Republic Revolt

This article, which I co-authored with Kari Lydersen, originally appeared on the Dollars and Sense website.  Kari is currently blogging about it at Melville House Publishing’s website and is putting together a book about the struggle due out in January. I’ve been checking out some of the other commentaries of the takeover, especially the very engaging Professor Darren Hutchenson at Dissenting Justice. In the next few days, I hope to offer some dialogue around the points that he and others have put forward.

One thing is certain: the economy isn’t getting much better anytime soon, and the more debate and discussion about where to go from here is needed. Let’s take our collective hats off the the brave Republic workers. Hopefully their action will inspire a sense that no one has to take the economic crisis sitting down (unless of course, it is a sit-in) and also help sharpen an analysis about what to fight for in the coming years.

The Real Audacity of Hope

Republic Windows Workers Stand Their Ground

The 2008 holiday season is one of high hopes and high anxiety. Barack Obama’s November victory has raised expectations of meaningful change, while the Department of Labor estimates over a half million jobs lost in November alone.

Workers at Chicago’s Republic Windows and Doors weren’t waiting for the White House when they learned that they were losing their jobs due to a plant closing. They occupied their workplace, insisted on receiving their full vacation and sick days pay—and won. Whether it be the shape of things to come or just a fleeting moment remains to be seen. Their action forced the mainstream media to show the faces behind the statistics—ones filled with pride and defiance, not pity and powerlessness.

Last fall, workers at Republic noticed that important pieces of equipment had disappeared from their Goose Island warehouse. Alarmed, they notified their union, United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America, Local 1110 (otherwise known as UE), an independent union with a tradition of direct action. Republic’s management assured the union that no plant closure was afoot; and that the equipment would be replaced with modernized pieces.

Not willing to take the company’s word for it, the union covertly monitored the plant, and watched as trucks removed the very machinery needed to produce windows and doors. Meanwhile as the foreclosure crisis unfolded, Republic lost most of its contracts for new home construction.

Then on Tuesday, December 2, employees were told what they feared had been coming for a long-time. Friday, the plant would be shuttered. They were to come pick up their checks and file for unemployment. Company officials blamed the closing on the economic crisis, and on Bank of America, who they said clamped down on their credit despite a federal bailout package of $25 billion in taxpayer money.

Interview: Restaurant Opportunities Center-NYC

Hey Partisans-

I highly recommend reading “The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization” by Rinku Sen and Fekkak Mamdouh. Sen is a legendary Community Organizer and a fantastic writer, Mamdouh is an organizer with the Restaurant Opportunities Center-NYC, an excellent worker’s center which emerged from the ashes of the World Trade Center disaster.

I’ll write a real review later, but I’m going to take the opportunity to post an unpublished interview I did with Mamdouh and his co-organizer Saru Jayaraman a few years ago. It was intended for an anthology on contemporary organizing, which unfortunately never saw the light of day.

NT: How Did ROC-NY come into being?

FM: I used to work for Windows on The World, a restaurant on the top of the World Trade Center, after 9/11 the workers had no where to go. There used to be a union there, HERE Local 100, it was a small union capacity wise and space wise, they didn’t have the space for the 250-300 displaced workers that came in the day after the tragedy. We thought about creating a new organization to work with the displaced worker, work with the families, and work with the people who lost their loved ones so they called me and they called Saru and we started ROC-NY.

NT: Were you a Shop Steward at Windows on the World?

FM: Yes, I was.

NT: And you, Saru?

SJ: I am an attorney and I’ve been organizing for about ten-years in immigrant communities, most recently at a workplace project in Long Island. When the union called me I was hesitant because I’ve always worked on union democracy issues but I ended up meeting the workers from Windows. That group of people was the most extraordinary group of workers I had ever met. The owner of the restaurant had decided that he wanted one person from every country, every language possible because anyone who came from anywhere in the world should have their language represented. Everything from Nepali to Indonesian the Ivory Coast, Mandingo- it was just the most extraordinary diverse group of people who worked for twenty years together, went through a trauma together and ended up being able to communicate not through language, but through solidarity. That initial period of meeting them and coming here was really extraordinary.

