Some of the wariness stemmed from OWS’s congenital aversion to establishment politics. On the first day of the occupation Zuccotti Park I talked to organizers, seasoned and new, who were committed to radical democracy, skeptical of electoral politics and opposed to capitalism. Their politics couldn’t have been more distant from unions like the SEIU, Teamsters and United Auto Workers, which are top down and centralized, joined at the hip with the Democratic Party and eager, even desperate, to be the junior partner of capital.
Even before Occupy Wall Street pitched its first tent, the politics were so amorphous that one person kept blocking outreach to unions on the grounds that it needed to attract Tea Partyers. “When Occupy was conceived there was no outreach to labor,” says Ari Paul, a New York City labor reporter. “They were hesitant to even let unions be a part of it, because they were seen as bureaucratic and short-sighted.”
Jackie DiSalvo, who attended pre-occupation general assemblies, helped change that by forming the labor outreach committee the first week of OWS. She is a retired associate professor of English who took part in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer.
“I was attracted to the movement because they adopted the line of the 99 percent against the 1 percent,” DiSalvo said in an interview. “It was very class-conscious politics. I thought the only way it was going to have any strength was to have a working class and trade union base because they bring resources, numbers and political realism. They would give Occupy a broader constituency than the young people sleeping in Zuccotti who were precarious workers, unemployed or students.”
For the first few days, however, the unions stayed away because “the initial press reports were Occupy Wall Street was a bunch of freaks,” says DiSalvo.
On Sept. 22, five days after it began, Occupy Wall Street received its first union backing: delegates from the City University of New York’s 25,000-member Professional Staff Congress marched to the park in a show of support. Other unions “were hesitant,” says DiSalvo, “because they didn’t know who we were and what we were going to do, but they very quickly got over their hesitancy and embraced us, endorsed us, and provided support such as supplies, storage room, printing literature and meeting space.”
via www.salon.com
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