Faced with widespread union busting and a feckless NLRB, a more aggressive labor movement is brewing.

The National Labor Relations Board has a long history of dysfunction, but its job just got a lot harder. In January, a federal appeals court ruled that Obama had illegally appointed three of the board’s members while the Senate was in recess early last year. Now, recess appointments are a touchy subject in Washington, but Obama had good reason. Republicans in the Senate had threatened to block any and all NLRB appointments, leaving the president with few options. (Oddly, there’s no law against deliberately obstructing a vital government agency.)

If the decision stands, the board is toast. With only one remaining member, the NLRB lacks a quorum, and legally loses all decision-making power. The bedrock of labor law enforcement would grind to a halt. What’s more, all decisions since the January 4 appointments last year could be nullified—that’s hundreds of rulings on everything from workers using social media, to who handles union dues on a day-to-day basis.

This is bad news for organized labor, but not as bad as you might think. While few doubt the board’s importance in protecting things the right to organize, the NLRB also has a long history of institutionalizing the bureaucracy and hierarchy that have plagued American labor for decades. The board was born during an era of historic labor militancy, and reforms that established basic workplace protections also went hand in hand with bans on more militant actions like sit-downs, sympathy strikes, and wildcats. In their place, the board set up channels like union elections and regulated negotiations. The new system was more predictable for everyone, but also more top-down, less democratic, and arguably much less effective for labor.

So, alienated by the rigidity and hierarchy of the NLRB system, many workers and organizers have begun learning to live without it, preferring to engage in struggles on their own terms. Indeed, with or without a functioning labor board, many of the movement’s brightest flashpoints are operating well outside the system.

One of the clearest of those flashpoints was certainly last year’s unprecedented organizing effort at Walmart, a grassroots campaign that united unions, labor groups, and activists across the country. The push began in September, when workers at a Walmart-controlled warehouse in Mira Loma, California, walked off the job and began a “Walmarch” to Los Angeles to demand safer working conditions. Earning well below a living wage, the Mira Loma workers had suffered 120-degree heat, inadequate ventilation, and broken equipment—conditions that lead more than 80 percent to experience on-the-job injuries. They were also mostly part-time workers, and often relied on a “buddy system” during slower workweeks.

The symbolism of the 50-mile march, inspired by the 1966 United Farm Workers march to Sacramento, was striking. Like the UFW, the warehouse workers found themselves excluded from the protection of the NLRB system—the UFW because the board explicitly excludes agricultural workers, the warehouse workers because of Walmart’s notorious (not to mention illegal) union-busting. But also like the UFW, where the warehouse workers lacked legal support, they found an outpouring of community reinforcement. During some of the march’s hottest days (with temps climbing above 100 degrees), volunteers set up impromptu clinics to provide health care to the mostly uninsured workers. A few days later, the warehouse workers were joined by more than 100 California farm workers as well as activists from Students Against Sweatshops, who marched alongside them in solidarity. By October 5, the marchers returned to work with a guarantee of better conditions.

That extraordinary victory soon galvanized Walmart workers in other states to more militant action. Within a couple of days of the Mira Loma strike, workers at a Walmart warehouse in Elwood, Illinois, presented a petition for safer conditions, consistent schedules, and an end to forced overtime. When supervisors began firing those who had signed, workers walked out. On October 1, hundreds of community activists joined the striking workers, where riot police arrived and arrested 17 protesters for civil disobedience. But like the workers in California, the Elwood strikers quickly won victories on core demands. By October 15, increasingly under the umbrella of the labor group OUR Walmart, actions had spread to a dozen cities nationwide.

Such early success had a lot to do with strategy, writes historian Staughton Lynd in December’s Industrial Worker. Although they relied on support from recognized unions like the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), their grievances, demands, tactics, and victories were entirely their own. At every step of the way, including the climactic Black Friday actions throughout the country, Walmart workers operated decidedly outside the NLRB system of petition and arbitration. Instead of channeling time and energy into the tedious process of requesting recognition and electing representatives to negotiate, workers in Mira Loma and Elwood decided collectively to organize and take action themselves. This direct action approach had a big impact.  

