Organizing the Unemployed

[marmar]

from the American Prospect:



Organizing the Unemployed
During past recessions, collective action among laid-off workers was common. Will this financial crisis foster a similar movement?

Jake Blumgart | May 21, 2009 | web only



At last count, conservatively speaking, 13.2 million Americans were unemployed, and according to Paul Krugman, we can expect the numbers to keep rising through 2010. The spirit-crushing reality of those figures has led several commentators to pen editorials bemoaning the passive state of the American worker. While laid-off French workers bossnap (kidnap their bosses) and the Chinese Commerce Minister warns of unemployment-related unrest, Americans have exhibited few signs of protest.

It hasn't always been this way. During the Great Depression, the unemployed -- often led by political radicals -- engaged in militant action. They restored gas heating to those who could no longer afford it, reinstated broke families in their homes, and pressed government for more aid. In 1975, the Philadelphia Unemployment Project was launched in order to organize the poor and unemployed. But where is such outrage and organization today?

"Before protest reaches the scale where it makes its way onto the political agenda, you've got to have a sense that this is a collective problem," says Frances Fox Piven, a professor at the City University of New York and co-author of the book Poor People's Movements, which documents instances of mass lower-class defiance. "There is a lot of small stuff happening, and I think, but I'm not sure, something like a nascent movement is developing. I hope so, because I think that is the way to get the Obama administration to act decisively."

Although the masses have remained quiet so far, several groups are attempting to foster a sense of solidarity among those most affected by the financial crisis. In February, Tom Lewandowski, a laid-off union electrician, founded the UAEWI in response to Indiana's rising unemployment rate, then pushing past 10 percent. Former UNITE organizer Jack McKay formed FAM back in 2002, to address the jobs hemorrhaging from eastern Maine's manufacturing sector. Both men saw the need to create a social network for laid-off workers who, along with their jobs, lost the support structure of their union when they needed it most. The founders of grass-roots groups such as the Unemployed and Anxiously Employed Workers Initiative (UAEWI) and Food AND Medicine (FAM) see their organizations as proto-unions of the unemployed, channeling workers' anger and disenchantment into a productive force. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=organizing_the_unemployed

[izquierdista]

1. It's been zoned away

One of the first steps in organizing is to get people together. It's a lot harder now, when people commute great distances to work and find it hard even to organize a carpool. There are few company towns left, where all the plant employees that were laid off live in close proximity to each other. Now that people depend on the car to get to work and to go shopping, they will also have to depend on the car to go protest and to organize. So while old time organizing was labor intensive, now it has become capital intensive, much to the delight of the capitalists running things.