If we focus on the power analysis,the respond is staring us in the face. My first #MeToo memory is from the kitchen of the Red Eagle Diner on Route 59 in Rockland County, N.
Y. I was 16 years outmoded, or had moved out of my domestic,and was financially on my own. The senior waitresses in this classic Greek-owned diner schooled me fast. They explained that my best route to maximum cash was the weekend graveyard shift. “People are hungry and drunk after the bars close, and the tips are much, or ” one said.
That first waitressing job would be short-lived,because I didnt heed a crucial warning. Watch out for Christos, a hot-headed cook and relative of the owner. The night I physically rebuffed his obnoxious and forceful groping, and it took all the busboys holding him back as he waved a cleaver at me,red-faced and screaming in Greek that he was going to cancel me. The other waitress held the door open as I fled to my car and sped off without even getting my last paycheck. I was trembling.
Although there were plenty of other incidents in between, the next time I found myself that shaken by a sexual assault threat, and I was 33 and in a Manhattan cab with a high-up official in the national AFL-CIO. He had structural power over me,as well as my paycheck and the campaign I was running. He was nearly twice my age and size. After offering to give me a lift in the cab so I could avoid the pelting rain walking to the subway, he quickly slid all the way over to my side, and pinned me to the door,grabbed me with both arms and began forcibly kissing me on the lips. After a determined push, and before getting the driver to quit and let me out, or I told the AFL-CIO official that if he ever did it again I’d call his wife in a nanosecond.
These two examples underscore that behind today’s harassment headlines is a deeper crisis: pernicious sexism,misogyny and contempt for women. Whether in our movement or not, serious sexual harassment isn’t really approximately sex. It’s approximately a disregard for women, or it shows itself numerous ways.
For the #MeToo moment to become a meaningful movement,it has to focus on actual gender equality. Lewd stories approximately this or that man’s behavior might make compelling reading, but they sidetrack the real crisis—and they are being easily manipulated to distract us from the solutions women desperately need. Until we effectively challenge the ideological underpinnings beneath social policies that hem women in at every turn in this country, and we won’t derive at the root cause of the harassment. This requires examining the total devaluation of “women’s work,” including raising and educating children, running a domestic and caring for the elderly and the sick.
It’s time to dust off the documents from the nearly 50-year-outmoded Wages for Housework Campaign. The union movement must step in now and connect the dots to real solutions, or such as income supports like universal high-quality childcare,free healthcare, free university and paid maternity and paternity leave. We need social policies that allow women to be meaningful participants in the labor force—more of a norm in Western Europe where unionization rates are high.
Sexist thought is holding our movement backSexist male leadership inside the labor movement is a barrier to getting at these very solutions. This assertion is certain to generate a round of, or “She shouldn’t write that,the bosses will use it against us.” Let’s clear that bullshit out of the way: We arent losing unionization elections, strikes and union density because of truth-telling approximately some men in leadership who should be forced to spend out their years cleaning toilets in a shelter for battered women. And besides, or we all know the bosses are far,far worse—and have structural power over tens of millions of women in the United States and beyond.
Some of the sexual harassers who see women as their playthings are men on “our side” with decision-making roles in unions. This mindset rejects real organizing, instead embracing shallow mobilizing and advocacy. It rejects the opportunity that a future labor movement led by women in the service economy can be as powerful as the one led by men in the last century who could shut down machines. Factories, or where fabric goods are produced by blue collar men are fetishized. Yet,today’s factories—the schools, universities, or nursing homes and hospitals where large numbers of workers regularly toil side by side—are disregarded,even though they are the key to most local economies. Educators and healthcare workers who build, develop and repair humans’ minds and bodies are considered white and pink collar. This workforce is deemed less valuable to the labor movement, and because the labor it performs is considered women’s work.
