A lesson for labor from Occupy Wall Street.

• Author: Early, Steve
• Position: Thinking Economically

Good-bye to the "middle class?"

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.

Top AFL-CIO officials first sought an infusion of those scarce commodities into labor when they jetted into Wisconsin last winter. Without their planning or direction, the spontaneous community-labor uprising in Wisconsin was in the process of recasting the debate about public sector bargaining through-out the US. So they were eager to join the protest even though it was launched from the bottom up, rather than the top down, in response to headquarters directives from Washington, DC.

OWS has become the new Lourdes for the old, lame, and blind of American labor. Union leaders have been making regular visits to Zuccotti Park and other high-profile encampments around the country. According to NYC retail store union leader Stuart Applebaum, "the Occupy movement has changed unions" both in the area of membership mobilization and "messaging."

It would be a miraculous transformation indeed if organized labor suddenly embraced greater direct action, democratic decision making, and rank-and-file militancy. Since that's unlikely to occur in the absence of internal upheavals, unions might want to focus instead on casting aside the crutch of their own flawed messaging. That means adopting the Occupation movement's brilliant, popular framing of the class divide and ditching labor's own muddled conception of class in America.

Them and us updated In his 1974 memoir and union history, United Electrical Workers co-founder Jim Matles reminded readers that labor struggles are about "them and us" or, as OWS puts it, the 1% vs. the 99%. 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 be 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.

As SUNY professor Michael Zweig argued in his book, The...