Wisconsin - How to Win - Fight for the Working and Middle
Class, We are All Union Now

1. Wisconsin's Fight for the Middle Class (Clancy Sigal in
   the Guardian (UK)
2. We Are All Part of the Labor Movement Now (Robert Creamer
   in Huffington Post)

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Wisconsin's Fight for the Middle Class

    This is more than a union dispute in Madison: what's
    at stake is Big Money's power to squeeze ordinary
    Americans yet more

by Clancy Sigal

Guardian (UK)

February 27, 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/27/us-unions-wisconsin

[see photo in original Guardian story - link above: An
estimated 100,000 people gathered at the state capitol in
Madison, Wisconsin on Saturday 26 February 2011 to protest
Governor Scott Walker's budget bill that would remove
collective bargaining rights from public employees.
Photograph: AP Photo/Wisconsin State Journal, John Hart]

    On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin! .
    Fight, fellows! Fight, fight, fight!
    We'll win this game.

    - Football song of the Wisconsin Badgers at the
    University of Wisconsin-Madison

My heroes have not always been cowboys but union organisers.
Mom and Dad were labour organisers, as were my cousins,
Bernie (printing trades), Charlie (shipbuilders) and Joe
(auto workers). If we had a religion, it was One Big Union
with loud, rambunctious mass meetings as its eucharist -
such as we are seeing in huge numbers of drum-pounding,
slogan-shouting local government workers in Wisconsin's
state capital Madison. We're talking about teachers,
custodians, clerks and garbage collectors, not to mention
sympathetic cops and firefighters.

Some kids are raised to respect God and country; I was bred
to respect a picket line. My very first parade, probably at
age eight or nine, was down Ashland Avenue - Chicago
labour's main drag - honouring a union official murdered by
company goons.

In a dozen other state capitals - in Ohio, Indiana, Florida
and others - there is a sustained, coordinated campaign by
recently elected and highly pugnacious Republican governors
to cripple what's left of the American labour movement. This
assault is essentially an ambush of the working middle
class. It is openly financed by Big Money, like the hard-
right multibillionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, who
also fund - courtesy of the US supreme court's Citizens
United decision - the Tea Party groups that supply anti-
labour's ideological storm troopers.

Sensing a possible kill, union-busters are - unlike our side
- in no mood to compromise. So, it comes as no surprise when
Jeffrey Cox, Indiana's deputy attorney general, calls
Wisconsin public sector workers "thugs" against whom he
advocates deadly force. "Use live ammunition," he tweeted.
Reluctantly, his boss fired him. Poor lawyer Cox was merely
saying aloud what a whole slew of Republican state governors
and elected officials are thinking, but dare not say . yet.

They want to push us back not just to the 1930s, before New
Deal labour laws mandated collective bargaining and anti-
child labour laws, but to the red-in-tooth-and-claw pitched
battles of the 1890s, in which unions were defeated by force
of arms - as in Homestead, Pullman and Coeur d'Alene when
local and federal governments felt little compunction about
shooting down strikers.

Wisconsin's governor Scott Walker, a dim bulb but ultra-
reactionary and with obvious political ambitions, has
threatened to bring in the national guard, and dispatched
armed state troopers to round up absent Democratic lawmakers
who have fled to avoid a quorum vote to strip unions of
collective bargaining rights. Now, Walker is twisting the
screw on unionists by issuing pink slips to state employees.

Wisconsin is a make or break fight for labour. The citizen
demonstrators camping out, in tents and on sleeping bags, in
freezing Madison can expect almost no help from their
natural ally, the national Democratic party, nor from
President Obama. For years, the now-defunct "centrist"
Democratic Leadership Council has been indistinguishable
from the rightwing US Chamber of Commerce and Business
Roundtable. Two years ago, a campaigning Obama promised,
"When I'm in the White House, I will put on a comfortable
pair of shoes and I will walk on that picket line with you
as president of the United States." Today, he says he has
"no current plans" to go to Madison - while his partner
Michelle chooses this exact moment to fly off to way-
expensive Vail, Colorado for a ski holiday. So much for
solidarity!

