The People's Record

Outraged against austerity, students & teachers in Philadelphia resist the machine of capitalism
May 17, 2013

Dozens to hundreds of Philadelphia students, teachers and school staff protested outside one of the city’s premiere high schools in an effort to fight proposed budget cuts to the district.

Wearing signs and handing out pamphlets to drivers, members of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers lined the sidewalk outside the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts along South Broad Street Friday morning. The teachers are fighting a series of severe budget cuts proposed by the district to close a more than $300 million funding gap. The proposed cuts include ending arts and music programs, sports and cutting auxiliary staff like secretaries, librarians and counselors.

“With the austere budgets schools have received, schools will not be able to provide a high-quality education for Philadelphia’s children,” said Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. Jordan says the teacher’s union has been discussing labor concessions with the district. However, he says a concession that results teachers taking a pay cut is a non-starter.

“The school district is asking for salary cuts for all PFT members of anywhere between 5, 10 and 13-percent,” he said. “I don’t think that you’ll find employee in the school district and the PFT…who are going to tell you that they can afford to take that kind of pay cut.”

The teacher protest is just the first of many demonstrations planned Friday over the funding flap.

Students from Philadelphia public schools around the city have also walked out of class and are marching on the School District of Philadelphia and Philadelphia City Hall. Similar walkouts were organized last week by students, who also marched on the same spots.

District spokesman Fernando Gallard says staff will not stop students from walking out, but says officials have asked principals remind students that leaving early will results in being marked as cutting. “Schools will follow the district’s attendance policy and will take the appropriate action which triggers at least a phone call to parents to notify them of the student’s absence, a request for a parent conference at the school, or after school detention,” he said.

Students are using Twitter to organize and document their protests. The group Philly Student Union is promoting the hashtag #walkout215 as a digital rally point during the event.

Source

California Domestic Workers Demand Bill of Rights

Walmart opts out of Bangladesh safety agreement
May 15, 2013

Walmart has confirmed it will not sign up to a legally binding agreement on worker safety and building regulations in Bangladesh supported by retailers including H&M, Zara, Primark, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Marks and Spencer, Next, C&A and several others.

However, the US retail giant has created its own agreement, which it claims goes beyond the current accord that was drafted by labour groups and campaigners.

The company, which also owns the UK’s third biggest supermarket, Asda, said the deal signed by its rivals was “unnecessary to achieve fire and safety goals” and questioned the “governance and dispute-resolution mechanisms”.

Instead, Walmart has agreed its own deal to inspect all 279 factories it uses in Bangladesh within six months, and has promised to publish the findings immediately.

Bosses claim this goes beyond the UNI Global Union and IndustriALL deal, pointing out the agreement requires 65% of inspections instead of 100% inspections taking place and argue its own deal means results are published straight away rather than within 45 days.

However, the Walmart deal is not legally binding, does not require the company to offer financial support for fire and safety regulations and blacklist factories unwilling to comply.

The agreement has been criticised by campaigners as a “business as usual” approach, which fails to address the core problems that led to the Rana Plaza factory collapse.

Sam Maher from Labour Behind the Label, said: “Walmart’s so-called new programme is simply more of the same ineffective auditing that failed to prevent the Rana Plaza disaster, or the deaths of 112 workers at Tazreen, who were producing Walmart goods.

“The changes demanded by the IndustriALL accord, include ensuring that factories are provided with the incentives and investment needed to actually make factories safe and are essential for any real change to occur. What Walmart are demanding is business as usual: a business that has cost lives of over 1,300 workers in the last six months alone.”

Walmart has also refused to clarify whether it sourced clothes from the Rana Plaza building, saying only that it had no “authorised” production at the site.

A statement from Walmart said: “The company, like a number of other retailers, is not in a position to sign the IndustriALL accord at this time.

“While we agree with much of the proposal, the IndustriALL plan also introduces requirements, including governance and dispute resolution mechanisms, on supply chain matters that are appropriately left to retailers, suppliers and government, and are unnecessary to achieve fire and safety goals.”

Several major UK retailers have declined to sign the agreement, including Arcadia group, the company behind brands including Topshop, Bhs and Dorothy Perkins; Debenhams; River Island; Matalan and Peacocks.

However, late on Tuesday night Next, the UK’s second biggest clothing retailer, did agree to sign.

Walmart’s decision leaves George at Asda, the supermarket’s clothing brand, at odds with its own position as a founding member of the Ethical Trading Initiative.

The ETI, the UK’s biggest alliance of businesses, trade unions and voluntary organisations, has recommended its members sign up to the accord.

