I'm not sure what this guy's referring to when he talks about "the Left" not being there -- I guess it depends on how you define "the Left." I was paying a lot of attention to it myself, and found it especially disturbing when the article in the LA Times came out not too long ago about how the ruling class was not disturbed at all by this. In fact, it quoted some financial analyst to the effect that the LA janitors' strike of 2000 had scared the pants off a lot of the elite, and that was a strike of maybe 10,000 or less. Here's a strike of 70,000, and they just don't care. The ruling class is pretty baldfaced in saying what they really think in situations like this, so I believe them.
Why that is so is difficult to tell -- I wouldn't entirely discount arguments to the effect that the nature of the industry, particularly with the growth of Wal-Mart, makes struggles like this very difficult to win. But it's also true that janitors have just about zero power "at the point of production," so to speak -- there's no way that you could win a janitors' strike because the janitors stop working and let the buildings get dirty. Janitors have won significant improvements (or at least, have begun to approach the levels they once had, before the building owners decided to contract out the work and break SEIU in city after city beginning in the mid-1980s) because their union has a clear strategy to win that includes disrupting business-as-usual through noisy demonstrations and civil disobedience, combined with a stophisticated approach to the industry that mobilizes community and political support to split building owners from contractors, etc. In other words, there are legitimate questions of union strategy here. What does a retail workers' union have to do to actually take on the retail industry, not as it was thirty years ago, and not as we would like it to be, but as it actually is in the here-and-now? That same article from the LA Times that quoted elites comparing the two strikes said that in the janitors' strike, it was very clear that the workers and their leadership knew exactly what they were doing, and that that just wasn't the case here.
- - - - - John Lacny
People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!