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Team Biden's taking

Jan 21, 2021 - With National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman’s words still ringing in the air — “Being American is more than a pride we inherit / It’s the past we step into and how we repair it” — a newly minted President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris stepped into our recent galling past to begin the long labor of salvaging what’s left of our future.

Before the sun was up on Thursday, Biden had signed a fistful of directives and executive orders meant to begin clearing away the rubble and refuse left behind by the earthquake of the Trump administration. Myriad policy areas were affected, some more profoundly than others. Among other things, last night’s flurry of activity was an education for many outside of government on the practical limits of executive orders.

One example of this was Biden’s order on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). With Donald Trump and his pet fascist Stephen Miller in charge, DACA recipients were whipsawed over the last four years by cruel attempts to fling them from the country. Last night, a Biden order was able to bolster some protections for the hundreds of thousands affected, but beyond that, the best he could do was to urge Congress to pass legislation granting permanent resident status and a path to citizenship.

Despite all the self-serving ballyhoo Trump slathered around them, that’s what most executive orders are in the end: A memo to Congress urging action on something of importance to the administration. Other orders that touch on matters beyond the immediate purview of the legislative branch, however, actually come with teeth.

Biden yanked the permit on the Keystone XL pipeline and paused construction of Trump’s farcical southern border wall. He has ended the racist “Muslim ban” and rejoined the Paris climate accord. He blew up Trump’s ridiculous 1776 Commission, which sought to influence educators away from teaching children that slavery was bad and racism still exists everywhere. He moved to extend the federal ban on evictions, and placed a temporary ban on drilling and pillaging the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Without question, Biden’s most important efforts yesterday and today focused on dealing with the ongoing and unchecked COVID-19 pandemic that has claimed more than 400,000 lives in this country alone. The pressing need for speedy action came into grim focus after the Biden team realized Trump’s administration had no plan whatsoever for vaccine distribution in place. None. According to one source, the Biden administration has to start its own plan “from scratch.”

With the Trump administration now receding in the rearview mirror, it is going to be incredibly important going forward to gather and compile facts like this, if only as a matter of ultimate accounting. They had no vaccine plan, for all the “Warp Speed” blather, they had no plan. A nation that has been hiding under the bed for the last 10 months was given false hope about the speed with which vaccines could be made available.

This was another lethal lie, and now the longer it takes to get the vaccine distributed, the more likely a mutation will arise and obviate the historic medical success thus far achieved. Throughout, the dead will continue to challenge the nighttime stars for numerical supremacy. I would call this the final insult, but for the fact that more such insults are surely on their way.

The pressing need for speedy action came into grim focus after the Biden team realized Trump’s administration had no plan whatsoever for vaccine distribution in place. None.

“President Biden will use his first full day in office on Thursday to go on the offensive against the coronavirus, with a 21-page national strategy that includes aggressive use of executive authority to protect workers, advance racial equity and ramp up the manufacturing of test kits, vaccines and supplies,” reports The New York Times. Not a new plan, because there was no old plan. At long last, a plan to grind this monster to some semblance of a halt.

According to the White House, this is the story for the next ten days: an avalanche of activity seeking to undo some of what has been done, and to begin doing what hasn’t been done.

The challenges facing the Biden administration are so extreme and pressing that many are urging swift and massive action. “Where the Obama administration’s approach was too often clever and strewn with budgetary wonkiness,” writes Derek Thompson for The Atlantic, “the Biden formula should embrace the opposite: big, fast, and simple.”

There are plenty of reasons to doubt, or even dread, the intentions and capabilities of this centrist administration. Given the last four decades of general Democratic ideology and behavior, this hesitancy is not only fair but absolutely necessary. On the activist front, there can be no sense of EVERYTHING’S COOL NOW YOU GUYS, which was sadly all too present after Barack Obama’s 2008 election.

