Comrades Read Together- No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane McAlevey

Andrea Haverkamp, President of CGE 6069; Sarah Pishioneri, labor organizer based in Oregon; and Alex Riccio, labor organizer based in Philadelphia; have a comradely discussion about the first two chapters of No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane McAlevey.

Join us in discussion and some reading sessions on our Discord server! You can get in on the fun by becoming a Laborwave Patron at patreon.com/laborwave and joining as a Rank-and-Filer, or Committee Member, or Strike Captain. Once joined, you'll receive an invitation to our Discord where we have a pdf of the book, multiple channels for discussions, and voice channels for periodic reading and chat sessions together!

We cover the main arguments put forward in the introduction and chapter two concerning theories of power, the difference between advocacy, mobilizing, and organizing strategies, and whole-worker organizing. We also hiss and boo at the villains taken on by McAlevey named Andy Stern, former president of SEIU, and Saul Alinsky, overall weak-sauce organizer pushing a mostly advocacy and mobilizing approach to social change where organizers pretend to be neutral support with no agendas or positions.

This and more in our first Comrades Read Together!

#comradesreadtogether #laborwaveradio #janemcalevey #noshortcuts #AndreaHaverkamp #SarahPishioneri #AlexRiccio

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