Is Social Justice Driven by Emotion or Reason?

Tuesday, 08 July 2014 09:53 By Kate Aronoff, Waging Nonviolence | Report

MRI of the brain. (Image: via Shutterstock)This spring, researchers at the University of Chicago published a study investigating how perceptions of justice and fairness relate to the human brain. As summarized last week by Erin Brodwin for News.Mic, the study’s main finding—or at least that most relevant to those of us who aren’t neurologists—is that “when people who are more responsive to injustice see things happen that they find morally wrong…their minds respond by accessing the sections of the brain responsible for logic and reasoning.”

Brodwin’s conclusion from the study is that those interested in social change—especially around human rights and environmental concerns—should appeal to logic rather than emotion. While it’s certainly true that powerful fact-based arguments about climate change have catalyzed the movement against it, it is also true that such arguments have been successful largely in mobilizing those not directly impacted by its effects. Understandably so, researchers were not seeking to simulate lifetimes spent dealing with climate change, let alone the realities of abuse or race-based inequality.

Over 40 years ago, Saul Alinsky dealt with this very issue in Rules for Radicals:

Communication occurs concretely, by means of one’s specific experience. General theories become meaningful only when one has absorbed and understood the specific constituents and then related them back to a general concept. Unless this is done, the specifics become nothing more than a string of interesting anecdotes.

It follows that regardless of the inherent logic of a concept, the logic by which a given person finds that logic compelling is rooted in their personal experience. Even activists and organizers operating from a place of relative privilege around the climate crisis, for instance, are not driven to act by facts alone; they interpret those facts through their own experience. Though useful for engaging those already responsive to injustice, the study doesn’t tell organizers how to motivate people to be responsive to injustice in the first place. As Alinksy and centuries of social movement history also tell us, most people act out of logical self-interest rather than a self-less desire to help others. A knee jerk reaction to displays of inequality is one thing, but sustained and active support for a movement confronting that inequality is quite another.

The study, then, presents a dual challenge for organizers looking to communicate with the broader public: engage self-interest in a given issue and then—crucially—provide those activated with the means to tap into the logical, reasonable and arguably strategic parts of their brain. Why do so many people sign petitions or attend demonstrations and then drop out of movements entirely? The study seems to suggest is that the appeal is working, but the follow-up isn’t.

Unfortunately, there is no magic formula for effective follow-up. On the local level, at least, forging strong relationships is hard to beat. In my own student organizing, we were most effective when we equipped as many leaders as possible with the tools they needed to run their own projects that fit within our most basic strategic vision and theory of change. As the study shows, people want to act strategically. It’s just up to organizers to give them the tools and framework to do so.

Note:  Workers in Unions integrate communications from Leadership into their daily work.
Unlike students, workers spend 8 hours together, cooperating, sharing, helping each other.
They read their weekly Union newspaper, not Murdock's Wall St Joke.

Jobs Grow When States Raise Minimum Wage

States that Have Raised the Minimum Wage this Year Have Faster Job Growth

Kenneth Quinnell

In the 13 states that saw their minimum wage rise on Jan. 1, 2014, job growth has been higher so far this year than in states where the minimum wage stayed the same. Extreme pro-business interests often argue that raising the minimum wage will lead to job losses, but once again, the evidence suggests otherwise.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research looked closely at the data and found states that raised their minimum wage increase have seen an average increase in employment of 0.99%, while the static states saw an increase of only 0.68%.

Of the 13 states, all but New Jersey saw employment gains and nine of the 13 states are above the median state in job growth. Four of the 13 states saw their minimum wage increase because of new legislation, while the rest saw automatic increases related to inflation.

The states in question are: Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

Cooperative Movement Owners Development Fund

Worker-Owners Cheer Creation of $1.2 Million Co-op Development Fund in NYC

  By Rebecca Burns, In These Times | Report

In a victory for new economy advocates, the New York City Council passed a budget last month that will create a $1.2 million fund for the growth of worker-owned cooperative businesses. The investment is the largest a municipal government in the U.S. has ever made in the sector, breaking new ground for the cooperative development movement.

