green syndicalism

By Stephyn Quirke - Earth First! Newswire, June 24, 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.

Is our weather getting funny?

Some bushes and flowers started to bloom near the end of January this year, and in the spring cherry blossoms were blooming weeks early. This capped a winter with extremely low snowfall in the Cascade Mountains. The abnormal heat, combined with the drought now covering 80% of Oregon, has actually raised temperatures in the Willamette River above 70 degrees, recently killing chinook salmon as they made their way up-stream to spawn.

In March, tribal leaders from the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians converged in Portland to discuss this ongoing phenomenon of strange weather, which they cannily dubbed “climate change”. These changes, they said, were related to a pattern of global warming, and were creating unique hardship on Northwest tribes. In 2013, the ATNI also passed a resolution opposing all new fossil fuel proposals in the Northwest, citing harm to their treaty rights, cultural resources, and land they hold sacred. Now the Affiliated Tribes are discussing plans for adaptation and mitigation, and asking how to undermine the root causes of climate change.

In addition to the sudden onset of strange weather, Portland has also seen the abrupt arrival of strange, mile-long trains loaded with crude oil – a very unusual sight in the Northwest until just two years ago. In the event of a derailment or crash, these trains are known to increase the temperature of surrounding areas by several hundred degrees – a strange weather event by any standard. This phenomenon has become so common that the train engineers who run them actually call them “bomb trains”.

While the danger of unplanned explosions is universally recognized, the risks of strange weather, and the planned explosions that take place in our internal combustion engines, are typically less appreciated. But the connections are becoming more obvious as the figure of the oil train valiantly pulls them together.

The sudden appearance of oil trains in the Northwest is one effect of the unprecedented crusade for oil extraction in North America – one that has produced a massive wave of opposition from residents and elected officials. In Washington state alone, nine cities representing 40% of the state’s population have passed resolutions that oppose oil trains. In Alberta resistance to oil politics recently replaced a 44-year ruling party with socialists. And in Portland, anger against oil trains just smashed a city proposal to bring propane trains into the port.

In recent months rail workers have become increasingly vocal about the industry-wide safety problems that lead to fiery train accidents. They are also critical of the latest safety rules that allegedly protect the public from accidents. Rail Workers United, a coalition of rail workers and their unions, says that the best way to make trains safer is to increase worker control and self-management; they propose a host of reforms that profit-obsessed rail companies are not interested in hearing. For many rail-side communities there is a parallel interest in community control over the railroads: no fossil fuel trains are safe for them as long as trains derail and the climate unravels. Together, the two movements are calling for a better future for our railroads and our environment, and demanding more public influence to safeguard both.

By John Cartwright - Rabble.Ca, June 24, 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.

Years ago, someone in the global disarmament movement came up with a humorous way to draw attention to a desperately serious topic. The slogan a single atomic bomb can ruin your entire day soon appeared on buttons everywhere, and it came to symbolise the absurdity of the military strategy of mutually assured destruction.

Decades later, another kind of assured destruction looms as climate change dramatically change weather patterns across the world. When Hurricane Sandy swept into the American eastern seaboard, many New Yorkers experienced aspects of devastation that hit like the aforementioned nuclear bomb. Suddenly, climate change was no longer an abstract conversation. People's lives had been affected in a way they never imagined. In New York City, there was a new immediacy to the issue of global warming.

And so, last September, I found myself surrounded by thousands of New York trade unionists as the People's Climate March surged through Manhattan. In the labour rally at the start of the march, the leader of a New York nurses' union described the scene in her hospital emergency room as the victims of Sandy poured in, while her members elsewhere were evacuating patients from hospitals that had lost electricity.

Transit workers saw the subway tunnels flooded for days, janitors were impacted as scores of office buildings shut down, and IBEW electricians worked overtime to repair damaged power lines and transformers. SEIU Local 1199 members were out in force carrying signs that proclaimed "climate change is a health issue." Teachers and Teamsters and City employees shared the street with a message of common concern. It was breathtaking.

