Saturday, January 21, 2006

Greek Anarchists have a beautiful madness

Statement of Federation of Anarchists of Greece (OAE) on the armed robbery in the centre of Athens

On Monday 16/01/2006, and the events following.

We denounce the constant tactic of the state of penalisation of the anarchist ideas on the occasion of the bloody robbery in the centre of Athens. In other similar cases, anyone who is violating the law by a robbery he/she is not declared by his/her political identity, but in this particular case this has been declared with more... We are enemies of the capitalism and the class exploitation at the expence of the popular masses from the exploitative banking system, but we condemn such practices by individuals and/or groups as counter-revolutionary, because they arm the power and the state with arguments and facilitate the more general repression against social movements and ideas.

Historically, anarchism is considering and using the capitalists’ expropriation as a mean within the general frame of the wide social movements and in pre-revolutionary periods.

Continued...

11 People Indicted in Ecotage Plot

11 People Indicted in Ecotage Plot
By MARK SHERMAN
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Eleven people were indicted in a series of arsons, claimed by the radical groups Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front, in five Western states, the Justice Department said Friday.

The 65-count indictment said the suspects are responsible for 17 incidents in California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming, including sabotaging a high-tension power line, in a conspiracy that dates back to 1996. The indictment was returned Thursday by a federal grand jury in Eugene, Ore., and unsealed Friday.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller were expected to talk about the indictment Friday at a news conference in Washington.

Eight defendants have been arrested. Three people remain at large, and are believed to be outside the United States, according to a statement from the Justice Department.

In Eugene, two defendants, Jonathan Christopher Mark Paul, 39, and Suzanne Nicole "India" Savoie, 28, were both ordered held without bail, pending further hearings.

A criminal complaint filed in federal court in Eugene accused Paul, a firefighter, of setting firebombs that burned down a horse slaughterhouse in 1997. The ALF claimed responsibility for that fire, which caused an estimated $1 million in damage.

Continued...

Korean Government Workers to Join Labor Group

Government Workers to Join Labor Group
By Lee Hyo-sik
The Korea Times

The country’s largest government workers’ union plans to join one of the two biggest umbrella labor groups to more effectively stage its struggle against the government.

The Korean Government Employees’ Union (KGEU) with over 140,000 members is expected to join the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), the country’s second largest labor group, next month to demand full guarantee of their rights as unionists.

The union has said that in protest against the Local Government Workers Act, which goes into effective at the end of this month, it would remain an outlawed organization without seeking approval for a legitimate labor union.

Another government workers’ union, the Confederation of Government Employees’ Unions (CGEU) with a 70,000 membership, has also indicated that it would refuse to abide by the law, which prohibits public workers from taking collective action.

Continued...

More TWU Madness

Strike the idea of another strike
By OREN YANIV, ADAM NICHOLS and JOSE MARTINEZ
DAILY NEWS

Exactly one month after walking off the job, transit workers last night were grappling with more labor unrest after narrowly rejecting a contract.

But they were largely united in wanting to avoid another walkout like the one that crippled the city for three days.

"Nobody will be willing to go on strike again," said subway conductor John Turner, 53, who voted against the contract offer. "You might as well go back to the table and get it over with."

Workers grumbled about how they would have had to contribute 1.5% of their salaries to their health plan for the first time - even as they were getting pay boosts over the next three years.

Continued...

Workers reject contract
BY RAY SÁNCHEZ
Newsday

Raising the specter of another transit strike, the city's bus and subway workers Friday rejected their new three-year contract by a margin of only seven votes.

"We are disappointed to report that the members of our union have voted not to ratify the agreement that we reached with the MTA," Transport Workers Union Local 100 President Roger Toussaint told reporters.

Toussaint, looking somber and tired during a Manhattan news conference, blasted Gov. George Pataki, union dissidents and MTA negotiators for the pact's rejection but said union officials were willing to return to the bargaining table.

The vote, which concluded exactly one month after transit workers walked off the job, was a stunning defeat for Toussaint and union leaders, who had lobbied heavily for ratification.

Continued...

No Talks Scheduled As MTA Presents "Final Offer"
NY1 News

The MTA says it will not budge from the offer rejected by transit workers early Friday morning following an overnight bargaining session, and while no new negotiations have been scheduled to try to break the apparent impasse, subways and buses are still running.

Hours after announcing that they were pushing back the strike deadline, officials from the Transport Workers Union said they would not accept the MTA's contract proposal, and instead would begin a series of small-scale strikes to put pressure on the city.

