Labor Unions Join Wall Street "Occupiers" for Mass Rally

When the "Occupy Wall Street" protests began to attract notice last week, the initial reaction was to scoff at the "Trustafarian nitwits who lacked leaders, spokespeople, a policy agenda, or even much of a philosophy beyond anarchy, its cousin minarchy, and drum circles.
And then, suddenly, everything changed. “OWS” was the video-conferenced toast of this week’s “Take Back the American Dream” conference, embraced as the vanguard of Van Jones’ new “Rebuild the Dream” initiative. Micah Sifry of TechPresident.org measured the movement’s growth through “likes” on Facebook and found 232,000 allies, with growth on track to double every three days. Press coverage turned from mockery to admiration. And mainstream groups, including labor unions, MoveOn.org, and New York’s highly effective Working Families Party headed down to Wall Street (which, ironically, is no longer the center of global finance, as the biggest firms have moved uptown) to lend the movement their leaders, spokespeople, and policy agendas. What happened? Once liberals stopped and took a long look at the motley protesters with funny signs, they began to see something they’d long envied with an irrational fervor: the Tea Party.


It wasn’t just that OWS was the only thing happening. In fact, as David Dayen of Firedoglake has put it, Occupy Wall Street can be seen as one additional voice in “a longstanding movement of bank accountability,” involving local protests in Los Angeles and elsewhere, the New Bottom Line project, which has become visible in the last few months, and others. This highly disorganized constellation of efforts includes the very moving “We Are The 99 Percent” blog on tumblr, and there’s also a site called “The Other 98 Percent,” which has almost 100,000 Facebook fans. (Perhaps they could join forces and compromise on 98.5 percent.) The most visible impact of these several efforts came just last week, when California Attorney General Kamala Harris opted out of the proposed comprehensive settlement with banks over foreclosure fraud, joining Eric Schneiderman of New York in pushing for a more aggressive investigation instead.


Perhaps the most interesting is National People’s Action, a coalition of community organizations that has been leading well-targeted protests for at least four years and getting meetings with members of the Federal Reserve Board to press their demands. In the spring of last year, I came across several dozen decrepit yellow school busses parked in Rock Creek Park—they had brought NPA protesters to Washington, where they jammed the nearby front yards of bank lobbyists and the next day snarled traffic on K Street. It’s not my style of politics, but strategically making bankers, lobbyists, and policy makers uncomfortable has gotten results. And most importantly, NPA represents the actual people affected most directly by the subprime and foreclosure crises—low-income people, working people aspiring to, but not yet settled into, the middle class.


Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, speaking at a retirement community in Florida yesterday, denounced the movement. "I think it's dangerous, this class warfare," he said.


While some on the ground welcome the concept of a showdown with the "one percent," organizers (who claim to represent "the 99 percent" of Americans they say are being trampled on by the financial elite), say they remain committed to "non-violent" protest.


The question for today, though, is what affect the presence of labor unions will have on the tenor of the demonstrations. To date, Occupy Wall Street has set their agenda during twice-daily "general assemblies" with large-scale votes and directly elected "working groups."


The unions do not operate this way. They are top-down organizations. Their leaders, though elected, make most decisions autonomously. They are well-versed in fashioning specific appeals, the very concept of which runs counter to Occupy Wall Street's purposefully abstract message.


"Think Facebook or Twitter: These protesters have adopted that same decentralized structure, Columbia University political science Professor Dorian Warren told ABC News yesterday. "There's no one leader. It's not top-down. It's much more democratic, much more 'open-source.'"


"One of the beautiful things about [Occupy Wall Street]," says Professor Yochai Benkler, co-director of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, "is that it is a movement defining itself as it 'becomes.'"


While the concept of "becoming" or "creating space" for dissent, as organizers preach, might seem a bit far off to grizzled union vets, it's a bedrock of the "Occupy movement." But to the hundreds who've made their beds on Zuccotti Park's stone encampment the meta-narrative probably seems a little bit beside the point. Whatever the risks entailed in opening up their action to different groups, with different acting ethics, they're happy for the new support.