We don’t have that kind of time anymore — really, we never did — and if yesterday and today are any guide, it appears the president understands this. Yet, of course, performance cannot be judged from such a small sample. It’s up to us to make sure there are more days like this — and that they go above and beyond correcting the wrongs of the Trump administration. It’s time to issue our bold demands, including those we know that Biden can’t or won’t address by executive order. It’s time to build momentum from the ground up. Let’s go. ...Read More

International policy, finally, will be a hot point. Biden is already moving on China and Venezuela in negative ways, and he should reverse Trump’s stupid designation of Cuba as a ‘terrorist’ state. We have to demand a foreign policy based on noninterference, mutual assistance, and peaceful co-existence. It will require winning some unity in our own peace and solidarity movements on these points. Let’s get started. ...Read More

You can’t miss it. The house sits off a main road in my county, about five minutes’ drive from my home. Three flag poles; three flags in support of Trump. And in a neighborhood that is overwhelmingly African American and pro-Democratic Party voters.

Yes, these are white folks and, yes, they have the absolute right to fly their flags. There is the First Amendment to the Constitution. But each time that I drive by their house, which I must do with frequency, I ask myself the same question: if this was a Black family in an overwhelmingly white neighborhood, dominated by pro-Republican voters, how long would they be able to fly a red, black & green, Black Liberation flag or to fly a flag in support of the Black Lives Matter movement?”

I think that you know the answer.

In my life, I have found African Americans to be very tolerant of different political views (we can be somewhat less than tolerant when it comes to matters such as religion and sexual orientation, but that is for a different discussion). In many of our families we have wide differences from conservative to Black nationalist to communist, and it is recognized that there can be legitimate points of view.

White America, overall, is much less tolerant and this is certainly the case within conservative white America. It is more than lack of tolerance, that is at issue here. There is an assumption, as in the case of the family with the Trump flags, that they will face no ramifications for flaunting the images of a racist, sexist, xenophobic President in a predominantly Black community. No ramifications! Yet were the shoe to be on the other foot, it is highly likely that the family would have come under physical assault by right-wingers, and quite possibly run out of town.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am not suggesting that these white Trumpsters get run out of the neighborhood. I am suggesting, however, that white privilege plays itself out in ways that is always in our faces, but becomes invisible to most white people. An African American family flying a red, black & green flag in a conservative white neighborhood would be considered insane, provocative, and quite possibly having brought down the wrath of white conservatives on them deservedly…unless, of course, the commentators were, themselves, Black.

I am glad that Trump is gone. I wish that he was relocating to an iceberg in the Arctic, but such is life. I know, though, that the Trump flags of my ‘neighbors’ will probably not be lowered any time soon because the problem is not Trump, nor the flags. The problem is that there is a virulent right-wing populist movement, and Trump was only one of many manifestations of this evil.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is an author and activist. He is a past president of TransAfrica Forum. ...Read More

Camila Valle: I wanted to start with what most people know as the heart of your work: the recognition of unpaid care work, disproportionately done by women. You actually coined the term unwaged work in the 1970s. At the time, the feminist struggle for recognition and compensation most prominently took the form of the Wages for Housework Campaign (WFH), which you helped found and in which you have been active ever since. Could you talk about the development of this work—including into the demand for a care income, one of its contemporary iterations?

Selma James: When I first put forward “wages for housework” in March 1972, I was unsure of the implications. I knew that wages for housework was qualitatively different from wages for housewives, which I had been considering; it spoke about the work and didn’t identify necessarily with women, which I thought—and others did too—was crucial.

A year later, I went on a lecture tour of North America with Mariarosa Dalla Costa and as I spoke with audiences (as an English speaker, I did most of the speaking), I began to understand that we were developing a new perspective that was international and far more comprehensive. Up to then, the working class was defined as waged workers at the “point of production”—the only ones who could make fundamental change. We were redefining the working class to include housewives and all the unwaged. It was not only antisexist, it was antiracist and saw the reproduction of labor power, in fact of the whole human race everywhere, as work at the service of capitalist accumulation. We said if you work for capital, waged or unwaged, you are part of the working class, the subversive class.

