Bill Bumpus an injury to one is an injury to all

Washington, DC- Immigrant workers organizing for justice at a Brooklyn-based producer and distributor of kosher food products have taken a big step forward in their campaign and achieved a legal victory for workers around the country. Using discriminatory allegations about workers' immigration status, Flaum Appetizing has been resisting compliance with a 2009 trial decision that found the company illegally fired employees who came together seeking dignified working conditions. The National Labor Relations Board holding precludes Flaum from continuing to raise baseless immigration status defenses against at least eleven of the workers, and potentially as many as fifteen. By prohibiting employers from engaging in discriminatory 'fishing expeditions' against immigrants or perceived immigrants, the Board clarified important procedural safeguards in cases governed by the landmark anti-immigrant Supreme Court case, Hoffman Plastic.

"Companies that discriminate and undermine labor rights drive down economic standards for every working person, native-born and immigrant alike," said Daniel Gross, the director of non-profit organization Brandworkers, which, along with the Industrial Workers of the World labor union is campaigning for justice at Flaum as part of the Focus on the Food Chain campaign. "Worker organizing helps create the type of quality jobs that support a dynamic economy and healthy communities. The Labor Board's decision is an important step toward ensuring that Flaum and companies like it will not escape accountability through unfounded and discriminatory inquiries into immigration status."

New York grocery stores and restaurants rely on an industrial corridor of food processing factories and distribution warehouses like Flaum that hold down wages and safety standards by exploiting recent immigrant workers. Wage theft, discrimination, and abuse is common in the sector and efforts for change are almost always met with determined and unlawful retaliation. Overcoming these challenges, the Flaum workers are waging a powerful campaign to bring the company into compliance with fundamental workplace protections. The workers have shared their story and persuaded over 120 of NYC's most prominent supermarket locations to discontinue selling Flaum products, including it's Sonny & Joe's hummus, until the company comports with the rule of law. The global kosher cheese giant Tnuva refused to renew its distribution contract with Flaum after spirited worker campaigning and support from Jewish organizations including Uri L'Tzedek, the Orthodox social  justice organization.

"We're glad Flaum didn't get away with avoiding its responsibilities under the law," said Maria Corona, one of the victorious workers and a Focus on the Food Chain member. "There's power in coming together with your co-workers and we are well on our way to winning the justice we have been seeking."

The NLRB's Office of the General Counsel is prosecuting the case against Flaum. The Flaum workers are represented by Eisner & Mirer, a New York labor & employment law firm.

Focus on the Food Chain promotes sustainable jobs and a thriving local food industry in the City of New York. Through organizing, grassroots advocacy, and legal action, the campaign challenges and overcomes unlawful conditions in food processing and distribution warehouses. The Focus campaign is a collaboration of non-profit organization Brandworkers and the NYC Industrial Workers of the World labor union.

read more

By Andy Piascik

This story will appear in the March 2012 issue of the Industrial Worker.

One hundred years ago, in the dead of a Massachusetts winter, the great 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike—commonly referred to as the “Bread and Roses” strike—began. Accounts differ as to whether a woman striker actually held a sign that read “We Want Bread and We Want Roses, Too.” No matter. It’s a wonderful phrase, as appropriate for the Lawrence strikers as for any group at any time: the notion that, in addition to the necessities for survival, people should have “a sharing of life’s glories,” as James Oppenheim put it in his poem “Bread and Roses.”

Though 100 years have passed, the Lawrence strike resonates as one of the most important in the history of the United States. Like many labor conflicts of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the strike was marked by obscene disparities in wealth and power, open collusion between the state and business owners, large scale violence against unarmed strikers, and great ingenuity and solidarity on the part of workers. In important ways, though, the strike was also unique. It was the first large-scale industrial strike, the overwhelming majority of the strikers were immigrants, most were women and children, and the strike was guided in large part by the revolutionary strategy and vision of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

Beyond its historical significance, elements of this massive textile strike may be instructive to building a radical working class movement today. It is noteworthy that the Occupy movement shares many philosophical and strategic characteristics with the Lawrence strike—direct action, the prominent role of women, the centrality of class, participatory decision-making, egalitarianism, an authentic belief in the Wobbly principle that We Are All Leaders—to name just a few. During the two months of the strike, the best parts of the revolutionary movement the IWW aspired to build were expressed. The Occupy movement carries that tradition forward, and as the attempt at a general strike in Oakland and solidarity events such as in New York for striking Teamsters indicate, many in Occupy understand that the working class is uniquely positioned to challenge corporate power. While we deepen our understanding of what that means and work to make it happen, there is much of value we can learn from what happened in Lawrence a century ago.

read more

Cleaners at the Guildhall have been holding a sit in and stopping work since the 22nd of December because of mistreatment and intimidation. Early this morning [4th of January] management called the police, who came and intimidated and threatened the cleaners. The cleaners protested that they were holding a completely peaceful sit-in. They finally left due to police threats to drag them out physically.