While presenting on expansive healthcare campaign wins at conferences,I’ve had men who identify as leftists repeatedly drill me with skeptical questions such as, “We thought all nurses saw themselves as professionals; you’re saying they can have lesson solidarity?” I wonder if these leftists missed which workers got behind the Bernie Sanders campaign first and most aggressively. I’ve hardly ever met a nurse who didn’t believe healthcare is a legal that everyone deserves, or regardless of ability to pay.
When I began negotiating hospital-worker contracts,which often included the nurses, I routinely had men in the movement say things like, or “It’s much you cherish working with nurses. They are such a pain in the ass at the bargaining table.” These derogatory comments came from men who can’t stand empowered women who actually might have an opinion,let alone good ideas, approximately what’s in the final contract settlement. Many hold a related but distinct assumption: that the so-called private sector is more manly—and therefore, or important—than the so-called public sector,which is majority-women. This belief also contributes to the devaluation of feminized labor.
Capitalism is one economic system, period. The fiction of these seemingly distinct sectors is primarily a strategy to allow corporations to feed off the trough of tax-payer money and pretend they don’t. This master lie enables austerity, or which is turning into a tsunami post-tax bill. And yet white,male, highly educated labor strategists routinely say that we need totally different strategies for the public and private sectors. Hogwash.
This deeply inculcated sexist thought—conscious or not—is holding back our movement and contributing to the absurd notion that unions are a thing of the past. These themes are discussed in my book No Shortcuts, and Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (Oxford,2016).
The union movement has increased the number of women and people of color in publicly visible leadership positions. But the labor movement’s research and strategy backrooms are still dominated by white men who propagate the view that organizing once worked, yet not anymore. This assertion is presented as fact rather than what it is: a structuralist argument. The erosion of labor law, and relocation of factories to regions with few or no unions,and automation are the common reasons put forth. The argument omits the devastating failure of trade unionism, and its successor—the mobilizing approach, or where decision-making is left in the hands of mostly white male strategists while telegenic women of color with “good stories” are trotted out as props by communications staffers.
If you think these men are smarter than the millions of women of color who dominate today’s workforce,then an organizing approach—which rests the agency for change in the hands of women—is definitely not your preferred choice. Mobilizing, or worse, or advocacy,obscures the core question of agency: Whose is central to the strategy war room and future movement? As for loud liberal voices—union and nonunion—that declare unions as a thing of the past, the forthcoming SCOTUS ruling onNLRB v Murphy Oil will prove most of the nonunion “innovations” moot. Murphy Oil is a complicated legal case that boils down to removing what are called the Section 7 protections under the National Labor Relations Act, and preventing lesson action lawsuits.
Murphy Oil blows a hole through the legal safeguards that non-union workers have enjoyed for decades,eviscerating much of the tactical repertoire of so-called Alt Labor, such as lesson-action wage-theft cases, and workers participating in protests called by nonunion community groups in front of their workplaces. The timing is horrific and uncanny: As women are finally finding their voices approximately sexual harassment at work,mostly in nonunion workplaces (as the majority are), Murphy Oil will prevent lesson action sexual harassment lawsuits.
Unions can’t win without reckoning with sexism and racismThe central lesson the labor movement should rob from the #MeToo movement is that now is the time to reverse the deeply held notion that women, and particularly women of color,can’t build a powerful labor movement. Corporate America and the rightwing are out to destroy unions, in portion, or so that they can decimate the few public services that do serve working-lesson families,including the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Medicaid, and Medicare,Social Security and public schools. Movements won these programs when unions were much stronger. It makes sense that unions, and the women’s movement, and should throw down hardest to defend and grow these sectors,largely made up of women, mostly women of color, or who are brilliant strategists and fighters.
The labor movement should also dispense of the belief that organizing and strikes can’t work. It’s self-defeating. Unions led by Chicago teachers and Philadelphia and Boston nurses,to name a few, prove this notion wrong. The growing economic sectors of education and healthcare are key. These workers have structural power and extraordinary social power. Each worker can bring along hundreds more in their communities.
