direct action

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, June 10, 2024

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, May 30, 2024

By various - Beyond Extreme Energy, May 23, 2024

By Clara Polliard, Ian Hodson, Janet Newsham, and Nuala Lam - Tipping Point, April 11, 2024

By Patrick Nevada and Bev Tang - Rising Tide North America, November 15, 2023

Photos and videos for download here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1CAZK8SHZ2Yi-Y1dMQMiaQZG_3SlJknpz?usp=sharing

San Francisco, CA – Members of the No to APEC Coalition engaged in a civil disobedience action by blocking access to the site of the APEC CEO Summit at the Moscone West Convention Center in defiance of the hyper-militarized structures erected by the local and federal government. This action is the latest effort by the No to APEC Coalition during its months-long campaign to highlight the global and local harms of free trade and global free market agendas while demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

By Keith Brower Brown - Labor Notes, September 28, 2023

The 18,000 Auto Workers on strike have lit up the labor movement. But the strike is only the most visible side of auto workers’ leverage.

The less visible side is on the shop floor, where organized refusals of voluntary overtime have shut down multiple lines and whole factories for entire weekends since the strike began.

Among the 130,000 UAW members still working at the Big 3 auto companies, shop floor creativity is bringing back a bold tradition of “work to rule”—where workers coordinate to do only their explicit duties by the book, and nothing more. When production slows to a crawl, it proves how workers’ savvy was what kept the factory humming to begin with.

The reform caucus Unite All Workers for Democracy, which backed the election of President Shawn Fain and the rest of his Members United slate, has become a hub for these militant tactics. UAWD’s weekly “Members’ Update” calls and a “Members’ Voice” strike bulletin focus on spreading tactics to push managers and bring more co-workers into action.

The caucus launched a Refuse Voluntary Overtime pledge; members have used the pledge and its leaflets to rapidly organize hundreds of co-workers to join the refusal.

The rebellion from the ranks is forcing management to scramble for a counterattack. In the last week, hoping to keep those profitable Escalades and F-150s rolling out, managers at plants across the Big 3 tried to make weekend overtime mandatory.

But members at many plants figured out new ways to hold the line with their striking siblings. Some are declining to take the usual shortcuts, like riding bicycles around a big plant. Others are exploiting the unique legal environment of working under an expired contract: it is now an unfair labor practice for management to make unilateral changes to wages or working conditions. If bosses want to change something, they have to bargain it.

Auto Workers at four plants shared these dispatches on their co-workers’ latest inventions.

By Keith Brower Brown - Labor Notes, September 8, 2023

Earlier this year, on the Ford stamping line in Buffalo, sewage started pouring onto the floor. Careless managers had shut down a pump to install new equipment and caused a deluge.

The workers didn't work meekly through the dizzying stench. They shut down their line, fast. And they did it with so much unity that their manager decided not to fight back.

That collective action didn't come out of nowhere. Over the last few years, Auto Workers at Local 897 have built a fighting safety culture.

They elected new local officers who turned “militant” into a badge of honor. Members stopped the line when poorly routed forklifts dropped metal sheets near workers. They got four managers fired with safety grievances and shop floor confrontations.

“We put fear into the company,” says longtime Ford Buffalo worker Ryder Littlejohn, “Now, we walk through the floor, it’s like the Red Sea parting.”

By Andrew Glasford, Lucy Burke, and Keir Milburn - Green New Deal Media, December 19, 2023

By Katie Myers - Grist, August 1, 2023

The heatwave enveloping much of the world is so deadly that, in Europe, it has acquired two hellish mythical names: Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards Hades, and Charon, the man who, legend has it, ferries the dead to the afterlife.

Workers are taking a stand against the brutal conditions, using walkouts, strikes, and protests to call attention to the outsize danger the heat poses to the people who must work outdoors or in conditions where air condition isn’t available. The ongoing threat has taken the lives of people, from a construction worker in the Italian city of Lodi to farmworkers in Florida, and letter carriers in Texas. 

The organizing efforts started in Greece, where workers in the tourism industry — which accounts for 20% of the country’s GDP — are chafing under the strain. Athens’s most famous archaeological site, the Acropolis, closed for a few days earlier this month, but even as the government reopened it, temperatures continued soaring to 111 degrees Fahrenheit. The Acropolis’s staff, which is unionized through the Panhellenic Union for the Guarding of Antiquities voted to strike during the hottest four hours of each day.