The cleaners started organising in the summer, striking against unpaid wages. Since then they have been fighting for union recognition, better pay and an end to bad working conditions. After a new company, Sodexo, took over the cleaning contract, their union rep was suspended and they have been subject to all kinds of intimidation and abuse. The workers say there is one supervisor in particular who is abusive to them and there are currently various complaints by different cleaners against him, but Sodexho are refusing to do anything about his behaviour. Sodexho are trying to drive out the organised cleaners by continually changing their work areas, giving them the worst jobs, increasing their workload and, now, using intimidation and harassment.

read more

By FW Liberte Locke - originally posted at libcom.com - December 29, 2011.

Union organizer with the IWW Starbucks Workers Union dispels the sentiment that 'being the better person' must entail living as a doormat.

I’m so sick of being told to be the bigger person. I get all the scrutiny. I should forgive the unforgivable. I should move on with my life, let it go, drop it, stop being confrontational, stop rocking the boat, stop holding grudges, and be the bigger person. When did “being the bigger person” mean just accepting being treated like shit?

I’m told not to create an “us against them” feeling between worker and employer. I did not create that. Employers created it and long before I was even born. It has always and will always be us, working ourselves to near death, against them, not lifting a finger to help but reaping all the spoils.

I fight this system of oppression because of all the love I have in me. It is because I’m capable of great love that I am able to meet a coworker and know that I will fight for them regardless of who they are, the size of their families, where they are from, how they do their job, what languages they speak, and traditions they keep. Even if they can't fight for me, I will fight for them. It is because I think we’re all truly worth something that I fight. Not everyone thinks like me. In fact, I think most people in American society are taught to never trust anyone. Everyone wants something from you, every boyfriend will cheat, every friend betray you, every parent leave you, every coworker steal credit for your work, every person asking directions will eventually ask for change, too. I don’t see it that way. Every person that I meet I make a concerted effort to trust their words, listen to their stories, and give them the benefit of the doubt. Despite popular belief, I do this with bosses, too, to some extent.

read more

Originally posted on libcom.com - November 11, 2011

Jessica Mitford wrote:
Oakland was still at the frontier, where the issues were sharper,
the corruption cruder, the enemy more easily identifiable…
There was nothing abstract about the class struggle in Oakland.

—Jessica Mitford in
A Fine Old Conflict (1977)

Oakland, California has historically suffered by being in the shadow of the golden allure of San Francisco across the Bay. From the Gold Rush to the Summer of Love to the Castro District as a Gay Mecca to the Dot.com Boom, San Francisco has been known around the world as a magnet for get-rich-quick dreamers, bohemians and idealists. Berkeley, bordering Oakland on the north, was the birthplace of radical student agitation throughout the 1960s, beginning with the Free Speech Movement on the University of California campus in 1964. Oakland has always been a gritty industrial town, whose working class residents have ranged from reactionary whites in the Ku Klux Klan (in the 1920s) and Hells Angels (after World War II) to blacks at the cutting edge of civil rights struggles, and today is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the U.S. Oakland was thrust onto the world stage in 1966 with the Black Panther Party and its militant self-defense of the African American community.

The radical history of the Bay Area is like a giant tapestry and its threads run through the whole region. Telegraph Avenue is 4.4 miles long; it merges into Broadway at Latham Square on the Oakland end, the exact location of the strike of women retail clerks at two department stores on either side that sparked the 1946 General Strike. That strike led to the Taft-Hartley Act (the 1947 federal law banning strike and solidarity tactics that make general strikes possible) six months later and was the beginning of Cold War politics that smothered class struggle for a generation. On the Berkeley side, Telegraph ends at Bancroft Way right at Sproul Plaza on the U.C. Berkeley campus. Exactly 18 years later, on the exact day that the Oakland General Strike was officially declared, December 3rd, the Cold War began to thaw in a mass arrest of over 800 (the largest mass arrest up to that time in California) at a Free Speech Movement sit-in at Sproul Hall. Several of those student protestors had been radicalized by participating in Civil Rights organizing in the Deep South for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); many had taught at Freedom Schools. For the rest of the sixties, U.C. Berkeley was shut down several times due to mass student strikes and protests, including a month-long occupation of People’s Park by the National Guard, sending waves outwards as the youth revolt spread throughout the world.