NT: Sometimes we as organizers have trouble keeping together a multi-racial vision that includes four or five groups. I can only imagine the amount of vision, let alone logistics that it takes to keep together something this diverse.

SJ: It’s not like we’re perfect. Our coop has twenty-two different countries and is pretty diverse, but organizationally, we’ve grown increasingly Latino, and its been a real struggle to keep our African and our Asian and our Bengali members coming and feel like it is their space too.

NT: Yet without struggle like this there would be no opportunity to build bridges.

SJ: That’s right.

NT: When the owner re-opened his restaurant, his concerns about diversity went right out the window.

FM: He opened up Noche at 49th and Broadway and didn’t rehire any of the Windows workers. This really pissed us off, made us angry. After 9/11 there was a ceremony in memory of all the people we had lost and there were a lot of Senators, the Mayor, and government people. He stands there on a podium, in a church and said like “I know a lot of restaurant owners and the only wat I can help you guys is to find you new jobs.”

A month after that he opens up this new restaurant and he says “I can not help you I only own fifteen percent,” We said “No, some of us have worked for you for twenty years, we will work here, in this place.

The union said that since there was no contract, they could not push the owner to hire us. Morally, we believe that we were a part of his business, we had been making money for him for twenty years. He’s rich because of us. We just came together, and went down there and fought him. He then set up a day of interviews for Windows workers only but didn’t hire any of us.

Sp on the opening day, we had a big protest, there all the media it made the Metro Section. Some of the media people got between us and them and made us meet.

NT: Was that a spontaneous media strategy or did you have a plan?

SJ: Spontaneous.

NT: You said the media got between you and the employer. Did any reporters come out from behind the official veil of neutrality and advocate for you?

SJ: No, Steve Greenhouse out us on the cover for the New York Times Metro section-the New York Times Metro section! He’s a labor reporter but he wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary. This was a big deal, these are 9/11 workers, this is the former owner of Windows on the World refusing to hire 9/11 workers. We deserved to be on the cover of the Metro Section!

FM: Just one day before the opening we were getting enormous amount of people ready to go down to Noche to protest in front of his big opening. He called us at 6:00 so we negotiated until late. We created a separate class of workers just for Windows people, banquet workers. Everyone who wanted to work there, thirty-three workers got hired. No one can talk badly to these workers. It is known that they are organized, and have an organization behind them.
NT: Did the union try to organize that shop?

SJ: No, it just shut down after two or three years.

FM: One of the owners is a landlord who was just giving the space at a cheap rent. Because all of those capitalists are friends with each other I give you this you give me that. They had other things to do with the space. I think they are going to open up a new restaurant.

NT: But you’ll be all over that!

[Laughter]

FM: I think this time. they’ll hire us without us going down there.

NT: Do you ever encounter difficulties utilizing the 9/11 card with the media?

FM: A lot of people came out to support us because of 9/11 an out poor of support of people saying “this guy has to rehire you.”

SJ: There’s no line. There would be if we were advocates for 9/11 victims but except for me, we are all 9/11 survivors. It’s our card to play! It is our people who died in there. There’s no taking advantage of it, we would be taking advantage of ourselves.

FM: I had a worker in front of the new restaurant. He lost two brothers. We were talking to NPR [National Public Radio]. The owner came out and I asked him “Do you know who this is?” They didn’t and that’s the kind of people they are.

SJ: We’re not the firefighters or the police officers who did take advantage of it to a certain extent. We’re the immigrant workers everyone forgot about. We’ll use it to the last day, for our coop for our campaigns.

NT: I had a similar conversation with an activist who is homeless currently here in New York City. He knows he lost friends, homeless people in that rubble, but there’s no compensation for shopping carts and homeless people’s lives.

SJ: Yeah, exactly.

NT: As a Worker’s Center, you had much more flexibility than the union in regards to being able to take Direct Action.