I had been at the point of production. My mother had been in a factory since she was twelve years old, up until she had children, and my father was a truck driver who had helped organize a branch of the Teamsters Union in Brooklyn, so I knew about that. But it was only part of the work. Most of the workers in the world, especially at that time, were unwaged workers on the land, mostly women but also men. ...Read More

Jan 21 2021 - THE BLUEGREEN ALLIANCE, a coalition of six labor unions and six national environmental groups, is gearing up for a significant staff expansion heading into the Biden administration, recently advertising for 11 new positions, including the 15yearold group’s first field organizers and federal campaign manager. The staffing up, said Jason Walsh, executive director of the alliance, is a reflection of funders recognizing “the moment we’re in, both in terms of the scale of the crisis and the opportunity with the new Congress and a new president” — and also a signal that policy differences in the Democratic climate coalition will emerge in clearer focus over the next few months.

As pressure for unity from the presidential campaign season fades and President Joe Biden begins enacting his climate vision, there will be more competition among climate groups for influencing policy, a preview of which emerged in September over a House energy bill that ultimately garnered 18 Democratic dissenting votes. The Biden campaign sought to align itself closely with unions on the trail, making BlueGreen a valued ally, though some of its other efforts to court environmental justice groups highlight policy differences that the new administration will have to navigate.

The BlueGreen Alliance, which emphasizes equity and the needs of working people in the U.S.’s response to climate change, rejects what it calls the “false choice” between economic security and a viable planet, according to an eight-page policy platform released in 2019.

While BlueGreen’s focus on public investment, good jobs, and justice shares much in common with the federal Green New Deal resolution introduced in February 2019, their “Solidarity for Climate Action” report is in tension with those in the environmental movement who call for a more rapid transition away from oil, coal, and natural gas. BlueGreen says that the ultimate goal should be to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, but not necessarily end the fossil fuel industry itself, with its tens of thousands of high-paying jobs.

“We’re focused on what we can build together, not on shutting down projects or facilities,” said Walsh. “We’re focused on what unites labor and environment … [and] we’ll need that unity, we have literally no votes to spare.”

And the BlueGreen Alliance, which endorsed Biden for president — its first endorsement of a candidate for public office — is well-positioned among Democratic leaders to push its platform. “Based on our efforts and the efforts of our allies, there’s something of an emerging consensus among Democratic policymakers of the central importance of getting to net-zero by 2050 in a way that supports and creates lots of high-quality, accessible union jobs in the process,” Walsh said.

The alliance — which includes large national green groups like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council and labor unions like the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Teachers, and the United Steelworkers — also calls for measures like restoring forests and wildlands, cracking down on employee misclassification, making it easier to unionize, winning universal highspeed internet, and investing in deindustrialized areas. Walsh declined to say who exactly was financing BlueGreen’s new positions but said it received some significant support recently from “old and some new” philanthropies, including the Hewlett Foundation.

BlueGreen will notably not weigh in on pipeline project debates, and it has no position on fracking. Walsh told The Intercept that as outlined in the “Solidarity for Climate Action” report, the coalition endorses “low and no carbon” electricity production, which could potentially include nuclear energy and natural gas.

“If Biden and Harris are truly committed to environmental justice, that means they have to be proactively figuring out how to close down fossil fuel infrastructure,” countered Erich Pica, the president of Friends of the Earth, a progressive climate group. Pica critiqued the BlueGreen Alliance’s 2019 report for not being aggressive enough in calling out fossil fuels. The Green New Deal resolution also did not make mention of fossil fuels, which Pica also objected to.

“With Democrats in control, it’s time for an honest discussion about whether fossil fuels can be a part of the solution and about whether we should be propping up a dying industry that’s screwing over its workers,” said Collin Rees, a senior campaigner at Oil Change International, which also opposes the expansion of the fossil fuel industry.

Anthony RogersWright, of the Climate Justice Alliance, a national coalition of environmental justice groups, said that while members of the group “probably agree on 8590 percent” of things with the BlueGreen Alliance, there are some fundamental differences. RogersWright said that he was not expecting the big scaleup of BlueGreen’s staff, but he’s not surprised either. “I have much respect for them, and we work with them, but there also still does exist a massive wealth gap of historically white-led environmental organizations compared to grassroots organizations, and that’s being manifested here as well.”

