Occupy Oakland and Unions

by Rashid Patch

A point about Occupy Oakland that still is not getting enough coverage is the involvement of mainstream unions in the 99% / Occupy movement. This is a big historical change - for many years in the mid & late 20th century, the major unions were very conservative.- and their membership and influence decreased, even as the wages and benefits of union members grew. In the last couple of decades, unions have been hammered, along with everybody else; and they have returned to the left.

I know that unions are now only about 10-15% of workers in the U.S., and they are under attack everywhere they remain. However, they are not washed-up relics; they can still get thousands of people on the streets, they can still shut down businesses, and the have organization - which the Occupy / 99% movement still lacks. I don’t want to put down Occupy Oakland - the effort to achieve consensus is highly praiseworthy - but consensus didn’t back a semi-load of food into Oscar Grant plaza on Wednesday - a bunch of Teamsters did.

Another point that most media have missed about Occupy Oakland is numbers. Lots of reports talked about 10,000 people marching to close the port, or marching around downtown. What they didn’t report is that 10,000 people going off on a march did not reduce the crowd in the plaza any. 10,000 was just a small fraction of the people who had showed up for a General Strike rally - and nobody has come out with an estimate of the total crowd. 100,000? More? Not even the police have talked about it - and their counts are always low.

SEE ALSO:  RAW VIDEO: Chopper footage of what seems like many more than 10,000+ at Occupy Oakland Takes back Highway http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4jYdCaHrjQ