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| Photo by N. Krupskaya |
The photo above is of a billboard paid for by the right-wing and anti-union Freedom Foundation. There are at least five of these billboards up in the Salem area. Don't worry if you don't understand the message or the intent here. Thousands of people pass by these billboards every day and have no idea what they are about.
Briefly, the Freedom Foundation has been attacking Oregon's public employee unions for years in ways that have been deceptive, underhanded, unfair, unethical and without substance. These billboards are one more slapstick step in the wrong direction by an outfit that wants to deprive workers of our rights and turn back the clock. The "OEA" referred to is the Oregon Education Association, probably the largest public employee union in the state and a powerhouse when it comes to defending the rights of school employees and working people in Oregon. OEA defends its members on the job and through lobbying and political action and is often allied with other unions and progressive organizations as it does so. Why these alliances? Because it is most often other unions and progressive organizations and politicians that center education, education workers, unions, and the interests of working people in their programs. "DSA" refers to the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the United States. DSA has a solid record of fighting for the interests of working people in many cities around the United States and has many members who are also union members. DSA supports a ceasefire in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and justice for oppressed peoples. Many unions, including the OEA, have passed pro-ceasefire resolutions.
The Freedom Foundation is once more trying to create a controversy and divide and antagonize people where no controversy exists. For a short period earlier this year the local DSA held some membership meetings at the local OEA office. The socialists are no longer using that space.
If there is anything of interest here, it is that this ham-fisted approach by the pro-Republican Freedom Foundation gives us an opening to talk a bit about labor history, democracy, and irony.
There are union halls and there are union offices and the two are quite different. A union hall is a place where union members and others can meet, relax, talk, and build community. Many unions once used their halls as libraries and reading rooms. In many western mining regions, the union hall was the foundation of local civil society and, in a sense, of civilization. Some union halls were shared with working-class and middle-class organizations that actively supported the prohibition of alcohol while others had union-member-only saloons. Some, quite unfortunately and stupidly, housed anti-immigrant and anti-Chinese organizations. Some were community centers with healthcare clinics, law offices, night schools, English language instruction, and training centers. Salem once had union halls, and one of these also had a socialist office and a bar a restaurant inside. Good and bad, this is our labor history.
I have seen union halls in the United States that had art galleries and performance spaces. I have attended weddings, community dinners, and polkas in union halls. I visited union halls in Spain that had cafes and bars and galleries and one that had readings of erotic poetry on Friday nights. I also visited a union hall in Turkey that had a large room of very busy human rights activists working on computers and telephones and I visted a Kurdish elementary school that was run by union members during the day and served as a union and community center at night.
Union offices, on the other hand, are places where union business is transacted and where union staff work and union members may meet to carry on union business. They are most often dull and uncomfortable places with a sad feel to them. There is an understandable tendency in our labor movement towards isolation and being totally focused on taking care of the business at hand and not being able to manage much more than that or to not seeing how union interests and community interests can coincide. That's all real, but what are we doing to break out of that?
SEIU Local 503, AFSCME, and Teamsters Local 324 have beautiful and fully-functional union halls in Salem. The PCUN hall in Woodburn is a good example of a one-time union hall now serving as communal and activist space. OEA has a wonderfully laid-out office with great meeting and social space that could be used as community and labor union space.
A union hall furthers democracy and preaches community engagement and activism just by existing. A union office sends quite another message.
The Freedom Foundation doesn't care about democracy and is opposed to unions in the first place, so they don't much care if we have halls or offices. They just want us gone. But they are implying in their latest billboard campaign that they don't want us to have social and democratic space. I don't know how OEA members and leaders are feeling about this, but I hope that they're not intimidated by this latest attack by the yahoos.
It is every union's right to use its property as it sees fit and without interference. The Freedom Foundation, always the outsider with deep corporate pockets and a hidden agenda, seeks to grab headlines by either ignoring these common rights or by trying to drive a wedge between union members and union leaders. The more member-led and member-driven a union is, the more able it will be to withstand such attacks and turn them to the union's advantage. Perhaps more to the point, a strong and member-led union will encourage union members to be involved in many causes and will open the union hall to them and uphold the principles of democracy in the hall, in the union, and in the workplace. Any pro-union organization supported by union members should have access to union halls, and the labor movement should feel and know that the Left has our back.
We can only get to that point of unity by working together and forming relationships. This is about something that is almost transactional. Do Labor people and Leftists here in the Salem-Keizer area have some things to offer one another? This is not about good intentions or particular histories or legacies, important as they are, but about identifying and fulfilling needs and building trust out of hard work.
We need a working-class culture that prizes solidarity. This is not, in the first place, about using solidarity to win fights with the boss or win in elections, although those are ever-important. A working-class culture of solidarity provides identity, belonging and inclusion, intellectual fulfilment, the constructive use of time, physical well-being, equality, diversity, balance, and the means to develop one's creativity with others. This assumes a willingness to join in for the long haul, take on responsibilities with others, and be open to new ideas.
Is it a big and scandalous deal that there are socialists, and are socialists marginal characters whose presence should alarm union members? Not at all. The historic socialist movement and the labor movement in the United States share common historic origins and have many interests in common. There have been great socialist union leaders in the United States, and this tradition extends back to the 1860s. We are not talking about extremes here, but about democratic ways of thinking and acting together that should be of special interest to union members.
And there is irony.
Salem does not have a working-class culture based on solidarity or a labor movement that engages often enough in mutual support and solidarity or an organized Left presence that is particularly meaningful or helpful to the region's labor movement. We don't have a workers' center or a Jobs with Justice organization or a progressive trade union committee for unity, action, and democracy led by people on the Left. The reasons for this are complex. But it is a sad fact, I think, that the Freedom Foundation has so little to worry about. Local Labor does not seem to be up in arms about the Freedom Foundation's latest attack, DSA isn't asking for solidarity from Labor (that I know of), and local socialist labor leaders tend to be so busy in their union work that they have mostly disengaged from the existing socialist groups. For their part, these groups can be cranky, pedantic, reactive, ageist, and factional. This isn't going to build unity between Labor and DSA or anyone else. The Freedom Foundation has little to worry about. Where the Left has traditionally supported popular fronts, the local Left seems more inclined to being the unpopular front.
The exceptions to this have been strong efforts by local Leftists and others to push for a ceasefire in Gaza and DSA's past local environmental work and when DSA helped lead the pushback against former U.S. Representative Kurt Schrader on certain policy issues. The Salem-Keizer DSA has a local leader who has a strong understanding of union organizing from the American Federation of Teachers and a solid record of environmental activism as well. Another local DSA member who is active in the ceasefire movement was a long-time SEIU Local 503 shop steward. This kind of intersectionality holds promise. There is also at least one winnable legislative race underway in our region where Labor and Left interests coincide.
DSA has shown its best hand in union organizing at Amazon, at UPS, in the auto industry, in certain school systems and on certain college and university campuses. The great Emergency Worker Organizing Committee (EWOC), a national project between DSA and the United Electrical Workers, has been groundbreaking. Many of the companies targeted by EWOC and other unions have facilities here in Salem-Keizer, and many of the unions that DSA members are active in nationally and regionally have locals in our area. We have to ask what is holding back local socialists from organizing in the non-union places and building solidarity and unionism in local unions and why we don't see more Leftists in our area active in the legislative race referred to above. The Freedom Foundation deserves a real run for its money and influence.
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