Wildcat Strikes at University of California w/ Shannon Ikebe & Tara Phillips

Laborwave Radio speaks with Shannon Ikebe and Tara Phillips, two striking workers at the University of California, on the power of wildcat strikes, importance of deep internal union democracy, and organizing worker insurgencies. They are the authors of the piece, The Grassroots Wildcat Strike for a COLA and the Fight for a Democratic, Militant Union.

Shannon Ikebe is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. They study social democracy and labor movements in Europe.

Tara Phillips is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California Berkeley where she studies US and Latin American Literature in the twentieth century from a food studies perspective. She is a also an academic worker and rank and file labor organizer at UAW 2865.

Our conversation provides an update on the wildcat strike at the UC system, and largely focuses on the strategies behind the strike and rebuttals to criticisms from certain detractors. Ikebe and Phillips reject the view that a wildcat strike must conform to pseudo-scientific claims about the "physics of strikes," and largely take their inspiration for worker insurgencies from the likes of Rosa Luxemburg and her writings on the "mass strike."

"You can't calculate everything and predict the outcome in advance. You have to experiment and see what's possible for workers. In the process our movement has grown organically and exponentially, and workers expectations have been raised.

The key point is that we now have a movement that formerly we have not had. We have not won a COLA yet, but I don't think it's a defeat as some people may like to call it. I think it's an inconclusive ending for now, but the difference being that we have a movement. Also, the way in which people have a real lived experience of doing a wildcat strike, and the wildcat strike as a repertoire of tactics has become normalized as part of the things we can do. I think that was completely unimaginable in November, 2019."

Other show references:

Maximillian Alvarez, Antifascism and the Left's Fear of Taking Power, Baffler Magazine

Strike University, https://strikeuniversity.org/

Music:

Damaged Bug, Lovely Gold

#wildcatstrike #cola4all #strikeuniversity #shannonikebe #taraphillips #laborwaveradio #alexriccio #maximillianalvarez #theeohsees #damagedbug

Police, Technology, & Unions with Bill Fletcher Jr

"As an institution the principle role of police is to protect wealth and property. Whether that's by intervening in strikes or repressing people of color, it's not in any way a progressive role. So we need to have that conversation about policing. What is crime and what is not? What are the social ills that need addressing, and how is that best done? But when you come out of a settler state, where people were encouraged to use guns to constitute slave patrols and colonial militias, and they were encouraged to use those weapons against the 'other,' none of this happening today should surprise us."

Bill Fletcher Jr is a long-time labor leader and author of multiple books, including Solidarity Divided: The Crisis In Organized Labor And A New Path Toward Social Justice (co-author Dr. Fernando Gapasin) and a new mystery thriller The Man Who Fell From The Sky.

We speak on the emerging demands on the AFL-CIO to sever ties with police unions, which Bill Fletcher Jr cautions could have the consequence of providing the right-wing with scripts to claim police are being victimized by the left, and enable Trumpists to more easily stoke reactionary fires. Fletcher suggests that our focus should be more on police repression, and having a reckoning with our own past within the labor movement that has a complicated record on racial justice.

We also speak on the paradoxical quality of online technologies confining workers to more hours on the job rather than liberation from work, and the need for organized labor to go deeper and further in demanding emancipation.

Two graduate employee unions in Oregon, GTFF 3544 and CGE 6069, have joined the growing number of union locals to publish statements pressuring the AFL-CIO to disaffiliate with the IUPA (International Union of Police Associations). For transparency, the host of Laborwave Radio was involved and supportive in the process of one of these statements being produced. The statement from CGE 6069 is linked (for transparency I was the staff employee of CGE during the time of this statement being generated).

CGE AFT Letter 6-22.pdf

Download PDF • 132KB

Rent Strikes w/ Liza Featherstone & Tenants United Corvallis

Full audio and transcript will be available at laborwaveradio.com/rentstrikes

Two part episode on Laborwave, we speak with tenant organizers from Tenants United Corvallis (TUC), a committee of the Mid-Valley IWW, about their efforts to scale up a rent strike in the Mid-Willamette Valley. We follow that segment by speaking with Liza Featherstone, a journalist featured in The Nation and Jacobin, about rent strike activities in New York as well as a broader conversation about relations of power between the tenant and landlord classes.

Tenants United Corvallis (TUC) can be reached via their website at midvalleyiww.org

Liza Featherstone penned the piece, On Strike- No Rent, for Jacobin which served as the baseline for our conversation. https://jacobinmag.com/2020/05/rent-strike-may-coronavirus-new-york-city-nyc-tenants-housing