FROM PLANTON TO OCCUPY
Unions and Immigrants and the Occupy Movement
By David Bacon
http://www.truth-out.org/unions-and-immigrants-join-occupy-movements/1323183717
OAKLAND, CA (12/5/11) -- When Occupy
Seattle called its tent camp "Planton Seattle,"
camp organizers were laying a local claim to a
set of tactics used for decades by social
movements in Mexico, Central America and the
Philippines. And when immigrant janitors marched
down to the detention center in San Diego and
called their effort Occupy ICE (the initials of
the Immigration and Custom Enforcement agency
responsible for mass deportations), people from
countries with that planton tradition were
connecting it to the Occupy movement here.
The banners at Occupy Seattle
This shared culture and history offer new
possibilities to the Occupy movement for survival
and growth at a time when the Federal law
enforcement establishment, in cooperation with
local police departments and municipal
governments, has uprooted many tent encampments.
Different Occupy groups from Wall Street to San
Francisco have begun to explore their
relationship with immigrant social movements in
the U.S., and to look more closely at the actions
of the 1% beyond our borders that produces much
of the pressure for migration.
Reacting to the recent evictions, the
Coalition for the Political Rights of Mexicans
Abroad recently sent a support letter to Occupy
Wall Street and the other camps under attack.
"We greet your movement," it declared, "because
your struggle against the suppression of human
rights and against social and economic injustice
has been a fundamental part of our struggle, that
of the Mexican people who cross borders, and the
millions of Mexican migrants who live in the
United States."
Many of those migrants living in the U.S.
know the tradition of the planton and how it's
used at home. And they know that the 1%, whose
power is being challenged on Wall Street, also
designed the policies that are the very reason
why immigrants are living in the U.S. to begin
with. Mike Garcia, president of United Service
Workers West/SEIU, the union that organized
Occupy ICE, described immigrant janitors as
"displaced workers of the new global economic
order, an order led by the West and the United
States in particular."
Criminalizing the act of camping out in a
public space is intended, at least in part, to
keep a planton tradition from acquiring the same
legitimacy in the U.S. that it has in other
countries. That right to a planton was not
freely conceded by the rulers of Mexico, El
Salvador or the Philippines, however -- no more
than it has been conceded here. The 99% of those
countries had to fight for it.
Two of the biggest battles of modern
Mexican political history were fought in the
Tlatelolco Plaza, where hundreds of students were
gunned down in 1968, and three years later in
Mexico City streets where more were beaten and
shot by the paramilitary Halcones. In both El
Salvador and the Philippines, strikers have a
tradition of living at the gates of the factory
or enterprise where they work. But even today
that right must be defended against the police,
and (at least until the recent election of the
Funes and Aquino governments) even the military.
Plantons or encampments don't stand
alone. They are tactics used by unions,
students, farmers, indigenous organizations and
other social movements. Each planton is a
visible piece of a movement or organization -- a
much larger base. When the plantons are useful
to those movements, they defend them. That
connection between planton and movement, between
the encampment and its social base, is as
important as holding the physical space on which
the tents are erected.
For the last two years that relationship
has been very clear in the Zocalo, Mexico City's
huge central plaza. During that time, fired
members of Mexico's independent leftwing
electrical workers union, the SME, have lived in
a succession of plantons. They've often been
elaborate, with kitchens, meeting rooms and
communications centers, in addition to the tents
where people slept and ate.
At various time, the SME encampment was
one of several in the huge square. A year ago
the workers were joined by indigenous Triqui and
Mixtec women from Oaxaca, who protested the
violence used by their state's previous governor
against teachers' strikes and rural
organizations. The social movement in Oaxaca,
which the women represented in Mexico City, grew
strong enough to finally knock the old ruling
party, the PRI, from the governorship it had held
for almost 80 years.
In the Zocalo plantons, people from
different organizations mix it up. Last
September's Day of the Indignant brought together
people from very diverse movements. Some see
electoral politics as a vehicle for change, but
many indigenous activists and SME members don't.
Even among those who do, there are deep
disagreements over how to participate in the
electoral process.
But the people in the Zocalo have two
things in common. Different plantons may not see
every political question eye-to-eye, but each
represents a social movement in the world outside
the plaza. And the planton itself has value
primarily because it forces public attention to
focus on the crisis that has led each group to
set up its encampment.
The SME workers used their plantons to
dramatize repression by the Federal government.
When Mexican President Felipe Calderon dissolved
the state-run power company for central Mexico
and fired its 44,000 employees, he sought to
destroy their union and move towards the
privatization of the electrical system -- to
benefit Mexican and foreign 1%ers. A year ago,
several SME members conducted a hunger strike at
the planton that generated front page headlines
for weeks, and lasted so long that doctors warned
participants they were risking death. At the
height of the protest, the union battled police
in front of the power stations, as it tried to
exercise its legal right to strike and picket.
