Illustration by Zina Saunders

You can still see traces of the Occupy Wall Street encampment that once stood in Zuccotti Park—a contingent of police officers by the plaza’s entrance and an NYPD watchtower standing guard on Zuccotti’s
northern edge. However, the protesters who made this park their home before being evicted by the police last November are largely gone and the news trucks that formerly stationed themselves outside have departed in favor of a Chabad Mitzvah Tank.

On a recent afternoon at Zuccotti, The Observer encountered handful of tourists and businessmen on lunch breaks but there was nary a demonstrator in sight. At nearby Federal Hall, there were about 11 Occupiers holding signs and sitting on the steps. On the street below, workers were seemingly oblivious to the Occupiers in their midst.

“You’re a Republican?” a suited man asked his friend as they briskly passed by. “Good man!”

Seven months into the movement, the Wall Street that protesters are ostensibly trying to occupy has become inured to the spectacle of carnivalesque protests, demonstrators sleeping on sidewalks and mass arrests. And it seems the rest of the city has too. The protesters are in danger of becoming just another discordant note in the daily din that New Yorkers are so adept at tuning out, like panhandlers, street performers, sidewalk preachers and the other distractions of urban life.

“Their entire message, it’s so fragmented that no one hears it,” said Sam Padilla, the owner of a construction firm behind several developments in the financial district. “It becomes a nuisance, it’s like a gnat that you’re just trying to swat away. It’s just another element of the background noise. They want to be heard, but their message is too confusing.”

Daby Carreras, a broker with Spartan Capital, smoked a cigar a half block away from the Federal Hall Occupiers. With their many messages, Mr. Carreras said the protesters concerns just get “mixed up” and don’t grab the attention of Wall Street workers.

“The brokers are thinking about how to make more money than they did last year,” he said.

Wider public interest in the Occupy protest has also waned. Mentions of “Occupy Wall Street” in the news media are down this month by nearly 75 percent from peak in October, according to Google News. During that same period, Google searches for “Occupy Wall Street” dropped by over 80 percent nationally. The decline was even steeper in New York.

On May 1, however, Occupiers hope to jump back to the forefront of the city’s collective consciousness with a massive day of demonstrations that has been termed a “general strike.” The forecast for the day includes civil disobedience, political performance art, flash mobs and a push into Midtown.

As they move toward May Day, the protesters promise the debut of a new, decentralized model for the movement that will fuel a comeback following their eviction from the park. However, their adversaries on Wall Street aren’t the only ones who don’t seem to speak the protesters’ language.

Occupy’s planned spring reawakening is the brainchild of a secretive group of protesters who have proved markedly unfriendly to outsiders. Progressive political types and union leaders who seem like the protesters’ natural allies have had difficult experiences working with them. Even some Occupiers are complaining they’ve been left in the dark and don’t know what’s on the menu for May Day. Amid this handwringing, the insular core planning the “general strike” are more than happy to do their own thing and confident they’re going to change the world.

The May 1 Occupy comeback is currently being planned at small meetings around the city. At one of these gatherings in a Lower East Side church Sunday night, a group of about 30 Occupiers met on folding chairs and a single couch. The crowd was evenly divided between men with shaggy hair and beards and women with edgy haircuts and thick glasses. They were almost all in their 20s. A handful were members of minority groups.

A skinny man with a combination Mohawk/mullet (call it a mullhawk) and striped overalls stood at the front of the room and scrawled a list of scheduled May Day activities on a large piece of paper as they were mentioned by the group’s members. There was a panoply of protest actions planned by different Occupy-affiliated groups—including marches, “choir flash mobs,” union rallies, games of “capture the flag,” a “music dance party” and a demonstration involving “trying to levitate the Goldman sign and throwing pennies at the Federal Reserve.”

Occupy has always prided itself on being a diverse, leaderless movement, but the downside of this structure was on display at the planning meeting. Many of the attendees clearly didn’t know the details of all the events in this smorgasbord of May 1 actions.

“There’s a ‘Shit Has Got to Go’ event posted on a news site,” pointed out a man named Malcolm, who wore a sleeveless shirt, Afro and beaded necklace.

