Picture by Julia Landau

Marshall Ganz calls Occupy a moment, but we have a history and a future.  My generation, in North America, was birthed over 12 years ago, in the streets of Seattle, when trade unionists joined with anarchists to disrupt the workings of global capital, well, in this case, the meeting of a major player, the World Trade Organization.  We refused to accept capitalism as a natural way of ordering our social world; “Another World is Possible” was a popular slogan.  We manifested alternatives in organizing our collective refusal.  Instead of relying on institutions created under capitalism, we created our own clinics, schools, decision-making bodies, and media outlets.  Some of which have formalized into counter-institutions that exist today.  The global network of independent media centers and community health centers, like the Common Ground clinic in New Orleans, started after Hurricane Katrina, are our legacy.

The Millennials may find inspiration when their peer, 26-year old Mohamed Bouazizi, educated yet unable to find a good job, self-immolated himself on the steps of the Tunisian governor’s office, sparking the uprisings of the Arab Spring.  Or, when 24-year old Bradley Manning, in a fit of frustration with military bureaucracy and the war abroad, uploaded confidential documents onto the Wikileaks website.  What is the future of the Occupy movement?  Approximately a half-year in and many camps have been violently evicted from the land on which they pitched their tents.  Many of us spent this late fall awake in an overnight vigil to defend a camp or recovering from being pepper sprayed by cops when trying to setup a new one.  At the time of writing this, only Occupy D.C. remains intact.  But, that is not the end of Occupy.

Like seeds released into the wind, we lodged into soil, to hibernate through the winter, and to unfurl new shoots in the spring.  For what Occupy has created is an opportunity for us collectively to create new subjectivities and to dream of a new world.  Social theorists have long thought about the relationship between the individual and society as a dialectical one, each informing the development of the other.  George Mead, for instance, wrote that social reality was an external thing that impressed itself upon and shaped a child during the process of socialization.  But, the self that had ideas that challenged social norms could win acceptance by the larger group, therefore changing society.

Under capitalism, Herbert Marcuse thought, the individual lost her capacity to think critically and the desire to yearn for freedom.  We lost our sense of self, subjectivity, and became objects in the process of production.  All of human life was organized for the instrumental means of achieving profit for the 1%.  We became mechanical producers, who worked to make a salary to enable us to passively consume mass culture and media.  This one-dimensional thinking dominated culture and ideology, focused only on keeping calm and carrying on.

One outcome of Occupy can be foretold by the example of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement or Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST).  Today, 350,000 families occupy 20 million acres of land, a challenge to global capital, which has setup white picket fences around the world, cordoning off what was once the commons.  MST’s flag celebrates the industry of the landless worker, represented by a couple holding aloft a machete, and their willingness to fight for land reform, with blood if necessary.   This flag accompanied MST leader Janaina Stronzake, when she visited the Occupy Wall Street encampment, before it was evicted from Zuccotti Park.  “Occupation was a time to grow,” she told the assembly, “To grow education, empowerment, and food community.”  The crowd echoed after her, amplifying Janaina’s words using the human microphone, “Occupy, Resist, and Grow!”

Janaina grew up in a MST occupation.  Her family lost their land to banks in the late 1970s because, like many family farmers in the global south at the time, they borrowed money in order to adopt industrial agricultural techniques.  Indebted and unable to pay back what they owed, the bank seized their land, displacing newborn Janaina, her eight older brothers, and parents to the city, where they survived precariously as field laborers.  But, in 1985, her family joined the MST and they moved into a camp, with 225 other families, for two years, where they studied and prepared to occupy land in the western part of the Parana state.

The MST uses a two-step method to expropriate land lying fallow, owned by corporations or latifundios, for collective use.  First, families are moved in rural camps, typically dwelling in shacks alongside highways, until land is identified for settlement.  This can take anywhere from six months to five years, but camp living has proved to be important preparation in transforming atomized individuals into collectively minded occupiers.  Camp residents receive a rigorous dose of participatory education, on politics and critical thinking as well as practical matters such as sustainable farming techniques and how to manage a cooperative.  Without this experience, families that move directly onto occupied land typically leave within a few months.  But, with this preparation, more than 90 percent stay for the long run.