Melissa Hoover, executive director of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives and the Democracy at Work Institute, hails the New York City Council’s move as “historic.” “We have seen bits and pieces here and there, but New York City is the first place to make an investment at that level,” she says.

New York’s cooperative development fund was the brainchild of a coalition of community groups—including the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, the New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives, the Democracy at Work Institute, Make the Road New York and others—that came together to stage a series of public forums and advocacy days to secure widespread support for the initiative on the City Council. Over the next year, the fund will provide financial and technical assistance in the planned launch of 28 new cooperatives and the continued growth of 20 existing cooperatives, supporting the creation of 234 jobs in total.

While this may just be a drop in the bucket when it comes to the city’s $75 billion total budget, cooperative advocates are hoping New York’s example can help turn the tide in favor of alternative strategies for urban development.

“We’d like to get to a tipping point where [cooperatives] really have a measurable impact on the local economy,” says Hilary Abell, a San Francisco-based co-op development consultant who co-founded the group Project Equity. She notes that while interest in cooperatives has surged, there are still fewer than 5,000 “worker-owners” nationwide. Nevertheless, the model of worker-owned cooperatives has captured the imaginations of many low-income communities of color hit hardest by the Great Recession, she says, creating “a window of opportunity to take this to the next level.”
 
Last month, Abell released a report called “Worker Cooperatives: Pathways to Scale,” which outlines a set of strategies to grow the cooperative movement nationwide. While  there are several promising federal policy initiatives underway—Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), for example, has introduced a bill that would create an Office of Employee Ownership and Participation within the U.S. Department of Labor, as well as another that would establish a U.S. Employee Ownership Bank—Abell believes that “advocacy for cooperatives may have the greatest momentum at the state and municipal levels.”

Across the country, similar local economic justice coalitions have been seeking to persuade municipal governments and local institutions to throw their resources behind the development of worker-owned co-ops. It’s those resources, many advocates believe, that could take co-ops from a niche movement to a broad-based strategy for creating living-wage jobs and putting economic power in the hands of workers.

To that end, Abell hopes to see more cities follow in New York’s footsteps. In the Bay Area, she tells Working In These Times, local organizers are currently reaching out to local officials for support in scaling up worker-owned cooperatives to the point that they constitute five to 10 percent of the local economy. The coalition is particularly focused on creating jobs for workers of color in the low-income areas of the East Bay , as past experiences have shown that worker-owned co-ops can be particularly effective in redressing racial inequities in the job market. For example, Women’s Action to Gain Economic Security (WAGES), a network of nearly 100 worker-owned cleaning cooperatives in Oakland, has increased members’ incomes by more than 50 percent.

Other hotbeds of co-op development include Richmond, California, where the city has hired its own cooperative developer and is launching a loan fund under the leadership of Green Party Mayor Gayle McLaughlin. In Cleveland, Ohio, the city’s economic development department has worked closely with the Evergreen Cooperatives, a network of worker-owned green cleaning, farming and construction businesses; local hospitals and universities have also thrown their purchasing power behind worker-owned businesses. And as In These Times has reported previously, several unions have made a foray into the co-op business, combining place-based growth with a focus on leveraging changes across industries such as homecare.

Instead of simply appealing to local leaders for support, some activists have sought to build both political and economic power by building electoral campaigns around the issue of cooperative development. No city had secured greater local support for co-ops than Jackson, Miss., a majority African-American municipality where human rights attorney and longtime black radical activist Chokwe Lumumba was elected mayor last year on a platform that included the use of public spending to promote cooperative enterprises. But following Lumumba’s sudden death in February, the movement that brought him to office has been left struggling to implement the vision it had forged.

Local activists say new Mayor Tony Yarber has been tepid in his support for the cooperative development plan developed by Lumumba’s administration, leaving them uncertain as to whether they can count, for example, on city contracts being awarded to local worker-owned businesses. According to Brandon King, a member of the group Cooperation Jackson who also worked on the Lumumba campaign, access to such contracts would have been a huge boon for nascent construction and waste-management cooperatives, as Lumumba’s campaign had estimated that the city would need to spend $1.2 billion over the next 10 to 15 years on infrastructural upgrades and repairs. What often happens, says King, is that contracts go to companies located in wealthier and majority-white suburbs outside of Jackson, with the result that “people in Jackson aren’t really engaged in building their own city.”

