'Occupy Wall Street' and It's New Alliance with Unions

Crain's New York Business reports:

At first, unions and community groups kept the protesters at arm's length, unsure of what to make of the upstarts. But they quickly realized Occupy Wall Street had become too big to ignore and organized an Oct. 5 solidarity march that attracted 15,000 people. A turning point came earlier this month when the Working Families Party played a key role in getting Brookfield Properties to postpone a cleanup of the park that protesters worried would serve as a de facto eviction.

Subsequently, ties between the unions and community groups and the occupiers grew tighter. Staffers from some of the city's most powerful left-wing groups had been at Zuccotti Park in a personal capacity from the beginning of the protest and had established credibility among the protesters.

Relationships built by those staffers, including several directors of organizing for major unions, have proven crucial both to labor and the protesters. Labor has secured office and storage space for the protesters at union halls and helped them deal with community concerns about noise. When protesters felt they needed more black and Latino involvement in the movement, union organizers made introductions to outer-borough community leaders and even brought the Rev. Al Sharpton down to the park.

At the same time, the ties make it easier for unions to recruit protesters to attract attention to their campaigns. And they are drawing from the protesters' playbook, learning to be more flexible and creative and adopting increasingly militant tactics...


The results of the collaboration are spinning off in multiple directions. Actions directed against Sotheby's, Verizon and Walmart last week will be followed soon with an edgy campaign planned for southeast Queens, one of the neighborhoods in the city that has been hit hardest by foreclosures. On Oct. 30, Mr. Sharpton will lead a “clergy and civil rights” march, in an attempt to bolster minority participation. Several protests will call for the extension of the millionaire's tax. And organizers hope to turn out more than 50,000 people on Nov. 17 for a massive demonstration to demand more new jobs.

“What you see is the beginning of a movement,” said Marvin Holland, political action director at the Transport Workers Union, who has been a fixture at Zuccotti. “I wouldn't call it a movement yet, but there's a tremendous amount of dialogue that you didn't have a month ago about things that are wrong with the system and how we change it collectively.”

Bottom line: OWS is fast becoming a left wing operation that will use union members to create larger spectacles. The demands developing out of the spectacles will be for more government intervention in the economy. Politicians will react to these orchestrated demands with more legislation to address the "frustration of the people", all the while taking greater control over the economy and directing it in favor of their sponsors and crony buddies. The ultimate result: a decline in the standard of living as new government regulations choke and suffocate more businesses.