ED OTT
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
2010 ILCA AWARDS LUNCHEON

November 19, 2010

(Transcript from video by Howard Kling)

GARY SCHOICHET (ILCA VICE PRESIDENT): I’m here to introduce Ed Ott, our Keynote Speaker.
He’s a worker, an organizer, a teacher, an AFT member, political director, former
Executive Director of the New York City Central Labor Council, who, seeing the
future, championed the unaffiliated unions of taxi drivers, restaurant workers, and
domestic workers, all headed by young and incredibly smart women, and brought
them into the New York City Central Labor Council.

Sisters and brothers. Put away your phones, stop texting, pay attention to 40 years
in labor movement: Ed Ott.

(Clapping)

ED OTT: I’m really embarrassed by introductions so he agreed to keep it short. Um.
It’s actually a long one. The one l like is I’ve been in the labor movement for over 40
years.

Good afternoon.

(Good afternoon)

I’m very honored to be here. This is an organization that I have known about,
engaged individuals in it over the years, but I just want to acknowledge something
because I don’t think it gets talked about enough. And it certainly wasn’t talked
about enough in my time at the Central Labor Council. You guys are the, a huge,
huge piece of the intellectual capital of the labor movement. And it needs to be put
out front more, as we craft message, as we engage outside forces. Um, you need to
be part of that.

But I just wanted to acknowledge your good work. Even at times when I disagree
with some of you about this or that, you’re a key component. But the intellectual
capital of this movement is not respected enough. It’s been lost somewhere and we
need to get back to that.

That being said I’ve been asked to come here today to talk about a few things
and people wanted me to talk about some of the work we’ve done with domestic

workers and others, and folks wanted to me to also talk about what’s going on with
the public sector, I see them as very much related.

But I would be remiss if I came to Washington DC and didn’t say something about
politics. I would feel like going to church without praying.

(Laugh)

So, let me just say this. On the way down here I was trying to think of some
philosopher, union leader, politician, that said something profound that could
describe the labor movement’s relationship with the Democratic Party.
(Laugh)

So what I came up with – and some of you are going to have to go back and find this
song on your computer – there’s a pop singer named Duffy. She has a song called
Mercy. It’s basically about a young woman whose lover is married. a\ And he has
got her under control. And it’s against her morals, but he has her misbehavin’. She
knows better.

He wants something on the side. And she wants to been seen in public holding his
hand.

(Laugh)

And I kinda think that that kinda gets at it with us and the Democrats.

(Laugh and clap)

They don’t want to be seen in public with us holding hands.

We’re in the hole we’re in folks – and it’s a political hole, it’s an economic hole.
For the working people of this country, this is probably a, to use an abused word,
challenging moment. But they’re in that hole because the Democratic Congress
never in my lifetime does what they say they’re going to do! And we have to figure
this one out.

We’re in a situation where we have so many people who are disconnected from
possibility that it is on the brink of social dynamite. Huge swaths of this country
have lost everything that defines their culture.

Our own U.S. Capitol has played a seditious role in our economy. They have used
their political power to rig the tax laws to shift the wealth disproportionately to
the top, and they used that same power to break the back of organized labor in the

private sector by the wholesale export of our industries. If we ran down the street
and someone grabbed our wallet, we would be screaming for the police. They stole
our entire livelihoods; they stole entire communities; they stole everything that
defined generations of hard work. And they walk around now within blocks of this
building, prepared to tell us how we’re going to live for a generation.

The question before the house, whether you’re AFL-CIO, whether you’re Change to
Win, whether you’re independent; the question before the house of labor is where
do we go from here, and what are we going to do about it? Every union organizer is
taught from day one: play the cards you’re dealt. We’ve got a bad hand.

(Yep)

We did a survey in New York out of the Murphy Institute of CUNY - this is also
a commercial. We have a great masters program in labor studies – some of you
may want to take advantage of. We have a journal, called New Labor Forum, and
if anybody who works in communications in the labor movement is unaware of
that journal, check it out on-site. We have covered these struggles in the labor
movement for over a decade very well.

