The Joy of Being a Workers' Defender

Bathing in the unbearable beatitude, lightness, and joy of working for the worker:

The Workers Defense Project Re-Claims the Oikos

This week the Workers Defense Project published what it called a "Supporter Spotlight."


Here's the abstract version:



Elvia Mendoza, a supporter of Workers Defense Project, recently hosted a House Party to raise money for 5604 Manor and Workers Defense Project. We asked her to share some feedback about hosting the party. Here is what she had to say. If you are interested in hosting a House Party, please contact Candace at 512-391-2305.




The post went on to romantically narrate the house party as a scene of solidarity. 


For example: 

We not only shared food and drink; they shared memories, desires, and visions.

A house party turned into an affirmation of critical historical consciousness:

[S]omehow a way of understanding and affirming their histories of migration as well. While the party was a success, some people did not come, and I wondered why and if something could have been done differently to have them. The struggle is critical and we can’t afford to leave anyone behind. Perhaps there were conversations that needed to happen; perhaps we needed to think of other strategies to spread the word. The event itself was a force of nature–from the phone call it took to spark it; to Café Rebelde feeding us; to Jaime Cano weaving music for us; to the trabajadores giving purpose to the event, to the gathering of people in the space of home, so that even if just for a moment in a series of many, cada quien ponga su granito de arena.

The post reclaims the home, the ancient oikos, as a sacred space for struggle: 

With all the attacks and impositions made on our homes, our communities, our bodies, our spirits, our minds–our histories, we are told our homes don’t matter. We are told that we can’t rely on our neighbors, our families and friends, our memories, or ourselves. We are taught to leave our communities and seek remedies elsewhere—that what we know with our own flesh has no significance. Me niego a tragarme estas mentiras, and opening our home to not only support PDL, but to recognize and honor the history that brought about its existence, was a deliberate act of refusal. It is an act of going home, coming home, being at home, (re)claiming home, and haciendo hogar. And in the name of keeping it real, I recognize that home is often fraught with struggles, tensions and violations that closed doors and windows cannot keep out. Home is not always a place of safety and the things we fight against outside of our homes find a way of seeping into our homes and into our desires. It is in recognizing and naming the volatile origins of these unsafe spaces and divesting ourselves of them that becomes all the more crucial.

Work and Play in Social Activism

This poster is for the Workers' Defense Project 1st Annual Soccer Tournament. The WDP is engaging in an innovative medium for raising awareness, funds and fun. Instead of merely asking for money or just hosting a rally the WDP has decided to bring both into a single event. This event is a stroke of tactical genius for a few reasons: 

First, Soccer Sells. Soccer is not only the most popular sport worldwide but has a large following here in Austin, especially among the most direly affected populations the organization seeks to assist. The Justicia Copa Laboral indicates the WDP is attuned to its target population on a cultural level. 

All of the proceeds of the event benefit the WDP's computer literacy course which; an initiative aimed at helping to teach workers a vital vocational skill set within Austin's technical industries. Many of the workers the WDP benefits are of a Latino background and thus need help with not just learning English, but translating English Language Training into marketable skill sets. 

Using Soccer to spread the WDP's cause reconnects abstract worker's rights issues to an Ethos of Community. It shifts the terrain of the debate about Labor policy from a technical economic issue to concrete histories, communities and cultures. Soccer is an international sport thus invokes ideas about the transnational flows migrants, capital and knowledge. 

When one aids the WDP you are not simply helping a lobbying firm but participating within a collectivity; an assemblage of people with real families, dreams, and desires. Instead of simply challenging stereotypes on the level of rational deliberation, the event publicly constitutes a site of performance, pride, and promise. One cannot simply persuade and tell the public that a job is more than a number on a spreadsheet, an opportunity cost, a liability - you have re-present the invisible, marginalized populations in a positive light. Furthermore, these public events express these laboring bodies as more than a charity case, a victim subjected to the whims of the business cycle. These bodies beat with hope beyond being a statistic of servitude. 

An event is a Gathering - showing solidarity means more than checking a box on a political questionnaire.  Witnessing the mixture of bodies laughing, sweating and toiling together shows that the relations between those trying to help and those in need does not have to mirror the segregation experienced in the market. Playing soccer together evinces publics that competition need not be conflated with a brutish interpretation of human nature. Rather, an ethos of collectivity can be forged despite the inevitability of competitive practices. 

Workers Defense Project: Occult Expertism

The other day I was speaking with Joao Costa Vargas, a professor and ally of the Workers Defense Project and I realized something interesting about the structural dynamics of the social advocacy group. I told Joao about how I was researching the group this semester and he asked me if I knew Cristina very well. I had to pause for a second; I knew the name, I recalled she was on the board of directors, but I couldn't say that I knew her very well or that I could say much about her as a person.

I think this, albeit anecdotal, encounter says something about the nature of the way that the Workers Defense Project handles its business. First, there is a large separation between the on-the-ground operations of the group and the directers of the organization. There exists a significant gap, both perceptually and empirically, between those the organization's leadership and its body of workers. While it is practically impossible, and perhaps unwise, to completely abolish this fissure between the visionaries and the implementers of social change; this structural fact potentiates some more significant consequences for the group's future.

How will an organization whose stated aim is to work on behalf of workers be perceived if it models the corporate structure in all aspects except the profit motive? Do the inequalities of work relations end when incentive structures and monetary systems are equalized? Or do other power relations persist beyond the numbers on the spreadsheet? Although the Board of Directors is quite exceptionally qualified according to neoliberal standards; most of the executives have multiple higher education degrees, some even from Ivy League institutions such as Brown, could they still be guilty of perpetuating the unequal power relations they aim to subvert?

If the organizations maintains in the division of labor between skilled and unskilled labor, between experts and docile laborers, between those capable of adapting to an immaterialized, flexible and adaptive work environment and those that are more suited for basic manual labor how can our cultural ethos change from its current preoccupation with conflating skills with life value? How can our current systems of economic production break out of its rigid regimentation of people that has existed sinces The Republic or Aristotle's Politics, dividing the polis into Philosopher Kings and Workers, full humans and those naturally disposed to slavery?

The cult of expertism through which the organization perpetuates an ideology of paternalism damages its ability to cultivate a new sensibility of labour relations. If the oppressors view themselves solely as the bearer of Enlightenment knowledge that rides into the slums on a white horse of liberation they will be perceived in terms which are negligibly different from that of the original exploiters. Only when liberation becomes a mutual and reciprocal process, rather than a one-way street can a truly emancipatory politics arise anew.