For one thing, it meant a much quicker process. Workers in Illinois and California organized, went public, and won concrete victories within a matter of weeks—an unheard of timeline for unions sticking with official channels. Eschewing official recognition also meant sidestepping legal restrictions like no-strike clauses and bans on civil disobedience, sympathy actions, and boycotts. In California, Illinois, and across the country, much of the campaign would’ve been difficult under the NLRB umbrella—from the “Walmarch” in California to the civil disobedience in Elwood, not to mention the spontaneous way it all took off.

But most importantly, workers took the company by surprise. For decades, Walmart has remained union-free by exposing and undermining union campaigns in whatever way it could. A 2007 Human Rights Watch report found that the company routinely breaks US labor law to snuff out labor actions, from spying on workers, to banning discussions of unions on company property, to firing those who join. The report added that because labor law in the US is so toothless, Walmart’s illegal conduct usually results in little more than a “slap on the wrist.”  

And if workers can somehow make it over these barriers and go public with their demands, retaliation can be swift. When organizing workers at a Quebec Walmart went public in 2005, the company pulled up roots and left. When a handful of Walmart meat-cutters in Jacksonville voted to join the UFCW in 2000, Walmart announced it was terminating meat-cutting operations in 700 stores. And like many big-box companies, Walmart’s managers have long been trained to put a stop to organizing efforts before they get off the ground. One “Manager’s Toolbox” from 1997 urges supervisors to be “constantly alert for efforts by a union to organize your associates.” It also gives instructions on curbing unionization at every step of the process, from initial organizing to petitions to elections and bargaining. The handbook even provides a “Union Hotline” to alert upper management at the first sign of trouble. Bottom line: Walmart knows the NLRB process very well, and how to subvert it.

Which is what made last fall so exciting. If workers in Mira Loma had circulated a petition, signed cards, or went public with demands, management would’ve been all over it. But there’s nothing in the “Manager’s Toolbox” about a Walmarch. This is what gives unofficial actions their power: instead of working through a process stacked against them, workers in Mira Loma, Elwood, and across the country took up the fight on their own terms. In so doing, Staughton Lynd argues, Walmart workers revived the tactics and strategy of the labor movement’s zenith—the heady decades before the NLRB put a lid on labor militancy in during the Depression.  

But as groundbreaking as these victories have been, they’ve not been alone. Workers in Mina Loma and Elwood are part of a growing trend in organized labor, one that relies more and more on decentralized, grassroots action outside the NLRB system—what the American Prospect’s Josh Eidelson calls “alt-labor.” It’s a method more radical unions like the Industrial Workers of the World have been pushing for a long time, and lately, it’s been catching on. Especially in big cities like New York, workers in traditionally unorganized sectors have started to organize in a different kind of way, and it’s led to more than a few concrete victories. From broad-based movements like Coalition to Immokalee Workers to local restaurants like Hot and Crusty, workers, particularly in food service, are winning critical victories by taking a more militant and creative approach to demanding their rights.

One of the most interesting approaches has been that of the Restaurant Opportunities Center, a radical labor group based in New York City. Like OUR Walmart, the ROC is not a formal union and has no desire to become one. Their strategy is a familiar one: direct action, unofficial strikes, and building community support for campaigns. Not only that, with a cadre of lawyers and worker advocates, the ROC helps educate workers on their rights, and when necessary, provides legal support against the industry’s worst offenders. It’s also adept at publicizing ongoing struggles. When food service workers win a victory on, say, overtime violations, like they did at Mario Batali’s Del Posto restaurant in Manhattan in 2012, the ROC labels them a “high road” establishment. To date, the ROC has won more than a dozen settlements against employers in New York City, along with millions of dollars in workers’ back-pay.

The ROC has been active in the New York area for more than a decade, but last year, they were joined by Fast Food Forward, a coalition of community groups and unions including the SEIU. Unlike OUR Walmart and the ROC, Fast Food Forward would eventually like to see their workers gain NLRB protection. But instead of petitioning for recognition and then entering into negotiations with employers, the group decided to take action in a more direct way. Less than a week after Black Friday, the group organized a mass walkout in New York to demand higher wages and greater labor protection. Workers pulled off the largest strike in fast food history before anyone even signed a union card.

