Students and Unions

“Arab Spring, European Summer, American Fall . . .”

—New School students’ banner on the march to Foley Square

By the mid-afternoon of October 5, as thousands approached Foley Square for the Community and Labor Rally in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, a dozen or so graduate students at New York University huddled at the north side of the fountain in Washington Square Park. The sun cast long shadows, as some scribbled slogans on poster board like, “9 of 10 PhDs AGREE MARX WAS RIGHT!” Others leaned against the fountain’s edge, sipping coffee and speculating whether anyone would heed their call to walkout, whether the contingent from the nearby New School for Social Research would take the streets. By 4 p.m., however, the square teemed with hundreds of students, professors and community members, and the New School contingent was still on its way.

The NYU organizers had planned for a relatively small contingent of students, marching along the sidewalks to join the community groups and union members downtown. “Because it was just this small number of grad students that organized this thing. We felt like we couldn’t in good conscience encourage NYU undergrads to do something illegal and risk getting arrested,” recalled Christy Thorton, an NYU graduate student in history and one of the walkout’s organizers, “This was right after the Brooklyn bridge arrests.” But as Washington Square swelled with people, a clamor arose north of the park—the New School students had taken Fifth Avenue. As they approached the square’s iconic arch, the crowd roared in approval. Daniel Aldana Cohen, a graduate student in sociology at NYU and one of the march’s organizers recalled, “When the New School came walking down Fifth Avenue, like down the middle of the street, we were like, all right!” Emboldened, the students set a new goal: occupy the streets.

As the march kicked off, hundreds poured out of Washington Square’s southeastern corner. Bearing signs such as “Student Debt = Indentured Servitude,” “They Call It Class War Only When We Fight Back!,” “Why are so many out of work . . . When there is so much work to be done??,” and “We Want Our Future Back,” the marchers turned onto the sidewalks along Fourth Street, chanting “We! Are! The 99 percent!” They swarmed around food carts and by the plaza adjoining NYU’s Stern School of Business, where several students, some dressed in suits and ties, looked on with light-hearted skepticism. Initially the march stuck to the sidewalks, with only a handful of students walking in the streets alongside traffic. But once they reached Mercer Street, the students flooded Fourth Street. They continued past Broadway, veering right onto Lafayette. Organizers had chosen Lafayette because it had clearer sidewalks than Broadway, which would have been a more symbolic target. “That ended up being an important part of the strategy, because police had no idea,” recalled Christy. “They had no idea when we walked past Broadway, they thought where are these people going?”

Clogging two blocks of Lafayette, the marchers brought traffic to a standstill as they headed downtown. Intermittently chanting, “All day! All week! Occupy Wall Street!” and, “One, Two, Three, Four, Wall Street fuck you!” some banged on pots and pans, while others scurried to document the march with their cameras and video equipment. While many in the buildings abutting Lafayette looked on from their windows, many on the ground floor emerged from shops to cheer the marchers on—some even took to the streets in solidarity. As the march approached Worth Street, just north of Foley Square, some New School marchers at the head unfurled a wide paper banner reading, “Arab Spring, European Summer, American Fall . . .” With this message at the fore, the Washington Square feeder march entered Foley chanting “Students! And workers! Shut the city down!” to the cheers of thousands of workers and community members who had already gathered for the subsequent march to Zuccotti.

On October 5, the mass convergence of students and workers at Foley Square, combined with the October 1 arrest of more than 700 OWS protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, played a pivotal role in raising public awareness of the Occupy movement. The event also shows how Occupy Wall Street facilitated interconnections and coalition building. Indeed, the OWS-enabled solidarity between student and labor movements was by no means inevitable. Conflicting motivations, needs, and goals had in recent years fostered divisions–not only between workers and students, but between students of public and private universities and between workers from different unions. With its amorphous goals, but ardent opposition to budget cuts and corporate takeover of public services, the Occupy movement offered a sufficiently large umbrella to mobilize groups with seemingly disparate priorities toward a common cause. The story of how the October 5 rally and march came to be, and the events it subsequently enabled, highlights Occupy’s power as an engine of solidarity.

