IN AUGUST 2010, the New York State Legislature passed and the governor signed a landmark Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. At least 200,000 domestic workers—nannies, housekeepers, and caregivers, almost all of them immigrants—were covered by the new law. Testifying before the legislature, some domestic workers described working twelve to fifteen hours per day and being paid only $135 per week. Under the new law, for the first time, domestic workers are entitled to a set workweek of forty hours, overtime pay, one day of rest per week or overtime pay if they work on their day of rest, and three days of paid time off after a year of employment. The law protects domestic workers, who are not covered by federal labor laws, against workplace sexual harassment and entitles them to temporary disability benefits and unemployment insurance.
The victory came after a five-year-long grassroots organizing campaign led by Domestic Workers United (DWU) and its thirty-seven-year-old founder and director, Ai-jen Poo. The daughter of immigrants, Poo frequently observes that domestic workers “do the work that makes all other work possible.” At Columbia University, she had helped organize the student strike to push for an ethnic studies department. After working as a community organizer for several years, she started DWU in 2000, helping thousands of domestic workers to get back pay and challenge other abuses. In 2007 Poo founded the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which within a few years had grown into a national network of groups in seventeen cities and eleven states. Thanks to this organizing work, California and several other states are considering versions of the New York law.
One hundred years from now, anyone wanting to update this book to include the greatest Americans of the 21st century would have no shortage of candidates. The first eleven years of the century witnessed significant movements whose leaders, like Poo, are outstanding contenders for the Social Justice Hall of Fame. Fifty of these young activists, and a dozen successful campaigns, are identified below, but many more could be cited. They reflect another link in the chain of activists who have changed American history.
As the 21st century opened, many of the movements of the previous decades were bearing fruit. On a number of important fronts, the civil rights, feminist, gay liberation, and environmental and consumer movements had dramatically transformed and improved the country.
A decade into the new century, discrimination against African Americans remained a serious problem in employment, bank lending, and the criminal justice system. The poverty rate among African Americans is twice that among whites. The insidious police practice of racial profiling and the outrageous fact that more than 2 million Americans (disproportionately black and Hispanic men) are incarcerated reveals that the dream of racial equality remains unfulfilled.
Despite the persistence of racism, however, there is little dispute that America has made major strides in race relations since the modern civil rights movement began in the 1950s. A majority of black Americans have moved into the middle class. African Americans have broken barriers in every area of American society. They anchor the evening news, edit major newspapers, or serve in the cabinet, as college presidents, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or as CEOs of major corporations—achievements that many Americans considered unthinkable before the 1960s.
One of the civil rights movement’s key victories, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, not only increased the number of black voters but also increased the number of black elected officials, many of whom had been active in the movement. In 1970 there were only 1,469 black elected officials in the entire country. By 2000, that number had reached 9,040. In the early 1960s, not a single major city had a black mayor. By 2000, many major cities, including many with relatively few African Americans, had elected black chief executives, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas, San Francisco, Denver, Seattle, and Philadelphia.
And in November 2008, Americans elected forty-eight-year-old Barack Obama—an African American, a former civil rights law professor, and a one-time community organizer—as their president, with 53 percent of the vote. The influence of Obama’s organizing experience was evident throughout his presidential campaign. The campaign brought together first-time voters, young people, African Americans, Hispanics, and union members. In his speeches, Obama frequently used the United Farm Workers’ slogan, “Yes, we can / Si se puede,” and emphasized “hope” and “change.” His stump speeches typically included references to America’s organizing tradition. “Nothing in this country worthwhile has ever happened except when somebody somewhere was willing to hope,” Obama said. “Change comes about,” Obama said, by “imagining, and then fighting for, and then working for, what did not seem possible before.” “Real change,” he frequently noted, only comes about from the “bottom up.”
Women battled and beat many barriers to economic, social, and political equality. The “second wave” women’s movement, begun in the late 1960s, raised awareness among men as well as women about gender bias. Corporations, law firms, the media, advertising, the military, sports, and other core institutions could no longer exercise blatant discrimination without facing scrutiny and the risk of protest and lawsuits. Today most Americans believe that women should earn the same pay as men if they do the same job. Women are now running corporations, newspapers and TV stations, universities, and major labor unions. More men in couples share housework and child rearing than was the case two or three decades ago. Giving girls an equal opportunity to play competitive sports is now taken for granted. Employers now recognize the reality of sexual harassment, which did not even have a name until the 1970s. The right to have an abortion, legalized in the US Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973, has come under attack but remains the law.
Since 1980, women’s turnout at the polls has exceeded men’s, according to the Center on American Women in Politics at Rutgers University. The number of women elected to office at every level of government has spiraled. In 1975, there were no women in the US Senate and only nineteen women in the House of Representatives. By 2011, seventeen women served in the Senate and seventy-two served in the House. Similar shifts have occurred at the local and state levels. Although a rise in women’s turnout has spurred these gains, men are now more willing to vote for women candidates than ever before. By 1999, 91 percent of voters said they would vote for a woman running for president.
After the gay rights movement burgeoned in the 1970s, it took time for public opinion to shift. But as gay activism accelerated and as more people (including public figures) came out of the closet, attitudes changed. Public support grew for allowing openly gay and lesbian teachers to work in public schools, providing health benefits for gay partners, permitting gay couples to adopt children, ending antisodomy laws, outlawing job and housing discrimination against gays and lesbians, funding research to combat AIDS, and imposing penalties on people who commit hate crimes against gays and lesbians. The proportion of Americans who support allowing open gays and lesbians in the military increased from 44 percent in 1993 to 75 percent in 2010. In December 2010, President Obama signed a law repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, which went into effect the following September.
Support for same-sex marriage was not even an issue before the 21st century, but it made dramatic progress within a decade. In 2002, the New York Times began including gay and lesbian couples in its wedding announcements, and many other papers soon followed its lead. The proportion of Americans who told pollsters they endorsed giving gay and lesbian couples the legal rights of married couples in areas such as health insurance, inheritance, and pension coverage has increased from 40 percent in 2003 to 66 percent in 2010. Although only 30 percent of Americans over sixty-five believe gay marriages should be legal, 65 percent of those between eighteen and twenty-nine do, indicating that the tide of public opinion has dramatically turned. By 2011, Washington, DC, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
In 1991, 49 openly gay and lesbian Americans served in public office. In 2009, that number had increased to 445, according to the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund. Gays and lesbians have been elected mayors of Houston, Providence, Chapel Hill, Cambridge, and Portland, Oregon. In 2010, John Pérez, an openly gay Latino labor activist from Los Angeles, was elected speaker of the California Assembly, the state’s second-most-powerful official.
The environmental and consumer movements gained enormous momentum. Activists organized the first Earth Day in 1970. In response to President Nixon’s plan to build 1,000 nuclear power plants by 2000, a new wave of activists began to engage in protest to thwart the expansion of the nuclear power industry and nuclear weapons. Large-scale anti–nuclear proliferation protests accelerated during the 1970s and 1980s. On June 12, 1982, a coalition of 130 organizations brought 1 million demonstrators to New York City’s Central Park demanding a “freeze” of nuclear weapons and an end to the Cold War arms race. It was the biggest political demonstration in American history.
