green syndicalism

By Whatcom-Skagit GMB, IWW - Portland IWW, May 6, 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.

Fellow Workers,

The Whatcom-Skagit general membership branch of the Industrial Workers of the World is urging everyone to join us in a boycott campaign in support of farm workers of the Familias Unidias por la Justicia (FUJ) union in NW Washington.

For decades now, the farm workers at Sakuma Brothers berry farm in Skagit County have endured inadequate housing, systematic wage theft, and racist abuse from supervisors, among many other problems. In the summer of 2013, the farm workers at Sakuma Brothers Farms went on strike and formed a union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, of over 450 indigenous Triqui and Mixteco berry pickers. After a series of strikes there was a written agreement between Sakuma and FUJ. However, Sakuma reneged on their word to the workers. After Sakuma broke promises they made during a negotiation session, the farm workers of Familias Unidas por la Justicia voted to endorse a public boycott of Sakuma, Driscoll’s berries and Haagen-Dazs ice cream (both are major buyers/packers of Sakuma berries) until the labor dispute is resolved and the workers have a contract recognizing their union.

The workers want a fair wage, health insurance, and respect on the job. In court, Familias Unidas has been recognized as a union with the right to organize and represent workers collectively. They have won landmark victories, including a settlement in which workers were collectively paid $500,000 in back wages and two rulings preventing Sakuma from changing their housing and hiring policies illegitimately. On the farm itself they have won several gains, such as the ability to take lunch breaks. However, these gains on the farm are now slipping as they have in the past. On February 3rd a farm workers tribunal took place in Olympia and members of FUJ spoke to state legislators about wage theft and working conditions at Sakuma Brothers Farm. The tribunal is an independent hearing by community judges that examines and provides judgments relative to human rights, labor rights, and civil rights abuses and the rights of peoples. The Farmworker Tribunal seeks to document and expose violations of state laws, civil rights, labor rights and human rights in Washington State’s Agricultural Industries. On March 17th in Toppenish the Washington State Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case (Demetrio et al. v. Sakuma Brothers Farms). This case will decide whether farm workers who are paid piece rate should also be compensated for rest breaks, as are wage workers in Washington State. The decision in this case will impact all Washington farm workers.

The farm workers at Sakuma are fighting against injustice on behalf of farm workers everywhere. We are reaching out to IWW branches to actively support these workers. Some ways that your group can support the farm workers is by promoting the boycott, picket stores that carry Driscoll’s, Haagen-Dazs and Sakuma Berry products, and supporting other groups’ boycott activities in your communities. The struggle of Families Unidas por la Justicia for dignity and justice in their workplace continues and it falls on everyone’s shoulders to support the people whose labor sustains us.

Solidarity,
Whatcom-Skagit GMB, IWW
Contact Info:
Email: iwwbellingham@gmail.com
Facebook: Whatcom-Skagit IWW

By Anarchist Materialism - Anarchist Materialism, April 20, 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.

“Our duty, which was the logical outcome of our ideas, the condition with which our conception of revolution and re-organisation of society imposes on us, namely, to live among the people and to win them over to our ideas by actively taking part in their struggles and sufferings” — Errico Malatesta

In order for the Anarchist movement to mature in this country, we must address a particularly troubling dilemma.  Are we to continue our historical struggle within the working class or do we evolve into a professional class of labor organizers and bureaucrats?? Addressing this question isn’t only about disagreements in methods but in affirming an anarchist conception of organization from the base.  Whether in garment factories and ports or in hotels and retail, our focus on the rank and file has always been obvious–without the revolutionary self organization of the workers, we will never overthrow this unjust system of economic and political domination.

Unfortunately there exists a layer of self proclaimed anarchists as well as other leftists today who have not only chosen to separate themselves from the rank and file, but to defend their activity as a strategic form of social insertion.  Such a view is heavily deluded and guided in no small part by years of NGO influence on social movements.  In the current political environment, there are anarchist staffers in every union imaginable from the SEIU and UFCW to the UAW and UNITE HERE.

Students interested in labor are directly recruited out of universities into internships with Jobs with Justice and other business unions, while militant rank and file workers are tempted off the shop floor with higher pay and benefits.

