Sowing the Seeds: Can Wisconsin Uprising Grow Nationwide
Movement?

Pat Schneider

The Capital Times

June 15, 2011

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/grassroots/article_d16ad7c6-96cf-11e0-936c-001cc4c03286.html

It may have been a small crowd compared to those that
thronged the state Capitol in the winter, but the "It's Not
Over" rally in May drew the kind of numbers that would have
been stunning in any other year: 10,000 protesters gathered
under a threatening sky to raise a collective fist against
the political agenda of Gov. Scott Walker.

When Mahlon Mitchell, the first African-American president
of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin, took the
microphone on the steps of the Capitol, he evoked the civil
rights movement to call on the crowd to steel its resolve.

That movement transformed U.S. society, but perhaps,
Mitchell said, its leaders grew complacent. "They stopped
taking it to the streets. They stopped doing what we're
doing right now. I think maybe they lost their sense of
moral outrage. We have to reclaim our sense of moral
outrage, we have to reclaim our righteous indignation,
because this is our time and we are in the fight of our
lifetime," Mitchell exhorted the crowd. "This is our time!"
he declared to the loudest cheers of the day.

The analogy with the civil rights movement illustrates the
breadth of what's at stake in Wisconsin, Mitchell said in a
later interview. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil
rights movement's best-known leader, spoke in support of
striking sanitation workers in Memphis the day before he was
assassinated there in 1968, but his message was about the
fundamental value of every human being.

"This is not just about union rights, it's about workers'
rights, it's about the middle class," says Mitchell, a
lieutenant with the Madison Fire Department who has been
speaking around the country on the Wisconsin uprising. "This
has galvanized the people who were sitting on the sidelines
and not involved in politics. They realize now `the attack
is on me.'?"

Protests at the Capitol are heating up again, with acts of
civil disobedience used to disrupt legislative hearings and
bypass security systems. A "Walkerville" tent city on nearby
streets stakes out a round-the-clock demonstration against
the political proceedings inside. Recall elections of
Republican state senators who backed the governor's agenda
are slated. And the bill gutting collective bargaining
rights of state workers that started it all works its way
through the courts.

But a bigger question is whether the protests in Wisconsin
can become a broader fight against policies that squeeze
workers' rights, destabilize the social safety net, and
concentrate even more wealth in a sliver of society. Nothing
is guaranteed. Yet the uprising has inspired a change in
consciousness reaching beyond the state, experts say. And
they also say that with strong alliances between labor and
other advocacy groups - and the emergence of a progressive
vision for the future - the anti-Walker uprising has the
potential to kindle a grass-roots movement for economic
justice in Wisconsin and beyond.

Such a cultural shift will require determined action by
people who desire change fiercely enough to sacrifice for
it, as Mitchell told the crowd at the Capitol. "We cannot
stop this fight," he said. "We have to have sustainability;
we have to make our voices heard. Our resolve has to be
stronger, our pain has to run deeper, our passion has to
last longer."

- - - - -

Organized labor's predicament today is analogous to that of
African-Americans a half-century ago, says Dan Clawson, a
sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts-
Amherst who has written on labor and social movements. With
declining membership in a battered economy where political
forces are arrayed against them, labor's apparent weakness
in 2011 mirrors the plight of black Americans back when the
laws were against them and the majority culture did not see
its future aligned with theirs.

It's hard to predict what seemingly small event will spark
revolution in such unlikely circumstances; the rise of a
social movement is almost always unexpected, says Clawson.

A handful of black college students sat down in protest at a
whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., in 1960.
Their sit-in was joined by others, whose numbers grew day by
day in what one political analyst has described as "a
fever." In a way earlier sit-ins had not, Greensboro
inspired other protests that challenged the underpinnings of
segregation until there was no turning back; the civil
rights movement was burning. It seared American
consciousness with a new idea of fundamental rights. No
matter the stumbles or back-steps since, things have never
been the same.

On Feb. 13, 2011 in Madison, a couple hundred protesters
marched at the Wisconsin Capitol and the governor's mansion,
mobilized by the news of an attack on collective bargaining
for public workers. Enraged by revelations of planned
spending cuts, policy changes cloaked in the budget, and the
influence of corporate money, more protesters joined marches
at the Capitol. By mid-March their number - teachers,
firefighters, police, students, nurses, farmers, women,
senior citizens and others - swelled to 100,000, stirring
protests in other Wisconsin cities and other states and
capturing international attention.

Is it possible that after Madison things will never be the
same?

The popular idea of economic justice already has changed
because of what happened in Wisconsin, says Clawson, who
reports that in his circle half a continent away he's
hearing people say "tax the rich" with a frequency he did
not before. It's not that people had not been aware of
inequities in income distribution and tax policy; they just
didn't believe it was possible to do anything about it.
"What happened in Wisconsin leads people to say `We can do
something about it.' It is part of popular consciousness in
a way it wasn't before," Clawson says.