GROUPS ACROSS THE Democratic spectrum agree that the Biden campaign and his transition team have done a notably good job of listening to and engaging with different perspectives. The expectation is that some deeper fissures will come to light when it comes time to actually roll out climate policy, especially around the future of carbon capture technology, nuclear energy, and natural gas.

Many leftwing climate groups have taken a hardline stance against carbon capture, which traps emissions before they’re released or sucks them from the atmosphere; they see it as a way to prolong dependence on fossil fuels and make it more difficult to reduce carbon emissions overall. While the Green New Deal resolution was ambiguous on carbon capture, during the 2020 presidential primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders came out against it, echoing leftwing climate groups that call it a “false solution.”

Carbon capture, backed by BlueGreen, is endorsed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said in 2018 that it was likely necessary to hit global climate targets. The International Energy Agency has also recently warned that it would be “virtually impossible” to reach net-zero without carbon capture tech. Advocates note that renewable energy alternatives like wind and solar are not viable solutions for reducing carbon emissions in the industrial sector, where nearly a quarter of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come from.

In September, the House passed a nearly 900-page clean energy package with bipartisan support, including from the majority of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and nearly all the Green New Deal resolution cosponsors. But, after a coalition of progressive climate groups, including the Sunrise Movement, Friends of the Earth, and the Climate Justice Alliance, protested the bill’s support for carbon capture, 18 Democrats, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley, voted against it. Progressives saw a victory in their ability to peel off dissenters and say they are prepared to do so again under a Biden administration. ...Read More

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Jan 18, 2921 - “I’m a Trump supporter,” the man told Danny Timpona, and went on to say that as much as he needed affordable health care, he absolutely was not in favor of any plan that included undocumented immigrants. “This country’s too damn free. We need to take care of our own people,” he said. That wasn’t the end of their conversation on a front porch in rural North Carolina. It was the beginning.

Timpona shared a bit of his own story, said there were many people he knew and loved who’d moved here from other places. He asked the man what his experience with immigrants has been. Turns out a lot of the people he worked with were immigrants. “They’re hardworking, family-centered, love ‘em to death.”

“Anyone in particular?” Timpona asked. Turns out the man had a friend named María, and she got notice that she could be deported. “I wrote a letter to the judge for her, wrote about six pages, got my buddies to bother the judge too,” he said. Maria stayed, at least for the time being.

The man was diabetic and really needed health care. Timpona asked him if he thought his friend Maria was to blame for the hospital bills piling up, the prescription medicine he couldn’t afford. “He said, ‘I never thought about it that way.’”

Timpona, who is the deputy director of distributed organizing for People’s Action, had that conversation in Fall 2019, as part of the group’s research leading into the 2020 election cycle. Over the next year, volunteers and organizers would have hundreds of thousands of such “deep canvass” conversations. Organizations in the People’s Action network reached out in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Colorado, Arizona, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ) called into Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, ultimately focusing on Georgia before the presidential election. Both organizations were active in the Georgia runoff election.

They were mostly, though not exclusively, interested in talking to poor and working-class white people, folks largely overlooked by the Democratic Party—and the white people with the greatest stake in deep change. Their conversations gently challenged racist explanations that have become the common sense, offering people a different frame and path. The approach they took also challenged the liberal taboo against talking about race with white voters, and yielded some insight into what those voters feel and need.

“Black and brown and indigenous communities are building power and we need to bring enough white folks to the table to make that a winning strategy, both for the immediate fights right now and the longer-term change we need,” said SURJ cofounder Carla Wallace. “If we are not organizing white folks and we are not being explicit around the issue of race, then the right is going to build. It’s the best messaging used with white people: those Black and those brown people are going to get something, and you’re going to pay for it. It’s the divide and conquer that’s been used since the beginning of this country and the reason race was created.”

“Deep canvassing is based in storytelling,” SURJ Electoral Campaign Manager Ash Overton said. They were among the first to work with the method when they were on staff at the Los Angeles LGBTQ Center’s Leadership LAB. Jolted by the 2008 passage of a California ballot measure banning gay marriage, organizers and activists took a hard look at how they were communicating. They discovered that exchanging stories can move people past talking points and ground them in their lived experience.

