Four more days to raise $8,262
Hi friend,
I first became a proud red card-carrying member of the Industrial Workers of the World in 2007. I was employed by a large healthcare workers union in New York City. This was my first job out of graduate school, which I fondly think of as Marxist finishing school and where I studied with superstars such as Neil Smith and David Harvey. Fresh from taking Harvey’s Reading Capital class (which I repeated four times), I was confused by the dissonance at my place of employment.
My employer, ostensibly a labor union, reprimanded us for starting a Marxist reading group among staff and member leaders. We got in trouble, again, when we criticized the union’s decision to hold a banquet for members at a restaurant where the workers were on strike. Other issues unsettled me: the union buzzed internally about plans to replace shop stewards with a 1-800 customer service number, where a worker could phone in with questions about their pension plan or file a grievance. Rumors whispered in the break room hinted at sweetheart deals brokered by the union with management, without input from members.
Disillusioned and heartbroken, I searched for other models of union organizing. I didn’t have to look far: Daniel Gross led an effort to bring Starbucks baristas into the fold of the One Big Union beginning in 2003 at a store on Madison Avenue and 36th Street. By 2007, similar campaigns by the Wobblies had emerged in 20 cities across North America. I believe it was the IWW that paved the way for 8,000 workers at 360 Starbucks stores in 40 states to vote to unionize two decades later.
Although I joined the union in 2007, I didn’t become active until six years later. I along with two other researchers were recruited to join the IWW Survey and Research Committee. Our task was to survey the membership biannually to help the union better understand the needs of its members. We expanded the scope to include strategic campaign research training for members wanting to organize in their workplace, as well as research assistance for existing campaigns. We also spearheaded efforts to understand key industries. Many of us read Forces of Labor by Beverly Silver and were inspired to focus our efforts at the chokepoints of global capital.
A 2014 document we drafted titled “Global Supply Chains: An IWW Project Proposal” starts with a provocation: “Everything in this world that is bought and sold starts at one point in this world. Sugar, steel, and oil from one place get sent to another place where they are pummeled and processed into commodities. Then, shrink-wrapped and packaged, products make their way by ship, train, or automobile to warehouses, to be distributed to retail stores. Where the end consumer buys it. But, what if the workers that pick the fruit or sew the garments unite with the dockworkers that unload the cargo, to stop their labor, to halt the flow of goods? What then?”
There are two campaigns that I am particularly proud of during our tenure: the first is for the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, the industrial unit for workers in prisons or jails within the IWW, and the second for Familias Unidas Por La Justicia, a nascent farmworker union in the Pacific Northwest.
In March 2014, we the SRC received an email from an IWW leader inquiring into prison labor in Alabama and Georgia: What is the profit made from the labor of inmates, and where are the profits going? An incarcerated worker at a maximum security facility reached out to the union suspecting that the chemicals processed by workers behind bars were later sold and packaged as cleaning products by a big box retail store. While we were never able to conclusively establish this supply chain link, we did estimate the financial impact of a prison strike in California in 2016. A later report released by colleagues from the research committee documented endemic issues with food and healthcare in prisons in 2018.
We partnered with a food justice organization, Community to Community, based in Bellingham, Washington in 2015. Farmworkers at a family-owned berry farm were not getting paid the full wages for their harvest labor. We helped to research the supply chain of the berry farm, finding that it led back to a multinational produce distributor. This led to a boycott of the distributor, as well as a global ice cream brand that used the berries, in solidarity with the farmworkers. The workers prevailed: in 2016 the farmworkers voted to join an independent union Familias Unidas Por La Justicia. A year later, the union signed a collective bargaining agreement with the berry farm.
During the boycott, supporters regularly asked workers where they could buy berries grown without exploitation. The idea of forming a cooperative was thus seeded. In 2017, four farmworkers who led the struggle for union recognition launched Cooperativa Tierra y Libertad/Land and Liberation Cooperative. The farmworker-owned cooperative grows food using cultural practices of organic farming and teaches the next generation agroecological practices.
It’s the fifth day of my one-week birthday fundraiser. I have been derelict in my earlier promise to share daily vignettes about Solidarity Research Center’s work over the course of our almost decade-long history. You my friends have not let me down: 27 have donated over $1,700 to Solidarity Research Center.
Your kindness and generosity brings us closer to meeting our budget: We have raised $15,137 — which is 65% of our budget — but we still need $8,262 or else Solidarity Research Center will end this year in the red.
Please support our work as a birthday gift for me and so we can continue to support (and win) struggles to create a new world in the shell of the old. Another labor movement is possible!
Four more days to raise $8,262!
In deep appreciation,
Yvonne