ideologically specific group– a group that espouses a specific ideology and that requires shared ideology among members. Additionally, such “Points of Unity for shared practices” can exist within decision making processes and bylaws of organizations in tandem with or distinct from being present in a document titled as such. Groups can structurally include the following points of unity for shared practices in varying ways. And such points of unity for shared practices, if they are to exist overtime as qualities of a group, must be sufficiently present within (and developed by) a living content and culture made by participants. 

One crucial reason for including the following points of unity is the overall coherence of the multiple points when they are combined; for they round each other out to defend against various detrimental qualities (to the extent they are actuated in form and content of course). And yet, there is significant redundancy between the following points– and there are ways to combine the various points together to make them more succinct and less numerous. And there are ways to simplify points, elaborate points, or change wording for the sake of communication as well as needs and preferences of various groups. More numerically and descriptively skeletal and simple versions of points of unity often make more sense initially until if and when more coherent practical unity has been developed within a given group (or between various groups). For example, a group that is just starting could just have the points of direct democracy and direct action for a direct action group, or direct democracy and mutual aid for a mutual aid group, or all of the above for a group that does all such functions. It is possible for “free association” to be combined with “direct democracy” in one point through a holistic notion of participatory democracy or self-management– which can even be descriptively combined with the essential features of “horizontality”! Such a way of framing those points can be very useful, as it creates a way to take in what would otherwise be multiple points of unity within a single point. Such a simplification can be important, as the points are supposed to potentially unite lots of people. However, such a lumping of qualities together into one can have a downside as well; if such a combining of qualities into one is not done well, then it is possible for the substance of one or more of the multiple points being lumped together to be obscured in the process.

The following points of unity were made with community assembly groups in the mode of struggle against hierarchical power in mind. However, the first six points can be adapted and applied to other kinds of groups such as radical unions, issue-specific movement groups, direct action collectives, and mutual aid collectives, and the like.