In May 2011, a group of 25 to 30 student organizers from the City University of New York and State University of New York systems met for a lakeside retreat just outside of Albany. Mobilized by state-level threats of budget cuts for higher education and tuition increases, those gathered formed a coalition called New York Students Rising (NYSR). Spreading throughout New York State, the coalition grew from 11 or 12 active campuses in May to nearly 30 by October. On August 12, NYSR set the date of October 5 for system-wide walkouts and teach-ins, “in response to budget cuts, tuition hikes, an absence of administrative accountability, the deterioration of shared governance, and the troubling threat of privatization.” The walkout call came ten days after the first OWS General Assembly convened in Bowling Green. According to Colin, an organizer who helped facilitate NYSR’s initial retreat, some members of the burgeoning student movement had taken part in those early OWS planning sessions and had tipped off the coalition that a September Wall Street action was in the works. But OWS did not necessarily factor into the decision to call for a walkout. “Honestly it seemed like a stretch at the time that [the occupation] could last three weeks,” Colin said. “The previous model we had for this type of action was Bloombergville, and it did not last three weeks.”

As the occupation of Zuccotti approached its third week, OWS grew, increasingly collaborating with the burgeoning student movement, and gaining support from labor unions. On September 29, less than two weeks into the occupation, a coalition of community and labor groups –including United NY, Strong Economy for All Coalition, the Working Families Party, the United Federation of Teachers, Workers United, SEIU 1199, and the Transport Workers Union Local 100—announced they would hold a Community and Labor Rally in support of Occupy Wall Street the following week, on the same Wednesday as the NYSR-called student walkout. By October 2, NYSR had itself endorsed the Community and Labor Rally and October 5 was set as a day of united action by students and workers in solidarity with the occupiers. The first issue of The Occupied Wall Street Journal, released on October 1, heralded this unity—its front page displayed a large photo of a pink-haired woman with a tambourine and the headline, “NEW YORK UNITES! WEDNESDAY OCT. 5 STUDENT WALKOUTS UNION MARCHES OCCUPYWALLST.ORG NYSTUDENTSRISING.ORG.”

Students and labor did not merely support the Occupy movement, the occupation at Liberty Plaza served as a vital catalyst for mobilizing around the distinct causes of students and workers alike. For example, prior to the occupation, and the October 5 call, the student movement in New York had largely been relegated to its public institutions—whose students were directly targeted by state and city austerity measures. But, as Zuccotti bloomed and a wide array of activists intermingled, the occupation united public and private university students and fostered a broader student movement. Josh Frens-String, a graduate student in New York University’s history department, said he first heard about NYSR when he was handed a flyer in Zuccotti. Josh, like many other NYU graduate student activists, was a member of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC) and had primarily focused his activism on building support for an anticipated union certification vote. But the news of NYSR inspired Josh to build public-private solidarity at NYU. “All that really happened was I posted something to Facebook saying, ‘Does anyone know if there’s something going on?’— and Dan [DiMaggio] was organizing an NYU walk-out in coordination with students at CUNY,” Josh said. “So I made my first Facebook group ever for it.”

Word of the October 5 solidarity march spread quickly through NYU’s departments of History, Sociology, and Social & Cultural Analysis, which are bridged by an intramural soccer team called “Historiology” and by GSOC, a United Auto Workers affiliated union of NYU graduate students. GSOC incorporated the Washington Square feeder march into its phone bank in support of the Community and Labor rally. Other New York City–area university unions—such as the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY–pursued similar efforts. The call also reached the Faculty Democracy list-serve, a list of activist NYU professors. Despite this outreach, those “attending” the march on Facebook numbered around 300, until the official Occupy Wall Street Facebook page promoted the event a couple of days before October 5: then it skyrocketed to nearly 700. Still, those organizing the solidarity march were modest in their expectations. “We thought we were going to get 50 GSOC-affiliated people and we would just wander down there together,” recalled Christy Thorton. “But what happened was a giant feeder march and a street takeover.” Furthermore, the march congealed a wide group of graduate and undergraduate students under the name NYU Stands with Occupy Wall Street (or NYU4OWS for short)—an organization which, in addition to hosting teachins and a recurring People’s University in Washington Square Park, mobilized solidarity campaigns around New York’s public university students and local workers. More broadly, the October 5 march produced a group called the NYC All-Student Assembly, which facilitated connections among student activists at different universities and helped coordinate broad-based student actions, not only in opposition to cuts in higher education spending and tuition increases, but in solidarity with local workers—especially the art handlers of Sotheby’s, Teamsters Local 814. These union members had been locked out of work for failing to agree to an austere new contract, with a 10 percent wage cut and a stipulation granting Sotheby’s owners unlimited freedom to hire non-union workers. The latter would have effectively ruined the union.

