A-Infos (en) US, BRRN: Anarchists in the Tenant Movement #2 - Salt Lake City (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

This is the second installment of our Anarchists in the Tenant Movement 
series. You can find the first installment here. The interview below was 
conducted with an organizer named Espy, involved in building a tenant 
organization in the western Salt Lake Valley. ---- Like our other series 
Anarchists in the Labor Movement, this series presents insights and 
perspectives from anarchists who are active in tenant organizing. Some 
of those we speak to are organizing through established tenant unions, 
others are building new unions, while others still are launching initial 
campaigns without a formal union yet.

For Black Rose / Rosa Negra (BRRN), mass organizations like tenant 
unions play a central role in our strategy. It is through these kinds of 
organizations that people create and apply their collective leverage 
against structures that dominate and exploit us, such as landlordism and 
private property. By engaging consistently in everyday campaigns, 
members of mass organizations grow their collective confidence and 
power, enabling them to take on ever bigger fights and ultimately to 
challenge the very existence of these dominating structures.

In part, the aim of this series is simply to shine a spotlight on the 
presence of anarchist militants in the U.S. tenant movement. More 
substantively, we ask participants to critically reflect on their 
experiences, including both successes and failures, to draw out 
generalizable lessons.

Some, but not all of those interviewed in this series are members of 
Black Rose / Rosa Negra.

Answers have been edited for clarity and length.

Espy - Tenant organizer in Salt Lake City
Black Rose/Rosa Negra (BRRN): How would you summarize your political 
perspective in one sentence?

Espy: Anarchist Communism: I want a world built by the working class and 
for the working class, without exploitation.

BRRN: What tenant union are you part of? (or describe where it is in the 
US if you do not want to name the specific union)

Espy: I'm helping to organize a residents' association in a mobile home 
park on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley. For the time being, we 
are only in one park, but we have plans to expand into other parks owned 
by the same company in the area through connections we have gained 
through organizing this lot.

BRRN: About how many people are part of your tenant union?

Espy: We currently have an active core group of 8 residents and around 
12 total members in the union.

BRRN: How is your tenant union organized? Describe its structures, how 
decisions are made, etc.

Espy: We are still trying to define the structure of the association. So 
far, we have developed rules around membership and a loose 
decision-making process. The bar of entry is extremely low; all that is 
required of members is to live in the park, attend one meeting, sign the 
Membership Agreement, and provide the association with a current phone 
number and lot number to maintain contact. The association settled on 
making decisions based on majority voting of all who are present at the 
current meeting. To make sure everyone knows what is going to be voted 
on so they can attend and voice their opinion, the Membership Agreement 
mandates that all proposals are given to members one week in advance to 
the meeting it will be voted on.

The structure is very much living and ever-changing and adapts to 
whatever issues we are facing at the current moment. For example, we are 
starting to run into new problems as we grow, like the need for live 
translation and a point of contact for management to connect with once 
we give them our demand letter, that will likely necessitate the 
formalization of more structure within the association.

BRRN: Prior to tenant organizing, did you have any other organizing 
experience?

Espy: I had tried to organize a union at my last job very 
unsuccessfully. I didn't take any time researching strategy or training 
on how to unionize and immediately made some harmful decisions. I failed 
to bring anyone into an organizing committee and falsely hoped that 
people with left-leaning politics would jump into organizing with me 
when they heard about the effort, but they were all too afraid of losing 
their jobs over it. I decided to announce the union effort to all of my 
coworkers by putting agitation propaganda by the time clock in hopes to 
get more people interested in joining the union. All this did, however, 
was tip management off and they immediately hired a union-busting 
lawyer, made each of the department managers sit through anti-union 
meetings, and began retaliation against me and my department.

BRRN: Describe the campaign you're currently involved in (or the most 
recent one): how did the campaign start, what are the main issues, what 
strategy and tactics are being used?

Espy: We recently finished a months-long process of developing a letter 
with our demands to the park management, that will announce our tenants' 
union and "force" management to recognize us as a collective bargaining 
unit, according to Utah Code 57-16-16. We have eight demands in the 
letter that we have discussed and voted on as an association. The 
demands vary in the degree of concessions that would be required from 
management and ownership. This includes smaller demands like renting a 
dumpster twice a year to help with maintaining cleanliness in the park, 
and sending all information to the residents in both English and 
Spanish, to more structural demands like stopping unjust evictions, 
pausing rent increases for five years and then, after that moratorium 
period, increasing rent by a fixed amount of $30 per year. If management 
does not heed to our demands, we have also included that the property 
owners should sell the land of the park to the residents at a 
competitive price.

