Rising Tide North America (RTNA)

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, June 4, 2015

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 news items feature issues, discussions, campaigns, or information potentially relevant to green unionists:

Lead Stories:

• Food, Water, Health, Life: UN Experts Warn of Threats Posed by Secret 'Trade' Deals - By Sarah Lazare, Common Dreams, June 2, 2015
• Louisiana Environmental Group Warns Santa Barbara Oil Spill Cleanup Workers to Protect Their Health - By Julie Dermansky, DeSmog Blog, May 31, 2015
• Peru: Shougang Mining Worker Killed in Marcona Protests - By Erin Gallagher, Revolution News, May 28, 2015

An Injury to One is an Injury to All:

• Why Your Beauty Salon Likely Doesn’t Have Any Employees - By Bryce Covert, Think Progress, June 3, 2015
• More Than 40 Charged With Murder For Bangladesh Garment Factory Collapse - By Beenish Ahmed, Think Progress, June 2, 2015
• Injured Workers' Day: Support shouldn't come in half-measures - By Ella Bedard, Rabble.Ca, June 1, 2015
• If You’re In A Nail Salon In New York, You’ll Now See A Workers’ Bill Of Rights On The Wall - By Tara Culp-Ressler, Think Progress, May 30, 2015
• Construction Worker Killed Near Wind Farm Construction Site - By Mark DelFranco, North American Wind Power, May 29, 2015
• Senior EU officials and industry lobbies joined forces to undermine the European strategy against endocrine disruptors - European Trade Union Institute, May 29, 2015
• Latest Mining Death Underscores Need to Enforce Westray Law - By United Steelworkers, Yahoo Finance, May 26, 2015
• Female worker dies in Canadian gold mine - By Andrew Topf, Mining.Com, May 24, 2015
• OSHA Chief: Fine for Deadly Leak "Petty Cash" for DuPont - By Neena Satija and Jim Malewitz, The Texas Tribune, May 23, 2015
• Fire on Gulf oil platform forces evacuation of 28 workers - Associated Press, May 22, 2015
• Marikana massacre: the untold story of the strike leader who died for workers’ rights - By Nick Davies, The Guardian, May 19, 2015

Carbon Bubble:

• Texas oil field vendors cut 200 jobs, close plants - By Collin Eaton, FuelFix, June 2, 2015
• US coal miner Murray Energy to lay off around 1,800 - By Cecilia Jamasmie, Mining.Com, May 22, 2015
• Popping Canada's 'Carbon Bubble' good for economy - By Jeff Rubin, CBC Radio, May 19, 2015

Just Transition:

• Climate justice and the good life--for everyone - By Marc Lee, Rabble.Ca, June 3, 2015
• Fossil fuels still hugely subsidized while number of jobs in renewables keeps growing - By Christiane Kliemann, European Trade Union Institute, May 28, 2015
• Why Students Are Joining the March for Jobs, Justice & the Climate - By Jody Chan, Fossil Free, May 28, 2015
• Activists Work to Stop East Bay Coal Exports - By Jean Tepperman, East Bay Express, May 27, 2015
• The darker side of solar power - By Konrad Yakabuski, Toronto Globe and Mail, May 27, 2015
• No Climate Protection without Climate Justice; No Climate Justice without Degrowth - By Christiane Kliemann, DeGrowth in Action, May 27, 2015
• Critics of Capitalism Must Include Its Definition - By Richard D. Wolff, Truth Out, May 26, 2015
• We need a new economic system - By Gar Alperovitz, Gar Alperovitz blog, May 22, 2015
• Why Democratic Energy Offers Faster Approach to Clean Energy - By John Farrell, Institute for Local Self Reliance, May 22, 2015
• Support the Workers - By Bruce K. Gagnon, Space 4 Peace, May 21, 2015

1267-Watch:

• Rail safety problems trigger protests - By Mark Gruenberg, People's World, May 29, 2015
• BLET/SMART–TD statement on Positive Train Control, crew size following fatal Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia - Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, May 19, 2015
• I-Team: Union Warned About Engineer Fatigue in Months Before Deadly Amtrak Crash - By Chris Glorioso, NBC TV 4 New York, May 14, 2015

Other News:

• Reclaim the Power! Climate protestors rout security with UK-wide fossil fuel strikes - By Oliver Tickell, The Ecologist, June 1, 2015
• The Limited "Victory" Won by Mexican Farm Workers - By Bertha Rodríguez Santos, Truth Out, May 31, 2015
• Harmony Gold to cut over 3,000 jobs, union asks Gov’t to intervene - By Cecilia Jamasmie, Mining.Com, May 29, 2015
• More Than 30 Student Groups Tell Aramark: Sustainable Tuna Now! - By David McElhatton, Greenpeace, May 28, 2015
• MUA Protests Plans to Deregulate Shipping - By Ashleigh Telford, Maritime Union of Australia, May 20, 2015
• Yes, We Protest Shell Oil with Products Made from Oil. Duh. Now Join Us - By Ansel Herz, The Stranger, May 18, 2015
• The biodiversity crisis and the environmentalist left - By Alan Thornett, International Viewpoint, May 13, 2015
• Recent elections in several countries suggest a worker-environment message is disrupting the norm - By Sean Sweeney, Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, May 10, 2015

For more green news, please visit our news feeds section on ecology.iww.org; Twitter #IWWEUC

By RTNA - Rising Tide Portland, May 23, 2015

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.

Starting this September, Rising Tide North America is calling for mass actions to shut down the economic and political systems threatening our survival.

Already, hundreds of thousands are streaming into the streets to fight back against climate chaos, capitalism and white supremacy.

This wave of resistance couldn’t be more urgent. To stop climate chaos we need a phenomenal escalation in organizing, participation and tactical courage. We need a profound social transformation to uproot the institutions of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, the systems that created the climate crisis. And we need to link arms with allies fighting for migrant justice, dignified work and pay, and an end to the criminalization and brutal policing of black and brown bodies.

We need to #FloodTheSystem.

In the lead up to the United Nations climate talks in Paris, in December, we will escalate local and regional resistance against systems that threaten our collective survival. Together, we will open alternative paths to the failing negotiations of political elites.

This is not another protest. It is a call for a massive economic and political intervention. It is a call to build the relationships needed to sustain our struggles for the long haul. To build popular power along the intersections of race, class, gender and ability. To collectively unleash our power and change everything.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, we are mobilizing locally.  If you want to get involved, let us know.  And if you already know you are willing to take direct action to address the climate crisis and stop the fossil fuel projects in our region, sign the Rising Tide Regional Pledge of Resistance.

See you at the barricades.

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, January 7, 2015

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 news items feature issues, discussions, campaigns, or information potentially relevant to green unionists:

Lead Story:

• Why Is the FBI Harassing Activists in Cascadia? - By Alexander Reid Ross, Defending Dissent, January 5, 2015

Carbon Bubble:

• Plunging Oil Prices Trigger Economic Downturn in Fracking Boom Town - By Anastasia Pantsios, EcoWatch, January 3, 2015
• Investors falter as fossil fuels face 'perfect storm' - By Kieran Cooke, The Ecologist, January 1, 2015
• Midland Basin oil worker talks crude prices, fracking bans in Reddit AMA - By Joshua Cain, FuelFix, January 1, 2015
• Oil driller laying off 700 in California - By Collin Eaton, FuelFix, January 2, 2015

Other News of Interest:

• Biomass Facility Fires a Regular Occurrence - By Josh Schlossberg, Vail Daily via Energy Justice Network, December 29, 2014
• India coal strike the biggest industrial action since 1977 - By Cecilia Jamasmie, Mining.Com, January 6, 2015
• Kinder Morgan: law-breaking, pollution, and cover-ups - By Derrick, West Coast Native News, January 5, 2015
• RMT pledges full support for general strike in Belgium - RMT Press Office, RMT, December 15, 2014
• This Changes Something - By Dru Oja Jay, Briar Patch, January 2, 2015

For more green news, please visit our news feeds section on ecology.iww.org; Twitter #IWWEUC

By Jen Wallis - exclusive, September 21, 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.

Editor's note: Jen Wallis meant to give the following speech at the People's Climate March in Seattle on Sunday, September 21, 2014, but had to abbreviate it due to time constraints. Here is the entire speech she would have given:

Hi my name is Jen Wallis, and I’m a founding member of Railroad Workers United. We are a rank-and-file caucus of the various national and international railroad unions. A few of us started this organization to respond to the decades of infighting created by the carriers to keep us divided.

