via Colorlines.com

In 1886, 300,000 workers, a great number of them immigrants and anarchists, went on general strike across the United States. That day, they took another step in the long march toward an eight-hour workday that had started in the 1860’s and didn’t end until well into the 20th century. That strike and the Haymarket Massacre that followed days later sparked a global tradition of celebrating unity among all workers, a tradition that never quite took hold in the United States with the same gusto as it did in other countries.

Over the last decade, the immigrant rights movement has revived May Day rallies and marches as a response to the waves of hate hitting immigrants since September 11, 2011. After something of a winter hiatus, Occupiers across the country have added their voices to those of immigrant organizations calling for massive marches and a general strike today. The strike includes no shopping, providing an action for those who can’t skip work or school for whatever reason.

There are also places where a partnership between Occupying and immigrant rights isn’t taking hold. In Los Angeles, there will be two events; a morning march led by immigrant rights groups, as has been true for a decade, and another in the afternoon organized by Occupy L.A. Michael Novick, a spokesperson for Occupy L.A. pulled up a generalist argument for the separation in an interview with CNN. May Day isn’t just about immigrants, he said; “It’s for labor rights, for economic and social justice, for economic equity, and for peace. And we think that will build a strong force downtown to say this is going to be a day that could change the world a little bit and hopefully for the better.”

It’s unfortunate that a march led by immigrants with those same messages doesn’t count as broad and inclusive in L.A.; that doesn’t seem to be an issue in New York, for example, where the immigrant rights groups and OWS have merged their major events.

Colorlines.com and our publisher, the Applied Research Center (ARC), continue to explore the relationship between OWS and the racial justice organizations that work to ensure that economic and social justice solutions take root in communities of color. ARC staff has been involved with Occupy Research, a network of academics and independent researchers doing research about and for the movement. We’ve conducted a series of focus groups with youth organizers involved in Occupy in various cities, including Oakland, New York, Portland, Baltimore, and Atlanta, and will be reporting on those later this Spring.

We are reminded daily that the 99 percent isn’t monolithic, and that the mechanisms that cause suffering differ from community to community. Some of the conditions that are new for this generation of the white middle class — the structures that bilk them of their assets or prevent them from acquiring any — are very old indeed, and often function with a particular sharpness, for people of color. That isn’t a coincidence, and economic justice movements would do well to deal with these patterns explicitly and deeply if they hope to solve the problem for everybody. In recent weeks, we’ve talked with Occupiers, activists and big thinkers about the question that will need to be asked as long as the movement carries on: “Where is the color in Occupy Wall Street?” The answer turns out to be: “wherever we put it.”

— Rinku Sen and Yvonne Yen Liu

This article appeared in the May 2012 issue of Sojourners magazine.

Low-wage work and racial inequity are rife in jobs that move food to your table.

IN THE U.S. food supply chain, 20 million workers labor in hazardous conditions for low wages. Uylonda Dickerson was one of them. Dickerson, a 39-year-old single African-American mother in Will County, Illinois, would show up every morning, hoping for work, at one of the many warehouses that litter the landscape of her area southwest of Chicago.

The Chicago region, once a proud steel and manufacturing hub, is now a major portal for food and other commodities produced cheaply overseas, transported by rail from West Coast ports, and slated for destinations in the Midwest or on the East Coast. Ironically, the workers—more than 80 percent of whom are African American or Latino—who were displaced from good, union jobs when factories closed are now employed in bad, temporary jobs, moving goods made in China.

The warehousing and storage industry, which feeds big-box retailers such as Walmart, relies on a pool of temporary laborers. This exempts employers from paying living wages or providing basic benefits and workers’ compensation; it also short-circuits worker attempts to organize into a union. Their costs of living are then displaced onto society. One in four warehouse workers relied on public assistance to survive, according to Warehouse Workers for Justice’s report “Bad Jobs in Goods Movement.”

On days when there was work, Dickerson was not paid an hourly rate, but by how many trailers she unloaded. She was sexually harassed by male colleagues and harangued by her supervisors for taking bathroom breaks. The job took a physical toll: “My body still is not the same,” she told a Huffington Post reporter. “I still have aches and I still have pains. I have migraines because of the stress I went through.”