Despite the change of course in city government, King says Cooperation Jackson “is still working on building co-ops that are large-scale, and getting as many people engaged in economic democracy as possible.” The movement has a history of black community participation in cooperative enterprises to draw from, King notes. Meanwhile, adds Cooperation Jackson memberIya'Falola Omobola, while the group works to get childcare and urban farming cooperatives off the ground, with or without city support, “We’re going to be ready to mobilize around an appropriate candidate in the next [mayoral] election.”

Noting the particular conditions that have helped secure local support for cooperatives in New York City and Jackson, the Democracy at Work Institute’s Hoover acknowledges that activists are still exploring how these can be replicated elsewhere. But if these cities are successful in retaining long-term support for cooperative growth, they can serve as a jumping-off point for other areas. “Our hope is that these won’t be one-off examples,” Hoover says. “What we need ultimately is a shift among those doing local development: from, ‘Quick, let’s get a Home Depot to come in and create jobs, but they’re low-wage and low-skilled,’ to a deeper and more patient strategy. These places could really start that shift.”

Originally published at InTheseTimes.com 

Rebecca Burns

Rebecca Burns, In These Times Assistant Editor, holds an M.A. from the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, where her research focused on global land and housing rights. A former editorial intern at the magazine, Burns also works as a research assistant for a project examining violence against humanitarian aid workers.

Systematic Corporate Irresponsibilty Resulting in Death

Giant Corporations, Giant Failures

  By Richard D Wolff, Truthout | News Analysis

(Image: General Motors, Crime scene via Shutterstock; Edited: EL / TO)
General Motors recently released the report it commissioned from the huge Jenner & Block law firm.

The latter's chairman, Anton Valukas, investigated how and why GM failed - for over 10 years - to recall cars it produced while knowing they had defective ignition switches. The eventual recall of 2.6 million Chevrolet Cobalt cars in February, 2014, followed 13 deaths GM linked to those defective switches (many others were injured, and government officials believe there were more fatalities).

GM's chief executive, Mary Barra, admitted publicly this April what Valukas wrote in his report: GM failed systematically to identify, take responsibility for, and act properly in the face of life-threatening defects in millions of automobiles it sold since 2002. On June 16, 2014, GM recalled an additional 3.16 million defective vehicles across seven of its models. GM's total recalls in North America so far this year exceed 20 million vehicles.

Lessons from so major a failure go far beyond GM leaders promising to fix their internal operations. As the Valukas report documents, many layers of the GM bureaucracy routinely ignored evidence of defective ignition switches and their risks to customers' lives. None of thousands of engineers and executives - even those who had recognized the problem or mentioned it to other GM officials - was able or willing to achieve the recall decision until 2014. Chief executive Barra attributed this failure to a "pattern of incompetence and neglect." Five years ago, GM announced another failure, its own bankruptcy, and got the US government to bail it out with $ 49.5 billion in taxpayers' money. We paid collectively to save a corporation whose chief describes its activities in terms of a "pattern of incompetence and neglect."

Despite such catastrophic failures over the past decade, we permit, and indeed subsidize, the continued operation of GM by the same bureaucracy. To date, a total of 15 engineers and other employees have been dismissed from GM for failures related to the faulty ignition switch. No one was fired because of any explicit responsibility for bankruptcy. GM had a total of 219,000 employees as of 2013.

GM's plunge into bankruptcy shook the entire economy. That same corporation persistently produced and marketed life-threateningly defective vehicles. Yet no serious steps are taken to correct actions that far exceed any reasonable standard for allowing such enterprises to continue. Are we a society that cannot recognize or deal with antisocial behavior when the culprits are large corporations?