I've been a conductor with BNSF Railway for over ten years. In 2008, I was injured on the job through no fault of my own. I was one of the first workers to file a whistleblower suit against a major railroad for retaliation for reporting a work-related injury. After 6 years of litigation, I won my case in Federal Court this past March, so I know a little bit about what it takes to fight corporations and what they will do to you and your family. I lost much of my support system, and I lost my house to foreclosure. And just as a side note, I first met Kshama Sawant when she showed up and got arrested for those of us fighting foreclosure. She is amazing!!! Over 1,000 railroaders who filed similar complaints have lost. I’m one of a handful to have won. The railroads have a lot of money to fight you, and they usually win.

I’ve taken it upon myself to use my victory to speak out for safety on the railroad because I’m one of the few people who can and not get fired for it, and I was actually in San Francisco speaking at a labor conference this past July when I got word that a group of unelected union officials from the conductor’s union had been meeting in secret with BNSF for 18 months, and unleashed a proposal that would have ended the job of the conductor on freight trains right here in my territory. My job. One person running trains at least a mile long through our communities where there have always been at least two, and engineer and a conductor. 140 years of railroading tradition gone with one contract. All the railroads would follow that precedent.

So we at Railroad Workers United went into what I can only call DEFCON 1 organizing. We had less than a month to mount a campaign to vote no before ballots were to be sent out. There were plenty of carrots in the agreement being dangled for the huge numbers of new hires we have, with things like “worker retention board” which claimed if you can’t hold a job, we’ll pay you to sit at home and not work, ending pay scale for new hires, and huge buy-outs for those getting close to retirement anyway. It was the standard concessionary agreement. Now those of us who have been in the game long enough knew these were only empty promises. We’ve seen enough of these broken in our careers, but the massive numbers of new hires did not, and we saw what scare tactics do at places like Boeing. Unions usually don’t defeat concessionary contracts, even when those companies are swimming in profits.

We knew we had to be bold, as bold as they were. I immediately started a FB group to protest the meeting in Sea-Tac where the officers would be to give us the hard-sell pitch. Now railroaders aren’t allowed to strike, and we haven’t done much in terms of organizing anything since 1894. You won’t find many of us who have ever so much as held a sign on a picket line. So I invited people who are more comfortable with holding signs - I invited my environmentalist friends I’d been trying to build alliances with these last couple of years - people from Backbone, from 350.org, Rising Tide, and members of the more radical unions like the Teamsters and Teachers and ILWU, and they showed up for us. Jess Spear showed up for us. The media we got in Seattle from that little picket inspired towns all across the country to follow suit. In places like Greybull, Wyoming and Creston Iowa, we got the spouses and families out there holding signs, (probably for the first times in their life), because they know our jobs and how terrifying it would be to have their loved ones out on these dangerous trains by themselves working under extreme fatigue in every kind of weather. We added over 2,000 new members to our facebook group in a month, distributed thousands of stickers and flyers and talking points. Many of us put our lives on hold and spent every waking moment organizing around this.

Finally, on September 10th, less than two months after we first got wind of it, the results were in. From the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes to right here in the Pacific Northwest, our members voted that proposal down. It was one of the proudest moments of my life. But as sweet as that victory was, none of that means anything compared to this fight against climate change. I have a 9 year-old son. I read recently that by the time he is my age, at the rate we’re going, this planet will experience a mass extinction. Extinction! And I can’t help but wonder If I’ve really done enough to protect him from that future.

Now our recent victory was a huge inspiration to all of us. We now know what we have to do, and we know what it takes to do it. We understand completely now that we are fighting an industry that cares as much about us as they do the environment, which is not at all...It might seem a little scary for environmentalists to approach labor, and sometimes the feeling is mutual, but when my co-workers saw that tripod up in Everett with the sign that said “Cut Oil Trains, Not Conductors”, they were blown away. Nobody has stood up for us in a very long time. America has what I call an epidemic of fence-straddling. Most people like to be perched up there, listening to information from both sides and occasionally hopping down from one to the other based on the news we get or the friends we know or which side has the most money or slickest campaign. But my friends, the fence is an illusion. If we could all just step back for a minute and notice that big field we’ve been in together this entire time. The fence is capitalism and corporate plutocracy, and it’s time to take it down!!!

