This interview is cross-posted from Truthout.org.

by Amy B. Dean

Immigrants’ rights are workers’ rights. These days, that idea is a principle held dear by the US labor movement. But that wasn’t always the case.

As recently as the mid-1990s, many unions took protectionist stances against allowing new immigrants to come to this country. It was only after these unions saw the abuses that became prevalent under an employer-driven system for verifying immigration status that the labor movement embraced a new position. The movement recognized that for working people to thrive, all employees had to have full rights in the workplace.

Today, labor is one of the key forces pushing for comprehensive immigration reform in Washington, DC. To learn more about the movement’s advocacy and more about how unions transformed themselves into outspoken champions of immigrant rights, I spoke with Maria Elena Durazo. A daughter of Mexican immigrant farm workers, Durazo rose to become the leader of the hotel and restaurant workers union in Los Angeles, the dynamic UNITE HERE Local 11. And, as chair of the national AFL-CIO’s Immigration Committee, Durazo is now a leading point person in the national immigration debate.

Knowing that many people are confused when hearing about union activism around immigration, I asked Durazo a straightforward question: Why is this issue a top priority for labor?

“It’s bad for American workers for there to be 11 million-plus people out there working with no rights,” Durazo said. “[These immigrants] are subject to exploitation. They are subject, as a result of that, to accept lower wages. They are subject to working in dangerous conditions. That is bad for those immigrant workers, and it is bad for American workers as a whole.”

She continued: “We cannot have a prosperous nation and recreate the middle class as long as there is an underclass of 11 million people who do not have rights. By fixing this and getting them all on the road to citizenship, we address a huge issue that is the cause of enormous exploitation – of wage theft and other massive violations of labor laws.”

“It’s kind of like why we support raising the minimum wage,” she added, by way of comparison. “Ninety-nine percent of unionized workers aren’t directly impacted by an increase in minimum wage. But when the standard is raised, when the bottom is lifted, that helps all workers.”

Continuing our conversation, Durazo and I spoke about the benefits she anticipates if immigration reform is successful.

“We are positive that immigration reform is going to strengthen the middle class. One of the studies shows that, just through citizenship, someone’s income grows by 15 percent. Employers know that they can’t threaten and push them down.

“We want to raise the working standards for everybody. That is both self-interest, and it is [consistent with] the values of the labor movement. That is what we hope to live up to, that is what we believe in, and that is what we have got to put into practice.”

Noting that there has been an almost 180-degree turn in the past 20 years, I asked Durazo to speak about the internal changes that the labor movement has experienced around its position on immigration.

“This year the national AFL-CIO convention is going to be in Los Angeles,” she said. “I was remembering that, the last time the convention was in Los Angeles – in 1999 – that was when there was a major break with the previous policies on immigrant workers. [Former AFL-CIO] President [John] Sweeney had recently come into office, and there was a [shift] from basically blaming immigrant workers for a lot of problems to saying, ‘We stand with immigrant workers, and we want immigration reform.’

“I think a number of things lined up” to make that happen, she said. “One is President Sweeney’s election and his own experience as the head of SEIU [which represents janitors and other service-sector workers]. Other unions had national leadership that had also become very passionate about immigration. SEIU, [UNITE] HERE, the Farmworkers Union, the United Food and Commercial Workers – and even the Laborers at the time. Those national leaders stood up and backed up this change in policy.

“It was delicate, to say the least, but it happened. I would say that from then to today, we have come a long way. It has been more constant, to the point where, this year, President Trumka is in a position to say, ‘We are going all out. This is one of two national priorities for the AFL-CIO to get done in 2013.’ That is a remarkable change from 1999.”

Knowing that Republicans are pushing for some pretty odious compromises, I asked what labor is willing to accept in an immigration reform proposal.

“It is premature to say what we would accept or would not accept,” Durazo said. “What we are pushing for, and what is absolutely essential to us, is that there has to be a path to citizenship. There are a lot of details still to be figured out about this. But we say, ‘Don’t play games about a “path to legalization,” which leaves people halfway there, with half the rights.’ That is a game we don’t want to play.