Source

Once more: “What Walmart are demanding is business as usual: a business that has cost lives of over 1,300 workers in the last six months alone.”

Detroit’s emergency manager outlines slash & burn “restructuring” plan: Slash wages & city services, privatization
May 14, 2013

Detroit’s emergency manager released a report on Monday, outlining a “comprehensive restructuring plan” for the city involving savage cuts to city workers’ jobs, wages and pensions and the shutdown of services to a large section of the population.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder appointed Kevyn Orr, a former Washington, DC bankruptcy attorney, as emergency manager on March 14. Under the state’s emergency manager law, Orr was mandated to issue a preliminary Financial and Operating Plan within 45 days.

The plan was drawn up in close collaboration with Andy Dillon, a former hedge fund manager and Democratic Speaker of the State House of Representatives, picked by Snyder as state treasurer.

The report begins with a lie, claiming that measures about to be unleashed in Detroit are aimed at improving the “governmental services essential to the public health, safety and welfare of its citizens.” In fact, the aim is to extract every penny possible from the working class to pay back an estimated $9.4 billion in debt, which currently costs the city $246 million to service, or 19.3 percent of the General Fund budget.

Orr’s former law firm, Jones Day, represents some of the same Wall Street banks—including Bank of America and UBS—that have profited from its financial misery.

In the report, Orr paints a dire picture of the financial state of Detroit. Unemployment has tripled since 2000 and is now officially at 18.3 percent. State revenue sharing has fallen by $160 million, or nearly 50 percent from its peak of $334 million in 2002. There has been a 40 percent decline in income tax since 2000, with a loss of $145 million.

These conditions are an indictment of the capitalist system. They point in particular to the devastating impact of the financial crash of 2008, which led to hemorrhaging of the auto industry, a wave of foreclosures and sharp cuts in federal and state aid. But nowhere is there any suggestion that the corporate and financial elite should be made to pay for the catastrophe they wrought. As a hatchet man for the banks, Orr, like Obama and the Republicans in Washington, is seeking to exploit this crisis to further enrich the financial criminals at the top.

According to Orr his plan has three principles. The first is “improving public safety and promoting reinvestment in the city.” These are code words for ridding the city of “undesirable” elements, including large numbers of unemployed and impoverished workers, and making way for the redevelopment plans of multi-billionaires like Little Caesars owner Mike Ilitch and Quicken Loans CEO Dan Gilbert. Already hundreds of low-income and elderly tenants are being evicted from apartments in the downtown area targeted for the development of upscale housing and shopping.

The second principle, according to Orr, is “evaluating and restructuring the City’s long term liabilities.” This means slashing the pensions and medical benefits of tens of thousands of retired city workers and their families. In his report, Orr complains that there are now more retirees, 18,500, collecting benefits, compared to 10,000 active city workers. The emergency manager, he states, plans to “reduce or eliminate certain healthcare costs for both active and retired employees” and “suggest modifications to the [pension] plans…”

The third principle is “evaluating and streamlining the City’s operations,” which entails an acceleration of the plans by Democratic mayor David Bing to downsize the city by eliminating services in areas deemed too poor or under-populated.

The city, Orr writes, has already developed strategies to address what he calls the “surplus land” issue, using three neighborhood categories (steady, transitional and distressed) to determine whether services in these areas will continue. This strategy, which would be incorporated into the comprehensive plan, would include a “coordinated program of foreclosures, demolition, public/private partnerships and targeted investment.”

In a press conference Monday, Orr said that the privatization of trash collection, transportation and other services were “all on the table.” He pointed to nearby Pontiac, Michigan as a model for his plan.

In that city, as the New York Times recently noted, the EM “overhauled labor contracts, sold off city assets and privatized nearly every service Pontiac once provided to citizens…Its Fire Department belongs to a nearby township. The city’s payroll, once numbering more than 600 workers, now amounts to about 50 public employees. Even parking meters have been sold.”

Other parts of Orr’s plan include:

* Reviewing “options for shared services and contract services” for the Detroit Fire Department, which has been slashed to the bone, leaving only 812 ill-equipped firefighters to cover 139 square miles.

* The possible full privatization of the Department of Transportation, which has already outsourced management duties and cut routes for its depleted bus fleet and employees.

* Turning “daily operations and programming” of the city’s remaining 17 recreation centers “over to experienced entities capable of providing improved services,” which would include “fee-based programming provided by third party operators.”

* The selloff of the Department of Public Lighting.

