Children seeking refuge; Organizing at the cutting edge +
a new class for organizers on power and strategy + Rilke + great jazz
Today in The Platypus: we provide our take on the mainstream media’s appalling coverage of the Biden administration’s border policy; continue our exploration of creative approaches in labor and community organizing; describe an exciting class for experienced organizers and campaigners on power and strategy; and link to an outstanding jazz performance and a powerful movement film. And we hope if you’re enjoying The Platypus, you’ll share it with your friends and/or become a paid subscriber.
The Spike
This week, The Platypus leads with its poisonous hind spike. We’re outraged by much of the mainstream media coverage of the children seeking asylum at the southern border. Many lazy journalists and pundits have adopted Fox News’ racist, right-wing tropes of crisis, scarcity, and chaos to pick a fight with the Biden administration. Let’s get this straight. People fleeing persecution and violence who seek asylum under our laws are not committing a crime, and their presence doesn’t constitute a crisis. Responding humanely to traumatized people and children is not “weak” – it’s our moral and legal responsibility. President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas inherited a system that Trump and Stephen Miller deliberately broke that now has insufficient facilities and funding and a workforce that is hostile to the new administration and to migrants themselves. The same members of Congress who criticize the administration today have repeatedly failed to vote for measures to fix that same system for years. Our country is not “full” as Trump infamously said – the number of people coming to the southern border now is consistent with previous years, and they can be welcomed and given full due process. The US is not being “invaded” – on the contrary, it created many of the conditions that led to this migration, including backing corrupt governments in Central America and causing climate change that is making regions of the world uninhabitable. What kind of “journalists” (Chuck Todd, Martha Raddatz we’re looking right at you) would fail to show any curiosity about the underlying realities that would compel desperate parents to send their children on a dangerous journey by themselves?
Tom K. Wong, Gabriel De Roche, and Jesus Rojas Venzor – three academics – did the work that journalists should have done. Their article in the Washington Post has the astonishing headline, “Biden’s immigration policies have not caused a ‘surge’ at the U.S. border with Mexico. Here’s the data.”
The increase in border crossings at the U.S. border with Mexico has generated a lot of attention — and a lot of theories about where this increase is coming from and whether it might be linked to Biden administration policies. Underappreciated in the developing narrative is just how predictable the rise in border crossings is. We analyzed monthly U.S. Customs and Border Protection data from 2012 through February and found no clear evidence that the overall increase in border crossings in 2021 can be attributed to Biden administration policies. Rather, the current increase fits a pattern of seasonal changes in undocumented immigration combined with a backlog of demand because of 2020s coronavirus border closure.
By swallowing the Fox frame, much of the mainstream media is doing the work of white supremacy – dehumanizing immigrants and contributing to the fear of “demographic replacement” that animates Trump’s authoritarian supporters. We also recommend this excellent piece by Rep. Veronica Escobar, which points to the need to deal with root causes of migration, this piece by Adam Serwer in The Atlantic which points out that cruelty is both immoral and ineffective as an immigration policy, and this piece by Mehdi Hassan, “There are a lot of lies about Biden’s ‘border crisis.’ Here’s the truth.”
The media’s failure to cover immigration fairly is not new. As Serwer notes:
In their 2015 book, White Backlash, the political scientists Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal found that “positive stories on immigration are relatively rare. Even in the liberal bastion of the New York Times, negative stories on immigration outnumber positive articles by three to one,” noting that “immigration coverage may have real, widespread effects because it is so lopsided, and immigration may be shifting white America to the right because that one-sided coverage is so negative.” Abrajano and Hajnal are not picking on the Times, but using it as a representative example; their point is that although one outlet “may not be powerful enough to influence the partisan balance of power on its own … the media as a whole appears to be capable of doing just that.”
Although there were many dedicated immigration reporters at the Times and other outlets who did fantastic work uncovering Trump-era abuses, many others accepted the president’s framing. In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections for example, Trump successfully baited the political press into saturation-level coverage of a supposed crisis posed by a migrant caravan, which abated as soon as the midterms were over. Whatever the intentions of individual reporters or outlets, in the aggregate, Americans are and have been regularly faced with coverage that reinforces false Trumpian rhetoric of an imminent “invasion.”
