Laura Flanders | The Nation

In 2011, the National Taxi Workers Alliance made history when it became the fifty-seventh affliate of the AFL-CIO. It was the first time that a group of independent contractors, drivers who don’t even work for an hourly wage, gained affiliation with the nation’s oldest labor federation.

That same year, Republican legislators and governors went after traditional labor, passing laws that undermined collective bargaining not only in Wisconsin, but also in Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Tennessee and many other states.

Not since the passage of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act have we seen such concerted attempts to undermine the rights of workers to negotiate collectively. Bhairavi Desai says, “Capital is unbelievably aggressive. They are unapologetic and they remain creative and they don’t take no for an answer. Neither can we as a movement.”

The taxi drivers don’t have collective bargaining rights yet, nor are they covered under the Fair Labor Standards Act which protects some workers’ rights to safe working conditions and overtime pay. But Desai is hopeful that affiliation with the AFL-CIO will help both parties:

“We are establishing ourselves as a mass base independent democratic workers organization, and through our association with the AFL-CIO [we are] building our political power, our numbers, our strength our resources to one day win collective bargaining.”

And the Alliance is bringing a strong radical tone. The “good old boys” of labor seem to like it. Last week at the 2013 Convention, more history was made when Desai, was elected to a seat on the AFL-CIO Executive Council. Desai spoke with GRITtv about why the inclusion of this independent contractors’ organization within the nation’s largest labor union federation is such a very big deal.

A child sits on the shoulders of her father during a protest in Atlanta after George Zimmerman’s verdict. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

“He did nothing wrong except for what he did before.”

Those are the words that stay with me, after so many sad, mad and outrageous words have been uttered about the George Zimmerman trial. When, exactly does the clock start and stop on this notion of “before”?

“He did nothing wrong except for what he did before”Juror B37 told CNN’s Anderson Cooper after explaining that while the shooter may have shown "poor judgement" early in the evening in question, the jury couldn’t convict because:

“[…]because of the heat of the moment and the Stand Your Ground.”… “He had a right to defend himself. If he felt threatened that his life was going to be taken away from him or he was going to have bodily harm, he had a right.”

What happened on the night of the shooting has, much of it, been called unclear, but some things are entirely clear. One of those is that for Zimmerman “the moment” wasn’t heated for very long. According to the police timeline, he shot Trayvon Martin at 7:16 pm on February 26, 2012. At 7:09, we know the heated moment hadn’t begun because that’s when he called a non-emergency police hotline.

It was a non-emergency for Zimmerman at 7:09.

For the next four minutes and seven seconds, Zimmerman and the non-emergency operator talked on the phone. No one talked about any threat to any life. At 7:11 and thirty-three seconds, they were still talking when he told her the teenage boy he perceived as suspicious appeared to be running away.

At 7:11 and fifty-nine seconds, the dispatcher told Zimmerman not to follow the teen. He replied, “OK” but followed anyway. No heat-of-the-moment fear there.

At 7:13 and forty-one seconds the call ended.

For Martin by then, his moments had been heated already for a very long time.

We know for sure Martin’s moment was heated when he saw he was being followed by a stranger and he told his friend Rachel that he couldn’t lose the guy. It was heated, for sure, when she heard him say “What are you following me for?” And a bit later “get off, get off.”

For Martin, the heated moment probably started earlier, when he was caught in the rain and put up that hood (in that hood) and tried to pick a path home.  Or even before that, when he was suspended from school at test time, for traces of weed in his backpack. That was somebody’s idea of an emergency.

Martin’s heated moment was long. Zimmerman’s was short. But the only moment the jury (apparently) talked about was the one just before 7:16, when they believe Zimmerman came to feel fear. In the jury’s eyes, the heated moment started right there.

And so it may be, under the law. But whose heated moment are we talking about?

It depends when you start the clock. Does the moment start when you leave your car and pick up your gun? Or when your head starts to bleed from the fight you picked?

We’ve heard this argument before. When does the moment get hot: when you steal the land and erect a fence? Or when you pull the trigger on the landless one who throws a rock? When you send troops abroad to suck up minerals and grain? Or when you send troops around the world again to shoot the labor organizers who fight back? Or how about when you force people in chains to work for you for free? Or when they stand up and look at you and you get scared?

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Juror B37 told Anderson Cooper on CNN that Zimmerman had a right to stand his ground. Whose ground is it anyway? For how long? The Seminole, the Miccosuk?

Whose right? Whose ground? Which heated moment are we talking about?

We need a big long conversation about heated moments and a good long conversation about the law. Let us share that same heated moment, all of us, starting now.