“We think both the Democrats and the Republicans, who have been shaken up by the surge in the number of Latino voters who went to the polls in November, have got to understand why those Latinos care. They care because if it’s not fixed the right way, then they are going to continue to be singled out – under the guise of immigration laws, which in fact turn out to be voter suppression laws [or] discriminatory laws, like SB1070 in Arizona.”

Concluding our talk, I asked Durazo to speak about her personal experience with this issue – and about how she sees labor’s investment growing.

“I have been working at this my whole life. My parents came to this country from Mexico. My oldest sisters were born in Mexico. We worked in the field. I personally know what it’s like to be singled out and to not earn enough money to have a roof over our heads, to not make enough money to have food on our table. It is wrong, period, in this country to live like that.

“When I see in the year 2013 – 40 years after I left working in the field – that there are car wash workers who routinely do not get wages, do not get paid for 8 or 10 hours of work a day, the only thing they get is tips . . . When I see routinely that hotel housekeepers have to clock out and then go back and clean a bunch more rooms . . . When I see that stuff going on to this day, it angers me.

“Yet it is extraordinary when those men and women turn around and take charge of their lives,” Durazo continued. “For me, this is not about what happens inside of Washington, DC. What I am excited about is all the organizing, all the connections that we are going to make outside of Washington, DC., outside of the Beltway, in our communities. Because not only will that organizing deliver the best immigration reform, but it is also going to get a whole lot of other things done for this country.”

“Lord knows,” she said, “we have got a lot of other things to fix besides immigration reform.”

E-Verify makes employers do the work of immigration officials, with potentially disastrous results.Immigration reform is next on the national legislative menu. The good news is that both Republicans and Democrats have vowed to fix our broken immigration system. The bad news is that they are poised to repeat a key mistake of the past: forcing employers to do the work of verifying whether or not someone is here legally.

The system known as “employer verification” is an outgrowth of the last major round of immigration reform, the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli Act. In the past few years, the E-Verify system has undergone some streamlining and revision. But it remains messy and problematic — for employers and for workers.

The labor movement and the business community often find themselves at loggerheads. But this is one area where business leaders and employees share a common purpose: getting out from under E-Verify’s unwieldy, error-prone and ultimately flawed set of tools.

For businesses, the system is onerous and distracting. Even if the many cases of “false positives” (people wrongly labeled as undocumented by the system and then forced to undergo additional paperwork and fees to clear their names) could be eradicated, 54 percent of unauthorized workers were still cleared to work by E-Verify, according to an independent review by Westat in 2010. The government acknowledges E-Verify’s imperfections, yet it still levies fines against employers who make mistakes.

“Immigration enforcement is a government responsibility,” said Steven Fischman, president of New England Development in Newton, Mass. “Forcing employers to utilize E-Verify creates confusion, fear, loss of productivity, and creates an inappropriate relationship between employers and employees by turning employers into policemen.”

Mr. Fischman speaks as a businessman. And he isn’t even from one of the states, such as Alabama, where E-Verify has been widely adopted by employers. According to a 2012 analysis from the University of Alabama, that state saw its GDP drop by at least $2.3 billion when between 40,000 and 80,000 workers fled the state en masse after elected officials strongly pushed E-Verify and other anti-immigration measures.

From a labor perspective, the system is equally bad. Immigration reforms that drive employees back into the shadows or create a two-tiered system of employment only foster unproductive workplace antagonisms. Moreover, they allow unscrupulous operations willing to embrace “off the books” practices to prosper at the expense of businesses trying to take the high road.

The result is the depression of wages for all workers, immigrant and U.S.-born, and the elimination of the type of healthy middle class needed to sustain a thriving American economy. For this reason, even once-protectionist unions have joined with business leaders in promoting comprehensive immigration reform. As AFL-CIO Political Director Michael Podhorzer said recently to the National Journal, “There’s a greater awareness that when immigrants have the same rights of other workers, that helps all workers.”

As lawmakers in Washington convene to discuss immigration, they should look beyond the E-Verify system to a next-generation solution, one that is driven by hard evidence and data about what works, rather than the desire to punish employers and workers. To help them, labor and business alike should convey a clear message: No one wants the confusion and cost incurred by a fragmented, flawed system that places the burden of verification on employers.

There’s little question that the vast majority of restaurant workers in the United States could use a union. On the whole, their jobs offer low pay and few benefits, and employees have little job security. Yet they are also a very difficult group to organize: turnover in the industry is high, the workforce is largely an immigrant one, and employers effectively use threats of deportation and other retaliation against those who speak up.

