Women Strikers Occupy Chain Stores, Win Big. Dana Frank
racial and ethnic lines. In the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike of 1912, for example, workers and organizers gave their speeches in literally dozens of different immigrant languages. In packinghouse workers’ union campaigns in the 1910s, Polish, Irish, and African American workers figured out ways to strike together even though they had huge conflicts. Ethnic solidarity can aid a social movement when people draw on cultural resources in their communities to then build to broader solidarities. We know employers are always trying to drive a wedge between racial and ethnic groups. There’s a long history of that. But there’s just as long a history of people overcoming it.
One of the things that’s changing today is that poor and working people are once again starting to realize that our problems are not about people failing individually. It’s that all this company or this system has to offer me is poverty. During the Great Depression, even when everyone knew a third of the country was unemployed, a lot of people still thought at first it was their own individual failure somehow. They had to figure out it was the system that was failing them. Also, you have to believe that organizing works. Because you have to believe that if you take the risk of a sit-down strike or the risk of an occupation it’s going to pay off. And that’s where history matters. Because if you look at U.S. history, it’s full of people going out on strike, full of people occupying things, saying, “¡Basta ya!, enough already!” People are always saying, “We are in this together and the only way out is together.” But you have see that and you have to believe in that and you have to know it’s possible.
That’s why this Woolworth story is so beautiful. It’s a true story, I didn’t make it up! These were absolutely ordinary young women who had never done anything like that. Some of them were sixteen and seventeen years old. But they were also very careful about choosing the right moment because they knew that if they didn’t choose the right moment they could fry. They had the media on their side, they knew how to frame their issues, how to present themselves. You have to be very careful about those things while believing deep in yourself that we can do this together.
You don’t walk in there all by yourself and say, “Mr. Boss, would you pretty please give me a raise?” You go in there with three thousand people all at once, and you say, “This is wrong, the way you’re treating all of us, and we are not going to accept it any more, and we have lots and lots of friends out there all lined up.” You have to believe in that power and that’s what solidarity is all about. But it’s also about having a vision of a labor movement that’s not just about one group of workers. It’s about seeing the need to fight for broader social gains, including big demands on the state. Whether it’s the antiracist movement, or immigrant rights, or gay rights, it’s about seeing all of these movements as a larger fight for social justice. That’s what’s brilliant about Occupy Wall Street and the way they’ve framed this as the 1 percent against the 99 percent.
We see in the thirties that the old strategies of craft unionism and exclusion utterly fail to deal with the economic crisis and a series of new ideas and tactics replace them, like the sit-downs, occupations, and city-wide general strikes. It seems to me that today, although there are more progressive elements, labor is in a similar crisis. Less than eight percent of the working class has a union, manufacturing is globalized, millions of workers cross borders looking for work, the service sector is now huge, etc. All of this has presented the unions with a huge dilemma. It’s true that some elements in the trade union leadership have welcomed Occupy Wall Street, but others have been hostile, or remained aloof, or are worried that it is too radical or too disconnected from the Democratic Party. So there is tension over these new questions, new methods, new tactics that Occupy Wall Street is developing and the traditional labor movement’s practices. Given this, what is your opinion about the role the established trade unions can play and, perhaps, what they need to change?
There’s a long history of debate within the labor movement over whether it should be narrowly defined for just a small group of workers who get some power through their own struggles, versus seeing the labor movement as something broad that includes all working people and their concerns and their social movements to address those concerns, whether it’s immigration or gay rights or housing discrimination. The labor movement is most powerful when it understands itself as a social movement. And it’s also strongest when it understands that rank-and-file workers, their neighborhoods, and their families are the driving force of social change, not just the union officials. In the thirties, ordinary people, the rank and file, were unleashed. Better, they unleashed themselves. So that’s one big thing. The labor movement has to respect its own members and their creativity and power and their faith in themselves. This is tied in with racism and sexism at the top. We still have a problem of who top-level labor leaders are in many of our unions. People of color and women need to be in the top leadership, with power to define what the labor movement is and what its priorities are in terms of social justice on all fronts.
Historically, the labor movement has been incredibly diverse in terms of what people understand a workers’ movement to look like. In fact, what most people today understand a labor movement to be—that what a union does is have a government-sponsored election and then bargain a contract and then, if a demand is not in the contract, it doesn’t exist— that’s not what the labor movement looked like for its first hundred and fifty years. Just as important, it hasn’t always been the case that the labor movement and social movements address different forms of oppression. At its best, the labor movement has fused with and served other movements, like the women’s movement or the Black freedom movement or Chicano power.
You were trained in a school of labor history exemplified by your mentor, David Montgomery, who just recently passed away, that started from the assumption that working-class people can run the world. A lot of people will agree that we need to protest because conditions are bad and we should try to fight for some reforms but there really is no alternative to capitalism. In other words, the idea the world can be fundamentally different, as they said during the French general strike in 1968, “The boss needs you, you don’t need the boss,” is a utopia. Do you believe that labor, working-class people of all colors and nations, men and women, can run the world? Or is that simply a dream that we should put aside in the interest of more practical politics?
Of course it’s possible. You do, though, have to define working people as broadly as possible and that’s why framing this as the 99 percent is really important. I think the ordinary people who go to work every day, they don’t own big things, they don’t have a lot of power in the formal sense, but they do know how to do their job, how to run that office, or hospital or school or factory or store or port, they know how to run it as well as the boss—and usually better. Famously, secretaries are always having to teach the boss how to do their job. And we have examples today like in Argentina, where people are successfully re-opening and managing their closed factories by themselves. There’s a long history of co-ops and collectives and communes. You still have to duke it out and have a lot of arguments and a lot of meetings. Of course, you always have to have a lot of meetings! There are all sorts of other structures we know about, non-capitalist or pre-capitalist, in which societies are not based on the idea that one group of people owns things and exploits another group of people so that they can get even more money, right? Why should that be the organizing principle for how we manage our lives together? I think there is a tremendous wisdom and creativity and generosity among all people. Working people know that they could be doing it themselves, but we don’t get to practice it very often. Our systems of governing ourselves don’t have to be about these big, monolithic, global corporations paying off governments to change the rules so they have even more wealth. Then there’s the challenge of how get there from here. Of course, it’s a REALLY big challenge. How do we do it? We’re not all going to just get along and agree with each other all the time; but that doesn’t mean that we should then just agree to hand over all the wealth to the top 1 percent and say, “Thank you very much, yes, you can drive me into the ground.” People aren’t going to put up with that forever.
In the end, what the Woolworth strike shows is that regular people have this potential to change the world, and they often do. You have to believe that it’s possible and you have to have the right moment and you have to do it together. But when people do move together—and in 1937 it wasn’t just those Woolworth strikers, it was people all over Detroit, at General Motors,