The planton and the movement outside it
were intimately connected. The hunger strikers
were few, but spoke for a union of tens of
thousands of workers. In the end, the SME
negotiated the removal of its last planton in
return for government acknowledgement of its
right to exist. It organized other unions to
resist the government's assault on labor rights,
and mobilized electricity consumers to protest
rising bills and cuts in service. The planton
helped to focus attention on these demands, and
to pull the union's allies into action.
Clearly someone in Seattle knows this
tradition of plantons in the Zocalo, perhaps even
as a participant. When the painter made the
Seattle banner, she or he also included, right
next to the word "planton", the anarchists' "A"
with the circle around it. This symbol was a
reminder of another aspect of cross-border
fertilization. Many anarchists or
anarcho-syndicalists -- members of the Industrial
Workers of the World - fought in the Mexican
Revolution. Because of that revolutionary
upheaval, even today, almost a century later,
ordinary Mexicans expect certain rights,
including the right to set up a tent in the
Zocalo. U.S. workers crossed the border to fight
alongside Mexicans in that insurrection long ago,
for a government that would acknowledge that
right. The planton, therefore, is a common
heritage, with a history that makes it as
legitimate on Wall Street as it is in Mexico City.
Not long after the OWS camp was set up in
Zuccotti Park, the planton/occupy movement
crossed the U.S./Mexico border. In Tijuana, home
to a million people, mostly displaced migrants
from Mexico's south, activists came together and
set up an occupation on the grassy median of the
Paseo de los Heroes. Their tents were pitched in
the middle of the Zona del Rio, where the city's
1% meet in fancy hotels and work in government
offices. Then, on October 18 police reacted even
earlier than they did in most U.S. cities,
arresting two dozen activists at the urging of
local businessmen. Occupy Tijuana condemned the
detentions, declaring, "We are not assassins,
delinquents, tramps or crooks."
In the U.S. we have our own history of
defending public space for protest, and it isn't
necessary to reach back a hundred years to find
it. In just the last few decades, immigrant
workers have popularized the use of the planton
here, helping unions recover the militant tactics
of their own past. In 1992 immigrants trying to
join the United Electrical Workers mounted the
first strike among production workers in Silicon
Valley, and set up a planton and conducted a
hunger strike to pressure their employer. A year
later other Latino immigrants in San Francisco
erected their tents on the sidewalk in front of
Sprint's headquarters, after their workplace was
closed days before they were scheduled to vote in
a union election.
A decade ago anti-globalization activists
and unions shut down the meeting of the World
Trade Organization in Seattle. Young protestors
chained their arms together inside metal pipes,
and lay down in the intersections of downtown
Seattle. Tens of thousands took over the
streets. Other anti-globalization protests
followed, in which activists battled for their
right to use public space to challenge the
international policies of the 1%.
Working=class support for the battle in
Seattle had its roots in the impact of the North
American Free Trade Agreement. Workers could see
the cost of free trade in the loss of their own
jobs, as production moved south. Over the last
two decades, many have also discovered that those
same agreements and policies didn't make Mexicans
better off, but led to their impoverishment as
well.
NAFTA and free market policies forced on
developing countries produced opportunities for
banks and corporations to reap profits. They
drove down wages, forced farmers off their land,
and destroyed the unions and livelihood of
millions of people. This system was designed on
Wall Street, by the same bankers Occupiers hold
responsible for the current crisis of
foreclosures and unemployment in the U.S. The
current economic crisis doesn't stop at the
border. In fact in Mexico, Central America, the
Philippines and elsewhere, it's been a fact of
life for a long time. This is the source of
forced migration -- what Garcia condemned at
Occupy ICE.
The 99% live in all those countries where
free trade agreements and structural adjustment
policies are imposed. They also live in the
communities of people who have come here as a
result. Who, then, are more natural allies for
Occupy protestors than people who've been on the
receiving end of these policies for years?
In New York this connection wasn't lost
on Occupy Wall Street. In October a group,
Occupy Wall Street - Español was formed at the
first Asemblea en Español. They, in turn,
translated the first issue of the Occupied Wall
Street Journal. Participants formed a subgroup,
Occupy Wall Street Latinoamericano to spread the
movement to Spanish-speaking communities,
recognizing that the city is home to so many
Mexicans from the state of Puebla that its
nickname is PueblaYork, as well as much older
established communities of Puerto Ricans,
Colombians, Ecuadorians and other
Spanish-speaking people. The group will soon
publish the first issue of its own newspaper,
with articles talking about immigration,
globalization, and the specific attacks by the 1%
on Latinos.
Claudia Villegas, a women's rights
activist working with the group Occupy Wall
Street Latinoamericano, helped organize a
demonstration of immigrant women four days after
police raided the Zuccotti Park encampment. "We
decided to change our original plan for a march
because we were afraid they would stop it," she
says. "Nevertheless, 23 organizations
participated including women's rights groups and
above all, those working with immigrant women."
In San Francisco a joint march of
immigrant activists and Occupy participants
helped to defend that city's encampment. In the
general assembly meeting preceding it
participants talked about the city's offer to
move the Occupiers into an abandoned building in
the Latino Mission District several miles away.