Over the past decade, the Restaurant Opportunities Centers, now a national organization known as ROC-United, has taken on these challenges. While not a union, ROC-United has brought together 10,000 restaurant workers into an advocacy organization devoted to improving wages and working conditions. In recent years, ROC has expanded beyond New York City and launched affiliates in New Orleans, Miami, Michigan, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. The organization has deployed a diverse arsenal of tactics—community and workplace mobilization, lawsuits against discrimination and wage theft, high-profile research and reports on the industry, and partnerships with “high road” restaurant owners—to advance the interests of low-wage workers who have been largely beyond the reach of the traditional labor movement.

Recently, I spoke with ROC-United’s co-founder and co-director, Saru Jayaraman, about how it has been able to use its status as an advocacy organization to develop fresh approaches to defending workers’ rights and building alliances in the community. Next month will see the release of Jayaraman’s first book, Beyond the Kitchen Door, which challenges foodies who demand organic, fair-trade, and free-range ingredients in their food to pay just as much attention to the people who do the majority of the work in the restaurants we patronize.

I started by asking Jayaraman about her background and about how ROC got started.

“My background is that I am a child of immigrants from India,” she said. “I grew up in California, then ended up going back East for law school and graduate school, and I got more and more engaged in immigrant worker issues. Ultimately, after 9/11, I received a phone call from the union that was in Windows On the World, the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center. They asked if I would start an organization that would initially support the workers who had lost their jobs, and the families of the victims.”

“We started in those early days just helping people get back on their feet. But something happened very shortly after the tragedy, which is that the owner of Windows opened up a new restaurant in Times Square, refused to hire any of his former employees from Windows. The workers felt a lot of moral outrage at that. We organized a protest in front of the new restaurant on opening night. The owner ended up hiring everybody who wanted to work there. That was in 2002.”

“It was on the cover of the Metro Section of The New York Times and got a bunch of other press. Instantly, we were overwhelmed, flooded with calls for help from workers, first all over New York City and then all over the country.”

Jayaraman discussed the conditions in the restaurant industry that soon came to the fore: “We did some research early on, in those early days,” she said, “and found we that the restaurant industry really is neck-and-neck with retail as the nation’s largest private sector employer. It has over 10 million workers. An estimated 1 in 10 American workers are employed in the restaurant industry. It’s been one of the fastest growing [sectors of the economy], even during the economic crisis. But it also has 7 of the 10 lowest paying jobs in America. Actually, the two absolute lowest paying jobs in America are restaurant jobs: fast food cooks and dishwashers. Largely due to the power of the National Restaurant Association, which has been named the tenth most powerful lobbying group in Congress, the minimum wage for tipped workers has been stuck at $2.13 at the federal level for the last 21 years.”

I asked Jayaraman about ROC-United’s outreach to different constituencies: food industry employees, customers, and restaurant owners.

“Our whole frame is around collective prosperity, that when workers do better, employers and consumers do better,” she said. “There’s a role for each of these three stakeholders–for workers, employers and consumers–to work together to improve the industry for everybody in it.”

“With the workers, we’ve now won over 13 workplace justice campaigns against large, high-profile restaurant companies, where we’ve actually changed workplace policies for thousands of workers,” Jayaraman explained. “With employers, we’ve organized close to 100 responsible employers, high-road employers that are doing the right thing: providing good wages and good working conditions. With consumers, we’ve launched a multi-year, multi-media consumer engagement campaign to build a groundswell of support for the local and federal legislative policy changes that we want to see, particularly raising the minimum wage for tipped workers.”

“I would say one of the most exciting, promising pieces of all of this is the fact that the food movement has been so explosive,” she continued. “It has reached so many laypeople who would not typically think of themselves as activists or care about labor issues. There’s phenomenal potential to reach a much wider audience of people, people who just care about what they eat and where they eat out.”

“We put out a ROC National Diner’s Guide, for example, with the minimum wage, paid sick days and promotions practices of the 150 most popular restaurants in America. And we created a smartphone app out of the guide. It allows consumers to know these things every time they eat out, to speak up every time they eat out, to send tweets every time they eat out, letting the employer know that they care about these issues.”

