Occupy Solidarity: The 99 Pickets Network in New York City
Activists formed a labor solidarity network in 2012 to bridge the Occupy and Labor communities in New York City. It ran for three years and supported over 50 actions in support of worker campaigns.
Introduction: Occupy and Labor Cooperation
After Occupy Wall Street started in September 2011, activists formed a number of labor-oriented groups in New York City with the goal of helping the Occupy and Labor communities work together. There was the sense among some labor folks that the Occupy world didn’t understand the labor movement and workers’ issues. Moreover, many local unions were curious about Occupy and could learn from its direct action, participatory style. These Labor-Occupy groups were generally started by labor union staffers and members who sympathized with or were active in Occupy.
99 Pickets was one of these groups which started in early 2012. Its primary aim was to publicize within the Occupy community the current labor struggles around the city. Even as Occupy’s public presence in the city waned that year, 99 Pickets continued for several years as a labor-oriented solidarity network, primarily working to support worker centers and unions in town.
After three years of existence, 99 Pickets suspended its activity in 2015. The group’s website is gone, but the Internet Archive has many snapshots over time. I was involved occasionally during the first year and then heavily as a core activist for the following two years. This article offers my thoughts on what 99 Pickets was and the challenges of building and sustaining a labor solidarity network. I interviewed several key members over time, and those discussions inform this article. I don’t specifically mention any other folks who were involved, because I don’t want to mischaracterize anyone’s involvement, and I would also hate to omit anyone.
I think it’s important to preserve the history of this Occupy-inspired group and fill in the overall history of the Occupy movement. Moreover, with unions and worker centers engaged in ongoing organizing, and wage theft rampant in many sectors of the economy, there is still a great need for labor solidarity activities. The history of 99 Pickets may offer some lessons for other organizers interested in this kind of project.
99 Pickets Origins and Goals
The original name, “99 Picket Lines,” later shortened to 99 Pickets, was a clever marriage of Occupy and Labor ideas. The “99” clearly signified Occupy’s fantastic “We are the 99%” meme, and “picket line” referred to one of the most common tactics of labor movement struggles, where workers and supporters protest in front of a workplace to shut down the operation and make visible a labor dispute with the employer.
When it started, 99 Pickets publicized many of the labor struggles going on in NYC around May Day 2012, to attract the support of the Occupy community. The idea was that labor should be highlighted on May Day, to show Occupy folks the concrete, local fights that were happening around them. I was arrested during this May Day organizing and spent a pleasant 22 hours enjoying the hospitality of “The Tombs” Manhattan jail facility. As these campaigns continued to need support, 99 Pickets kept on doing outreach throughout 2012. Over time, the mission evolved, and after its first year of activity, 99 Pickets had developed three broad goals intended to help advance the local workers’ movement:
· Organizing creative actions in support of organizing, bargaining or other labor campaigns. The goal was to provide concrete solidarity to show employers that the workers have the support of the wider community.
· Hosting monthly open meetings which served as a regular forum to bring together workers and organizers involved in workplace organizing throughout New York City.
· Bringing more people into labor solidarity work, through publicizing campaign actions and events in the regular email newsletter, the website and other social media platforms, as well as one-on-one turn-out efforts.
Folks understood the 99 Pickets project in a number of different ways. A framework that was useful for me is what is generally called a “solidarity network.” There have been many “solnets” around the country and a prominent one at the time was the Seattle Solidarity Network, which still exists. These are generally groups of activists who engage in direct action to support each other with workplace or housing problems, such as getting bosses to pay unpaid wages or landlords to make needed apartment repairs. This is a form of participatory organizing that recognizes that individual problems are really collective problems. We should increase the capacity of people to fight together for social justice, rather than become passive clients who rely on professional experts or lawyers to solve their problems.
Group Structure and Operations
99 Pickets was inspired by the anarchistic, participatory ethos of Occupy. With many members holding union staff positions, and being familiar with union bureaucracy, 99 Pickets strove for a flexible structure, minimal rules, and consensus-based decision making. We wanted things to evolve organically according to the interests of the members and who could take on tasks.