The second step is occupation of the land by families, usually at dawn when security guards and police are sleeping.  Janaina remembers arriving early one morning with her family to an unused piece of land, but the police were waiting and prevented the families from entering the land.  So, they camped on the side of the road for two months, where conditions were difficult,  “hunger and cold were always stalking us,” Janaina recalled.  Brazil is unique in that, beginning in the nineteenth century, one had legal claim to land if it was serving a social function.  While petitioning through bureaucratic pathways for the title, the MST also moved the camp to occupy the plaza in front of the state capital, Curitiba.  After participating in seven occupations, Janaina’s mother finally acquired land, collectively.

Once land is occupied, the collective immediately begins to dig in and grow roots.  Peter Rossett describes how “crops are planted immediately, communal kitchens, schools, and a health clinic are set up, and defense teams trained in nonviolence secure the perimeter against the hired gunmen, thugs, and assorted police forces that the landlord usually calls down upon them.”  This is the new society that the MST is building alongside the current model of global capitalism.

Already, we are experimenting with land occupations.  A faction of Occupy Oakland tried to takeover a foreclosed homeless shelter on the day of the general strike.  They were unsuccessful, but planted a seed.  A seed that took root on December 6, the national day of action, where organizers across the country occupied foreclosed properties.  Next, come spring, as Max Rameau promises, we will emerge and bloom.

Postscript:

I had the opportunity to ask Janaina: How does the MST example apply to Occupy, which does seem primarily to be urban?  I found her response quite profound.  She said, “It’s time to break the Cartesian dualism, step away from the rural versus urban dichotomy, and think of other ways to defend land, grow food, and distribute resources… We who are living in ‘urban’ places can create ‘rural’ spaces, to grow our own food.”

Activist Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez once wrote in an essay that “there is no separating my life from history.” And it’s true: her life is like a thread weaving through the movements for self-determination and justice.  Born in 1925, she has lived more than nine lives: as a member of New York’s heady literati in the 1940s and 50s, a link between the Black Power and Chicano movements in the 1960s, a feminist critic of the sexism and homophobia within Third World solidarity groups here in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s, and a respected public intellectual in the left throughout her entire career.

In March 2000, Betita authored an essay for Colorlines that asked “Where Was the Color in Seattle?” engaging a new generation of organizers of color, wanting to make the link between global capitalism abroad and austerity measures impacting communities of color, here at home.  Connections, wrote Betita, “absolutely crucial if we are to make Seattle’s promise of a new, international movement against imperialist globalization come true.”  It was through this essay that I first came into contact with Betita and her ideas, as a young organizer of color both influenced by the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO), yet also critical of a movement that was largely comprised of white, middle class males.  Her words helped me think about how inclusion figured in other struggles, such as the antiwar movement and, more recently, Occupy Wall Street.

It was with these questions in mind that I had the privilege to engage both Betita and her old friend Olga Talamante in dialogue this past Sunday.  The two have a friendship going back more than 35 years. They first met when Olga was released from prison in Argentina, where she was incarcerated for one year as a political prisoner, and was tortured the hands of the right-wing Peronist dictatorship.  Now, Olga heads the Chicana/Latina Foundation, which develops the leadership of young Latinas, and is active with local LGBT advocacy groups.

Olga and I visited Betita in an assisted living home in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury area, where she was recently moved, bearing ice cream and chocolate (she has a sweet tooth).  Betita suffered from a stroke three years ago.  Since then, her cognitive functions and memory have been slipping away, a tragedy for a life so rich with experiences.  Her friends have rallied to support her, starting a Betita Martinez Fan Club, to organize support and monetary contributions for her care.

But here are snippets of the conversation we got to have:

Colorlines.com: I want to preface this by saying that we at Colorlines approached you to honor as a part of Latino heritage month.  But, we also have complicated feelings about it and my colleagues and I thought that you would too. So, my first question to you is what do you think of Latino heritage month?

Olga Talamante: The media and corporations celebrate one month as Latino heritage month.  But, it’s much more complicated than that.