SJ: Since that time we have won six more campaigns against hotel owners. In each case we have settlement agreements that are more than justback-wages or getting people their job back. They include things that resemble a union contract such as vacations, sick-days and promotions.

NT: Do you see the Labor Movement as needing Worker’s Centers as a shot in the arm?

SJ: In our situation, there are 161,000 restaurant workers in New York City and only 1,500 of them belong to Local 100. They really need us to be creating a labor friendly environment in the majority of the shops, pushing the envelopes, putting the big industry players between a rock and a hard place. We are telling them “Either your workers will be organized through ROC-NY or Local 100 but either way or the other we will create density in this industry!”

There are segments in the industry: tablecloth fancy, tablecloth midlevel and family-style franchise and quick serve. At the top level we mapped out all the ownership groups mini-empires, where one person owns ten restaurants. these are very fancy places that we, that I could never afford to eat at. We picked one as a target and organized twenty-five workers in two restaurants around wages, discrimination that we’re now settling with a great settlement agreement.

Its a guy who owns seven restaurants in New York City-three of which are union. We’re going after two non-union restaurants and putting him on notice, putting him between a rock and a hard place.

NT: What kind of tactics do you use?
SJ: We start by organizing the workers, taking a big group and having them hand-deliver a demand letter to the owner. They usually don’t respond, so we protest. We protested for a year, handbilling. We created a handbill that looked like a menu listing all of the health violations in the restaurant. We work with clergy and the press but its really the pickets because restaurants are in a vulnerable, public place. In two of the situations, the owners came out and settled immediately.

NT: Doing tenant organizing in San Francisco, we picketed a lot of landlords who were also restaurant owners. When we went to their restaurants instead of their homes, we almost always won!

[Laughter]

NT: Let’s talk about the Coop. Some say that the idea of worker ownership and management within a capitalist system is nothing more than creating more capitalists.

SJ: It’s something that I’ve personally struggled with. I didn’t want to do a restaurant, I didn’t want to do a coop, and I wasn’t interested in creating entrepreneurs. What convinced me in the end was our ability to use it for our larger campaign, for the movement. One is to demonstrate that you could do things different, two being having a group of owners that could infiltrate the owners’ association, and three is having a group or worker-owners who have to put in sweat equity for the movement prior two and post opening of the restaurant.

It requires a constant connection between the social justice movement which is the parent and the coop that is the child. I think that the problem is that people do it the other way around-they start a coop then do social justice work on the side. For us, the primary institution is ROC-NY. There are people who will focus on making the restaurant successful, I’m not saying that that’s not important. ultimately the mission of the restaurant is contribute to the movement.

JT There’s a great self-management tradition within Left-Communist and Anarchist thought. The Industrial Workers of The World referred to their syndicalist strategy as creating “a new world within the shell of the old.”

SJ: The way we’re shaking up the system is by shifting the balance of power within the industry and the coop is just a tactic to get there. The issue is not the 51 people in the coop, it is the 161,000 people in the industry. We’re not working within the confines of the old world, we’re creating something new and different.

It has to be something new and different because globalization has created an entirely new situation with the combination of immigration and the service economy. Its an entirely new world we’re after and we have to create it.

I don’t think we’re working within the capitalist system: we’re making this up as we go along!

FM: In this free-capitalist society, owners always say that they are not making any money, we’re going to move our business. If you talk to any owner, they are going to say “I’m not making any money this year-all of them1” Yet you stil see them with the new car, the new house, with the vacations if that’s not making money I don’t know what is. We want to demonstrate that you can make money, pay your workers, a pension, healthcare. We want to prove them wrong.

NT: Let’s talk about the help you are getting from the Italians in this endeavor.

FM: We went to these people’s houses in Italy. They are really having a good life, respecting each other. They have taken the second poorest place in Italy and made it into the second richest. Through hard-work and respect, taking the capitalist’s money and building a movement. And everything there is a coop the cheese place, the wine place the supermarket. We took a bus and the driver was a member of a bus driver’s coop.

