"The
labor movement? Don't you mean the labor stays-the-same?"

This
was an off hand comment from a San Franciscan friend of mine when I
told him I was working for the labor movement in Detroit. I had
been doing labor-solidarity and economic justice work while I was in
college, so that made sense to him, but I also identified as a strong
feminist and a queer person.

So
what the hell was I doing in the labor movement?

What were
any of us doing in the labor movement? Often times ambivalent
or downright hostile to youth, the labor movement is viewed by many
young people as too institutionalized and mainstream to make any real
change. Yet there is a growing group of young activists who are
choosing to make the U.S. labor movement their life's work.

I
attended the 13th Annual Labor Notes Conference, "Building Solidarity
from Below," with 900 other labor activists this past May in Dearborn,
and talked with many of the young people who attended. The numbers
of youth involved are rising -- nearly 100 of the participants this year
were under 30, the highest number that the organization has seen in
the last 10 years. This is encouraging not only to
the new generation getting involved, but also the more forward-thinking
members of older generations, who realize that despite their iron wills
and wealth of experience, they simply cannot live forever. This
piece is written from the interviews of seven young labor activists
from all over the country, ages 21-29, who have dedicated themselves
to this movement and all the potential it holds. Thanks to them
for inspiring my own work, and the work of thousands of other activists,
young and old, across the country.

The
State of Things

To many people both within and outside
of labor politics, the U.S. labor movement is in crisis. But according
to Chris Kutalik, co-director of the monthly rank-and-file worker magazine
Labor Notes, it is at a crossroads: "Labor has really been
on the losing end the last four years in their contracts and with concessions.
People are getting pushed to the wall. But when people feel the
wall behind them they start to move a little. There's a sense
of urgency: now is the time. And I can't think of any other time
that seems more critical than it has been in these last two years."

These
sentiments are shared by a growing number of young people in the U.S.
Youth from all different backgrounds are choosing to work for this movement.
Some are children of immigrants, farmworkers, and longshoremen.
Some have come to the labor movement out of a greater commitment to
social justice. And some just sort of found themselves there out
of necessity, after entering the working world and realizing that without
a union, their lives were a whole lot harder.

For
whatever reason they were brought to the movement, they are here and
they are doing powerful work. They are working towards leadership
positions, forming national and international networks with each other,
creating community-labor alliances. They are carrying on the work
of activists before them, while bringing their own perspective and organizing
strategies to the struggle.

This
current generation has come of age in a very different world than those
preceding them. While this can be said for all generations, the
rapid rise of corporate, top-down globalization, a hostile-and-still-getting-worse
administration, and a post-9/11 world bring new challenges to their
work. Top that off with figuring out how to navigate the hierarchies
that exist in their new workplace, the union, and the country, and you
have a very tall order.

Young
people see the labor movement in steady decline, and wonder why anyone
would even want to go there. For many, the union movement in this
country is heaving its dying breath; rife with corruption and nepotism,
many of today's unions worry more about serving big business than they
do about their own members. The union is just a deduction off
their paycheck -- it doesn't actually do anything for them. The
same goes for a lot of young leftists. They see the labor movement
as irrelevant -- a dinosaur that lacks the power to make any sort of
significant change. Slow, irrelevant, reformist, small, unorganized,
and -- worst of all -- mainstream.

"What's
wrong with the mainstream?" asks Tiffany Ten Eyck, 26, a
staff writer at Labor Notes and a former organizer with the Student
Farmworker Alliance. "The mainstream is where people are
at. It's where you're going to effect the most change. You
can't just live in a separatist, fringe culture your whole life and
expect to create any real revolution." Ten Eyck worked
with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) during their successful
campaign against Taco Bell, Inc. The CIW organized a four-year
boycott of Taco Bell that forced the fast food chain's owner, Yum! Brands,
Inc., to increase workers' wages and enforce a tough code of conduct
on Florida tomato suppliers. They took on a corporate food giant
and won. The Taco Bell campaign showed her how the labor movement was
changing people's everyday lives, as well as introducing them to the
power of solidarity and what can happen when people get organized.

The Importance
of the Workplace

When
you're talking about the labor movement, you're talking about all kinds
of people. Joe Sexauer, 28, a member of Teamster Local 743 in
Chicago, sees this as a strength: "The labor movement is important
because it organizes everyone, not just people who think like you, into
a movement where you can work to make people's lives better."
Sexauer was struck by the importance of organizing in his workplace.

"I had this epiphany type of moment, when someone said to me that
if you don't organize around what you do for over 40 hours a week, the
other stuff is incidental."