“The Emergency Manager believes that it is in the best interest of the citizens of Detroit for the City to exit the power supply business,” he writes. Beginning in 2014, the city will “pare down the current number of streetlights from approximately 88,000 to approximately 46,000,” providing lighting only to the “main thoroughfares and population centers.”

The first step will be to transform DPL into an “authority” with the power to issue debt. Once the city pays for infrastructure improvements, the system will be handed over to a “third party,” most likely the electric monopoly DTE Energy. Three years ago, the City Council and Bing administration approved a $150 million deal to buy 100 percent of the city’s power from DTE Energy, replacing the electricity produced by the city-owned lighting department. Before becoming mayor, David Bing, sat on DTE’s board of directors for two decades, and former DTE CEO Anthony Early was the chairman of his election campaign.

Also being targeted for privatization is the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, one of the largest municipal water departments in the nation. Orr writes that he will evaluate all options regarding public assets, including “entering in partnerships with other public entities, outsourcing of operations and transferring non-core assets to other private or public entities in sale, lease or other transactions.”

In regards to labor costs, Orr says the city has “made great strides” under the Consent Agreement reached between the city government and the governor last year, “in reducing costs imposed by its numerous active and expired collective bargaining agreements between the City and various labor organizations.”

This included the unilateral implementation of “City Employment Terms,” which froze or reduced active employee benefits, reduced or eliminated pension and retiree medical benefits and imposed a 10 percent wage cut. It also gutted seniority protections, expanded management rights, changed shifts, hours of operation and overtime procedures and revised or eliminated job classifications.

Nevertheless, Orr complains that these concessions have not been uniformly applied to all bargaining units. The emergency manager’s “labor strategy will be developed with a view that any concessions are equitably distributed across” the city’s entire workforce.

While the emergency manager law suspends the city’s duty to bargain under the Public Relations Act and empowers him to “reject, modify or terminate” collective bargaining agreements, Orr states that he has willingly negotiated with the unions. In this, he is counting on the complicity of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and other unions to reach what he calls a “consensual agreement” and block any resistance by workers to the demands of the banks.

“Overall, employee headcount ultimately may be lower in the future than it is today,” he adds. At the same time, a new “compensation structure” will be established to retain “high performing individuals,” by which he means the army of highly paid consultants and turnaround specialists he is bringing in to help loot the city.

On the eve of the report’s release, Orr’s press secretary Bill Knowling said, “Unless we change and restructure city operations, it’s not going to get any better. That’s a message to the capital markets… If we stop providing services, and basically stop functioning as a city and only paid our debts but kept collecting taxes, we couldn’t pay it off in 20 years.”

Here Knowling may have said more than he intended. The essential purpose of Orr’s plan is to transform the city into little more than a cash machine for the banks and big business. To pay off the wealthy bondholder in the next few years, instead of twenty, will require the suspension of city services for virtually everyone but the well-to-do and a limited number of workers who service them.

As for his boss, Orr made it clear he is essentially a dictator for the banks and oblivious to the concerns of the working people in the city. “The public can comment,” he told WWJ radio, “but it is under the statute, it is my plan and it’s within my discretion and obligation to do it. This isn’t a plebiscite, we are not, like, negotiating the terms of the plan.”

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The American Dream of upward mobility is dead, thanks to the neoliberal ministrations of capital and government. But a new dream could rise from the mess left by globalization, off-shoring and austerity.
May 10, 2013

The continuation of the economic crisis of 2008 up to the present has driven home a social trend that has been evident since the late 1970s, the decline of what is usually called “the middle class” and the accompanying American Dream.

As Richard Wolff has pointed out in Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to do About it, this upward mobility was a reality for most citizens of the United States for several generations, from 1820 to 1970. For 150 years, real wages rose. In the quarter century from 1947 to 1973, average real wages rose an astounding 75 percent. But that shared prosperity came to a halt in the mid ’70s. In the next 25 years, from 1979 to 2005, wages and benefits rose less than 4 percent. The sustained rise in standards of living had been made possible by a conjunction of historical circumstances, circumstances that began to reach exhaustion by the mid 1970s.

In recent decades, the economy has grown, and there was a gain in total wealth. But where did it go? From 1983 to 2008, total GDP grew from $6.1 trillion to $13.2 trillion in constant 2005 dollars. The unequal distribution of the total wealth gain during this period is revealing. The wealthiest 5 percent of American households captured 81.7 percent of the gain. The bottom 60 percent of households not only failed to share in the overall increase, they suffered a 7.5 percent loss. Some of what the top 1 percent gained came directly from that bottom 60 percent.