People of color are particularly concentrated in the lowest-paid sectors of the food chain: agricultural labor and retail service, according to “The Color of Food,” a recent report by the Applied Research Center. At all stages of the supply chain—production, processing, distribution, and service—people of color make less than white workers. In the distribution sector (which encompasses warehouse and storage workers such as Dickerson), the typical yearly wage for a white worker is $42,234, while a worker of color earns only $27,452.

For women, there’s an additional penalty: Women of color make 30 to 50 cents less for every dollar earned by a white male worker. Food chain workers are also particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment; for example, in a 2010 survey of women farm workers in California’s Central Valley, 80 percent reported experiencing such harassment.

A manager in the logistics industry has the potential to earn a family-sustaining wage, but, with only one managerial position for every 100 warehouse jobs, few opportunities exist for warehouse workers to move up the career pathway. Not many of those opportunities go to people of color: Whites make up 74 percent of managers and 85 percent of chief executives. Women of color are even rarer in the executive class, making up just 10 percent of all managers.

Much of the labor in the food system cannot be outsourced—a key leverage point for worker advocates. Across the country, warehouse and storage workers are contesting the precarious conditions in which they labor. Warehouse Workers for Justice has filed nine lawsuits and numerous complaints with state and federal government demanding enforcement of labor laws. Advocates representing warehouse workers in California’s Inland Empire are pursuing similar measures. And Uylonda Dickerson is now an organizer with Warehouse Workers for Justice, working to shine a light on the conditions for the workers who stock the grocery shelves at Walmart.

Yvonne Yen Liu co-authored “The Color of Food” and is a senior researcher at the Applied Research Center, a racial justice think and action tank that publishes Colorlines.com.

Source URL: http://sojo.net/magazine/2012/05/injustice-food-chain

Four environmental organizers and researchers examine the ‘green jobs’ buzz.
By Rebecca Burns, In These Times
April 3, 2012

A “green recovery” is being championed as a solution to both ecological and economic crisis, but the sanguine rhetoric has not always been matched by progress toward a more sustainable U.S. economy. Growth in “green jobs” has so far included waste incineration and offshore manufacturing of electric sports cars along with weatherization of homes and expansion of public transit. While the Right and industry lobbyists assail the very notion of green jobs, progressive critics argue that the catch-all term permits corporations to continue business as usual while banking public dollars to “greenwash” their image.

In These Times discussed the green jobs conundrum with four environmental organizers and researchers, including David Foster, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a partnership between labor unions and environmental groups; Yvonne Yen Liu, a senior researcher with the Applied Research Center who has examined inequities in the green economy; Joanne Poyourow, a member of Transition Los Angeles, which organizes community-led responses to climate change and shrinking energy supplies; and Ananda Tan, U.S. program manager with the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, which mobilizes for clean energy and zero waste.

President Obama’s first campaign ad of 2012 touts 2.7 million jobs in the clean energy economy. Do the realities of green job creation match the hype?

David: 2.7 million is a sound but very conservative number — an awful lot of economic activity isn’t counted in that estimate. This is the section of the economy that’s growing faster than all others.

Joanne: To bank on green jobs as the salvation to bring this economy out of recession is giving people false hope. We’re facing a bio-capacity issue as well as a “greenness” issue. Many of the “green” industries that are being touted by corporations and government officials are really ways of greencasting North Americans’ excessive consumption.

There is no standard definition of a “green job.” Does this impact the ability to hold industries accountable? What should be considered a green job?

David: A green job is nothing but a blue-collar job with a green purpose. The green economy could pick up all the jobs that currently exist if we started using products we already make for different purpose — steel is used to manufacture Hummers, but it could also be used for wind turbine towers.

Ananda: Any meaningful definition of “green jobs” should require real evidence of environmental, public health and community economic benefits. Industry has duped lawmakers into gifting them billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies for false solutions — waste incinerators, biomass incinerators, clean coal and nuclear power — that divert public money, increase pollution and burn materials, which if recycled instead would create 10 times the new jobs.

Many have argued that a clean-energy economy can also be a more equitable economy. How true has this proven so far?