Getting this issue right is important not only for today’s migrants but for the next decades of immigration policy. Many of the contributors to a new forthcoming book Immigration Matters: Movements, Strategies, and Visions (New Press, April 2021) argue that our debate has been trapped in old paradigms for decades. Policymakers have failed to update laws and still use frames that don’t describe current realities. As Cecilia Muñoz points out in her brilliant chapter, people coming to our southern border today, for example, are not mostly single men from Mexico seeking work and trying to evade the border patrol but families and children fleeing violence and the effects of climate change who are turning themselves in and seeking asylum. In the short and medium-term, she argues that we need new facilities, new laws, a new workforce, and a whole new framework for adjudicating claims for asylum fairly, and greater hemispheric cooperation to meet the challenge. For the long term, many of the contributors make the case for a vastly more generous immigration system that welcomes many more people from the global south, some of whom will be forced to migrate in growing numbers by the effects of climate change caused by the countries of the global north.
The good news is that despite all the demagoguery of the last few weeks, public support for immigration reform and a path to citizenship remains very high. Consider the new poll by Data for Progress:
Notably, voters across the ideological spectrum support an eight-year pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who pass a background check by a +44 point margin — Democrats by a +64 point margin, Independents by a +43 point margin, and Republicans by a +19 point margin.
Reading Recommendations
Now that we’ve gotten that off our chests, . . . today’s issue continues on the theme of last week with insightful pieces about organizing, covering topics such as:
how the law can be used to foster organization and power for working-class people
bargaining for the common good
the “inner life” of organizing and organizations
the potential of domestic movements to change US foreign policy
the central role of unions in preserving democracy
how improved use of data can spur better organizing
In their Yale Law Journal article “Constructing Countervailing Power: Law and Organizing in an Age of Political Inequality,” Kate Andrias and Benjamin I. Sachs draw on their expertise in labor law to sketch an intriguing model for how policy can deliberately foster mass organization among poor and working-class people. In an LPE Project blog post, they summarize their case:
[W]e argue that the traditional approaches to combatting political inequality—campaign finance reform, voting rights, participatory governance—do not go far enough, and we ask what else might be done to redress the fundamental power imbalances that define our politics. We argue that the key lies in building countervailing power among poor and working-class people, and that law can and should be used to facilitate organizing by the poor and working class: not only as workers, but also as tenants, debtors, welfare beneficiaries and others.
The beneficial effects of countervailing, mass-membership organizations are well known to theorists and researchers of democracy. Put simply, such groups increase political equality by building and consolidating political power for the nonwealthy, thus serving as counterweights to the political influence of the rich. Over the past few decades, however, there has been a decline in broad-based, mass-membership organizations of low- and middle-income Americans, particularly unions but other poor people’s organizations as well. This decline in countervailing organizations has exacerbated the political distortions caused by massive political spending by the wealthy. . .
In brief, we argue that a legal regime designed to enable organizing among poor and working-class people should have several components:
First, the law should grant collective rights in an explicit and direct way so as to create a “frame” that encourages organizing.
Second, the law should provide for a reliable, administrable, and sustainable source of financial, informational, human, and other relevant resources.
Third, the law should guarantee free spaces—both physical and digital—in which movement organization can occur, free from surveillance or control.
Fourth, the law should remove barriers to participation, both by protecting all those involved from retaliation and by removing material obstacles that make it difficult for poor and working people to organize.
Fifth, the law should provide the organizations with ways to make material change in their members’ lives and should create mechanisms for the exercise of real political and economic power, for example by providing the right to “bargain” with the relevant set of private actors and by facilitating organizational participation in governmental processes.
Finally, the law should enable contestation and disruption, offering protections for the right to protest and strike across domains.
A thoughtful response in Yale Law Journal by Catherine Fink, “The Once and Future Countervailing Power of Labor,” appreciates the contributions of the framework Andrias and Sachs offer and raises useful questions:
Government protection of labor organizing came with government regulation of labor organizations. The labor organizations to which the NLRA gave a special role in the self-regulation of industry were no longer just private-membership organizations but were now imbued with the public interest.18 Law therefore created a tangle of incentives towards less radical, less political, more self-interested behavior.19 The Norris-LaGuardia Act20 and the NLRA reduced outright repression of labor as a social movement, but they channeled union activism towards a state-preferred goal—collective bargaining—and away from more radical movement objectives.21 The NLRA’s promotion of union organizing on a certain model changed the structure under which unions organized.22 . . .
A legal regime like the NLRA that grants power to organizations risks entrenching inequality if the organizations that gain power under the law are not representative, as many unions during the New Deal were not.