The
importance of the workplace resonated across the board with young people.
Meredith Shaffer, 29, former member of the International Longshore and
Warehouse Union and former organizer with AFSCME in Portland, Oregon,
had this to say: "Organizing is all about where you can build a
base -- and the workplace is where you do that. It is a really
complex place where people spend most of their lives, and it can't be
separated out from where people develop their ideas about society and
their expectations. It's like the place. And people are
often more influenced by their co-workers than anyone else in their
lives, even if they don't acknowledge that. That's where political
education should go on. And I'm not just talking about organizing
and building labor unions."

Building
Across Borders

Many
of today's young activists understand the importance of creating coalitions
across perceived movement boundaries. They view the labor movement
as part of the larger global justice struggle, and recognize the value
of joining forces to have a broader impact. For Melody Gonzalez,
22, with the Student Farmworker Alliance and Interfaith Action in Immokalee,
Florida, this realization is what brought her in and led her to identify
as a labor activist: "It has not been until recently that
I realized that the labor movement is and should be about more than
just unions. There are community organizations of workers like
the Coalition of Immokalee Workers that are revitalizing the labor movement
with new ideas, structures, strategies, and hope."

Sexauer
goes on to speak of the power of coalitions that can be built when labor
works with other groups, such as the Teamsters and Turtles coalition
(made up of labor and environmental activists) that formed during the
WTO mobilization in Seattle back in 1999: "The real threat
of Seattle wasn't just the non-profits and the students, but the alliances
built with labor. Teamsters and Turtles didn't just happen.
It happened because of serious education in environmental movements
about labor and in the labor movement about the environment. No
one would have thought that labor and environmentalists would ever join
forces, but they did. This speaks to the fact that these were
not old-guard Teamsters, but honest and militant reformers and activists,
open to new tactics and new ideas."

Youth
in the movement also recognize the need to organize across international
boundaries. Emily Anderson (name changed to conceal identity),
23, salting with UNITE-HERE in the South, says: "I met with people
in Nicaragua that were trying to organize unions in the maquilas.
That's when it really hit me -- that there's no way that we're going
to bring up labor standards if it's not done internationally."
With the multitude of free trade acts that are being passed by the U.S.,
the race to the bottom is heating up with a ferocity that shows no sign
of stopping. An international movement is the only way we will
be able to stand up against transnational corporations and get our demands
recognized.

Our Current
Tactics Have Only Taken Us This Far

Today's
young activists definitely see a need for new tactics and ideas.
Many of the youth that I talked with saw labor as one of the main forces
to change our society from capitalist to an alternative model, but do
not currently see an outlet in the movement to do that: "There's
this terrible legacy of labor being partnered with capital in so many
ways and not being anti-capitalist," says Shafer, "but I think
that the only way that youth are going to be engaged is to see the way
that it's not just challenging the boss against concessions, but challenging
a system of exploitation. And I think that that's why young people
are excited about the labor movement." Diane Foglizzo, 22,
full-time staff for the Living Wage Action Coalition in Washington D.C.,
sees the labor movement as a place that not only exposes the economic
exploitation of people, but other forms of oppression as well: "It's
helped me see where a bunch of things intersect, like race and class
and gender and sexuality and it makes sense. There are a lot of connections
that can be made with the exploitation of workers' bodies in the capitalist
system. In the context of labor and economic justice all these
things come together and it's just right there."

The
labor movement has been a powerful force in shaping U.S. history, and
has won many battles that people today take for granted, such as the
eight-hour workday and the weekend. While acknowledging the gains of
their predecessors, young activists are very aware of the erosion of
workers rights, and see this as an indicator that it is time to change
the tactics to fit with the changing times. "You know, people
forget that the eight-hour day was once a radical demand, because now
it is so common," says Sexauer, "but if more people don't
get involved in the labor movement with new ideas and energy, it may
become so again." Tommy Simon, 21, Midwest Organizer for
United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and member of Students for
Economic Justice in East Lansing, MI, sees the creativity and new ideas
of youth as an asset to the movement: "Young people are not afraid
to try new things. We use a wide range of tactics to get our message
across, and work on incorporating a wide range of people in the movement.
We need this, along with more radical politics, to be guiding the labor
movement so that it doesn't continue to be a pushover to big politics
and corporate interests."