Betita Martinez: Frozen symbols.  Even Latina heritage is a frozen symbol already, frozen in its definition of what Latina means and what heritage means.  We have to be careful of encouraging it, the symbolization, this point cannot be emphasized enough.

CL: You have played an important role at the intersections of many important movements. [For example, you ran the New York office of SNCC in the 1960s as a Latina.] How did you develop this intersectional analysis?

BM: That has been a wonderful opportunity, to be at those intersections.  The intersections have always been there, people were waiting to see that the intersections were being made.  I was just lucky, I happened to come along during those moments.

OT: You articulated what many of us felt in those times.  You said it.

BM: That’s a big honor.  I am happy when people saw the connections before I even made them.  I didn’t want to be ahead, I wanted to be with the people in the moment.  But, you end up being ahead because you’re different.  That’s the irony of it.

CL: What made you different?  Why did you change your name from Liz Sutherland [an Anglicized version, using your mother’s maiden name] to Betita Martinez?

BM: My mother played a role in that, even indirectly, because her mother’s name is Phillips.  And, she was a very Phillips kind of person born from Tacoma Park, Maryland.  She married my father who worked at the Mexican embassy, while she worked at the Swedish embassy.  So, her mind was already working in multi-directions.  So, it helped me to have a multiple sense of reality and identity, right there.  It made a lot of difference to me: I couldn’t be a simple two-dimensions; I had to be multi-dimensional.

CL: What inspired you to link the Black Panthers with the UFW [who were organizing migrant farmworkers]?

BM: The connections between people and their cultures are very important.  When we make those links, we strengthen those capacities to be human, in the best sense.  [She started to cry with emotion.]  It’s always there, hiding in the rocks, we have to give it a chance to grow.  A big chance.

OT: That’s what the occupiers of Wall Street are doing right now. Lots of people, workers and students, the young and the old.  It’s an evolving movement, changing every day.  New ones are springing up in cities across the country.

BM: [Occupy] is a real place for people to talk, to blossom.  How beautiful, how exciting!

CL: Your essay Where’s the Color in Seattle is inspiring many organizers of color to ask similar questions about the #Occupy movement: Where are the people of color?

OT: I’m excited some people of color are participating, but we should be the majority.  [Occupy] should be led by people of color. We’re the ones suffering from unemployment, from the recession, and from banks being bailed out.

BM: I hope that I’ve been an inspiration for young women and young women of color activists.  I don’t think about my work in the way that you talked about.  It’s an honor, it’s a legacy to maintain.

CL: What advice would you give to young women of color organizers today, on how to sustain themselves in the movement, as mothers?  [Betita wrote in her essay Neither Black nor White in a Black-White World that she “deeply regrets neglecting another identity: being the mother of a young daughter who needed much more attention than she received in those years.”]

BM: We don’t think about this.  It’s an issue we have to think about.  Women do both, raise a family and participate in the struggle, we have to make them connect.

OT: It’s an issue when you were doing this work and continues today.  I work with young Latina college students.  This is a key issue because many of them work and go to school.  Many are activists; many are mothers.  They are doing all three things.  I don’t have one formula except to say that it has to be part of the discussion, otherwise it’s your problem, you have to balance everything, you have to be superwoman.  We have to make it not the individual’s problem, but the movement’s.  We have to setup time and resources that can help women be a part of the movement, because if being a mother or working prevents you from being part of the movement, then it’s not working.

BM: Amen.

To read more about Betita’s life and work, see Tony Platt’s essay The Heart Just Insists.

Mariano Lucas Domingo traveled north from his home in Guatemala in search of work to support his sick parent. He landed in Immokalee, Florida, the tomato capital of the United States, where he found work harvesting tomatoes. He expected to earn about $200 a week.  Then Lucas met two brothers who offered him room and board at their family house, in exchange for a cut of his pay. This didn’t seem like a bad deal to Lucas who had no family or friends nearby, and also because the brothers offered to extend credit even when work was sparse.