A typical deep canvass conversation begins with an open-ended question. It aims to engage rather than persuade. The canvasser will offer a bit of their own story in response to the answer, then ask the person they’re talking with for their experience, and try to engage them with a “cone of curiosity”—simple questions like “When did this happen? How did it feel?” As appropriate, the canvasser shares more stories. Both the listening and vulnerability are key. In the process, the canvasser listens for doubts, conflicts, openings to suggest a different way of seeing.

Overton helped organize around Los Angeles County Measure R, which was placed on the ballot in the March 2020 primary by a Black-led community coalition. Measure R gave subpoena power to the newly minted commission to oversee the Sheriff’s Department and directed the commission to look at redirecting $3.5 billion away from jail expansion to alternatives to incarceration. SURJ doorknocked white voters in less affluent neighborhoods, mostly in eastern LA County. To ground the discussion in people’s lived experience, SURJ asked voters about cycles of harm and trauma in their lives, how they worked through those, and whether continuing the hurt had helped.

“It’s very vulnerable to talk about cycles of harm,” Overton said. “There was a shame and secrecy that had kept people from processing these experiences. To be asked questions and not judged was significant.” One of the voters they talked to was a grandmother who was raising her daughter’s children. She started out saying she had family in the Sheriff’s Department, didn’t know anyone who’d gone to jail. After a bit, she volunteered that her daughter’s boyfriend had done time for drugs, “and came out worse than he went in.” She reflected that she was trying to do better with her grandchildren than she had with her own children. “If I raised these guys the way I raised my kids, I’d be in jail. I was raised, you know, with a belt.” She and Overton shared about struggling, and anger, and the need for mental health support. By the end she said she favored Measure R “if it’s going to make life different, not just helping people but helping them understand so they can help the next person.”

Deep canvass conversations follow the arc of organizing—acknowledging people’s experiences, suggesting a different way to understand and respond to them. The raceclass narrative frame highlights the stake that white people have in fighting racism and points to ways to take action.

The right wing has built crossclass solidarity on whiteness. Organizers using the raceclass narrative aim to break that up. In doing so, they cross a taboo. Liberals and many leftists have shied away from talking about race with white people. “We think a different approach is necessary, one that links, rather than counterposes, class and race,” wrote Professor Ian Haney López. The raceclass narrative understands racism as both violence done to people of color and the elites’ most effective tool for preserving their power.

“We should not be sacrificing racial justice concerns in order to pander to racist stereotypes,” López said. At the same time, white people need to understand how racism hurts them. In practice, this means identifying experiences and concerns that white people and people of color share.

Members of SURJ went door to door in Louisville’s white workingclass neighborhoods to build support for an effort to end cash bail. “Kentucky is overwhelmingly white and it’s some of the poorest white folks in the country,” Carla Wallace said. Poor and workingclass white people have been hurt by the criminal justice system, and relate to the unfairness of jailing people before trial just because they can’t make bail. But then SURJ canvassers introduce race.

“We say ‘a lot of black families have been impacted by that, a lot of struggling families like yours.’ … Then they say, ‘well, it depends. If someone does something…’ and we go back to their experience. ‘Was it fair for your uncle to be held before he was even found guilty?’ ‘No, no, that’s not fair.’ So we say, ‘Who’s making all that money collecting those bails? It’s not your neighbors, it’s the people at the top.’ I have found there will be a hesitancy around the conversation about race, but once you say, ‘I wonder who’s getting rich?’ a lot of people will be open to the conversation,” Wallace said.

Part of the conversation has to be calling out the racist tropes. During the fall 2020 elections, Pennsylvania Stands Up made deep canvassing calls into each of the state’s 67 counties. “We trained people to really talk about race and class,” said Jules BerkmanHill, the group’s deputy organizing director. “Part of the methodology in deep canvassing is inoculating people against the right wing’s strategic racism and xenophobia. We would say, ‘It’s not your immigrant neighbor who’s the problem, it’s the one percent who’s dividing us,” BerkmanHill said. The conversations explicitly identify people’s needs and selfinterest.