Punishing more individuals is not the point. That would change little in the internal corporate system of rewards and punishments that produced GM's behavior. After all, GM leaders all knew the company risked major, punishing damage (loss of sales, profits and market share, law suits from victims, extremely negative publicity, government investigations, etc.) by not recalling vehicles that killed, injured, or endangered people, yet they did it anyway. The market simply did not adequately discipline GM. The corporation believed it could control its markets (by mountains of advertising, via political influence at federal, state and city levels, using massive, costly legal maneuvers, and so on).

Running the firm into bankruptcy and selling unsafe vehicles happened because GM saw both series of actions as more advantageous and less dangerous to them than other options (from earlier recalls, to sharply reduced payouts to executives and shareholders, to public discussion of mass-transportation alternatives to producing cars and trucks). In such calculations, GM is not atypical among large corporations. That is why damaging the environment; bureaucratic oppression (the "suck-up-and-kick-down" system); moving jobs to low-wage countries; producing poor quality outputs; paying their top executives and shareholders huge amounts and deepening the divide between rich and poor; crippling public revenues by shifting operations to foreign tax havens; and so many other antisocial consequences flow from those corporations.
 
The major lesson of GM's failures is that we cannot afford to leave such corporations in charge of producing the goods and services we all depend on.
 
Similarly, can we allow that system to keep purchasing our major parties and politicians to secure its immunity from real accountability? The answer is that we can and should do better than a system so obviously failing.

What is to be done? One basic problem is the link between jobs and incomes. The layers of GM bureaucracy looked the other way, did not pursue what they knew, avoided making waves inside the company etc. because they feared for their jobs and incomes. Especially in an economy with high unemployment and job insecurity, acting in socially responsible ways becomes too risky personally. If employees knew that their companies' failures would not necessarily jeopardize their personal incomes, we could expect far more socially responsible behavior from many more of them.

If government guaranteed personal incomes even when individuals had to move from one job or enterprise to another, those individuals could better face and fix the failures where they work. Making families' incomes depend on their jobs pressures job-holders not to rock the corporate boat even when they know they should. We ought to disconnect our citizens' incomes from their particular jobs (national discussions of this idea have increasingly engaged the Swiss and others in Europe over recent years).

Another lesson from GM's failures is the need to broaden the community of people making key economic decisions. If the citizens of Detroit had had real participatory power over GM decisions, GM might have kept more facilities there and thereby avoided urban collapse. If GM customers had more institutionalized participation in corporate decisions, concerns about faulty ignition switches might have gained hearings sooner and so saved lives and avoided vast financial losses.

Here lies yet another argument to shift from private, capitalist corporations (governed by major shareholders and the boards of directors they select) to cooperative enterprises (governed democratically by workers, surrounding communities, and customers/consumers).

Such cooperatives would democratize enterprises in ways likely to make their economic decisions far more socially responsible.

Richard D Wolff

Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan. Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994, he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris (France), I (Sorbonne). His work is available at rdwolff.com and at democracyatwork.info.

An Iraqi Woman's View

Who are the Real Barbarians?

Another (Unwelcome) Liberation of Iraq

by HAIFA ZANGANA

It goes without saying, that very little space has been available in the Corp Media, whether Arabic or international, for Iraqi voices that challenge the dominant rhetoric about the situation in Iraq.

Under the dark shadow of US “War on Terror”, the crimes and massacres of 11 years of Iraq invasion, occupation, the killing of hundreds of thousands of  Iraqis  and the daily oppression carried out by a sectarian kleptomaniac regime, have been covered up, not just by a garb of democracy, but also by the Corp Media reduced yet to a fight against terrorist organisation called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria ( ISIS),  supported by ( take your pick) either one or all the following countries, no matter how bizarre the notion is: Saudi Arabia, Qatar , and Israel  not forgetting Turkey . 

Once again, as in 2003 feverish drumming up for war, desperate Iraqis who are trying to defend themselves against a ruthless regime that uses the pretext of combating terrorism as a ploy to silence critical voices have been sidelined, not to be heard and not to be seen. In the Arab countries, joining the choir of exaggerating the role of ISIS in Iraq and elsewhere became the bleach to clean the bloody hands of those responsible of invading, occupying and laying the fertile ground for endless acts of terrorism including state terrorism.