Yvonne: When we talk about green jobs, we often don’t include standards around race, gender and class equity. Less than 30 percent of green jobs are held by blacks and Latinos. Ninety percent of green construction and energy firms are managed and owned by white people.

Ananda: Designs and plans for the green economy need to be made at a community level, where there’s more expertise developing jobs that are not only green but good. In San Francisco, a unionized recycling company has achieved nearly 80 percent recycling while providing those jobs to the poorest in the city.

With fossil fuel production highly subsidized, how can clean energy be competitive? How dependent are clean-energy jobs on federal funding?

David: The failure to pass national clean-energy legislation was a great failure. A regulatory system that mandates targets and timelines on the goals for renewable energy production gives a clear signal to the private-sector economy that we intend to head in a different direction. Without that kind of broad policy, we’re left doing these initiatives piecemeal.

Yvonne: We don’t need to depend on the federal government to bail us out, because they haven’t yet. We can be resilient in our ability to sustain our families and our communities. The Alliance to Develop Power in Western Massachusetts is at the center of an $80 million community economy that started out by facilitating a housing cooperative, and then branched out into contracting and green construction work like retrofits and weatherizing. Community-funded projects like Solar Mosaic here in Oakland allow people to donate money to have solar panels installed, usually at a community center or nonprofit site. After it’s installed, the money gets paid to the investors and generates wealth for the community in the form of energy savings

Ananda: We need to re-localize our political priorities. Start with the governments we can hold accountable to come down on big polluters in our backyards, and shift the local subsidies — utility contracts, waste contracts — that are feeding polluting industries.

Joanne, tell us about your work in Transition Los Angeles.

Joanne: Transition is a network of grassroots groups that are asking: What will climate change mean for our local food supply? What can we do to ensure our energy and water supplies? Six years ago in L.A., five of us started by putting in a community garden in the site where we were meeting. Then we began gardening classes, rainwater harvesting demonstrations and a miniature orchard. We’re working in conjunction with the L.A. Unified School District (LAUSD) and the mayor’s office to build a new garden at a local middle school that will define some of LAUSD’s models for the entire area. We touch a few thousand people now through eight groups based in different neighborhoods.

How do your organizations build support for this agenda, particularly among groups worried about losing existing jobs?

Ananda: We need to break away from the dichotomy of jobs versus environment. If we doubled our national recycling rate, we could create 1.5 million new jobs, and the climate pollution reduction would be equivalent to taking 50 million cars off the road.

But given continued economic contraction, is the green jobs paradigm an adequate response to either the unemployment or the climate crises?

David: There is a green model of economic growth that can put Americans back to work doing the work that America needs done — the construction of mass transit systems, renewable energy production and infrastructure, the retrofitting of every commercial building and home in America. The fundamental problem has been that the Obama administration’s stimulus package was too small. But it’s given some clear signs about how to use green growth as a way to return us to full employment.

Joanne: To be depending on government dollars to re-float an economy that we saw in the ’80s and ’90s is unrealistic. Faced with a severe curtailment of our energy supplies within the next five-to-10 years, government is not that powerful. The current packaging of green jobs isn’t moving us toward something that is going to make our local communities more resilient. We are facing a future where we will have less ability to transport food, to manage our sewage and to move our waste. The transformation is going to be coming from a lot of much smaller industries.

Yvonne: I like the term “community economy” instead of “green economy” because it doesn’t allow corporations to use the cover of green jobs to continue with their same practices. We’re so naturalized to thinking within the system of capitalism. This [Occupy] moment is giving us a psychic break to think outside of that. I think the long-term solution does lie in community economies.

This article is permanently archived at: http://inthesetimes.com/main/article/12941

Call for Proposals

Research Justice Track 2012: http://researchjustice.com
Allied Media Conference: http://amc.alliedmedia.org
June 28-July 1, 2012 in Detroit, Michigan

Submit a Proposal: http://talk.alliedmedia.org
Deadline: March 15, 2012

Research is an essential part of creating the knowledge required to enact change. Communities have first hand experience of oppressions, and research is a tool to package those experiences so that it can be used strategically to affect change. For example, domestic workers in New York documented working conditions in their industry and used the data to pass the first ever statewide Bill of Rights. Students in Oakland interviewed their peers to create recommendations that were included in the school district’s strategic plan that would better serve students’ needs. Profiles of restaurant owners informed the strategy to win back wages for workers.