SURJ and People’s Action don’t dismiss the problem of “white privilege” – but they don’t lead with it either. The work of bringing white people into multiracial coalitions is less about making “better white people” and creating “allies” than about developing a genuine identification among white people with people of color.

“In any of this work that we do to build a broad-based multiracial working-class movement in this country, we have to be able to speak to everyone’s pain and their experiences of oppression and suffering,” said Adam Kruggel, director of strategic initiatives for People’s Action. “Everyone is situated differently. There’s antiblackness and terror directed against immigrants… We have to recognize that white people aren’t suffering because we are white. We have strategic advantages because of our race but it doesn’t mean that we don’t suffer or have disadvantages or difficulties or struggles…That is the basic question that we are trying to ask: Can our pain be a bridge instead of a barrier? We believe these are things that can bring us together, but what the right has been able to do for centuries is weaponize them and use them as a wedge to divide us. Once you begin to pull back the curtain and you can start to build empathy and you feel seen….we can have honest, meaningful transformative engagement with people.” ...Read More

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Jan 13, 2021 - I’m not a labor historian, but I grew up in a longtime union household that instilled a strong sense of working-class values. For most of my adult life, I’ve thought about labor unions, how they could better organize, and how those of us not organizing on the shop floor could aid such efforts.

Indeed, there’s much to learn from any movement or organization that’s been able to stand the test of time, regardless of the sectoral, geographical, or political context in which they emerge, organize, and fight.

Unfortunately, in my experience, activists and organizers in the U.S., particularly those in trade unions, rarely seek advice, lessons, or to better understand trade union movements in what some might refer to as the ‘Global South.’ This, of course, is a major problem, and one of the reasons why U.S. labor organizing, mobilization, and activism has been so abysmal.

Kim Scipes, in his latest book, Building Global Labor Solidarity: Lessons from the Philippines, South Africa, Northwestern Europe, and the United States, adds a significant and meaningful contribution to our understanding of trade unionism, how we might better theoretically understand the concepts of “labor movements” and “social movement unionism,” and how labor centers such as the KMU in the Philippines and others in South Africa embody these understandings and practices.

Scipes takes us on a fascinating and inspiring personal and political journey, from San Francisco in 1984 to Northwestern Europe during the fall of 1985, experiences in the Philippines in 1986, and reflections on trade union organizing in South Africa during the late1980s and early1990s. Without question, Scipes’ personal history and tails from his international travels are as engrossing as the intellectual content contained in his latest book.

For the sake of time, I’ll limit my reflections to the latter, in the hope that activists and organizers of all stripes can take away important lessons from this lengthy review.

“Shop floor internationalism is workers joining together across national boundaries to support each other through concerted action on the shop floor.” As an example, Scipes references the experiences of Larry Wright, “a key organizer of the Liberation Support Committee in the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) in San Francisco.” In 1984, Larry and members of the ILWU Local 10 stopped a Dutch ship from carrying South African cargo for three days during November-December of that year.

A few key points: first, the action was led by rank and file workers; second, a robust and longterm educational program laid the ideological groundwork for such an action to have any level of success (leaders within the union spoke openly about and stood in solidarity with workers abroad); and third, the union actively sought support from different unions and community organizations — three points that come up routinely throughout the book.

One of the key components to building shop floor internationalism is the ability to communicate and convey a sense of internationalism. As Scipes points out, “One of the first efforts to communicate and theoretically develop the concept of shop floor internationalism was the establishment of NILS, Newsletter of International Labour Studies.”

Other important journals such as International Labor Reports (ILR), based in England, a project Scipes actively worked with from 1984–1989 as ILR’s North American representative, the Asian Labour Monitor (ALM), published in Hong Kong, LABOUR, Capital and Society, located in South America, the South African Labour Bulletin, and the KMU’s journals, KMU Correspondence and KMU International Bulletin, have all played significant roles in communicating the vital and important role of internationalism in trade union struggles.

