After Pride, Unionize

We recently began establishing a new branch of ACORN in Leeds, a membership-led community and tenants’ union that seeks to build power through direct action against inequality and housing injustice. It’s been both trying and immensely rewarding, reminding me what a left with a sense of direction, strategy and robust structures can concretely achieve in working class communities from which we’ve been too long severed. As an homage to Pride month coming to a close, I thought it worthwhile to figure through why queer tenants are strongly participating in the organizing drives in multiple cities. This is perhaps unsurprising: for all the chauvinism and social conservatism that abides in trade unions, particularly defanged and bureaucratized as many are today, queer and trans workers are disproportionately unionized, not least because, however hollowed out, union representation remains one of the strongest defences against discrimination in-work, especially in instances of unfair dismissal. But we do not just need people to be unionized, we need people to be organizers: militant labour organizers and queer activists creating autonomous institutions have a shared historical understanding that only our self-activity can ensure emancipation.

This is especially significant on the 35 year anniversary of the formation of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, whose fervent support of the miners remains an inspiration to those of us who believe class injustice and LGBTQI+ oppression are fundamentally bound up with one another, that the indignities inflicted upon us share a similar source, and that only collective power can defeat and supplant a system that has division, bigotry and exploitation at its core. Their legacy, our heritage, is a watchword that can sometimes seem distant, both for the political pacifications of neo-liberalism and the seething prejudice that continues to resurge: solidarity. That our destinies are intertwined, that divisions between us can be overcome through struggle, that a challenge against any one oppression bears with it a duty and commitment to the cessation of all oppression.

In short, that the power we have to transform society derives from the leverage we have as workers, as tenants, as communities to directly shut down and repurpose the infrastructures of production and reproduction. That mass social and labour movements, whether Act Up groups blockading the FDA building to demand the adequate provision of AIDS medication or miners engaging in mass pickets outside coal mines, have much more in common than we might imagine, fighting for livelihood as much as dignity, bread as well as roses, often in the very same historical periods where states and corporations were besieging both working class and queer communities. That the organized working class, and agitations for a politics of liberation within it, has been a key driver in civil rights movements the world over, and precipitated many of the advances in rights and protections — such as Equal Pay legislation deriving from the Ford Dagenham strikes — that seem under renewed threat today. That the fabric of our world, that can so often seem to be fraying under the ravages of neo-liberalism, climate change, and the far-right, was formed by the vision of unity and solidarity these movements, at their best, shared — a mantle we must now extend in our struggle over the future.

Indeed, it is in realms like struggles over housing that I believe we can fruitfully develop common cause to combat both material exploitation and social oppression. It is in such arenas that discrimination and inequity converge to manifest in acute forms of dispossession, as exemplified by those who are homeless being disproportionately LGBTQI+. We know what the trauma of losing a home is like. Housing as a terrain is uniquely disposed towards community forming, because it is where we share living conditions, intimacy and care, but it is also where misogyny and queerphobia are systematically brought to bear through abuse, exclusion and violence. As such, it is a site of contradiction where alternatives are most needed: where we might both organize with those who have been dispossessed to demand public housing provision and proactively intervene by bolstering communities so people are less vulnerable to such oppression.

Indeed, it is also a site where we are increasingly atomized and isolated, whether through cuts to disability benefits, cycles of rental house shares with strangers, or blighted community and support services. And though the influence of the patriarchal nuclear family unit is waning, the power relations it mystifies still have a hold: property ownership, the guarantor of resource distribution in capitalist society, increasingly out of reach for young, precarious workers whose families might be at odds with our sexuality or gender identity. Disowning conspires with displacement by gentrification and avaricious landlordism to broker a raw deal for a generation that is queerer and poorer than their parents. This, alongside the dynamics of insecure work, perhaps goes a great way to explaining the trajectories that are resulting in more young people conceiving of their lives in terms of class, despite the long decline in trade unionism: a whole industry of agents and landlords, and increasingly universities themselves, engineering themselves specifically to fleece and capitalize upon an ever swelling, unhinged, predatory rental market. Exorbitant, spiralling rent for collapsing roofs, black mould and faulty electrics: ever deteriorating living conditions to further line the pockets of those who control our lives simply by virtue of being rich enough to afford a property outright. Suffering and insecurity for the workers, profit for the bosses: housing and work are two pillars of the same dismal fortress of inequality.