A challenge in implementing the Andrias-Sachs proposal is to ensure that the organizations that law supports remain responsive to the diversity of working-class interests. In today’s polarized and highly segmented political culture, no one should underestimate the difficulty of forming broadly inclusive unions.
Stephanie Luce’s article “Building Class Power by Fighting for the Common Good” in Organizing Upgrade makes a compelling case for a key strategy to revitalize the labor movement and connect worker and community struggles:
As activists orient to the post-election landscape, we’re having lots of conversations about building power for the long term. We’re taking stock of the types of power we need and how they can reinforce each other – narrative, organizing, mobilizing, and electoral power, to name a few. And despite the decline in union membership and strength, workers’ collective bargaining power also offers a means of making gains for broader communities. “Bargaining for the Common Good” (BCG) makes this real.
Unions that adopt a BCG framework incorporate community demands alongside their workplace demands in contract bargaining. For example, the Chicago Teachers Union worked with students, parents, and community allies to bargain for higher wages as well as smaller class sizes and a nurse in every school, and to oppose school closures.
A superb chapter in the forthcoming anthology Labor and Democracy by Sarita Gupta, Lauren Jacobs, Stephen Lerner, and Joe McCartin makes the case that worker power and democracy are inextricably linked.
The thrust of BCG [Bargaining for the Common Good] efforts was to break down the wall that separated the workplace from public space and workers from community members and taxpayers. Central to this effort was a shared analysis of the ways in which racialized capitalism was systematically undermining Black and Brown communities and the public services upon which they depended. Forging new alliances and forcing open the black box of collective bargaining, these efforts helped bring collective action to bear on festering public policy failures, giving community members a democratic voice on key issues that the political status quo denied them . . .
Caring Across Generations, the Committee for Better Banks, and Athena share the central premises of Bargaining for the Common Good: old methods of organizing and bargaining are not up to the challenges presented by 21st century capitalism; and the fight to organize workers in this century cannot be separated from the effort to reverse the steady erosion of democracy in recent decades. As powerful forces are threatening to bring the U.S. full circle from the “industrial autocracy” that workers battled a century ago to the “private dictatorships” they work under today, these initiatives help point the way forward. With the lever of worker organization, and the fulcrum of community-based demands for a democratic voice over the issues that impact working people, they intend to move our world forward toward a politics of hope, just as the struggles of the last century did—and we can feel it budging.
Jennifer Disla, currently Organizing Director for Detroit Action, has an insightful piece in Organizing Upgrade entitled “What Could Our Movement Build With Trust” that speaks to the inner and relational dimensions of building power.
It’s March. We have accomplished an inauguration and a fresh new start with a new beginning. With a new set of characters in our political landscape, I am sitting with many thoughts on our movement’s future. I have spent over ten years in movement spaces struggling with building authentic reciprocal relationships and have seen how damaging it can be when trust is broken. To build real and powerful movements, we also need to build authentic relationships with other people, and that requires trust.
Jessica Barba Brown has a provocative piece in The Forge, “Healing is Necessary in the Post-Trump World,” that lays out an agenda for dealing with the ongoing ramifications of trauma for movement activists:
For activists, organizers, policy nerds, and others who work in and around the progressive movement, the past four years have been some of the most taxing we’ve worked through. We have made sacrifices in our physical health and emotional wellbeing, and our personal relationships have suffered. We watched with horror as the rise of white supremacy, fascism, extremist hate, and disinformation rocked every sector and every issue that we care about — and just when we thought another shoe couldn’t possibly drop, it did. We lost loved ones and community members to a virus that ravaged our country precisely because of the former President’s incompetence, indifference, egotism, and cruelty.
The Trump years (and especially 2020) have had a deep impact on everyone’s mental health. What has it done to those of us who had the responsibility for stopping him?
Maria Stephan has an important piece in Just Security, “How Domestic Civic Movements Could Reshape US Foreign Policy,” that makes a compelling case for a greater role for US social movements in foreign policy.
Broad-based civic movements provide the energy, dynamism, and power-shifting ability necessary to address the world’s interconnected social, political, and economic crises, including climate change, staggering inequality, structural racism, and resurgent authoritarianism linked to white nationalism. Given the inextricable linkages between domestic and foreign policy, the ability of movements to bridge these domains is critical to addressing these challenges.
These kinds of powerful movements operating in the United States have human rights and human dignity at their core and bring together domestic and foreign policy. They are critical to developing and implementing effective solutions at home and abroad. And practical steps can enhance collaboration between domestic movements and the U.S. foreign policy community, building on previous efforts to bridge domestic and foreign policy.