- - - - -

As evidence of the lopsided distribution of wealth mounts -
the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute reports that the
richest 10 percent of families claimed all income growth
between 1979 and 2008 - Americans are split over what to do
about it. A national Gallup poll released June 2 found that
47 percent of respondents think the rich should be taxed
heavily to redistribute wealth, while 49 percent oppose such
a policy. Results on that question have shifted back and
forth over the 50 percent mark for more than a decade.
That's in stark contrast, however, to the results of a
Fortune Magazine survey as the country struggled to pull
itself out of the Great Depression in 1939, when only 35
percent of respondents wanted to "tax the rich."

A growing sense of determination to change the balance of
power in Wisconsin can be weighed in the profusion of
organizations - many new, some existing - that lined up to
counter the Walker agenda: Wisconsin Wave, We Are Wisconsin,
United Wisconsin, Defend Wisconsin, Defending Wisconsin,
Recall the Republican 8 and more. They joined labor unions
in mounting a sometimes dizzying spin of actions that were
noisy, messy and exuberant.

None of the organizations is dominant now, but the absence
of tight organizational structure is not necessarily a
barrier to success, says Pamela Oliver, a University of
Wisconsin-Madison professor of sociology who researches
protest dynamics.

Big, powerful social movements in American history - like
the one for civil rights - have not been especially well-
organized, Oliver says. Often they have involved more than
one organization, with sometimes competing factions holding
different ideas. As the movements build popular support,
they inspire actions by small groups and individuals that
help spread their goals culturally as shifting social
relations and political alliances allow.

Such decentralized social movements have the potential to
produce great turmoil and social change, Oliver says. "They
keep opponents more off-balance, and can't easily be co-
opted."

But even a decentralized movement needs leaders to build a
sustained movement, some observers say. Leaders not only
oversee logistics, says Oliver, their charisma and influence
can inspire people to persevere.

A leader who can translate the message for the masses beyond
the picket line - and the Madison city limits - would be key
to any popular movement arising from the protests, says one
academic who is skeptical of their potential for a lasting
impact. "The people who organize these things tend to have a
difficult time articulating their message in a way that
resonates with the average person," says Mike Dalecki, a
sociology professor at UW-Platteville. "Until such leaders
emerge, it's not going anywhere."

- - - - -

Beyond leaders, the success of an emerging movement for
economic justice will depend on the ability of organized
labor, with its money, infrastructure and political
alliances, to collaborate with other groups whose goals are
in harmony with its own. Putting to work the picket sign
slogan "an injury to one is an injury to all" means assuring
advocates of other constituencies that labor, which so
impressively flexed its muscle in Madison, is committed to
working for other agendas.

That means overcoming a checkered history between labor and
the left. Organized labor in America as we know it today was
born of progressive laws aimed at quelling the social
upheaval of the Great Depression. Labor and the political
left remained aligned until staking out opposite sides in
the cultural wars attending the Vietnam War, feminism and
the environment. The fissure gaped for decades, as the
political center moved to the right and labor was branded by
critics as insular and the left as elitist.

The gap has been bridged, says Ben Manski: "A generation
ago, there would have been a question for the left how to
get labor on board. Today, we are labor," says Manski,
executive director of the Liberty Tree Foundation, a
Wisconsin-based progressive nonprofit corporation working
for election reform and greater participation in government.

"I think the labor movement in Wisconsin and many parts of
the country has shifted in a significant way in the past few
decades, and returned to its roots of focusing on organizing
and mobilizing workers," says Manski, who was a Green Party
candidate for a Madison-based state Assembly seat in 2010.
In the wake of trade agreements and austerity cuts that
diminished the quality of life for working people, labor's
goals now fall under the progressive umbrella, he says. In
fact, Manski, whose foundation launched Wisconsin Wave with
the Center for Media and Democracy, is seeking funding from
labor to support its activities.

If there's any progressive cause that labor must embrace to
build a new movement, it is the powerful, polarizing issue
of immigrant worker rights. Not only is that a movement that
has mustered millions of protesters into streets across the
country since 2006 to demand the reform of U.S. laws, it
also is one that embodies the issue of economic justice,
says Benjamin Marquez, a political science professor at UW-
Madison who researches Mexican-American social movements.

"Unions need to tap into the social justice messages these
organizations project," says Marquez. Fighting exploitative
practices like discrimination, nonpayment of wages and lack
of health care insurance fit neatly with labor's mission,
even though it is only in the last decade that organized
labor moved from a more hostile position and embraced
immigrant workers as potential union members.