By David Osborn - Common Dreams, September 18, 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.

Beyond appealing to powers-that-be, climate justice movements need to focus on creating systemic change to address the climate crisis

A Weekend to Change the Course of History. That is how the call-to-action for the People's Climate March taking place this coming Saturday, September 21, begins. The appeal goes on to suggest the weekend will be used “to bend the course of history.” This raises some questions critical to climate movements. How do we make that bend? And in what direction? In other words, what understandings and methods of social change inform the New York mobilization, and where do we want it to lead? These are urgent questions. The scale of the New York mobilization and the concentration of resources for the march demands that we put such questions firmly on the table.

The answers hinge on what we understand the nature of the problem to be. There are two general kinds of problems: surface and systemic. Imagine a house. Surface problems would include paint peeling, a leaky faucet or even flooring that needs replacement. All of those repairs can be done within the structure of a home. In the political realm, surface problems might include road decay, wasteful government spending or the lack of green spaces. Systemic problems go deeper. They would include a cracked foundation or rotted support beams that are so severe that fixing them would entail fixing the structure itself — or building an entirely new home. Racism and sexism are such problems. It isn’t enough (or even possible) to integrate schools or create policies for pay equity; the very structures that support these systems must be challenged for them to be addressed.

Climate change is also fundamentally a systemic problem. The climate crisis has emerged from the structures of our society, particularly capitalism, and their arrangement of values.

There are a wide variety of activities planned in New York and I know that many environmental and climate justice groups involved in the march understand the systemic nature of the climate crisis and are articulating community-based, power building strategies. I believe this approach is essential. However, I worry that the surface-level politics of the big environmental (and other) organizations and a march and rally to pressure heads of state focus on surface-level approaches, and could drown out those voices calling for systemic change.

By Rising Tide North America - August 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.

Rising Tide North America is part of the global movement against climate chaos and for social and environmental justice. We believe climate change can only be addressed by exposing the intersections between the oppressions of humans and the earth. No effort to create a livable future will succeed without the empowerment of marginalized communities and the dismantling of the systems of oppression that keep us divided.

As such, we condemn the Israeli military’s attacks on the Palestinian people in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank. We reject any attempt to isolate the attacks on the Palestinian people and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza from the intersectional global fight for climate justice. As the broad-based climate movement prepares to march in New York City, we call upon other groups and organizations committed to fighting the climate crisis to condemn publicly the Israeli military’s assault on Palestine.

In New York City, we will march with communities and groups who are working daily for community resilience against climate events like Superstorm Sandy and for food and environmental justice. We believe that from Palestine to New York City and beyond, our struggles for climate and social justice are all related.

In the movement for environmental and climate justice, we stand with those around the globe fighting war and occupation. Rising Tide North America is committed to opposing land grabs and resource exploitation by industries and state-sanctioned institutions. One of those institutions has been, and continues to be, imperial militaries which destroy communities, the environment, and the climate.

Militaries exploit land and natural resources to fuel their violent control and power over others. The unfettered burning of fossil fuels by militaries to wage war and violence on communities is exacerbating climate change and the impacts of droughts, extreme weather events, flooding, and sea level rise. This will lead to an increase in forced displacement and the number of climate refugees hoping to seek access to food, water, and homes elsewhere.

We recognize and reject that the United States financially and materially supports the Israeli military and countless other land grabs. As North American-based activists fighting against climate change, it is necessary to connect the colonization, capitalism and imperialism of our state and others with our daily work. The Israeli military’s actions actively support the corporations whose profits depend on the control and exploitation of land. As many regions of the world have so called ‘valuable’ natural resources, including the occupied Palestinian territories, we extend our solidarity with all who are impacted by resource extraction processes, and encroachments on their sovereignty and self-determination.

We recognize that the struggle to protect the land, water, and air from colonization, capitalism, and imperialism is a struggle that the people of Palestine face everyday. We extend our voices of solidarity to the people of Palestine who are facing unacceptable escalation of violence as they struggle to end the illegal occupation of their land.