Though this sad state of affairs shows a severe weakness of the left in offering alternatives, it is also a deliberate tactic of the union leadership.  By placating agitated workers with radical staff who “get it”, the union leadership is able to control mobilization and to later use their staffers to push through harmful cuts and “reforms.”

By Paul Messersmith-Glavin - Institute for Anarchist Studies, April 15, 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 forces responsible for changing the climate and endangering the future of humanity have names. Names such as: Chevron and Exxon Mobil, Saudi Aramco and Petroleos de Venezuela. They are the predominant groups responsible for playing havoc with our collective future. In fact, two-thirds of historic carbon dioxide and methane emissions can be attributed to exactly ninety entities. They are based in forty-three countries and extract resources from every oil, natural gas, and coal rich region in the world. They process the fuels into products that are sold to consumers in every nation on the planet. Of the top 85 emitters, 54 are in industrialized countries and 31 are in developing nations.[2] Knowing who and where they are demonstrates that an end to the problem is within our reach. In order to stop global climate change all we need to do is put pressure on these isolated entities, right?

Wrong. While these are the primary economic forces responsible for climate change, it would be a mistake to think if we stop these particular companies from conducting business as usual, we can solve the problem. They are only the most public faces of a system that goes much deeper.

Naming the responsible parties should not lead to a reformist strategy of regulating or even abolishing these companies. That would not be ultimately effective because they operate within a system that rewards their behavior. Very similar groups would emerge to fulfill these roles. What must be addressed and confronted is the social and economic system of capitalism that makes their work possible. This is the true enemy. The driving force of climate change is the capitalist profit motive and confronting this effectively will require massive grassroots local organizing with an international perspective. It will require developing an extra-legal movement, one that does not play by the rules of established power. It necessitates a revolutionary focus, and attention to how the systems and structures of racism, patriarchy and the nation state intersect with and reinforce capitalist social relations. It will require working with a broad cross-section of the population, learning from folks outside established radical circles, educating ourselves and others, while moving with hundreds, thousands, and ultimately millions of people to fundamentally transform society. The civilization that gets us out of the climate crisis will be different than the one that has gotten us into it.

Many questions arise: what is required to create such a mobilization? How does social change happen, and can it happen quickly enough to prevent further catastrophic change? Simply having access to the science is not enough; activists battle conflicting and politically driven media messages alongside feelings of despair and apathy born of disempowerment. A new, ecologically minded paradigm will require not just information but an expanded and critical economic analysis, as well as shared assumptions about collective power and the experience of working together from the ground up.

In the Pacific Northwest of the US, several organizations have been working on responding to the crisis. Three groups working closely together in Portland, Oregon have been experimenting with new models. These groups offer ideas for organizers through their experimentation with different approaches to outreach, education, and mobilization.

By Dario Azzellini - Occupied Times, April 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. 

Published below is a heavily condensed and edited version of a chapter from Dario Azzellini’s recent book,“An Alternative Labour History”. The chapter can be read in its entirety here (PDF).

During the first decade of the current century, factory occupations and production under workers’ control seemed to be limited mainly to South America, with a few exceptions in Asia. It was beyond the imagination of most workers and scholars in industrialized countries that workers would or could occupy their companies and run them on their own. Nevertheless, the crisis that started in 2008 put workers’ control back on the agenda in the northern hemisphere. In the course of the current crisis, factory occupations occurred throughout Europe, especially in France, Italy and Spain, but also in other countries, including Switzerland and Germany, and in the US and Canada. Nevertheless, in most cases the occupation was a means of struggle and not a step toward workers’ control. In some better organized cases workers achieved their demands, in others the occupations were a result of spontaneous indignation over factory closure or mass dismissals and the struggles fell apart without any concrete results.

Compared to other historical moments when factory takeovers and workers’ control were part of offensive struggles, the new occupations and recuperations develop out of defensive situations. However, this has been true since the neoliberal attack on workers in the early 1980s, with very few exceptions like the recent struggles for worker control in Venezuela. As consequence of the crisis, occupations and recuperations are accomplished by workers in reaction to closure of their production site or company, or relocation of production to a different country. Workers try to defend their workplaces because they have little reason to hope for a new job. In this defensive situation, the workers not only protest or resign; they take the initiative and become protagonists. In the struggle and on the production site they build horizontal social relations and adopt mechanisms of direct democracy and collective decision-making. The recuperated workplaces often reinvent themselves. The workplaces also build ties with nearby communities and other movements.

