Reflections On Labor Day 2012 Rally In Boston

Click on the headline to link to a Boston IndyMedia entry for the Boston Labor Day 2012 Rally and March.

Markin comment:

Leftists in the United States have worked for several generations now to link American working class solidarity with the international working class through an acceptance of May 1st as our as common international labor holiday. Over the past several years we have had, in Boston (and elsewhere), some limited successes in that direction on May Day through the struggles around immigrations policies that effect a fair portion of the local labor movement particularly in the Latino community. However we are still rolling the rock up the hill and this year Labor Day continued to surpass May Day as the day when the local organized labor movement made itself heard.

The following are some random notes and observations from the Labor Day program held in downtown Boston on the morning of September 3, 2012 at the Parkman Bandstand (followed by a march to Copley Square but the bulk of the program was centered at the bandstand) sponsored by a coalition of labor organizations, notably the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), minority community organizations, and pro-labor outreach organizations.
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In a sense Labor Day 2012 (and previous Labor Days over the past several years) saw two different approaches to getting labor’s message heard (although, unfortunately, in the end not two different strategies). One approach, the tradition approach over the past few decades, especially in election years, was the annual Greater Boston Labor Council sponsored breakfast where every labor bureaucrat aspiring bureaucrat, and their hangers-on showed up to profusely pledge fealty to the labor movement and its friends. (I will leave the who the friends are question to your imaginations but the keynote speaker this year one Elizabeth Warren, Democratic Party candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts.) This element long ago gave up the usual street parade showing labor’s muscle that was a staple of long past Labor Days.

And then we had the rally (and march) at Boston Common which reflected a different part of the labor movement for the most part than the “labor aristocracy” that showed up at the breakfast. For one thing the several hundred (maybe a thousand), mostly Latinos, who showed up on the Common would have been hard-pressed to buy the ticket to the breakfast and if they had been able to afford such a thing would have felt left out there. The vast majority at the rally although in presentable working class dress and who had the look, the worried look, of solid working people were “los pobres,” the unskilled or semi-skilled labor, many showing the marks of recent immigration, who do the hard cleaning and fixing of office buildings, of hospitals and of college campuses in the Greater Boston area.

Where the two events come together though is the politics, or rather lack of politics, independent politics. We know, or can imagine, who and what showed up at the breakfast, every fast-talking Democrat from Elizabeth Warren on down professing “concern” for the middle-class (read: American bourgeois political speak for workers) and calling for votes, money and volunteers. And getting them. But the rally also had it fair share of bourgeois politicians, highlighted by Joe Kennedy who is running for Barney Frank’s old congressional seat. The different, since SEIU (and maybe the others like UNITE and Local 1199) had already announced its support to Barack Obama last year, was that “gringo” politicians like Kennedy felt compelled to speak a “pocas palabras en espanol” or have their words translated reflecting the audience in front of them. We have our work cut out for us.
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One would have thought that given the rise of the Occupy movement last year and it emphasis on solidarity with the poor, people of color, and immigrants that there would have been some reference to that movement from the platform or in the crowd. However not one speaker that I heard uttered anything about that moribund movement. And while there were a few references to the now ubiquitous 99% (not the same thing as Occupy) and some other related slogans on signs (and SEIU shirts) it was clear that this was not an Occupy or leftist-inspired event.

The official slogans (si, se puede, “yes, we can” mainly) and plaintive plea for some amorphous good jobs and a fair shake were purposefully sub-political reflecting a specific political tactic not to embarrass the Democrats with demands (see Occupy was not the only operation that knew the “dangers” of demands). That hard fact should give us pause when leftists reflect on the disconnect between what we are trying to accomplish and this part of our natural audience. We, moreover, clearly need to win over more Spanish-speakers, probably students in ones and twos from the campuses at first, to be able to write materials in that language in order to get our message across and to create a common bilingual political vocabulary just to be able to gain entry into this important area of work.