Now, at first glance, the fast food strike doesn’t make a lot of sense. Historically, big unions like the SEIU have not been fans of acting outside the NRLB system. Even during the Depression, when wildcat actions and unofficial strikes broke out in hundreds of cities nationwide and labor’s power was at its height, large, established unions like the AFL and CIO urged moderation. The difference today, argues Labor Notes reporter Jenny Brown, is that the moderate strategy hasn’t worked. If labor was at its militant height in the 1930s, today it’s at an historic low. Faced with employers like Walmart that regularly violate the law to impede organization, and an NLRB system that offers few prospects for victory, some labor leaders have started to rethink and retool. The result has been a labor movement that is more grassroots, more democratic, and more about action.

And it seems to be working. The last few years have seen a wave of unprecedented achievements, often in industries long thought impossible to organize. Numbers are still small, but activists and strikers in New York, Mira Loma, and across the country have shown an energy and creativity that’s been hard to ignore. Whether supported by established unions or not, this new militant wing of organized labor has in many ways brought the movement back to its roots—rank and file workers, organizing themselves democratically to fight for their rights in direct and meaningful ways. If the campaigns spearheaded by OUR Walmart and the ROC can continue this trajectory, it will have much more to do with their unique vision and spirit than whatever ends up happening at the NLRB.

Above image, of a Fast Food Forward/Occupy/RiseUpNY day of action in July 2012, by Katie Moore. Used with permission.  

This post originally appeared at WagingNonviolence.org.  

For Mahoma Lopez, a long-time restaurant worker in New York City, it came down to a decision between fight and flight. Last fall, his boss at the cafe on the Upper East Side where Lopez had worked for years began cutting hours and screaming at his employees, withholding overtime pay and threatening to fire anyone who complained. Being Mexican-born and with halting English, Lopez had been in this position before. Time after time, he’d quit; to be a proud man in his industry required a fair number of employment changes.

“Hot and Crusty —” Lopez said, smiling as he began the story of his most recent employer, one in a chain of cheap, 24-hour eateries sprinkled across Manhattan. Lopez leaned back in the flimsy chair of the pizzeria a few blocks from his Queens apartment. With his large stomach thrust forward and his wide cheeks covered in a trimmed beard, the 34-year-old looked stately, almost regal. 

“In December, the campaign began underground,” he said.

Last month, Lopez and his co-workers at the Hot and Crusty on 63rd St. won a suspenseful and highly atypical 11-month labor campaign. The battle pitted 23 foreign-born restaurant workers, supported by a volunteer organizing center and members of Occupy Wall Street, against a corporate restaurant chain backed by a multimillion dollar private equity investment firm. The campaign itself was filled with enough twists, betrayals and finally triumphs to be the subject of an upcoming documentary,Cafe Wars (check out the trailer, below). Yet the story of Mahoma Lopez’s own year-long evolution from an employee to an organizer exemplifies the new, dynamic direction of the U.S. labor movement that appears to be on the brink of resurgence.

Lopez has a friendly disposition, which he employs in conversation to smooth over whatever difficulties have come his way. Crossing the Mexican-American border with a coyote — a smuggler of migrants — was no big deal, he says, even though the coyote was detained and imprisoned at the border, leaving 18-year-old Lopez in charge of the rest of the group once they reached Texas. Lopez also talks about his father’s early death deftly, explaining that it left him a good job as a gas station attendant, which Lopez assumed when he was 13. His relaxed demeanor didn’t inure him to things like chaotic protests; as a boy growing up in Mexico City, he was generally against marches.

“I thought: The people are crazy,” he remembered.

His aversion to chanting crowds doesn’t mean that Lopez can’t be rash and impulsive in his own life. “Me enojé” — which means “I got angry” in Spanish — is frequently his answer for why he made various life decisions, from quitting unpleasant jobs to immigrating to the U.S. But what Lopez sees in himself as recklessness, labor organizer Virgilio Aran sees as the type of pride and steadfast character that can make someone a good organizer.

“He’s very disciplined, that’s one of the most important qualities,” said Aran, who became involved in the Hot and Crusty campaign at the end of 2011. “He has been developing throughout the campaign, but I think that quality came with him before I met him.”