Downward mobility
Between 2001 and 2008, entry level wages declined 7 percent for college graduates and 4 percent for high school graduates. Entry into middle-level incomes is becoming more difficult.

With the offshoring of manufacturing, the industrial regions of the northeast and the Great Lakes were transformed into a Rust Belt. United States manufacturing employment peaked in 1979 at almost 20 million and fell under neoliberalism to about 11.5 million in 2010. Today, 80 percent of the world’s industrial workforce is now in the global South. Most of it used to be in the United States. This is in no small measure the result of corporate policies over the last 30 years - policies encouraged by our political leaders - to offshore those low-skilled industrial jobs that used to be the entry point to the middle “class” for many. As less-skilled industrial jobs were offshored, at first, in the ’90s, we were told by Robert Reich, labor secretary in the first Clinton administration, that to remain competitive in the global economy, US workers needed to upgrade their skills. We were told the new economy would be the new road to the American Dream. We are still being told that. But offshoring of jobs has not been limited to low-skilled assembly line work. Corporate capital has discovered that any job that can be done by computers can be done anywhere in the world and consequently will be done wherever the cheapest workers with the requisite knowledge can be found. So the knowledge-economy jobs are now also being offshored to countries like India. The knowledge workers there will work for far less than in the United States. And many of our college graduates today are saddled with heavy debt and unable to find work.

As a result of corporate policies and public policies purchased by corporations, there has been wage stagnation for the past 30 years, even as worker productivity rose sharply. This is shown clearly in the above graph. Capital took the bulk of productivity gains (shown by the upper pink line) over the 1993-2006 period by holding wages down (shown by the lower blue line). But then with the 2008 financial crisis, median family income declined further, by nearly 10 percent. Overall, as incomes have declined, corporate profits have soared.

For a while, wealth appeared to increase for average citizens because of inflating real estate values. But the financial crisis of 2008 wiped out that fictitious wealth. Median family wealth in 2010 was the same as it had been 20 years earlier.  

It is corporate capital’s unquenchable thirst for profit and political leaders’ easy purchasability under capitalism that is destroying what was once called ‘the American dream’ (of upward mobility). Political leaders, Democrats and Republicans alike, embrace Charles Wilson’s adage that “what’s good for General Motors is good for America.”

Corporate-led neoliberal globalization has transformed nation-states into what I call globalized states, that is, states that serve the interests of transnational capital above the interests of national populations. This has resulted in a limitation of sovereignty and of the possibility for democratically-shaped national policies. Increasingly, the countries’ fates depend more on powerful transnational corporations rather than on their own people.

Support for neoliberalism bipartisan
In the United States, there has long been bipartisan consensus behind globalization and the neoliberal policies that promote it. Both parties have long embraced basic public policies that undermine the economic security of millions of working people. Both parties favor no-strings Wall Street bailouts, expanded unregulated trade, weakened unions and fiscal austerity as an economic priority, with its concomitant shredding of social programs. There may be some difference in degree on these issues, but both parties are in basic agreement.

One-third of all working families are now poor; their annual income, for a family of four, is below the $45,622 poverty threshold - an income insufficient to meet basic needs.

This bipartisan consensus is illustrated by Senate approval this last year of free-trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. While all politicians were calling for more jobs, they approved a free-trade agreement that they knew would destroy jobs. This was evident in the fact that approval of the free-trade agreement was accompanied by extended unemployment benefits for displaced workers. They just can’t help themselves when an opportunity arises to favor transnational corporations. And now the Obama administration is set to expand this folly even further with the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Legitimacy of systems questioned
With the growing downward mobility now being experienced, the social contract is unraveling. The legitimacy of the dominant institutions is being questioned. Public confidence in Congress as well as government is at an all-time low; large banks are viewed (correctly) as criminal; blind faith in market magic has been dispelled - and corporations are even seen as having betrayed the nation. The legitimacy of the system of capitalism is in crisis as sizable percentages now have a positive view of socialism as an alternative, particularly among the young (who have not known the rabid anticommunism of the Cold War era). As the national elections in 2008 and 2012 have shown, the people of the United States are asking for far-reaching changes, more change than the political elite is willing or even able to deliver.

Without new major innovations to offer opportunities for profitable investment, where is all the accumulated capital to go? Here again we have a classic over-accumulation crisis. One fix that has been deployed by the corporate wealthy is to reduce their tax burden, shifting it to the popular classes below. This has been the agenda of their sector of the political elite for decades. That has been combined with the neoliberal offensive against social programs, again at the expense of the popular classes. In effect, the plutocracy has come to understand that growth of their wealth will no longer come mainly from productive investment, but must come out of the hides of those below them. That requires imposing austerity on others so they can continue to prosper.