We are on our own in this battle to save America's middle
class. But it need not be so.

The Wisconsin workers will lose unless they turn their skins
inside out and make this a community fight, too. Unions are
notoriously insular and atrocious at public relations. They
can't afford the luxury of that ineptitude now. Unions win
when they reach out, convince people that a strike is their
fight also, as Martin Luther King taught us during the
Memphis garbage workers' strike, and in the more recent,
remarkably successful "Justice for Janitors" campaigns, and
my own Writers' Guild strike against studio corporations
three years ago when we touched base with churches,
synagogues and mosques, community groups, rock bands and
even reached into police and fire stations to ask for their
support. When you're walking a picket line, there's nothing
more uplifting - and PR-savvy - than being serenaded by
Bruce Springsteen or Billy Bragg while cop cars and fire
engines drive by blowing their horns and flicking their
lights in support.

But the public has to be convinced first. Junk those
placards that accuse the opposition of being anti-union.
Much of the Fox News- and Rush Limbaugh-propagandised public
is anti-union because it perceives public sector workers
especially as soft-living crybabies who refuse to sacrifice
high-on-the-hog benefits and pensions along with the rest of
us. Education, by any and all means, is the key. Make this
what it is: a fight to protect the American middle class.

It's not easy to put it right out there, with pie charts,
statistics and personal stories, among your neighbours, the
family next door, the American Legion post. The crux, as
expressed by America's most successful investor Warren
Buffet: "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my
class, the rich class, that's making the war, and we're
winning." But pushing the case that it was labour unions
that made the middle class could get through - because it's
true. When unions at their height, with 35% of the private
sector workforce in the 1950s (now down to 7%), bargained
collectively for better wages and conditions, it impacted
everybody and made their lives better, union, non-union and
anti-union alike.

Wisconsin has suffered badly from the "rust belt" disease of
outsourcing jobs, deindustrialisation and stagnating wages.
Still, the state has a good many Forbes 400 companies like
the plumbing giant Kohler, Harley-Davidson and Mercury
Marine, whose billions are left untouched by Scott Walker's
tax cuts to the rich. And contrary to his absolutely false
assertion that the "fiscal crisis" is due to bloated worker
pensions, the latest report, from the Pew Research Centre,
says that Wisconsin's state pension fund is one of the
healthiest in the nation.

Go, Wisconsin! You're fighting for all of us.

[Clancy Sigal, is a screenwriter and novelist in Los
Angeles. Chicago-born, he has worked precincts for
Democratic candidates since his teens. He emigrated to the
UK during what David Caute calls the 'Great Fear' and
returned to America after the 1984 miners' strike. He is a
reformed Fleet Street journalist]

==========

We Are All Part of the Labor Movement Now

by Robert Creamer

Huffington Post

February 26, 2011

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/we-are-all-part-of-the-la_b_828699.html

Speaking to a cheering crowd of eight to ten thousand
outside of Chicago's State of Illinois Building Saturday,
American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees
(AFSCME) Deputy Director Roberta Lynch said, "whether you
are a member of a labor union or not, we are all members of
the labor movement now."

She was dead on. In a matter of less than a month, since
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker declared war on the right of
public service employees to organize and negotiate the terms
of their employment, the public's perception of organized
labor has fundamentally changed.

For many who previously believed that unions were just
another "special interest" they now represent a labor
movement that is fighting for the rights of middle class
Americans.

The struggle has become a movement because the battle is no
longer simply about dollars and cents -- it is about
principle. It is about rights. As the AFSCME banners say in
Madison: "It's about freedom."

The battle of Wisconsin -- and all of the other states where
right wing governors have trained their sites on public
employee unions -- is no longer just a struggle over wages
and benefits. It's no longer about the "state budget." It
has become a struggle about the dignity of middle class
Americans -- about the principle of whether everyday people
have the right to sit at a bargaining table and have a say
about their wages, their working conditions, and their jobs.
It has become a symbol for the desperate desire of everyday
Americans to stand up straight and fight back against the
forces that are destroying the middle class.