The beginning 

Aran, who co-founded the Laundry Workers Center along with his wife, Rosanna Rodriguez, first heard about Hot and Crusty when he received a call from one of Lopez’s co-workers, a man named Omar. At that point, the campaign was in its “super-secret” infancy. It consisted only of Lopez and two others, Gretel Areco and Gonzalo Jimenez, encouraging trusted co-workers to call the city Labor Board’s anonymous hotline. This, at first, was about as radical an action as Lopez was willing to take against his boss’s threats and frequent tirades. Omar hadn’t yet been vetted, and his unsolicited offer to call Aran put Lopez in a panic.

The moment was one of Lopez’s first brushes with the heart-racing anxiety that can come with organizing. By the end of the campaign, it would become a frequent sensation.

As it turned out, Omar was trustworthy, and Aran was one of the city’s best unaffiliated labor organizers. The newly-formed Laundry Workers Center was looking for its first campaign — although, as the group’s name implies, Aran had been eying the city’s notoriously exploitative laundry industry, not the low-wage restaurant business. Aran began an eight-week political education crash-course for the Hot and Crusty workers, and Lopez became his most curious and determined pupil. As the New Year approached, few could expect what was on the horizon — both for the Hot and Crusty campaign and on the national scene.

For the labor movement, 2012 began with all the paralysis of an election year, combined with the gloomy disappointment of the failed Scott Walker recall campaign in Wisconsin six months earlier. To many grassroots activists, organized labor was too lumbering and bureaucratic; to nearly everyone else, it was a pension-hungry special interest group that no longer belonged in today’s economic reality.

By the end of the year, however, labor had re-established itself through the popular teachers’ strike in Chicago, the first successful strikes at Walmart stores and warehouses in its 50-year history, the world’s largest private employer, the airport workers’ Thanksgiving Day walkouts at LAX, and the beginnings of an ambitious campaign to unionize employees at McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Taco Bell and other fast-food chains in New York City. The movement seemed invigorated, bursting with new leaders — and nowhere was this rapid transformation happening faster than at the fringes of the labor world, where the organizing could be focused on worker empowerment rather than continually being constrained by restrictive labor laws.

“The places I see [exciting organizing] happening most consistently are on what we would call the margins of the former labor movement,” writes Jane McAlevey, a labor organizer and author of Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement. This, she explains, “is in a lot of the immigrant organizing.”

On a blistering cold day in late January, smack in the middle of Manhattan, Mahoma Lopez and his small cadre of co-workers and volunteer organizers went public with a 50-person march to his Hot and Crusty store, where Lopez delivered a list of demands to a stunned manager.

“For me, that was one of the most incredible moments,” Lopez remembered. He confessed to being so nervous that, nearly one year later, he couldn’t quite believe that it had been he who delivered “la carta de demandas.”

The stakes 

Compared to the scale of the teachers’ strike or the snowballing Walmart walkouts that would erupt less than six months later, the Hot and Crusty fight was minuscule. Yet, the backdrop — the Manhattan food-service industry — was a microcosm of today’s highly globalized and highly unequal economic system.

Combined, the city’s tens of thousands of restaurants net an annual profit of more than $12 billion, according to the New York State Restaurant Association. Inside the sector’s hierarchy, however, this wealth hardly trickles down. The majority of the jobs the industry produces are low-wage, no-benefit positions that are overwhelmingly held by immigrants, about a third of whom are undocumented. According to a 2005 study, 60 percent of surveyed workers reported their bosses violating overtime laws, and one-third reported being verbally abused at work.

Mexican workers like Mahoma Lopez often endure the most exploitative conditions. According to a 2010 New York Times investigation, Mexican men are more likely to be employed in the restaurant industry than any other ethnic group, including American-born workers, in part because fear of deportation and desperate economic need makes them unlikely to report below-minimum-wage pay or workplace abuse.

While this addiction to cheap labor drives down wages throughout the industry, investors and private equity firms end up accumulating much of the resulting profits. The chain that includes Lopez’s Hot and Crusty is owned by Praesidian Capital, a $700 million company with a white South African operating partner named Mark Samson. To the Hot and Crusty workers and supporting organizers, Samson — living in a high-rise around the corner from the restaurant — became the symbol of the industry’s power imbalance. Rumors flew about his investing practices and his numerous chains of restaurants. But the bottom line that sparked the labor struggle wasn’t jealousy over Samson’s and other investors’ tax filings — it was their labor practices.