Even within Oakland, the tapestry has threads that are deeply rooted in previous periods of heightened class struggle, having cross-fertilized with other radical movements across the country, as well as the world. Being that San Francisco is at the tip of a narrow peninsula, surrounded on three sides by water, Oakland became the mainland terminus of the transcontinental railroad when it was completed in 1869. Trains ran along 7th Street through West Oakland to the Mole, a railroad wharf complex extending into the Bay where ferries completed the journey west to San Francisco. During the nationwide Pullman Railroad Strike of 1894, workers occupied the tracks around the Mole, disabled trains, and the whole community prepared to defend the strike. In subsequent years, landfill pushed further into the Bay and the site of the Mole is at the heart of the current Port of Oakland, the destination of our mass march and shutdown during the attempted General Strike on November 2nd.

The Black Panthers had a significant base in West Oakland, where massive railroad yards had been built at the western terminus of the transcontinental line. A thread, although tenuous, connected them with the legacy of African American railroad porters who settled there a generation before. The area became the West Coast organizing center for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a socialist union founded in 1925. The Brotherhood came out of the radical ferment of that era; in October 1919 Brotherhood founder A. Philip Randolph wrote in The Messenger, “The Negroes and the Industrial Workers of the World have interests not only in common, but interests that are identical.” The IWW, whose member are called “Wobblies,” is an interracial revolutionary union founded in 1905 in Chicago that adopted a class struggle approach to organizing through direct action and the strike weapon, striving towards class consciousness and the general strike, with the ultimate goal being the creation of a classless society.

The Wobbly spirit – best embodied in the opening lines of the IWW preamble: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common” – was pervasive in the Bay Area, especially in the class unity, solidarity actions, sympathy strikes that exploded into many mass strikes and in turn led to at least two full-blow general strikes.

read more

Headlines:

• Wobbly Cleaners Fight Back Against Sodexo
• Call For International Day Of Action Against Eurest
• London IWW Cleaners Occupy Guildhall

Features:

• Whose Ports? Our Ports!
• Staughton Lynd Reviews "Rebel Voices"
• Interview With Wobbly Fiction Writer Lewis Shiner

Download a free PDF of this issue.

read more

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";}

By John Reimann - Fellow Worker Reimann has been involved with Occupy Oakland, along with several other members of the Bay Area IWW since its inception. The opinions expressed here are the author's alone, though they generally reflect the views of many others who are active in OO and are rank and file union members.

The port shut down of Dec. 12 showed that there is a lot of support for and strength in the Occupy Oakland movement. Sometimes, though, the greatest problems for a movement can arise exactly out of the successes, when we don’t think enough about what problems there are. 

Worker Participation Necessary 

The port shut down was accomplished with the active involvement of almost none of the workers there, especially the longshore workers. This can become a critical weakness if actions continue against employers and those actions don’t come from the workers themselves. In fact, there were several reports that a layer of the longshore workers were somewhat hostile to the Occupy pickets, who were causing them to lose a day’s pay. 

This cannot continue. We cannot continue to act in the place of workers; we must find a way to draw in a wider layer of working class Oakland. If we don’t, we will alienate large sectors of the working class. 

In order to do this, we should make a drive into the work places. Where there are unions and where officials of those unions claim to support Occupy Oakland, we should ask them to organize work place meetings for us to meet with the workers. If they don’t do this, then their “support” doesn’t really count for very much, but in any case, we can find ways to get into those work places. The purpose of such meetings would be to discuss with those workers the issues they are confronting and how Occupy Oakland can help them. This includes the public sector workers who are facing layoffs and cuts. In many cases the union leadership has accepted these cuts, but we in Occupy Oakland should not. 

read more

By "The Union Thug" - originally posted at nebraskaworker.wordpress.com. The views expressed here are the author's alone and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the IWW.

On November 2, 2011 Occupy Oakland successfully shut down the ports in Oakland along with the approval and aid of the union, ILWU Local 10, which has a contract with the port’s legal owners.  This event was a tremendous leap in consciousness and something the U.S. working class has not done nor attempted in decades.  Shortly after, Occupy Oakland passed another resolution for a West Coast port shutdown.  Occupy movements in Portland, Long Beach, Seattle, Vancouver, Anchorage, Honolulu and Tokyo responded.  On December 12, 2011 the Occupy movements succeeded in shutting down the ports completely or partially in most of those cities.  However, this time around Occupy did not have the full support of the unions involved.

This action has sparked debate between Occupy and the traditional labor movement encompassed in the AFL-CIO.  The unions’ argument is that Occupy did not have the right to shut down the workplaces (ports) where they did not work and that this needed to be decided democratically within the bureaucracy of the ILWU.

We don’t buy this argument.  The Occupy movement is a reaction to the ruling class monopolizing the distribution of profits that are produced socially and collectively by the world’s working class.  They use these profits to buy the government and re-instill this class monopoly; therefore, we must find strategic ways to disrupt the creation and movement of these profits as a class. We propose that the Occupy movement adopt a strategy of class struggle known as solidarity unionism and apply it to strategic points in the economic system that we are all protesting against.

