As some of you are aware, I am an organizer with the Ottawa Panhandlers’ Union. We are a real union, a shop of the Industrial Workers of the World, with whom I am registered as an official delegate (which means I have the right to collect dues and issue new memberships).
Our members range from homeless panhandlers to street-involved youth, to buskers and street artists. On paper we have some 70 or so members, although we can count on the support of a larger number when we hold actions or pickets (which is historically traditional with the Wobblies; many who prefer not to join an organization which is openly revolutionary are still fellow-travellers who lend support where they can and as required). The OPU has attracted a lot of media attention (you may have read about us in your local newspaper or read about us on Fark or one of the other “unusual news” sites) and I’ve been questioned about our activities in a number of threads here. It was suggested that I create this thread as a way of centralizing discussion about the OPU and its activities, so here I am.
Please be advised that I will answer only respectful questions. It’s fine to disagree with us (or me, personally), but poor-bashing, trolling, snark, and sarcastic one-lining will get you ignored. If this thread turns into a circus, I’ll simply take my ball and go home. This is a public forum and I will not allow people to abuse our members. I am the official spokesperson for the OPU, but unless I indicate otherwise, the opinions I express here are my own and may not be quoted by media unless I have explicitly stated that what I’ve said in a given posting is the official view of the OPU. I also do not speak in any capacity for the IWW.
Can you explain what makes it a “Union” as opposed to, say, a social group or any other sort of lobbying coalition? I’ve always thought the term “union” referred to an organization of workers that collectively bargain with with their employers. Panhandlers are independent contractors.
To follow up on Rand’s question, do you actually engage in any kind of bargaining with anyone? Do your interests lie in getting local police and government to not hassle you or to provide a “panhandling zone?” I guess I really don’t see the point.
It’s a common misconception that a union exists for the explicit purpose of collective bargaining. That’s certainly the main use of most craft unions today, but it was not historically the case.
In the beginning, unions existed in order to provide mutual protection and support for workers. The bosses were organized and the workers were not. In order to get better working conditions – whether that meant improved safety, higher wages, or simply more respect – the workers organized also. The original unions were, as you are probably aware, illegal. There was no official registration with the State, and no collaboration with employers in terms of the collection of dues.
The OPU is a union in the most traditional sense of workers banding together for better conditions. It’s not as unusual as you might think. During the Great Depression, for example, the IWW organized the men in work camps to fight for their rights, better conditions, and simple human dignity. At one time, the hobos crossing the continent in great numbers by rail were mostly Wobblies (that is, members of the IWW) and if you wanted to hop a freight car, you had better have your union red card or you were likely to get pitched right back off.
Also bear in mind that the IWW is not a craft union, it’s an industrial union. The unions with which you are probably familiar are almost entirely craft unions in that they unionize only within a single given occupation (or craft). So, for example, in a factory, the line workers, the janitors, the secretaries, and the cafeteria cooks will all belong to different unions. This allows management to play the unions off against one another. If the (largely female) secretaries demand equal pay for equal work, for example, they may be told that there’s no money available because those evil Steelworkers’ Union folks down on the line took it all. If the Steelworkers go on strike, the management might use a collective bargaining agreement they already have with the Teamsters to force them to act as scabs. The IWW, on the other hand, organizes industrially. That is, they will organize the entire factory, as an industry, rather than each individual job within it as a trade. This has the benefit of greatly strengthening everyone and preventing the bosses from playing workers off against each other. In the early 20th century, the bosses had great success playing off the skilled workers against the unskilled, the whites against the ethnic minorities, the men against the women, and so on. The IWW grew to the prominance and importance it did because it organized across all of those lines, and was the first union to do so in North America.
So, while you are correct that most modern unions are concerned primarily with collective bargaining (although you may find it interesting to note that the majority of strikes are, statistically, more likely to be over issues of safety or respect than money), the IWW is a traditional union and organizes along different lines.
Gentle observation - you’ve already given permission for Creative Loafing Media (and anyone they decide to pass your message on to) to quote you. See the text at the bottom of the page.
I think we understand what your (very vague) rational is historically speaking. What is it that you plan to DO in both the short and the long-term. A concrete list of goals would be appreciated for both us and, I am sure, your members.
The OPU was started in direct response to increasing levels of abuse, both figurative and literal, by the police in Ottawa. The actual source of this abuse requires a bit of background information.