Thomas B. Edsall, author of The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics, sums up the situation as follows:

Affluent Republicans - the donor and policy base of the conservative movement - are on red alert. They want to protect and enhance their position in a future of diminished resources. What really provokes the ferocity with which the right currently fights for regressive tax and spending policies is a deeply pessimistic vision premised on a future of hard times. This vision has prompted the Republican Party to adopt a preemptive strategy that anticipates the end of growth and the onset of sustained austerity - a strategy to make sure that the size of their slice of the pie doesn’t get smaller as the pie shrinks. 

It is in this light that we can understand the death march the Republican Party has set out on. Its survival and that of its patrons is at stake. It leads them to adopt scorched-earth policies that ought to spell certain electoral defeat were it not for their gerrymandering, voter suppression, election rigging and other antidemocratic measures needed to maintain political power within the existing political duopoly. What they are so desperate to protect is not only their own political careers, but the insatiable hunger of capital.

For its part, the Democratic Party is also beholden to the interests of transnational capital, as I pointed out earlier. As Jeff Faux has documented, as early as the Carter administration, the Democratic Party embraced the neoliberal ideology. New Democrat Bill Clinton extended the Reagan-Bush I program of globalization with free trade and deregulation of finance capital. The Obama administration has continued on the same course. The political elite is united on its basic priorities. As Faux remarks, the United States is no longer rich enough to continue to finance America’s three principal national dreams:

1. The dream of the business elite for subsidized, unregulated capitalism.

2. The dream of the political elite for global hegemony.

3. The dream of the people for a steadily rising standard of living.

We can certainly continue to have one out of three, and perhaps even two out of three. But three out of three? No. 

It is the dream of the US people that will have to go. That is the reality that no US politician dares to utter. If he did, it might spark popular demands that dreams 1. and 2. be sacrificed instead. The hard truth is that none of the three can be sustained indefinitely. Capitalism is in crisis. The military costs of global hegemony have become more than a debt-burdened state can sustain, as well as more than much of the world will continue to tolerate.

As for rising living standards, even if the dreams of Wall Street and Washington did not trump those of the people, are they really sustainable? With only a small portion of the world’s population, the United States consumes an immensely disproportionate share of the world’s resources. The current rate of use of world resources globally would be sustainable if we had one and one-half planet Earths. But guess what? We have only one. And the rest of the world’s peoples also have dreams of rising standards of living. If all the people in the entire world enjoyed US standards with the same per capita ecological footprint, five Earths would be needed. 

My favorite slogan from the Occupy movement was “Wake up from the American Dream. Create a livable American reality.” That is the challenge We the People face in the 21st century. And we have to face it with little help from our political elite and none from capital. We have to do it ourselves. It will take social movements and prolonged struggle. It will take courage and bold experimentation. And for starters, it will take speaking the truth: The American Dream is over. For good or ill, history will move on without it.

Postscript: Besides this dominant American Dream, there is an alternative one in the background. It has its roots in the 18th century Enlightenment and was expressed in the French Revolution with the slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” That was the dream of a society in which all could live in community, a society of mutual support among equals, where each individual was free to develop his/her human capacities supported by the community. The basic values of that vision are deeply rooted in the American culture. It can be the basis of an alternative - sustainable - American Dream.

Source (I heavily reduced weaker/less-engaging paragraphs so read the full thing if you’re interested)

Upper photo for sharing

Fast food strike wave spreads to Detroit, St. Louis
May 10, 2013

St. Louis, and last month’s in New York and Chicago, today’s work stoppage is backed by a local coalition including the Service Employees International Union, and the participants are demanding a raise to $15 an hour and the chance to form a union without intimidation.

Organizers say that over a hundred workers joined the St. Louis strike between Wednesday and Thursday. That included a group of Jimmy John’s workers who alleged that management humiliated them by requiring them to hold up signs in public with messages including “I made 3 wrong sandwiches today” and “I was more than 13 seconds in the drive thru.”

“Sometimes I walk for more than an hour just to save my train fare so I can spend it on Ramen noodles,” St. Louis Chipotle worker Patrick Leeper said in an e-mailed statement Thursday. “I can’t even think about groceries.”

