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UFW Tries to Silence Boycott Driscoll’s Activists at Cesar Chavez March

Submitted by x344543 on Sat, 04/16/2016 - 18:43

By Bradley Allen - Indybay, April 5, 2016

On Sunday, April 3, Michael Garcia and fellow Watsonville Brown Berets traveled a short distance to Salinas, California to attend the annual Cesar Chavez March and Rally presented by United Farm Workers (UFW). The Watsonville Brown Berets were joined by members of Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ), an independent farmworker union in Burlington, Washington fighting for a union contract, and initiators of the boycott against Driscoll's.

The Watsonville Brown Berets (WBB) and FUJ activists spoke with people assembled at Cesar Chavez Community Park and handed out flyers about the growing movement to boycott Driscoll's, the world's largest berry distributor. FUJ, along with tens of thousands of farmworkers in San Quintín, México, are fighting to end wage theft and poverty wages, inhumane production standards, and retaliation from protected union activity.

Although advocating for farmworkers' rights seems like it would be warmly welcomed by UFW, that was unfortunately not the experience for WBB and FUJ members. Garcia, born and raised in Watsonville, noticed that his friend was working the stage and asked if his group could have some time later to speak about the Driscoll's boycott. Garcia's friend, who was both the owner of the stage and a mariachi musician performing at the event, agreed to provide Garcia time. The stage owner, however, was then reportedly approached by UFW representatives and specifically told that UFW does not want WBB or FUJ speaking from the stage.

Prior to parading through the streets of Salinas, Garcia enthusiastically approached UFW Regional Director Lauro Barajas and asked if it was OK if they carried their “Boycott Driscoll’s” banner towards the front of the march. Garcia was denied and then told that UFW did not want him to carry the banner at all during the march.

Tags: 
United Farm Workers (UFW)
trade unions
green unionism
agricultural workers and peasants

Doro-Chiba Declaration of Anti-Nuclear Power Plant Fukushima Action On March 11th, 2016

Submitted by x344543 on Sat, 04/16/2016 - 18:23

By H Yamamoto - Doro-Chiba, April 16, 2016

The Abe administration is rushing to start war and restart the nuclear power plants. Down with the Abe administration, gathering the Fukushima people’s widespread anger together with the labor unions waging strikes at the forefront of the fight!

The Abe government has decided to lift the evacuation orders in all municipalities in Fukushima that are still exposed to radiation doses of up to 20 mSv/year. This means the evacuees in and outside Fukushima Prefecture are forced to go back into these heavily contaminated areas by March 2017 except for “the difficult-to-return-to areas.”

In line with this, the “compensation for mental suffering” by Tokyo Electric Company (TEPCO) for more than 100,000 evacuees and the government-subsidized apartments for “voluntary evacuees” will be cut off with the intention of forcing these evacuees to return home. This is essentially economic coercion.

The big construction companies make easy money from the wasteful and ineffective “cleanup” operation of the contaminated areas. Contaminated waste is packed into thousands of black bags that have nowhere to go. Radioactive contaminated water increases 500 tons per day as it is used to cool the hundreds of tons of molten fuel, and it will finally be poured into the sea. Even though 167 children in Fukushima have developed thyroid cancer, both the central and prefectural governments repeatedly say that this “has nothing to do with the effects of radiation.” No one can believe such a blatant lie.

The government and TEPCO have never assumed responsibility for the accident, and have been driving wedges against the angry people of Fukushima. Moreover, the government is moving to promote nuclear power plants again as if nothing had happened. We fiercely condemn this shameless covering up of the apparent facts, and are determined to fight resolutely against the restarting of nuclear power plants and export of nuclear power plants.

March 11th marked a starting point for each of us. “Something is wrong with this society”—everyone shared this same feeling and stood up to challenge the political and social situation. It has been five years since that day. Now an aggressive war on the Korean Peninsula is imminent. Furthermore, World War III is actually on the near horizon. There are numerous people who earnestly seek a fundamental change of the society. In South Korea, workers are waging general strikes repeatedly to protest against the drive to war and rampant onslaught of temporary labor.