“In these ways, like with my book, we’re engaging foodies. We’re getting people to view the connections between small farms and local sourcing and organics and the minimum wage and paid sick days.”

To follow up, I was curious to hear about some more specific examples of how ROC United has mobilized workers.

“Our most recent victory was against Mario Batali, who is considered to be probably the most famous chef in America,” Jayaraman said. “He has a four-star restaurant in New York called Del Posto. We were approached by a group of bussers and runners from that restaurant, Latino and Bangladeshi employees.”

“We ended up organizing 40 or 50 workers in that restaurant company. After a year-and-a-half campaign, Batali now has agreed to get rid of an abusive chef, create a new promotions policy, and institute paid sick days for all his employees. This is a really big deal for workers in our industry. Batali is actually joining our High-Road Roundtable to promote a different way of doing business and to become a spokesperson on these issues.”

Jayaraman added: “In other restaurants, we’ve won grievance procedures, job security, promotions, raises, paid sick days, vacation days, holiday time.”

I also wanted to hear more about the consumer piece of the organizing, and I asked if ROC United has called on people to boycott any restaurants.

“We generally don’t do that,” she responded. “Right now we have a campaign against Darden, which is the world’s largest full-service restaurant company. It owns Olive Garden, Red Lobster, and the Capital Grille Steakhouse. The Capital Grille Steakhouse is the fine-dining segment of the company and that’s where we’ve been organizing. We’ve organized workers in six or seven cities in Capital Grille Steakhouses, and that’s led to a larger campaign against the whole company.”

“But, in that campaign, we’re not asking people to stop eating there. We want people to go in and say things when they eat there, or even when they’re passing by an Olive Garden or Red Lobster. We want them to engage in social media-type activity. We generally don’t do boycotts because we feel like, in our industry, the more effective thing is to actually go in and speak up.”

Jayaraman continued: “The reason for this is actually connected to the food movement. Over the course of our organizing in the food industry, we’ve seen an incredible thing. About five or six years ago, when Eric Schlosser’s book, Fast Food Nation, came out, and when Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma came out, a consumer-driven movement—totally unorganized—led to a radical transformation. Restaurants across America do now provide locally sourced, organic menu items. It was because consumers started asking if their food was local, if it was organic.”

Jayaraman asked if I watched the show Portlandia. “There’s an episode in that show where a couple goes into a restaurant and they are really obnoxious,” she said. “They keep asking the server about the chicken: ‘Is it locally-sourced? How is the chicken? How was it treated? Did it have friends?’

“It’s really funny, but sometimes we say, ‘This is our dream.’ If consumers would ask management those type of questions about working conditions, you would see a response. It would become trendy to provide paid sick days and do a little bit better by workers. This is an industry that follows trends.”

“That’s how we ended up launching a multi-year customer engagement campaign. It started in 2008 with us convening the Food Chain Workers’ Alliance, which is an alliance of worker organizations along the food chain. It reaches from farm workers all the way up to restaurant workers and grocery store workers. That alliance has been pivotal for bringing all of us together to speak to the food movement. We’re saying, ‘Sustainable food has to include sustainable working conditions.’ There’s no question about it.”

This diary was cross-posted from Truthout.org.

At this moment, various plans to reform America’s broken immigration system are working their way through Congressional debate. On Monday, a bipartisan group of eight lawmakers unveiled a plan that includes what they call a “tough but fair” path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Last Friday, members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus met with President Obama to discuss the issue, and this caucus’ input will be influential in shaping any final legislation.

In the current political climate, immigration reform is broadly popular, with both parties eager to win over the Hispanic electorate in 2014 and 2016. But that doesn’t mean that a bipartisan effort will pass a good law—especially if long-time opponents of immigration reform are only cynically vying for votes. We have every reason to doubt the sincerity of conservatives such as Senator Marco Rubio, who is leading the charge from the Republican side of the aisle with an eye on his own bid for president.

For the Democrats, the challenge will be to avoid simply jumping at the first deal offered by newly converted conservatives. Instead, for the first time in decades, promoters of reform have the opportunity to hold America to its promise of being a land of liberty and justice for all.

Most centrally, that comes down to the issue of work. Holding America to its promise will mean ensuring that immigrants have pathways for securing just and meaningful employment in this country.