Walker intentionally transformed this battle into a struggle
over principle by refusing to accept Wisconsin union
member's willingness to take cuts in salaries and benefits
in order to balance the state budget. Instead he has
insisted on stripping everyday, middle class Americans of
their right to have a say.

Luckily for the future of the middle class -- the labor
unions -- and the millions of others who are now part of the
new, broader "labor movement" have risen to the challenge.

As USAction President William McNary said, in an inspired
speech to the crowd in Chicago, this is a battle about human
dignity the same way that the garbage worker's fight for
union recognition in Memphis, Tennessee in April of 1968 was
a struggle for human dignity. That was the battle that drew
Dr. Martin Luther King to Memphis to make his famous "I've
been to the mountain top" speech -- just before he was
gunned down by James Earl Ray.

Martin Luther King inspired the world by his sacrifice in
Memphis 43 years ago. He was there to champion precisely the
cause that has become the center of the struggle in
Wisconsin.

The movement -- the new labor movement -- has spread like
wildfire across America.

Saturday, MoveOn.org and its allies like USAction --
together with public employee unions, teachers unions -- and
labor organizations of all shorts -- organized rallies to
support the workers in Wisconsin in every state capitol and
most major cities. Hundreds of thousands participated.

Usually rallies like this take months of planning and
require hundreds of busses to assure turn out. These rallies
were organized on several days' notice. People told their
neighbors who told their neighbors. The on-line tools that
have helped turbo-charge the movement for democracy in the
Arab world allowed notices of rallies to go out in seconds.

The turn out was about the wide spread anger at what
Governor Walker has proposed - but mainly it was because
people were inspired by the resolve of the workers in
Wisconsin - and the Democratic State Senators who have stood
their ground.

Movements are not primarily about material self-interest.
They are mainly about spiritual self-interest. They are
about inspiration -- about being part of something
meaningful -- about making history -- about empowerment --
about freedom.

The Obama campaign inspired millions. It engaged their
hunger for meaning and purpose -- for empowerment and hope.
It wasn't mainly about what they thought about Barack Obama
-- or what he could do for them. It was about how he made
them feel about themselves -- about what they themselves
could achieve.

In the two years since President Obama's Inauguration,
America had lost that feeling in the difficult struggle to
dig out of the Great Recession and the "sausage making" of
political battle in Congress.

In the last month, many Americans have found it once again.

The people in Chicago Saturday were from every ethnic group.
They were veterans of the Progressive Movement and they were
kids for whom this was the first experience of the feeling
that comes when you're part of something historic.

The radical right wing Republicans decided to strike now to
destroy organized labor. They wanted to destroy it because
it is the only institution in the country that prevents Wall
Street and the largest international corporations from
having their way with America. Organized labor is the only
organization that can simultaneously stand up for the middle
class at the bargaining table and the ballot box.

But by making their play to destroy unions they risked
something that from their point of view is much worse - a
reborn labor movement - one that involves labor union
members - and millions of others throughout America.

The right gambled that it could make policemen,
firefighters, teachers and nurses into the " greedy welfare
queens" of our time - scapegoats for America's economic
woes. Fortunately, most Americans see policemen,
firefighters, teachers and nurses as their neighbors - as
breadwinners for middle class families that are just like
them. Turns out it's tough to make cops, firefighters,
teachers and nurses into villains.

Instead of creating political momentum to destroy unions,
the right has sparked its worst nightmare - the rebirth of
the labor movement.

On his way to the Chicago rally, and AFSCME staffer was
stopped by a young woman in a parking garage. She asked him
about the AFSCME insignia on his jacket. "Are you part of
the organization that's defending the workers in Wisconsin?"
she asked.

"I'm an organizer for the union, " he responded.

"Very cool! I'd like to do that too," said the young woman.
That wasn't exactly the idea, was it, Governor Walker?

[Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and
strategist, and author of the book: Stand Up Straight: How
Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com ]

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