As a result of these efforts, many laws and activities that were once viewed as radical are now taken for granted. In response to grassroots pressure, Congress created the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency and passed the Clean Air Act. Led by Ralph Nader, the consumer protection movement pushed lawmakers to enact tough health and safety standards. New laws required corporations to give consumers more information about products and limited price-fixing and other monopolistic practices. Congress passed the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act in 1966 to ensure that labels carry such information as products’ quantity and ingredients. The Wholesome Meat Act of 1967 required inspection of meat to ensure it meets federal standards. Congress passed laws requiring seat belts in cars, compelling factories to reduce pollution, and outlawing racial discrimination by banks in their mortgage lending, a practice called “redlining.”
In 1976, Congress passed the Toxic Substances Control Act, which required manufacturers to test products for risk to human health or the environment before marketing them. Four years later it added the Superfund Law, which allocated federal funds to clean up abandoned hazardous-waste dumps and toxic spills and made dumpers and owners responsible for cleanup costs. That same year, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act preserved 104 million acres of wilderness in Alaska. In 1990, Congress strengthened the Clean Air Act and the regulation of air pollution by the Environmental Protection Agency. Starting in the 1980s, community, civil rights, and labor union organizations challenged the mainstream environmental groups to focus attention on the ways that pollution and other dangers disproportionately affect low-income areas and people of color. As a result, a new wave of “environmental justice” activism focused on issues such as the siting of toxic-waste facilities, public health, access to parks and open space, and land and water rights.
In 2000, 73 percent of Americans told pollsters that a candidate’s support for environmental protection was “somewhat” or “very” important in determining their vote. At the start of the new century, 70 percent of Americans approved of international agreements in Kyoto, Japan, and Bonn, Germany, that would require countries to limit their emissions of carbon monoxide and other greenhouse gases. During the administration of George W. Bush, conservatives expanded their attacks on environmental science on behalf of business interests, particularly the oil industry. This propaganda campaign had an impact. The number of Americans who believed that the threat of global warming was a serious problem declined from 79 percent in 2006 to 63 percent four years later. Even so, a 2009 Gallup poll found that 80 percent of Americans wanted government to set higher fuel efficiency standards for automobiles and that 70 percent believed it should impose mandatory controls on carbon dioxide emissions by businesses. Two years later, a Gallup poll found that over 70 percent of Americans worried about pollution of air, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and drinking water and about contamination of soil and water by toxic waste.
Government policies have made a big difference. America’s air and water are now much cleaner than they were a generation ago. Americans now accept recycling as a standard everyday practice. They expect and want the government to require car manufacturers to build cars that are safe and energy efficient and that limit the emission of pollutants.
One of the most successful progressive movements of the past generation addressed the public health dangers of tobacco use. After starting slowly in the 1950s, by 1969 the antismoking movement had persuaded Congress to enact the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, which required cigarette companies to include the following warning on all packages: “The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health.” In 1970, Congress passed and President Nixon signed a measure banning cigarette advertising on radio and television. Public opinion shifted dramatically, especially after scientists documented that “secondhand smoke” posed a dangerous health risk to non-smokers. Cities, states, and the federal government adopted laws raising taxes on cigarettes and banning smoking in restaurants, schools, airplanes, and other public places. Between 1965 and 1990, adult smoking declined from 42 percent to 25 percent. By 2010, only 19 percent of American adults smoked cigarettes. The tobacco industry, once viewed as an invincible political force, had become an almost helpless giant, increasingly weakened by attacks from public health groups, politicians, and the general public.
The first decade of the 21st century was not simply a story of steady progress. It was full of turmoil, as conservative political forces and ideas competed with their progressive counterparts to shape American society. It began with the controversial 2000 presidential election in which the Supreme Court, not the voters, decided who would occupy the White House.
The Bush presidency was the culmination of several decades of successful political and ideological battle by business and conservative groups to reshape the public debate. In August 1971, Lewis Powell, a prominent attorney and member of the boards of eleven corporations (who later that year would be appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon), wrote an influential memo to the US Chamber of Commerce, “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System,” calling on the business community to go on the attack against activists. He warned of a growing threat to the business establishment posed by consumer advocates, environmentalists, labor unions, and other voices and of the declining public support for business as reflected in opinion surveys. He particularly pointed to the growing liberalism on college campuses, in the media, and in the courts, which had become increasingly receptive to class-action lawsuits against big corporations. Powell argued that the American capitalist system was under attack. The changing mood, he warned, could ultimately threaten business’s ability to operate freely and to generate adequate profits to survive. Business Week echoed this view in its October 12th, 1974, issue: “It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow—the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more. . . . Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in modern economic history compares with the selling job that must be done to make people accept this reality.”
The Chamber and business leaders took this advice to heart and began a “selling job” that changed American politics. They began funding a powerful network of organizations designed to shift public attitudes and beliefs over the course of years and decades. In 1972, the CEOs of General Electric and Alcoa founded the Business Roundtable, a lobby group made up of the heads of the nation’s 200 largest corporations. Inspired by the Powell memo, Joseph Coors, the conservative head of the large brewery company, wrote a large check to establish a think tank called the Heritage Foundation to enlist academics and journalists to come up with conservative policy proposals. The memo inspired the creation of other conservative policy and lobby groups such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Accuracy in Academe, and other opinion-shaping institutions. The California Chamber of Commerce launched a conservative nonprofit law firm, the Pacific Legal Foundation, the first of about a dozen conservative litigation groups. In 1973, a conservative political operative, Paul Weyrich, started the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to provide a forum for state legislatures to share ideas for laws against abortion and in favor of school prayer. Within a few years, however, big corporations—including Coors, Amway, IBM, Ford, Philip Morris, Exxon, Texaco, and Shell Oil—began donating funds to ALEC, and the group shifted its focus toward promoting state legislation to limit government regulation of business. William Simon, former treasury secretary under Nixon, became head of the John M. Olin Foundation and began providing universities with donations to hire conservative faculty members and to fund conservative student organizations. Other corporate-funded foundations, such as the Scaife, Koch, Smith Richardson, and Bradley Foundations, soon followed Olin’s example.
These long-term investments laid the groundwork for the election in 1980 of Ronald Reagan, who had a “hands-off business” philosophy. “Government is not a solution to our problem,” Reagan said. “Government is the problem.” Too many government regulations, too much taxation, and too many government employees stifled personal freedom and economic growth. The attack on “big government” and the notion of “getting the government off our backs,” once viewed as extreme conservative ideas, moved from the margins to the mainstream.
During his first campaign for president in 1992, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton correctly observed that “the Reagan-Bush years have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.” Clinton initially had bold plans to expand the New Deal and Great Society legacies. These hopes were quickly dashed. Early in the Clinton administration, the Republicans (led by minority leader Senator Bob Dole) and the Democratic majority in Congress thwarted the president’s efforts to enact a public investment plan to stimulate jobs, universal health insurance, and even a child-immunization program. After the November 1994 elections put a Republican majority in Congress, any significant progress on such matters was impossible. After a few years as president, Clinton proclaimed, echoing Reagan, that “the era of big government is over,” which he carried out by slashing welfare benefits for poor children.
