To: s-acc@yahoogroups.com

From: Andrew Phelps <no-action@cwnet.com>

Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2011 18:08:31 -0700

Subject: [s-acc] labor experience

Yesterday I attended a 9to5 Bay Area Working Women training in "Wage Theft." It was a daylong labor initiative project training with the sole focus being the Santa Clara Co. "dependent contractors" campaign. Eim, Fjn, and Gko from this "Work Group" also attended.

I mentioned in another post that parts of the client/survivor movement are doing dialogue for "community connections" and also taking on the psych drug disconnect: "If We Don't Medicate, What Can We Do?" What they don't seem to have taken up is the "labor discipline" - bringing our advocacy to a "working edge" by engaging the labor dynamic competently.

When I got (re)involved in the client/survivor movement, after my "psychiatric experience" of the early 70s, it was as a labor organizer in Washington, DC. I got training by a professional labor trainer; I saw yesterdy a rather similar training (they brought in people from CO, GA, as well as from Southern California).

The fact that the initiave directly involved the mental health stigma/discrimination dynamic also provided exceptional conversational access to the trainers: They are learning about this "new" kind of human rights abuse. And we are learning better how it is that our advocacy can "work" and how we are not there just to "get help" and thus to move past the paradigm of self-help in a productive manner.