OWS for Unions: A much-needed Ideological Dope Slap

Goodbye to the ‘Middle-Class’? A Lesson for Labor From Occupy Wall Street
BY STEVE EARLY. In These Times.

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has given our timorous, unimaginative and politically ambivalent unions a much-needed ideological dope slap. Some might describe this, more diplomatically, as a second injection of “outside-the-box” thinking and new organizational blood.... Unfortunately, most other unions have long relied on high-priced Democratic Party consultants, their focus groups and opinion polling, to shape labor’s public “messaging” in much less effective fashion. The results of this collaboration have been unhelpful, to say the least. Organizations that are supposed to the voice of the working class majority have instead positioned themselves–narrowly and confusedly–as defenders of America’s “middle class,” an always fuzzy construct now being rendered even less meaningful by the recession-driven downward mobility of millions of people.