That bond has been strong in recent months, says Christine
Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of the nonprofit Voces de
la Frontera, the state's largest advocacy group for
immigrant worker rights. "We are working together at a
closer level than we have before," she says, mentioning the
appearance of AFL-CIO national President Richard Trumka at a
huge May Day march that stepped off from Voces' headquarters
in Milwaukee.

But despite the formal support of immigrant worker rights,
Neumann-Ortiz says some individual unions have a ways to go
in embracing the philosophy. "Unions need to be very clear
that the future depends on building strong alliances among
all workers."

Besides its support of immigrant workers, who are the target
of an Arizona-style law introduced last month in the
Wisconsin Legislature, organized labor also has
conspicuously stood for women's and reproductive health care
coverage, which face defunding under the Republican-majority
Legislature.

Amanda Harrington, spokesperson for Planned Parenthood of
Wisconsin, points to Wisconsin AFL-CIO President Phil
Neuenfeldt's speech from the Capitol steps in March. "Let's
take care of each other," said Neuenfeldt to a group awash
with pink  "I stand with Planned Parenthood" signs. "We're
here today to say `It's not OK to take away our rights.'?"
Labor organizations are long-standing supporters of equity
for contraception in health care plans, Harrington said.

Neuenfeldt insists there is nothing new in labor's
collaborative strategy in response to Walker. "We've always
had coalitions and connected with other organizations around
issues of economic justice or fairness," he said in an
interview, adding that there is no political ideology
involved. "I hate to characterize it as `left' or `right.'
This is about democracy in the workplace; about shared
sacrifice but also shared prosperity. It is about the future
people want for their children and grandchildren."

The message of social and economic justice voiced by labor
also resonates with faith- and values-based groups. They
tend to mobilize more slowly than the events of the last few
months have demanded, but Brian Christens, an assistant
professor at UW-Madison who researches grass-roots
organizing, says it would be a mistake for a budding
economic justice movement to leave them behind. "They're not
as dexterous as some other groups that flare up and die
out," Christens says. "But in their best form, they are a
voice that politicians can't ignore, because they are not
going away."

Christens hopes the Wisconsin uprising will spark a
resurgence of political engagement by local religious
organizations but isn't sure that it will happen.

It may be happening in Milwaukee, however, where WISDOM, a
statewide organization of faith communities, is banding with
labor unions and community and advocacy organizations with
renewed vigor to work for economic justice, says organizer
Rev. Joe Ellwanger.

The participation of faith-based groups can lend moral
authority to a movement to resist leaders whose polices
disadvantage society's most vulnerable, he says. "It really
is the justice and morality of the issues that's going to
win the day ultimately."

- - - - -

Despite the evidence that a number of like-minded groups
have begun to bond together, the process hasn't been easy,
says Amy Mondloch, executive director of Grassroots
Leadership College, a Madison-based nonprofit organization
with development programs for community leaders. She recalls
watching the focus of protesters' wrath change during the
occupation of the Capitol from "an attack on public workers
to an attack on anybody receiving services from the state -
poor people, people of color, anybody with a disability - to
an attack on the environment and beyond that, an attack on
what democracy means in Wisconsin."

So what does that mean for collaborative efforts in a
sustained movement? "It's difficult to figure out what is
our shared goal here. How do we talk about environment at
the same time we talk about public workers at the same time
we talk about health care? How do we get to each other's
events and see ourselves as connected?" Mondloch asks. "If
people begin to frame it as a class issue - the working
class and the owning class - they'll see they share
something with everyone else in the room."

But even with a shared frame of reference, efforts to
marshal disparate forces for effective action has had its
ups and downs, says Erika Wolf, an organizer with the United
Council of UW Students.

"It's definitely had its hiccups, because everybody has an
agenda," says Wolf, whose organization helped bring
thousands of students from around the state to the Capitol
protests. "At the end of the day everyone wants to see that
this is a broad fight and that a lot of people are
impacted."

One group that has been notable by their relative absence
from the Capitol is low-income people of color, despite the
dire possibilities of proposed changes in funding and
administration of medical and food assistance programs under
Walker.

That's a real problem, says the University of Massachusetts'
Clawson. A movement that cannot convince its poorer members
that vital public services require the preservation of
public workers' resources will not succeed, he says.

And there's a lot of work yet to be done to refine the
message of the protests so that it resonates with people of
color, say community organizers in Madison.

"To build a collective movement, you have to develop a
collective identity, and there's no collective identity
here," says Monica Adams, who works with Take Back the Land,
a direct action group working on homelessness issues. "To
achieve that, we'd have to have some hard conversations
about race."

Low-income people were not visible at the protests in the
numbers that might have been expected because their issues
were not the main narrative of the protests or media
coverage, Adams says.

What's more, she says, mass protests, where participants
might take part in acts of civil disobedience, are dangerous
for people - disproportionately black and Latino - who have
served jail time and therefore risk revocation of probation
for minor infractions of the law.

