A-Infos (en) Canada, Linchpin interview, The IWW and the Ottawa Panhandlers Union by Dave - Common Cause

Dave interviewed Ottawa anarchist Andrew Nellis for Linchpin. Andrew is an 
organizer with the Ottawa Panhandlers Union.---- Q. What is the Ottawa 
Panhandlers Union and how was it started? ---- A. The Ottawa Panhandlers Union 
is a shop of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). It's a real union. What 
we do is run by the panhandlers themselves. The IWW has one paid member for the 
entire union. It's entirely member run. The idea is to empower people on the 
street to fight for themselves. ---- Ideally despite coming in as an outside 
organizer I'll be able to step out of the picture once the organization is up 
and running and there's a structure in place to ensure that the organization 
continues. I was on the street myself. I'm not on the street now. So I do know 
something about the milieu in which I'm working.

Ideally it [the Panhandlers Union] should be run by people who are actually on 
the street but in practice we find that our most valuable members are those who 
have just come off the street or are in the process of getting off the streets. 
Their lives are somewhat less chaotic than people who are actually on the street 
although we do have some [key] people who are hardcore street. It always 
impresses me. I'm so proud of all of these people. For example, the guy who 
writes our press releases has to leave the room every 15 minutes or so to take a 
sip of hand sanitizer As you may be aware people who are heavily addicted to 
alcohol stand a one in three chance of death if they go through withdrawal so 
they have to drink alcohol continuously just to survive The fact that someone 
who is dealing with this many crises in his own life is capable of not only 
functioning but contributing something to the welfare of others around him. It's 
just really humbling for me to work with someone like that considering the many 
sacrifices that he's got to be making in his own life are so much larger than 
anything I'm expected to give.

Q Could you give some examples of some of the problems that are faced by 
panhandlers and homeless people in Ottawa that the Panhandlers Union was formed 
to help resist.

A I can tell you that although things were bad before the new police chief, 
they've become infinitely worse since. The new police chief has the "broken 
windows" philosophy. He believes that you can stop big crimes by stopping little 
crimes. He's ordered his police officers to stop issuing tickets and begin 
arresting panhandlers. It costs $185 a day to keep someone in jail and they're 
more than willing to pay that to keep panhandlers off the street than providing 
supported housing is infinitely cheaper they prefer using enforcement for 
something it was never designed to do.
We were forced to start a Copwatch program because the police are openly and 
blatantly breaking the law. We have had many cases where its been reported to us 
that the police have stolen the panhandlers' money, roughed them up, and told 
them not to come back or they'd be beaten. One night I had to start guard under 
the bridge by the Rideau Centre because the street kids there had been informed 
by a police officer that if they were there when he came back he was going to - 
and I quote - "boot-fuck" them. So I went there with a recorder and I warned the 
police that I'd be there all night with my recorder. This is the kind of stuff 
that we do.

We do a lot of advocacy work. We have one member who is schizophrenic and he was 
picked up in an ambulance and he was [held] involuntarily at the Montfort 
Hospital in their psychiatric wing. And he requested our assistance in getting 
his doctors to agree to let him go to school since he has a law degree from 
Russia and he's in the process of updating his credentials here in Canada. His 
doctors were concerned about letting him go by himself to his classes so we went 
there to tell them that we'd have a person willing to go with him to the classes 
if necessary to assure them that he wouldn't be a danger to himself or others. 
What was particularly gratifying for me was that while the doctors did not want 
to talk to us, it took us several hours to buttonhole the doctor, once he heard 
the name Industrial Workers of the World, he was at great pains to assure us 
that that they very sensitive to his cultural and religious needs, and that they 
were not discriminating against him. When I tried to get a word in edgewise to 
assure him we were not there to complain about his treatment but to make sure 
that he was able to attend his classes.

This is the kind of work that we do. A lot of it is in the background. A lot of 
people think that because our most visible efforts revolve around things like 
marching in the street, or egging the BIA that this is [all of] what we do. In 
fact 99% of what we do is just quiet support work for the streets that 
particularly teaches people where to go, how to wend their way through the 
paperwork of police complaints, to make sure they turn in their tickets [under 
the Safe Streets Act] to the Ticket Defense Program and see benefits of what 
standing together can do.

We have one member right now who is an organizer with the IWW. He came to us 
because he had been beaten up by Rideau Centre security. Immediately after 
getting out of the hospital, he contacted us. We got our video cameras and 
documented his injuries, I got him in contact with a lawyer, Yavar Hamid. As a 
result, we sued the Rideau Centre in superior court for $70,000. The Rideau 
Centre settled.