Immigrants Rebuilding the Middle Class

The primary reason people come to the United States from other nations is the potential for good work. It’s not enough for immigrants to have legal status to stay here. They must have legal rights as employees to speak out against wage theft and abusive working conditions—and to exercise their freedoms to associate and engage in collective bargaining.

In recent decades, unions that were once isolationist have come around to this position. That’s why, in the current debate, organized labor is one of the strongest institutional voices speaking out in favor of immigrant rights.

A key goal in crafting a legislative package for reform will be to avoid the creation of a permanent two-tiered system of employment—with some immigrants allowed to stay and work, but only on terms that greatly restrict their rights. Some conservatives would like to see a version of immigration reform that emphasizes helping corporations maintain a pool of cheap immigrant labor and that would further weaken unions. Such a system would foster a permanent underclass of workers living little better than serfs.

We go down that path at our collective peril. More than any other institution, the trade union movement was responsible for the creation of a stable American middle class. And more than any other constituency, waves of fresh immigrants to this country’s shores did the most to lay the foundation for the U.S. labor movement.

For this reason, whether or not you are an immigrant or a union member yourself, we all have an interest in ensuring that new arrivals to the United States are able to stand up to fight for better wages and working conditions.

Avoiding the Errors of the Past

In order to make sure that immigrant rights and workers’ rights go hand-in-hand in any new reform package, we must not repeat the errors of the past. And with regard to immigration, the past is the Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986. For the last 27 years we have lived, however messily, under the guidelines set out in this bill.

Most consequentially, Simpson-Mazzoli beefed up enforcement partly by making employers turn workers in to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (now called ICE). At the time, this idea had broad support. In an influential editorial from 1982 (the year Simpson-Mazzoli was first introduced), the New York Times argued, “The United States cannot conceivably let in all the worldwide millions who want in. That means controlling our own borders and that in turn, means something called employer sanctions.”

This provision was likely the bill’s greatest mistake, as many former supporters have since recognized. Employers should not be made to do the government’s job of enforcing the law. Doing so only deepened the divide between employees based on their legal residency status. More importantly, it opened the door for unscrupulous employers to use the threat of an immigration raid to keep disaffected workers from standing up for themselves and exercising their rights.

Under the broken system, employers looked the other way on employees’ legal status when it was to their advantage, but they used workers’ undocumented status as a tool when it could ensure their employees would never take collective action. Such behavior and unfairness helped lead to depressed wages throughout the economy.

The current bipartisan immigration reform plan promises an “effective” employment verification system. The devil will be in the details, and much remains to be worked out. But this much is clear: To allow employers to have the power to enforce immigration laws in 2013 would be history repeating itself, and it is the wrong way to go.

The folks who supported Simpson-Mazzoli back in 1986 thought they were making our system fairer. Yet everything fell apart after it was passed. The U.S. began to witness a steady climb in illegal border crossings, rampant fraud, and a snarled mess of an enforcement system–the exact reverse of the legislation’s intended consequences. And America’s middle class has only suffered in the years since.

When people come to this country, they are coming because they want to make a living. While it’s important that immigrants be given a pathway to citizenship and the ability to reunite with family members, these goals are not enough. Until immigrants are able to fully exercise their rights in the workplace, America has not lived up to its promise.

The successful Chicago Teachers' Strike was a high point for labor in 2012.

This was a tumultuous year for working people and their families. From the grassroots uprisings last winter to the low-wage workers’ strikes at year’s end, 2012 saw many people coming together for the first time and finding their voices. Below are the items that I would highlight as the best and worst developments of 2012 in the world of labor and progressive social movements.

THE WORST:

• Conservatives have repeatedly tried to pass anti-worker legislation under misleading names and false slogans in 2012. This approach hasn’t always worked—California’s Prop 32, which would have unfairly restricted workers’ political speech in the state, failed at the polls in November. Sadly, though, at the end of the year, Michigan’s lame-duck legislature, dominated by a billionaire-funded GOP, passed a so-called “right to work” law. As has happened in other states, the new law will pit Michigan workers against each other by forcing those who pay union dues to represent and bargain for those who don’t. The state has been a union bulwark historically, so this is a sad sign for working people all over the country.

