By Jon Hochschartner - Species and Class, October 9, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Paul Shapiro is the vice president of farm animal protection at the Humane Society of the United States. He recently agreed to an interview with Species and Class in which he discussed alliances with the workers’ movement, among other things.

Species and Class : You recently coauthored a piece with the vice president of the United Farm Workers. How can the animal movement develop a better relationship with the labor movement, so we might work together on issues we agree on?

Paul Shapiro: Factory farms are terrible places to be a farm animal, and they’re also bad places to be a farm worker. There’s a reason turnover is so high at these facilities. Not only is it physically draining to work inside animal factories, but the mental toll which comes from being around such violence all day long is also quite serious. One need only peruse Human Rights Watch’s report on the working conditions for slaughter workers, for example, to know that these are very dangerous jobs.

So there should be a good amount of common ground between those seeking to help farm animals and those seeking to help farm workers. That’s one reason The Humane Society of the United States regularly works with the United Farm Workers on joint efforts. We’ve also partnered with other workers’ rights organizations to challenge a particularly inhumane poultry slaughter method that also causes traumatic injury to workers.

These are just a couple examples, but certainly there are more.

By Steve Klak - Railroad Workers United Blog, October 8, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

120 years ago Eugene Victor Debs stood six blocks from here at Langley Park and pledged the support of his brand new union, the American Railway Union to the struggle of the Pullman car builders. The ARU had just decisively defeated the Great Northern Railway in 18 days preventing a 10% wage cut. Now, this same company the Burlington Northern Santa Fe, is demanding concessions just as drastic. I came here today to ask you to help these present day rail workers in this fight.

By The Angry Syndicalist - October 9, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Grassroots Campaigns Inc is in the process of being unionized by the newly formed United Campaign Workers who have canvassed for the progressive non-profit organization. The canvassers have been denied paychecks owed by the organization and have been running a campaign for the regulation and restoration of hemp. Apparently these progressives have bounced checks before as well, since management wasn't willing to discuss these problems, the workers walked off the job.

The UCW was formed in concert with the help of the IWW. A phone blast was the first response to the liberal organization, with supporters calling in for the UCW. The demands were simple, $15.00 an hour and the overtime pay they were owed. When these were handed in to the director, he apparently thought the word grassroots and the IWW were strangers, naivety abound.

The campaign has been gathering signatures for I-21, the Oregon Cannabis Amendment, which would end all legal penalties for marijuana products and extend growing permissions to Oregonians. It’s paired with the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act, I-22, which would override existing laws to create a new regulatory framework and funnel money from marijuana sales into state programs.

The crew pulls 600 signatures a day and it would make sense since they are in favor of the campaign they'd be brought back to work? No. The canvassers have support in the community in the form of Jobs for Justice and other union members.

Nonprofits have been using methods normally reserved for the conservative wing of liberal politics to bust unions i.e. Sisters Camelot, which has left a sour taste in many Wobblies mouths. Who resorted to a lawyer whose goal was to destroy the union, despite the fact the NLRB recognized them as workers.

I do not put it past progressives to have the not in my backyard mentality if it affects them. So much so, they hired scabs who ironically were offered $15.00 an hour. Since then the workers have done what they can to get management back to the bargaining table, including demanding enough dignity from the work they perform in the payment of bonuses so they can feed their children.

A confused liberal called this heteronormative, however I question if this liberal has ever had to starve before.

Part II: Boston Wobblies in Solidarity.

GCI has had their reputation for union busting spread throughout the local community in Boston(where their HQ is). Their quotas were unrealistic and union busting isn't a thing a labor democrat would do would they? Anyways, they resorted to hiring private security who were too cowardly to show their faces to the world.

• Boston IWW and GCI
• Progressive Union Busters

Grassroots Campaigns was founded in December 2003. By April 2004 Grassroots Campaigns had opened offices in 40 cities throughout the country. By July 2004 they had over 2,000 staff knocking on doors and fund raising on behalf of the  Democratic National Committee With continued work on behalf of MoveOn PAC to run "Leave No Voter Behind," (LNVB). This was a "get out the vote" (GOTV) program intended to give Democratic candidate John Kerry an edge in the swing states. 