Let us join together to fight against neoliberalism through international solidarity of the working class! Wage strikes to stop war! Masses of workers have fallen into non-regular jobs and are suffering from extreme poverty. The working class has the power to lead the struggle to change this society.

Tags: 
National Railway Chiba Motive Power Union (Doro-Chiba)
Japan
Fukushima
nuclear power
nuclear power workers
green unionism
green syndicalism

Capital Blight: The Two Bums

Submitted by x344543 on Wed, 04/13/2016 - 18:53

By x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, April 15, 2016

It may seem like King Coal has suffered a couple of bad weeks in a row.  Consider the following:

Six years and a day after Massey Energy Co.’s Upper Big Branch Mine exploded, killing 29 men, U.S. District Judge Irene Berger issued former Massey CEO, Don Blankenship, the maximum allowable sentence for for willfully conspiring to violate mine safety standards: one year in prison, one year of supervised release and a $250,000 fine.

However, when broken down, this only roughly figures out to $8621 and 12½ days per dead miner. Perhaps that's why Tommy Davis, who lost his brother, son, and nephew in the explosion (while he was working in another section of the mine that day) shouted at Blankenship as he left the courthouse,

"You don’t have a heart; you don’t miss your kids like we miss ours...I hold a picture, I hold a tombstone; you hold nothing."

He further elaborated, in response to Blankenship's (no doubt well scripted) "apology" spoken in response to the sentencing

"It didn’t mean nothing, and it still won’t mean nothing...He never come to me in six years, never come to me, never come to my mom, my dad who’re gone now. They grieved themselves to death. He never come to apologize to us. He never said nothing."

This also likely explains why Annette Workman, who lost her husband, Ricky, in the incident angrily shouted, “Did you ever go down in that mine?” at the soon-to-be imprisoned (though not for long) erstwhile CEO.

Clearly this sorry affair reveals just how unfair the capitalist system really is. Any working class individual who'd caused the equivalent amount of death and mayhem would have been given the death sentence, but as long as such activity is done in the persuit of profit, it falls under the presumed innocence of capitalism and is thusly rarely charged more than a slap on the hand. One should not blame Judge Berger for not meting out harsher judgement. By law, she can only slap so hard. 

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Tags: 
capital blight
x344543
Don Blankenship
coal
mine workers
health and safety
carbon bubble
climate change
climate justice
just transition
green unionism

Austerity vs. the Planet: The Future of Labor Environmentalism

Submitted by x344543 on Mon, 04/11/2016 - 18:37

By Trish Kahle - Dissent, Spring 2016

Last December members of the International Trade Union Confederation joined other civil society activists in a mass sit-in at the COP21 talks in Paris. Unionists and their allies, some 400 strong, filled the social space adjacent to the negotiating rooms for several hours, in defiance of a French ban on protests that remained in effect in the wake of the November 13 terrorist attacks. The ITUC delegation demanded the negotiators go back to the table and make a serious effort to incorporate labor’s demands for a just transition—which, at its heart, is concerned with making sure workers in environmentally unsustainable industries are retrained and put to work building a new, sustainable economy.

The action, even as it generated energy and media buzz, failed to convince the negotiators. The “just transition” clause of the Paris agreement remained stuck in the preamble (not in the body of the agreement itself, as the ITUC members had demanded), more of a hat tip than grounds for international action. But at least it got a mention—unlike the fossil fuels largely responsible for the climate crisis in the first place. Nowhere in the Paris agreement or its preamble do the words fossil fuel, coal, oil, gas, or pollution appear.

As the talks wrapped up and world leaders hailed a “historic turning point” in the world’s relationship to ongoing climate disruption, environmental activist Chris Williams pointed out that “twenty-one years of treaties and negotiations have all been stepping around the main problem, which is the production of fossil fuels.” For all the pomp and circumstance, this agreement was no different. Meanwhile, the consequences of two decades of inaction become clearer each day. A few weeks after the Paris agreement was signed, scientists confirmed that 2015 was the warmest year on record, with global temperatures approaching 1°C above the twentieth-century average. And those already feeling the worst effects of this climate disruption, predominantly poor people of color, continued to have the least say in how to combat it.