By Striking Heart - Striking Heart, February 3, 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 ways we know each other and ourselves are transformed through collective struggles. Sometimes we manage to exceed and push beyond what is anticipated. The bonds formed between Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and mining communities in South Wales are one such example. Matthew Warchus’s film Pride got us thinking about what notion of ‘pride’ might be required to combat climate change through a struggle around the conditions of contemporary work. We see that labour struggles of the 20^th century were accompanied by a discourse of pride in being a worker – for some, in being a miner. We ask, how might our collective nostalgia for labour movements remembered in terms of the pride to be labour be unsettled by the catastrophic threat posed by our enduring reliance on coal mining?

Juxtaposing reflections on our families’ histories in the Taff Bargoed and Cynon valleys with the contemporary political and economic situation in Australia, we ask whether there is another path for communities that rely on wages/welfare today. What possibilities are arising for our generation, a generation that must challenge catastrophic environmental destruction? Is it possible that we might not need to sacrifice our well-being, our environment and the futures of others to satisfy our immediate material needs and desires?

We propose that we can be proud of mining communities’ battles to defend their livelihoods by clarifying these as struggles for dignity, sustainability and for community control over community interests. These characteristics will be essential in ongoing efforts to put an end to mining. To this we would add that a major battleground for our time is the struggle to collectively work less!

Mining Memories

As two Welsh-Australian women who were children in the 1980s and for whom Sydney is mostly home, there isn’t much we can contribute to a personalised analysis of the battles against pit closures. There are, however, some links to be drawn between the experiences of our ancestors and the conditions we face in contemporary Australia.

We know that in Wales the pits sustained life by providing relatively well-paid jobs, and sites around which strong communities were built and where our families flourished. But they also took life, sometimes quickly and brutally, sometimes by slowly chipping away. Emphysema and other lung conditions affected our grandparents’ and parents’ generation. Many people would not live beyond their fifties due to over-work and poor health and safety conditions. Injuries were commonplace in the hazardous underground mines and for children playing in the towns around the coalfields. Claire’s Dad remembers,

‘There wasn’t much in the way of health and safety! If we were going up the mountain, we used to hitch a ride on the coal trams. There was a rope that winched them up and we’d jump on that. I don’t know how many of us got hurt doing it. We also used to play on the bridge over the train tracks. The game was to be on top of the bridge as the coal train passed, shooting smoke up as it went. We came back covered in soot, black from head to foot.’

Despite some of the horrors and misery of the daily grind, we feel a longing for the courage of those communities that fought against the pit closures. We understand that a way of life was at stake during the struggles in the 1980s. Much of what has been lost in the last few decades relates to the breaking down of that culture, as well as the very real consequences of inter-generational under-employment and poverty. This acknowledged, one of the starkest examples of the contradictions inherent in the fight to keep the pits open is found in many people’s hopes that their children would not have to work in them. ‘No one wanted their children to go down the mines but there weren’t many other options in the Valleys. It was down the pits or to the army,’ says Claire’s Dad. The less common narrative of the struggle to against pit closures is the struggle for better lives, lives extricable from work.

By Scott Nicholas Nappalos - Miami IWW, June 17, 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.

Miami IWW Web Editor's Note: The IWW is has always been centered around the debate between trade unions and industrial unions. That debate has fallen by the wayside after the 1930s when industrial unions rose on a mass scale. Today’s article comes from healthcare worker Nappalos, where he explores division between trades, professions, and industry in today’s health care. Looking at a world wide debate between revolutionary unionists in the IWW’s heyday, he offers a critique of both craft and industrial unionism and suggestions to reform the IWW’s vision in light of this.

Healthcare today is built around key divisions of labor between craft specialities. It is highly regulated and the state plays a strong role in determining who can do what work, for how much money, and under who’s authority. There are strong differences across borders and within, but within the US the schema is roughly like this. To keep it simple, we’ll ignore all the crucial technical crafts for the sake of argument. The main players are doctors, nurses, and pharmacists. Doctors diagnose and prescribe treatments. Pharmacists check and dispense the treatments (when they’re medications). Nurses administer the treatments prescribed and monitor/assess the patients course of illness. This is a gross simplification, but it’s instructive.

Where did these divisions come from? Healthcare is not only divided by crafts, but other social factors divide the workforce. For instance we need to add to this the highly gendered nature of the work. Male nurses still represent only around 10% of the US workforce and nurses are the largest trade in the entire country. Florence Nightingale herself reinforced the patriarchal thinking of her day, either unknowingly or exploitively, in helping form nursing under the strict control of physicians giving nurses only a subservient role due to the prejudices of her time. Physicians are becoming more diverse, the rigid hierarchies between doctor and nurse themselves have proven difficult to break with nurses on the bottom in terms of power, respect, and working conditions.