Q. How is the Panhandlers Union structured internally?

A. The IWW is not an anarchist organization. Our constitution actually forbids 
us as members from promoting and political or anti- political party. The 
organization itself runs in an anarchist manner. We have no hierarchy. At 
meetings everybody takes turns, everybody is expected to be either ther chair or 
recording secretary and at every meeting it changes so that everybody gets to 
see and develop the skills necessary for running a meeting. It’s very important 
for the continuation of the kinds of traditions that we are trying to build for 
the organization.
For many people this the first time they’ve ever had any responsibility in a 
social sense, and its very gratifying to see someone who started out at the 
beginning of a meeting very nervous and unsure of themselves actually telling 
someone like me to shut up and let other people talk.

Q. Earlier [before the interview] we were talking about the backlash that has 
been felt by the Panhandlers Union and yourself. Could tell me a little about that?

A. We’ve experienced some amount of backlash from the police towards the 
organization. It’s become particularly bad lately since we’ve started the 
Copwatch program. It started in earnest perhaps a year ago when someone logging 
in from the Regional Municipality of Ottawa Carleton [IP address] vandalized 
Panhandlers Union Wikipedia article saying that “Mr. Nellis,” that is myself, 
“really, really, really needs to get a life” and saying that the members of this 
union are a “parasitical blight on the city of Ottawa.” These changes were 
edited back fairly quickly but it was only discovered as a result of the release 
of the Wiki Scanner tool. The official response from City Hall was “No Comment.” 
I’ve subsequently discovered that the police use the same system that City Hall 
do. Whoever made these changes might well have been within the police station as 
well as inside City Hall.

Since then there have been posters put up on Ottawa city streets saying things 
like “Don’t feed the human pigeons” This is in response to Mayor Larry O’Brien’s 
statement in which he compared panhandlers to pigeons stating that if you don’t 
feed them they’ll go away. During the election campaign he [O’Brien] compared 
panhandlers to seagulls at the Carp Dump saying that in order to keep the 
seagulls away, occasionally you have to shoot one.

The second set of posters that went up, we believe by the same people, featured 
myself with a gun in my mouth in a circle with a line through it saying 
“Panhandlers follow your leader” with [a picture of] the mayor standing in the 
background grinning. I can only take this as a death threat.
We’ve recently had the Panhandlers Union [Wikipedia] articles deleted by a false 
flag campaign launched by someone who also we believe hijacked my internet 
account. Someone contacted Sympatico, my ISP, identified themselves as me and 
asked for my password. We know that that the first time this did not work 
because Sympatico Security contacted me to tell me my password which I informed 
at the time them that it was not me [requesting the information]. We put a 
special password on my account which was supposed to prevent anything like this 
from happening and which would require the person to give a password to identify 
themselves as me if they called. Apparently this did not work because within a 
couple of weeks someone had hijacked my e-mail, deleted a week worth of personal 
e-mail, vandalized my blog, attacked an anarchist IRC channel I founded and 
helped facilitate, and generally made my life very miserable on the internet. 
Whoever did this used servers they had hijacked in Pakistan and Hong Kong.

The Wikipedia campaign to delete the Panhandlers Union article – someone 
identified themselves in the discussion as a member of the Panhandlers Union, 
gave details of his arrest records, the fact that he was Hepatitis C positive, 
details that only the police would know about this man. We know it was not the 
panhandler himself who posted this because he was at the time homeless. And we 
know that whoever posted this was [also] using servers in Pakistan and Hong 
Kong. We have reason to believe it was the same person [who hacked Andrew’s 
internet account] who posted these messages. And in these messages he ranted 
about fascists and police and said that he had voted numerous times to keep the 
article. This gave Wikipedia administrators the excuse to delete the article out 
of hand by ignoring all calls to keep it. The Wikipedia article is currently 
deleted and no record of it ever having existed remains including the evidence 
that the City of Ottawa or the police had vandalized it.

Q. Do you think that the Panhandlers Union in Ottawa is a model that could be 
applied to other cities? Has there been interest in trying to develop 
Panhandlers Unions in other cities?

A. Yes. In fact I’ve been in a number of presentations on street organizing. 
It’s a very different milieu from what most organizers are used to. The street 
has its own rules. It’s stylized and ritualized not all that different than lets 
say a medieval Chinese court. It’s a very different place.