Lucas spent the next two-and-a-half years living as a captive with other workers in a truck with no water or electricity.1 The workers were forced to relieve themselves in a corner of the truck and wash with a garden hose in the backyard. The brothers locked them in the truck every night, forced them to work even when they were sick or tired, and took away their paychecks. Lucas and his colleagues finally escaped from the truck one night by punching a hole through the roof.2 The two brothers were subsequently arrested and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

This story, unfortunately, is not unusual among the workers who produce our food.  While Lucas’ experience of being enslaved is certainly a horrific extreme, the 20 million workers employed in the food system earn low wages, work in unsafe and unhealthy conditions, and are unable to collectively organize to demand rights at work. Half of all workers in the food system earned just $21,692 a year or $11.05 per hour in 2008.3 That is well below what a family needs to make in order to sustain two children, according to the Center for Women’s Welfare at the University of Washington.4 In a metropolitan area like San Francisco, a family needs to earn around $26.97 per hour just to meet basic needs. In Cleveland, that figure is $20.21 per hour and in Atlanta, it’s $18.37 per hour. Close to one quarter of all food system workers live at the federally defined poverty threshold—earning less than $21,200 for a family of four—as per data gathered in 2008.5

A recent report from the Applied Research Center mapping out the race, gender, and class of the food system shows some sad but not surprising trends:

(1) People of color earn lower wages than whites in comparable occupations within the food system. Half of all white workers made $25,024 a year in 2008, whereas workers of color earned $19,349, or $5675 less. Calculated by the hour, food workers of color earned almost $2.50 less than their white counterparts. The income gap—or race penalty, as it is commonly called—was greater in certain sectors, particularly in food processing ($6.04 less per hour) and distribution ($5.35 less per hour).

Additionally, it appears that women are subject to a gender penalty as well. White women, for example, earned just 63 cents for every dollar made by a white male—the highest paid worker in the food system. Black women fared worse with 53 cents for every dollar and Latinas fared worse still with just 50 cents for every dollar earned by white men.

(2) People of color are overrepresented in food system occupations. Thirty-four percent of the general population in 2008 identified as people of color, but more than 42 percent of the workers in the food system were people of color. Whites, who comprised over 65 percent of the general population, only made up 57 percent of food system workers. But Latinos, who represented just 15 percent of the general population in 2008, were disproportionately represented in the food system—making up over 25 percent of the work force.

(3) Few people of color hold management positions in the food system. Whites are clearly the majority in management positions within the food system. They constitute 74 percent of the managers and 85 percent of the chief executives. Within management, perhaps not surprisingly, half were white men and less than 10 percent were women of color.

In terms of money, managers earned the most with a median income of $40,544, which is double that of a rank-and-file worker in the food system. Even in management, whites made more than people of color. Additionally, half of all white chief executives made six figure incomes, nearly $40,000 more than their black or brown counterparts.

(4) The food system has some of the most difficult and dangerous jobs. Farmworkers are exposed to toxic pesticides daily and an estimated 300,000 suffer from pesticide poisonings every year.6 Even access to some basic necessities is lacking for many working in the fields. A survey conducted among farmworkers in North Carolina found that only four percent had access to fresh drinking water, hand washing facilities, and toilets.7

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers in food processing suffered some of the highest rates of injury and illness in 2008.8 Much of the labor in food processing involves repetitive, physically demanding movements using dangerous tools and machinery for which workers often receive inadequate training. Juan Baten, a young father from Guatemala, was crushed to death one night by a dough-mixing machine while working the third shift at a tortilla factory.9 In the opinion of Daniel Gross, executive director of Brandworkers International, Baten’s death could have been avoided if the tortilla factory had been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.10

(5) Food system workers are excluded from the right to organize.11 Farmworkers are exempt from the nation’s labor laws, such as the minimum wage and the right to organize into a union, crafted during the New Deal of the 1930s.12 Historically, workers in the fields have been people of color, whether they were descendants of African slaves who worked on Southern plantations or undocumented workers from Latin America. And the architects of federal labor laws, no doubt, found it politically expedient to exclude farmworkers in order to curry favor with white Southern racists.13

This racialized exclusion of workers from basic labor protections now extends from farmworkers to workers dependent on tips and to those formerly incarcerated. The minimum wage for tip-earners, such as restaurant workers, has been stuck at $2.13 an hour for 20 years. A study of low-wage workers in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago found that 30 percent of those who receive tips were not even paid $2.13 an hour. When workers complained or tried to form a union, 43 percent were subjected to retaliation, such as firing, suspension, or threats to call immigration authorities.