Movement participation could democratize U.S. foreign policy while strengthening domestic constituencies for foreign assistance programs and priorities – because they would be seen as improving communities and priorities at home. These partnerships could build momentum for focusing U.S. foreign and national security priorities and budgets on human security.
Mike Podhorzer provides an excellent and comprehensive argument for the centrality of unions to any effort to strengthen democracy in the U.S.
Meanwhile, progressive opinion leaders and policy wonks wring their hands and heroically search for fresh solutions to the most pressing crises of the day as if there isn’t a substantial body of evidence that increased union membership ameliorates many of them, including income inequality, democratic participation, racism and authoritarianism among other things (below).
Katrina vanden Heuvel argues that strengthening the power of workers must be a top priority in her Washington Post op-ed “Unions Have Endured Body Blows for Too Long. But the Tide is Turning”:
For more than 40 years, America’s unions have endured body blow after body blow, inflicted by Republicans and abetted by the neglect of pro-corporate Democrats. But now, the tide is turning. The House is set to pass, for a second time, the Protecting the Right to Organize (Pro) Act, which would dramatically strengthen unions. President Biden, the most pro-union chief executive in recent history, issued an extraordinary message in support of workers in Bessemer, Ala., attempting to unionize a large Amazon warehouse. Polls show that young people strongly support strengthening unions. And a diverse new generation of labor leaders is forming coalitions to fight back against anti-union campaigns.This is a moment of immense promise: By elevating pro-labor legislation and policies, we have the opportunity to revive union power and launch a new labor movement for the 21st century.
For the geekier among you (a disproportionate number of Platypus readers!), Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Suresh Naidu, Adam Reich, and Patrick Youngblood have a very useful piece in New Labor Forum, “Quantitative Data Tools for Service Sector Organizing.”
Scholars concerned about the future of the labor movement often wonder how our research might benefit the workers and organizations on behalf of which we advocate. Strong labor organizations, we believe, are necessary for the passage of labor-friendly policies in the political realm and necessary to channeling any moments of worker militancy into durable political power for workers. Yet, our social science scholarship typically takes one of two forms: research aimed at policymakers in support of policies that might strengthen the hand of labor, but which are unlikely to get passed in the current political environment; or broader paeans about the importance of labor unions and labor militancy, reaching those already mostly likely to agree. Here, we outline a different way for scholarship to be of use: using modern quantitative social science to strengthen existing labor organizations.
Despite being the source of organized labor’s power, bursts of worker collective action are rare and difficult to sustain. What can be done to make such action easier in the current U.S. political climate, in which organized labor appears to have limited durable influence?
Modern quantitative social science provides some new tools to address this challenge. These tools have been used to allocate scarce resources, for example, matching medical residents with hospitals, allocating food donations across food banks, assessing tactics in political campaigns, and evaluating anti-poverty initiatives in developing countries.[1]
The same tools might also help with solving the collective action problems faced by workers and the labor movement.
Savvy Corner
Stephanie Luce and Deepak will be offering a class designed for mid- and senior-level organizers and campaigners this fall on “Power and Strategy” at CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies. From the course description:
How do groups in society achieve the changes they seek? This course will explore how elites, labor unions, community organizations, political parties, and social movements organize, develop strategies and deploy resources to advance their interests and win major changes in society. To provide a shared framework, we’ll begin with an overview of classical and contemporary theories of power and cause and effect. We’ll look at elite strategies to wield power developed in the military, Silicon Valley, business, and politics. We’ll also consider five “strategies from below,” including building mass organization, disruptive movements, efforts to capture governing power, and “inside-outside” strategies.
In the eternal battle between David and Goliath, how and why does David sometimes win? We’ll examine a variety of case studies from the right and left, including the orchestrated rise of neoliberalism, and cutting-edge campaigns from contemporary racial justice and labor and other movements. The class will focus heavily on introducing applied tools for strategy development from a variety of traditions. We’ll review tools commonly used in campaigns like power analysis and strategy charts, but also introduce frameworks like “lean startup,” reverse engineering, OODA loops, emergent strategy, scenario planning, policy feedback loops, time shifting, and methods to harness and work with strong emotions. The class is appropriate for intermediate to advanced social change organizers and campaigners, as well as for graduate students. The class will feature guest faculty and practitioners with extensive experience building winning campaigns.
You can apply here. The full course description, including cost, is below. Please help us spread the word to your networks!