• Neoliberal trade policy has continued to undermine the American middle class in 2012. As reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele have documented, the so-called “free trade” deals modeled after NAFTA are part of a pattern that has resulted in huge job losses here in the United States. This year, the Obama administration has been promoting a new pact based on this same model that would create a “free trade zone” made up of ten countries along the Pacific Rim, called the TransPacific Partnership (TPP). As Matt Stoller has said in Salon, the creation of the TPP has mostly flown under the radar, but it could lead to “offshoring of U.S. manufacturing and service-sector jobs,  inexpensive imported products, expanded global reach of U.S. multinationals, and less bargaining leverage for labor.” None of this is good for Americans who desperately need jobs to be created here.

• Another disturbing trend that continued this year was giveaways of public funds to private companies. As watchdog Good Jobs First documented earlier this year, state and local governments handed out $32 billion to private corporations in the name of job creation, but with no real accountability or guarantees of public benefit.

THE BEST:

Not everything was bad news; there were also some positive developments that offer hope for the future. Four of these were:

• Student activism allied with union advocacy paid off in San Jose, California, where a student-led coalition got a ballot initiative passed that will raise the minimum wage from $8 to $10 per hour for everyone working within the city limits. Organizers estimate the number of workers who will get a raise to be in the tens of thousands. I see this as a fine example of regional coalition-based organizing, and I hope it becomes a trend.

• Labor helped push President Obama to victory: once again, organized labor showed that its electoral muscle is critical in propelling candidates to victory. This creates a window of opportunity for pursuing future gains for workers at the federal level.

• Chicago teachers won their strike. The September walkout that lasted for seven school days may prove to be a bellwether for other places, where teachers can begin to reframe the issue of reform to include teachers’ unions and more equitable distribution of resources as part of the solution for public education.

• Walmart workers staged the first-ever strikes against the biggest private sector employer in the United States. United Food and Commercial Workers Organizing Director Pat O’Neill talked about how the union is experimenting with a new model of organizing—workers and community members coming together to support better conditions in the stores and warehouses even before the workers join a union.

In 2013, as Obama starts his new term, we can find hope in these examples of regionally based innovation. Rather than waiting for change to come from above, we must take what is working at the regional level and turn it into a people’s agenda for Washington.

This was originally posted on The Century Foundation.

Photo by Shutter Stutter under Creative Commons license.

United Food and Commercial Workers’ Pat O’Neill talks about the difficulty of organizing retail and the new tactics that have been developed, shoppers’ support and Walmart workers’ extraordinary courage in the rolling actions leading up to Black Friday.

Black Friday Walmart Worker Strike

This fall has witnessed a wave of rolling strikes and other employee actions at America’s largest private-sector employer: Walmart. The actions, spread across more than a dozen cities, have been the first in the retailer’s 50-year history. This week, things are set to get bigger: Walmart associates across the country are now promising pickets, leafleting, and creative flash mobs on and around Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year.

One of the main groups involved in planning the actions has been OUR Walmart, a labor-community organization for Walmart employees, backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). Rather than going through the arduous process of forming a traditional union by signing up majorities in each store, they have developed a more flexible process for employees to get involved early on. Smaller groups can use OUR Walmart to take collective action to advocate for rights and for better conditions. Such advocacy harkens back to the early days of the US labor movement, before the labor laws of the New Deal institutionalized processes for collective bargaining. It may also be a bellwether for future employee action, reflecting an age in which labor law has again failed to catch up with the reality of the American economy.

To get inside insight on the new activism taking place at Walmart, I talked with UFCW Organizing Director Pat O’Neill. We discussed the rolling strikes, the revived use of “minority unions,” and why OUR Walmart is not calling for a boycott.

I started by asking how many employees are part of OUR Walmart.

“It’s in the thousands of workers who are paying the $5.00 a month in membership dues for OUR Walmart,” O’Neill replied. “There are a lot of others that are not paying, but they’re active. On Black Friday, our goal is to have in excess of 1000 Walmart workers striking, and there will be many more that take some other form of action.”

I asked what sort of message the public will be getting on Black Friday.

“The public’s going to be asked to support Walmart associates as they fight for better hours and better working conditions and as they call on the company not to continue with reprisals against workers for their organizing activity,” O’Neill said. “It’s two-fold: we want people to support the workers in pushing for better conditions, but also in standing up for their organizing rights.”