Organized Food Workers Build Momentum
In July 2009, worker-based organizations whose members plant, harvest, process, pack, transport, prepare, serve, and sell food came together to form the Food Chain Workers Alliance.14 Their mission is to build a more sustainable food system that respects workers’ rights, is based on the principles of social, environmental, and racial justice, and in which everyone has access to healthy and affordable food. The Alliance is currently engaged in building solidarity among food system workers with the idea of identifying shared worker concerns and goals.

Members of the Alliance gathered in early March in Florida, close to the tomato fields where farmworker Mariano Lucas Domingo was enslaved for two-and–a-half years. They came to lend their support to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ campaign, Do the Right Thing, which targets the Publix supermarket chain for refusing to pay a penny more for a pound of tomatoes.15 Workers from Alliance member groups, like the Northwest Arkansas Workers’ Justice Center and Chicago’s Warehouse Workers for Justice, joined the picket line outside a Publix store and marched with thousands of farmworkers and their allies for living wages for everybody.

Endnotes
1.    Estabrook, Barry. “Politics of the Plate: The Price of Tomatoes.” Gourmet Magazine. March 2009. www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2009/03/
politics-of-the-plate-the-price-of-tomatoes
2.    Lydersen, Kari. “Florida Modern-Day Slavery Museum Hits the Road.” In These Times. March 7, 2010. www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5658/ florida_modern_day_slavery_museum_hits_the_road/
3.    Liu, Yvonne Yen and Apollon, Dominique. “The Color of Food.”
Applied Research Center. February 2011. www.arc.org/foodjustice
4.    “The Self-Sufficiency Standard.” Center for Women’s Welfare.
www.selfsufficiencystandard.org
5.    2008 Federal Poverty Guidelines.  U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services. http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/08poverty.shtml
6.    “Like Machines in the Fields: Workers without Rights in American Agriculture.” An Oxfam America Report. March 2004.
www.oxfamamerica.org/files/like-machines-in-the-fields.pdf
7.    Ibid.
8.    Workplace Injuries and Illnesses—2008. Bureau of Labor Statistics. News Release: October 29, 2009. www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/ osh_10292009.pdf
9.    Liu, Yvonne Yen. “America’s Food Sweatshops.” Colorlines. February 17, 2011. http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/02/americas_food_sweatshops_and_the_workers_of_color_who_feed_us.html
10.    Gross, Daniel. “Death in a New York Food Sweatshop.” Counterpunch.
February 2, 2011. www.counterpunch.org/gross02032011.html
11.    “Expanding the Right to Organize to Win Human Rights at Work.” Unity for  Dignity: Excluded Workers Report. December 2010.
www.excludedworkerscongress.org/report
12.    “Like Machines in the Fields: Workers without Rights in American Agriculture.” An Oxfam America Report. March 2004.
13.    Ibid.
14.    Food Chain Workers Alliance. http://foodchainworkers.org/?page_id=41
15.    Food Chain Workers Alliance. March 2011 Workers Exchange.

http://foodchainworkers.org/?page_id=955

Yvonne Yen Liu is a senior research associate at the Applied Research Center (ARC) and a frequent contributor to ARC’s Colorlines.com.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, well, Richard Trumka is no fool. The president of the largest labor federation in the country—the AFL-CIO boasts of 11 million members—had scathing words for Democrats and President Obama at a speech last week at the National Press Club.

“If leaders aren’t blocking the wrecking ball and advancing working families’ interests, working people will not support them. This is where our focus will be—now, in 2012, and beyond,” Trumka said.

The speech built upon a theme Trumka has been developing for months: Don’t count on labor to blindly support Democrats who aren’t supporting labor. “It’s actually going to be fun,” he told Salon’s Joan Walsh a few weeks ago, speaking of the union’s plan to give “less to party structure, and more to our own structure.” He repeated the point last week. “Our role is not to build the power of a political party or a candidate,” he said. Ouch.