In the days since George Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges, people in cities across the country have come together to express their outrage and disappointment.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka speaks during a luncheon at the National Press Club Friday, May 20, 2011 in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka addressed a gathering of labor activists in Washington this week and told them that he needed them.

“The future of America is at risk,” he said “because we have a democracy deficit and a solidarity deficit, and nowhere is that truer in our national life than in the workplace.”

The sentiment was less startling than the context, at the second annual conference of the Labor Research and Action Network (LRAN). LRAN attracts organizers largely from community-based workers’ centers and training and research groups who work with low-wage, immigrant and part time, non-union workers. The biggest guy in Big Labor, in other words, a man who came up through the nation’s oldest industrial union (the United Mine Workers), was asking the newest organizers on the scene—the fast-food, retail, restaurant, day labor and domestic workers—for help.

“How do we thicken relationships to both encourage experimentation and knit together a united labor movement?” he asked.

It’s no wonder that he’s asking.

When it comes to solidarity, Trumka knows whereof he speaks. The first time I laid eyes on him, in fact, it was in a place called Camp Solidarity in southwest Virginia. A public park turned union campground, in 1989 supporters flooded into Camp Solidarity from churches, schools and unions around the country in support of coalminers on strike against the Pittston Coal company.

Solidarity sparked the strike, which came in reaction to the company’s cuts to retired miners’ healthcare and pension plans. Solidarity kept it going, through sun and snow over a long eighteen months. Squads of volunteers cooked up burgers and wings for visitors and Appalachian music kept people step-dancing late into the evening. Trumka, a former miner, then president of the UMWA, would come by to thank the camouflage-clad crowd and encourage the striking miners in their campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience in defense of the workers who’d gone before them.

The UMWA occupies a particular place in American trade union history. Founded in 1890 with a (radical for its time) pledge to nondiscrimination based on race, religion or national origin, the union was a leader in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and a driving force behind the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Under legendary president John Lewis, the UMWA didn’t organize just coalminers but the entire industrial supply chain. Lewis sent UMWA organizers out across the nation Trumka recalled this week, because he understood that coal miners’ lives were linked to those of steelworkers and autoworkers.

A quarter of a century on, “We need our historic organizations of the nineteenth century to adapt to the new workforce of the twenty-first,” Trumka told LRAN.

Domestic workers, day laborers, farm workers and the rest, were never targets for John Lewis’ organizers. To the contrary, in the 1930s, they were explicitly excluded from the nation’s landmark labor law, the Fair Labor Standards Act. Calling themselves the “excluded workers” today they’re organizing for basic rights like overtime, paid sick days and minimum wages through non-union structures, like the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) or the National Day Laborers Organizing Network. That new generation of workforce groups has been turning heads and grabbing headlines, while traditional trade unions have been losing approximately 200,000 members a year since the 1970s. Less than half of the private sector workers—autoworkers, steelworkers, miners, plumbers—who were members in 1979 belong to a union today.

“Let me be frank, I am here to tell you that the American labor movement cannot and will not continue down the same well-traveled road—but the path forward is far from clear. We need your help,” Trumka told the crowd at LRAN.

He must be keenly aware of how true that is for coal miners. The UMWA just suffered its biggest blow since Pittston cancelled thousands of retirees’ health insurance cards in ’89. On May 29, a federal judge gave Patriot Coal, which declared bankruptcy last year, permission to end the existing health plan for 23,000 retirees and their families and replace it with what the union says is an inadequately funded Voluntary Employees Benefits Association or trust, administered by the union. The ruling also allowed Patriot Coal—which many believe was explicitly created to fail by the coal giants Peabody and Arch– permission to terminate the union’s current collective bargaining agreement and replace it one that reduces pay, benefits and time off for current workers.

While hugely profitable coal corporations move west to non-union mines in the Rockies, or China, union miners in Appalachia are frightened of the green light the Patriot decision gives to other companies. Jim Hall, of Castlewood, Virginia, who worked for Pittston, has a lot of medical expenses after a career spent down the mines. He had to have a heart valve replaced not long ago and relies on his union health coverage.

“It’s disheartening to think that a corporation will do that to people,” he told GRITtv this month. “We’re the ones went underground. Not them corporate officers. We’re the ones who put our lives on the line. They made money. They just want to make more.”

Before his retirement, Hall was active in the 1989 strike. His wife Shirley staffed the Camp Solidarity kitchen. This spring, they participated in Patriot protests and if there are more, they’ll be there, they say. They’d even support strike action.

Talks between the union and the company broke off June 12. Patriot’s cutbacks could go into effect as soon as July 1.

“Nothing’s off the table,” UMWA International Vice President James Gibbs told GRITtv. Without a contract, strike action would be legal, but risky, as reported by Mike Elk in In These Times:

[Patriot Coal CEO Bennett Hatfield] has hinted in the past that if the union struck Patriot Coal may be forced to liquidate the company. If the company sold off its mines, the new owner would decide whether to allow the union to return to work at them.