It’s worth questioning the divisions all together. In frontier medicine in the US nurses often played the role of doctor, nurse, and pharmacist. The history of midwifery is riddled with other ideas about performing medical servies than the model of physician-nurse-techs we have today. Pharmacists used to prescribe medications and still do in some countries. Much of what doctors did 30 years ago is now done by nurses. The divisions between the trades are fluid and constantly changing, and are far from any natural division. An even deeper question we should ask is are these divisions of labor the best for society and individuals, or could we do better by transforming how health care is done?

By the Centre for Social Justice and Socialist Project - Socialist Project, June 21, 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.

It is no longer plausible to propose incremental solutions to the ecological crises of our time. The numbers are clear: to avoid a trillion metric tons of cumulative carbon emissions by 2039, and an increase in global average temperatures of 2°C, it is necessary to stabilize immediately Greenhouse Gas emissions. The ecological scars of desertification, coastline loss, species extinction, destruction of habitat, and much else is evident for all to see.

The main culprit of runaway climate change and environmental degradation, as Naomi Klein points out in her new book, is the economic system itself: capitalism. This is a class system that requires endless growth and is incompatible with sustainability and meaningful climate action. Market solutions from the last decades of neoliberalism have miserably failed. The tactics of even "Big Green" environmental groups have too often pursued immediate reforms that fail to address the real sources of the crisis in the unequal relations at work, the need for endless consumption, and the hollowness of democracy today.

But what might serve as an alternative political program for an ecological transition? Where might new radical political movements emerge to carry forward such an ecological revolution? Is "Blockadia" enough? Or is there even more needed to, as Klein suggests, "build the world that will keep us all safe"?

Moderated by Lana Goldberg. Presentations by:

• Niloofar Golkar is a Toronto-based activist with Rising Tide Toronto and a graduate student in the Department of Political Science at York University.
• Greg Albo is a professor of Political Economy at York University, co-editor of the Socialist Register (recent volume: Transforming Classes), and director of the Centre for Social Justice.
• Jodi Dean is a professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York State. She has been active in the We Are Seneca Lake anti-gas struggle and is the author of Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (2009), Blog Theory (2010), and The Communist Horizon (2012), among others.

The forum was sponsored by: Centre for Social Justice and Socialist Project.

By That Green Union Guy - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, June 17, 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.

I have been closely following the debate between various members of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Tom Wetzel (a syndicalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area) which began with Tim Goulet's review of Ralph Darlington's Radical Unionism: The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Syndicalism on April 22, 2015 and has bounced back and forth since then [See: Misunderstanding syndicalism, by Tom Wetzel, April 29, 2015; Contradictions of syndicalism, by Tim Goulet, May 21, 2015; Syndicalism and taking power, by Brian Kelly, May 26, 2015; and Confusion about political power, by Tom Wetzel, May 28, 2015].

I want to say, before I go any further, that I consider myself a syndicalist, specifically a green syndicalist (the very first IWW member I met was Judi Bari, in 1995, and it was through her that I found my way to the Wobblies). I have been a dues paying IWW members since 1995, and I have a fairly deep knowledge of IWW history, as well as contemporary discussions on matters of strategy and tactics within the IWW.  Two years ago, I cofounded the IWW's Environmental Unionism Caucus with two other IWW members. I am also a member of System Change not Climate Change, and I work fairly closely with a handful of ISO members that also belong to SCnCC. I think there is little to be gained by engaging in sectarian squabbles when our very existence is threatened by the capitalist economic system which all of us, syndicalists and socialists alike agree, must be overthrown and replaced by something different, and I suspect that we'd find much agreement on what that different system would look like and how it would function.

However, I also recognize the need to debate strategy, tactics, theory and praxis if we're to be effective as revolutionaries and devise a winning strategy to successfully combat capitalism. This debate on syndicalism to some extent qualifies, but I've also noticed a good deal of sectarianism from some of the ISO folks in this discussion, not to mention some rather glaring omissions and inaccuracies. The most recent entry, from comrades Joe Richard and Ty Carroll (The Wrong Place at the Right Time), represents for me a particularly egregious example.