AFL-CIO isn’t the first union to publicly distance itself from Democrats’ electoral fate; the firefighters union declared in April that it would freeze its federal political spending in 2012 and direct money to local campaigns instead. But the support of AFL-CIO is of another scale, both financially and politically. Trumka’s much discussed speech on white union members and race remains one of the most significant political moments of the 2008 campaign.

An AFL-CIO affiliate, AFSCME (which represents 1.6 million local, state, and county employees), outspent the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Republican groups in campaign contributions to the 2010 elections, throwing in $87.5 million. Meanwhile, SEIU spent $85 million to get Obama into office in 2008.

Labor is now justifiably wondering what all of its support for national Democrats has yielded. Yes, there is a more sympathetic cabinet secretary, Hilda Solis, at the helm of the Department of Labor. And the National Labor Review Board has ruled favorably in the Boeing case, forcing the corporation to move airplane production from a nonunion plant in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, to a unionized facility in Washington State.

But national Democrats have left labor hanging thus far on its core concerns. The most glaring congressional omission: The Employee Free Choice Act, also known as EFCA. The passage of this bill would allow workers to organize easily into a union, if a majority signed cards in favor. Since the bill was introduced in March 2009, EFCA has been stalled in the Senate.

Moreover, despite the outrageous outlay of campaign contributions by AFSCME last year, public sector workers have not reaped the benefit in terms of good political will. From Wisconsin to Maine, Ohio to Indiana, the rights of public sector workers to collectively organize have been cut back or curtailed altogether. University of California, Berkeley, Labor Center researcher Steven Pitts, among others, has established that public sector jobs are particularly crucial to the already struggling Black workforce.

And what will happen if unions indeed follow through on threats to build their own political structures, rather than those of the Democratic Party? Maybe, they’ll return to their social movement origins. The left has historically seen workers as the catalyst for cataclysmic, revolutionary change for all of society, not just union members. Recent events play out this theory: Trumka announced a historic partnership two weeks ago with the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the National Guestworkers’ Alliance.

Both domestic and guest workers fall under the rubric of what’s known as excluded workers, called such because they are excluded from basic labor law protection, such as the minimum wage or the right to organize into a union. Excluded workers include farmworkers, domestic workers, tipped workers in restaurants, the formerly incarcerated and those in welfare-to-work programs. The work done in the fields or in the home has historically been borne by people of color, whether they were enslaved or undocumented workers from Latin America. Back in the 1930s, when these labor laws were being negotiated, lawmakers found it politically expedient to exclude farmworkers and domestic workers from inclusion, in order to curry favor with white Southern plantation owners.

The embrace of these racialized workers back into the fold of organized labor is quite a mea culpa for the unions. It’s also a recognition, according to organizers with the domestic and guest workers, that all workers are in the same boat in the global economy. “[The] informal sector and many industries that were once thought of as marginal, like domestic work, are coming to represent more and more of the economy,” explained Jill Shenker, field director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

“At a time when American workers are locked out of jobs and immigrant workers are locked into exploitative workplaces, this partnership agreement [with the AFL-CIO] unites workers who are pitted against each other,” Saket Soni, executive director of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, added. “There’s a rising tide coming—it’s called solidarity. And, it’s going to engulf small Southern towns and major labor markets; local workers and global workers are going to speak a common language—dignity—and inspire transformation in the U.S.”

SEIU’s purple army has also played a leading role in the Wisconsin uprising and the mobilizations it inspired, to organize union and nonunion members to push elected officials to embrace a more progressive agenda. John Nichols for The Nation quoted an internal SEIU memo, sent to the union’s executive board in January, which said, “We can’t spark an organizing surge without changing the environment, so that workers see unions not as self-interested institutions but vehicles through which they can collectively stand up for a more fair economy.”

This kind of organizing turns around a trend that I’ve written about previously—the plague of business unionism that once contaminated major unions. Organized labor since the 1980s, when Reagan cracked down on striking air traffic controllers, has responded to the hostile environment by becoming more like its arch-enemies: the bosses. Unions in the past 30 years have morphed into calcified bureaucracies, run by skilled technocrats—far removed from workers on the shop floor—who staff the campaigns and call the shots at the bargaining table. Worse, in the past decade, labor has been riddled with internecine battles—SEIU versus CNA, UNITE versus HERE, and UHW versus NUHW—totally impenetrable to all except insiders and those two degrees removed. Not quite the movement of the masses.