Converting
Ideas into Action

Young
labor activists are doing things differently, and unfortunately in large
part, they are doing it on their own, without direction from the older
generations. According to Kutalik: "On the whole, [youth]
are just not talked about. Now you have most unions dominated
by the baby boomer generation, which is a generation that was fixated
on age and age differences and the uniqueness of being young and wild
in the streets. They pay lip service to that, so you have things
like Union Summer that are bringing people in, but you're bringing them
in for the most part at the mid-level, straight from college into organizing
roles and staff roles." All the people interviewed did not view
this as the most effective way of recruiting new activists. Foglizzo
comments specifically about students, who "are moving away from
graduating from college and joining unions and organizations on a staff
level and becoming rank and file workers. Groups like the Rank
and File Youth Project and Young Workers United are organizing around
that. I think it's huge and it can change a lot." Unions
that recruit people right out of college into staff roles are creating
a larger rift between the members and the leadership.

Young
activists are organizing themselves with this understanding, embracing
a bottom-up philosophy similar to that of groups such as Teamsters for
a Democratic Union and Labor Notes. Emily Anderson talks about
one group of activists named the Rank and File Youth Project, explaining,
"[It] is a group of young adults, mostly high school and college
age into their early thirties, who believe that the true power of the
labor movement lives in the rank and file. We are getting jobs
and doing union organizing in the workplace. We're working to
build clusters in different cities in the U.S. not only because we will
be more effective organizing together, but because the work can be very
demanding and isolating. Having other like-minded people around
to help keep you grounded and to keep you focused on what you're doing
is essential when you are up against not only your employer, but often
times your own union." This is a new project, just about
two years old, and already they have clusters in New York City, Atlanta,
Chicago and Knoxville, with more forming in Seattle, San Jose, and the
Bay Area.

Young
workers that have already established themselves in the workplace are
taking leadership roles within their unions. Joe Sexauer is currently
running for steward in his local, and is working with members of his
union to investigate the corruption of his local president who is accused
of rigging the election in Teamsters Local 743. Anderson is taking
part in an undercover union organizing campaign at the hotel she works
at, a practice known as salting. "I'm trying to build relationships
with co-workers and find out what their needs and their issues are.
Trying to figure out who the leaders would be at the time when the union
would come in."

Students
are also committing themselves to the labor movement. Groups like
Living Wage Action Campaign, the Student Farmworker Alliance, United
Students Against Sweatshops, and others are bringing labor organizing
to college campuses all over the world, and getting students involved
in solidarity campaigns, both locally and internationally. One
campaign that has really taken off in the past year has been the Killer
Coke campaign, working to end the murder and harassment of union leaders
in Colombia, human rights and environmental abuses in India, and the
rest of the long laundry list of crimes that Coca-Cola has committed.
Some activists are using college campuses in other ways to strengthen
the movement. Shafer has recently returned to graduate school
to earn her Master of Business Administration. She wants to arm herself
with knowledge of how business works to help unions find leverage points
for negotiations.

It
is this diversity of tactics that will reinvigorate the labor movement
and bring it forward into our globalized world. Though the number
of workers currently organized into unions is low, history has shown
that this does not mean that the labor movement is dying. "When
unions have grown in this country, it has never been incrementally,"

says Kutalik. "Take 1926 for instance, unions had less density
than they do now, but by the end of the late 1930s, it had grown almost
four fold. The same thing happened in the 1890s. These explosions
happen when labor enters into dynamic movement phases." Kutalik
believes that we are on the verge of this now, and this generation will
play an important role in that. Intergenerational dialog is key
in bringing us into this movement phase. The knowledge and experience
of the older generation combined with the creativity, energy, and fresh
political analysis of the youth, has the potential to be a dynamic force
for change. A truly unified labor movement, across the boundaries
of race, class, gender, age, and nation will be a key element to move
us into the better world that we envision for ourselves and the generations
that will come.

To get more
information about these youth and student organizations working in the
labor movement:

Living Wage Action Coalition:

www.livingwageaction.org

1536 U St NW

Washington, DC 20009

Phone: (202) 339-9368

Young Workers United:

http://youngworkersunited.org

P.O. Box 15866

San Francisco, CA 94115-5866

Phone: (415) 621-4155

Rank and File Youth Project:

ranknfileyouth.project@gmail.com

Student Farmworker Alliance:

www.sfalliance.org

PO Box 603

Immokalee, FL 34143

Phone: (239) 657-8311

United Students Against Sweatshops:

www.studentsagainstsweatshops.org

1150 17th Street NW, Suite
300

Washington, DC 20036

Phone: (202) NO SWEAT

rachel
parsons is a member of the Critical
Moment collective.
She can be reached at racheleparsons@hotmail.com.