Today, Thousands of Iraqis are fleeing their homes. So far this year, an estimated 1.2 million Iraqis have been displaced by fighting, including from Anbar, and Ninewa, west and Northern governorates.  (Maliki's) ...carrying out airstrikes in Mosul  and Tikrit as well as extrajudicial executions of detainees by the regime’s forces and militias in Tal ‘Afar, Mosul and Ba’quba, in northern Iraq have raised fears of a large scale vengeful attacks leading to a large  scale humanitarian crisis.

Meanwhile, an international competition is on the way between US, Russia and Iran to supply the regime with weapons.  Russia has already sent five Sukhoi fighter jets, the first of 25 warplanes expected to be delivered soon,  the US has sent Special Forces, Apache attack helicopters and drones as part of the top up in U.S. military presence, and the fact that Iraq has been, for many years now, a battlefield to settle scores on nuclear programme between US and Iran will only lead to an endless bloodshed reaching far beyond the region where the politically correct whispers about the Maliki’s  regime  “violations of human rights” in annual governments’ reports, are seen as adding salt to injuries.

In this hysterical atmosphere of supplying arms while tainting everything happening in Iraq by ISIS, which is by no mean comparable to the nearly 1 million strong army and security forces, and especially to the Special Forces (inherited from the occupation, trained by the US and now attached directly to Maliki’s office), it is worth remembering how the current eruption of fighting begun.

It begun with a few hundred people demonstrating in both Anbar and Nineveh, in December 2012, at the news of rape of women detainees at the hands of the Iraqi security forces under Maliki’s command as Commander in Chief. 

Within few days the protests morphed into a genuine mass movement and a vigil which lasted for over a year. The demand for the release of 4500 women detainees, some of whom have been tortured, raped or threatened with rape gained a wide support, igniting a gradual escalation.  Other demands focused on release of prisoners and the repeal of section 4 in the Terrorism Act which allows the arrest of anyone without a warrant and without submitting him/ her to courts and  to abolish or suspend the Justice and Accountability Law which have been used to target political dissidents labelling them Ba’athist. 

The Maliki's regime’s response was to brand the demonstrators terrorists (ISIS was not born yet).  A campaign of arrests and assassination of vigil’s leaders was followed and amid world silence 50 demonstrators were massacred in Huweija, north of Iraq.  With every arrest, torture and killing, with every act of humiliation and marginalisation, the prospect of justice diminished.  

The Council for Iraqi Revolutionaries (GMCIR),  the Iraqi National army, and council of tribal rebels in Al-Anbar Province, issued statements emphasising the Iraqiness of the uprising, condemning terrorism, calling out to protect the holy places and not to target them because Al-Maliki’s regime is “trying to use the protection of holy places as a pretext to target the revolution”.   Above all, they reject all kind of (outside) interference in Iraqi affairs.

And while A spokesman for the GMCIR, described ISIS as “barbarians“.

The influential Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq issued a statement dismissing the new Khilafat declaration, describing it as a step against the interest of Iraq and its unity that will be employed as a pretext to divide the country and harming its people.

Listening to these voices while admitting responsibility about the mushrooming of terrorist’s organisations, in a country that had no link to any before the US led occupation, not airstrikes,  is a must if the US and international community are genuinely interested in the stability of the region and the world.

Haifa Zangana is an Iraqi novelist, artist and activist. Her recent books are “Dreaming of Baghdad” and “City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman’s Account of War and Resistance” and co authored “The Torturer in the Mirror” with Ramsey Clark and Thomas Ehrlich Reifer. She has also published three novels and four collections of short stories and many chapters in books on Iraq and the ME. As a painter and writer she participated in the Eighties in various European and American publications and group exhibitions, with one-woman shows in London and Iceland. She is also a contributor to European and Arabic publications such as The Guardian, Red Pepper, Al Ahram weekly and Al Quds (weekly comment). She contributes to academic conferences on women, gender, resistance and war. Haifa is co-founder of Tadhamun: Iraqi Women  Solidarity, founding member of the International Association of Contemporary Iraqi Studies (IACIS) and advisor for UNDP on “Towards the Rise of women in the Arab world”. Currently she is a consultant at ESCWA.

