Living Peace: Connecting Your Spirituality with Your Work for Justice, Victor Narro’s new book on the spiritual side of organizing, is just over 100 pages long. His little volume is broaching a topic that might raise cynical eyebrows in certain quarters in our labor movement. His thesis intrigued me and in the spirit of self-mindedness I read the book and then reflected on my own recent experience.
On January 24th Agustin Ramirez, the gifted ILWU Northern California Lead Organizer invited my wife and me to participate in a levantamiento in Merced, California hosted by his mother and father. I had participated in “posadas” at Christmas season before, but I was ignorant of the “levantamiento” “Posadas” is a ritual whereby the community marches door to door in the neighborhood singing carols and reenacting the quest of Joseph and Mary for room at the inn, lodging or “posadas”. “Levantamiento” comes 40 days after the birth of Jesus and is also a community procession in which the baby Jesus is raised up and presented. Both these rituals are part of the Christmas season in Latin America and part of Agustin’s formation as an organizer. These are the cultural connections that enable the deep base building involved in his work in the Latino immigrant community. Merced is worlds away from the Bay Area but not from the lives of its immigrant Latino working class.
“…sustaining lifelong activism for social change requires more than clinical strategy and political exhortations”
I have had the privilege of participating with Agustin in a wonderful worker organizing campaign in the County of Alameda California over the last three years. The Campaign for Sustainable Recycling has been successful in raising the dignity and the hourly wage of the sorters who pick through garbage and waste on filthy conveyor belts in the wee hours before most residents of the Bay Area are even awake. The workers of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and its Local 6 have succeeded in raising their hourly wages to $21.00 per hour by 2019! All this progress for a workforce that is 65% female and mostly Latina immigrants has come through a combination of worker action, strikes and stoppages coupled with political pressure in particular municipalities like San Leandro, Fremont and Oakland that set the rates for garbage pickup and recycling.
This is a “Si Se Puede” story for 300 workers against all odds. Policy makers, pundits and certain “union leaders” said it couldn’t be done. This year on March 1, the workers will celebrate three years of struggle and their achievements at an International Day of the Recycler Convention in Oakland California. March 1 was designated Dia Internacional de Los Recicladores by the Associacion de Recicladores de Bogota, Colombia. In that country last year’s March 1 was celebrated with a march of over 17,000 recyclers.
No organizing achievement of this magnitude happens solely or mainly because of clinically detached policy wonks and labor strategists figuring out leverage. There is a transcendent quality of spirituality in this powerful organizing. I was reminded of this when I attended a recent steering committee meeting of the campaign. Agustin punctuated the meeting and the history of the campaign by telling an amazing story of the life challenges of one woman at the ACI recycling facility in San Leandro.
But first a little background. The ILWU started working in 2013 with a group of recyclers at ACI. The workers there had each been bilked out of almost three dollars per hour for three years under the City of San Leandro’s living wage. Led by several Latinas the workers organized to file a lawsuit under the living wage. The company retaliated by firing workers whose immigration papers were not in order. The workers struck and protested against this retaliation. They persevered and finally organized a union with ILWU Local 6. The Teamsters who represented the higher paid garbage truck drivers acted in concert with the employer and tried to bully the workers into joining their union. The workers voted 49-9 for the ILWU, got a three dollar per hour immediate raise and settled a law suit for over $1million dollars, and are on the precipice of a first contract that will bring wages to the Alameda standard of $21 by 2019.
Ramirez told of one ACI worker, a Latina immigrant who was fired in the initial retaliation. Despite this humiliating experience and the sacrifices it imposed on her family, she has remained a loyal supporter of the lawsuit and the organizing. I can only imagine the inner strength needed to face this maze of challenges, which brings us back to Victor Narro and his fine book on connecting the spiritual to our work for justice.
Narro’s spiritual faith in a greater ‘Good” is the product of his own amazing work as a labor and community organizer in Los Angeles for thirty years and his study of the teachings of St Francis of Assisi and a Vietnamese spiritualist and teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh. Living Peace is a manifesto, skillfully written and beautifully illustrated with photographs by Narro and his life partner Laureen Lazarovici. Each chapter is introduced by a quote from St Francis. Reflection questions end each chapter and there is space for personal notes. This is meant to be a book that an organizer can take into the field as a spiritual companion.
Narro’s fine work recognizes that sustaining lifelong activism for social change requires more than clinical strategy and political exhortations. He provides a spiritual guide for organizers who are engaged for the long haul. Ramirez was reflecting on the courage of one worker in his telling of the challenges of the ACI worker, but her story is not unique. The quote that precedes the final chapter of Narro’s work could apply to many organizing situations:
“When surrounded by a thousand dangers, let us not lose heart, except to make room for one another in our hearts.”
For a copy of Living Peace contact Victor Narro at vnarro@irle.ucla.edu
Peter Olney is retired Organizing Director of the ILWU. He has been a labor organizer for 40 years in Massachusetts and California. He has worked for multiple unions before landing at the ILWU in 1997. For three years he was the Associate Director of the Institute for Labor and Employment at the University of California.
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