A Message from ILCA President-Elect David Katzman

On October 5, they came to the Wall Street area by the thousand. They were transit workers. They were teamsters and nurses, teachers and elevator operators, telephone workers and retail clerks. They were students and retirees. Their message was simple: this is our occupation, too.

Occupy Wall Street has struck a chord because those whose futures are being stolen are not only the thousands who have left college because they can no longer pay tuition, nor the millions who have lost their homes to foreclosure, nor even the tens of millions who have no job and no prospect of a job. It is the 99% of us.

The turnout of organized labor in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street has raised the profile and potential reach of the fight to make the rich pay. The challenge before us is to make this a beginning, not an end.



Going forward

 
Concrete political demands are on the agenda. Among those that have been mentioned in labor circles are: to tax the rich to pay for a jobs program; to create a financial transaction tax to do more of the same; and most difficultly, to take steps to relieve the crushing burden of debt on much of the population.

Yet, reducing the movement to lobbying for a handful of bills would raise the danger of ending up with neither a movement nor legislative gains.

At the present time, solidarity actions are underway in 200 different cities from coast to coast. It remains to be seen the extent to which they develop, and, crucially, the extent to which local labor forces find ways to embrace them and take them to another level. October 5th in New York City was a key moment, and kudos are due to the local unions and internationals who took a stand and made it possible. But what happens in the next days and weeks will tell us whether we have a movement that can endure.



Communication matters

 
From the outset, communication has been key for Occupy Wall Street and key for building labor support.

How do a few hundred core occupiers make their presence known in a city of 8 million? An imaginative action was only the starting point. It has been accompanied by tweeting, a website, a blog, a printed journal, and extensive media relations.

Building a labor turnout in a week – unions deciding to take the plunge, sharing that with each other, above all communicating with their members about it – took no less.

Going forward will demand more of communicators, not less. And as we go forward, the responsibility will fall that much more on labor communicators in particular to cut through the haze of misinformation.