We Shall Not Be Moved

workers

I have to give the American far right an award for chutzpa: somehow they have managed to turn every one of their failures into an attack point. A schizophrenic student buys a glock and turns it on a Congresswoman, a child, and others in a shopping mall? Use this as an argument that we need more guns, including guns on our college campuses. Deregulation of the oil companies leads to a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and deregulation of our financial markets allows irresponsible speculation that causes a world-wide meltdown? Attack excessive government regulation and extol the virtues of unfettered free enterprise. President Bush turns a surplus into a mammoth deficit through tax cuts, two unpaid-for wars, and an unpaid-for prescription drug plan? Blame unionized teachers for the deficit and go after their rights to collectively bargain.

I’m at a loss to think of a literary work that captures such craziness. Alice’s looking glass world perhaps? Kafka?

Here’s a word of comfort for those bucking a Wisconsin governor who is currently going after public sector unions in the name of “deficit reduction”: solidarity. It has worked in the past and can work now. I am reminded of this by one of the best contemporary novels I know on unions.

Full disclosure requires me to acknowledge that the work, Leaps of Faith, has been written by one of my dearest friends. In it, Rachel Kranz looks at a powerful Manhattan university (Olympia in the book, Columbia in real life) that wants to prevent its workers from pressing for conditions they should be able to take for granted.

In neither the book nor real life can the workers and union organizers be called angels. After all, they are people and have the strengths and weaknesses that we all have. In the book they bicker, they make mistakes, they stumble around. Yet when ordered to back down, they rise to the occasion and pull off a miraculous victory. Call it a leap of faith.

Here’s an inspirational address to local organizers by Rosie, one of the principle characters in the book:

The point being, people, that if we let them psych us out, we’re going to act from a position of weakness. And I want us to come from strength. I want us to look around this room and see the incredible strength we represent, the way we’re all here together, all different types of jobs, all different races and backgrounds, male and female, gay and straight—when do people ever come together like this? This is what freaks them out. This is what blows their minds, because they can’t believe that here we all are, together, on our own time, these stupid little secretaries and file clerks and Xerox operators, from their point of view, because—until we don’t show up Monday morning—they have no idea of the work we do, am I right?” This gets nods, agreement. “And they can’t understand how we can be holding out so long, how we don’t just cave.”

Rosie may sound sure and confident but, secretly, she fully expects them to cave. She also believes that the strike the local union has called is precipitous and ill-advised. And yet somehow the union prevails.

Nor is this empty wish fulfillment. Rachel herself helped unionize Columbia University’s workforce, a movement that, against all odds, succeeded.

Take a leap of faith and who knows what may happen?

Time to dust off those old union songs.

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