“What does that mean?” a girl asked.

“I don’t know, I just thought people would want to know about it even though it’s vague,” Malcolm said.

At one point, a man named Chris discussed plans for the aftermath of one of the main marches, which was to take protesters from Union Square to Wall Street. The ideas were rather open-ended.

“At that point, some folks from Occupy are going to ask anyone in the crowd who’s willing to, to leave to go to an evening staging area,” Chris outlined. “From there, there’ll be, like, whatever the hell we want to make it. So, some people probably want to do a march. Some people probably want to, like, go sleep out on Wall Street or something.”

In addition to these activities, people at the meeting described even vaguer protests planned for “50 to 70 targets across Midtown.”

Organizers at the strategy session said union workers would be holding “99 pickets” as part of the festivities, but they had scant details about the union element of the protests.

“Some TWU union workers are going to be like, We don’t have a contract or whatever,” Chris said when asked to give details on a transit workers’ rally.

As attendees pressed for more information about union participation, a young woman seated on the couch explained that organizers might not be able to provide more detail about the union portions of the protest because they were being planned separately.

“There’s like 40 different groups plus that are doing this and we have to get confirmation from a bunch of different bureaucracies,” she said.

Another woman with a blond chunk of hair in her otherwise brown bob was clearly unsatisfied with this explanation.

“Talking about bureaucracy in this room makes me cringe and a lot of this info should be worked out already,” she said.

The distance from organized labor was maintained partially because many Occupiers are uncomfortable with the structured nature of established progressive political groups. Because of this, May 1 marches will be facilitated by union marshals but will also include segments solely made up of Occupiers.

“There’s an Occupy Wall Street zone in the march and anyone who doesn’t feel like marching with marshals should go with the Occupy zone,” one of the organizers said at the meeting.

After about two hours of talking, the disagreements over the unknown aspects of various events seemed to have taken their toll on the group.

“Can we do a vibe check? It seems like people are getting really angry,” said a young woman with a plaintive voice. “Can we all just take a moment and take a deep breath? We all want this to be really awesome and we shouldn’t be fighting with each other.”

The meeting concluded soon after.

Despite being branded a general strike, one thing that isn’t on the menu for May 1 is a work stoppage. Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, told The Observer the Occupiers haven’t worked with the unions in “a serious way.”

“They haven’t tried to understand how you create coalitions with established elements of the progressive community,” Mr. Appelbaum said.

Despite the fact he and his union were early supporters of the Occupy movement, Mr. Appelbaum said the protesters made no attempts to communicate with organized labor.

“We’re on the same side, that’s what the Occupy movement doesn’t seem to understand,” Mr. Appelbaum said. “We’re on the same side and we should be talking to each other, not just being talked at.”

Over 20 labor groups, including Mr. Appelbaum’s RWDSU, have endorsed the Occupy protests. However, they have not called on workers to strike. Mr. Appelbaum said Occupiers should have checked with the
unions before proclaiming a strike.

“You’re not going to see workers leave their jobs in large numbers,” Mr. Appelbaum said. “That was what was called for at this time without appropriate discussion and involvement.”

A union official, who didn’t want to be named because his group is endorsing the protest, said “continuing conversations” between Occupiers and unions broke down because the diffuse, leaderless nature of the movement made it difficult to collaborate with.

“With the Occupy movement, it’s not always clear who you’re even supposed to be speaking with,” he said.

The union official also described the culture clash that occurred between labor groups and Occupiers.

“I think that, because the labor movement was established with hierarchy and the like, that it was held up to a little bit of disdain. It didn’t reflect the way the Occupy movement thought that democracy should operate, so I think that there were language barriers because of that,” the official said. “I also think that the labor movement, because it has such a hierarchical structure, has difficulty in understanding a movement without structure like that.”

Mr. Appelbaum believes Occupiers’ inability to partner with unions and other established progressive political groups shows the movement might not be able to grow beyond the cadre of young protesters who have kept the occupation alive after its eviction from the park.

“I think that in order for a movement to be successful, you have to expand beyond your core constituency and that has not happened with Occupy Wall Street,” Mr. Appelbaum said.

