“The Storm” (A Poem)

By Noah Streng

Footsteps on the hot, cracked pavement

Tires on the road, fighting enslavement

The organizers trek into the field

Their spirits hopeful, their souls healed

Listening to the throes of workers’ woes

From wartime tales, hopelessness arose

The organizers turn despair into dignity

Moving workers to action, their words electricity

The power they sought was within them all along

Together united, they could be strong

Endless, bountiful, radical love as deep as the boundless sea

Who could have known what they could be?

Ocean waves crash upon the ports of power

Awaiting their demise, bosses sit in their tower

With each passing second, the waves start to rumble

Stone by stone, the frail walls crumble

Awash with forgotten, unrecognized pain

The crackling of thunder, the pounding of rain

The organizers march on, their strength astounding

Their footsteps drum pavement, pattering and pounding

A chorus of giants, the tower shatters

Bosses weep as their power scatters

Galloping waves fill every crack, every crevice

Those who were legless are running the fastest

Freedom!

The tower is gone

What stands in its place, an open field, a new dawn

Ripe soil, pregnant with possibility

Dreams of the forgotten are now reality

Birds sing, flowers bloom

The voiceless are the chorus, their hopes boom

Freedom.

The organizers part, their journey completed

The swift storm delivering what was needed

What began in haste is now at an end

Who could have known what would happen to them?

Their quest to transform has left them changed

Their bond unbreakable, their love unrestrained

Tires sear the open road once more

The pavement awaits, the oceans roar

Their kinship eternal, their battle won

With strength in numbers, anything can be done

Revealed in community lies the beauty of humanity

Unbridled by fear, they are stronger than gravity

The old world is gone, the new world is born

What once seemed impossible, made real by the storm

Our future awaits, our destiny inevitable

Together we stand, our power incredible

Through love,

Through tears,

Through laughter,

Through pain,

United, we are the pouring rain

The organizers turn despair into dignity

Moving themselves to action, they love unconditionally

The power they hold as bountiful as the sea

Who could have known what they could be?

Unions Fight Back: The Transformation of Labor Law in the United States and its Impact on Union Organizing Strategy

[Pictured: Christian Smalls has become an instrumental part of a nationwide labor resurgence in the United States, heading up union efforts at Amazon]

By Noah Streng

The state of union organizing in America is intimately tied to the legal structures governing labor. Court rulings during the late-19th and early-20th century, for example, created a semi-outlaw status for unions and their activities. Nearly every time unions tried to get the political system to pass pro-labor legislation, their efforts were overturned by a reactionary Supreme Court that had the final say over labor law. A prime example of this was Lochner v. New York (1905).

In the case, the Supreme Court overturned a New York law that prevented bakers from working more than 10 hours per day, citing liberty of contract guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. Unions had fought hard to pass this and other protections for workers in the New York legislature. But, despite the public’s mandate via their elected representatives, the Supreme Court overruled them in favor of private property rights.

Cases like Lochmer were common in postbellum labor relations. The outsized influence of the judiciary left elected legislatures with little say over American labor law. Many unions consequently lost faith in the potential for winning reforms through the ballot box and adopted an anti-statist approach to labor organizing. These unions had never experienced a state that worked on behalf of the working class, so it was hard for them to envision one.

This disillusionment gave rise to the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and voluntarist American Federation of Labor (AFL). Both prioritized grassroots labor action over state intervention. But, despite this commonality, the two unions practiced very different kinds of anti-statism.

The AFL focused on upholding liberty of contract by fighting to remove the government from labor relations entirely. When the AFL participated in elections and legislative advocacy, it was typically to preempt judicial intervention in labor disputes. Meanwhile, the IWW sought to unite laborers across race and gender lines to overthrow capitalism. In their organizing, the IWW gained significant traction — especially among unskilled workers, immigrants, people of color, and women. Unlike the AFL, which organized along craft lines, the IWW ran industrial unions that united all workers in a given shop.

Despite early momentum, however, many judicial rulings stifled the IWW’s ability to organize across racial lines. In Hodges v. United States (1906), for example, the Supreme Court officially stripped black workers of equal labor rights. This — in tandem with other hostile decisions — divided the American working class, thereby frustrating the IWW’s universalist strategy.

The environment for labor improved significantly following the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which guaranteed many American workers the right to organize unions, engage in collective bargaining, and partake in concerted union activity such as strikes. The NLRA did this by expanding executive power over the judiciary, transferring power from courts in labor law cases to the National Labor Relations Board. This paved the way for much of the pro-labor legislation in the New Deal, which the Supreme Court almost certainly would’ve struck down had it been able. The NLRA thus redefined what was politically possible for unions. Now, they could plausibly build worker power through the organs of the state.

Nevertheless, the NLRA had its flaws. Following the precedent set by Hodges and other discriminatory cases, the bill excluded domestic, agricultural, incarcerated, and sex workers from its labor protections. This would be hard to reconcile if we interpret the NLRA as something intended to advance working-class liberation. But that arguably wasn’t its intention at all.

Indeed, the NLRA’s legality was based on the federal government’s right to regulate interstate commerce. The bill provided concessions to labor in order to achieve “labor peace” and ensure the stability of the capitalist economy. Nevertheless, the NLRA — coupled with other pieces of legislation like the Norris-La Guardia Act — was undoubtedly beneficial to workers. By shifting power over labor relations from courts to the administrative state, the NLRA opened new opportunities for radical pro-union reforms.

