In A Year Of Politicians And Bad News, Surprising Stories Of Resistance

The giddy heights of 2011—the Wisconsin uprising and Occupy Wall Street—yielded this year to a slog of an election seasonwhere many crucial questions were not even up for debate, from labor law reform to the minimum wage to climate change.

Unions once again dropped a lot of cash and burned a lot of shoe leather defending against the greater evils of a Romney administration and a Republican Senate. But winning meant holding the line, at best, and a hard pivot after Election Day to defend what too many Democrats won’t: Social Security and Medicare.

Labor still has no strategy for dealing with electoral politics, and a Democratic Party that’s just not that into us. This fall’s independent agitation on taxing the rich and saving entitlement programs was at least a recognition of that fact.

Unions mostly did well on ballot initiatives, with a tax-the-rich measure winning in California and three cities raising the minimum wage. California Governor Jerry Brown vetoed bills that would have helped farmworkers and domestic workers, though.

Even with election-year pressure to sit down and shut up, Chicago teachersnotched up the debate around education. Going up against a Democratic mayor, they exposed the bipartisan effort to sell out public schools.

Because of years of coalition-building by the union’s revitalization caucus, CORE, their seven-day strike gained majority public support in Chicago, reversing the teachers vs. parents narrative carefully crafted by school privatizers. Chicago teachers also rolled right over the naysayers in their own national union.

That battle was won, but the war in education is still raging. Just days after the strike ended, as the media spotlight winked off, CTU was mobilizing against yet more school closings.

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