The business-sponsored attack on government reached a crescendo during the eight-year administration of George W. Bush, who took office in 2001. Bush will be remembered primarily for three things. First, during Bush’s first year in office, terrorists attacked New York, Washington, DC, and rural Pennsylvania, the first foreign attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor in 1941. The attacks led to the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan (which lasted more than a decade) and the crackdown on civil liberties and immigrants as part of the “war on terrorism.” Second, the Bush administration bungled the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, allowing the city and its people to suffer unprecedented displacement, economic hardship, and property destruction in the wake of the storm. Third, the Bush administration and bank regulators looked the other way while Wall Street banks triggered a meltdown of the nation’s housing market and financial system, leading to a deep and prolonged recession that persisted after his successor took office in 2009.
During the Bush years, a combination of forces that had begun decades earlier triggered the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. One force was the gluttony of merger mania and outrageous corporate compensation. Second was business’s persistent assault on labor unions, which caused the weakening of this country’s most effective bastion against economic inequality. Third was a dramatic cut in federal taxes for the wealthy and corporate America (resulting in the lowest tax burden on the rich in generations). Fourth was the political influence of big business, which persuaded Congress to weaken regulations designed to prevent banks from taking on too much risk or engaging in predatory practices. Finally, the conservative movement—led by corporate-backed think tanks, right-wing media like Fox News, the Republican Party, and the Tea Party—effectively led an all-out attack on government initiatives to address inequality and economic insecurity and to protect consumers, workers, and the environment from abusive businesses.
The Bush years saw dozens of corporate scandals that ripped off billions of dollars from the government, stockholders, and consumers. For example, top executives of Enron, a large energy corporation, hid billions of dollars of debt, the result of failed deals, from the company’s shareholders. It also pressured its auditors, Arthur Andersen, to ignore these problems. As a result, shareholders lost more than $60 billion.
Bush rolled back regulations to limit greenhouse gas emissions, handed the pharmaceutical industry windfall profits by restricting Medicare’s ability to negotiate for lower prices for medicine, and allowed the Food and Drug Administration to permit food companies to list health claims on labels before they had been scientifically proven. The Bush administration even used the war in Iraq as an opportunity for corporate profit making: it awarded defense contracts to Halliburton, a company once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, and other politically connected firms, a practice that was soon labeled “crony capitalism.”
No corporate sector acted as recklessly and irresponsibly as the financial industry. The newly deregulated banking sector had the freedom to charge usurious interest rates on mortgages and credit cards, to bundle and sell collateralized debt obligations and mortgage-backed securities, to take on astonishing amounts of toxic debt, and to make astounding profits while squeezing consumers. The majority of American families, suffering from decades of declining wages, had to borrow more and more money to pay for their mortgages, college tuition, and other basics. Banks invented new “loan products” with hidden costs and fees, low or no down payments, and low initial interest rates. They often rejected applications for conventional loans from families who had sufficient income and good credit, pushing them into taking out riskier loans. Black and Hispanic consumers were much more likely to be victims of such predatory practices than white consumers, including those with comparable incomes and credit worthiness. These risky “subprime” loans made up 8.6 percent of all mortgages in 2001 but had soared to 20.1 percent by 2006. After 2004, more than 90 percent of subprime mortgages came with adjustable rates that had initially low interest rates that exploded after several years. As these interest rates rose, the adjustable rate loans got more expensive and families could not make their mortgage payments. Soon, large financial institutions were holding portfolios of loans that were worthless.
Every part of the financial industry—mortgage companies like Countrywide Savings, commercial banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America, Wall Street investment banks like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, and ratings agencies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s—played a part in this fiasco. Executives and officers of some of these companies cashed out before the market crashed, most notably Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide Savings, the largest subprime lender. Mozilo made more than $270 million in profits selling stocks and options from 2004 to the beginning of 2007.
But borrowers were not so lucky. When the dust settled, millions of Americans were no longer able to make their monthly mortgage payments. Banks initiated a massive wave of foreclosures that touched low-income urban areas and middle-class suburban neighborhoods alike. According to the Center for Responsible Lending, from January 2007 through the end of 2009, banks completed 2.5 million foreclosures, most of them on owners who had taken out mortgages between 2005 and 2008. After the housing bubble burst, the wealth of American homeowners fell by some $9 trillion, or nearly 40 percent. Many families found themselves “under water,” with mortgage balances that exceeded the values of their homes. The drop in housing values affected not only families facing foreclosure but also families in the surrounding community, because having a few foreclosed homes in a neighborhood brings down the value of other houses in the area. The neighborhood blight created by the housing crisis was much worse in African American and Hispanic areas. African Americans and Hispanics were almost twice as likely as whites to lose their homes to foreclosures.
In July 2011, Michael Cembalest, the chief investment officer of J. P. Morgan Chase, issued a report to the giant banking firm’s clients in which he observed that profit margins of the Standard & Poor’s 500 companies were at their highest levels since the mid-1960s. How could that be, when the nation was mired in a deep recession and almost one in ten Americans were out of work? Cembalest’s answer: “U.S. labor compensation is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and U.S. GDP [gross domestic product].” He explained that “reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement in margins.”
We have seen this before. In 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation’s total income. When the gains of economic growth go to the very rich, the rest do not have enough purchasing power to buy goods and services. That is a recipe for economic disaster. The next year, Wall Street crashed, triggering the worst economic crisis in US history.
Thanks to the New Deal and then World War II, the United States climbed out of the Depression. Government spending—for highways, housing, schools, universities, and the military—catalyzed three decades of postwar prosperity. The growing influence of the labor movement assured that the prosperity would be widely shared, lifting a majority of Americans into the middle class. The incomes of the poor and the middle class grew faster than the incomes of the rich. Inequality declined. By the late 1970s, the top 1 percent had only 9 percent of the nation’s total income.
After that, however, inequality grew. By 2008, the richest 1 percent of Americans—the 1.3 million families with incomes over $386,000—had a quarter of the nation’s income and owned 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. That widening economic divide has meant a declining standard of living and shrinking opportunities for most Americans, because the costs of basics, such as housing, health care, food, and college tuition, has increased much faster than wages. As a result, more Americans found themselves in debt. The median household income (in inflation-adjusted dollars) fell from $53,388 in 1999 to $49,777 ten years later. The number of Americans living in poverty grew from 31.5 million in 2000 to 46.1 million in 2010—from 11.3 percent to 15.1 percent of all Americans. During that period, the proportion of children under six living in poverty rose from 16.9 percent to 25.3 percent. Meanwhile, the number of Americans without health insurance increased from 36.5 million to 49.9 million—a jump from 13.1 percent to 16.3 percent of the population. According to the official statistics, 9 percent of Americans—14 million people—were unemployed in 2011. Nearly half had been jobless for more than six months—a record. If one adds workers who were so discouraged that they had given up looking for work and people who were underemployed (working part-time but wanting full-time jobs), the number of jobless Americans skyrocketed to more than 25 million.
Over the last quarter century, the super-rich gobbled up most of the economic gains. Between 1979 and 2007, the incomes of the richest 1 percent of American households grew by 224 percent. But the richest of the rich widened the gulf even more. The top 0.1 percent—one-tenth of 1 percent, or one out of a thousand Americans—saw their incomes grow by 390 percent.
It is hard to fathom the excessive wealth held by the handful of Americans in that stratosphere. Although sports and show business celebrities get the bulk of attention, most of the people in this category are top executives in the largest corporations. In 1979, the average compensation earned by the CEO of a major corporation was thirty-five times greater than that of the typical worker. By 2010, it was 325 times greater.