Grassroots Campaigns, Inc clients are a who's who for those who like to name drop, from the ACLU to the SPLC to the Sierra Club. It's one big club and the canvassers aren't in it. Praise be to the liberal elite with college degrees and Starbucks addictions.

By Patrick Robbins - This Changes Everything, October 6, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Getting your mind around climate change is hard. Confronting it requires us to deal with the ways that coal, oil, and gas have shaped nearly every aspect of our world, from our built environments to our economic systems — even our ideologies and patterns of thought. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t concrete actions each of us can take, right now. Here are 20 examples of things YOU can do (some details are US-specific).

1. Reorganize the mode of production so that surplus and capital is distributed equally throughout society, and workers have decision-making power over their labor.

2. Find out about fossil fuel projects being built or proposed in your neighborhood (most of which can be found in the records of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or the Environmental Protection Agency) and mobilize your community against them. Read these excellent resources on how to start organizing your community and spread them far and wide.

3. Understand that while climate change affects us all, there are specific populations who are more vulnerable than others — these are low-income communities, communities of color, coastal communities and communities on the frontlines of fossil fuel extraction. Find a frontline organization near you and offer to support their work. Ask them what kind of help they need and take direction from them.

4. Lay off the policeman, the commodities trader, the real estate agent and the speculator in your head.

5. Read about what the crisis could potentially look like — go HERE or HERE or HERE or HERE or HERE — and think about what this could mean for you personally, or for people and places you love.

By Tim Norgren  - Portland Rising Tide, October 5, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

The following is an open letter from  union member Tim Norgren to Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA). Read on as Tim explains why union support of fossil fuel export projects is short-sighted and generally not in the best interest of workers. 

Dear LIUNA and Fellow Workers,

In joining forces with avowed union enemies to lobby for export projects like coal and bitumen/oil terminals and pipelines, which would create some short term, but VERY FEW long term local jobs, I strongly feel we’re selling ourselves out, along with every worker in America!

The propositions stand to benefit billionaires like the Koch brothers and other members of ALEC, which as you know are behind state by state attacks on worker’s rights via campaigns like the “right to work” bill recently pushed in OR (see www.alecexposed.org for more).

Export proponents Arch and Peabody coal (ALEC members) were featured in the Labor Press last summer for shifting pensions worth over $1.3 BILLION (owed to some 20,000 beneficiaries) to a shell company- then bankrupting it, leaving retirees destitute. This “success” opened the door for Detroit to become the first city to declare bankruptcy and default on pensions. Scrutiny showed this to be an ALEC “model” scheme. Supporting companies which commit such crimes against dedicated workers is UNACCEPTABLE for anyone who purports to be part of a labor movement!

According to Greg Palast (investigative reporter for the BBC), the Koch brothers stand to save about $26 a barrel bringing in the oil from the Keystone XL instead of from H. Chavez in Venezuela. The Koch’s Houston refineries are designed to refine only the high carbon tar sands oil available from those sources and cannot even process the lighter Texas crude. $26 a barrel would add up to a lot more ammo in their union-busting arsenal.

Should proposals succeed, then when our job’s over, coal will continue being extracted from public lands, with mainly non-union miners and huge federal subsidies (taxpayer expense) in obscenely higher quantities than now, then carted though our neighborhoods alongside explosive fracked oil tankers. Tar sands oil will keep flowing into Koch Industries refineries. And while NOT keeping us working, it WILL continue to profit enemies of labor (fueling their next campaigns) as it’s shipped to Asia, providing cheap fuel for deathtrap factories where subsistence workers slave at jobs outsourced from living wage employment in America!

Indeed as industrial and other jobs are replaced with government subsidized resource extraction and privatization schemes, across the board from fossil fuels and lumber to such basic staples as water and social services, we can see in our mirror a third world nation.

In my humble opinion as a member of LIUNA, pursuing these proposals rather than insisting on cleaner, more labor-friendly energy and transmission projects IS SUICIDE! Are we truly willing to follow the short-term carrot on a stick, like an ass to the slaughter? To feed ourselves willingly to those who would destroy us? Or do enough of us still have the conscience, guts and faith to stand up with those who’ve struggled at such cost to give us rights as workers?