After drafting the letter, we are now going back into the park to 
collect signatures from other residents. We have collectively decided 
not to turn in the letter until we have signatures from half (about 150) 
of the trailers in the park. This was done because the residents have 
felt that a lot of people in the majority hispanic park are afraid to 
stand up for themselves both because of a fear of retaliation and due to 
the political moment we find ourselves in. The residents decided that 
they would feel much more comfortable going public with the association 
when they have a majority behind them.

We have been gathering signatures for a little over three months now and 
it has been a slower process than we originally anticipated. This is in 
part due to the fact that none of the residents have had any experience 
with door knocking and having one-on-one organizing conversations, and 
those of us with these skills have been slow to practice these skills 
with them. As we are hitting these hurdles we are starting to look to 
give advice to the residents to support their struggle.

BRRN: How do your anarchist politics relate to/inform the day-to-day of 
tenant organizing work?

Espy: Our politics inform almost every decision we make in our 
organizing. Since the main organizers do not live in the park itself, we 
constantly have to question the ethics and politics behind what we are 
doing and how we are doing it. We are trying our best to avoid coming in 
from without and telling the residents what they should do, and instead 
building a more collaborative and democratic environment for many ideas 
to thrive. At one of the first meetings we had, the residents all 
decided that they wanted to form a tenant union if us organizers were 
the leaders of it. All of us being anarchists, we pushed back against 
this but it is still a common refrain from the union members. We even 
went as far to include in the membership agreement that only residents 
at the park could be members and have voting power as a way to say that 
the organizers could participate in discussion but we are not members. 
Since we have more experience and knowledge on the organizing front, we 
have taken the approach that we should be walking slightly ahead of, but 
still alongside, the residents instead of trying to lead them. We are 
trying to build up the capacities and knowledge of the residents to run 
their union without our help as much as they can. There has been several 
times where we have recognized a common problem in the tenant union but 
we wait until the residents bring it up and help them think through 
possible solutions instead of dictating what they should do.

BRRN: How do tenant unions fit into a broader strategy aimed at 
revolutionary social transformation?

Espy: Tenant unions are one site where we can develop class 
consciousness and popular power. To me, I see tenant unions as another 
way to combat the State, both because of the State's claim to a monopoly 
of violence over a specific territory and because people seem to be more 
militant in defending the places they live over the places they work. 
This is, of course, not to say that we don't need workplace organizing, 
only that we will need both, and these movements will need to link up to 
fight against the System of Domination. The struggle over housing is 
essential to overthrowing capitalism because one of the main mechanisms 
that capital uses to force us to sell our labor is the fact that we have 
to pay for a place to sleep at night and feel secure. If we can 
eliminate the need to pay for housing, we eliminate part of the need to 
sell our labor to capital.

BRRN: What resources have helped you the most in developing as a tenant 
organizer?

 Espy: The piece that helped me the most to get started in tenant 
organizing and thinking strategically was Seattle Solidarity Network's 
"Building a Solidarity Network." Other than that the resources published 
by Tenants and Neighborhood Councils (TANC), Los Angeles Tenant Union 
(LATU), Autonomous Tenants Union Network (ATUN). In fact, we have shared 
the LATU Tenants Association Handbook with the residents and read 
sections of it out loud in some of the early meetings.

BRRN: What advice would you share with anarchists looking to organize or 
become active in a tenant union? What do you wish you had known when you 
started?

Espy: Find your people. Tenant organizing involves a lot of door 
knocking, one-on-one conversations, strategizing, and attending 
meetings. It all becomes much easier if you have a solid group of people 
with similar tactical, strategic, and political thinking. Our park has 
over three hundred trailers, and two of us almost got burnt out from 
knocking on 60 doors before the first meeting. No one person could've 
knocked on any door by themselves, and that was only the first task that 
set off 10 months of organizing in this park.

Study! While nobody has it all figured out, doing a baseline amount of 
research can be immensely helpful! At the start of our organizing, we 
discovered Utah Code 57-16-16, which gives the residents in a mobile 
home park some basic rights to form a "Residents' Association." While we 
are striving to build power outside of the law, it has been super useful 
to be able to tell folks who are on the fence about joining the union 
that their rights to organize are at least nominally protected. 
Researching your local context as well as tenant organizing tactics, 
resources, etc. can be extremely helpful in the long run.

https://www.blackrosefed.org/anarchists-tenant-movement-2/
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