Knowledge is power; it has the ability to legitimate, establish, and undermine authority and the 1%. What we consider as common sense is socially constructed by the power elite, who skew facts to their advantage. We as the 99% can create new regimes of information by shifting the production of knowledge to the periphery of political and economic power and to refocus the critical gaze onto the 1%, as the subjects of inquiry.

Hegemony is established, according to Antonio Gramsci, through coercion and consent. Abroad, the shadow of the U.S. empire is shrinking. Here, at home, municipal governments and police have violently cracked down on the insurgent Occupy movement, while Congress and White House continue to bail out banks and corporations, so they can continue to wreak their structural havoc, in pursuit of profit.

Help us build a new regime of knowledge, that can empower communities now and into the future, as we collectively face global economic contraction and devastating ecological crises. We are looking to foment a revolution in research and knowledge production, starting with our gathering in Detroit this summer 2012.

We have three goals with the Research Justice track:
1) To create a community of radical researchers and expand our capacity to create liberatory knowledge through skillshares and hands-on workshops;
2) To support participant action research by and for indigenous communities, youth, low-income people of color, etc.; and
3) To encourage research targeting the 1%.

To that end, we call for sessions that fall into the following categories:

___How-to: Hands on, tools, methods, skillshares.
___Theory: theory, strategy, history, postcolonial, decolonial, militant coresearch, movement based research, liberatory knowledge, revolutionary inquiry.
___Examples: Existing research projects, such as Occupy Research, Excluded Workers, youth models. Case studies: challenges and lessons learned.
___Participant Action Research at AMC: Deconstructing Detroit, visions of a city of hope, what is media-based organizing, definitions of a community media economy.
___Future: National strategy/working meetings, ongoing research network.

To submit a proposal, go to http://talk.alliedmedia.org. The deadline for submissions is March 15, 2012. Contact info@researchjustice.com for more information.

Track Coordinators:
___Kat A. Hartman, Data Driven Detroit
___Joe Rodriguez-Tanner, Detroit Future
___Saba Waheed, Data Center
___Yvonne Yen Liu, Applied Research Center/Colorlines.com

via Mobilizing Ideas, a blog of The Center for the Study of Social Movements at the University of Notre Dame

Picture by Julia Landau

Marshall Ganz calls Occupy a moment, but we have a history and a future.  My generation, in North America, was birthed over 12 years ago, in the streets of Seattle, when trade unionists joined with anarchists to disrupt the workings of global capital, well, in this case, the meeting of a major player, the World Trade Organization.  We refused to accept capitalism as a natural way of ordering our social world; “Another World is Possible” was a popular slogan.  We manifested alternatives in organizing our collective refusal.  Instead of relying on institutions created under capitalism, we created our own clinics, schools, decision-making bodies, and media outlets.  Some of which have formalized into counter-institutions that exist today.  The global network of independent media centers and community health centers, like the Common Ground clinic in New Orleans, started after Hurricane Katrina, are our legacy.

The Millennials may find inspiration when their peer, 26-year old Mohamed Bouazizi, educated yet unable to find a good job, self-immolated himself on the steps of the Tunisian governor’s office, sparking the uprisings of the Arab Spring.  Or, when 24-year old Bradley Manning, in a fit of frustration with military bureaucracy and the war abroad, uploaded confidential documents onto the Wikileaks website.  What is the future of the Occupy movement?  Approximately a half-year in and many camps have been violently evicted from the land on which they pitched their tents.  Many of us spent this late fall awake in an overnight vigil to defend a camp or recovering from being pepper sprayed by cops when trying to setup a new one.  At the time of writing this, only Occupy D.C. remains intact.  But, that is not the end of Occupy.

Like seeds released into the wind, we lodged into soil, to hibernate through the winter, and to unfurl new shoots in the spring.  For what Occupy has created is an opportunity for us collectively to create new subjectivities and to dream of a new world.  Social theorists have long thought about the relationship between the individual and society as a dialectical one, each informing the development of the other.  George Mead, for instance, wrote that social reality was an external thing that impressed itself upon and shaped a child during the process of socialization.  But, the self that had ideas that challenged social norms could win acceptance by the larger group, therefore changing society.