What does all this mean at a time when Black unemployment is at 16.1 percent, Latino at 11.8 percent, and 51.7 percent of unemployed Asians have been without a job for more than six months, 39 percent unemployed for more than a year? At a time when Washington, D.C., has largely moved on from thinking about job creation and into fighting over the deficit? Is it all, as Mike Elk wrote for In These Times, just a bunch of union hot air?

Pitts, who authors the Labor Center’s monthly Black Worker Report, puts labor’s new turn towards social movement unionism into perspective. “What’s happened is the unions’ frustration with Congress and Obama and the incredible attacks from the right has caused an acceleration of activity itself, of unions aligning with grassroots elements. In the short term, I’m not sure what it means. But the issue is always going to be what happens on the ground. What understanding the top holds isn’t always communicated to the bottom. It doesn’t matter what proclamations happen from the top, but how it’s rolled out on the bottom.”

Come 2012, let’s see what all this translates into. Hopefully, it’ll be real power for workers of color and their families.

Green jobs are in the news, again. This time, Monica Potts asks where is the green economy, that was sold to America by Obama and company, in the American Prospect.

Two years ago, the rage was green jobs not jails, a clever framework by the racial justice movement to refocus environmental advocates to think about humans, not just the dolphins and rainforests, in our transition to a post-fossil fuel society. Today, however, millions have been funneled into green job training, but to what end? I’ve written on the need for green job creation, not just training before, as has Jonathan Yee on the history of job training, post-Reagan.

For communities of color, we need jobs, of any color, be they green or otherwise. Sadly, this is the piece that is missing from policy proposals right now. With a divided Congress and a President that operates by reaction rather than vision, the possibility for public intervention in creating employment is slim.

If I had my druthers, my three-point platform for economic recovery would include a federal plan to bail out regions and local communities, to stave off budget cuts, much like the proposed House bill, the Local Jobs for America Act, which has been in sitting in limbo since March of this year. The bill proposed to provide fiscal relief to local government and community-based organizations to save and create local jobs that provide services to communities.

Even if green jobs are created, chances are that they’re not going to people of color and women. In Los Angeles, I wrote about the passage of the retrofit ordinance by the city, largely due to the mobilizing efforts of a coalition of unlikely partners, comprised of community-based organizations, labor, and environmental groups. The ordinance commissions the retrofit of city buildings and requires high quality labor practices, such as local hire and project labor agreements, to be in effect for the workers employed. The city benefited from the federal stimulus package, receiving over $16 million, as well as additional funds from a municipal bond.

But, even still, the monies are being used to save existing jobs for municipal employees, not create new ones. This month, 40 people will start a 10-week boot camp to train to become green workers for the city. All are existing city employees.  What we need now is policy that creates jobs on a large-scale and targets communities of color for employment.

Concurrently, we would invest in innovative strategies that build community economies, new ways of producing value that don’t reproduce the unequal social relationships and racist hierarchies that plague capitalism.

Take the example of the Alliance to Develop Power (ADP) in western Massachusetts. They started by facilitating the purchase of five apartment complexes by tenants and converting them into tenant-owned housing cooperatives. Now, the organization sits on an empire worth over $80 million, and created 60 jobs for its members. Twenty worker-owners are employed at United for Hire, a worker-owned contracting firm that is now expanding into weatherization and green retrofits.

“We fight for just policy, while, at the same time, create the world as it should be,” explained ADP’s Executive Director Caroline Murray recently to me. “We believe in shared power, not power over, and everyone making the decisions that affect our lives.”

It’s this kind of transformative thinking and strategy that should guide green job creation and economic recovery. How can we truly reconfigure power, work, and social relationships so we have a green economy that sustains the planet and all its peoples? Short-term fixes by training people for green jobs that don’t exist simply won’t do it. Neither will replicating the gray capitalist economy, washed over in green.