Just as they have been dismissed in international climate negotiations, workers have largely been excluded from the fragile global recovery since 2008. Some 197 million people around the world are jobless, with young people making up over a third of this number. Unemployment in southern and eastern Europe remains particularly high, still hovering at 24.6 percent in austerity-ravaged Greece, as well as in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East.

The picture in the OECD economies is not much prettier. In the United States, economic recovery has meant the swapping out of middle-wage jobs, earning between $14 and $21 an hour, for part-time, on-call, low-wage employment with few benefits. Energy-sector jobs, often hailed as the lifeblood of the American economic recovery, have taken a dive as oil prices plunge below $30 a barrel. In 2015 the industry slashed 104,514 jobs, compared to 4,137 the year before. Fracking boom state North Dakota went from ranking first in U.S. job growth to dead last.

All this takes place in the context of a weakened labor movement that has failed to maintain workers’ expected standard of living in the face of ongoing restructuring in the world economy and, particularly in the United States, political backsliding. The degradation of work and the destruction of the environment have proceeded hand in hand. Good jobs keep going away, but fossil fuels haven’t gone anywhere. And yet the industry-propagated myth of “jobs versus the environment” persists. From the moment Congress debated anti-pollution legislation in the early 1970s, fossil fuel industry leaders promised such regulation would destroy the heavily unionized employment in the industry. In 1971 the Chamber of Commerce warned that the passage of the Clean Air Act could lead to the collapse of “entire industries,” while auto industry lobbyists prophesied “business catastrophe.” Four decades later, the talking points remain the same: the Heritage Foundation claims that Obama’s Clean Power Plan will cost 1 million U.S. jobs, while West Virginia Senator Shelley Moore Capito says that new coal rules threaten to “regulate out of existence” her state’s key industry.

The problem with this story is that environmental regulation never got the chance to destroy whole sectors of “good jobs,” as opponents of pollution regulation promised it would; the fossil fuel companies themselves, with the winds of free-market fundamentalism at their backs, destroyed them instead. A decade after the passage of the Clean Air Act, the United States was producing more cars and fossil fuels than ever, and employing a record number of workers to do so. Another decade later, as the Cold War was ending, U.S. fossil fuel production was still going strong, but the jobs were evaporating.

It wasn’t just fossil fuels, of course. The decline in manufacturing jobs, union density, and real wages wrought by neoliberal restructuring hollowed out the prospects of the entire American working class. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the resulting misery has only been exacerbated by government austerity and anti-union measures, as manufactured scarcity is marshaled to frighten workers into concessions.

Tags: 
Trish Kahle
green unionism
just transition
Miners for Democracy
Jock Yablonski
United Steelworkers of America (USW)
refineries
National Nurses United
Communities for a Better Environment (CBE)
Appalachia

EcoUnionist News #99

Submitted by x344543 on Mon, 04/11/2016 - 18:01

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, April 12, 2016

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

Lead Stories:

Ongoing Mobilizations:

The Thin Green Line:

Just Transition:

Bread and Roses:

Tags: 
Eco Unionist News
green unionism
just transition
agricultural workers and peasants
Berta Cáceres
Thin Green Line
health and safety
whistleblowers
greenwashing
disaster capitalism
capital blight
Flint
labor and environment
privatization

Carbon Bubble News #99

Submitted by x344543 on Mon, 04/11/2016 - 16:30

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, April 12, 2016

A supplement to Eco Unionist News:

Lead Stories:

Other Carbon Bubble News:

For more green news, please visit our news feeds section on ecology.iww.org; Twitter #IWWEUC; Hashtags: #greenunionism #greensyndicalism #IWW. Please send suggested news items to include in this series to euc [at] iww.org.