In 2010, the CEOs of the 500 largest corporations collected an average of $10.8 million in compensation. Even CEOs whose companies performed poorly, laid off workers, and saw declines in their stock prices received significant pay raises.
At the very top of the economic pyramid are the wealthiest 400 Americans, profiled each year by Forbes magazine. To make the list in 2010, an individual needed at least $1.1 billion in wealth. These 400 people have a total of $1.52 trillion in wealth. In a society of over 300 million people, these 400 people have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans.
On his weekly radio show on September 9, 2011, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of America’s richest people, warned that rising unemployment and poverty in the United States was a ticking time bomb that could explode in a wave of riots. “You have a lot of kids graduating college [who] can’t find jobs,” Bloomberg said. “That’s what happened in Cairo. That’s what happened in Madrid.” He reminded listeners about the recent uprising that overthrew Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak and the protests against the Spanish government’s austerity measures. “You don’t want those kinds of riots here.”
Eight days later, on September 17, a few hundred people gathered at Zuccotti Park near the city’s financial district to protest corporate greed, income and wealth inequality, and the corrupting influence of major banks and global corporations on American politics. They did not riot. They engaged in peaceful, nonviolent protest. The organizers’ initial idea was to camp out for weeks or months to emulate the large-scale demonstrations that had erupted earlier that year in Egypt, Spain, Israel, and elsewhere. The activists called their protest Occupy Wall Street and said they were speaking on behalf of the 99 percent of the population against the richest and most powerful 1 percent. Within a few weeks, similar demonstrations had spread to dozens of other cities across the country.
Riots are expressions of hot anger—outrage about social conditions—but they are not truly political protests. They do not have a clear objective, a policy agenda, or a strategy for bringing about change. They only bring more hardship. The Los Angeles riots in April 1992 left fifty-five people dead and caused more than $1 billion in property damage in inner-city neighborhoods. Almost twenty years later, many of the stores and other buildings in the riot-torn area had still not been rebuilt.
Social protest movements, in contrast, reflect cold anger. They are intentional, organized, and strategic. Activists carefully select the target to raise public awareness about an issue. A handful of people may engage in nonviolent civil disobedience, which could result in fines and jail time, but most participants find other ways to contribute to the cause. They attend rallies and marches, donate money, make phone calls and lick envelopes, distribute leaflets, write letters to newspapers, meet with and lobby elected officials, and encourage friends to vote.
Riots occur when people are hopeless. Protest takes place when people are hopeful—when people believe not only that things should be different but also that they can be different. The women’s suffragists who chained themselves to the fence outside the White House in the early 1900s, the farmers who showed up at their neighbors’ homes during the Depression and stopped banks from carrying out foreclosures, the auto workers who occupied the Flint, Michigan, GM plant in 1937 to protest wage cuts and layoffs, the college students who waged sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in the early 1960s, the antiwar activists who protested the Vietnam War by disrupting military induction centers and defense contractors’ offices, and the environmentalists who blocked the construction of nuclear power plants in the 1970s helped bring about much-needed change.
The first decade of the 21st century witnessed similar movements for social justice, important milestone victories, and momentum for future changes.
In Florida, where George W. Bush beat John Kerry by only 381,000 votes (winning 52 percent of the votes cast) in the presidential race, voters favored a ballot measure raising the minimum wage to $6.15 an hour (a dollar over the federal level) by 3.1 million votes (71.3 percent to 28.7 percent). A broad coalition of labor, religious, and community groups, initiated by ACORN, mounted the campaign, whereas major business groups—especially hotel, restaurant, and tourism industry firms, including Disney World—sponsored expensive opposition efforts. That same day in Nevada, Bush narrowly beat Kerry by 21,500 votes, but voters backed a similar boost in the minimum wage by 293,328 votes (68.3 percent to 31.6 percent). The Nevada campaign was led by the state’s labor movement. Obviously, many Floridians and Nevadans who voted for Bush also voted to raise the minimum wage. Both states also saw a significant increase in turnout among low-income and working-class voters, thanks to grassroots voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns by coalitions of progressive groups.
Buoyed by these victories, ACORN and its union allies looked for other key states where they could not only win ballot measures to hike the minimum wage but also increase turnout among likely Democrats—a liberal counterpart to conservative efforts to put anti–gay marriage measures on the ballot. In 2006, voters in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, and Ohio approved measures to raise state minimum wage levels by $1 to $1.70 an hour, joining Florida, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington, which had not only increased their minimum wages but also included annual cost-of-living adjustments.
These statewide campaigns were part of one of the most successful grassroots crusades of the past several decades—the “living wage” movement. Baltimore passed the first local law in 1994 following a campaign led by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and BUILD (a federation of forty-six churches affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation network of community groups). The law raised the base pay for workers employed by companies with city contracts to $6.10 an hour from $4.25, the federal minimum at the time. The idea caught on. By 2007, 145 cities and counties—including St. Louis, St. Paul, Minneapolis, Boston, Los Angeles, Oakland, Denver, Chicago, New Orleans, Detroit, Sacramento, and San Francisco—had passed similar laws. In 2007, Maryland became the first state to pass a living-wage law. As the new century opened, students at Harvard, the University of Miami, and other colleges mounted successful campaigns to win living wages for campus employees.
The local grassroots campaigns helped inject the phrase “living wage” into the nation’s vocabulary and consciousness. Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 best-selling book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, helped popularize the phrase “working poor.” Community activists in Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities waged campaigns to stop Walmart from opening new big-box stores, criticizing the company (the nation’s largest employer) for paying employees poverty-level wages.
Polls consistently found that Americans believed that full-time workers should not have to live in poverty. By 2010, two-thirds of Americans (including a majority of Republicans) supported raising the minimum wage to at least $10 an hour at a time when the federal minimum wage was $7.25, which amounts to about $15,000 a year, far below the poverty threshold.
More than 500,000 people marched in downtown Los Angeles to protest federal legislation that would build a 700-mile-long security fence on the US-Mexico border and penalize people who assist undocumented immigrants in obtaining food, housing, or medical services. Unions, religious organizations, and immigrant rights groups organized the rally and publicized it through Spanish-language radio shows and newspapers, which encouraged participants to bring American flags. The mobilization against the legislation was given a big boost when Cardinal Roger Mahony, leader of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, announced that he would instruct his priests and parishioners to defy the legislation if it ever became law. The Los Angeles rally—orchestrated by labor leader Maria Elena Durazo and thirty-five-year-old Angelica Salas of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles—was part of an unprecedented nationwide effort to organize immigrants and their supporters.
In 2001, unions and immigrant rights groups, as well as the Mexican government, worked to persuade Congress and President Bush to grant legal status to many illegal immigrants. The September 11 attacks derailed the momentum for comprehensive immigration reform as the Bush administration shifted its focus to border security. Five years later, rallies in Los Angeles and other cities triggered a new phase in the immigrant rights movement. Much of its focus involved fighting a wave of anti-immigrant laws in cities and states, but the movement also pushed for laws to expand immigrants’ rights. One of its signal victories was passage of the California Dream Act in 2011, allowing undocumented students who grew up in the United States to apply for and receive state-funded scholarships for college education. The activists viewed that success as a stepping-stone to winning a similar law at the federal level.