Of course one drawback of this approach is the danger of so-called “tyranny of structurelessness” where informal and unacknowledged hierarchies develop. Our group was not immune to this problem, as it seemed to some that a few of the most active folks were at times more influential in decision making.
There was a core group that had about 20 members over three years and peaked at about a dozen who met weekly or biweekly at the planning meetings. This is where we planned the larger open meetings and discussed group operations. Anyone was welcome to join this core group, but in practice, the core folks attempted to bring in activists who they knew. The race and gender breakdown among this group was fairly diverse.
There was an open framework for action planning. Anyone who wanted to undertake an action was welcome to take the lead on planning and ask 99 Pickets for support. They would advertise the project and solicit help. If anyone wanted support for their campaign, they were invited to come to these planning meetings to discuss it. Often a core member would be asked by someone they knew to reach out to 99 Pickets for solidarity on a campaign.
Open meetings were held monthly for about a year. They were intended to be a forum for a larger group of activists and workers to meet and present their campaign updates and have a discussion on specific organizing topics. In general, two core group members would plan and facilitate the meetings. Often 70+ people attended these meetings, many of which were energizing and productive, and usually had food. However, it was difficult to sustain these meetings as planning and turnout consumed a lot of time and energy that the core group wanted to put into actions.
It seemed important to the group to remain a collective of folks volunteering their time to the project. There were some discussions about whether to do more fundraising beyond the minimal needed for holding actions, but there was never any real interest in raising enough money to hire staff. We were highly aware of possible staff domination of the group. The dangers of this model of course are the possible lack of sustainability. When folks are unable to put in the necessary time, due to the inevitable push and pull of other life obligations, then the project may starve for lack of participation, and this is what eventually happened.
Politics
The main political framework was focused on labor rights and the need to organize and build working class power. 99 Pickets would work with any group that was organizing, whether a worker center or labor union, and preferred to see campaigns where the workers themselves played a leading role.
Likely the entire core group held anti-capitalist politics of various kinds. But as there was some wariness about sectarian divisiveness, these political positions were never developed or discussed extensively. There was also the sense that since a number of core members were already associated with anti-capitalist groups, 99 Pickets didn’t need to explicitly be another one, and that we should stay focused on actions rather than theory. This kind of openness also created a welcoming space for people with various political positions, an important factor in attempting to grow a large solidarity network.
Actions
99 Pickets embraced the concept of direct action and was intended to be a forum for creative and fun protests. There was generally an informal understanding that the actions should have a fairly low risk of arrest so as to attract a large number of participants and not endanger undocumented workers.
The group supported campaigns at many restaurants, delis, bakeries and stores in support of wage theft protests and organizing efforts by worker centers such as Brandworkers, the Chinese Staff and Workers Association, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the Laundry Workers Center, New York Communities for Change, and the Restaurant Opportunities Center. There were also solidarity actions in support of union organizing or contract campaigns with the Amalgamated Transit Workers, the Communications Workers of America, the Newspaper Guild, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, the Teamsters and the Utility Workers, as well as the OUR Walmart and Fight for 15 campaigns. Many of these campaigns ended in organizing or contract victories or wage theft settlements.
Typical campaign actions included picketing and flyering customers at the target stores or restaurants, loud marches among multiple targets, and entering stores with large groups to “mic-check” and confront the store manager. Several times we did restaurant “sip-ins” where protestors would pose as customers, sit at tables for a while drinking water, leave a tip and then march out as a group. We did grocery store “line clogs” where we would act as difficult customers taking a long time to pay with pennies. There were also frequent call-ins and social media actions. Often the fantastic Rude Mechanical Orchestra (RMO) would participate with loud brass band music which would attract more attention.
There were frequent protests at a number of apparel retail stores such as the Gap over their use of sweatshop labor. I remember a funny moment one time when a few dozen of us went into an Old Navy with the RMO playing. A security guard said we had to leave, and we said we would leave after we spoke to the store manager. The guard then said that we could stay, but asked if the band could stop playing.