None of the May Day festivities planned by the Occupiers are part of the “99% Spring,” a slew of Occupy branded activities hosted by the multimillion-member progressive fund-raising organization MoveOn.org.

Justin Ruben, MoveOn’s executive director, told The Observer his group got behind the protests almost as soon as they began.

“Economic injustice and inequality had been our top priority and campaign since the beginning of last year,” Mr. Ruben said. “Then, when Occupy happened, we kind of jumped in. It was articulating the exact same concerns that our members were really frustrated about and had been working on all year, but in a really compelling, amazing way. So, we sort of jumped in to connect people with it, to support it.”

MoveOn’s involvement triggered a backlash from Occupiers who abhor the organization’s work on Democratic political campaigns. Last week, AdBusters, the anticorporatist magazine that initially launched the call for a Wall Street occupation, published a scathing online editorial blasting MoveOn for sending Occupy-themed solicitations for donations and calling the organization part of the “dead body of the old left.”

“MoveOn wants to hijack our movement with their 99% Spring,” the AdBusters editorial said. “MoveOn is an existential threat to our movement because they don’t have a revolutionary bone in their body.”

Mr. Ruben vigorously denies the charge his group was trying to co-opt the Occupiers. He also suggested protesters’ intolerance of different approaches may hurt them, especially as the presidential election
nears.

“Many of these groups and strains, who have been fighting together against economic inequality and for the power for the 99 percent, are going to go in different directions around the elections,” Mr. Ruben said. “Some people want to put their energy in different places and, I think, we need to have a notion of a diversity of strategies that we all respect, because we’re doing the work of the 1 percent if we just tear each other down.”
Electoral politics can be a “useful tool,” he added, “and even if that’s not your bag, hopefully we can sort of honor the fact that some folks are going to want to get into that.”

Protesters we spoke to seemed unconcerned what others think of their methodology and confident they’ll blow the city’s collective mind, come May Day. “Ultimately, this will be a catalyst for a lot of people who are in their early 20s and relatively middle class to wake up and recognize their place in the theater of the world and the social struggle,” said one Occupy organizer we spoke to after the planning meeting.

“That brings more people to it. It’s a new context.”

What remains to be seen is whether the Occupiers can continue to make an impact on the larger world by speaking on their own terms. And whether they can regain the attention of a city populated with habitual ignorers. The kids say they’re all right. The rest of us will find out on May 1.

hwalker@observer.com

While Walmart refuses to say if, when or where it might finally open a store within the five boroughs, one of its favored sites is the Related Company's Gateway Center Mall in the far reaches of Brooklyn. The area is economically depressed, meaning the cheap jobs and cheap merchandise are (theoretically) desirable. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union sees Walmart jobs as junk, and they have been campaigning against the store since it resurfaced a two years ago.

Today, they made things personal, not just with Steve Ross, Related's founder and CEO, but also his more than 7,200 tenants in the New York area.

The union and its Walmart Free New York campaign put together a postcard urging residents in Relatated's 26 developments across the city to contact the company and say they do not support a Walmart in the city. The front side of the postcard shows a Walmart sign looming over a terrace (above) while the back (below) directs tenants to a special website where they can send in an electronic complaint. Related representatives were not immediately available for comment.

Even in liberal Manhattan, it seems hard to believe anyone would move because a big box store might open up on the opposite side of the city.

Update: To clarify, the junk jobs referred to above were those of Walmart, not the entire Gateway Center complex, which the RWDSU does support, as made clear in this statement from a union spokesman:

Appreciate the coverage but the RWDSU does not view the jobs at Gateway II as "junk." We support the effort to bring in high-road retailers and businesses that will create the best jobs for local residents. Walmart is a low-road retailer that harms workers, small businesses, and communities. New Yorkers stand to lose far more than they would ever gain from Walmart, and that's why we're opposed to Walmart.

Also, this post initially misstated the number of tenants receiving postcards as 2,600. The number is in fact 7,200 or more in 26 different developments in New York City. The Observer regrets the error.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

"It's not Yalta," said a labor source, but "the conversation from Kingston will continue."

