"Solidarity, we have always thought, is more difficult at a distance. The great, mythic union victories of the 1930s, like the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936-1937, when the United Auto Workers beat General Motors and opened the door to organizing the auto industry, were won by workers who lived and worked alongside each other. You could find whole blocks of homes where every single one had a worker at the factory in it."
"On Saturday night they went to the same beer hall; on Sunday they worshipped in the same church. If they were part of one of the many ethnic immigrant enclaves in Northern cities-Italians, say, or Poles, or Czechs-they might have a newspaper in their home language, even as the younger generations spoke English without any accent. The reinforced connections between home and work made it easier for workers to trust each other, to stand up with each other, to fight together."
"But skeptics, and for some time I counted myself one of them, failed to realize that what we thought was a universal truth, wasn't. There have always been examples of solidarity working at a distance, but we dismissed them as flukes or happy accidents. But distance means different things to different people. And for Millennials and Generation Z, who grew up in a digital age where people thousands of miles away were just as easy to connect with as people down the street,"
Solidarity has often been associated with physical proximity, exemplified by 1930s union victories like the Flint Sit-Down Strike where factory workers lived in the same neighborhoods, worshipped together, and shared ethnic institutions. Those reinforced home-work connections made trust and collective action easier. Historical skepticism assumed distance undermined solidarity, but examples of distant solidarity existed and were underestimated. Distance takes different meanings for different generations. Millennials and Generation Z, raised in a digital age, can connect across thousands of miles as easily as neighbors, enabling solidarity to spread nationally. The Occupy movement around 2011 served as an inflection point for digitally enabled solidarity.
Read at Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly
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