In the past, Ottawa has not had a large problem with homelessness. Ottawa is the capital of Kanada, and has traditionally been regarded as recession-proof because most people were employed by the government. Welfare payments, while they were certainly not at all pleasant, were sufficient at least to keep people housed in rooming houses.
Then, in 1995, Mike Harris was elected premier of Ontario. Harris was a neo-conservative and an ideologue whose very first action as premier, within a week of being elected, was to slash welfare rates by some 22% and arbitrarily throw hundreds of thousands of people off of welfare and into the street.
Twenty-two percent is a lot, but it’s worse than you think. The 22% cut was applied to the entire cheque. The largest single expense by far for any person on welfare is rent. Since this amount is fixed, a cut of 22% means the actual money a person had after paying rent was actually cut by 50% or more. The man Harris put in charge of social services was a chauffeured socialite by the name of Dave Tsubouchi. When the media told Tsubouchi that the provinces’s own health department said it was now physically impossible for a person on welfare to eat a balanced diet, his responses became infamous: “They should eat more tuna, tuna is cheap,” and “They should haggle with supermarkets for better prices.” When Harris was confronted by the media with the same information, he said, famously, that he ate baloney sandwiches growing up and it never hurt him. (His mother, incidentally, sniffed indignantly when asked by reporters and said she would never serve balogna to her children.)
At the same time that all of this was going on, Harris completely removed rent controls in Ontario. Rents all over the province skyrocketed to record levels – while, simultaneously, vacancy levels rose to levels not seen since the Great Depression because landlords didn’t want to lock into tenants paying lower rates who could not be arbitrarily evicted and preferred their units to sit empty on the chance they might find someone willing to pay much higher amounts. Social Services attempted to track the hundreds of thousands of people who had been cut off of welfare entirely and a year later admitted that 100,000 people had simply vanished. The government claimed that these people probably had never existed and crowed that they had clearly been correct in cutting these fraudulent non-people off. Except it was during this period when homelessness in Ontario exploded right off the charts.
Once a person is homeless, there are a number of effects which conspire to keep that person homeless. The long-term effects of Harris’ policies will linger for decades at the very least. Harris did everything in his power, while he held power, to make the effects of his policies as permanent as he could make them. He made sweeping changes to everything from the educational system (his minister of education was a used car salesman who had dropped out of highschool) to welfare and disability eligibility. The effects were pernicious. For example, he made teenagers ineligible for welfare. He said that teens were the responsibility of their parents, not the State. Teens who were running from abusive homes now were forced to choose between returning to families were they were beaten and raped and becoming hardcore street youth, sleeping in squats and committing petty crime or panhandling to survive. Over the next ten years, Harris refused to raise the welfare rates, causing them to shrink still further to inflation, losing an additional 20% while rents continued to increase. At the same time all this was happening, Harris cut provincial taxes and simultaneously cut government funding for programs like food banks; he said government had no role in “charity,” and that if people really wanted such services they could pay for them from the tax money he was saving them.
You can imagine the net effect of all of this. Toronto’s homeless population exploded, estimated at about 10,000 people. In Ottawa, where poverty had been discretely hidden from view, suddenly there were pawn shops everywhere and panhandlers on every street. With the growth of homelessness came the accompanying drugs. Crack and meth, which had been entirely absent in Ottawa, was suddenly being sold everywhere, pushed onto the newly homeless as a way of escaping their misery today at the expense of untold misery tomorrow – but when you’re on the street, you don’t worry about tomorrow.
The situation was becoming desperate. The police were under intense pressure to “clean up the streets.” Since there’s no law against being poor in public, the police simply started breaking the law. They started writing thousands and thousands of tickets, most of which were nonsense and almost none of which were collectable, in an attempt to harass people off the street. When that failed, police started arresting people on trumped-up charges like “creating a disturbance” or “mischief” which are so vague that they could charge anyone at all for anything at all. When the local prison filled up to the point where conditions were so bad judges were giving people triple-value for time served there, the police started resorting to simple beatings. They’d drive you to the city lines and tell you not to come back, and if you did, you’d be dragged into a parking lot and beaten mercilessly. The police force started hiring roid cases and meatheads for the specific purpose of beating unwanted “troublemakers” (ie/ poor people) up.
By 2004, the street started to fight back. The problem is, people have to exist somewhere. You can ticket them, imprison them, and beat them, but if they have nowhere else to go, even the most frightened and submissive twink will eventually fight back. On the lawn of city hall, a homeless camp began growing. I am proud to have been part of it, helping to teach those who arrived to self-organize. For 50 days we occupied the lawn at city hall and made our demands known. We had grown so large and our demands were so reasonable – that police stop beating people up for being poor – that city hall was afraid to send the police in shut it down by force, both because they knew we would fight back, and because it would make them look like the sociopathic assholes they were. City hall consistently refused to meet with us to hear our demands. The mayor, when asked by media, said we need to go talk to Social Services, that’s what they’re there for. The police started sending infiltrators, trying to stir up in-fighting and gathering intelligence, looking for the “leaders.”
Eventually, it culminated one day in a bunch of us spontaneously invading city hall and setting up camp right outside the mayor’s door. They hadn’t expected us for the simple reason that we hadn’t planned it. In the finest insurrectionist traditions. we acted on the spur of the moment. They threatened us, but we refused to back down. They were trapped in their offices. They couldn’t leave, and they wouldn’t let us enter. We used a megaphone, chanted, and sang, totally disrupting the usual silent inefficiency of city hall. In the end, the mayor agreed to meet a delegation from the camp to hear our complaints and our demands.
Days later, a delegation from the camp, consisting entirely of homeless youth and panhandlers, had their meeting with the mayor. He agreed to all of our demands, including case management for all those who had participated in the homeless camp and a task force to deal with the issue of police violence and harassment. The agreement was reached on Thursday and they all agreed to take down the camp and leave on Saturday, having accomplished their goals. Friday night the city sent in the riot police to rip down the camp by force, in the kind of childish “fuck you” gesture we’ve come to expect. They knew we wouldn’t fight because we had already got what we wanted and were planning to leave anyway, so they wanted to look “strong” in front of the media. Our camp had been set up around the Human Rights Monument on the lawn of city hall, and hanging from the monument we had a bedsheet with a reproduction of a letter from the Golden Lakes band of the Algonquin, whose land had been stolen by the original settlers, and who have never given up claim to the land. They had given us permission to set up our camp on their land, and expressed support for what we were doing. The riot police took a knife and slashed the bedsheet into ribbons, but left it hanging from the monument. That should tell you all you need to know about the mentality of the people we’re fighting.
In the aftermath of that 2004 homeless camp, two organizations were founded: the Ticket Defence Program and the Ottawa Panhandlers’ Union. The TDP was a collective of local activists who collected all the thousands and thousands of tickets the police were giving the homeless, and represented them as agents in court, helping to jam up the gears and forcing the courts to throw out 90% of the tickets even before they reached court. The OPU was, as I’ve explained, a group founded on direct action, for the mutual protection of people on the street. The TDP, in other words, was responsible for working within the framework of the legal system, while the OPU worked outside of it. The two groups worked in tandem. I am both spokesperson for the OPU, for example, while I am also an agent for the TDP and empowered to collect tickets and affidavits.
I know this is rather long (and I’ve only handled one of your three questions so far!) but you can see why a lot of what we do and why we do it requires context to properly understand.
Yes and no. While we are certainly willing to work with the community, the problem is the community has no interest in working with us. Our main opponent over the years has turned out to be the BIAs. BIA stands for “Business Improvement Area” and they exist as consortiums of local businesses. They are funded by mandatory levees extracted from every business in the city through their property taxes, and they are responsible to no one. They have been given (as part of Mike Harris’ legacy, natch) the right to pass what are effectively their own bylaws regarding use of the streets. The BIAs are on record as wanting to entirely eliminate the poor on “their” streets. Unless you’re there to shop, they don’t want you walking on public streets. They remove benches, have sharp spikes installed anywhere people might sit, and install speakers anywhere the poor gather, through which they blast easy-listening as ear-splitting levels, to prevent busking or any kind of conversation. I’ve had a number of debates on both radio and television with the BIAs and I have been told by these representatives, off the record, that they own city hall; it’s bought and paid for.
Our members have said that they want to vend. Almost no one wants to be a panhandler. It’s degrading and often dangerous. Among our members are amateur jewelry-makers, buskers, artists, and artisans. Vending in Ottawa has been completely banned in Ottawa under pressure from the BIAs, who say that street vending is unfair because it takes business away from shops which are forced to pay property taxes and rent. At one point we had a newspaper distribution program where panhandlers could get newspapers at cost and distribute them on the street for donations. Everyone liked the program. The public liked it because they saw people doing work instead of sitting their hands out. The police liked it because they stopped getting complaints from the public. The panhandlers themselves liked it because they made more money and it gave them a sense of accomplishment and pride. Yet the city shut us down – again, under pressure from the BIAs. We were getting around the city anti-vending bylaws by making it a donation rather than a sale; the panhandler would give you the newspaper free if you asked for it, and there was no set cost for a paper (although again, if asked, they would state there was a recommended donation of a dollar). The city lawyer was brought in to change the definition of the word “vending” to mean “handing anything to anyone on the street without the intention of getting it back.” At the meeting we asked, “Wait, does that mean that if we hand a pack of matches to someone on the street and they don’t hand them back that we’ve broken the law?” The lawyer pondered for a bit and said, “Well… yes.”
If everyone who could vend was permitted to do so, there would be few enough people forced to panhandle that no one would complain.
Absolutely. After the success of the TDP, the police began resorting to more physical intimidation. At one point the OPU occupied the street outside the police station and shut down traffic for an hour to warn police to fire one of their officers who was notorious for dragging street kids into parking lots and beating them up. We told them if he wasn’t fired, we’d be back. He wasn’t and we were. Exactly one month later, we marched inside the police station this time and occupied their lobby, surrounded by swarms of angry cops, and read our demands through a megaphone. They arrested one of our members (when I stepped out of the building they arrested him for “swearing” – I looked the cop in the eye and said that was bullshit; he simply turned his head and pretended I hadn’t said anything), so we simply refused to leave the police station until they released him. Fortunately, this time the cops took us seriously and got rid of him. They promoted him to detective which, while not ideal, at least got him off the streets. It’s a lot easier to promote them than to fire them, and as long as he’s not beating up street kids any more, we don’t really care.
We have also instituted a formal copwatch program as an arm of the OPU. We use the privilege of outsiders, generally nice white college activists, to act as a barrier between our members and the police. We do nightly patrols in pairs, in vests which identify us as members of copwatch, and when we see police breaking the law, we intervene. We record the police, we file complaints, and we teach people what their legal rights are, while using our unwanted privilege to shield those who lack it.
Yes indeed. For example, two years ago, we filed a one million dollar lawsuit against the City of Ottawa as a result of them putting up an ugly wrought iron fence to prevent people from sheltering under a pedestrian underpass which was where street people had been socializing (and sheltering from the elements at night). An underpass isn’t ideal by any stretch of the imagination, but given the lack of other options it is both cruel and – we believe – illegal under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to deliberately deprive someone of a place to shelter in a city where the temperature in the winter regularly hits -35 C. Our lawsuit has been slowly making its way through the courts, and on Sept. 8 we sit down with the city for mediation to see if we can reach some mutually-agreeable compromise.
Likewise, one of our members was severely beaten by thee members of the Rideau Centre Mall security. It’s been the most open secret in the whole city that for 20 years, the Rideau Centre has been beating up and intimidating poor people to keep them out. See, the Rideau Centre was built over a public road so part of the deal was that they had to act as a public right-of-way. They can’t legally keep street kids and the homeless out, so they use violence to intimidate them into staying away. The police refused to press charges (indeed, one of the security guards responsible became a cop during our court proceedings and showed up in uniform to try and sway the judge), so our member came to us as soon as he got out of the hospital. We documented his injuries (we have Bill’s explicit permission to use his image, mods), and negotiated on his behalf with Rideau Centre management. All he wanted was an apology, for the trespassing ticket to be dropped, and for formal action (we didn’t even specify what form it would take) to be taken against the security guards responsible. The Rideau Centre laughed in our faces, so we filed a lawsuit in Superior Court for $70,000. They eventually ended up settling out of court for a sum of money I am not permitted to state, but can say is sufficiently large that they’ll think twice about beating one of our members again.
Dues are set by the IWW, based on income. The vast majority of the OPU falls into the lowest category, which is for members who are experiencing severe financial hardship. Dues at this level are $5 a month. I should add that one remains a member whether or not they pay dues. A member who does not pay dues goes into bad standing, which means they cannot vote at the level of the larger IWW organization (although they can certainly vote at the OPU itself regardless).
This is pretty disrespectful, but I’ll answer it. Zero. The IWW has a single paid member for the entire union, which is why our dues are so low. All other positions within the union are done on a strictly volunteer basis. For the work I do I am paid nothing. I sometimes claim expenses if I have any (for example, the OPU voted to buy food for our meetings to the tune of $15 a month, and I am reimbursed for that), but more often than not I end up donating the money to the union because we’re panhandlers and have fuck-all for resources.
What I meant is that while they’re of course free to quote me (as you just did), they can’t quote me as spokesperson for the OPU unless I have explicitly stated in a posting that I am doing so. You have to understand, we deal with some folks who play hardball (I’ll probably post the death threats I’ve received at some point), and the media is generally not kind to us; one newspaper article accused us outright of being extortionists (they were forced to retract it) and a local right-wing radio host has stated on the air that I am a drug dealer (he says I should send him my tax return to prove I’m not) and wrote some decidedly unflattering things about me in his book. I want to make sure that what I say here isn’t used against the organization.
Does the union make decisions about what actions to take? If the union does make such decisions, what is the decision-making process? If possible goals and actions are put to a vote, what are the rules for quorums, majorities (consensus?), etc.?
The OPU decides on actions collectively. Every meeting (we meet formally the first Monday of each month) members are free to bring forward new business (or to contact the secretary before the meeting to have it added to the agenda). We use a simplified version of Robert’s Rules of Order for meetings, so that everyone has a turn to talk and the more boisterous of us don’t drown out the quieter folks. We all take turns chairing meetings so that everyone learns how to run a proper meeting and keep order. Quorum for the OPU is five members. We use a consensus-based voting model in which people can vote to support, stand aside, or block. When someone blocks, we start a discussion to see if we can find consensus. In the event that we can’t reach a consensus and we absolutely must reach some decision it’s majority rules, but that has never been necessary, as we’ve always either been able to reach consensus or agreed to drop the matter out of respect for dissent.
Five members seems like a relatively small quorum. How many members does the average meeting have? What’s the biggest meeting you’ve had in which a consensus decision was made? How often do you meet?
Are there other unions like yours in elsewhere in Canada? In the US? I haven’t heard of this sort of organization before. A google search just showed yours on the first page, unless I missed something.
I’ve already mostly dealt with this in my longer answers, but I don’t mind re-emphasizing it. Contrary to what many believe, we do not want to see panhandlers on every corner. Not even panhandlers want to see panhandlers everywhere, since it’s bad for business and it’s a major heat score. Here I can speak as official spokesperson for the OPU when I say that we have from our very founding supported free enterprise. Our members wish to vend, to be responsible members of the public body, and to be treated with the respect and dignity they deserve. We believe we have the right to gather where we please to socialize, and we believe that it should not cost us money to do so.
Thus in the short term we seek to redress the violence and aggression which is visited upon our members by the police and private security at the behest of business interests and city hall. We wish to make manifest that panhandling is a legal activity protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and that every person has the right, both legal and moral, to ask for assistance on a public street, and each members of the public has the right to give or withold that assistance as they deem fit. In the longer term, we seek to change those conditions which force our members to panhandle, and to create new opportunity for street entrepreneurialism as a way to build both self-esteem and lifeskills among our membership.
That’s where my skills as an organizer come into play. As you can imagine, people who live on the street are not big on meetings, agendas, and structure. We have had meetings where we failed to get quorum, but where it was important for us to reach a decision as an organization. In case like this, I go out onto the streets and start networking, talking to our members in their places of business and soliciting their views. It may take a few days of going from streetcorner to streetcorner and hanging out around the homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and drop-ins, but eventually I can start to build a consensus and generate a decision from that. Organizing the disorganized is a very specialized skill, which is one of the reasons I give freeschools on street organizing to other organizers. It is especially important that any street organizer know how to subtract themselves from the final equation, so that you don’t inadvertantly create the consensus through force of your own personality rather than listening and encouraging the membership to build it themselves.
At our formal meetings we average between six and 12 members. As you might imagine, not all our members are active at any given time, especially as the street population is highly transient. I am often asked by media how we deal with this, and I usually smile and tell them it’s a feature, not a bug: as our members learn how to organize, maintain order at meetings, and fight for their rights, they take these skills with them as they travel, sowing fresh seeds wherever they go.
As I mentioned earlier, we meet formally once a month, but a lot of our business is transacted on the streets, when and where a handful of us gather. That’s really a strength for us, as it means we are not centralized enough for anyone to shut us down. Even if our meeting space was taken away from us and I was imprisoned (both of these have happened in the past), our decentralized structure means we retain continuity.