Under capitalism, Herbert Marcuse thought, the individual lost her capacity to think critically and the desire to yearn for freedom.  We lost our sense of self, subjectivity, and became objects in the process of production.  All of human life was organized for the instrumental means of achieving profit for the 1%.  We became mechanical producers, who worked to make a salary to enable us to passively consume mass culture and media.  This one-dimensional thinking dominated culture and ideology, focused only on keeping calm and carrying on.

One outcome of Occupy can be foretold by the example of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement or Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST).  Today, 350,000 families occupy 20 million acres of land, a challenge to global capital, which has setup white picket fences around the world, cordoning off what was once the commons.  MST’s flag celebrates the industry of the landless worker, represented by a couple holding aloft a machete, and their willingness to fight for land reform, with blood if necessary.   This flag accompanied MST leader Janaina Stronzake, when she visited the Occupy Wall Street encampment, before it was evicted from Zuccotti Park.  “Occupation was a time to grow,” she told the assembly, “To grow education, empowerment, and food community.”  The crowd echoed after her, amplifying Janaina’s words using the human microphone, “Occupy, Resist, and Grow!”

Janaina grew up in a MST occupation.  Her family lost their land to banks in the late 1970s because, like many family farmers in the global south at the time, they borrowed money in order to adopt industrial agricultural techniques.  Indebted and unable to pay back what they owed, the bank seized their land, displacing newborn Janaina, her eight older brothers, and parents to the city, where they survived precariously as field laborers.  But, in 1985, her family joined the MST and they moved into a camp, with 225 other families, for two years, where they studied and prepared to occupy land in the western part of the Parana state.

The MST uses a two-step method to expropriate land lying fallow, owned by corporations or latifundios, for collective use.  First, families are moved in rural camps, typically dwelling in shacks alongside highways, until land is identified for settlement.  This can take anywhere from six months to five years, but camp living has proved to be important preparation in transforming atomized individuals into collectively minded occupiers.  Camp residents receive a rigorous dose of participatory education, on politics and critical thinking as well as practical matters such as sustainable farming techniques and how to manage a cooperative.  Without this experience, families that move directly onto occupied land typically leave within a few months.  But, with this preparation, more than 90 percent stay for the long run.

The second step is occupation of the land by families, usually at dawn when security guards and police are sleeping.  Janaina remembers arriving early one morning with her family to an unused piece of land, but the police were waiting and prevented the families from entering the land.  So, they camped on the side of the road for two months, where conditions were difficult,  “hunger and cold were always stalking us,” Janaina recalled.  Brazil is unique in that, beginning in the nineteenth century, one had legal claim to land if it was serving a social function.  While petitioning through bureaucratic pathways for the title, the MST also moved the camp to occupy the plaza in front of the state capital, Curitiba.  After participating in seven occupations, Janaina’s mother finally acquired land, collectively.

Once land is occupied, the collective immediately begins to dig in and grow roots.  Peter Rossett describes how “crops are planted immediately, communal kitchens, schools, and a health clinic are set up, and defense teams trained in nonviolence secure the perimeter against the hired gunmen, thugs, and assorted police forces that the landlord usually calls down upon them.”  This is the new society that the MST is building alongside the current model of global capitalism.

Already, we are experimenting with land occupations.  A faction of Occupy Oakland tried to takeover a foreclosed homeless shelter on the day of the general strike.  They were unsuccessful, but planted a seed.  A seed that took root on December 6, the national day of action, where organizers across the country occupied foreclosed properties.  Next, come spring, as Max Rameau promises, we will emerge and bloom.

Postscript:

I had the opportunity to ask Janaina: How does the MST example apply to Occupy, which does seem primarily to be urban?  I found her response quite profound.  She said, “It’s time to break the Cartesian dualism, step away from the rural versus urban dichotomy, and think of other ways to defend land, grow food, and distribute resources… We who are living in ‘urban’ places can create ‘rural’ spaces, to grow our own food.”