Films have also played a significant role in shaping the ideological contours of working-class people and the communities in which they live. Scipes suggests viewing Controlling Interest, The Global Assembly Line and Bringing It All Back Home, to name a few. 

For Scipes, one of the keys to understanding successful trade union movements is their ability to educate and mold member consciousness, values, and worldview, a point we’ll return to later. Scipes is correct when he claims identity and ideology must be developed. The methods mentioned above — education, films, and journals — play a vital role in this process.

In Part Two, Scipes poses the question, “How do we theoretically understand labor movements and worker mobilization?” Here, I’ll do my best to summarize some dense and reasonably complicated concepts.

To begin, he argues that “using broadly comparative methods to understand global unionism is…a necessity, as it is not enough just to use case studies of single labor movements or even narrow comparisons: doing so, we find that a structural analysis cannot provide the level of analysis needed [to understand the emergence of ‘social movement unionism’].”

In this section, he clearly and convincingly rejects the notion that structural based analyses can explain the surfacing of social movement unionism and distinguishes between three types of trade unionism: economic, political, and social movement unionism.

While Scipes accepts “that structural changes can account for changed conditions leading to the emergence of militant labor movements,” he’s very explicit that, “structural changes cannot account for the emergence of any particular type of trade unionism, thus specifically cannot account for the emergence of social movement unionism.”

In other words, a nation’s changing political-economic landscape — Neoliberalization, rapid industrialization, trade agreements, financialization, broader economic restructuring, etc. — cannot account for the birth of “social movement unionism.” For instance, the percentage of Filipinos working in the manufacturing sector in 1990 (9.7%) was less than in 1960 (12.1%), yet social movement unionism emerges in the Philippines in 1980, during a decline in industrialization.

So, what accounts for the emergence of the KMU (Kilusang Mayo Uno, or May First Labor Movement)? Before we answer that question, let’s examine some of Scipes’ definitions and conceptualizations. Labor movements, in Scipes’ view, are simply one example of social movements, though an important one due to their proximity to economic production and exchange.

Social movements are defined as “a collectivity acting with some degree of organization and continuity outside of institutional channels, for the purpose of promoting or resisting change in the group, society or world order of which it is a part.” Trade unions are at the heart of labor movements. Labor centers seek to “unify and strengthen the unions.” Intellectuals, individuals, and various other organizations, educational institutions, allies (progressive churches, for instance), together, “mobilize into a mutually-reinforcing social network, that comprises a labor movement.” ...Read More

Jan 12, 2021 - It was likely, if not downright inevitable, that in the year of our lockdown, somebody would make a drama called “Locked Down,” about a handful of people in lockdown. The director Doug Liman and the screenwriter Steven Knight conceived their movie in July, sold it in September and had completed shooting it, in London, by the end of October. They turned it around nearly as quickly as Steven Soderbergh did “The Girlfriend Experience,” his shoestring guerrilla drama shot at the end of 2008 in response to the global economic meltdown.

In more ways than not, “Locked Down,” which premieres on HBO Max on Jan. 14, feels like one of the modestly budgeted, shot-on-the-fly movies that Soderbergh has been making as palate cleansers ever since “Full Frontal,” in 2002. The film is set over a few days during the first month of the pandemic (there’s a radio reference to the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson being hospitalized, which occurred last April), and the heart of it unfolds in a townhouse on Great Portland Street in West London, where Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, as a veteran couple, hang out, thrash around, bounce off the walls, and spill their guts, all as a way of trying to avoid cracking up under the strain of forced confinement.

“Locked Down” has a good time satirizing such now-iconic COVID-19 rituals as the forced civility of corporate Zoom calls, the ADD agony of socially distanced lines to get into supermarkets, the falling into old addictive habits (in this case: smoking, guzzling wine, and going off the wagon after 10 years to smoke opium), and, more than any of that, the claustrophobic ritual of talking, talking, talking as a kind of desperate existential self-therapy. The film’s deadpan atmosphere of voyeuristic impishness, the casual shaggy-dog cameos by stars (Ben Stiller, Mindy Kaling, Claes Bang) who would be featured gets for most directors, the fact that the film ultimately turns into a desperado heist drama like “Logan Lucky” — at this point, you could almost say that “Locked Down” belongs to the Soderbergh genre.