Because, of course, the conflict is not just internal, other tenants or our families that might be hostile towards us so as to diminish our power and resources, but also overriding, a class conflict between tenants and landlords. An antagonism that probably is the most clear-cut, the most egregious, the most acute, younger people encounter on a daily basis, as they are harassed and bullied by tyrants who ratchet up the rent year-on-year with impunity, revenge evict them if they complain about health and safety, and sell the house out from underneath them when it’s decided speculation is more profitable than leaching away half of someone’s wages so they can access shelter. The reservoir of indignation is profound, because the degradation is: entrenched by decades of policy of housing deregulation, fire-sale of public housing and rampant speculation by landlords, property developers, investment firms — and the same building companies that are spearheading precarious contracts and turfing undocumented workers into the Home Office after hyper-exploiting their labour. A vicious cycle, a poisonous web, the very same profiteering whose fallout haunts us from the financial crisis, willingly abetted by the powerful in Westminster who reap the spoils and benefit from the turmoil.

Because it’s not just younger people: long-standing working class communities have been and are being socially cleansed, as epitomized in the ongoing struggle of the Save Our Homes LS26 campaign to stop the demolition of their former mining estate right here in Leeds, just around the corner from where I used to go to high school, parents of peers who they probably rarely see now, who I wish I’d known better, who I can’t help but think of still. It will often be public sector workers inhabiting these estates, who already bear the experiences, memories, and scars of class struggle, who have endured the brunt of the bloodied impacts of austerity policies, and remain some of the most densely unionized workers that we must unite with. The ‘managed decline’ of social housing, where working class estates are left to crumble into disrepair to rationalize their eventual sell-off, the institutional indifference and facelessness of ever more commercialized housing associations, the toothless enforcement mechanisms and negligence of local councils: older working class tenants are subject to appalling profiteering and contempt, often from the same ‘public’ bodies that were supposed to protect them. With more and more shafted into the private rented sector, we have common foes and interests; though neo-liberalism has eroded public housing provision and local government, councils are often accomplices to property developers, and should not be absolved of their own political weakness in addressing the housing crisis. We must stand up for ourselves, hold them to account for their abdication, by developing our own collective power.

In and after Pride, we must stand shoulder-to-shoulder with these struggles, reach out and form alliances across communities, embed ourselves in the kinds of organization with the potential to win back class power and upend this rapacious social order. Just as LGSM fought alongside the miners then, we must stand with the residents of Sugar Hill Close and Wordsworth Drive now: what more apt way could there be to inherit and honour that noble history of solidarity than opposing the threat of eviction against one of the last enduring mining estates? It is in our power to continue that story, not just to preserve it as a relic but to reclaim and take it up and advance it as we too become authors in the persistent struggle for emancipation. In the process, the legacies of institutions of queer life flourishing outside the bounds of capital and the state, the furtive solidarity underpinning queer shelters and the expansion beyond family structures as the sole basis for community, the rage and defiance inflamed by dispossession, could be instrumental in deepening class struggle.

While we nurse the vitriol burning from the wounds of bigotry and hatred, we cannot resign ourselves to the bitterness of lonely refuge, to insular competition for absolution. Our salve is compassion for the forsaken, for each other. That is the fount of our pride: to affirm and discover one another, to love anew, to resist, through even the most desperate grief, for that chance to love. More deeply, more passionately, and more freely than we might ever have imagined. United on the picket lines, in the streets, in our homes: rejoicing together in the yearnings of dignity and hope, the spirit of a drag queen pummelling a cop with her heels at Stonewall and the fortitude of the miners at Orgreave defending themselves from police alike blazing in our chorus of commemoration.

Pride is finding somewhere to belong. A home.