So here we are in a situation where in New York City, as an example - and the
national numbers are similar - 72% of union members are in the public sector. How
many of you are in the public sector? Well that’s the bad news for you. That is not a
good thing. This is a movement that will live or die in the private sector. And what
has happened, that period I described earlier, of them destroying entire cultures and
communities of the people who made things, moved things, built things, has left us
in a private sector with a working class many of whom are working for ten dollars
an hour or under. No sick days, no holidays, no benefits. You think about that for a
second.

People don’t understand: how did the Republicans, and about a third of the
Democratic party, get traction on the notion that the teachers who teach our
children are the bad guys? How did they get traction on the people that provide
vital services are the bad guys?

Well. Let me tell you a story: how did it happen? It happened because if you’re
working for ten dollars an hour or less and you look at somebody that has a job that
the day they’re hired they have 12 sick days, 12 holidays, 5 personal days, 3 weeks
vacation. You’re hired in District Council 37 of AFSCME in New York City: you’ve got
almost 40 days off the day you’re hired, any job. Some Republican or Blue Dog Dem
comes on the TV and says, “I want to take away five days,” and we scream like our
children have been murdered. But for a working class that has nothing, that doesn’t
make sense.

And I would submit to you that the social base for our undoing is in an impoverished
working people. Every labor person understands social wage. Increase in rent –
wage cut. Increase in cost of transportation is a wage cut. Well a tax cut is a raise.
And the reason that Republican and Blue Dog Democrats get traction on that issue
is if you’re working for nothing and somebody sends you a $600 check in the mail,
and it’s from the US government, it’s a raise. And they are seducing generations of
workers. We need to come to terms with what the dynamic of this discussion really
is.

This is a period for the labor movement to take inventory. Part of that inventory has
to be the political reality of what it means that our public sector is 72% of our union
members. We need to raise wages in this country.

I believe we need to re-form our message to Democratic politicians. You want
more revenue? Raise wages. We shouldn’t be the guys running around tellin’
people they gotta pay more taxes. When they hear tax the rich, some of your public
school teachers, public sector workers, think you’re talking about them. Because
in, certainly in some of the cities like New York, they are the rich folks in a lot of
people’s eyes. And tax questions are not resonating with our own members and you
all know it. You all know it.

Raise social security. Raise the minimum wage. Raise prevailing wages wherever
they exist. Fight for living wages where there are none. Democrats want to do
something for working people: raise wages. You want more revenue: raise wages.
We should not support any tax increases unless they raise wages. We can’t afford it.

Taxes! Any old Marxists left in the room? “Bourgeois law is the codification of social
realities?” I am a professor!

(Laugh)

The tax laws are what they are because we, the labor movement, are weak. We are
weak! The tax laws are rigged; this is a casino you would not play in.

I began to change my thinking as I engaged the organizations of immigrants. Taxi
workers in New York City are contract workers. They have no rights as workers
under any law. We have unions in our city, and I won’t name names, that spend
more money on catered food than they do organizing. Taxi workers run around for
little foundations looking for $10,000 donations. They pass the hat at the airport
parking lot among the drivers to get money they need sometimes to pay their rent.
They use interns from various institutions including the Murphy Institute of the City
University of New York.

They have won two strikes. Without any union contract the industry negotiates with
them all the time. The city, which regulates that industry, does not make a move
without trying to at least neutralize them. And they are in and out of city hall all the
time.

The domestic workers, who are poorer than the taxi workers - 99 and 9/10 percent
women, working in isolation, under the worst of conditions, consciously left out
of the national labor relations act for racist reasons, left out of the labor laws in 50
states for the same - were the only legislative victory we had in New York state this
year with the passage of a modest domestic workers bill of rights and they don’t
have two nickels to rub together.

We represent 18 million people in the unionized sector of this country and we are
walking around wringing our hands: what are we going to do, what are we going to
do, what are we going to do?