The TWU then said early Friday evening that the union is willing to resume negotiations, claiming they “are not ready to abandon New York.”

Continued...

Unions kept pace with growing U.S. workforce in 2005

Unions kept pace with growing U.S. workforce in 2005
By Peter Szekely
Reuters

WASHINGTON, Jan 20 (Reuters) - The number of workers belonging to labor unions rose last year for the first time in six years, as union membership kept pace with a growing American workforce, the U.S. Labor Department said on Friday.

The number of union members rose by 213,000 to 15.7 million in 2005, the first increase since 1999, the department's Bureau of Labor Statistics said in an annual report.

Unions' share of the workforce was unchanged at 12.5 percent in 2005, as the number of union members grew at the same rate as the number of all wage and salary workers, which includes managers and executives who are ineligible for union membership under federal labor law.

The news was welcomed by the AFL-CIO, the country's largest labor federation, which has long complained that hard-core tactics by many nonunion employers, including illegal measures like firing union activists, has intimidated many workers who would like to have a union.

"In a political climate that's hostile to workers' rights, these numbers illustrate the extraordinary will of workers to gain a voice on the job despite enormous obstacles," AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in a statement.

Continued...

Friday, January 20, 2006

Holy Crap!!! TWU Votes Down Contract!

NYC Transit workers reject new contract
By David B. Caruso
Associated Press

NEW YORK --One month to the day after it stranded 7 million riders with a crippling three-day strike, the city's transit union announced Friday that its members had voted to reject their new three-year contract.

The margin of defeat was just seven votes, out of 22,461 cast.

The vote was a sharp rebuke to Transport Workers Union local president Roger Toussaint, who convinced his 33,000 workers to walk off the job last month but could not muster enough support for the deal that he reached with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Continued...

NYC Transit Union Rejects Contract Offer by 7 Votes
Bloomberg.com

Jan. 20 (Bloomberg) -- New York's 32,000 bus and subway workers, who shut down the U.S.'s largest transit system for three days last month, rejected a new contract by seven votes.

The proposal, offering raises of 10.5 percent while requiring workers to pay part of their health insurance premiums for the first time, was rejected 11,234 to 11,227, said Roger Toussaint, president of Transport Workers Union Local 100. He said the union would seek to open negotiations with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

"We will go back to the drawing board," Toussaint said.

Continued...

NYC Transit Union Rejects Contract Offer by 7 Votes
Bloomberg.com

Jan. 20 (Bloomberg) -- New York's 32,000 bus and subway workers, who shut down the U.S.'s largest transit system for three days last month, voted down a new contract by seven votes.

The proposal, offering raises of 10.5 percent while requiring workers to pay part of their health insurance premiums for the first time, was rejected 11,234 to 11,227, said Roger Toussaint, president of Transport Workers Union Local 100. He said the union would seek to open negotiations with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

"We'll try to recognize what the differences are and hopefully we can build a bridge," said Ainsley Stewart, a union vice president who had opposed the agreement. "If that fails, we'll have to bring in the mediators again."

Stewart said it was "premature" to discuss the possibilities of a resumption of the strike.

Continued...

Read your classics

WAR
Alexander Berkman

War! Do you realise what it means? Do you know of any more terrible word in our language? Does it not bring to your mind pictures of slaughter and carnage, of murder, pillage, and destruction? Can’t you hear the belching of cannon, the cries of the dying and wounded? Can you not see the battlefield strewn with corpses? Living humans torn to pieces, their blood and brains scattered about, men full of life suddenly turned to carrion. And there, at home, thousands of fathers and mothers, wives and sweethearts living in hourly dread lest some mischance befall their loved ones, and waiting, waiting for the return of those who will return nevermore.

You know what war means. Even if you yourself have never been at the front, you know that there is no greater curse than war with its millions of dead and maimed, its countless human sacrifices, its broken lives, ruined homes its indescribable heartache and misery.

‘It’s terrible’, you admit, ‘but it can’t be helped’. You think that war must be, that times come when it is inevitable, that you must defend your country when it is in danger.

Let us see, then, whether you really defend your country when you go to war. Let us see what causes war, and whether it is for the benefit of your country that you are called upon to don the uniform and start off on the campaign of slaughter.

Let us consider whom and what you defend in war: who is interested in it and who profits by it.

Continued...