“It doesn’t matter how rich you are, it matters what type of situation you’re putting the workers’ lives in,” said Diego Ibanez, a volunteer organizer who worked with Lopez and Aran to plan actions throughout the Hot and Crusty struggle.

The campaign 

After that first freezing march, the escalation on both sides was fierce. The employees organized and won an independent workers’ association recognized by the National Labor Relations Board in May. They received tens of thousands of dollars in back pay, only to learn that the company decided to close the store in retaliation against the newly formed workers’ association. At that point, the legal handbook went out the window, and Lopez’s impulsiveness became indispensable. Far from being against a noisy protest, Lopez now hungered for it.

“Organizers like to joke about the most radical things we could do, and he always liked those conversations,” said Ibanez. When we joked about occupying the workplace, and he’d be like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to do that.’ He liked the possibilities of escalation.”

On August 31, the day the manager came to inform Lopez that the store was to be closed — a decision made weeks earlier — Lopez, his co-workers and a handful of community members rushed into the restaurant and prevented its closure by holding a workers’ assembly. The action resulted in multiple arrests and kicked off a picket line and a week-long sidewalk cafe that, fittingly enough, opened for (free) business on Labor Day.

The back-and-forth continued. Finally the company relented, only to reveal that unpaid rent had soured the relationship with the landlord, who wouldn’t renew the lease. The workers’ picket stretched into its second month, straining finances and spreading fatigue. Still, Lopez remained a bedrock of the campaign.

At one point, his financial situation had become so precarious that Virgilio Aran found Lopez — who has a wife and two sons to support — a part-time job, which kept him away from the picket line for the first time since it began.

“The first day that he went to the part-time job, one of his co-workers stayed at the picket line himself,” said Aran. “Mahoma called me that night and he said, ‘I won’t take the job. That was my first and last day.

“‘We’re here in the struggle for the victory, and the picket line is more important than getting some type of income,’” Aran remembered Lopez saying. “That’s his character.”

Finally, in late October, the company ceded to the workers’ demands — agreeing to reopen the store, recognize the workers’ association and sign a collective-bargaining agreement that included paid vacation and sick time for the workers, required wage increases, a grievance and arbitration procedure, and a union hiring hall that gives the association the power to hire new employees. That night, after Lopez learned that he had finally won, he sat down and called every single organizer and thanked them.

The next week, as he waited for the store to reopen, Lopez became the newest volunteer organizer with Laundry Workers’ Center. According to Aran, Lopez is now one of the lead organizers on another underground labor campaign.

But, like any seasoned organizer, if you ask Mahoma Lopez about the new campaign, he won’t reveal a word.

Photo by Workers of Hot and Crusty. Used with permission.

Cafe Wars Trailer from Robin Blotnick on Vimeo.

This post originally appeared at Waging Nonviolence.  

“We are standing up to live better,” say Walmart’s retail workers, playfully twisting Walmart’s slogan of “live better” into a rallying cry for better conditions and treatment. In a taste of what the nation’s largest retailer can expect on Black Friday, frustrated Walmart workers have again started walking off their jobs to protest their employer’s attempts to silence outspoken workers.

Workers from both the retail and warehouse sectors of Walmart’s supply chain have called for nation-wide protests, strikes and actions on, and leading up to, next Friday — the busiest shopping day of the year. In the past week, wildcat strikes in Dallas, Seattle and the Bay Area saw dozens of retail workers — from multiple store — walk away from their shifts, suggesting that the Black Friday threats are to be taken seriously.

Dan Schlademan, Director of the Making Change at Walmart campaign, said in a nation-wide conference call organized for media on Thursday that Walmart can expect more than 1,000 different protests, including strikes and rallies at Walmart stores between now and Black Friday.

According to organizers working with the Walmart retail workers’ association, OUR Walmart, stores around the country — including, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee, Washington D.C. and others — can expect workers to go on strike. Specific dates have not been announced yet out of concern to minimize chances for Walmart to preemptively silence workers’ voices.