Few wanted to give up the camp on Justin Herman
Plaza, and most felt the city was just trying to
move them out of sight. But many people also
felt that having an Occupy camp in the barrio was
a good idea.
"We're still really working in parallel,"
Villegas says. She draws attention to the
potential power of the immigrant rights movement,
and what it could mean to OWS. "We have to
include the movement that began in 2006, when
there were hundreds of thousands of people in the
streets across this country. People were
reacting to the injustice of the system then
too." They're separate movements, though, she
warns, and "our agenda has to come from
immigrants themselves. We need to integrate, and
at the same time the Occupy movement has to learn
to accept us. But we're all on the same path."
Bringing the immigrant and Occupy
movements together means more than setting up an
encampment. The San Diego demonstration didn't
set up an overnight camp, but it brought
thousands of workers and supporters down to the
ICE detention center to protest the firings of
immigrant janitors.
The Occupy ICE protest was intended to
draw public attention to the Federal government's
immigration enforcement strategy that requires
employers to fire undocumented workers. In
Southern California, the multinational
corporations who clean office buildings are
terminating 2000 union members. Earlier waves of
firings have targeted unionized building cleaners
in Minneapolis, Seattle and San Francisco, sewing
machine operators in Los Angeles, food service
workers on university campuses, and thousands of
others.
Garcia says ICE and the employers are in
collusion. After firing union janitors with high
seniority and benefits, using immigration status
as a pretext, the companies can then hire new
workers at lower wages with fewer benefits. "To
hide their greed the commercial real estate
industry has used the tools of government to
confuse and divide the 99%," he charges. "They
first said we were unskilled workers who should
be happy to be working. They then weakened worker
protections to make organizing virtually
impossible. Over the last decade the industry has
used immigration as a wedge to intimidate and, if
need be, replace our workers. ICE is doing what
the 1% corporate real estate industry wants:
using immigration laws to recycle well paid
janitors in the hopes of taking back gains in pay
and benefits our union has won." [Ironically the
week USWW organized Occupy ICE its parent union,
SEIU, endorsed the reelection of President Obama,
who is responsible for the ICE policy of firing
workers.]
For Occupy, defending workers under
attack is a way to survive, grow roots and
develop a strong base. That's not always the
direction activists take, however. Near Oakland,
over two hundred immigrant workers at the largest
foundry on the west coast, Pacific Steel Casting
in Berkeley, are being fired in another "silent
raid" like that hitting the janitors. Through
the summer and fall, foundry workers went to city
councils, unions, churches and community
organizations, seeking help to pressure ICE not
to force them from their jobs. Their campaign
held "the migra" off for months, but the firings
began nevertheless in November. Now these
immigrant families are trying to survive. Occupy
Oakland has yet to respond, however.
Instead, some of its activists are trying
to shut down work in Oakland's port a second
time, as well as others along the west coast. An
earlier march to close the port after the first
eviction of Occupy Oakland drew thousands of
people. The proposal for a second coast-wide
shutdown, however, is opposed by the longshore
union. The ILWU's opposition does not come from
conservatism. The union, whose members make a
living from international shipping and trade, has
been one of the most vocal critics of U.S. free
trade agreements. ILWU members have taken action
many times to defend the SME and unions in
Mexico, as well as other countries. Its locals,
however, had no role in the decision to try to
close the ports, nor did other port workers.
Solidarity is a two-way street, based on
mutual respect. In most cities, including
Oakland and San Francisco, labor has welcomed
Occupy and sought to defend the encampments. In
New York, Occupy activists have been given
resources in many union halls, and unions have
mobilized against police raids at Zuccotti Park.
An alliance of unions, immigrants and Occupiers
has great potential strength, not just in
numbers, but also in the exchange of ideas and
tactics. Unions in particular might benefit from
wider use of the planton or Occupy encampment.
Occupy ICE challenges the Occupy movement to take
up the firings of immigrant workers, but it's
also a challenge to unions themselves, many of
whom have watched in silence as longtime members
were forced from their jobs.
The vision of Occupy -- the 99% vs. the
1% -- has enormous support among immigrants and
unions. In place of the tired rhetoric of
politicians, shedding crocodile tears for the
"middle class" while demonizing the poor, Occupy
gives workers a vision of their commonality in
the 99%. This powerful message blows away
illusions that higher-paid workers have more in
common with stockbrokers than with immigrants
laboring at minimum wage, or unemployed young
people on the streets of African American ghettos
or Latino barrios.
The Coalition for the Political Rights of
Mexicans Abroad shares the same vision of
class-based commonality. "We are outraged," it
says, "that U.S. citizens, when they demand
justice and expose the inequalities that exist in
their society, are treated like criminals. With
the same outrage, we condemn the criminalization
of migrant Mexicans by the U.S. government, the
raids by immigration authorities [and] the
militarization of the border...No human being
should be treated as a criminal because they
struggle to find better conditions in which to
live."
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org
See also Illegal People -- How Globalization
Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants
(Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002
See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575
See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the
U.S./Mexico Border (University of California,
2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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