When you’re dealing with people as oppressed as people on the street are, it’s 
extremely important not to come across as an authority figure. Often the 
temptation is there to present yourself as leader and this must be resisted at 
all costs because the street will try to turn a person into a personality and it 
will become a cult of personality in which the personality is more important 
than the movement. While there can be short term results, eventually the 
organization falls apart when this person leaves.

The street is extremely hierarchical. There is usually a dominant alpha male. 
It’s very patriarchal. Often it’s racist and homophobic. I should add that it’s 
probably no more so than any other sector of society but because people live 
much closer to the bone there’s not as much lying about it. People are very 
straightforward about their prejudices.
So because of all these things which exist on the street, it’s important that 
the organizer establish from the very beginning that its about the 
organizational structure and that its not about the individual. If it’s about 
the individual, the structure is never going to survive. The reason to have an 
organizer when one is organizing on the street is to make sure that there is a 
structure.

The entire reason [many] people are on the street is that they cannot live in a 
highly structured scenario. There is nothing wrong with this but it is very 
difficult to keep an organization going when there is no structure to it. In 
order to ensure that it survives it’s necessary to create a tradition. And this 
takes many, many years. There is no short way to do this. And the way you do 
this is by giving people successes, by showing them that what you’re doing 
works. On the street people don’t have enough resources to take risks so they 
tend to do what works for them. If its already working they are loathe to change 
it. In a very real sense they are very conservative. In order to break through 
this it is necessary to give them successes and show them that working together 
is better than working by themselves. The only way to do that is by slowly 
building people’s trust and to show them that if they work together there is an 
advantage to them personally.

Q. Could you tell me a about your own politics and how you became an anarchist.

A. I identify as an anarcho-syndicalist and I am a member of the IWW. I believe 
that the union structure provides a very viable means of building resistance to 
the current system. Anarcho-syndicalism I believe is important because it will 
not only allow us to build an army within capitalism itself while continuing to 
function but will allow us to create a structure which will continue to exist 
when capitalism will have been destroyed.

A lot of the problem we face is that there’s always a sense of immediacy. We’re 
always looking at the next battle and never at the longer strategic plan. And we 
see the results of that in what’s happened thus far in anarchist movements. For 
example in Spain and the Ukraine where people were no careful about who they 
chose as allies and were crushed as a result. Anarchists have a history of 
winning on the battlefield and losing in the halls of power. I think its very 
important that we develop long-term strategic plans for dealing with our success 
rather than planning for our failures.

Q. What do you see as some of the strengths and weaknesses of anarchist 
organizing in Ottawa?

A. It’s interesting. I often get the feeling from anarchists that they really 
don’t believe that anarchism works. It’s a strange thing to say but often people 
seem to feel that anarchism is something you need to weave life into, that it 
requires extra effort to put a slather of anarchism across whatever structure it 
is that they create but it gives me a feeling that people don’t have faith that 
anarchism itself works. It’s not a chore that you need to apply to whatever it 
is you’re actually doing. Anarchism works. I’ve seen it in action. I’ve seen 
people who are oppressed and beaten down and frightened empowered by what 
anarchism has done for them. I’ve seen people on the street who’ve literally 
been beaten down. We have a man who was beaten so badly be Rideau Centre 
security that he nearly lost the use of his eye and yet through solidarity 
through what he saw anarchism was able to do for him he is now today an 
anarchist organizer himself. And its gratifying to see that he’s taken control 
of his life. He has a good paying job. He has a permanent home. And he’s using 
these advantages now to teach other people the value of anarchist organizing. 
These techniques don’t need to be grudgingly applied. They need to be lovingly 
embraced. They work. If you actually use them they work. It is such a thrill the 
first time you see it actually working, not just in theory but in practice. It’s 
easy to see why those original anarchists were so passionate why they continued 
to work into their eighties and nineties why they sang on the gallows, because 
anarchism is a revolutionary idea in every sense of the word. It gives a person 
such joy to see that it is capable of empowering people to take control of their 
own lives.

Abbie Hoffman said that a revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a 
revolution in the distribution of power and that’s perfectly true and valid but 
the opposite is also true. A revolution in the distribution of power will be 
meaningless unless there’s also a revolution in consciousness, It starts inside 
and continues on into the world outside of us


A shorter version of this interview appears to Linchpin 2.

http://linchpin.ca/
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