“We are expecting a wide variety of activity — strikers right in front of their stores, demonstrations, flash mobs, rallies and people working to educate customers — I think it’s going to be a very creative day.” said Schlademan. “Brave strikers are seeing a huge amount of support from community allies.”

As Waging Nonviolence has previously reported, the historic wildcat strikes are invigorating a new form of labor organizing of non-union labor. By drawing on the support of community allies — particularly from religious and student groups — workers are finding it increasingly easier to resist their employer’s abuses.

In addition to joining striking workers at rallies at Walmart stores, supporters are able to donate to Making Change at Walmart to help the striking low-wage workers make up lost wages. In the form of food gift cards, the community support organization Making Change at Walmart is providing concrete ways for others to be in solidarity with Walmart’s workers. Thus far, $25,000 has been raised.

But this kind of grassroots support pales in comparison to the revenue and capital at Walmart’s disposal. Some Walmart executives are making upwards of $10 million a year while full-time retail workers struggle to make ends meet. Sara Gilbert, a customer service manager at a Seattle Walmart, makes only $14,000 a year to support her family.

“I work full time for one of the richest companies in the world and yet my children are on state healthcare and we get subsidized housing,” said Gilbert who joined other OUR Walmart associates in Seattle’s walkout on Thursday. Walmart posted almost $16 billion in profits last year and recently announced changes to employee healthcare premiums that could raise the cost for workers as much as 36 percent.

Also back in the struggle against Walmart are its warehouse workers. On November 14, the Inland Empire, Calif., warehouse workers — who are privately contracted through the logistics company NFI but move 100 percent Walmart goods — resumed their strike due to retaliations against outspoken workers. The workers were part of the 15-day strike in mid-September that re-ignited workers’ efforts to change Walmart’s treatment of its employees.

David Garcia, a warehouse worker from Southern California who took part in the first strike, was recently terminated for speaking out against unsafe working conditions and broken equipment. According to Elizabeth Brennan, an organizer with Warehouse Workers United with whom the NFI workers are affiliated, about three dozen workers have had their hours cut while others have been demoted and suspended in retaliatory efforts from Walmart’s contractor to curb organizing efforts.

“It’s been tough,” said Garcia. “My kids need food, school supplies and an apartment to sleep in at night, but right now it is difficult to provide them these basic things.”

On Thursday, six community supporters were arrested for blocking a major thoroughfare to the Walmart-contracted warehouse. The two dozen striking warehouse workers returned to work on November 16.

The Inland Empire strike, which still demands an end to unsafe working conditions, retaliatory practices and poor wages, comes during a crucial time when much of Walmart’s supply chain is moving into high gear. It remains unclear whether the strikes and walkouts will generate enough pressure to force Walmart to systematically change how it treats its 1.4 million employees, but the Walmart workers movement seems to be spreading and growing.

The Corporate Action Network is hosting online activism for supporters as well as publicizing some of the events planned at Walmart stores for Black Friday. While some activists for workers’ rights and just wages advocate boycotting Walmart and shopping on Black Friday in general, Making Change at Walmart has not called for boycotts but affirms all efforts that support workers’ rights to assemble and speak out.

Charlene Fletcher, a Walmart employee in California plans to go on strike to emphasize her message that Walmart is not listening to its workers. Fletcher and her husband both have to work Thanksgiving Day for Walmart and will miss spending the holiday with their two young children. Complaints have alleged that Walmart’s scheduling practices have made it very difficult for families to spend time with each other on holidays like Thanksgiving when Walmart plans to open its doors to shoppers that evening. Fletcher wants Walmart executives to know that Walmart’s employees are just as important as its customers.

“We are going to make the ultimate sacrifice,” said Fletcher who is also a part of OUR Walmart. “By going on strike on the busiest shopping day of the year, we hope to send a message out to Walmart that we are not a small percentage of workers who are struggling and that we mean business.”

Image by Walmart Corporate, licensed under Creative Commons.    

And check out this video from OUR Walmart, "Why Are We Standing Up to Live Better?" 