In this article we are going to define what solidarity unionism is, as practiced by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW); make the argument that the entire working class has a moral right to every workplace, especially those of strategic importance in the world economy; discuss the 1934 Toledo Electric Auto-Lite strike as a historical example of solidarity unionism; and finally how this type of strategy could further the goals of the Occupy movement.

read more

By Juan Conatz - originally posted at recompositionblog.wordpress.com

Often when talking to people about their frustrations at work and the prospects for organizing, a common response is one of negativity and desperation.

“I could never get anything goin’ where I work!”
“Other people don’t care.”
“It would be too hard.”

These types of sentiments cut across industries and sectors. Even folks in officially unionized workplaces that have unaddressed grievances feel this way many times.

But while your preconceived ideas of what workplace organizing entails may clash with the obstacles you think of, other things going on in your workplace perfectly mesh with what we commonly call ‘job actions’. Slowdowns, work to rule and pace setting are all tactics that workers have used in response to management doing ans saying things we don’t like. Most commonly, nowadays, it seems like our coworkers do these things as individuals, but when it expands beyond that…well, there’s an opportunity to get somewhere.

Background

In early 2010, I was working at a warehouse as a forklift driver in Iowa City. Most of my day was spent on the shipping side of the building, pulling pallets off the production lines and staging them in a different area so they could eventually be loaded onto trucks. I also spent a fair amount of time loading these trucks, as well.

For the most part, the majority of my interaction with co-workers was limited to the other shipping forklift driver, the shipping manager and 2-3 temps who used a pallet jack to drop off pallets for me to stage.

The shipping manager, Phil, was basically a ‘lead’, with little power himself. Any power he had was mostly snitching power in that he directly answered to the Warehouse Supervisor. Phil was in his mid 40s and a casualty of the bad economy, being a recently laid of worker at a factoiry that made parts for General Motors.

read more

Since the February uprising in Wisconsin, which began with a three-week occupation of the Capitol in Madison, the building has been home to a variety of demonstrations and political actions.  What perhaps stands out the most is the Solidarity Sing-along, which draws upwards of 100 participants and has been going on for more than 40 weeks.  The singers gather in the rotunda each weekday at noon to sing songs that include both traditional labor and protest songs and some new songs penned in the months since Governor Scott Walker first introduced his plans to bust the public employee unions and impose devastating austerity measures on the working class of Wisconsin.

In recent months police have begun arresting and ticketing people for trivial "violations", such as wearing hats or sunglasses in the Senate and Assembly galleries, holding signs, or exercising their right (protected by the Wisconsin constitution) to record legislative sessions.  These restrictions have apparently been a lead-up to the real crackdown.  Just last week, the Walker administration announced a new policy that will severely curtail the free speech rights exercised by the Solidarity Sing-along and other groups who use the Capitol building. 

The new rules require groups of four or more people to apply for a permit from the DOA at least 72 hours in advance “for all activity and displays in state buildings”.  Groups can be charged $50 per hour per police officer if law enforcement is determined to be necessary.  Payment for law enforcement could be required in advance as part of the permit process and protesters could face additional charges for liability insurance.  The rules are vague and arbitrary, and so far the administration has refused to clarify them or answer questions from citizens about how they will be enforced, leaving room for abuse by police and DOA officials.

These rules are obviously aimed at making free speech inconvenient and restrictively expensive for most people.  Free speech is a hard-won right for Americans.  Between 1907 and 1916, free speech demonstrations lead by the IWW swept the western United States.  In Spokane, the Industrial Worker published a call to all workers to defend their rights: "Wanted -- Men to Fill the Jails”.  And fill the jails they did!  As one Wobbly got dragged from the soapbox and arrested, another would take his place and the call would go out for more “footloose rebels” from all over the country to hop on a train and come join the fight.  The struggle can be seen as a victory as it eventually led to the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union.  The Wisconsin chapter of the ACLU is currently working to help defend the right of Wisconsin citizens to speak freely in the Capitol.

read more

By Phinneas Gage - originally posted at recompositionblog.wordpress.com

Christine braced herself, took a deep breath and then jumped up on to a mail tub and began to shout “help! help! I am being robbed.” A sea of faces stared at her blankly. She got the attention her fellow Letter Carriers, but everyone was looking at her like she was crazy. That was fine, she was acting crazy. “Canada Post is robbing every single one of us, they are robbing people collecting pensions, they are robbing workers who aren’t even working here yet. We need to stand together, Winnipeg walked out and we need to show them that we have their back and will stand with them”.

Some began to nod knowingly; she then explained that workers earlier in the week had walked out in an unlawful strike in Winnipeg over technological change that was causing twelve hour days and massive job loss. She explained that Winnipeg was a testing ground for the new work methods and that the workers in Winnipeg were not just fighting for themselves they were fighting for everyone at Canada Post Corporation. Christine explained the struggle, the stakes, and that our fellow workers in Winnipeg were counting on a show of solidarity from across the country. She may have been a bit dramatic, but she was also being honest, sometimes you have to shout to be heard.

