Street Roots
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September 22-28, 2017
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News
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Page 5
S A W ANT, from page 4
K sh a m a Saw ant is
a member o f the
Socialist
Alternative party,
which pushes back
against capitalism .
toward homeless people, but also used for
funding for services so that people have a
cushion to fall on so that they don’t become
homeless in the first place.
All the politicians know everything I’m
talking about. It’s a question of political will.
How are we going to generate the political
will unless we have candidates running for
office who are part of the movement, who
P H O TO C O UR TESY OF
KSHAMA SAW ANT
are accountable to the movement and don’t
take money from big business so that when
they go to City Hall, they use their office to
amplify the voice of movements and to really
fight for the oppressed.
*(Why Washington has the “most regressive
tax system ”: In Washington, there is.no
statewide income tax, so the poor pay a much
larger portion o f their income on taxes than
the wealthy through the state’s sales and
property taxes. In Ju ly , Seattle City C o u n cil
unanim ously approved an income tax on only
the wealthy residents o f the city, an initiative
championed by Sawant.)
Emily Green: So few Am ericans are
accountable to the labor movement.
represented by unions, yet most o f us work. D o
you see a viable replacement fo r the traditional
union model that would include the needs o f
a ll working people in its efforts?
K.S.: You’re right, that in the last several
decades the labor movement and the unions
as an organization have taken a severe
beating, much of it starting in the Reagan-
Thatcher era. It’s been, in many ways, a
downward spiral. But I think you can also see
that, just in the logic of capitalism, unless
workers get organized, in a real way -
meaning we get united behind a common
political demand like $15 an hour, like rent
control, like taxing the rich, getting
organized to build unity in our political
demands, developing strategies and tactics
for the movement so that we are able to push
back against the might of big business -
unless workers and ordinary people get
organized in some shape or form, we have no
hope of defeating the might of big business
and the political elite that support them.
That’s the system of capitalism, and we’re
fighting against those forces. There is no
alternative to that kind of mass organizing.
We should resist the temptation of
looking at unions as something old
fashioned, but while recognizing and making
a sober assessment of how far we have to
go. We are starting almost at rock bottom in
some ways given that the vast majority of
labor in America and in our cities is not
unionized; young workers especially are not
unionized. But the cycle here, this is a
concrete example of how we won in 2015 -
and a woman is running as a socialist for
Minneapolis City Council now - the only
reason we won is because we were
organized; we had a grassroots campaign
that actually brought working people
together, something like a union.
As we continue to build movements in our
lifetime, it will require organizing workers
and the unions. But the other dimension to
this that I should mention within the labor
movement right now, there are workers who
are unionized, but there is an urgent need
to raise up rank and file representation and
realize democracy within unions.
Look at the downfall from last year. Most
E.G.: Oregon has been getting pretty cozy
with (Seattle-based) Am azon lately. We have
two new fu lfillm en t centers hirin g thousands
o f people (and on Sept. 18, a third fu lfillm en t
center, in Portland, was announced), and we
pla n to bid on the new corporate headquarters.
A n y lessons we should take from Seattle on
this one?
K .S .: This is a very good time for us to be
major unions endorsed Hillary Clinton, but
if you talked to most of the rank and file
members of those unions, they said they
voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary.
Why did major unions, like SE IU (Service
Employees International Union), national
unions, which could be decisive factors in
national election outcomes, why would they
endorse Hillary Clinton in the primary?
Randi Weingarten, the president of my
union, A FT (American Federation of
Teachers), she went door-knocking for
Hillary Clinton while most of us teachers,
members of her union, were supporting
Bernie Sanders.
We need to demand real accountability.
Rank and file have to get organized within
their unions to fight for greater democracy.
Seattle has a mayoral race going on, and
unfortunately, the (M .L.) King County Labor
Council (affiliated with National AFL-CIO)
has just endorsed Jenny Durkan, the most
corporate candidate in the race, the
candidate who comes with the blessing of
the Chamber of Commerce and all the
businesses that fought hard against $15 an
hour and launched lawsuit after lawsuit on
every worker law that we have succeeded in
passing. Why is the Labor Council endorsing
that candidate? They should be fighting to
run working-class candidates who are
talking about this. As you know, just days ago
Amazon announced that they are looking for
a different city for their new headquarters,
and it’s a chilling message to Seattle, but it’s
not a new one. It’s reminiscent of what
happened with Boeing. Boeing has carried
out, and is still carrying out, a decades-long
extortion of working people and taxpayers in
this state, and every time they have done
that, they say, “If you don’t do this or that,
we will take away your jobs.”
But this is not about good apples versus
bad apples. This is the logic of capitalism,
and as long as there are workers in other
cities and other countries that are worse off
than us, who are willing to accept worse-off
conditions just to get the jobs, the jobs will
move; the companies will move. The only
way to reject this race to the bottom is for
workers to refuse to be pitted against each
other in this kind of perverse bidding war
and say we fight for workers everywhere.
Ultimately, the solution is for workers to
fight everywhere and in solidarity.
We don’t want a system where a few
people make such an unimaginable profit
and everybody else has to live in deplorable
conditions, not to mention the conditions in
which the workers in the Amazon
warehouses work: Amazon workers who
want to unionize. Fulfillment centers, which
by the way is an ominously Orwellian name
considering the conditions the workers face
there, so we need to begin fighting on that
basis, and not accept the logic of corporate
politicians and the corporations themselves.
. E.G.: Seattle used to be like Portland, in
that its city councilors were elected citywide.
B u t as you know, in 2013 that changed, and
now Seattle’s councilors represent geographical
districts instead. C a n you tell me how this
restructuring has changed city politics either
fo r the better or the worse?
K .S.: When we ran our first campaign for
City Council in 2013, we ran citywide, and
that same year, the district initiative was
passed by ballot. When I ran for re-election
in 2015, by then it was a district election,
and I ran for District 3, which is essentially
th e c e n tra l p a r t of th e city. 1 w ould say fro m
th e standpoint of grassroots cam paigns tike
ours, which has never taken any corporate
cash in campaign donations, we ran our
campaign entirely, without exception, on the
basis of funding from working people
because our campaign and our office
belongs to working people and the labor
movement, and so for us, running a
districtwide campaign is much less daunting
in terms of the resources it demands than
running a citywide campaign.
But as you’ve seen, it’s also possible to
win a much more daunting citywide
campaign even openly as a socialist, so in
terms of resources for a grassroots
campaign, I would say this is something we
can take advantage of in Seattle. But you
can also see in the last two years since the
district initiative passed, that by itself it is
no guarantee of outcomes that are more
favorable for those who are left out of city
politics.
There is no shying away from the real
political struggle, which means regardless of
the conditions you face, each day it was that
ordinary people, homeless people, those
who are marginalized become organized in a
movement and really fight back, which
means building street heat, building
workforce actions. It also means that while
not every campaign will be won, our
movements need to run candidates because
we will generate an inspiring example so
that we can really build movements on top
of them. Because having even one voice, as
we’ve shown in City Hall, can completely
change the dynamic of a city’s politics.
emily@streetroots. org
@greenwrites
.