Even in antiunion Houston, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) successfully organized 5,300 janitors, mostly immigrants, winning higher pay and better working conditions. Over several years, SEIU had built support among local religious leaders, elected officials, and community groups, who put pressure on the global investors who owned many of the city’s largest office buildings. Unions also used the leverage of their pension funds, which were invested in the real estate companies that owned much of downtown Houston and that hired a handful of cleaning companies employing the majority of the city’s janitors.
One year later, many of the janitors went on strike—which led to mass arrests—to win a decent contract. They won major raises as well as health insurance. Under the agreement, pay for janitors increased to $6.25 an hour, to $7.25 an hour a year later, and to $7.75 in 2009. Houston mayor Bill White disagreed with the union’s militant tactics but still encouraged the cleaning companies to negotiate with the janitors. A year later, the union helped elect one of its own members to the Houston City Council. The Houston workers drew on lessons learned from SEIU’s successful “Justice for Janitors” campaign, which began in the 1980s, spread to more than thirty cities, and combined worker mobilization and financial pressure on global office owners. More than 100,000 workers fought for and often won better wages, better conditions, and health insurance, often utilizing civil disobedience to gain public attention and sympathy. Led by SEIU organizer Stephen Lerner, the struggle was turned into a popular movie, Bread and Roses, directed by Ken Loach and released in 2000.
An unlikely coalition of the Teamsters union, the Sierra Club, the National Resources Defense Council, and local public health and community groups waged an ambitious and successful effort to clean up the country’s largest and filthiest port. More than 40 percent of the goods that come into the country use the adjacent ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The ships and trucks that carry the goods spew toxic pollutants that result in high rates of cancer and asthma (especially among children), particularly in the communities near the port. Every year 1,200 deaths in the Los Angeles area are caused by port-related pollution. As more than 10,000 trucks idle in long lines waiting to load goods from the ships, drivers inhale the pollution, leading to serious respiratory diseases. “After talking and meeting, we realized that issues affecting workers and communities are inextricably linked,” explained Patricia Castellanos, the thirty-eight-year-old director of the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, which was formed in 2006 at the initiative of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy.
Two years later, the mayor-appointed Harbor Commission, which oversees the Port of Los Angeles, passed the Clean Trucks Program. It required all pre-1994 trucks to be gone by the end of 2009, to be replaced by new clean trucks paid for largely by container fees. Three years after the program was implemented, diesel truck emissions had been reduced at the port by 80 percent. The coalition also sought to improve the living standards of the more than 15,000 port truck drivers, who were classified as independent contractors but who earned about $11 an hour, not enough to pay for gas and insurance, maintain their trucks, obtain health insurance, and pay themselves a living wage. The second part of the Clean Trucks Program required the Harbor Commission to set standards for trucking companies, who would employ the drivers and make them eligible, as employees, to unionize to improve their wages and benefits. The American Trucking Association sued to challenge the ban against independent trucking contractors, litigation that was still in the courts at the end of 2011. The Los Angeles effort sparked similar efforts by Teamsters, public health and environmental groups, and community organizations in other port cities around the country.
For six days in early December 2008, 240 members of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers union illegally occupied their Chicago workplace after their employer, Republic Windows and Doors, abruptly told them that it was shutting down the factory and denying the workers severance pay or the vacation pay they had earned. Asked at a press conference about the workers’ takeover in his hometown, Obama, still the president-elect, said, “When it comes to the situation here in Chicago with the workers who are asking for their benefits and payments they have earned, I think they are absolutely right. What’s happening to them is reflective of what’s happening across this economy.”
By quickly endorsing the workers’ protest, Obama showed the kind of bold leadership that progressives had been hoping for. His comment put pressure on the company’s management and on Bank of America (its lender) to forge a solution. Following Obama’s lead, local politicians sided with the workers. The Chicago police did not arrest the workers, despite their flagrant violation of the company’s private property rights. The protest garnered national media attention, triggering donations and support from around the country. Emboldened by Obama’s support, the workers—led by thirty-nine-year-old local union president Armando Robles and thirty-six-year-old organizer Leah Fried—pledged to keep their sit-down strike going. Eventually they reached a solution, the factory remained open, and the workers kept their jobs and their union contract.
Also in December 2008, after a brutal fifteen-year organizing battle, workers at the world’s largest hog-killing plant voted to unionize. The workers at the 5,000-employee Smithfield Packing slaughterhouse had rejected union membership in 1994 and 1997, after being subjected to the company’s illegal harassment and intimidation, in a state known for its antiunion climate. The workers’ vote to join the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) was one of the largest private-sector union victories in many years and the biggest in UFCW’s history. About 60 percent of the slaughterhouse’s workers were African American. “It feels great,” Wanda Blue, a hog cutter, told the New York Times. Blue, an African American, made $11.90 an hour after working at Smithfield for five years. “It’s like how Obama felt when he won. We made history.”
Following a year-long pressure campaign orchestrated by United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), Russell Athletics, a clothing company, agreed to rehire 1,200 workers in Honduras who lost their jobs when the company closed its factory soon after workers had unionized. Russell agreed to open a new plant in Honduras as a unionized factory and pledged not to fight efforts by workers to unionize at the company’s seven other factories in the country.
After Russell had shut the factory the previous January, USAS mobilized student activists on about a hundred campuses—including Columbia University, the University of Michigan, Cornell, Boston College, the University of Miami, New York University, Stanford, and the University of North Carolina—who persuaded their universities to sever licensing agreements with Russell. The contracts had allowed the firm to put university logos on T-shirts, sweatshirts, and other articles of clothing and sell them in campus stores and elsewhere. USAS also picketed the National Basketball Association (NBA) finals in Orlando, Florida, and Los Angeles to protest the NBA’s own licensing agreement with Russell. In addition, students distributed leaflets inside Sports Authority stores and sent Twitter messages to customers of the Dick’s Sporting Goods chain, urging them to boycott Russell products. The group helped arrange a letter signed by sixty-five members of Congress, who voiced “grave concern about reports of severe violations” of workers’ rights at Russell. The reports came from the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), a nonprofit human rights group founded in 2000 to monitor conditions in clothing factories around the world.
“For us, it was very important to receive the support of the universities,” Moises Alvarado, president of the union at the closed plant in Honduras, told the New York Times. “We are impressed by the social conscience of the students in the United States.”
The student antisweatshop movement began in 1998, when Duke University students took over the university president’s office. Within several years, about 200 colleges had adopted antisweatshop codes of conduct that required licensees to use factories that pay a living wage, follow adequate labor standards, and allow workers to form independent unions. Using those codes as leverage, students won some important victories, pressuring global apparel firms such as Nike to set limits on mandatory and unpaid overtime and to reduce sexual harassment of female employees (including requiring female workers to use birth control pills) in the factories making the company’s clothes. USAS helped workers win recognition of their unions in some factories.
Implementing these standards proved difficult, however. College-bound goods, a $3 billion-a-year industry, are only a small fraction of the products made by the thousands of apparel factories around the world, and monitoring all those workplaces was an impossible task. In 2010, USAS embraced the Alta Gracia clothing brand. Alta Gracia clothing is produced in a unionized factory in the Dominican Republic. The brand was created with the help of WRC as a model to demonstrate that socially responsible clothing production was not only possible but also profitable. The factory opened in 2010, and its 120 workers earned three times the country’s minimum wage, plus overtime pay. The Alta Gracia factory is cooler than other nearby workplaces, with good ventilation, plenty of windows, overhead lighting that helps workers avoid eye strain, and comfortable chairs to reduce workers’ back pain. By the fall of 2011, several hundred colleges were carrying Alta Gracia’s T-shirts and sweatshirts, which were sold at the same prices as clothing made by Nike, Russell, and other brands.
