Of Teamsters and Turtles, Plumbers and Progressives, a MayDay rumination
Ever since the much-promoted alliance between “teamsters and turtles†at the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, there’s been a renewed hope that the decades-long opposition between organized labor and environmentalists might be resolvable. The original Teamsters and turtles weren’t really in much of an alliance in 1999, what with AFL-CIO leaders trying their best to keep the labor march away from occupied downtown Seattle on November 30, 1999. But we don’t have to rehash that old story because we have a new, local angle on this here in 2009 San Francisco.
Steve Jones wrote about a split between “progressives and labor†in the SF Bay Guardian last week. It is an interesting framing of the current possibilities for social liberation, improvement, or—gasp—even revolution. While thoughtful and well-researched, Jones fails to escape a recurrent set of assumptions that continue to confuse the possibilities of a more thorough-going reshaping of oppositional politics in this era. The most delusional assumption is that “pwogwessives†of a green hue should find a common platform with old-style unionists, most likely over the empty demand for “green jobs.†Before laying out why ‘jobs’ don’t work, let’s recap the recent tempest in a teapot:
The basic story is that Larry Mazzola, Jr., the son of Mazzola Sr. (together they run the nepotistic Plumbers Union), was denied a seat on the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District Board of Directors that has traditionally gone to a Labor representative. Mazzola Jr. was fully backed in his attempt to get the appointment to the seat by the San Francisco Labor Council and other local Labor leaders, but was thwarted by a 6-5 majority at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The Board’s Rules Committee, chaired by lefty Chris Daly, rejected Mazzola and quietly asked local labor leaders to advance an alternate candidate at least vaguely qualified to address transportation issues, but the Labor Council and Building and Construction Trades Council and other labor luminaries refused, insisting that Mazzola get the nod. The impasse was resolved by the full Board vote which appointed Dave Snyder to the seat instead of Mazzola or any other labor choice. Snyder (a personal friend of mine) is widely credited with resuscitating the SF Bike Coalition in the mid-1990s, and later helped launch Livable City and most recently has been the Transportation analyst for SPUR. (He took this appointment as his chance to resign from SPUR, which he generally found too conservative, especially when it comes to class issues and development.)
Dave Snyder represents a new cognitariat-rooted kind of politics (for a recent, provocative essay/speech from the theoretical wing of this kind of thinking, find Bifo’s latest here), one that has been framed most often as “environmentalist†but is actually a lot more than that. It is an emergent political tendency that looks at urban design, transportation, food, housing, and every part of daily life as inextricably linked. While Snyder is no flaming radical, he at least understands that the 21st century and its unfolding crises require new approaches and fresh, wholistic thinking. He wasn’t happy to have been chosen by the Supervisors, feeling he got caught in the middle of a political spat between the progressive majority on the Board and vocal elements of organized labor.
