SocialismBeta
7th October 2015, 02:42
This is not mine, but I read it and I think it is definitely worth a reading:
"Jane McAlevey on Fight for 15, labor’s crisis of strategy, and the difference between organizing and mobilizing."
[No link, sorry, weird restriction. Google "Jacobin Having the Hard Conversations", or something]
From the article:
"Here’s the thing: we need to do lots of mobilizing, no question. I don’t want to be painted as anti-mobilizing. The problem is that there isn’t any depth to the Fight for 15 campaign. We call it the Berlin Rosen campaign: one hot-shot media firm that’s gotten something like $50 to 70 million from SEIU to paint, through social media, the illusion of a huge movement.
Now, in Chicago they’ve got some real work on the ground going on, the original Sea-Tac campaign was a real organizing campaign — in fact, the very first real $15 campaign, was the one at Sea-Tac Airport. It was worker-led, there’s unionization coming out of it, and they won $15 now. They didn’t get a phased-in model that’s very complicated, where the minimum wage becomes $15 in 2022, when it’s no longer $15 because it isn’t indexed. We should be looking more closely at that original campaign rather than the mostly publicity, social media campaign we have now.
Of course, it’s great that people are getting a raise. A dollar an hour here and there is a good thing, even if it’s phased in and complicated. The problem is that isn’t also doing any deep organizing.
I was having this conversation with some people from the climate movement recently, and I challenged them on organizing. They said that the climate is going so fast that their job isn’t organizing — they’re all mobilizing. Everywhere I go, in every sector of the movement, people say that everything is so urgent that they’re just mobilizing and someone else has to worry about organizing. That is the problem: everyone is focused on mobilizing.
There are very few places where people are actually trying to figure out how to have live, face-to-face conversations that allow for self-discovery by the working class. And where it is still happening, it tends to be in the labor movement. So for all the criticisms that it’s easy to heap on the labor movement, there is at least still real organizing going on."
"Jane McAlevey on Fight for 15, labor’s crisis of strategy, and the difference between organizing and mobilizing."
[No link, sorry, weird restriction. Google "Jacobin Having the Hard Conversations", or something]
From the article:
"Here’s the thing: we need to do lots of mobilizing, no question. I don’t want to be painted as anti-mobilizing. The problem is that there isn’t any depth to the Fight for 15 campaign. We call it the Berlin Rosen campaign: one hot-shot media firm that’s gotten something like $50 to 70 million from SEIU to paint, through social media, the illusion of a huge movement.
Now, in Chicago they’ve got some real work on the ground going on, the original Sea-Tac campaign was a real organizing campaign — in fact, the very first real $15 campaign, was the one at Sea-Tac Airport. It was worker-led, there’s unionization coming out of it, and they won $15 now. They didn’t get a phased-in model that’s very complicated, where the minimum wage becomes $15 in 2022, when it’s no longer $15 because it isn’t indexed. We should be looking more closely at that original campaign rather than the mostly publicity, social media campaign we have now.
Of course, it’s great that people are getting a raise. A dollar an hour here and there is a good thing, even if it’s phased in and complicated. The problem is that isn’t also doing any deep organizing.
I was having this conversation with some people from the climate movement recently, and I challenged them on organizing. They said that the climate is going so fast that their job isn’t organizing — they’re all mobilizing. Everywhere I go, in every sector of the movement, people say that everything is so urgent that they’re just mobilizing and someone else has to worry about organizing. That is the problem: everyone is focused on mobilizing.
There are very few places where people are actually trying to figure out how to have live, face-to-face conversations that allow for self-discovery by the working class. And where it is still happening, it tends to be in the labor movement. So for all the criticisms that it’s easy to heap on the labor movement, there is at least still real organizing going on."