You say Tomato we say Tomahto

TERRORISTS IN CHILE TRY TO BOMB INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
Anarchist Group Claims Responsibility For Attack
By Nathan Gill
Santiago Times

(Jan. 20, 2006) An unknown anarchist group detonated a bomb outside Chile’s National Intelligence Agency (ANI) in downtown Santiago Wednesday morning. The blast, which injured one man, is the third terrorist bombing in Chile in the last six months. The government downplayed the bombings, saying they lack any real significance

Sergio Aguila, a downtown street cleaner, discovered the bomb while making his daily rounds early Wednesday morning. “I saw a bag by a building, I picked it up and inside was a little gas cylinder and some papers. I put it on top of my cart when, all of a sudden, it began to make a noise, I pushed it away and it exploded.”

The cart was completely destroyed, while Aguila suffered hearing damage and moderate injuries to his back and neck.

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German Rail Union Threatens World Cup Strike Over Bahn Plans

German Rail Union Threatens World Cup Strike Over Bahn Plans
Deutsche Welle

Plans by the German government to split up the state-owned rail operator Deutsche Bahn may lead to German railway workers staging strikes during the World Cup.

"We don't want to but if necessary we will strike during the World Cup," Klaus-Dieter Hommel, the head of one of two unions representing German railway workers, was quoted as saying in the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper on Wednesday.

Continued...

STRIKING NYU GRADS KEEP UP THE PRESSURE INTO SPRING SEMESTER

STRIKING NYU GRADS KEEP UP THE PRESSURE INTO SPRING SEMESTER
Support from Community of Scholars, Labor Movement and Elected Officials Felt over Winter Break

NEW YORK - Today, the first day of the spring semester at New York University, the teaching and graduate assistants of NYU return to picket lines as they continue to fight for a second contract. The strikers, members of GSOC/UAW Local 2110, suspended regular picketing over the winter break when there are no classes. NYU's graduate employees have been without a contract since August 31 and went on strike November 9 after NYU repeatedly refused to come to the bargaining table.

"They have tried to threaten and intimidate our members into relinquishing their rights as workers" said Michael Palm, the
union's chairperson, "but we have stayed strong despite their union-busting campaign."

Continued...

Great Cesar's Ghost

Great Cesar's Ghost
The UFW has to give it up, and reinvent a culture of organizing
By HAROLD MEYERSON
LA Weekly

Within the all-too-small world of liberals and labor, there’s been no larger topic of discussion for the past couple of weeks than the Los Angeles Times’ four-part series on the United Farm Workers. Following the groundbreaking stories from the Bakersfield Californian and the Weekly’s own Marc Cooper, Times reporter Miriam Pawel did a thorough job of digging, and unearthed a sad tale of an iconic liberal institution that in recent decades has grown too comfortable resting on, and marketing, its iconic status.

But Pawel’s story took as a given one crucial but contestable assertion: that today’s farm workers are organizable. When the union was at its height, in the late 1970s, they clearly were. But that was then, when the work force wasn’t composed almost entirely of undocumented immigrants, as it is today. That was then, when the union movement wasn’t in shambling disarray, as much of it has been for decades now. That was then, when there was a cadre of brilliant organizers, the majority of whom were to leave the union in frustration when founder Cesar Chavez sought to transform it into a never very well-defined movement. (The UFW was a child of the ’60s, and, like the CIO unions that were children of the ’30s, it was prey to the manias of the moment — though a number of those CIO unions weathered Stalinism better than the UFW weathered Synanon.)

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Congress Hotel strikers could be replaced by temps, federal court rules

Congress Hotel strikers could be replaced by temps, federal court rules
By EMILY UDEL
Medill News Service

For five days a week for more than two years, Chicago resident Sylvia Diaz has been walking the picket line in front of the Congress Plaza Hotel on Michigan Avenue instead of going inside to work. Before that, she worked in the kitchen of the hotel and convention center for nine years. Diaz was earning $5.68 per hour with benefits when her union voted to strike back in June 2003 after hotel management offered a contract that included a 7 percent pay cut and no provisions for increases in benefits, but in the wake of a Jan. 10 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Diaz’s old job could be snapped up by a temp worker. The court ruled that the Illinois Employment of Strikebreakers Act violates federal labor law. Since an amendment to that act in 2003, Illinois employers had been prevented from hiring workers through a temporary agency to replace workers on strike.

The Strikebreakers Act "is so starkly incompatible with federal labor law that we do not understand how a responsible state legislature could pass, a responsible governor could sign, or responsible state official contemplate enforcing such legislation," wrote Judge Frank Easterbrook in a searing opinion for the three-judge panel.