The student activists viewed their campaigns as part of the global fair-trade movement, mobilizing consumers to demand better treatment of the workers in Third World countries who produce food, clothing, and other products.
On March 9, more than 5,000 protesters picketed outside the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the powerful insurance industry trade association, was holding its annual lobbying conference. About fifty public figures—including writer Barbara Ehrenreich, AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka, the Center for Community Change’s Deepak Bhargava, and former congressman Bob Edgar—participated in civil disobedience. The following day, twenty-four victims of insurance industry abuses—people who had lost family members, suffered because they were denied care, or gone bankrupt because of premium costs—confronted House Minority Whip Eric Cantor and other opponents of reform. Their question was simple: are politicians on the side of consumers or of the insurance industry?
The protest—led by Health Care for America Now (HCAN), a broad coalition of more than a thousand labor, consumer, civil rights, antipoverty, community, netroots (mobilizing via the Internet), and religious groups—was part of the endgame effort to salvage a victory from what appeared to be certain defeat. It represented an escalation in HCAN’s efforts to spotlight the destructive role of the insurance industry.
In Obama’s first year, an unholy alliance of the health care industry lobby groups (insurance, pharmaceutical, and hospital groups), the conservative media echo chamber (Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, Rush Limbaugh, and the right-wing blogosphere), extreme conservative forces within the Republican Party, and their allies among Tea Party ultraright groups threatened to stymie reform, in large part by influencing moderate Democrats either concerned about reelection or held hostage by campaign contributions from the medical industry. In the summer and fall, the Obama administration had lost momentum and wasted precious months as it encouraged Senator Max Baucus, a moderate Democrat from Montana and chair of the Senate Finance Committee, to pursue a futile bipartisan deal. From the beginning, Obama sent mixed signals on whether he truly supported a strong public option—a Medicare-like government insurance plan. In the meantime, the Tea Party movement seized the mantle of popular unrest, demonizing the administration’s health care proposal. They stoked fear and confusion by warning that Obama’s “socialized medicine” plan would create “death panels,” subsidize health care for illegal immigrants, pay for abortions, and force people to drop their current insurance.
White House strategists, in regular contact with HCAN and other progressive groups, initially discouraged activists from mobilizing protests. In late August 2009, seeing defeat on the horizon, HCAN—whose largest members included SEIU, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, ACORN, US Action, and MoveOn—regrouped. It mounted more than 200 increasingly feisty protest events in forty-six states, including demonstrations at insurance company offices and protests at the homes of the CEOs of the three largest health insurance corporations—CIGNA, United Health, and WellPoint. In some cities, protesters engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience and were arrested.
The large demonstration outside the AHIP conference was part of the activists’ final push to rescue health care reform. The action coincided with Obama’s cross-country speaking tour to energize voters to pressure members of Congress to vote for reform. “Let’s seize reform. It’s within our grasp,” Obama implored his audience at Arcadia University outside Philadelphia. He denounced the insurance companies, which “continue to ration care on the basis of who’s sick and who’s healthy.” Forgoing the bipartisan rhetoric that for months had frustrated activists, Obama taunted Republican critics who had stymied reform: “You had ten years. What happened? What were you doing?”
A few weeks later, Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, extending health insurance to most Americans and ending the industry’s policy of denying coverage to people with illnesses. Progressives were disappointed that it did not include a public option, but most agreed that, for all its shortcomings, it was one of the most important pieces of social legislation in the nation’s history.
Following a decade-long battle, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) signed an agreement with Florida tomato growers and several major fast-food chains to pay the farmworkers a penny more for every pound of fruit they harvest. Led by thirty-year-old Lucas Benitez, CIW scored its first major victory in 2005, when Taco Bell agreed to meet demands to improve wages and working conditions for the Florida tomato pickers in response to a national consumer boycott led by college students and religious groups. Students at twenty-one colleges persuaded their institutions to remove Taco Bell from their campuses, and students at more than 300 other colleges waged “Boot the Bell” campaigns. Taco Bell agreed to increase the amount it paid for Florida tomatoes by a penny per pound, with the increase to go directly to workers’ wages.
It took more pressure to get McDonald’s, Burger King, and other chains to reach a similar agreement, and several more years before the CIW pushed aside its biggest obstacle: the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, a trade association that acts as a middleman; the association finally agreed to pass along the extra penny a pound to the workers. Florida growers produce $520 million worth of the nation’s $1.3 billion annual tomato crop. “The impact of the penny per pound is a minimal addition to our purchase,” an executive with Whole Foods told the New York Times, but it significantly improved living standards for farmworkers, who are not covered by federal minimum-wage laws. Under the agreement, Florida farmworkers’ average earnings increased from $10,000 to $17,000 a year.
In June, the New York State Senate approved a bill legalizing same-sex marriage by a 33–29 vote. Four members of the Republican majority joined all but one Democrat in supporting the measure. Gay rights activists, with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo, mounted an intense, emotional, and effective campaign aimed at the handful of fence-sitting lawmakers. Having failed the previous year to win a legislative victory, the state’s fragmented gay rights groups agreed to unite into a single coalition (New Yorkers United for Marriage) and adopt a common lobbying strategy.
Moments before the roll call, it was still unclear how some senators would vote. The tide appeared to turn when Senator Mark J. Grisanti, a Republican from Buffalo who had campaigned as an opponent of same-sex marriage, told his colleagues he now believed he had been wrong and would support the measure. “I apologize for those who feel offended,” Grisanti said, adding, “I cannot deny a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, the people of my district and across this state, the state of New York, and those people who make this the great state that it is the same rights that I have with my wife.”
Twenty-nine states have enacted constitutional amendments blocking samesex marriage. In eighteen of those states, the amendments also ban domestic partnerships or civil unions. New York became the sixth state (along with the District of Columbia) to legalize same-sex marriage. The victory in New York—which became the largest state where gay and lesbian couples can marry—gave the national gay rights movement a much-needed boost.
The Occupy Wall Street movement that began in New York soon spread to cities across the country, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Portland, Nashville, Atlanta, and San Francisco, as well as to many suburbs and small towns. Protesters created encampments in local parks, where dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people slept in tents at night and organized demonstrations and rallies during the day. Some protestors engaged in civil disobedience at bank offices and elsewhere, leading to arrests.
The protesters included veteran and first-time activists from a wide swath of social and economic backgrounds. The movement reflected Americans’ pent-up frustrations and anger about big business’s culpability for the nation’s widening economic gap and declining standard of living. It also reflected the coming together of many separate movements and activists that had been fighting for social justice since the start of the 21st century—for workers’ rights, financial reform, immigrant rights, women’s equality, environmental justice, and other battles. It was fueled not only by the widening gap in wealth and income but also by outrage over the Bush administration’s calamitous economic and military policies and by frustration over the inability of the Obama administration to make good on many of its promises to move America in a new direction.