The meeting Christine called was part of a wave of work floor meetings across the city. The wave started at another workplace, Depot Nine. At some of these meetings stewards read statements published by “The Workers Struggle with the Modern Post” a grassroots Postal Workers blog based out of Winnipeg. Some of the meetings were open assemblies open to all employees, where workers could plan their next steps and air grievances. These meetings were part of a very flexible plan, part strategy and part flying by the seat of our pants. The workers led the struggle and often the official union structures were left behind in the dust as workers on the floor took initiative. This wasn’t centrally planned but it didn’t just happen spontaneously. It wasn’t outside and against the union nor was it a struggle within it against some abstract bureaucracy- we were trying something new on our own terms.

read more

Liberté Locke, a Starbucks Workers Union organizer, writes about how violence at work and in our personal lives are similar, how domestic abusers and bosses use the same techniques of control and that we need to fight both.

By Liberté Locke

I was raped by a boyfriend on August 18th, 2006. The very next day I held back tears while I lied to a stranger over the phone about why I was unavailable to go in that day for a second interview for a job that I desperately needed. When I hung up the phone I saw a new text message. It was from him. “It’s not over. It will never be over between us…”

The next day I went in for the second interview. It was inside of the Sears Tower Starbucks in Chicago. I took the train to the interview constantly looking around me and shaking. I needed work. I had just been fired from Target two weeks prior and had no prospects. I knew I would have to go through a metal detector in order to enter the building so despite every instinct in my body I did not bring a knife with me.

“What would you do if you caught a coworker stealing?”

My mind is racing. I’m thinking that I risked my safety by leaving my house for a stupid job that pays $7.75/hr. Aren’t I worth more than that? Aren’t we all worth so much more?

“I’d tell management right away, of course. I’ve never understood why someone would steal from work…”

I tell them what they want me to.

I started working at Starbucks on August 22, 2006. That was a little over five years ago. Every year we have annual reviews where I generally get to argue with someone younger than me who makes significantly more than do about why my hard work, aching back, cracking hands, sore wrists, the bags under my eyes, the burns, the bruises on my arms, the cuts on my knees, the constant degrading treatment by the customers, the “baby, honey, sugar, bitch”, the “hey, you, slut…I said NO whip cream!”s, the staring, the following after work…I get to argue why all that means I’m worth a 33cent raise rather than 22cents, Degrading for any worker. Degrading especially for a woman worker. Only for me, I get to do this every year just four days after the anniversary of when someone I was in love with raped me. My annual review is truly the only reason I’m reminded of the anniversary of the assault.

read more

This is a report written by two IWW organizers from out of state on the activities of the union during the height of the protests in Madison and Wisconsin. The version is slightly modified from a text sent to the 2011 Delegate Convention and reflects the opinion of the authors.

By Juan Conatz and Brendan Sawyers

Shortly before Valentine’s day of 2011, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker announced a budget bill which, along with a package of severe neoliberal cuts to social services, took the unprecedented measure of effectively outlawing unions for state or municipal employees. In order to ‘balance the budget’, the bill made it illegal for unions and public entities to negotiate on any conditions (work safety, hours of work, pensions, healthcare) other than wages, and outlawed any contracts which would give wage increases above the official rate of inflation, unless a referendum was held to approve those raises.

Furthermore unions would no longer be able to rely on the ‘dues check-off’, in which the employer collects the dues on behalf of the union. Finally, unions would be required to undergo a ‘re-certification’ election every year in order to be considered legitimate bargaining agents. On top of this were roughly 20% pay-cuts for all public employees!

From the start, Walker acknowledged the power that workers had to shut down the state: against the possibility of a strike by prison guards who form a large portion of Wisconsin's state employees, he threatened to use the Wisconsin national guard as strikebreakers. To ensure loyalty, the Police and Firefighters’ unions would keep their bargaining rights, although they would still take a pay cut (although this eventually changed).

This was an especially drastic move in the traditionally labor-oriented Wisconsin, home of the first socialist member of Congress and the last socialist mayor of a major city (Milwaukee), not to mention the ‘progressive’ Republicans of ‘Fighting Bob’ Lafollette. On February 14, 2011, after seventeen hours of testimony by the public on how the bill would effect them, the large group of people in the capitol realized that their testimony was not going to stop the bill, and that they were already effectively occupying the Capitol. They decided to stay. At the same time, teachers in Madison and several other school districts held effective sick-outs - in other words unofficial strikes - that were supported by student walkouts and lasted for several days.

