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by Andrew_Archive
Thanks for the reply. I think the key is the kind of rank-and-file militancy/participation and meaningful community outreach required for a strike to have real potential. Especially for public sector unions, which need to position themselves as defenders of the broader public good, advocates for all workers. This community plug-in, beyond not just the workplace but extending beyond membership, is one key to the CTU's power, especially as rooted in a broader vision for education itself. It's a union willing to advance and defend its own social vision. And this has meant a willingness to actually confront the "abusive relationship" with the Democratic Party and its attempts to dismantle public education. Micah Uetricht wrote:Rather than continuing an insider strategy that has netted so little for the rest of labor over the years, the CTU has entered into open opposition with the neoliberal wing of the party.At the same time, the union has put forth its own vision of reform, both at the bargaining table and in the streets through their engagement in mass action, their September strike, and their formal policy recommendations. It is a vision that explicitly rejects the Democratic Party s education agenda and offers a strong program to shore up public schools as a public good “stronger than any reform proposals by the two major national teachers unions.[...]What is possible, and what is necessary, if labor and the broader left ever stand a chance of reversing the rightward shift of the Democrats and mounting an effective pushback against neoliberalism more broadly, is a shift in what that political engagement looks like, towards an increasingly confrontational stance with the sections of the Democratic Party now on the attack against unions and the public sphere.That stance must be centered around labor s ability and willingness to engage in mass action like strikes, rather than the perpetual hope that the Democrats will someday return to labor s corner through a continual moving of the goalposts rightward as national teachers unions and the broader labor movement have done.The Chicago Teachers Union accomplished this in their 2012 strike. They identified who their allies and who their enemies were within the party; they forced the hand of those enemies in the streets with 30,000 striking educators, and they approached their allies from a new posture of power, with the threat of mass mobilization against those allies an unspoken but ever-present possibility.It is the possibility of a labor movement that views its interactions with the Democratic Party with clear eyes and from a position of mass action-based power that stands a chance to beat back the party s openly neoliberal wing ...https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/12/ctu-and-dems/Meanwhile, it's not uncommon for people in unions to have no clue who their shop steward is. I know that my own union -- which used to be among the most radical -- has been willing to let smaller locals fall instead of fight for them, and there's virtually no commitment to rank-and-file training and empowerment. I totally agree with Gindin on the bigger picture: A crucial lesson from the past quarter century is that if we lower our expectations and keep our heads down, this will hardly protect us; in fact it virtually invites the other side to be more aggressive. Unless we think more ambitiously and more radically, things will continue to get worse.Finally, what we face is an organizational barrier. If we understand the inactivity of workers as reflecting their fatalism, their sense that nothing can be done, then this can only be addressed by concretely demonstrating the potentials of organized collective action. Workers aren't inherently radical and they're not inherently conservative “ they adapt to the structured options they face. Once they are convinced that organizations exist that hold out some real promise that struggle can change things, even if that will take time, workers will be there. http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/878.phpAnd also Deena Ladd: Unions need to realize that bargaining in the context of austerity and the recent recession is very different. Community movements and strong internal organizing are critical. For example, there is an alliance leading a campaign to raise the minimum wage in Ontario to bring it to $14. It s a great opportunity for unions to work with community groups to raise people above poverty. Unions should recognize that they have members who make $14 or less and that it won t be possible to raise these wages acting only at bargaining time. Working in alliance with non-union workers opens a space for building relationships, and it fosters a political understanding of what it means to create a left-wing movement.http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/ ... ground-up1