This description already includes certain criteria not necessarily shared by all workers’ takeover of companies. While in fact it is fundamental to recognize the diversity of situations, contexts and modalities of workers’ controlled companies, it is nevertheless important to understand workers’ control or recuperation of workplaces as a socio-political operation and not as a mere economic procedure. Therefore, it is necessary to have some basic criteria when discussing recuperated companies. Some well-intentioned authors calculate 150 recuperated workplaces under worker control in Europe (Troisi 2013). A closer look shows that very few of these can really be considered “recuperated” and under worker control. That count includes all workers’ buyouts of which most at best adopted the structure and functioning of traditional cooperatives. Many, if not most, have internal hierarchies and individual property shares. In the worst cases we find unequal share distribution according to the company’s social hierarchy (and therefore economic power) or even external investors and shareholders (individuals and major companies). Such reckoning reduces the concept of recuperation to the continued existence of a company originally destined to close and merely changing ownership from one to many owners, some of whom work in the company. Companies following these schemes can hardly be considered “recuperated” in that they do not provide a different perspective on how society and production should be organized.

That contemporary worker-controlled companies almost always have the legal form of cooperatives is because the cooperative form is the only existing legal form of collective ownership and collective administration of workplaces. Usually, however, these are based on collective ownership, without any option of individual property; all workers have equal shares and equal voice. It is an important and distinctive characteristic that they question private ownership of means of production. They provide an alternative to capitalism based essentially on the idea of a collective or social form of ownership. Enterprises are seen not as privately owned (belonging to individuals or groups of shareholders), but as social property or “common property” managed directly and democratically by those most affected by them. Under different circumstances, this might include, along with workers, participation by communities, consumers, other workplaces, or even some instance of the state (for example in countries like Venezuela or Cuba). That workers’ control the production process and are decisive in decision-making, usually also turns them into social and political agents beyond the production process and the company (Malabarba 2013, 147).

All following examples of factories recuperated during the crisis correspond to these modalities.

By Mark Serwotka - DeSmog UK, April 9, 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 trade union movement and the environmental movement should be “together like hand in glove, they should be allies,” argues Mark Serwotka, the General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) – the trade union for British civil servants.

We should watch out for those who try to divide us and try to get their way by getting us at each other’s throats: it makes life easier for them and worse for us.

We should be absolutely, naturally allies. And that means starting to recognise that capitalism attacks workers who are members of trade unions, and it attacks the environment.

For us, at the moment, we’re dealing with tens of thousands of people being laid off, living standards have dropped at a faster rate than any time since Queen Victoria, and, for the environmental movement, we see a lack of investment in renewables, in public transport, [and] pollution seems to be something the capitalists can get away with willy-nilly.

By Geoff - Ideas and Action, April 9, 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. 

“An injury to one is an injury to all”. This IWW slogan characterizes the solidarity necessitated by class struggle. It characterizes the idea that it’s necessary for the working class to cooperate and work together towards their individual interests, as these are also class interests. The interests of gaining control over economic, social and work decisions which affect the working class directly is made necessary due to the odious nature of our current global economic conditions.

But this slogan really goes further than just class. It is also an embodiment of the solidarity necessitated by intersecting forms of oppression which divide the working class and hinder their ability to fight back in the global class war. Intersectional, meaning, issues concerned with intersections between forms or systems of oppression, domination or discrimination. These issues also create various social hierarchies which marginalize and disempower people. Examples of these issues include, but are not limited to, racism, sexism, queerphobia and gender essentialism. For instance, sexual harassment in the workplace, workplace discrimination on bounds of race or gender, and gender essentialism when it comes to the dignity of transgender folks who often experience terrible cruelty from others when they need to use public restrooms.