There are two labor movements in this country. One, based on an incredible record
of struggle, has a modicum of security, decent income, and still have some health
care although we’re paying increasingly for it. The other works in the nonunionized
sector, largely in the private sector. They are making $10 an hour or less, and huge
pieces of the old U.S. industrial workforce is descending toward that number. And
yet these organizations, deeply routed in their communities, are creating new forms
of struggle, new forms of organizations, and they are winning fights. That working
class, largely immigrant, not exclusively, is the new labor movement.

Immigrants are not helpless. Who the hell were our grandparents and great
grandparents that built this building, that created the movement that allowed this
to happen? Well these folks in those communities in those kinds of organizations:
they are our great grandparents all that many years ago. We as a movement, we
need to sidle up alongside them, support them, nurture them, fund them. Let them
organize the rest of the working class. They will build great, great legacies. And we
will change the politics of this country.

If our response in this immediate period is to circle the wagons and try to hold onto
what we’ve got, they will continue to chip away at us. Three weeks ago, front page
of the wall street journal, an article about the victory, and the last line of that article
is some wack governor who says “well now we can have a real discussion about
whether we should have collective bargaining and unions in the public sector at all.”
If you’re in the public sector you’ve got a bulls-eye right here.

And don’t think that they will not put the boot to us. This is their moment. The
one big difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, for all

the wrong reasons I might add, is that the Republicans since Ronald Reagan have
consistently stated up front what they wanted to do and they have done it. And if
they’re talking about taking away collective bargaining in the public sector, you can
believe that there’s at least a substantial number of them that are going to try it.
You will see governors trying to abrogate contracts, eliminate pensions.

In New York State we’re going to fight to try to stop a constitutional convention
from happening. Because the only thing that guarantees the public sector pensions
in our state is a little line in the state constitution which says they are a debt to the
taxpayer if they go belly up. If they could convene a constitutional convention and
knock out that one line, they’ll stop funding these pensions and they will let them
bleed out. And I would assume that that’s the same thing that goes on in other
places.

And yet there is this other working class that has very little protection under the
law. Government statistics are about 15 million people who live and work in this
country without full legal status as citizens or even visitors. Now I would argue
that if there were a 150 folks who snuck across the border in El Paso, we had a legal
problem. Maybe at 15,000, we’ve got a bit of a social problem. But at 15 million,
it was public policy that brought them here. Employers wanted them and I would
argue employers needed them. And the government facilitated them getting here.
And we gotta be stupid not to recognize that that is a potentially powerful force that
should be part, full partner, of the labor movement.

Taxi workers were the first worker center of its type to affiliate under the AFL-CIO’s
worker center program to a central labor council. I consider that work, the work
that I did with the domestic workers, to be the best work I have done in 42 years in
the labor movement.

You, who are a huge piece of our intellectual capital, need to engage this, study it.
I’m going to say this. Some people are going to be offended by it. We cannot finish
the civil rights movement unless we organize immigrants. It is not possible. You
will leave unanswered labor questions on the table. For our enemies. And they are
our enemies.

This is not the Republican Party of the Scrantons and the Rockefellers. This is a
mean spirited, class-conscious group of haters. Those of you, and I respect the fact
that 40% of our members are Republicans and describe themselves as such. They
need to understand: this is not that old Republican Party. There are elements of
potential violence in that Tea Party movement. There are elements of reason. Some
of our own members are sympathetic to the Tea Party. But in the end, we have
seen some of this before. We have seen this in the history books. Some of us have
experienced it at the dinner table. They did this in Germany. This is a movement

that will lend itself out to the worst elements. And they will try to put the boot to us.

I argue right now this labor movement needs to rethink what we do best. What we
have done best in our history is to raise wages.

There has to be a component of this movement in the public sector, who has
fabulous wealth even in their downturn, that needs to think what needs to be done
to organize in the private sector.

40% of the construction workers, unionized construction workers in New York City,
are not working today. We haven’t seen numbers like that since before World War
II over a consistent, protracted period. If we don’t figure this out, we don’t do it at
our own peril. There is risk that needs to be taken. There are things that need to be
changed. But most importantly, we need to understand this other labor movement
and forge with it. And we will reshape this country for generations to come.

