Adventures in Tabling

From the State that Killed Joe Hill

I am not a Utahn by birth or by faith or by temperament, but it is where I have chosen to live since I came home from Egypt to take care of a partner with cancer. This Southern bird has the dessert suck the moisture from his expression and the sugar from his tea, and I have learned to love this otherwise wholesome and surreal place. Salt Lake City, in particular, has an interesting history as it is no longer the majority Latter-Day Saint. Despite its reputation, it is not a lily white city in demographics.

On May 3rd, I tabled representing my union… urm, I mean “association ” —I was an association representative for my school from 2019 until this year when I resigned. I got my red shirt¹, put on some sunscreen, and went down to the park to the table for May Day week. This was an Organize Utah (OUT) event. OUT is a union promotion group that advocates for pre-majority unionism, social union functions, and community involvement of workers in their civic sphere. I encountered OUT when Utah House Bill 267 was in the state legislature, and I was also considering starting an Independent Labor Clubs chapter here in Utah, only to discover that an organization that did a similar thing already existed.

The event was lovely, but it brought a few things to the forefront for me. In the park, there was also an anarchist-inspired food not bombs event nearby. We collaborated with them somewhat in so much that they had tacos and we had hot dogs, and we were both very left-oriented events for May Day. The electrician union, the CWA nurses’ union, trying to organize the University of Utah hospital, and the Ski Patrolers union were all speaking. Around the various old picnic tables, flaking into the open air, the various political groups loomed like sparrows: the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Black Rose Anarchist Federation, and Democratic Socialists of Salt Lake had a few members flitting about in the atmosphere.

I rarely get recognized in Salt Lake City except by former high school students or people adjacent to the poetry scene, but the OUT members are familiar with me and locals here recognize me quickly. What is immediately apparent is the diversity of the people here eating hot dogs and listening to Joe Hill Labor Choir: straight-laced men and pink-haired men, nurses and dockloaders, teachers and high school dropouts, LDS and neo-pagans. It is immediately clear that most people in the left cultural commentariat imagine either the rural or the urban worker as some kind of imaginary of an imaginary collective—be it the 1950s hardhat men on scaffolds or plumbers with F150s, or a barista with blue hair and an half the course work for an MFA in ceramic arts.

So much writing about the “working” class is projection: not a projection of oneself, but one’s imago of what one thinks legitimate work is. I spent my afternoon chatting to a few left podcast listeners, helping set up a queer in the workforce table, chatting to some CWA organizers, and talking to a college drop-out who worked stagecrew before becoming a union staffer about Badiou. I talked to some electricians about annoying “college boys” and another who complained about anti-intellectualism.

A few anarchists from the Food Not Bombs event came by, and one young woman drilled us about our stance on boycotts.

”Do you support the genocide?”

”No, here’s some literature on workers’ relationship to mid-east if you want it,” one of the others tabling responded.

“Do you support the boycott?” she said.

“We aren’t buying Sabra hummus if that’s what you mean, but I am not sure what boycotting does about the Israel/Palestine?” said the erstwhile Badiou-fan.

”I think boycotting is one of the most effective….”

I smirked and kept my head down. I appreciated the drilling, but also found the turn of the events so incredibly individualistic in focus. The B.D.S. movement was as much about institutions as individuals, and as rank-and-file union members or those trying to stop them, we had minimal impact on institutional investment other than attempting to force books open.

I finished some chips and looked over to he other person at the table was speaking about platformism and union organizing.

”There is so much individualism in these kinds of anarchist circles, rendering everything about consumer choice,” he said, and almost sighed. He expected me to rib him about anarchism, but I didn’t.

“To you send her over to CWA or one of the other recruiting union booths?”

”She’s self-employed,” the other man at the table said.

To be fair, only two unions were recruiting at the event anyway. The others, like myself, were trying to extend their profile into the communities, sometimes with the backing of their union leadership and sometimes as individuals or members of OUT. We all shrugged, and we spoke more about change in the situation.

“Tout ce qui bouge, n’est pas rouge” became a topic of discussion between me and the autodidact Badiou scholar. Not all that moves is red. From trucker strikes to mobbed-up Teamsters stories from the seventies, to talking about wading across rivers with rifles over one’s head as an intimidation tactic to Pinkertons.

We listened to a skit on the life of Joe Hill and then another performance of traditional labor songs, mostly from before the New Deal, with a few from the 1960s thrown in. It occurred to me that all our labor songs were from several generations back. The choir did a solid job, but the disruption of the tradition became clear.

“Have you ever felt that Trotskyist in the SWP-US or that old Panther who sits in the DSA meeting and talks about 1968?” I ask.

”I am 40,” he said as he passed out directories of the SLC unions.

“I am 44, and Battle for Seattle was when I was 18. I don’t lionize it, but it’s definitely a key point of reference. I realized that I am just a decade or so younger than old Trots we used to complain about around Occupy.”

“You know, my history professor thought Joe Hill did it?” said a graduate student with us, referring to the double murder that Hill was convicted of with almost no evidence other than a bullet wound, which his wife said was part of a love triangle after Hill’s death.

“Of course he does,” I said. “Of course, he does.”

A little over a hundred people probably passed through the park that day, and I think we all hoped we were half in the future but also wondered if I was focusing primarily on heroic but distant past.

1. Most union shirts are red because they represent the pre-aughts shifting of the color-code of the rest of the planet, but being a “red shirt” has other implications for those of us who crew up watching Star Trek.