By Mary Solberg
For Silas Russell, a 2007 graduate of Allegheny College, the Occupy Wall Street movement is personal. It is, he says, “a movement of ordinary people” like him and the 20,000 Pennsylvanians for whom he works as a political organizer for SEIU PA, Pennsylvania’s largest union for health care workers.
“People need to take back power,” Russell told a luncheon gathering Nov. 10 at Quigley Hall on the Allegheny College campus. “We cannot have an economy that is controlled from the top.”
In his work, Russell sees firsthand the effects of an unstable economy and how the average worker struggles to maintain financial security. Little wonder that the Occupy Wall Street movement appealed to him; he was intrigued with its call to equalize the financial playing field in America. In the early fall of 2011, he started working as an organizer for Occupy Pittsburgh, camping out the first week in a park on Grant Street in the Steel City.
“At this point,” he added, “the movement is too big to fail.”
By the looks of the packed audience at Quigley’s Henderson Auditorium, the movement is too big to be ignored, too. Fittingly titled “Occupy Quigley,” the panel discussion included Russell, who came from Pittsburgh for the day, and Political Science Professor Bruce Smith, and Economics Professor Russell Ormiston. While attentive to the two professors, students were clearly intrigued by Silas Russell and his activism. Several stayed afterward to talk to Russell about Occupy activities in Pittsburgh.
During a question-and-answer segment, Kimberly Langin ’13 asked Russell if he thought the Occupy movement was anti-capitalist.
“Occupy is a movement that wants to have capitalism work for everybody,” Russell said.
For Professor Smith, Occupy Wall Street makes him sentimental for his own days of activism. “It’s in the American gene,” he explained. “It’s radical, it’s democratic. It’s Jeffersonian.”
For any movement to be successful, Smith added, it needs three things: skilled organizers, meetings that continue on a regular basis after the initial weeks, and promotion of public policies that address the majority of people, in Occupy’s case, the 99 percent of Americans for whom it claims to speak for.
“Absence of leadership is not good, and actions like stomping on the flag can sully the movement,” Smith said.
Professor Ormiston views the Occupy movement “through the lens of the American worker.” From 1979 to 1990, union membership in the United States fell by one-third, creating the issue of income inequality that Occupy is protesting.
“From 1945 to 1979, the social contract was that if workers worked hard they’d be rewarded,” Ormiston explained. “From 1979 to 1981, a new mode of thinking came to the fore [with more imports from Asia and with the firing of striking air traffic controllers].”
The gradual decay of unions has affected the power of the American worker, but no one—even the Democrats—haven’t addressed the tough questions on how to help. In the past couple decades, there haven’t even been any significant protests of this decline. As Ormiston said, “We don’t protest erosion.”
That erosion, combined with the recent economic recession, has created the perfect environment for a movement such as Occupy to appear. The Occupy movement, Ormiston explained, “has changed the conversation.”