Going to Jail In L.A.

    Sounds like a start of a piece about Paris Hilton, huh? Nah. Several hundred people went to jail yesterday in Los Angeles for blocking a main street near the airport as part of a protest in support of unionizing Hilton and Westin hotels.

    Which brings up the tactic of civil disobedience. It says something when--if this is true--the Los Angeles Times reports that, "Police, noting the number of arrests, called the event the largest civil disobedience in Los Angeles in a generation and one of the largest in the city's history. The protest saw more arrests than any labor action in 60 years." Could that be right? 300 people going to jail tops anything over the past 60 years. Hmmmm...

    I'm all for civil disobedience (and, in fact, have my own court date next week for participating in such an effort to support the striking NYU grad students here). But, don't we need larger numbers to make this effective? Or at least have these arrests take place day after day in order to truly have an impact. Particularly in L.A., which has no geographical center, I'm not sure how this kind of action disrupts the daily pace of the city. If CD is a moral action designed to get media attention, certainly you don't need thousands of people.

Comments

[M~]

I think we should take some lessons from the past. The Wobblies and the Women's Suffrage movement used great tactics that tied up the courts and the police and worked to get their point across. The Wobblies would have someone soap box. After he/she got arrested and the cops left, someone else would soap box. When that person got arrested, someone else would soapbox. And it would keep going. The Suffrage movement would put protesters in front of the White House. When they got arrested, the next group of women lined up and got arrested, and so on. It tied up the resources of the police and of the courts. I just think these are interesting strategies.

[Commie Curmudgeon]

Just passing through (from a link somewhere else), and a couple of things occurred to me... Three hundred arrested might be impressive as an official "labor action" in Los Angeles, but it's the biggest in 60 years only given the specific city and the parties involved. We've certainly seen more arrests at other actions in more recent years. And I don't mean the '60s or '70s, either, I mean much more recently... In my home city, New York, there were over 1,000 arrests of people protesting the 2004 Republican National Convention, and the civil disobedience involved was very mild or non-existent in many cases. (People arrested for riding in a group of bicycles or walking in an "illegal" march, sometimes while on the sidewalk, or in some cases just passing by...) And if I remember correctly, the April 16, 2000 protests in Washington, DC against the IMF and World Bank (which I protests I also happened to be part of) had well over 300 arrests. And so on...

Given these figures, I don't think greater numbers alone will have much impact, unless we're talking about numbers far greater than anything we've ever seen.

The more interesting protests in recent memory were effective because of creative tactics that took people by surprise. The "anti-glob" protests fell into this area, especially Seattle 1999, when people pulled something off, using a variety of creative tactics of disruption, which was completely unexpected. It wasn't the numbers arrested that made that event. (In comparison, the RNC protests, with its 1000 arrests, were generally useless. Because, they didn't really work very well as civil disobedience - didn't stop anything - and they had no clear objective outside of expressing an opinion, IMO.)

The Suffragettes and the old Wobblies both used tactics that were very creative and quite disruptive. The Wobs used a variety of tactics beyond the strike to stop, slow down, or disrupt many a workplace, and the Suffragettes, at least in the UK (which I know more about because I happened to read the Pankhursts, etc.) actually engaged in quite a bit of property destruction.

So, these mass-arrest scenarios were only a small part of it...

[anon]

Here's a tactic they could try. They need to canvass the neighborhoods of the people who own those hotels (I don't think they're corporate owned) and let their neighbors know about the union struggle. picket their houses, country clubs, kids' schools. embarrass these bastards. make the owners' lives a living hell. they need to get the message that what their doing is NOT socially acceptable.

[anon]

also, tom morello rocks.

whatever it takes.

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