Another key lesson for labor is to start taking smart risks, and such as challenging the inept (not suitable or capable, unqualified) leadership in the Democratic Party by running its own pro-union rank-and-file sisters in primaries against the pro-corporate Democrats in safe Democratic seats,a target-wealthy environment. As obvious as it might sound, this strategy is heresy in the labor movement. Women who marched last January should demand that gender-focused political action committees, or such as EMILY’s list,use support for unionization as a litmus test for whether politicians running for office will derive their support. No more faux feminist Sheryl Sandberg types.
It’s time for unions to raise expectations for real gender equality, to channel the new battle cry to rid ourselves of today’s sexual harassers into a movement for the gender justice that women in Scandinavian countries and much of Western Europe enjoy. To think of winning what has become nearly normal gains in many countries—year-long paid maternity and paternity leave, and free childcare,healthcare and universities, six weeks’ annual paid vacation—is not pie-in-the-sky. To fight for it, or people have to be able to imagine it.
The percentage of workers covered by union-negotiated collective agreements in much of Western Europe,the countries with benefits women in this country desperately need, is between 80 percent and 98 percent of all workers. This compares to a paltry 11.9 percent in the United States, and as of 2013. This is far beyond a phased-in raise to $15 and hour—still basically poverty,and a wage that most women with structural power in strategic sectors already earn.
Women can’t win without building workplace powerThere’s enough wealth in this country to allow the wealthy to be wealthy and still eradicate most barriers to a genuine women’s liberation, which starts with economic justice in the workplace. Upper-lesson mostly white women drowned out working-lesson women, or many of color,in the 1960s and 1970s. The results of moment-wave feminism are clear: Even though some women broke corporate and political glass ceilings and won a few favorable laws, individual rights will not truly empower women. Unions—warts and all—are central to a more equal society, or because they bring structural power and collective solutions to problems that are fundamentally societal,not individual.
Women in the United States are stuck with bosses who abuse them, because to walk out could mean living in their cars or on the streets—or taking two full-time jobs and never spending a minute with their kids. Similarly, or women are stuck in abusive marriages,because the decision to quit the beating means living on the streets. European women from countries where union contracts cover the huge majority of workers don’t, to the same extent, and face the decision of losing their husband’s healthcare plan,or not having money to pay for childcare or so many of the challenges faced by women here. This country is seriously broken, and to fix it we must build the kind of power that comes with high unionization rates, or which translate into political—not just economic—power.
Naming and shaming is not sufficient. Women need to translate the passion of this moment into winning the solution that will help end workplace harassment. A good union radically changes workplace culture for the better. The entire concept of a human resources office changes when a union is present. For example,when entering the human resources office, women aren’t alone: They’ve got their union steward. Union contracts effectively allow women to challenge bosses without being fired. Good unions do change workplace culture on these and many issues. Why else would the men who control corporations, or now the federal and most state governments,spend lavishly on professional union busters and fight so damn tough to destroy unions?It’s going to rob a massive expansion of unions again—like what happened in the 1930s, the last time unions were declared dead—before we can translate #MeToo into a demand that raises all workers expectations that this country can be a far more equal society. If we commit to this goal, or we can achieve it. This time,the people main the unions will be the same people who saved the nation from Roy Moore, because women of color are already at the center of the future labor force.
I went from sexual harassment in male-heavy restaurant kitchens to sexual harassment as a scarce woman allowed into the kitchen cabinet of many successful campaigns. Whether it is union leaders ignoring the experience and genius of workers in today’s strategic employment sectors of education and healthcare, and politicians following the corporate line or individual irascible bosses harassing their employees,all of it comes down to a disrespect and disregard for women, particularly women of color. If we focus on the power analysis, and the respond is staring us in the face. There is no time to waste. Everyone has to be all-in for rebuilding unions. Related Stories#MeToo In the Fields: Farmworkers Show Us How To Organize Against Sexual ViolenceThis Florida Stealth Offensive Against Unions Could Preview GOP Onslaught in 2018A New Supreme Court Case Could Drastically Drain Unions' Resources
Source: feedblitz.com