If we reduce these next two years, even, to a fight over budgets, we lose. The
solution to the public sector budget problem is not in the budget process. It is in the
economy. And in the private sector economy we need to make demands on.

You could raise wages in this country by employing the, really, 20% of people who
don’t have either full time jobs or work. There’s a middle strata organization in the
city of note called the Freelancers Union. I say middle strata because they tend to
represent people who have particular skills or education that they can sell. But they
are offered work, not jobs. And the Freelancers Union has developed strategies
so that they can get health care. They can in fact have an organization that chases
down people who buy their skills and don’t pay them. We have those traditions
in our movement. The actors unions, the arts unions, were basically set up for the
same reason. They were offered work, not jobs. They found strategies to survive
within that.

This is a new moment. This is a new moment that was dropped at our feet by defeat.
When I teach my students at the Murphy Institute I tell them there’s always two
questions you have to ask: what happened, and where do we go from here?

I’ll take questions, thank you.

(Clapping)

QUESTION: It’s not just the immigrants. There’s a whole lot of US citizens who were
immigrants, and US citizens who were born here as well, who are just clueless as to
how to pay the next rent. Who had jobs who lost them; who’s jobs were relocating
and dumping on the street, or follow me to the ends of the world . . .

ED OTT: Let’s get to clueless. I want to answer that.

QUESTIONER: Thank you.

ED OTT: If you were part of an organization and were paying money and you
never heard from them and what they were doing wasn’t working, would you keep
paying?

We have gone through 30 years of wage suppression in the private sector. Workin’
people aren’t stupid. “Ahhh, let’s see, you guys can’t get me what I need so I should
join.” Bad message. Sorry, it’s a bad message. We have taken it in the teeth for 30
years.

There is a book I will recommend. I confess he is a Marxist, he is a Marxist
geographer. David Harvey. He also has lectures on the web. There you go – The
Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism. That book is very helpful. It goes
through page by page what actually happened in this crisis and what they’re
objectives are going forward.

But working people will not join. Workers go forward ‘til they’re defeated. What’s
happened to us in the private sector is a thoroughgoing ass-kicking, I’m sorry. And
the public sector is now isolated.

One, we have to defend the public sector.

And I would agree with you, it’s not exclusively immigrants, but I talked about
immigrants because there’s a reluctance in this movement to talk about two things:
immigrants and race. We’re very uncomfortable talking about that.

Talk about wage theft; wage theft if one of the worse crimes going on in this country,
and yet there is institutionalized wage theft that we have lived with our whole life:
women still make less than men for the same work.

(Clap)

But we don’t talk about it. We don’t talk about it. We need to. We need to.

Whatever else we do from this way forward, we have to be seen as the vehicle for
workers to make progress, or why would they join us? You risk losing your job for
being associated with us; in the private sector you lose your job instantly. It’s gotta
be worth the risk.

I went to Cornell to speak at one of their industrial relations classes. And I walked
in and on the board they had this big sign, it said, “why is the atmosphere for
organizing so toxic?” And I laughed. I said, “they used to kill us!!!!”

(Laughter)

We got fat and soft. This movement used be the lean and the hungry, that had a
vision and a goal, and they were willin’ to take risks. And now we’re wondering if
we can sell our buildings at the market rate so in our demise we can continue to
fund our operations. Boy, it’s been a long slide down.

Go ahead.

QUESTION: Thank you for an excellent presentation. What you are advocating: why
is that not happening now?

ED OTT: Well, this is where I gotta go to AMTRAK.

(Laughter)

Look. If, uh, hey, I - I – I – I also teach it this way: if there was one right way to
do this, we would probably have figured it out and we’re all doing it. The first
organizing drive I was ever involved in 42 years ago was at Columbia Presbyterian
Medical Center in New York. The union was 1199 and I was a glassware washer.
We got beat in a very close election. And I was pretty distraught. I was young. I
thought things always worked out. Some older worker just came up to me, kinda hit
me in the back of the head and said, “give some credit to the boss; they work at this.”

END OF TAPE