A spokesperson for Jimmy John’s declined to comment on Thursday’s strike; McDonald’s and Wendy’s did not respond to inquiries last night.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the fate of the fast food strike wave carries far-reaching implications: Fast food jobs are a growing portion of our economy, and fast food-like conditions are proliferating in other sectors as well. Organizers say the fast food industry now employs twice as many Detroit-area workers as the city’s iconic auto industry. These strikes also come at a moment of existential crisis for the labor movement, a sobering reality that was brought into sharp relief in December when Michigan, arguably the birthplace of modern US private sector unionism, became the country’s latest “Right to Work” state.

Along with a shared significant supporter—SEIU—the campaigns in New York, Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit have apparent strategies in common. Rather than waiting until they’ve built support from a majority of a store’s or company’s workers, they stage actions by a minority of the workforce designed to inspire their co-workers. Rather than publicly identifying the campaign and its organizers with a single international union, these union-funded efforts turn to allied community groups to spearhead organizing. Rather than training all their resources on a single company, they organize against all of the industry’s players at once. And—faced with legal and economic assaults that have weakened the strike weapon—these campaigns mount one-day work stoppages that are carefully tailored to maximize attention and minimize, but not eliminate, the risk that workers will lose their jobs.

Whether these strategies can ever compel a fast food giant to negotiate with its employees remains to be seen.

“After what I would consider well over three decades of wage suppression, workers in this particular industry—and then I think it’ll go to others—are realizing that their only way up the wage ladder is through their own organizations,” CUNY labor studies lecturer Ed Ott said Wednesday. Ott, a board member of the community organizing group that spearheaded the New York fast food strike, added, “The only way these workers are going to be able to advance these jobs is through unionization. And I think that idea has finally gotten traction.”

Update (9:15 AM Friday): According to the campaign, a walkout by twenty workers at Detroit’s 10400 Gratiot Avenue McDonald’s prevented the store from operating. Some workers brought in as strikebreakers to replace those striking workers chose to join the strike instead.

Organizers say that by day’s end, today’s strike could be the largest fast food work stoppage yet, topping last month’s 400-strong strike in New York.

Source

On this day in 1972, 4,000 garment workers (mostly Chicana workers) go on strike at Farah Manufacturing Co. in El Paso, Texas. They demanded union recognition and better working conditions. At the time they were making $1.70/hour starting pay with no maternity benefits. 

Read more on the strike here.

I recently began an working with a few EP social justice orgs, such as La Mujer Obrera, Sin Fronteras, SURCO community farms & El Centro de los Trabajadores Fronterizos, which all have involvement from Farah strikers, who are have continued to organize workers along the borderland. They’ve created crucial organizations that have come to be the backbone of a lot of neighborhoods in south El Paso, as they have produced quality jobs, community resource centers, cultural libraries & workers cooperatives, along with a network of community farms that are working to provide food sovereignty for the area. 

+ fun fact: The city is opening the Fountains at Farah, a luxury shopping area where the factory used to be this October. 

California farm workers fired for leaving fields during wildfire
May 8, 2013

More than a dozen farm workers in Southern California were out of a job after walking out of the fields last week, forced indoors because of heavy smoke from a massive wildfire burning nearby.

“Oh, yeah, the smoke was very bad. That’s no doubt about that,” said Lauro Barrajas, of the United Farm Workers.

As the blaze, dubbed the Springs Fire, continued to grow in Camarillo May 2, farm workers 11 miles south in Oxnard said they started to feel the effects of the smoke in the strawberry fields.

The ashes were falling on top of us, one of them explained, adding “it was hard to breathe.”

Air quality in the region was at dangerously poor levels and 15 workers at Crisalida Farms decided they could not handle it any longer. They left, even though their foreman warned them they would not have a job when they returned.

When they went back to the fields May 3, the farm fired them.

Barrajas, who is a representative of the UFW, said the workers contacted him for help, even though they were not members of the union.

Union representatives met with the farm’s upper management and applied a union rule.

“No worker shall work under conditions where they feel his life or health is in danger,” Barrajas said.

In a statement to Telemundo, the farm representative said the workers left without permission while orders still needed to be filled. The company offered to pay them for the hours they’d worked.

Later, the company settled with the union and offered to rehire all 15 workers. But only one worker returned.

The others took jobs on other farms.

One worker said while it hurts to lose work, one’s health is more important.

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More photos from International Workers’ Day

1: Milan, Italy
2: Ramallah, Palestine
3: Beirut, Lebanon
4: Mexico City, Mexico
5: Los Angeles, California
6: Asuncion, Paraguay

Submit your May Day photos here!

A look at International Workers’ Day - Happy May Day!