Inspiring Wildcat Strikes from 1960s-1970s

For Inspiration, Look to the History Of 
Public Worker Strikes 

June 18, 2014 / by Joe Burns

An illegal national postal wildcat in 1970—not approved by union leaders—set contract standards postal workers are still defending today. The government tried to use the military to deliver mail. Photo: San Francisco Bay View. Politicians want to turn the clock back 50 years by restricting the bargaining rights of millions of public workers.

Unions would do well to look back, too, to the great public employee strike upsurge of the 1960s. Today’s unions, in both the public and private sectors, have a lot to learn from this little-discussed period in labor history. Here are seven lessons: Strikes Worked.  Entering the 1960s, public employee unions were weak, engaging in “collective begging” rather than “collective bargaining.” But then public workers rose up in one of the great upsurges in U.S. labor history. Public workers marched on school board meetings. They conducted slowdowns. And they struck, by hundreds of thousands over the next two decades, to win union recognition.

The civil rights movement inspired sanitation workers’ strikes throughout the South. Teachers in Florida and Utah pulled off statewide walkouts. Postal workers struck nationwide, in a wildcat conducted against the wishes of union leaders. Police and firefighters contracted “blue flu” and “red rashes” to demand what private sector workers already had: the right to bargain. This wave of militancy won both contracts and changes in labor law. And in the process, public employee union membership surged from 400,000 in the late 1950s to 4 million by the mid-1970s. Strikes, it’s safe to say, created the public employee labor movement.

The Power of Example
Just as today’s activists look to the 2012 Chicago Teachers strike for inspiration, teachers back then looked to a one-day strike in New York City schools, in 1960. According to one scholar, that single, short strike not only spurred the organization of teachers in New York state but also became “the watershed for teachers’ strikes in the twentieth century.”  Teachers around the country followed the trail blazed by New Yorkers and struck for union recognition, too.   In 1968 teachers struck 112 times—up from zero a decade before. Of course, not every local struggle will start a prairie fire. The Republic Windows factory takeover in 2008 did not prompt an outpouring of plant occupations. But we never know where a particular struggle may lead and how it may give others the courage to act.

MADE TO BE BROKEN 
Don’t Let Repressive Laws Stop You. Today we face a web of legal restrictions specifically constructed to force unions to fight small, pointless battles. Public employee strikes are illegal in most states. Private sector strikers can be permanently replaced with scabs. Simply put, the rules are rigged. Figuring out how to break free of these rules is a practical necessity. Until the late 1960s, public employee strikes were illegal in every jurisdiction in the U.S. Yet when the idea took hold and the context was right, hundreds of thousands of public workers struck anyway, violating state laws and court injunctions. And they generally won—achieving recognition and good contracts, and forcing lawmakers to amend state laws to permit public employee bargaining. Even though strikes remained illegal in the Union strongholds of New York, Ohio, and Illinois, strike levels were high there throughout the ’70s. In fact, one study of 1970 to 1981 found that “70 percent of the most strike-prone states were those where strikes were not legal.” When their union president was jailed during a 1973 strike, striking teachers in Evergreen, Washington, lined up with toothbrushes in hand demanding to be jailed as well. The flustered judge backed down and when the district refused to negotiate, he threatened to jail the school board instead. The Union won a first contract. When lawmakers realized that their laws didn’t prevent strikes, in many states policymakers legalized them, hoping to better control the activity. Union Democracy Matters.

Some say labor can confront giant corporations only by building centralized, vertically structured mega-unions. Union democracy, they say, is a luxury we cannot afford. But labor history gives little support to that proposition. During the 1960s, public workers fought to transform conservative organizations into fighting machines. Members battled at their union conventions to take no-strike clauses out of their constitutions. Public workers flocked to more militant unions—forcing others, such as the National Education Association, to adopt the strike or lose members.