There’s been a lot of talk today about what Scott Walker’s victory means for progressives. There are a lot of potential takeaways. The Citizens United decision allowed Walker to overwhelmingly outspend his opponent, mostly from out-of-state donors and independent expenditures. Unlike the RNC, national Democrats (and the president) were conspicuously absent during the race, indicating that Obama may be unwilling to take a stand on workers’ rights during an election year. Turnout yesterday was unusually high for Wisconsin, which says a lot about how contentious the election really was. And other Republican governors, who have watched the race closely, may now be planning similar policies in their own states.

All that may spell big trouble for workers across the country. But there’s another lesson we may be forgetting: organized labor’s campaign against Walker was its largest and most significant in decades, and Tuesday’s results are only a small part of that. Historically, elections have been a pretty minor part of most social movements—especially labor. And activists in Wisconsin know this history very well. When the state legislature cut off citizen testimony on Walker’s budget proposal early last year, their response was not a petition or an official complaint, but an occupation. As Allison Kilkenny points out in TheNation,

Alienation from the traditional leftist institutions was the cause of the original occupation of Wisconsin's state capitol, followed by a slew of occupations all across the country, and the world. Burnt by the Republicans and abandoned by the Democrats, protesters turned to nontraditional forms of protest, including camping in public spaces and refusing to leave.

Until the recall campaign officially began several months later, those nontraditional forms of protest made up most of the progressive response to Walker. Citizens sent sarcastic valentines to the governor’s office, closed public schools, and revealed Walker’s baser intentions in other creative ways.

But by far the most significant action was the occupation of Wisconsin’s state capitol, which connected the struggle both to Arab Spring demonstrations, and later to the Occupy movement it helped inspire. There's also its connection with labor history—it was hardly the first time citizens occupied the capitol in Madison. In 1936, more than a hundred WPA workers and their families camped out at the state house to protest low wages and inconsistent pay. That year, sit-down strikes (“occupations” in 2012-speak) erupted in dozens of factories, plants, and workshops across the country. The next year, there were nearly 500.

Then as now, a stalled recovery threatened a double-dip recession, and many Americans wanted to see more action from a divided government in Washington. (This was less than a year after the Supreme Court declared the National Recovery Administration unconstitutional.) Wisconsin even had a leftwing governor from a radical third party, but like many people throughout the country, the WPA workers still chose to work outside the system. Last year we saw a similar (and somewhat smaller) wave of organizing and action in dozens of cities, including Madison, and it’s hard to know exactly where all of that will end up.     

The recall in Wisconsin gives us some idea of that, but not a complete picture. The Tea Party is still clearly an important political force, and many ordinary people remain suspicious of the intentions and tactics of organized labor. But the situation is far from black and white. Last night’s numbers make it easy to claim a resounding defeat for organized labor, but the last 16 months seem to show the opposite. It would be a shame, for instance, if the recall vote overshadowed recent labor victories, like when Ohioans voted overwhelmingly to restore collective bargaining last November. And let’s not forget that Dems took the Wisconsin senate yesterday in another recall, which may create some hurdles for Walker’s more conservative planks.

But even more than that, with or without a successful recall, the fight in Wisconsin was a significant step forward for organized labor. Unions have been steadily losing strength for decades, and its mobilization in Wisconsin was pretty unprecedented. Writes John Nichols:

For those who see democracy as a spectator sport with clearly defined seasons that finish on Election Day, the Wisconsin results are just depressing. But for those who recognize the distance Wisconsin… and other states… have come since the Republicans won just about everything in 2010, the recall story is instructive.

Walker’s February 2011 assault on union rights provoked some of the largest mass demonstrations in modern labor history, protests that anticipated the “Occupy” phenomenon with a three-week takeover of the state Capitol and universal slogan “Blame Wall Street Not the Workers,” protests that both drew inspiration from and served to inspire the global kicking up against austerity.

And that kicking up is far from over. As Peter Dreier points out in Common Dreams, Walker spent 88 percent of the money in yesterday’s recall to get 53 percent of the vote. In 2010, when Walker faced the same opponent for the same office, his campaign spending was a small fraction of what it was this year. In Wisconsin, as in many other parts of the world, austerity may require much more convincing than it did two years ago. In spite of the recall results, Wisconsin may represent less an end than a beginning.    

Sources: The Nation, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Common Dreams, National Institute on Money in State Politics. 

Image by WisPolitics.com, licensed under Creative Commons.