The heads of 32BJ, 1199, RWDSU, the UFT and Building Trades Council met last month with the chairman of several large Democratic county organizations as well as Jay Jacobs, the incoming state party chair. They expressed frustration that some of the issues important to them are not being appropriately prioritized by Democrats, and relayed concerns with low poll numbers among members of the 2010 ticket, including Paterson. The idea that Paterson's standing is sufficiently diminished to hurt Democrats in general is also spreading to some marginal House members.

The union leaders will also discuss Paterson's as-yet-unrevealed plans to bridge a $2.1 billion budget deficit. Paterson will likely propose spending cuts that the unions will not be pleased with.

"Difficult decisions may not always be popular, but the governor will continue to do what he believes is best for the people of New York," Tracy Sefl, Paterson's campaign spokeswoman, said in a statement. "He's always willing to discuss that principle with constituents, including those in labor whose support he has long appreciated."

"I don't have any trouble getting through, I have trouble convincing them," said Alan Lubin, executive vice president for the New York State United Teachers. "They do hear from us, they do hear us. It's just we're not satisfied they're not paying attention to all of the issues."

A representative from NYSUT joined the heads of several other unions--32BJ, 1199, RWDSU, the UFT and the Building Trades Council--in Kingston to talk with the leaders of several major Democratic organizations about concerns that many of the progressive elements they're pushing for have been left by the wayside, and that they will not provide political support if that's not the case.

The discussion touched on the low poll numbers of Democratic officials--Paterson among them--and concerns about their electability. There was two-tiered thinking, according to people who were there: push the agenda, and figure out what to do (including a possible change in the batting order) to make sure Democrats stay in power.

Most of the attention has focused on the second question, and on Andrew Cuomo as a possible answer. But from the perspective of Paterson and other Democrats, the first question contains the path to revival.

One organized labor source described it as a "wake-up call" for the second floor. Since the meeting, top aides to the governor have been in touch with heads or representatives from many of the labor unions involved. Paterson spoke briefly with George Gresham, the head of 1199, at a meeting of the Democratic Governors Association last weekend in Saratoga Springs. According to Leah Gonzalez, an 1199 spokeswoman, the discussion was "cordial" and not out of the ordinary.

There has been a concerted focus on outreach, people on both ends of things say.

"I don't think there's as big a rift as people are trying to make it," Bill Lynch, a political consultant based in Harlem who has advised the governor. He said that Gresham is no foe of the governor, and that the other labor officials in Kingston aren't looking to "stomp" him.

But things are likely to come to a head soon. The state is facing a $2.1 billion deficit, Paterson's staffers say, which will be addressed in September. Paterson will be proposing more cuts, which unions will likely oppose. While Paterson and other Democrats may be sympathetic to the unions' wishes, they say that being a fiscal hawk is the only way to go.

"What Governor Paterson has done and will continue to do is, when appropriate, say no to certain things," Tracy Sefl, a spokesman for Paterson 2010, said. "And that's not always a popular thing. Is the going to back down from that? No. Is he willing to accept the fact that it is not always popular to be the one who says no? Yes."

"It was more a general opportunity to put on the table people's frustrations and feelings that they're, in a sense, taken for granted. I have to say I was somewhat surprised by some of the points that were made," Assemblyman Joe Morelle, who is also the Monroe County Democratic chairman, said after the three-hour meeting.

Assemblymen Carl Heastie and Vito Lopez, the chairs of the Bronx and Brooklyn Democratic parties, attended as well as Julian Schreibman of Ulster County, Diane Dwire of Onondaga County and Jay Jacobs, the incoming state chairman who currently runs the Nassau County party.

Union leaders present include Michael Mulgrew of the United Federation of Teachers; Stuart Appelbaum of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union; George Gresham of SEIU 1199; Mike Fishman of SEIU 32BJ and Gary La Barbera Building & Construction Trades Council of Greater New York.

According to one person in the room, the 2010 ticket was discussed, and union leaders "expressed concern about the polling numbers for everyone--except Cuomo."

The group agreed to meet again.