United together, students and trade unionists affiliated with Occupy Wall Street infiltrated auctions—interrupting the sale of multi-million dollar paintings and furniture. “Sotheby’s made record profits of $680 million,” one OWS infiltrator would announce in the midst of an auction, “and put its workers out on the street!” Then ten minutes later, after the auction returned to order, a second protester would rise to shout, “the Sotheby’s CEO makes $60,000 a day!” This would continue until several had been escorted from the room. These interventions continued, eventually causing Sotheby’s to require a $5,000 deposit just to enter the sales room. OWS affiliated protesters also disrupted lunch at high-priced restaurants owned by Danny Meyers, a member of Sotheby’s Board of Trustees, informing patrons that the restaurant they were sitting in supported the Sotheby’s lockout. The wide array of actions in support of the locked-out Sotheby’s workers, which included several arrests for blocking the auction house’s doors, culminated on November 9, when 200 people, including Hunter College students and members of at least 10 different unions, joined the Sotheby’s picket line.

Indeed, OWS and the burgeoning student movement it fostered provided a lucrative opportunity for the labor movement to stage a broader-based counter-attack against owners’ increasingly hard-line tactics at the bargaining table, as well as the renewed threats against collective bargaining in statehouses nationwide. Maida Rosenstein, president of United Auto Workers Local 2110, said, “We in the UAW had been talking about how do we mobilize people and our members not just electronically? How do we mobilize people to get out and protest and rally and demonstrate?” The protests against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attacks on collective bargaining rights in February of 2011, in which students and union workers occupied the State Capitol in Madison before erecting a tent city, served as an important precedent. While they failed to prevent Walker’s unionbusting law from passing, those protests served to radicalize the labor movement nationwide, and made union leaders quick to recognize the potential benefits of aligning with Occupy Wall Street. “This is a dream come true for us to have these young people speaking out about what’s been happening to working people,” said George Gresham, president of Local 1199 SEIU, a union of 300,000 health care workers.

Trade unionists were active in Occupy Wall Street from the outset, taking part in the first General Assembly on August 2 and forming the OWS Labor Working Group within the first week of the occupation of Zuccotti. The group, which would come to have more than 100 members representing more than 40 unions, adopted a dual purpose—supporting union struggles and seeking union support for the Occupy movement. By the October 5 rally, the group had succeeded in securing the endorsement of the executive council of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the United States. “I was surprised at the eagerness with which the unions responded,” said Jackie DiSalvo, a founder of the Labor Working Group. “This alliance is unprecedented in decades in the U.S. and distinguishes Occupy Wall Street from the movements of the ‘60s when unions were more conservative, and the youth culture tended to be antiunion. The unions have been under attack by the 1 percent, and they’re looking for new strategies and new allies.”

One such union was Transit Workers Union 100, which in the fall of 2011 was involved in difficult contract negotiations. Working through the OWS Labor Working Group, the TWU rank and file set up a table in Liberty Plaza. Festooned with hard hats left by laborers from the nearby Freedom Tower construction site, the table served as a place where workers could share their stories with visitors to Liberty Plaza, as well as learn about and plug into the movement. The Occupation also facilitated connections among unions. Members of Teamsters Local 802 were introduced to members from Local 814 through the Labor Working group, and the two locals quickly decided to support one another’s respective struggles with management. Julian Tysh, an organizer with Local 814, credited the Occupy movement with encouraging workers on picket lines, while universalizing their struggles by pitting them against a common enemy—the 1 percent. “The Occupy movement has changed unions,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). “You’re seeing a lot more unions wanting to be aggressive in their messaging and their activity.” Indeed, in response to Occupy Wall Street, many unions were quick to seize upon the “99 percent” slogan, affixing it to buttons and signs for the October 5 march.

By 5:30 p.m. on October 5, Foley Square teemed with thousands of students and workers—laughing, chanting, and reveling in the power of their numbers. As the sun set, they trickled out of the square via Centre Street to the south, marching toward Liberty Plaza and the occupation that occasioned their unity. Though the police hadn’t restricted the unwieldy feeder march, which had filled two blocks of Lafayette, the NYPD strictly managed the protesters’ movements once they entered the square and all along the march to Zuccotti. The contrast could not have been starker. Descending on Foley, the protesters exhibited the unabridged freedoms of speech and assembly that had made the Occupy movement such a breath of fresh air. But as they marched to Zuccotti, police barricades pigeonholed them onto the sidewalk and into one lane of Broadway, while armored officers occupied the rest of the wide avenue. The specter of police authority (and ultimate crackdown) loomed. “What we did marching to Foley Square was an example of the complete opposite,” said Josh Frens-String, recalling the contrasting marches. “We took the streets. It was an example of the possible. It was what the march from Foley Square should have looked like—it should have looked like our march, but it didn’t. But juxtaposing those two marches—I think it shows where the movement’s at and what it’s striving for, how much more we’re going to have to do.”