WILL OCCUPY WALL STREET REACH THE TIPPING POINT WITH UNION SUPPORT?

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Courtesy of Richard Metzger of Dangerous Minds 

The Occupy Wall Street protests seem set to get much bigger in the coming days. Yesterday, 1199SEIU, the health-care workers’ union with over 200,000 members in New York/Long Island, volunteered to help feed the protesters in Zuccotti Park and to send nurses for first aid needs. The Transport Workers Union Local 100, representing the 38,000 MTA workers have also pledged their support, including marching with the protesters on Wednesday.

With union support comes $$$, some ancillary organizational structure the leaderless movement may come to really need, and perhaps most importantly, more bodies.

My sense of it is that the movement is now past the tipping point and will rapidly start to gain critical mass. One of the main reasons, as we all know, that the mainstream media was so slow to cover the OWS protests is because it was “just a bunch of hippies.” There could have been half a million of them and it would have merited the same response: dismissal. With the union support, the nascent movement is starting to look much more ready for prime time, as the Wall Street Journal reports:

“The premise of the protest, we’re in complete agreement with,” said TWU Local 100 President John Samuelsen. “It’s about fair share and it’s about the claim that everybody needs to share a bit of the burden of this terrible economy.”

The transport workers, 1199 and other labor groups plan to join the protesters for a Wednesday march from City Hall to Zuccotti Park, where the protesters have camped since Sept. 17.

Also Monday, lawyers for TWU Local 100 sought a temporary restraining order in federal court to prevent the police from commandeering buses operated by its members to ferry protesters who had been arrested.

Police took over at least three buses Saturday to transport some of the 700 people who were arrested after a march veered onto the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge, according to the union and the MTA.

“Our bus operators are working-class people who are raising children in New York City and by and large they support the protest,” said Mr. Samuelsen, the TWU president. “They’re not going to press our members into service and thrust them onto the wrong side of this protest without a fight from our union.”

Read that last paragraph again and ponder the implications.

The genius of this…