The Untold Story of When Labor Linked Arms With Occupy Wall Street
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18475/labor_movement_and_occupy_wall_street_joined_forces
Since the financial crisis, millions of union workers had been targeted for cutbacks, layoffs, wage freezes, and furloughs. New York City employees had not seen a raise since 2009. Education workers had been faced with mass layoffs, school closures and bruising budget cuts. In the private sector, the concessions demanded were even more extreme. Verizon had sought to squeeze higher health care premiums and a pension freeze out of its workforce, triggering a fifteen-day, 45,000-strong strike against the telecom giant. But by the fall of 2011, organized labor had little to show for its trouble.
While the unions had sat out the initial phase of the occupation, some of the occupiers had set out to win them over. More than a few had union members in their families or in their networks of friends. Others had histories of student-labor activism or graduate student unionism. Still others had ties to white-collar unions like the Writers Guild of America East and the Professional Staff Congress, or to dissident tendencies within the teachers and teamsters unions. Together, they had formed the Labor Outreach Committee, sending flying squads across the city to support local union fights.
The first was in protest of the Sothebys auction house and its lockout of 42 unionized art handlers, who process its Picassos, its Rembrandts, its Bacons and its Munchs, and who were now facing replacement by temporary nonunion workers. It began on the morning of Thursday, September 22, as hundreds picketed outside the well-appointed headquarters of Sothebys, at 72nd Street and York, in the heart of one of the wealthiest congressional districts in the country, forming a sort of gauntlet for the buyers in business suits.
On the inside, nine occupiers stood up one by one over the course of the two-hour action, disrupting the sales of De Koonings, Calders, and Thiebauds: Sothebys made $680 million last year, then kicked their art handlers out on the street! Sothebys is fighting a class war ... and it is unacceptable! The greed in this building is a direct example of the greed that has ruined our economy! Sothebys is auctioning off the American dream! The disrupters were then manhandled by companys private security force and maneuvered off the premises.