The one distinctive difference is that Steven Knight, who made the superb Tom Hardy into-the-night solo drama “Locke” (2014), has written an exuberantly verbose screenplay that allows Hathaway and Ejiofor to attack their characters as if they were acting on stage in some delirious Sam Shepard two-hander. “Locked Down,” which begins with a hedgehog wriggling down the garden steps like a refined version of the gopher mascot in “Caddyshack,” never loses its light, floridly witty, slightly detached tone of look-we’re-making-a-movie-here!, but it’s also a lockdown drama that has more than a little on its mind. Ejiofor’s character, Paxton, is a former druggie and biker who’s still clinging to his bad-boy days, though he’s now a van driver trapped in a nattering intellectual bunker of eloquent self-loathing. “My super-analysis of every grain of sand, every word?” says Paxton. “Being locked up is making it worse.” Linda, a CEO with issues of her own, heads the UK division of a ruthlessly amoral conglomerate, and beneath her backstabbing acumen lies a woman of conscience who has watched herself betray herself.

After 10 years together, these two have hit the skids — Linda announces, early on, that she’s leaving the relationship — and the movie is about how lockdown, for the two of them, becomes a kind of truth game that pushes them apart and pulls them together. “Locked Down,” at times, generates an uneasy mixture of intimacy and showiness, yet it’s a kick to watch a couple of actors who are this terrific pull out all the stops. Ejiofor, a master of understatement, plays Paxton as a likable blowhard who overstates his own angst (he’s also a lyric soul who shouts poetry on the street), and he brings it off by lending even the character’s windiest monologues a crestfallen edge. Hathaway, meanwhile, makes Linda the kind of high-strung tornado who speaks from the tip of her brain. It’s as if her character from “Rachel Getting Married” had grown up and gone straight, taming but never quite repressing her inner manic hunger.

There’s no denying that these two are living a privileged life. Yet as the film sees it, even that offers little protection from the cruelties that lockdown has a way of unleashing. Paxton, in the midst of finally selling his beloved motorcycle, finds that he may be losing everything — his partner, his identity as a rebel, his reason for being. Ejiofor has a speech about taking the bike out for one last ride and lighting up a smoke (the tobacco, he says, “tastes like youth”) that will speak to anyone who has ever felt forced to leave the past behind. And Hathaway’s monologue about how she snuck off to an executive birthday party in Paris, where she began to see the specter of “emerging markets” as a kind of living swamp creature, is a hyperkinetic tour de force of contemporary corporate confession.

So how does “Locked Down” slide from psychodrama to robbery? In a way that just about signposts its own coincidental contrivance. Linda, as part of her job, has to move the $3 million Harris Diamond out of the fabled Harrods department store so that it can be delivered to some ruthless world dictator. Paxton’s weekend driving gig is…to pick up a shipment out of Harrods. When they see that their assignments have converged, the two stumble onto the idea of stealing the diamond, replacing it with the fake version that’s on display for the public.

You may not buy every detail of how the plan comes off. Yet Liman, shooting in the real Harrods (the first time that’s ever been done — they could do it because the store closed down during the pandemic), does an ingenious job of milking the heist for ordinary-people-caught-up-in-a-caper suspense. Paxton’s boss, played over the phone by an irascible Ben Kingsley, has gotten around some red tape by assigning Paxton the fake name of “Edgar Allan Poe,” and the film makes tasty comic hay out of the way this plays out — the dread of it being a telltale giveaway, along with the fact that no one actually seems to remember who Edgar Allan Poe was.

“Locked Down” is a lark, a made-for-the-pandemic entertainment that winks at its own built-in shelf life. Yet for anyone watching it right now, the movie has a message that can resonate. It’s that the single most sane response to lockdown is, in fact, to let yourself go a little crazy, to acknowledge your inner demon of confinement and give into it. If you do that, the movie says, you may just come out the other side. ...Read More