Despite gains in the previous century, however, we still find ourselves in an era where the federal government and judiciary are aligned with the interests of capital. As both continue to chip away at the progress made by the NLRA, organized labor in the United States needs to develop new strategies for our current context. That includes finding ways to work around — or, preferably, reverse — legal restrictions on union activities as enshrined by, for example, the Taft-Hartley Act and infamous Janus vs. AFSCME (2018) Supreme Court decision. Just as union leaders in the past had to adapt to rapidly changing rules governing labor, leaders today must strategize to meet the moment and revitalize class struggle in America.

One way to do this would be through rekindling the socialist labor movement in the United States. Organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America have already begun doing so by raising over $100,000 for strike funds, engaging in solidarity actions, and directly organizing workers into unions across the country. Labor is at its strongest when grassroots, militant, rank-and-file-led unions organize to radically change society. Part of this strategy should include capturing state power and wielding it to redefine labor law, empowering workers in their fight against the owning class.

Noah Streng is a member of River Valley DSA’s steering committee and a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Labor Center.

How the Media Legitimizes Gentrification

By Noah Streng

Republished from Michigan Specter.

If you’ve ever seen an episode of HGTV’s Good Bones or any other “house-flipping” show, you’ll know that like all reality TV shows they depict dramatized situations as a way of increasing the stakes and encouraging viewers to keep watching. However, when watching these types of shows, it is important to recognize what narratives they are promoting. Whose voices and stories do they center? What underlying assumptions are left unchallenged?

In the strange world of reality TV, there’s an entire genre dedicated to “home improvement” where wealthy individuals will buy homes in “rundown neighborhoods’’ and “make them beautiful again” (all while making a significant profit for themselves, of course). These shows like to promote the idea that the house-flippers are courageous underdogs venturing into an uncharted and dangerous land to save target homes from the scary, filthy people who live in them. Euphemisms like “up and coming” and “transitional” are often used to describe low-income, minority neighborhoods starved for investment.

In a dramatic scene from an episode of HGTV’s Good Bones, the gentrifiers are seen “scouting” a house that they bought and breaking through a window because the doors of the house are locked — a sign that people have been staying there. The scene depicts the gentrifiers as being frightened by the possibility of encountering a squatter and being disgusted by the house’s “filth.” However, what’s never asked or included in these shows is questioning why the person living in that house needed to squat in the first place.

Did the state fail to provide them affordable housing? Are they suffering from a mental health issue and lack insurance? Did they get evicted from their former home? Instead of analyzing the root causes of this person’s housing insecurity and seeking to address it, the squatter is demonized as singularly responsible for their failures. Not only that, but the content of these characterizations is highly racialized, contributing to the white supremacist and colonial themes of the show.

These shows almost never consider the perspective of the tenants evicted by gentrifiers who rip their apartments out from under them. In some cases, there will be depictions of scary, drugged-up squatters who are illegally occupying the gentrifiers’ new passion project. In an article titled ‘We Bought a Crack House,’ house-flippers Catherine Jheon and Julian Humphreys detail their “brave” story of buying a house for $560,000 and encountering the tenants — whose home had just been sold by their landlord without consent — still living in the house when they arrive. Some of the home’s residents are experiencing problems with drug addiction, and are even caught by the gentrifiers using crack in an upstairs room.

What’s not mentioned here is how poverty, and these people’s recent condemnation to homelessness by their landlord, may have influenced their decision to use drugs to cope with the immense hardships they face. When Jheon and Humphreys ask the former tenants to leave the home so that they can start renovating, the tenants refuse, citing that they have nowhere else to go and that this is their rightful home. Jheon writes about her frustration with this, as every day she can’t renovate the home is money lost. In the end, she and Humphreys bribe one of the tenants to leave the house and call the police to forcibly remove the rest of them.

This is a classic example of how law and the media intersect to legitimize the violence of colonization and gentrification which continues in our cities today. The poor are demonized and gentrifiers are portrayed as innocent white saviors who are just trying to make a living — but they are doing so by displacing poor, housing insecure black and brown people. The police advance these projects of colonization by using their monopoly on violence to aid gentrifiers in their mission of displacing community residents so that their house can be fixed up and eventually sold to a rich white family.

While seeming innocent on their face, these shows can have devastating effects on the lives of the millions of people in the United States who experience housing insecurity. Not only do these television networks make money off of stories of tragic displacement of poor people, but they frame these stories in a way that valorizes gentrifiers and legitimizes a landlord’s right to hoard property and force destitute people into homelessness. Oftentimes, the excuse that gentrifiers will use when evicting tenants is “it’s our house now.” However, this statement is highly ideological and reinforces the social dynamic between property owners and the property-less in our capitalist society.

Who controls housing is not something that is natural or written in the stars. It is a power arrangement forged by the deliberate decisions of actors within an economic system that prioritizes profit over human life. House-flipping shows are just one part of the larger media trend of legitimizing societal oppression.

TV companies make political decisions when they choose to only highlight the voices of landlords, realtors, and house-flippers over tenants and the housing insecure. The depiction of low-income, predominately black people as filthy, dangerous, and lazy — rather than victims of a violent, exploitative, and racist economic system — feeds into the narrative that gentrification is good for society at large. How the media depicts people’s interactions with the law and frames which laws are just has real consequences. When the media chooses to center the story of the colonizer over the colonized, it legitimizes the displacement, land theft, and systemic impoverishment that millions of people face every day.