Tags: 
carbon bubble
Eco Unionist News
oil workers
mine workers
coal
green unionism

Railroad Workers United calls for Just Transition

Submitted by x344543 on Mon, 04/04/2016 - 16:12

Press Release - Railroad Workers United, April 1, 2016

Whereas, the continued extraction and combustion of fossil fuels such as coal and oil has been scientifically proven to represent a threat to the environment and the future of the planet; and

Whereas, there is a mass movement domestically and globally to radically reduce the continued use of such fuels to power economic development; and

Whereas, other alternative energy sources – wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric–are developing rapidly and appear to be the wave of the future; and

Whereas, railroad corporations have traditionally hauled large amounts of fossil fuel–especially coal–but the future of this traffic appears uncertain or possibly even non-existent within a few decades; and

Whereas, the burden of shifting from an economy based on fossil fuels to one based upon renewal energy should not be unfairly born by workers, including railroad workers; and

Whereas, to ensure that such a transition to alternative energy does not create an economy of low paid jobs for working people-including railroad workers-whose jobs could conceivably be threatened by such a transition;

Therefore, Be it Resolved that RWU supports a “Just Transition” to an economy based upon renewal and clean energy; and

Be it further Resolved that RWU demand workers who are displaced from environmentally destructive industries be provided living wage income and benefits through public sector jobs or a universal basic income; and

Be it Further Resolved that RWU demand that workers who are displaced from environmentally destructive industries be provided with commensurate rates of pay and benefits while retraining; and

Be it Further Resolved that RWU demands that fossil fuel extraction dependent regions such as Appalachia be locations where investments of alternative energy are made to offset the economic dislocations that workers and communities would face from such a transition; and

Be it Finally Resolved that RWU call upon the rail industry and the rail unions to work together to move away from unsustainable practices - specifically the hauling of environmentally destructive commodities--and work towards expanding the railroads’ business prospects in areas such as mail, passengers, trailers and containers, renewal energy components, etc.

Tags: 
Railroad Workers United (RWU)
green unionism
just transition
coal
crude-by-rail

Amid Price Plunge, North American Oil and Gas Workers Seek Transition to Renewable Sector

Submitted by x344543 on Sun, 04/03/2016 - 20:42

By Candice Bernd - Truthout, April 3, 2016, ©Truthout; reprinted with permission.

Lliam Hildebrand says he had a moment of clarity during an apprenticeship at a steel-fabricating shop in Victoria, Canada. He was learning the metal-working skills he would need to become a boilermaker, to eventually move on to work on the many steel vessels -- including furnaces, pipelines, "cokers" and "exchangers" -- that make up the oil industry's vast infrastructure in Alberta, Canada's oil sands fields.

During that apprenticeship, Hildebrand would come into the fabricating shop and see a pressure vessel on one side of the shop being made for the oil sands, and at the same time, on the other side of the shop, his own project -- a wind farm weather station. Hildebrand says he walked into the shop one morning, and the contrast between the two ventures struck him sharply. That was the moment when he realized, "We are the trade -- the building trade -- that's really going to help address [climate change]."

From then on he has felt as though he's been living two lives. Coming out of his apprenticeship, he started looking for jobs in the renewable sector, but was unable to find work. Six years ago, he reluctantly decided to apply his skills where there were plenty of jobs: the Canadian oil sands fields.

But after years of working in an industry that one top climate scientist has called "the biggest carbon bomb on the planet," Hildebrand came to realize that he was not the only oil worker in Alberta who felt "guilty about developing the infrastructure that is creating climate change."

Tags: 
green unionism
just transition
Iron and Earth
tar sands
carbon bubble
renewable energy
United Steelworkers of America (USW)
renewable energy workers

EcoUnionist News #98

Submitted by x344543 on Sun, 04/03/2016 - 20:18

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, April 4, 2016

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

Lead Stories:

Ongoing Mobilizations:

The Thin Green Line:

Just Transition:

Bread and Roses:

An Injury to One is an Injury to All:

Tags: 
Eco Unionist News
green unionism
just transition
agricultural workers and peasants
Berta Cáceres
health and safety
privatization
disaster capitalism
capital blight
greenwashing
whistleblowers
Thin Green Line
labor and environment

Carbon Bubble News #98

Submitted by x344543 on Sun, 04/03/2016 - 20:17

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, April 4, 2016

A supplement to Eco Unionist News:

Lead Stories:

Other Carbon Bubble News:

For more green news, please visit our news feeds section on ecology.iww.org; Twitter #IWWEUC; Hashtags: #greenunionism #greensyndicalism #IWW. Please send suggested news items to include in this series to euc [at] iww.org.

Tags: 
carbon bubble
Eco Unionist News
oil workers
railroad workers
mine workers
green unionism

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