By Pamela Brown, March 19th, 2012 
Occupy’s six-month birthday celebration last Saturday at Zuccotti Park was first spent in celebration: the scene was joyous with friends reuniting after winter hibernation. “Spring training” regimes were conducted. The drum circle was back, and mic checks once again created a collective voice.
But when protestors undertook a spontaneous, albeit brief, reoccupation, they were met with the most violent and unrestrained NYC police force to date. MTA buses were commandeered and over seventy arrests were made. The significance and power of the park was clear once again.
Police violence was immediately challenged with solidarity marches in New York and throughout the country on Sunday. In spite of a winter predicting our demise, Occupy is alive again this spring. Not that we were ever really dead, but since the cops evicted Zuccotti the first time last fall, OWS has been struggling to find a way of staying meaningful without the spectacle of the park. Liberty Park offered a sense of commonality, a point of access, and a feeling of empowerment that has been difficult to replicate.
In fact, as the winter approached, the occupation had already started to weaken. Social problems appeared within the park. The influx of those bearing the stigmas of long-term homelessness, substance abuse and mental illness had already created divisions, cutting across the usual lines of class, race and “mental status.” Neighborhoods and maps developed to segregate social groups, restricting movement within what was established and claimed as a space of “openness.” Just after the fall storm, a woman pushed past me rushing from one side of the park to the other, and I heard her say to a friend, “Oh noooo, we don’t want to get caught in that part of the ‘hood.’ ” That comment stuck.
Many of us felt relieved that the police closed the park – that the occupation went out with a bang, rather than slowly disintegrating in front of an increasingly disinterested television audience, suggesting the movement’s ideals as being fundamentally in conflict to the wider public.
Nonetheless, the movement did continue. The loss of the park meant . . .
Read more: OWS at Six Months: Reflections on the Winter Occupation
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 5th, 2011 
Today is Labor Day in the U.S. In practice, for most Americans, the primary significance of the day is as the unofficial last day of summer. I just went for a long swim in my outdoor pool, which closes today.
There are also political and union activities on the labor theme, marking the official reason for the holiday. Thus, President Obama gave a speech today in Detroit to a union gathering, previewing the themes of his long awaited address to a joint session of Congress on Thursday, addressing the concerns of organized labor.
This September date as a workers holiday was originally chosen by the Central Union of New York in 1882. It is strange that the rest of the world celebrates May 1st as the international day of labor, marking the Haymarket Affair of 1886, a scandalous labor conflict in Chicago. During the cold war, the U.S. even officially designated May 1st as “loyalty day.” The contrast with the practice of the Soviet Union and its allies was essential. The American Labor Day, though, has an equally serious origin. It became a national holiday after the violent events surrounding the Pullman Strike of 1894. American indeed has an important and rich labor history.
I think it is unfortunate that American labor’s celebration is out of sync with the rest of the world. We commemorate alone, which weakens the power of the ritual. Nonetheless, especially now, when labor issues are so central, as President Obama indicated in his speech, it is important to take notice. I recall some previous Deliberately Considered posts.
Rachel Sherman’s “Domestic Workers Gain Visibility, Legitimacy” noted an advance in labor legislation in the state of New York. She highlighted the achievements of the Domestic Workers Union to agitate and achieve some fundamental rights in the new legislation, concerning overtime, vacation leave and protections against sexual and racial harassment. As she also observed the place of American domestic workers in the global economy and the connection between class and gender, . . .
Read more: In Review: On Labor Day
By Cecilia Rubino, May 1st, 2011 
“We heard an explosion, through the shattering glass
We looked up at the Asch building
A bundle of cloth came flying out the window
On the way down it opened up in the wind
It was a girl, it was girl.”
(From the Fire)
Today is May Day, “el Dia del Trabajo,” a day in which work and workers are honored around the globe. Today in particular, five weeks after the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, we remember the 146 immigrant workers, most Jewish and Italian girls, who died trying to escape flames that roared through the upper floors of the Asch building, a garment factory near Washington Square. Trapped behind locked doors, many never had the chance to escape. Others jumped out the windows, some hand-in-hand, their hair and clothes aflame.
Saturday, March 25, 1911 was a clear, early spring day. Crowds of New Yorkers strolled in Washington Square and on the streets of the lower East Side. Suddenly at 4:45, many looked up and saw smoke billowing from a ten story building on Green Street and Washington Place. Hundreds rushed to the scene. One observer said he thought the factory owner was trying to save his best cloth by throwing bundles of fabric from the ninth floor. He and so many others realized in horror that they were seeing not bundles of cloth falling from the windows but girls — girls in flame, girls who were landing in broken heaps on the sidewalk in front of them. The fire which lasted less than half an hour, made these invisible immigrant workers suddenly starkly visible. Photographs of the mangled bodies were printed in the morning newspapers but still thousands came to view the open coffins lined up in rows on ‘Misery Lane,’ the makeshift morgue set up on the peer at 26th Street. Some were family and friends desperately searching for missing loved ones but most wanted to just see the dead with their own eyes. Ocular proof.
New Yorkers felt that they knew these shirtwaist makers. They were the girls who . . .
Read more: May Day’s Ocular Proof: A Bundle of Cloth
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