In response to this mass ferment of working-class activity there was an emergency meeting of Midwestern IWW members (Twin Cities, Madison, Chicago) to plan an organized response and activity within the growing demonstrations. The participants decided to make an absolute priority of agitating for a general strike. Within this strategy, they examined the specific abilities of the Madison branch, as they were closest to the epicenter. The Madison IWW was a relatively small and somewhat disorganized branch, having a few of Madison’s many worker-owned cooperatives affiliated with it, but with years having passed with no independent shop-floor organizing. The Madison IWW nevertheless had one attribute that many IWW branches lack: of its small membership, a large number were ‘dual-carders’, that is, workers who hold a red IWW membership card along with their membership in a business union. These dual-carders ranged from an apprentice in the building trades to several long-time members of public sector unions, all of whom were known to the labor-left of Madison as basically solid militants.

read more

By Richard Meyers - This article was originally published on Daily Kos and reused under fair use guidelines.  Fellow Worker Meyers is involved with Occupy Denver. The opinions expressed here are the author's alone.

There's a debate raging over the OWS port shutdowns, and the role of unions in the shutdowns. Some believe workers have been betrayed; others claim that unions simply cannot signal their support.

Suggesting that a union does, or does not support an action like shutting down the ports (on the basis of what we've seen so far) is a gross oversimplification. In the first place, the no-strike clause has legal implications, with the result that statements of position may exist primarily to satisfy legal obligations.

Second, as we have apparently seen with ILWU 10, there may be significant differences in position and perception between local leadership and national/international leadership.

Third, all of those stating in comments on other KOS articles that they've drawn conclusions based upon what has been published ought to hold their breath; we've never before seen a global movement like OWS interact with a mainstream labor movement before. It is very likely, in spite of pronouncements, that many union leaders at the local AND the national level hadn't yet formed opinions on a one day demonstration port shutdown; many will have awaited the opportunity to assess the effectiveness of, and the public's reactions to, the day's actions.

The history of the labor movement, characteristics of the labor bureaucracy, and the success of the effort (operationally, and perceptually) will play a role in what is about to unfold.

read more

By Emily Loftis

As Occupy Wall Street groups stretching from San Diego to Anchorage mobilize for a multi-port shutdown of the North American West Coast, union members are finding the mobilization offers more than just support against union busting and unfair contracts. Activists and rank-and-file workers say the movement is teaching them what the bureaucratic infrastructure of organized labor has made them forget: collective power.

On Dec. 12, general assemblies (the decentralized governing bodies of OWS) in Los Angeles, Oakland, Calif., Tacoma, Wash., Santa Barbara, Calif., Portland, Ore., Seattle, Longview, Wash., San Diego, Anchorage, California’s Port Hueneme region, and dozens of smaller camps plan to blockade ports and halt commerce for a day. There is a combined Dallas-Houston effort to demonstrate at the port in Houston. Japanese rail workers, who are sympathetic to longshoremen, who work a partner company of Bunge — the company Occupy is protesting — will be demonstrating in Japan.

Farther inland, Denver will try to shut down a Walmart distribution center. Occupy Bellingham may block coal trains; and landlocked California occupiers will bus to the coast. According to the Journal of Commerce, the “West Coast ports handle more than 50 percent of the U.S. containerized trade, including 70 percent of U.S. imports from Asia.” The demonstration is in solidarity with Longview longshoremen who say their jurisdiction is being threatened by multinational grain exporter EGT, as well as port truckers who have been prevented from unionizing in Los Angeles. (Their little-known plight was exposed by Salon in October.)

The campaign to shut down what some call “the Wall Street of the Waterfront” is consistent with the general Occupy Wall Street message on the distribution of power and wealth. Yet, the effort faces opposition from the union bureaucracy’s upper echelons, precisely because of the conflict with EGT. Last week officials of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU ) sent out a memo reminding its members:

“To be clear, the ILWU, the Coast Longshore Division, and Local 21 are not coordinating independently or in conjunction with any self-proclaimed organization or group to shut down any port or terminal, particularly as it relates to our dispute with EGT in Longview.” (emphasis added).

So, paradoxically , where labor conflict is starkest, the union leaders reject outside support, and when Occupy Oakland acts to support the union’s members, the union itself resists. That’s why Dec. 12 looms not just as a test of strength for the Occupy movement. The port shutdown is also shaking up Big Labor.

Mobilizing without unions

The idea of a port shutdown was born out of an Occupy L.A. plan to demonstrate in solidarity with local port truckers. L.A.’s intentions exploded into a large-scale mobilization to shut down the ports along the entire coast.

Shrugging off tent removal, tear gas and rubber bullets, Occupy Oakland has become the nucleus of coordination, holding inter-Occupy conference calls; brainstorming budgets to provide camps with everything from porta-potties to bullhorns; and using union networks to connect rank-and-file members with general assemblies on the West Coast.