Miners and supporters rallied June 17 in St. Louis against Peabody, Arch and Patriot coal companies. Among the protesters, representatives from the Communications Workers, the SEIU and the St. Louis Central Labor Council—but there’s barely been a murmur in the national media. Will we see another Camp Solidarity? Were it to happen, it would have to look a whole lot different from the predominantly white, middle-aged crowd that gathered almost a quarter of a century ago in Virginia. More tacos, fewer hot dogs? Some salsa too, for dancing? One suspects that more than that will be wrapped up in building a more “tightly knit” solidarity for the twenty-first century.

Meanwhile, one thing is clear: these are life-changing times for big, old labor.

What a difference five years make! In 2008, when a few hundred union workers at the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago voted to occupy their plant instead of submitting meekly to being laid off, theirs was a rare act of courage in a cold winter of crisis for organized labor. Five years on, as some of those same workers cut the ribbon on their own cooperatively run business last week, it was yet another bold step by innovative workers in a season of daring by labor.

It’s no easy thing to sign a lease, buy equipment and open a business with a group. Starting a coop is risky, just like walking off a low-wage job. Asked why he and his fellows had decided to start a co-op, veteran window maker “Ricky” Maclin told me it was because they were tired of their lives being in someone else’s hands. In the last five years, two different owners for two different sets of reasons had tried to lay them off. Now Maclin and his partners are owner/operators of a cooperative company called New Era and a similar sort of determination and defiance is being seen in city after city, from fed up workers who are taking to the streets.

Fast food workers went on strike in Milwaukee this week, the fifth city to see low-wage workers walk out in one-day protests. Before Milwaukee it was New York, Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit.

There’s plenty to be fed up about. The same people slashing services are talking about an economic recovery, but if this is the economy in recovery, workers seem to have no place in it. Politicians and pundits are doing OK—in fact, for anyone with a stock portfolio, the economy’s in the pink. But that old supposed pact between Big Labor and the Democrats is clearly broken. Labor unions invested millions in helping Democrats win the last election but they’re getting nothing back—at least nothing that helps working people live and rear families and eat.

Wages remain rock-bottom, millions are more or less permanently out of work and those who are working are working harder, for more bosses, in less secure workplaces, with nothing in the way of benefits.

No wonder people are embracing new tactics. And surprise, surprise, those tactics work.

By occupying their plant the first time (in December 2008), the New Era workers won back-pay—and time for a new owner to be found. By occupying a second time (in February 2012, when those new owners threatened to liquidate), they won a chance to form a cooperative and make a bid on equipment.

Now their company’s name is seeming especially apt: New Era Windows. Are we, in fact, entering a new era for labor? The last time the labor movement embraced sit-down strikes and worker occupations, it was the 1930s. For most of the last century, industrial unions viewed autonomous worker co-ops as a threat. Today the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America will be representing the New Era workers, and the United Steelworkers of America is working with the Basque co-ops of Mondragon to open industrial co-ops in the US.

Likewise, until recently, trade unions refused to support ambitious strikes by low-wage workers in predominantly non-union industries, especially strikes led by women, immigrants and community organizations. The one-day stoppages around the country by retail and fast food workers this season are targeting non-union chains like McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell and TJ Maxx. Community groups are leading the way (although many are funded by the SEIU). They’re demanding a meaningful raise—to $15 and hour—and the right to organize a union without attack. So far, they’re succeeding in staging one-day walkouts without dire reprisals from management. That’s a jaw-dropping thing, with visible support. Milwaukee’s strikers returned to work Thursday, flanked by elected officials and clergy.

While the one-day strikes may be involving only a minority of workers so far, they are clearly building support as the wave of actions shows. What happens next? Strikes and co-ops are two different ways to respond to the finance-driven crisis of job losses and low wages. The first aims to build power at the bargaining table, the second to compete in the market. The outcome’s unsure, but just like that first occupation at Republic, the experiments themselves have unleashed new potential.

It just goes to show what can happen when workers lead the way, and when, as Jim Hightower would say, those who say it can’t be done get out of the way of those who are doing it.

In this video from Raise MKE and Wisconsin Jobs Now! workers describe what it’s like living on a low wage and why they’ve had enough. Today’s low wage buys only about 70 percent of what it bought in 1968. The majority of jobs created in this so-called “recovery” have been low-wage jobs. What’s that like to live on? As one woman puts it simply, “Living on minimum wage sucks!”

New York fast food joints may be in trouble for rampant wage theft. Read Josh Eidelson’s report.