Sincerely,

Tim Norgren, Laborers Local 320

By Amador Fernández-Savater  - ROAR Magazine, September 29, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Interview by Amador Fernández-Savater. Translated by Richard Mac Duinnsleibhe and edited by Arianne Sved of Guerrilla Translation.

In 2002, John Holloway published a landmark book: Change the World without Taking Power. Inspired by the ‘¡Ya basta!’ of the Zapatistas, by the movement that emerged in Argentina in 2001/’02, and by the anti-globalization movement, Holloway sets out a hypothesis: it is not the idea of revolution or transformation of the world that has been refuted as a result of the disaster of authoritarian communism, but rather the idea of revolution as the taking of power, and of the party as the political tool par excellence.

Holloway discerns another concept of social change at work in these movements, and generally in every practice—however visible or invisible it may be—where a logic different from that of profit is followed: the logic of cracking capitalism. That is, to create, within the very society that is being rejected, spaces, moments, or areas of activity in which a different world is prefigured. Rebellions in motion. From this perspective, the idea of organization is no longer equivalent to that of the party, but rather entails the question of how the different cracks that unravel the fabric of capitalism can recognize each other and connect.

But after Argentina’s “que se vayan todos” came the Kirchner government, and after Spain’s “no nos representan” appeared Podemos. We met with John Holloway in the city of Puebla, Mexico, to ask him if, after everything that has happened in the past decade, from the progressive governments of Latin America to Podemos and Syriza in Europe, along with the problems for self-organized practices to exist and multiply, he still thinks that it is possible to “change the world without taking power.”

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Oscar Olivera led the first successful protest against water privatization. He spoke at Climate Convergence 9/19/2014

By 6eoff - Boston IWW, October 2, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Today Wobblies from Boston took to the street to support Portland OR canvassers, employed by Grassroots Campaigns Inc (GCI), who formed the United Campaign Workers* union in response to poverty pay, impossible quotas, meager training, and blatant disrespect. Canvassers’ demands included $15/hr, overtime pay, and sick leave. The company retaliated by shutting down its Portland operation, laying off employees with no notice and just two days’ wages!

GCI has its headquarters here in Boston at 186 Lincoln Street. Today local IWW’s leafleted to expose GCI’s union-busting and exploitation. We sent the message to GCI and the neighborhood: there is nothing progressive about terminating canvassers for not meeting unreachable quotas, or for banding together to negotiate better terms and conditions. GCI apparently heard we were coming, and had to arrange for special security goons, who however were camera-shy and hid demurely inside the building when we attempted to preserve their images for posterity. It was a great time & we’ll be back!

*Affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World

IndustriALL Global Union - Mining.Com, October 2, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

A scathing official report into the Soma mining disaster in Turkey has revealed a catalogue of negligent practices and a complete disregard for worker safety. The comprehensive analysis shows warning sensors were ignored, safety reports fabricated and ventilation systems faulty. Three hundred and one miners were killed in the tragedy in May.

The much-anticipated 126-page expert report, commissioned by the Turkish public prosecutor, clearly states the catastrophe was preventable. While eight high-level managers of the mine’s operating company have already been arrested in connection with the tragedy, the report points the finger of blame at almost everyone involved in the mine, including ministry bureaucrats, with the exception of the miners themselves. “The only innocent group is the workers,” says the report.

The Soma mine is owned by a state-owned company Turkish Coal Enterprises (TKI) and operated by a private company, Soma Kömür İşletmeleri A.Ş.

Call to Action - Beyond Extreme Energy, October 2, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

In recent months many voices have called for larger, escalated action on climate change. We agree. At the beginning of November, as the election campaigns conclude, we call for multiple, consecutive days of climate direct action in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Vote we must, but we must do much more.

We hurtle toward a climate precipice with one foot occasionally, tentatively tapping the brake but the other simultaneously flooring the accelerator on our fossil-fueled economy.

At the wheel, among others, is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).  Our government is pretending to navigate, but industry is calling the shots from the back seat.

We know how this will end:  very badly, unless we change how we make energy, how we transport ourselves , how we grow food, how the economy is structured, how we measure the economy, and what we value.

Only our action can make the difference.