SJ: We were connected because one of our early allies and supporters had done a Fullbright in Italy and studied the coop movement in Northern Italy.. He was working with us and finally talked to one of his friends. His friend finally came to meet us. It was the President of a very large Italian Restaurant Coop. In the first meeting we immediately connected. His name was Yvanne Brusetti, he comes out of the hard-core communist movement of Northern Italy, he is named after Lenin. He worked for many years in the Communist Party and over the past fifty-years they have built their coop to be the third largest caterer in Europe. It is a 350 million Euro a year enterprise. So I think they have lost a little of what they were. In fact, when they came here, they said “Wow, you guys are who we were fifty years ago. We’ve lost some of that passion.

They got together with other coops and created a consortium that is investing nearly a half a million dollars in our coop.

To be honest with you I think that they wanted to do their thing for 9/11 victims. But hey, we’ve spoken all over North America and not one person has come forward and said we want to invest in you. Here are these Italians with solidarity across borders.

FM: We took eighteen low-wage workers to see how the coop works. We saw a dishwasher presenting his case in City Hall in Italy and people are amazed with what is possible there.

NT: It’s like CLR James wrote every cook can govern, and so can the dishwasher!

[LAUGHTER]

SJ: Exactly.

NT: What would a good world look like? What are good examples from past movements and what are things that we as organizers should leave far behind?

FM: It is obvious that the capitalist model is not working for everybody. A lot of countries are dying, people are immigrating here, and suffering. If it weren’t that many people would just stay in their countries. It is working in the eyes of the 6% of America or whatever. People are not getting it. When you seeing immigration, war, starvation it is because of capitalism. They say I want what you have, I don’t care I need another zero after the other zeros I have in my bank account, the the back of my one. None of them ever say it is enough,

SJ: It would look a lot like a situation that might not be pure socialist, but there certain spectrum of economic thought and opinion, democracy and there certainly is a great amount of control over one’s life especially by immigrants and people of color. Control of their work situation, control over their living situation.

NT: Collective self-management?

SJ: Collective self-management but democracy, really trying to get away from any kind of vanguardism or rule by any kind of Left elite. There’s a lot to be said for real popular control of everything. You can feel it. You can feel it in Northern Italy, you can feel it in Carola. Its a culture of not just democracy, but about caring about the world. In Cuba I had conversations with twelve year olds about conditions in Africa. Or in Carola, with my boat driver who was a Marxist. It is a cutlure of people who care deeply about the world.

NT: There’s definetely a cultural aspect about it, a social aspect. When I was in Nicaragua in 1992, after the fall of state socialism, I witnessed campesinos struggling to preserve a socialistic way of living through maintaining the campos collectivized through the revolution. Now I’m sure that without socialists having state power many of these gains have been lost. But what I witnessed went beyond simple state power analysis, or a simple anti-state power analysis.

SJ: We need globalization of worker’s rights, a real International Labor Organization.

NT: What would this type of ILO look like, who would enforce the standards?

FM: People!

NT: So do you believe that you always have to maintain a direct action capability of the movement?

FM: I don’t care what you call it, if it has dignity and respect then it is a beautiful movement.

NT: Within the United States, who inspires you?

FM: The groups we are the closest with are the Taxi Worker’s Alliance and the Domestic Workers Union. Outside of New York…
FM: There’s a lot of groups in the Bay Area. Chinese Progressive Association, the Young Worker’s Project. In LA SAJE and the Agenda.

NT: What is something you want the rest of the world to know about movement building today?

SJ: Movement building today is strategic, planned well thought out, its not fly by night, its not just a group of young people shouting. Its strategic, well thought out, but led by the people themselves. I think we’re heading in the right direction.

FM: I want people to know that it is not our fault that people are dying in Fallujah today/ We try and try and try to stop to what is happening. But coming back to what is going on here in NYC today, we’re trying what hasn’t been done here in 35 years. Recently, we helped three families get paper, doing what other organizations have problems with. We’re going to keep fighting, opening more coops, but always keep fighting.