The mainstream media initially ignored Occupy Wall Street. Then they ridiculed it, focusing on the spectacle of the protestors rather than on the issues. But after a few weeks, the media began taking the movement’s concerns seriously. A growing number of stories, columns, and editorials addressed the problem of corporate influence and income inequality. The movement had obviously struck a nerve with the public. A Time magazine survey conducted a month after the establishment of the first encampment found that 54 percent of Americans had a favorable impression of the Occupy protests, whereas just 23 percent had a negative impression. By contrast, just 27 percent had favorable views of the Tea Party.
Many Americans who did not agree with the Occupiers’ tactics or rhetoric nevertheless shared their indignation at the outrageous corporate profits and excessive executive compensation that were occurring side by side with an epidemic of layoffs and foreclosures. According to a Pew Research Center national survey released in mid-December, most Americans (77 percent)—including a majority (53 percent) of Republicans—agreed that “there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and corporations.” Pew also discovered that 61 percent of Americans—including 76 percent of Democrats, 61 percent of independents, and 39 percent of Republicans—believed that “the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy.” A significant majority (57 percent) of Americans—including 73 percent of Democrats, 57 percent of independents, and 38 percent of Republicans—thought that wealthy people do not pay their fair share of taxes.
The phrase “We are the 99 percent” became a much-repeated slogan. MoveOn, faith-based groups, and major labor unions embraced the Occupy movement. Around the country, union members joined Occupiers at rallies and protests. College students also joined in, organizing campus protests against skyrocketing tuition costs. At Harvard, where students pitched tents on campus, the protests helped persuade the university to raise wages and benefits for the college custodians. At City University of New York, fifteen students protesting tuition hikes were arrested when they refused to leave a building where the university’s trustees were meeting.
In Washington, DC, and in cities around the country, many Democratic politicians jumped on the bandwagon, voicing support for Occupy Wall Street’s grievances, although Republicans were generally hostile. After being grilled during congressional hearings by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke reluctantly expressed his agreement with the grievances of the Occupy Wall Street protest. In a speech in Kansas in December, Obama said that the nation’s “gaping” economic inequality was “the defining issue of our time.” He added, “This is a make or break moment for the middle class. At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home and secure their retirement.” Obama criticized the “breathtaking greed” that has led to the widening income divide. “This isn’t about class warfare,” he said. “This is about the nation’s welfare.” Democrats in Congress invoked the “99 percent” to press for passage of Obama’s jobs act, to raise taxes on the wealthy, to extend unemployment benefits, and to strengthen mine safety regulations. In contrast, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, called the protesters “a growing mob,” and GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House, described Occupy’s protests as “un-American” and “class warfare.”
In November, Mississippi voters rejected Initiative 26, a “personhood” initiative that would have made the state the first to ban abortion by declaring that life begins at conception. The initiative, which proposed to give constitutional rights to a fertilized egg, would have banned emergency contraception, birth control pills, intrauterine devices (IUDs), and fertility treatments as well as all abortions, even in cases of rape or incest or to save the life of the woman or girl. For more than a year before the election, antiabortion activists had been pushing Congress to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood’s family-planning clinics. By November 2011, every Republican candidate for president had endorsed the idea, as had many Republicans in Congress.
Reproductive rights supporters had defeated antichoice state ballot measures in South Dakota, Colorado, and California in 2006 and 2008 and in Colorado in 2010, but they were worried about the outcome in conservative Mississippi. Antiabortion crusaders expected Mississippi to be the first “personhood” victory. Two-thirds of Mississippians had identified themselves as “prolife” in a poll two years earlier. “If it can’t pass here, it’d be hard to pass anywhere,” said a University of Mississippi political science professor.
A month before election day, polls predicted the initiative would pass by 20 points, but a poll taken a few days before the election showed that the contest was a toss-up. The campaign against Initiative 26 was led by the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood, which formed Mississippians for Healthy Families. Planned Parenthood members from across the country made phone calls to Mississippi voters, while local activists waged a campaign using television and radio ads, mailers, and door-to-door canvassing. The campaign was designed not only to make sure that prochoice voters went to the polls, but also to persuade many “prolife” Mississippians that Initiative 26 went too far. The Mississippi State Medical Association warned that doctors could be charged with murder or wrongful death for “employing techniques physicians have used for years.” The strategy worked. According to Planned Parenthood, polls found that when voters were given information about the “personhood” amendment, support for it dropped significantly. “Concerns that the measure would empower the government to intrude in intimate medical decisions far afield from abortion—involving not just infertility, but also birth control, potentially deadly ectopic pregnancies and the treatment of pregnant women with cancer—were decisive in its defeat,” the New York Times reported. Voters firmly rejected Initiative 26 by a 58 percent–42 percent margin.
In early February, Wisconsin’s Republican governor Scott Walker unveiled proposals to scrap public employees’ collective bargaining rights and slash funding for public education and services. Part of the GOP’s ongoing war against unions, Walker’s “budget repair” bill shifted pension and health insurance costs to state and local workers, even as he proposed cutting taxes for corporations and the rich by $200 million over two years. Walker also announced that he would refuse to bargain with the state’s public employee unions.
Walker’s actions triggered large-scale protests, including a rally with more than 150,000 protesters in March at the state capitol building, including thousands of high school students chanting “We support our teachers! We support public education!” The demonstrators then moved their protest from the streets to the ballot box, mounting recall efforts against Republican state senators. Prounion Democrats picked up two state senate seats, but they fell one short of winning a majority in the Senate, which left the law still standing.
The events in Wisconsin rippled across the country, as public opinion polls showed growing support for public workers’ right to join a union and to bargain collectively with employers by a nearly 2–1 margin. The Wisconsin uprising inspired similar demonstrations in Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, and other states with Republican governors who hoped to follow Walker’s example.
On the same day in November that Mississippians stood up for women’s rights, Ohio voters cast their votes for workers’ rights. They overturned a controversial law that would have weakened public employee unions. Backed by newly elected Republican governor John Kasich and passed by the Republican-led legislature, the new law sharply curbed collective bargaining rights for 350,000 police officers, firefighters, teachers, snowplow drivers, and other government employees and increased public workers’ share of health insurance payments. It also gutted unions’ political clout by making it harder for them to collect dues and fund their political action committees.
We Are Ohio, a labor-funded coalition that led the repeal effort, collected nearly 1.3 million signatures during the summer to put the repeal of the law (SB 5) on the November ballot. (They only needed 230,000.) Large rallies and marches kept spirits high during the fall and winter months. More than 10,000 volunteers knocked on a million doors and made nearly a million phone calls. More than 2 million Ohioans came to the polls and voted by an overwhelming 61 percent–39 percent margin to repeal the antiunion law. A majority of voters in eighty-two of Ohio’s eighty-eight counties supported repeal.
Much to her own surprise, as the Occupy Wall Street movement gained momentum, Rose Gudiel became the public face of a growing protest movement to stop banks from foreclosing on families victimized by the economic crisis and abusive banking practices. Since the housing bubble burst in 2008, several million homeowners have lost their homes to foreclosure, many of them victims of banks’ predatory and unscrupulous loans. When served with an eviction notice, homeowners routinely left quietly, embarrassed to have lost their homes after losing a job, getting their work hours cut, or having to pay for unforeseen medical emergencies.
