[Moderator's note: Over the past several years
Professor Frances Fox Piven has been a frequent target
for Glenn Beck and other right-wing commentators. But
after her recent article in the Nation called,
"Mobilizing the Jobless," the attacks have intensified,
including regular death threats. We are taking this
opportunity to repost Piven's article in order to
counter the climate of fear and highlight her original
message. For more on the attacks see Peter Dreier's
recent piece in the Huffington Post,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/glenn-becks-attacks-on-fr_b_812690.html]

Mobilizing the Jobless
by Frances Fox Piven
The Nation
December 22, 2010

http://www.thenation.com/article/157292/mobilizing-jobless

As 2011 begins, nearly 15 million people are officially
unemployed in the United States and another 11.5
million have either settled for part-time work or
simply given up the search for a job. To regain the 5
percent unemployment level of December 2007, about
300,000 jobs would have to be created each month for
several years. There are no signs that this is likely
to happen soon. And joblessness now hits people harder
because it follows in the wake of decades of stagnating
worker earnings, high consumer indebtedness,
eviscerated retirement funds and rollbacks of the
social safety net.

So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-
ins and unruly mobs? After all, the injustice is
apparent. Working people are losing their homes and
their pensions while robber-baron CEOs report renewed
profits and windfall bonuses. Shouldn't the unemployed
be on the march? Why aren't they demanding enhanced
safety net protections and big initiatives to generate
jobs?

It is not that there are no policy solutions. Left
academics may be pondering the end of the American
empire and even the end of neoliberal capitalism, and-
who knows-in the long run they may be right. But surely
there is time before the darkness settles to try to
relieve the misery created by the Great Recession with
massive investments in public-service programs, and
also to use the authority and resources of government
to spur big new initiatives in infrastructure and green
energy that might, in fact, ward off the darkness.

Nothing like this seems to be on the agenda. Instead
the next Congress is going to be fixated on an Alice in
Wonderland policy of deficit reduction by means of tax
and spending cuts. As for the jobless, right-wing
commentators and Congressional Republicans are reviving
the old shibboleth that unemployment is caused by
generous unemployment benefits that indulge poor work
habits and irresponsibility. Meanwhile, in a gesture
eerily reminiscent of the blatherings of a panicked
Herbert Hoover, President Obama invites corporate
executives to a meeting at Blair House to urge them to
invest some of their growing cash reserves in economic
growth and job creation, in the United States, one
hopes, instead of China.

Mass protests might change the president's posture if
they succeeded in pressing him hard from his base,
something that hasn't happened so far in this
administration. But there are obstructions to
mobilizing the unemployed that would have to be
overcome.

First, when people lose their jobs they are dispersed,
no longer much connected to their fellow workers or
their unions and not easily connected to the unemployed
from other workplaces and occupations. By contrast
workers and students have the advantage of a common
institutional setting, shared grievances and a boss or
administrator who personifies those grievances. In
fact, despite some modest initiatives-the AFL-CIO's
Working America, which includes the unemployed among
their ranks, or the International Association of
Machinists' Ur Union of Unemployed, known as UCubed-
most unions do little for their unemployed, who after
all no longer pay dues and are likely to be
malcontents.

Because layoffs are occurring in all sectors and job
grades, the unemployed are also very diverse. This
problem of bringing people of different ethnicities or
educational levels or races together is the classic
organizing problem, and it can sometimes be solved by
good organizers and smart tactics, as it repeatedly was
in efforts to unionize the mass production industries.
Note also that only recently the prisoners in at least
seven different facilities in the Georgia state
penitentiary system managed to stage coordinated
protests using only the cellphones they'd bought from
guards. So it remains to be seen whether websites such
as 99ers?.et or layofflist.org that have recently been
initiated among the unemployed can also become the
basis for collective action, as the Internet has in the
global justice movement.

The problem of how to bring people together is
sometimes made easier by government service centers, as
when in the 1960s poor mothers gathered in crowded
welfare centers or when the jobless congregated in
unemployment centers. But administrators also
understand that services create sites for collective
action; if they sense trouble brewing, they exert
themselves to avoid the long lines and crowded waiting
areas that can facilitate organizing, or they simply
shift the service nexus to the Internet. Organizers can
try to compensate by offering help and advocacy off-
site, and at least some small groups of the unemployed
have been formed on this basis.

Second, before people can mobilize for collective
action, they have to develop a proud and angry identity
and a set of claims that go with that identity. They
have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry
and indignant. (Welfare moms in the 1960s did this by
naming themselves "mothers" instead of "recipients,"
although they were unlucky in doing so at a time when
motherhood was losing prestige.) Losing a job is
bruising; even when many other people are out of work,
most people are still working. So, a kind of
psychological transformation has to take place; the
out-of-work have to stop blaming themselves for their
hard times and turn their anger on the bosses, the
bureaucrats or the politicians who are in fact
responsible.

Third, protesters need targets, preferably local and
accessible ones capable of making some kind of response
to angry demands. This is, I think, the most difficult
of the strategy problems that have to be resolved if a
movement of the unemployed is to arise. Protests among
the unemployed will inevitably be local, just because
that's where people are and where they construct
solidarities. But local and state governments are
strapped for funds and are laying off workers. The
initiatives that would be responsive to the needs of
the unemployed will require federal action. Local
protests have to accumulate and spread-and become more
disruptive-to create serious pressures on national
politicians. An effective movement of the unemployed
will have to look something like the strikes and riots
that have spread across Greece in response to the
austerity measures forced on the Greek government by
the European Union, or like the student protests that
recently spread with lightning speed across England in
response to the prospect of greatly increased school
fees.

A loose and spontaneous movement of this sort could
emerge. It is made more likely because unemployment
rates are especially high among younger workers.
Protests by the unemployed led by young workers and by
students, who face a future of joblessness, just might
become large enough and disruptive enough to have an
impact in Washington. There is no science that predicts
eruption of protest movements. Who expected the angry
street mobs in Athens or the protests by British
students? Who indeed predicted the strike movement that
began in the United States in 1934, or the civil rights
demonstrations that spread across the South in the
early 1960s? We should hope for another American social
movement from the bottom-and then join it.

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