Hundreds of Oakland citizens are leafletting commuter trains, staging rush-hour banner drops, reaching out to non-unionized workers, and sending out bilingual teams to ethnic boroughs to help populate the blockade. Other local organizations are independently working for the event. For example, the International Socialist Organization immediately began contacting branches in relevant cities while the East Bay Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice will be hosting a pre-march teach-in about the plight of longshoremen and port truckers.

As for the possibility of future police action, the occupiers do not have to speculate. The City of Oakland and the Oakland Police Department will be working together to keep port operations running on Dec. 12. Though Oakland is no stranger to police violence at port shutdowns the police presence may actually help the protesters.

A police blockade, says one union member and shutdown organizer, is enough reason to prevent longshoremen from unloading ships. Though the longshoremen could technically ask the police to escort them across the picket line, historically, they have not done so. Such a standoff would protect the ILWU from litigation and enable it to respect– as it usually does — a community picket.

The labor battle in Longview highlights Big Labor’s awkward position of resisting a popular movement against corporate power. Longshoremen have been protesting EGT’s decision to contract with another union whose members are paid lower wages than the ILWU’s.

EGT is an export grain facility owned, in part, by agribusiness holding company Bunge Ltd., and has employed ILWU workers on the ports for years. Bunge extracts billions of dollars a year in profits, but has a tarnished international reputation. It was expelled from Argentina this year for accusations of evading taxes. Environmentalists charge Bunge with undermining ecological recovery through intensive sugar cane andsoybean-growing in Brazil. It has also resisted South American union demands for workers’ rights.) But in the United States, the company’s name doesn’t make much news outside of stock reports and longshoremen activist sites.

The ILWU’s problem is that no-strike clauses in contracts require union leaders to foreswear labor action and distance themselves from independent action. Throughout the protests, including those at the Nov. 2 general strike and shutdown of the Oakland port, most unions did not officially sanction the strike, though they all supported it materially and in marching feet. The president of Local 21 of ILWU, for example, was a keynote speaker of the Nov. 19 march.

But resistance endures at the top of the unions. In a recent meeting, the Alameda County labor council not only refused to endorse the port shutdown, but actually considered a public rejection of the action. The proposal was eventually tabled, but the whole debate was arguably a consequence of the entanglement of big business and labor: specifically, of the labor council’s executive treasurer-secretary and a port commissioner.

“The fear of getting sued that haunts the union leadership is unfortunate,” said Barucha, a young anarchist with Occupy Oakland.

“It’s not our job to rail against union leadership,” she said. “We don’t have to come out and criticize union leadership, because we’re leading by example. The occupation movement being able to provide a better framework of getting the rank-and-file working class’s needs met. [It] exposes the recuperation of the union institution by political parties.”

For years, members of certain — not all — unions say their bosses have compromised their collective power in back-door agreements and concessions. Some resent the “team concept,” a labor term for the working relationship between union bosses and CEOs, which places efficiency and profits over workers’ needs, according to disgruntled members. There is similar sentiment regarding the unions’ long-standingrelationship with the Democratic Party — an institution also married to big business.

“The Occupy movement struck a chord,” explained Stan Woods, a member of the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee, a multi-union rank-and-file organization made up of ILWU members, teamsters, city train drivers and other similar blue-collars workers. “The union leadership doesn’t want to be left out, but they are hamstrung by their relationship with the Democrats, mayors and other politicians. They’re caught in a quandary.”

Barucha says the democratization paradigm of the leaderless occupation movement is proving to be a model for workers unhappy with the status quo.

“This is the first time there has been an exemplary movement that is encouraging and teaching people to self-organize.” The occupation, she said, allows union members to act as individual community participants and create community pickets, alongside the unemployed, the non-unionized working class, the homeless and any other supportive neighbors that share the same material needs.

One Bay Area couple who belong to another big local union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, said they and some other grocers chose to organize after watching their contracts being written up behind closed doors. The couple, who asked not to be identified, said the UFCW leaders negotiated a pension concession that they could opt out of by accepting other concessions.

“The union and the company decided all of this without employees being aware of it,” said one grocer. “They kept sending out sugarcoated letters but never once said, ‘Prepare yourself because there’s going to be drastic changes.’”

After attending Occupy Oakland’s general strike, they heard socialist and union activist John Reimann speak to the crowd. They approached him and asked for help. Out of their concerns, and those of others who had joined the strike, they formed the Grocery Workers’ 99% Club, a group of UFCW members who “have created a sort of rank and file caucus of members who want to fight to make their union do what it is supposed to do: fight for the members,” said Reimann.

“We’re not trying to break the union,” said the anonymous grocer. “We just want our voice back so we can make decisions about our contracts. That’s what we thought the unions were supposed to be about.”