Children’s Place became an important target, in support of Bangladeshi workers after the Rana Plaza factory collapse in April, 2013. The company was soon identified as a big customer of the factory, and a broad coalition began a campaign to demand they pay compensation to the victims’ families. 99 Pickets held a number of retail store demonstrations in New York City and several protests at the corporate headquarters, including a “die-in” at the annual meeting. The company eventually agreed to pay $2 million into the Rana Plaza Compensation Fund, and I think 99 Pickets played a significant role in this victory.
99 Pickets participated for several years in planning the Black Friday Walmart protest in Secaucus, NJ. The creative materials developed for this campaign included the popular Rebranding Walmart signs, such as “Everyday Low Wages” that supporters could print off the website and place inside stores near them. 99 Pickets also helped plan the May Day Immigrant Workers Justice Tour for several years in which a large group would march along a New York City route that featured several ongoing campaigns. These annual events would generally attract up to several hundred people.
Successes and Challenges
The period of several years after the start of Occupy Wall Street in 2011 was a time of tremendous excitement and possibility in New York City. Protests around town were frequent, and it was typical for events to have hundreds of people. 99 Pickets drew from, and contributed to, that energy.
With a focused and dedicated group of activists, 99 Pickets organized a fairly large number of protest actions for a wide array of campaigns. My rough count is that there were over 50 actions created or heavily supported by the 99 Pickets network over a three-year period. There was a number of successful large open meetings with representatives of many campaigns from around the city. Moreover, at its peak, there was an extensive network of over 700 people subscribed to the online newsletter, over 2,000 people who liked the group Facebook page, and over 1,000 followers on Twitter.
A key challenge, however, was attracting a large enough group of core members to sustain and grow the effort. The core group never increased beyond about a dozen at any one time, and then as folks got busy with other things, there were not enough of us to keep it going.
Furthermore, there was an apparent activist/worker distinction which was extensively discussed but never fully resolved. With some exceptions, core activists did most of the work of the group and made most of the major decisions, rather than the workers who were organizing in various campaigns. Of course we’re all workers, but there was an awareness that many of the folks we were interacting with were also “professional activists.” We wanted 99 Pickets to be a forum for people to come together and provide solidarity for each other and not just another gathering place for the usual activists. A lot of folks came to 99 Pickets events, but to the extent that we drew a lot of activists to this project, we didn’t really expand the number of people involved in solidarity work enough.
Another issue was the nature of the actions themselves. Though there were many creative actions, because of time pressures, most of the protests ended up being the standard picketing/chanting/flyering types that we see all the time. A running joke was that protests often involved shouting at buildings. I have since read through the excellent direct action manual Beautiful Trouble and it reminded me of the full range of interesting tactics that could be used.
Moreover, turnout for many actions was often lower than we wanted. Despite the network that had been built up over time, and the many hundreds of folks who participated at some point, it remained a significant challenge to encourage enough folks to turn out regularly, especially as the energy of Occupy started to dissipate.
Conclusion
I think 99 Pickets can be proud of the tremendous amount of work that we did, much of it fun and exciting, and which made a real contribution to the labor community in New York City. That a small volunteer group of activists found it difficult to sustain a broad action network for more than three years is not a surprise, as this is common to many groups.
Since there are many workers struggling to organize their workplace and fight wage theft, and they all need support, there is still a great need for solidarity groups that can help coordinate that assistance. Groups that engage in this work will likely have to grapple with the same issues 99 Pickets did. We have to be great organizers and attract enough folks to do this work. It has to be compelling enough to many people so they will turn out again and again. We must continuously democratize the work and decision-making. Groups must decide if they need paid staff dedicated to this. I hope the experience of 99 Pickets can help others who are undertaking similar work to think through these issues.
Acknowledgements
Shoutout for the great work done by many 99 Pickets organizers! It was great working with you, and you taught me so much.