To quote Bakunin, “I am truly free only when all human beings…are equally free…”. This means that a worker in the USA who gains freedom and control over their own work isn’t truly free while other workers in, say, China and Africa continue to be brutally repressed and exploited. But it also means that, so long as social hierarchies characterized by intersectional issues are not addressed and dissolved, that the working class as a whole cannot be free. In other words, there cannot be real liberty, equality and solidarity where some workers are discriminated against or otherwise disempowered by social hierarchies.

So, for instance, there is no real solidarity expressed by people who are only interested in their particular craft’s labor fights (because it has no real class characteristic)…for instance, IBEW workers crossing USW’s picket line during the recent refinery strike. But additionally, there is also no real solidarity expressed by people who are only concerned with freedom, for instance, for white, male, heterosexual, cisgender workers, as these are folks who are not subject to marginalization like other workers are, including people of color, women, queer and transgender folks. Because different workers are subject to various social hierarchies (like patriarchy, racism and queerphobia) and they experience a lack of freedom differently than others of the working class.

As a result, it is critical for those of us who believe fighting for another world characterized by human dignity, liberty and equality, to understand that such a thing is necessitated by solidarity. But also that this solidarity must be characterized by both class struggle as well as the recognition of the need to combat and resolve intersectional issues and dissolve all their associated social hierarchies. Because these issues ultimately disempower and marginalize people, prevent the liberation of the working class and throw a wrench in the spokes of libertarian solidarity.

By That Green Union Guy - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, April 11, 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.

Note: The Secret History of Tree Spiking Part 1 and Part 2 were written by Judi Bari in 1993.

Twenty-five years ago, a group of Earth First!ers, including Judi Bari, Darryl Cherney, and Earth First! co-founder Mike Roselle held a press release in Samoa, California (a small town west of Eureka, in Humboldt County, northwestern California) at the Louisiana-Pacific lumber mill and export dock. There, they issued the following statement:

In response to the concerns of loggers and mill-workers, Northern California Earth First! organizers are renouncing the tactic of tree spiking in our area. Through the coalitions we have been building with lumber workers, we have learned that the timber corporations care no more for the lives of their employees than they do for the life of the forest. Their routine maiming and killing of mill workers is coldly calculated into the cost of doing business, just as the destruction of whole ecosystems is considered a reasonable by-product of lumber production.

These companies would think nothing of sending a spiked tree through a mill, and relish the anti-Earth First! publicity that an injury would cause.

Since Earth First! is not a membership organization, it is impossible to speak for all Earth First!ers. But this decision has been widely discussed among Earth First!ers in our area, and the local sentiment is overwhelmingly in favor of renouncing tree-spiking. We hope that our influence as organizers will cause any potential tree-spikers to consider using a different method. We must also point out that we are not speaking for all Earth First! groups in this pronouncement. Earth First! is decentralized, and each group can set its own policies. A similar statement to this one renouncing tree spiking is now being made in Southern Oregon, but not all groups have reached the broad consensus we have on this issue.

But in our area, the loggers and mill workers are our neighbors, and they should be our allies, not our adversaries. Their livelihood is being destroyed along with the forest. The real conflict is not between us and the timber workers, it is between the timber corporation and our entire community.

We want to give credit for this change in local policy to the rank and file timber workers who have risked their jobs and social relations by coming forward and talking to us. This includes Gene Lawhorn of Roseburg Lumber in Oregon, who defied threats to appear publicly with Earth First! organizer Judi Bari. It also includes the Georgia Pacific, Louisiana Pacific, and Pacific Lumber employees who are members of IWW Local #1 in northern California.

Equipment sabotage is a time-honored tradition among industrial workers. It was not invented by Earth First!, and it is certainly not limited to Earth First! even in our area. But the target of monkey wrenching was always intended to be the machinery of destruction, not the workers who operate that machinery for $7/hour. This renunciation of tree spiking is not a retreat, but rather an advance that will allow us to stop fighting the victims and concentrate on the corporations themselves.”

