The Occupied Wall Street Journa<\/a>l on Saturday: \u201cWe are speaking to each other, and listening. This occupation is first about participation.\u201d<\/p>\nThat said, take a look at the largest support base that has thrown its muscle behind Occupy Wall Street during the past week\u2014organized labor\u2014and the direction of this movement becomes somewhat clearer.<\/p>\n
America\u2019s unions have been so sidelined and mismanaged in recent years that Tea Partiers last winter thought they could run them off the cliff altogether. The workers\u2019 revolt in Wisconsin showed that wasn\u2019t about to happen\u2014and what we\u2019re seeing now in Manhattan is further proof that labor is retooling, its ambitions sharpened and emboldened by the participatory assembly in Liberty Park.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe occupation movement [in America] was started by labor in Madison when they occupied the capital, and that has given labor the go-ahead to do more, to become more active, more militant, and to support things like this,\u201d said Jackie Di Salvo, who teaches English at Baruch College and is a member of the Professional Staff Congress, a union of faculty and staff representing 18 colleges in the CUNY system.<\/p>\n
Since Occupy Wall Street began more than three weeks ago, Di Salvo has been instrumental reaching out to organized labor and gaining institutional support; the unions that have endorsed the movement are many, and they are growing. National Nurses United. United Federation of Teachers.<\/p>\n
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. The American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees. Laborers\u2019 International Union of North America. Amalgamated Transit Union. United Steelworkers. Industrial Workers of the World. Transport Workers Union Local 100. The list goes on.<\/p>\n
What we saw last Wednesday, Oct. 5, when 30,000 people filled Foley Square before marching en masse to Liberty Square, was the unions\u2019 first visible show of solidarity with the occupation, and it counted. Alongside thousands of students (with many teachers) who engaged in a citywide walkout that afternoon, their voices added power to the call resonating across the nation: that big finance and big politics need to gear up for a big change.<\/p>\n
Cementing that support, two days later AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka visited Liberty Square where he stated his support and his union federation\u2019s unanimous decision to back Occupy Wall Street. Feeling betrayed by free trade agreements that hobbled domestic manufacturing (under Clinton) and a false promise to allow workers to unionize via \u201ccard check\u201d (under Obama), organized labor has been on the ropes; the assault on pensions and collective bargaining diminished it further.<\/p>\n
What Trumka\u2019s endorsement of the occupation means is that unions, with millions of members and a formidable political apparatus, now have the green light to make noise. The responsibility is on their shoulders along with ours to grow this movement nationally.<\/p>\n
As we wrote in the latest OWS Journal:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe exhausted political machines and their PR slicks are already seeking leaders to elevate, messages to claim, talking points to move on. They, more than anyone, will attempt to seize and shape this moment. But how can they run out in front of something that is in front of them? They cannot. For Wall Street and Washington, the demand is not on them to give us something that isn\u2019t theirs to give. It\u2019s ours. It\u2019s on us. We aren\u2019t going anywhere. We just got here.\u201d<\/p>\n
The occupation, which has now spread to more than 100 cities across America, grew from the desire to reshape a criminal and bankrupt financial-political landscape that favors the 1% over the 99%. Where precisely is this movement going? Perhaps that isn\u2019t as important as the question about where it\u2019s not going.<\/p>\n
Said Di Salvo: \u201cWe\u2019re not going to settle for one reform demand that can be conceded and then lets us shut down the movement\u2014no one demand could meet the goals that have been set by this group for readjusting the balance of power in this country.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe other place we\u2019re not going is we\u2019re not going to go into electoral politics, weighed down into waiting for the next election when everything will be okay. We\u2019re going to keep engaging in direct action, the marching, the occupation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Labor\u2019s traditional power is mobilizing bodies in the street and in the ballot box. How much they\u2019re engaging in support for the movement\u2014and how much they\u2019re becoming it\u2014has yet to be seen.<\/p>\n
The next date to circle on your calendar: this Saturday, Oct. 15, when new encampments and occupations spring up across the nation, and across the world. Some are calling it a global day of revolution. One that will, it appears, be televised.<\/p>\n
Go to Original \u2013 nationofchance.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Let\u2019s get something straight: this movement has issued no demands. It is not a protest. It\u2019s an occupation. Rebellions don\u2019t have demands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15091\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}