6 Ways to Juice Up the Labor Movement

http://www.alternet.org/6-ways-juice-labor-movement

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1. Stephen Lerner, architect of the Justice for Janitors campaign


“It's time to reinvent the strike—the strike as guerrilla warfare,” says Lerner. The strike is the traditional weapon of organized workers, but employers have gotten pretty good at beating those strikes. But in his work with Justice for Janitors, Lerner learned that bosses weren't ready for short, quick strikes. “If you look at the strike as a way to make them pay a price for how they treat you, you do short strikes, in and out strikes,” he notes. “Part of the reason it's so difficult to organize workers now is most people work multiple jobs, they have not a moment to participate. If you view the strike as having multiple goals, one is it allows workers to publicly declare and demonstrate they're unhappy. Second, because they're not at work they can talk to the media, go to churches. Third, it's something very concrete that they can do that does start to make the bosses a little crazy.”

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2. Jonathan Westin, executive director, New York Communities for Change, organizer of recent fast food strikes
“We believe that the future of the labor movement is really organizing low wage service sector jobs. These are the jobs we're stuck with, we need to make them livable jobs,” says Westin, whose organization, despite not being a labor union, has been organizing low-wage workers across New York City, from McDonald's and Wendy's to grocery stores and car washes.

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3. Ruth Milkman, Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, Academic Director at the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies


“Don't mourn, organize!” says Milkman, whose research has focused both on the American auto industry and recently, on low-wage immigrant workers. “Forget the NLRB system,” she continues; that system has become largely dysfunctional for the workers who are covered by it, and for many it's simply not a question—they're not included in its protections, so they have to find other solutions.

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4. Bill Fletcher Jr., longtime organizer and author most recently of “They're Bankrupting Us” And 20 Other Myths About Unions
“We're living with the consequences of a movement that ceased being an economic justice movement,” Fletcher says. To get back to those roots, he's advocating some serious change and rebuilding for labor.