1: Madrid, Spain
2: Ankara, Turkey
3: London, England
4: Moscow, Russia
5: Jakarta, Indonesia
6: Dhaka, Bangladesh
7: Havana, Cuba
8: Taipei, Taiwan

More photos/updates coming soon… Submit your May Day photos here!

MAY 1 LOS ANGELES SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

12:00pm: Long Beach Revolutionaries : Back in Actions @ Pershing Square

2:00pm: Occupy LA Meet @ Pershing Square

2:30pm: March to Olympic and Figueroa

3:00pm: Join with Occupy Fights Foreclosures to SHUT DOWN Wells Fargo

4:00pm: Join the SCIC march @ Broadway & Olympic to march for FULL legalization for all!

7:30pm OLA General Assembly @ Pershing Square

Neighboring Occupations are also holding their own events this year! For more information, please visit their Facebook pages:

• Occupy San Fernando Valley
• Occupy Venice Beach

Additional Information:

• http://occupylosangeles.org/
• http://www.immigrationcoalition.org/
• http://www.occupyfightsforeclosures.org/

This was all from that first link that was posted after the question. The other two links were for these Facebook pages:

• One for LA in general
• & one for UCLA

Thank you to everyone who submitted links to answer this person’s questions!

The role we all played in the Bangladesh tragedy
April 29, 2013

The first thing Shariful noticed was debris falling from the ceiling. Then he heard a crash as the factory floors gave way and the building crumpled. He fell from the seventh to the first floor‘faster than an elevator’s speed.’Next he heard people screaming: mostly women and children.

There were three crèches in the eight-floor factory. When Shariful gained consciousness he saw dust. He felt a sewing machine crushing his left leg and then he saw death. Everywhere. Dead pale bodies powdered with fine brown dirt. Shariful didn’t know this, but a pregnant woman went into labour around this time. Of course she shouldn’t have been at work. No-one should have been at work. Factory inspectors ordered the building be evacuated the day before but the owners ignored them. Workers who complained were threatened with dismissal. So the 3000 workers filed into the Dhaka factory last Wednesday against their will. As I write, the death-toll stands at 350, but is predicted to rise to 1000.

I learnt about the collapse of the Bangladeshi garment factory a few hours after it happened. I was lying in bed chatting on skype to a friend who is living in Dhaka. It was around 9.00 at night and I was already in my pyjamas: Benetton pyjamas in fact. My floor was its usual mess, strewn with clothes that I had proudly bought for ten dollars or less from Big Bargain Discounts as well as some more respectable work clothes: Gap, Zara, H&M and Levis. ‘It’s OUTRAGEOUS’ I railed, ‘the factory owners made them go back to work when they knew the building was unsafe.’ My friend agreed. We also tsked the government for doing so little to enforce basic safety standards for workers.

But as I hung up the phone the question of fault nagged me. There I was clothed in pyjamas that had been made if not in that factory then in one like it. The labels found inside the collapsed factory included Benetton, Mango, Joe Fresh, Primark and C&A. My floor was littered with dresses and tee-shirts that had been run through the sewing machines of people working in prison conditions or even possibly now dead.

The question of responsibility and what is to be done stretches from the global to the minutiae, from international labour standards to the clothes racks of Myer. It’s a question that stems from our commercial imperialist past and will continue into our neoliberal future. And it’s a question that centres on the lives of women.

We could start by blaming the illegally built building, although it’s certainly not the first. Five months earlier 112 workers died in a fire in the Tazreen garment factory. The workers burnt to death because the gates had been locked from the outside. We could also blame the fact that there are only 18 inspectors to monitor the 100,000 factories in the Dhaka area. Or we could blame the fact that all foreign retailers except Tommy Hilfiger, Tchibo and Calvin Kelin have refused to sign the Fire and Building Safety Agreement that would establish a system of independent factory inspectors. All this is true, and terrible, but there’s also a larger context.

The only reason why clothing companies go to places like Bangladesh, Cambodia, or the US-Mexican border, is because they’re on a hunt for cheap labour and they no longer want to invest in building factories. The minimum wage in Bangladesh is $37/month and there is an entire shadow economy that pays even less. The profit margin for Bangladeshi manufacturers is low so they subcontract out their labour to factories with illegal risky practices. While the foreign retailers report stellar annual profits, some Bangladeshi manufacturers often barely break even. The only way they can make profits is through increasing work hours often to 12-14 hour days, and avoiding building safety regulations and environmental standards.

As global capital sniffs like a ravenous wolf around the world in search of cheap labour, who are the workers who end up caught in its jaws? Liesbeth Sluiter from the Clean Clothes Campaign estimates that 84% of workers in the global clothing industry are women, which is 30-40 million women worldwide.