Delights and Provocations
The astonishing Netflix documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution is a master class in community-building, risk-taking, and mobilizing anger to create profound social change. It tells the story of several fierce and brilliant leaders of the disability rights movement who first met each other and were radicalized in the early 1970s at Camp Jened, a summer camp for disabled teens in the Catskills. There, they played sports, awakened sexually, raised each others’ consciousness, and felt seen for the first time as full human beings. After that pivotal summer, the film follows them as they discover the cruel indifference of American society and launch a social movement to change it, staging sit-ins, going on hunger strikes, and speaking undeniable truths to those in power. Their courage and persistence won a transformation in American law, climaxing the Americans With Disabilities Act. This film changed us, and we cannot recommend it highly enough.
Some friends introduced us to this Rilke poem, “Ah, not to be cut off,” which beautifully evokes the yearning for self-transcendence.
Ah, not to be cut off
Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner—what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
For Harry, it was especially exciting to encounter this poem after just having read Rick Hansen’s Neurodharma: New Science, Ancient Wisdom, and Seven Practices of the Highest Happiness. Chapter eight is a fascinating discussion of the latest research about what is going on in our brains when we experience a mystical suspension of our usual egocentric mode of being.
For thirteen minutes of joy and virtuosity, check out Julian Lage, Kenny Wollesen, and Scott Colley perform "I'll Be Seeing You."
Power and Strategy Course Description
URB 651/LABR 669
School of Labor and Urban Studies
Power and Strategy
Fall, 2021
Course Description
How do groups in society achieve the changes they seek? This course will explore how elites, labor unions, community organizations, political parties, and social movements organize, develop strategies and deploy resources to advance their interests and win major changes in society. To provide a shared framework, we’ll begin with an overview of classical and contemporary theories of power and cause and effect. We’ll look at elite strategies to wield power developed in the military, Silicon Valley, business, and politics. We’ll also consider five “strategies from below,” including building mass organization, disruptive movements, efforts to capture governing power, “inside-outside” strategies.
In the eternal battle between David and Goliath, how and why does David sometimes win? We’ll examine a variety of case studies from the right and left, including the orchestrated rise of neoliberalism, and cutting-edge campaigns from contemporary racial justice and labor and other movements. The class will focus heavily on introducing applied tools for strategy development from a variety of traditions. We’ll review tools commonly used in campaigns like power analysis and strategy charts, but also introduce frameworks like “lean startup,” reverse engineering, OODA loops, emergent strategy, scenario planning, policy feedback loops, time shifting, and methods to harness and work with strong emotions. The class is appropriate for intermediate to advanced social change organizers and campaigners, as well as for graduate students. The class will feature guest faculty and practitioners with extensive experience building winning campaigns.
Departmental permission required.
Faculty
Stephanie Luce is Professor of Labor Studies at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies and Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a member of the PSC-CUNY/AFT faculty staff union and has spent many years working with unions and labor-community coalitions on living wage campaigns, policy fights, and organizing projects.
Deepak Bhargava is Distinguished Lecturer at CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies and has been involved in social change movements and organizations for over 30 years, including 16 years leading Community Change.
Who Should Apply
This class is suitable for both current graduate students and for non-matriculated students who are experienced labor, community, environmental, or social movement leaders, organizers, or campaigners. Departmental permission required.
Meeting Schedule and Requirements
The class will meet on Thursday evenings from 6:15 – 8:45 pm Eastern time. The class will be held entirely online, so non-NYC students can participate fully in the course. The first class will be held on 8/26/2021 and the term runs for 15 weeks ending on 12/16/2021.
There will be extensive reading, writing and class engagement as part of this course. Non-matriculating students who are social change practitioners will be assessed based on their application of tools presented in the course.
Cost:
Exact tuition and fee levels have not been set for the fall term, but for the spring 2020 term fees and tuition costs for non-matriculating New York State residents were $1552.50 and for non-matriculating out-of-state students $2707.50. For graduate students, the total cost was the same, plus an additional $10.00 in application fees.
(Note that CUNY has not announced any tuition changes for fall but a small increase is possible and will be noted here: https://slu.cuny.edu/tuition-and-financial-aid/tuition-and-fees/tuition-rates/)
Deadline for Applications: May 30th. But the class will be filled as successful applications are approved, so early submission is strongly encouraged.
Application Form is here.
Non-matriculated students accepted for the course will then be asked to fill out a CUNY application form.