In 2005, the twenty-nine-year-old Gudiel—a state employee—purchased a small one-story three-bedroom house in La Puente, a working-class suburb of Los Angeles, where she, her father (a warehouse worker), and one of her brothers cared for her disabled mother. They made steady mortgage payments until 2009, when the brother with whom she lived died unexpectedly and the family lost his income. The family was two weeks late on the next mortgage payment. When they sent in the payment, OneWest Bank would not accept it, telling Gudiel that she needed to apply for a loan modification instead. She spent over a year attempting unsuccessfully to get the bank to modify the loan—even though their income had long since recovered after another brother moved in with them. Eventually, Fannie Mae, the quasi-governmental housing finance agency, took over the OneWest mortgage and continued the foreclosure process. Fannie Mae offered Gudiel $4,000 to give up her fight and leave voluntarily. She refused. Fannie Mae took her to court to evict her. Then the bank started foreclosure proceedings. “My parents instilled in me the idea that if you work hard and study you could live your American Dream,” Gudiel told a local paper. “I was the first person in my family to graduate from college, and I worked hard so that I can own a home. And now these banks are taking my dream away.”
Gudiel had never been politically involved before, but her experiences changed her views. She contacted the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), a community organizing group that had been helping homeowners deal with recalcitrant banks. With the guidance of Peter Kuhns, a thirty-five-year-old organizer for ACCE, Gudiel decided to join with others to resist eviction. Gudiel, her neighbors, coworkers, and supporters from the ACCE and her union (the Service Employees International Union) began a round-the-clock vigil at the house, pledging to link arms in front of the doorway to stop the sheriff from evicting the family, risking arrest. In early October, Gudiel joined members from ACCE and SEIU, as well as some Occupy Los Angeles activists, who protested at the $26 million Bel Air mansion of Steve Mnuchin, OneWest’s CEO. The following day, Gudiel and other supporters occupied the Pasadena office of Fannie Mae, which had taken over the mortgage from OneWest. Gudiel and six others were arrested.
All this protest and media publicity put Los Angeles County sheriff Lee Baca in a bind. He obviously did not want to have to evict Gudiel and her family, including her disabled mother. The prospect of his deputies hauling off Gudiel’s wheelchair-bound mother to jail did not sit well with the county’s top law enforcer. So he stalled for time, contacted OneWest and Fannie Mae, hoping these giant institutions would do the right thing and modify Gudiel’s mortgage so her family could stay in their home.
A week later, while leading several thousand Occupy Los Angeles protesters in a march in downtown Los Angeles, Gudiel received a message from Fannie Mae and OneWest Bank saying that the bank would modify the mortgage so the family could stay in its house. The protest and publicity had worked.
“I’m so happy and relieved, but this isn’t over for the thousands of people out there on the brink of losing their homes,” Gudiel told the media. “We were fighting against a big giant and people said we could not win this, but we proved them all wrong. What I’ve learned is that when you take a stand and fight against some of the richest and most powerful people in our country, you can win.”
Gudiel’s example—reported in the media and through union and community networks—inspired a growing number of homeowners facing wrongful evictions to take a bold stand. A coalition of religious groups, community organizations, and unions were mounting the Occupy Our Homes campaign, mobilizing homeowners who, when the banks or sheriffs came knocking on their doors, said, “We’re not leaving.” On one day in early December, homeowners in the Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Portland, Oregon, areas took similar actions. They hoped to catalyze a massive nationwide campaign to resist foreclosures and block evictions; to create a mounting sense of crisis and urgency so that banks would change their routine practices and politicians would change government policy at the local, state, and federal levels; and to inject the foreclosure crisis—and Wall Street’s culpability for the recession—into the 2012 presidential and congressional elections.
Every generation of activists confronts new challenges and seeks to move the country in a new direction. But all social movements involve an overlap of generations. Older activists recruit and mentor the next generation. Younger activists learn from the successes and failures of their older counterparts. So, not surprisingly, many of the people included in the 20th century Social Justice Hall of Fame remained engaged in struggles for change in the new century. In addition, tens of thousands of baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1960, became politically active in the 20th century and continued their commitment to social justice into the 21st century.
But the future belongs to those born after 1960. Ai-jen Poo, the founder of the Domestic Workers United, is one of many people who have already made their mark. The fifty individuals listed here represent a new generation of activists, artists, thinkers, and politicians who have already become leaders of exciting movements for social justice. Many were involved in the 21st century movements described above. They offer hope that the 21st century will witness dramatic changes toward greater equality and democracy.
Key to any progressive resurgence is the growing wave of innovative community and union organizing. Among the most effective young organizers are Cheri Andes (Greater Boston Interfaith Organization), Fred Azcarate (AFL-CIO), Aaron Bartley (People United for Sustainable Housing in Buffalo), Lucas Benitez (Coalition of Immokalee Workers), Deepak Bhargava (Center for Community Change), Jeremy Bird (Wake-Up Wal-Mart and Organizing for America), Joy Cushman (New Organizing Institute), Leah Fried and Armando Robles (United Electrical Workers), George Goehl (National People’s Action), Simon Greer (Jewish Funds for Justice), Sarita Gupta (Jobs with Justice), Mary Beth Maxwell (American Rights at Work), Kirk Noden (Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative), Ethan Rome (Health Care for America Now), Amy Schur (Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment), Liz Shuler (AFL-CIO), and Roxana Tynan (Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy). Since being chosen as its president in 2008, organizer Ben Jealous has helped reinvigorate the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Teresa Cheng, born in 1987, has helped lead several successful campaigns by United Students Against Sweatshops.
Young leaders of the burgeoning immigrant rights movement—including Marissa Graciosa (Fair Immigration Reform Movement), Pramila Jayapal (One America), Christine Neumann-Ortiz (Voces de la Frontera), Carlos Saavedra (United We Dream), and Angelica Salas (Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles)—will continue to make waves as the century evolves, as will a new generation of environmental activists, such as Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins (Green for All), Van Jones (former Obama adviser and founder of Rebuild the Dream), Erich Pica (Friends of the Earth), and Phil Radford (Greenpeace).
Writers Naomi Klein (author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine), Ezra Klein (Washington Post columnist), and Tamara Draut and Heather McGhee (both of the think tank Demos), television news analyst Rachel Maddow and Daily Show anchor Jon Stewart, media critic David Brock of Media Matters for America, Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker (coauthor of Winner-Take-All Politics, among many other books), New York University historian Kim Phillips-Fein, Rinku Sen (editor of Colorlines), sportswriter Dave Zirin, and singer and musician Tom Morello have been provocative interpreters and advocates for the progressive movement. Robin Brand (Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund) and Jennifer Chrisler (Family Equality Council) represent a young cohort of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender leaders. Eli Pariser of MoveOn has been a pioneer in the fast-changing world of netroots activism.
Congresswomen Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Tallahassee City Commission member Andrew Gillum, South Carolina state legislator Anton Gunn, New York City Council member and former community organizer Brad Lander, and activist Darcy Burner of Seattle are among the many young politicians who serve as the progressive movement’s key allies inside the world of politics.
Many of these people are not well known to the general public, but each of them, as part of organizations and movements for change, has already shaped the contours of American society in the 21st century, and each is destined to keep reshaping it in the coming decades. Born in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, they inherited an America that seems to be holding its breath, trying to decide what kind of country it wants to be.