For those not familiar with the tactic of "tree spiking", Earth First cofounder Dave Foreman describes the act in great detail in the book, EcoDefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching. While that text is not official Earth First! literature--in the sense that Earth First!, as a loose ad hoc organization that prefers to think of itself as a movement, has long distanced themselves from the text, and Dave Foreman, due to the latter's borderline racist and classist perspectives, has long been associated with Earth First!, and Earth First! has long been associated (for better or worse) with Tree Spiking, and to this day, there are many Earth First!ers who continue to support the tactic, or--at least--choose not to renounce it.

By Bruce Lesnick - Truthout, Op-Ed, March 27, 2015, reprinted by permission, © truthout 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.

"All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come."
- Victor Hugo

Ever since scientists discovered a runaway greenhouse effect on our nearest planetary neighbor, Venus, we've known that climate Armageddon is a possibility. Even though Venus is closer to the Sun than the Earth, Venus' thick cloud layer permits only one-sixth as much sunlight to reach the planet's surface. And while Mercury is nearly twice as close to the Sun as Venus, the surface on Venus is 10 percent hotter, measuring more than 864 degrees Fahrenheit. Why is Venus so hot? Its atmosphere is 97 percent carbon dioxide.

We know that human activities are adversely affecting Earth's climate. Scientists began to draw our attention to the link between fossil fuels, greenhouse gases and climate in the 1980s. Since then, the evidence for anthropogenic climate change has become overwhelming.

All that's left to debate is what to do about it.

Under the current setup, energy conglomerates that owe their fortunes to fossil fuels have every incentive to dismiss global warming and to cast aspersions on climate change research. The top five oil companies (BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Shell) reported combined profits of $93 billion for 2013. That's more than the discretionary US budget that year for health, human services, Medicare and Medicaid ($80.6 billion). It's more than 10 times the federal budget for environmental protection ($9.2 billion). The more coal, oil and natural gas that get burned, the more the climate is thrown out of whack, and the more these companies are rewarded financially.

If you give a dog a piece of meat every time it bites someone, it could reasonably be argued that you are encouraging this dangerous and irresponsible behavior. In light of environmental necessity, we might beseech the energy companies to behave responsibly, but they are guaranteed to ignore us. Why? Because they earn large sums of money when they do so. A demand for reform of energy policy may be well framed and well founded, but it is wasted wind if the current setup, which so richly rewards all of the wrong behaviors, is allowed to persist.

If we're serious about addressing climate change, nationalization of the energy industry must become a central organizing demand.

By Patrick Bond - CounterPunch, March 31 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.

Looming ahead in eight months’ time is another Conference of Polluters, or COP (technically, the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). The last twenty did zilch to save us from climate catastrophe. Judging by early rough drafts of the Paris COP21 agreement recently leaked, another UN fiasco is inevitable.

The ‘Coalition Climat21’ strategy meeting for Paris was held in Tunis on March 23-24, just before the World Social Forum. I had a momentary sense this could be a breakthrough gathering, if indeed fusions were now ripe to move local versions of ‘Blockadia’ – i.e. hundreds of courageous physical resistances to CO2 and methane emissions sources – towards a genuine global political project. The diverse climate activists present seemed ready for progressive ideology, analysis, strategy, tactics and alliances. Between 150 and 400 people jammed a university auditorium over the course of the two days, mixing French, English and Arabic.

It was far more promising than the last time people gathered for a European COP, in 2009 at Copenhagen, when the naivety of ‘Seal the Deal’ rhetoric from mainstream climate organisations proved debilitating. That was a narrative akin to drawing lemmings towards – and over – a cliff: first up the hill of raised expectations placed on UN negotiators, before crashing down into a despondency void lasting several years. Recall that leaders of the US, Brazil, South Africa, India and China did a backroom deal that sabotaged a binding emissions follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol. In ‘Hopenhagen,’ even phrases like ‘System change not climate change’ were co-opted, as green capital educated by NGO allies agreed that a definition of ‘system’ (e.g. from fossil fuels to nuclear) could be sufficiently malleable to meet their rhetorical needs.

That precedent notwithstanding, the phrase “A climate movement across the movements” used here seemed to justify an urgent unity of diverse climate activists, along with heightened attempts to draw in those who should be using climate in their own specific sectoral work. The two beautiful words ‘Climate Justice’ are on many lips but I suspect the cause of unity may either erase them from the final phraseology or water them down to nebulousness.