Fauzia Ahmed says factories prefer women because they’re excluded from male-dominated union movements and so are less likely to strike. And because they’re women they’re paid less, even in instances where they do the same work as men. Most of these women are young, poor and rural. They are as Sluiter describes: ‘women whose children sleep beneath the sewing machine and begin to help out as soon as their fingers can manage to thread a needle; some who wear nothing but black clothes to work when menstruating, because toilet visits are restricted and stains on their clothes will shame them; pregnant women who stand all day; women who are sexually harassed and psychologically intimidated…’

Surely there is no other issue where first world women’s consumerism collides so dramatically with the conditions of third world women. I mean, I wonder what Sex and the City would have looked like if Carrie turned her mind to these issues. But leaving Carrie’s ethics aside, let’s think about a feminist response.

Firstly, I think we should demand that labels be placed on clothing so that we know what we’re buying. Secondly, we try to buy locally and to buy less. Thirdly, we campaign with the many feminists from the global south who have demanded that labour standards be established by the International Labour Organisation and enforced with sanctions by the World Trade Organisation. Capitalism is a prowling, salivating beast that needs to be tamed with regulation and personal ethics.

Source

#4… & most importantly: Let’s not tame capitalism; let’s destroy it.

2013 Workers Unite Film Festival Schedule is Online!
April 15, 2013

After many months of searching out great new worker/labor films and going through the archives of historical labor films, we here at The Second Annual Workers Unite Film Festival have come up with an eight day long program plus an extra evening at one of the biggest unions in NYC, SEIU1199.

Our eight day schedule, which you can find on our website under “2013 Schedule” tab, covers many of the themes that effect working people today as the stuggle to make ends meet, or to find a new job, during this very difficult economy. We have films on being fifty and out of work, films about immigrants seeking to find a decent job in their new home - anxious to make a contribution to their new communities. Our films are as close as our own backyard, here in NYC (Cafe Wars and Judith:Portrait of a Street Vendor) to as far away as the men who tear apart de-commissioned oil tankers with their hands and simple tools in the deserts of Pakistan (Iron Slaves).

We have films about the African American men who fought for dignity on the job and in their union as steelworkers - one of the most dangerous jobs in America, to mothers in Bangladesh who must put their children with their own parents due to 15 hour days in the sewing factories of high fashion sweatshops. These are the same women who survived a recent “Triangle Shirtwaist” style fire in Bangladesh, where over 111 young women perished because the exit doors to the factory were padlocked shut. One hundred years plus after the deaths at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in NYC and we are still fighting the exact same battles.

Please look through the whole schedule. Find some programs that look intereseting, then go online - by next week - and buy tickets!! We have kept ticket prices as low as possible so as many of you as possible can attend at least one program, or one full day of amazing films. Tickets are $7.50 for one show (online sales may incur a service charge) $11.50 for a full day of films!! And $59.00 for a full 8 days of educational and emotional programming about the lives and struggles of workers and their unions all over the globe.

This year we are particularly honored to join with twenty other worker/labor film festivals around the world - known as The Global Labor Film and Video Festival on May 16th. On that day we will screen films on labor issues in China, Pakistan, Mexico, Slovakia, from all over the U.S. and a film about the merchant marines whose work took them from one end of the earth to the other. And that’s just one day of the festival!

We plan to have either the directors or speakers at most of these events, many of them currently engaged in the worker struggles for labor rights and dignity in the workplace. We want to put these films into context so that we all come out of the theater with both a better understanding of our places in the global fight for labor rights and the motivation to get out their and participate in whatever actions are possible to make these rights a reality.

So please take a few minutes to check out the huge list of films and pick out at least a few to come view. If you can afford it, we’d love to have you visit our homepage and make a small donation to help keep building the festival for this year and coming seasons.

Finally - on April 17th at the Gap on 34th Street

Article Source | Festival Schedule | Festival Facebook Page

Happy Birthday, Dolores Huerta (April 10, 1930 - present)!

Huerta is a labor & civil rights leader who co-founded the United Farm Workers Union in 1972, and directed the groundbreaking, five-year National grape boycott that won the first-ever contract for a grape grower.

She has been a tireless advocate for women’s rights, organizing against the Welfare Reform Act and California’s Prop 209.

She is also a 101 Changemaker: 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radical Who Changed US History

For more on the Farmworkers movement check out Fields of Resistance by Silvia Giagnoni: http://bit.ly/11TcrPr

All images on The People’s Record Facebook page for sharing there.