I next asked about his hopes in terms of the outcomes from the rolling actions.

“We want to put pressure on the company and let them know that the workers are upset, ” O’Neill responded. “We want the company to know that they’re not going to squash them in their endeavors to organize by taking retaliatory action. The workers are not just crawling under the table and hiding. They’re actually taking stronger action; they’re upping the ante, if you will. When Walmart changes somebody’s schedule, suspends someone, or terminates them even for their organizing activity, the rest of the workers are upset over it and know about it.”

Pointing to a long history of unsuccessful organizing at Walmart, I asked what he thought today’s employees have learned from some of these past efforts that haven’t been successful.

“I think the past efforts weren’t successful because it’s always difficult in retail, period,” O’Neill said. “It’s not like one plant. The workforce doesn’t have that much camaraderie with each other. There are so many people at the store; there are part-time hours. A lot of workers don’t even know each other. Then you lay on hundreds or thousands of different locations, it makes organizing under the [National Labor Relations Act] very difficult. Even if you get in at one store, then you got to worry about whether you can get a contract.”

“The old way of organizing that we did didn’t work,” he said. “Now we really studied the history, not just what we’ve had with Walmart, but the civil rights movement and the beginning of the labor movement, what the United Auto Workers (UAW) and others did back in the ’30s. That’s where we came up with the concept of minority unionism and trying to hook people up with each other, even if there’s only one activist in one store.”

“Traditionally, it was all about signing cards, then holding an election and hoping you win. You don’t charge dues or anything until after you get a contract. With OUR Walmart, workers put some skin in the game up front with a five-dollar-per-month contribution. They buy into it and want to do it. I think those two pieces are really major differences from the past.”

I pressed further, asking what he thought Walmart associates themselves have learned from the past efforts to organize.

President Barack Obama’s re-election is a huge relief—we dodged the Romney/Ryan bullet.

However, that’s not the same as winning a better future. If Obama’s first term is a prologue to the second, we should not expect to see much progress in strengthening the rights or bargaining ability of workers. Therefore, in Obama’s second term, we need to be:

• Smarter about the policies we advocate.

• Selective about the candidates we endorse.

• More disciplined about building a strong social movement.

Progressives need to recognize where the real fight is happening. Congress is still firmly under Republican control—or, at least, under threat of a Republican veto that can stop any worthwhile federal legislation. Since progress won’t happen in Washington, we must work for it at the state and local level. We are already seeing some of the most exciting innovations take shape in cities and metropolitan regions. Urban labor-community coalitions are making respect for collective bargaining a precondition for businesses to receive public support. They are also approaching politics in a new way. In exchange for supporting candidates, these coalitions are ensuring that politicians use the bully pulpit to defend workers and denounce union-busting. In San Jose, Calif., student, labor and faith groups demanded that local politicians back an across-the-board minimum wage increase that passed on Election Day. And in Long Beach, Calif., a coalition of LGBT activists, labor and faith groups got city council members to endorse a ballot measure for hotel housekeepers to get a raise, which passed.

Such coalitions must evaluate elected officials on whether or not they understand that their success in pushing legislation forward is directly linked to the strength of social movements. As Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) told me earlier this year in an interview for The American Prospect, “Sympathetic members of Congress have the power to draft, introduce and vote on legislation. But leaders in the progressive community … have the ability to mobilize, educate and organize all across America. We need each other to be successful.” We can no longer afford to invest in politicians who do not understand this.

Most candidates favored by Democratic Party powerbrokers are unable to grasp this concept. The few who do have social-movement roots, such as Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.). Consequently, a long-term electoral strategy must involve cultivating candidates directly from the ranks of social movements and then fighting for them in the primaries.

As Obama begins his second term, Republican obstructionism cannot be an excuse for inaction—particularly when it comes to the president’s use of his bully pulpit.

During the recent attacks on collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin and Ohio, and during the teachers’ strike in Chicago, White House leadership was nowhere to be found. Obama once promised, “If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself. I’ll walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America.”

The President seems to have misplaced his walking shoes. We should send him a new pair—and make sure that no future candidates we endorse have any excuse for losing theirs.

Originally published on In These Times.