And that desire is an oft-missed message of the West Coast occupation movement, often overshadowed in media coverage focused on sanitation issues and simplistic debates on violence. The occupation movement is proactive as well as reactive, offering new paradigms that transcend binary choices such as unions vs. corporations, Democrat vs. Republican, and leaders vs. followers. Just as the 1 percent now has to listen to the 99 percent. Big Labor has to listen to the rank and file. Dec. 12 marks a step in the evolution of the movement from a collection of improvised tent-villages to a national network of empowered, community-conscious problem-solvers.

read more

By David Feldmann

For several years, the IWW has had an active organizing drive in Jimmy John’s sandwich shops, most notably in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn. (the Twin Cities). Earlier this year, six Jimmy John’s workers were fired, ostensibly for violating the company’s attendance policy regarding sick days. The workers were all IWW members who had been involved in attempts to publicize the food safety concerns of Jimmy John’s sandwich makers in the Twin Cities. Naturally, the union members contend that they were targeted because of their involvement with the IWW and not because of their attempts to call in sick without finding someone to cover their shift (the contentious policy in question).

On Nov. 4, Erik Forman, longtime IWW member and Jimmy John’s worker, announced that “the NLRB [National Labor Relation Board] is going to file a complaint against Jimmy John’s on every single charge we filed against them.” The Jimmy John’s campaign went public in 2010 after a long period of clandestine organizing activity. In October of that year, the first fast food workers’ union in the United States lost a union election (85 in favor, 87 against) after franchise owner Mike Mulligan spent more than $84,000 on union busting, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. IWW members argued that Mulligan, who owns ten Jimmy John’s stores in the Twin Cities, broke labor laws in trying to stifle the union’s presence and influence. This position was reinforced by the NLRB, who threw out the election results in January 2011 after declaring Mulligan had, among other things, lied to employees about the union and unlawfully retaliated against IWW members. To date, the IWW hasn’t called for another election, but has instead focused on exposing alleged health code violations at Jimmy John’s locations and getting the fired workers reinstated at the fast food chain. After the results of the NLRB investigation were announced, the Jimmy John’s union proclaimed that all “six fired organizers will go back to work, with back pay, hopefully within the next few months.”

For a labor union that has historically eschewed legal recognition, the IWW has been surprisingly successful at convincing the NLRB that they are in the right, not just in regards to Jimmy John’s but also in the more established campaign to organize baristas at Starbucks (the IWW has won even more legal victories in that struggle). Time will tell whether the IWW can withstand the onslaught of anti-union tactics employed by Mulligan and the rest of Jimmy John’s management in the Twin Cities and continue to expand the union. Now that the NLRB decision has strengthened their resolve, this prospect seems very likely indeed.

read more

Headlines:

• Wobbly Cleaners Fight Back Against Sodexo
• Strike At World’s Biggest Hotel
• Legal Victory for Jimmy John’s Workers

Features:

• Report on the IWW Food and Retail Workers Convention
• A Debate on Collective Bargaining & the IWW
• On the Ground at the Oakland General Strike

Download a free PDF of this issue.

read more

 

The National Labor Relations Board reached a decision (case 05-CA-062891) this week bringing justice to a fellow worker wrongfully fired from the Forest Hill  Crossroads Coffee & Ice Cream in Richmond, Virginia.
On August 18, 2011  (see 'Unfair Labor Practice'  at the Forest Hill Crossroads Coffee & Ice Cream?) an 'Unfair Labor Practice' was filed against the local establishment for a violation of an employee's right to engage in concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid protection, as found in Sec. 7. [§ 157.] of the National Labor Relations Act.
 
The boards decision will require Crossroads Coffee & Ice Cream to pay the fellow worker a settlement for lost wages, which includes an agreement that they will not return to their former position with the employer.  Furthermore, Crossroads Coffee & Ice Cream must visibly post, for all current workers, and email all former workers, an apology and notice of an employee's right to unionize.

read more

Headlines:

• Occupy Wall Street: Reports & Analysis of a Growing Movement
• Wobblies Gather For Bi-Annual Assembly In Scotland
• Community Protects Indigenous Land In Australia

Features:

• Financial Crisis & the American Working Class
• The Annual IW Year in (Book) Review
• In November We Remember Fallen Comrades

Download a Free PDF of this issue.

October 23, 2011

WHEREAS, the working class and the employing class have nothing in common; and

WHEREAS, we are in the throes of a Second Gilded Age; and

WHEREAS, 2011 has been a year of unprecedented working class struggle around the globe; and

WHEREAS, the working people of Albuquerque and New Mexico are standing up as a class against the economic elite;

BE IT RESOLVED the Albuquerque General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World offers its full support to the Occupy movement, locally and worldwide.

Contact: abq [at] iww.org