"People of color are beginning to mobilize a stronger
presence, but it's not at the level where 100,000 can occupy
the Capitol. Can you picture that?" Adams asks. "They'd have
the Army in there. It's not a safe thing for us to do."

Even the leader of one the area's most influential minority-
focused agencies, the Urban League of Greater Madison, says
the economic equity issues of the Walker agenda are best
left in the hands of mainstream groups with the wherewithal
to lobby.

"Let the majority community with the authority, the
resources and the influence address those issues," Kaleem
Caire said in an interview, adding that he is concerned
about the legal limits of political activity for his tax-
exempt nonprofit organization, whose mission is economic
development in minority communities.

Cuts in state funding to support services are a problem, the
Urban League president and CEO admits. "I appreciate
everything everyone is doing to raise concerns around these
issues, but we need to be focused," says Caire, whose high-
profile campaign to found a non-union charter school aimed
at African-American boys in Madison had him testifying in
favor of a controversial GOP bill that would hand local
school districts' power over charter schools to a statewide
board.

It took a while for low-income people even to become aware
of the potential impact of the Walker budget on their lives,
says Kabzuag Vaj of Freedom Inc., a Madison nonprofit
organization serving immigrant and refugee groups that
hosted information sessions in several low-income Madison
neighborhoods.

Instead of political action, Freedom is focusing on helping
communities come up with ways of coping with cuts in
services, like growing medicinal herbs at a neighborhood
center for use by Hmong elders, and increasing access to
community gardens to grow produce to supplement family food
budgets. "We are people who have been disenfranchised for a
long time; we look for alternatives," Vaj says. "But this
Walker fight has created alliances with progressive white
organizations that we didn't have before."

- - - - -

UW's Oliver says her research tells her that an important
step in the development of a movement is transforming
protesters mobilized to respond to a crisis into proactive
groups working to advance their own agenda. There are signs
that that is happening.

Take, for example, the "Wisconsin Values Budget" unveiled
last month by a coalition of advocacy groups who say that by
increasing taxes and revenues and moderating cuts, it better
reflects the values of the state's citizenry.

"It's an important step," Robert Kraig, executive director
of Milwaukee-based Citizen Action of Wisconsin, says of the
spending plan his organization helped draft. "It's much
easier to attack someone else's position, and another matter
to come up with a constructive alternative. What has to come
out of this budget and the first wave of recall elections is
a focus on a positive progressive message on what kind of
society we'd like to build," he says. "We can critique
what's wrong with the right-wing vision of Scott Walker and
(U.S. Rep.) Paul Ryan, but that critique has to become a
vision of a more progressive future. They have a vision of
where they'd like society to go; we need a competing, more
compelling vision on the progressive side of the ledger that
invests in human values and human potential."

Some business entrepreneurs in Madison are preparing to
advance their vision of what business should look like in
the future. Brad Werntz, founder of Boulders Climbing Gym,
is part of a group of small-business owners who are legally
organizing as a progressive political action group. "We want
to be the voice of small business in Wisconsin for the next
50 or 100 years," he says.

The business model for major companies based on extracting
value - whether yields from a field or profits from labor -
is part of a dying economy, Werntz says. The future belongs
to businesses that create value in their goods and services
and put the value back in the community with local spending.
"Leaders of vision realize this."

National Nurses United has a vision for America that
resonates with the emerging movement in Wisconsin. The
upstart progressive union is soliciting support online and
on the ground in states across the country for its Main
Street Contract, a workers' bill of rights on quality of
life that embraces a holistic concept of health extending to
housing, wages, education and more.

It was the restlessness in Wisconsin, the refusal to rely on
political and legal solutions alone, that drew the attention
of the group, says President Jean Ross.

"Madison was the first time people were doing what we feel
is the only way to be effective: Taking it to the streets,"
says Ross, a Minnesota registered nurse who joined in
protests at the Capitol this winter and has been back since
to speak at rallies.  If it happens in enough cities across
the country, political leaders won't be able to ignore the
demand for economic justice, she insists.

And what happened in Wisconsin, Ross says, signals that the
time is right. She tells about a mock New Orleans-style
funeral march, with dirges transmuting to songs of
celebration, that was staged at the height of the protests
to mark a rebirth of the people's engagement. As protesters
marched down State Street toward the Capitol, Ross recalls
growing ever more stunned by the number of people who joined
in. "Coming up to the Capitol steps, I saw there were not
just thousands of people behind us, but many more waiting
for us. It rivaled what has gone on in Washington, D.C., in
the past.

"It told me that we are on the right track. People are
hungry for this."

____________________________________________

PortsideLabor aims to provide material of interest to
people on the left that will help them to interpret the
world and to change it.

Submit via email: [log in to unmask]

Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3

Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq

Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe

PS Labor Archives: http://portside.org/archive

Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate