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Class Struggle In The Green Mountains: Vermont Workers' Center
by Lady, Green Mountain Anarchist Collective (NEFAC-Vermont)

The VWC was founded by a large proportion of class struggle anarchists, and currently those who do a lot of the organizing identify to one degree or another with anarchism. While the volunteers involved with the center do not all identify as such, a number of those who do are known to the community as anarchists. However, their politics are not front and center; it is about the work they are doing. The VWC prioritizes its work by first building a movement around people and what their issues are. Then, the need to figure out how to build that movement into a more democratic one emerges.

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[ 11 December 2003: Message edited by: Mick ]

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In Vermont, where 79 percent of businesses employ nine or less people, building a strong union movement could be an uphill battle. Many workers are employed in small service sector operations highly dependent on tourist dollars, where organizing has been a seemingly impossible task. Additionally, most of these workplaces pay low wages and employ people on an ‘at will’ basis, where workers can be fired at anytime for any reason. These economic ‘on the job’ realities have long posed difficult questions for workers interested in building a movement that gives them a voice on the job and strives to organize broad based working class power in the Green Mountains. Enter the Montpelier Downtown Workers Union.

For almost a year, organizers from the Vermont Workers' Center, a statewide workers’ rights organization, and the rank and file oriented United Electrical Workers (UE) have collaborated with downtown workers to bring all service and retail workers in the state capitol of Montpelier into a single citywide union. Our union seeks to represent cooks alongside cashiers, coffee shop workers next to bartenders and gas station attendants with movie theater concession stand clerks.

Unlike other more “skilled” strata of the working class, most workers who are employed in the service and retail sectors are living check to check, week to week. To be fired could mean getting your electricity shut off, eviction, forclosure, sleeping on a friend’s or family member’s couch, navigating labyrinthine bureaucracies just to get some cash to buy diapers for your kids, filling up on crap food at church soup kitchens, or any number of other undesirable consequences. Such conditions of poverty and precariousness don’t often help build the sense of entitlement among workers that leads us to take collective action to bring about changes in our workplaces. More often our vulnerability in capitalism limits us to more individualized forms of resistance: slacking off, stealing and shirking off work for a day by calling in sick. In this context, our unionization effort has not only been an uphill battle but also a bold statement that if we band together change is possible.

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