Occupy!

by Dave Sherry

Workplace occupations have reappeared over the last year in response to the economic crisis. Groups of workers have refused to let their factories and jobs go without a fight. Today's movement can learn from a century of experience. Dave Sherry looks at waves of occupations and sit-ins from Italy 1920, France 1936 and 1968, to the US car workers in Flint and Britain's own tradition from the Upper Clyde shipbuilders to the women at Lee Jeans. This short, accessible history.

157 pages, Paperback

First published August 25, 2011

Reviews

[Andrew Stone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in response to an embryonic revival of workers' occupations triggered by the 2008-9 crash that never fully developed, this is nonetheless a good synthesis of some of the historical high points of this tactic. Brief by design, the most engaging section is probably on the US sit-ins in the 1930s as it gives the clearest account of the ebb and flow of the movement. I was also unaware of the scale of some of the occupations in the UK well into the late 1980s. Those familiar with the IS/SWP tradition won't find anything hugely novel here in terms of theory, but apart from a little SWP boosterism there's not much to disagree with.

[Stephen Pinna · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the book definitely betrays it's sectarian leanings and it's optimism from 2010 is a bit outdated, it's still a great short record of worker's occupations and should be read widely by all those in the worker's movement.

[André · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dave Sherry's "Occupy!: A Short History Of Worker's Occupations" has 160 pages, while my cheap German Aurora edition is just 58 pages long, covering only the years 1920-1940 in Italy and the US. The original also covers France 1968, Britain in 1970s and other topics (and there have been incidents after that, but not in the ten or hundred of thousands, e.g., Germany's first worker's occupation was in 1975 at Seibel & Söhne; or the series of bossnapping incidents in the spring of 2009 in France).

So I can not say much about the whole book, but what I read was interesting. The text does not go into depth but rather shows more or less successful occupations and their hurdles, which were found not only in the opposing company, state/police, 'civil defense' (Bürgerwehr) and strikebreakers (rerecruited from the unemployed) but often in the leadership of the labor movements, too.
Especially in the US, trade unionists were tackled particularly hard. All the more impressive is the courage of the US workers, socialists, communists etc. involved.

My edition concludes that occupations were not revolutionary but a situation to organize employees and make them aware of their collective power and aware of the possibility of self-organization - ideally overarching to different sectors -, a situation to teach workers etc., assuming all workers would want to go further.

I did not find much about the rationales of the actors in my edition:
For example, unions need to be able to bring their workers into line - possibly by force - because only then would they be taken seriously by the capitalists as bargaining power. This implies negotiating capitalists and wage workers who need a flourishing economy location with wages being the negative quantity and are therefore necessarily at a disadvantage. My edition is more about telling the events and concomitant circumstances.

By the way: Although you often see individual stressed workers and bad bosses in movies, there are some but not many movies which include unionizing, the establishment of a works council, or other labor-action methods with clear partiality and first-person narration. One such labor film is "F.I.S.T.", from 1978 with a 31 year old Sylvester Stallone. The first part of the movie plays in the 30-40s (described by Sherry's book):

F.I.S.T.- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKY75...

Edit 2020-01-26:
bought the English edition, too - will update the review later