A HUMAN RIGHT
Treat Striking as a Human Right. When the strike-banning Taylor Law was under debate in 1967, three New York City unions held a packed rally in Madison Square Garden, and passed a resolution stating, “No one, no body of legislators or government officials, can take from us our rights as free men and women to leave our jobs when sufficiently aggrieved. “When a group of our members are so aggrieved, then indeed they will strike.” Public employee unionists rejected illogical arguments about why public workers should not be allowed to strike. Better yet, they did not accept that legislators or courts had the right to make that decision; striking was a human right which judges or politicians could not take away. But few in labor today discuss striking as a fundamental right. Instead we look only at the practicalities: whether a strike seems immediately feasible. When it doesn’t, we forget the principle, and accept restrictions on our right to strike and free speech that earlier generations refused to tolerate.

Build Community Alliances
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, striking public workers could draw on allies in the civil rights movement, as did the 1968 Memphis and 1969 Charleston sanitation strikes. Public unions allied with still-powerful private sector unions. They could demand equality with the wages and pensions bargained by their private sector counterparts. But with the waning of the ’60s movements and the organizing climate they helped foster, public employee strikes became harder to win.  Over time, as public employee unions became more successful and private sector unionism declined, politicians began painting public employee strikers as greedy and overpaid. Understanding the economics of public employee strikes became essential to winning them. While the private sector strike aims to put economic pressure on the employer by depriving him of revenue, the purpose of the public employee strike is to exert political pressure. Winning public employee strikes, then and now, depended on a union’s ability to frame the issues, garner community support, and thereby exert political pressure on policymakers to settle.

Don’t Give Up Hope
When we look at today’s restrictive labor laws, it can be hard to see how to break out of the box. But the greatest lesson of the 1960s is that public employees believed in themselves—and dared to win. Joe Burns is a union negotiator/attorney in the airline industry and author of Reviving the Strike. He’s a former public employee and Union president. His new book is Strike Back: Using the Militant Tactics of Labor’s Past to Reignite Public Sector Unionism Today (June 2014). New Yorkers can hear him talk about the book June 25 at 7 p.m. at Bluestockings Books.
 See more at: http://labornotes.org/2014/06/inspiration-look-history-public-worker-strikes

Congress Protects Their Personal Cell Phones

Alan Grayson Hosting “Crypto-Party” In Congress

The Edward Snowden effect. posted on June 19, 2014, at 8:35 a.m.

Rosie Gray BuzzFeed Staff

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Mark Wilson / Getty Images

Florida Rep. Alan Grayson is hosting a “crypto-party” on Capitol Hill for colleagues in Congress to learn how to use encryption technology next week, according to an invite sent from an aide in his office.

A Dear Colleague letter sent from Grayson’s office that was forwarded to BuzzFeed reads:

Dear Colleague,
Please join our offices and Access, a nonprofit organization dedicated to defending digital rights and open and secure communications online, for a “crypto party” on Capitol Hill. The event will feature experts who will explain how to protect your security online, how to assess your privacy risks online, encrypt your devices, chat securely, and anonymously browse the Internet.
Bring your personal devices if you would like help using encryption technologies. Refreshments will be provided. We hope you will stop by Rayburn 2200 on Monday, June 23 starting at 9:00 a.m. to learn more.

The event is being co-hosted by Grayson and by California Rep. Zoe Lofgren, both Democrats.
Crypto-parties are a do-it-yourself encryption movement founded in 2011 by an Australian internet activist named Asher Wolf. The parties, which involve groups of people getting together to learn encryption, usually host journalists or online activists — seldom politicians.
The event inside the halls of Congress illustrates just how mainstream the use of encryption has become since the revelations about the National Security Agency surveillance disclosed by Edward Snowden showed how widespread the government’s online spying capabilities are. While he was still a contractor for the NSA, Snowden himself hosted a crypto-party in Hawaii in 2012, as reported by Wired. Members of Congress may have good reason to use encryption — the NSA has not denied surveilling them.

Spokespeople for Grayson and Lofgren did not immediately return requests for comment.
“This is the first crypto party we’ve done with U.S. lawmakers,” said Amie Stepanovich, senior policy counsel at Access, the group that will teach encryption at the event. “We’re excited about the opportunity to educate members and their staff on the importance of encryption tools and how to use them.”