"Just as workers are free to withhold their labor, so employers are free to hire either temporary or permanent replacements," Easterbrook wrote. The appeals court sent the suit back to the district court, where the lawsuit had been dismissed by Judge Robert Gettleman.

For Diaz, the news means that the ongoing strike will immediately lose much of its power.

"This is very bad for us," Diaz says. "If they have somebody to work inside, they don’t care if we’re outside; they don’t care if we’re going back or not."

Continued...

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Union links safety, patient care

Union links safety, patient care
Hospital staffing levels blamed for injuries
BY JEREMY OLSON
Pioneer Press

Union leaders representing 14,000 health care support workers in Minnesota on Wednesday linked a high rate of workplace injuries and illnesses in hospitals to the quality of patient care.

There were 285 injuries or illnesses resulting in missed days of work for every 10,000 hospital workers in 2004. That was double the rate for private industry overall, according to the report released by the Service Employees International Union Local 113.

The union report, which cited federal injury data, didn't prove that a high injury rate causes poorer patient care. But SEIU leaders said both problems have the same root causes: inadequate levels of hospital staffing and investments in equipment and technology.

"The connection between a safe workplace and quality care is more than just common sense," said Holly Rodin, who wrote the SEIU report.

Continued...

ELFin Targets of the State

Two more arrests and direct evidence of FBI infilitration of activist meetings around US

Anarchists in TroubleThe FBI's witchhunt against activists continues, with two more charged with arson in the last 36 hours, both Cascadian environmentalists. Johnathon Paul, 39, of Ashland and Suzanne Nicole "India" Savoie, 28, of Appelgate were both indicted for their alleged involvement in a 2001 firebombing at the offices of a Superior Lumber Mill in Glendale, OR, an action claimed by the Earth Liberation Front.

Continued...

The Blind Leading The Blind

Organizing 101: Labor Organizing
IWW

Fire Your BossAlthough every workplace is different and the needs of workers vary, there are some basic steps involved in winning a union voice on the job. This will be primarily useful to workers in the United States of America. To begin organizing a union at your workplace there's a simple starting point before going through the steps listed below: quietly talk to a few of your coworkers who you think may be interested in organizing.

Labor Organizing

Some Basic Steps To Organizing a Union

Although every workplace is different and the needs of workers vary, there are some basic steps involved in winning a union voice on the job. This will be primarily useful to workers in the United States of America.

To begin organizing a union at your workplace there's a simple starting point before going through the steps listed below: quietly talk to a few of your coworkers who you think may be interested in organizing.

Continued...

Health care creates stir among labor

Health care creates stir among labor
By James Hohmann
The Stanford Daily

Health care spending reached $1.9 trillion in 2004, the U.S. government reported last week. That number is 16 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product and four times the amount spent on national defense. Although 45 million Americans are uninsured, the United States spends more on health care than other industrialized nations with universal health insurance. Public funds account for less than half of total spending in this area.

Health care is facing an impending crisis, experts say. Total out-of-pocket spending on health care reached $230 billion in 2003, the Health Affairs Journal reported. And according to the California Health Care Foundation, the amount spent per person increased 69 percent between 1993 and 2003.

Continued...

Hotel Workers Rising

Hotel Workers Rising
Lifting one another above the poverty line
Hotel Workers United

The UNITE HERE Hotel Workers Rising campaign represents an effort to empower thousands of hotel workers in hundreds of properties in cities across North America as they work to improve their jobs and secure better lives for themselves and their families.

In recent decades, the hotel industry has witnessed the rapid consolidation and expansion of international hotel corporations. The hotel industry used to be dominated by local players and local markets. But today the industry is dominated by multimillion dollar national and international corporations. Hotel companies such as Starwood, Hilton and Marriott are present in every major city, and employ thousands of workers.

Continued...

Faced With IWW Pressure, Sky turns Blue During Daylight

Faced With IWW Pressure, Starbucks Releases Sub-Par Health Care Number
Coffee Giant Has Lower Percentage of Insured Workers Than Wal-Mart
IWW

New York, NY- The myth of a socially responsible Starbucks is steadily unraveling with an admission by the coffe chain that less than half of its employees are covered by company health care. The revelation is all the more remarkable since the company has long promoted itself as a leader in employee health care while the actual percentage of Starbucks workers covered is less than that of Wal-Mart, a corporation notorious for the burden it places on taxpayers via uninsured workers.

Continued

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Sweeney smooths over split in labor

Sweeney smooths over split in labor
By William Glanz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney can look ahead tomorrow with a measure of relief when he gives a speech outlining the labor federation's agenda.

Labor's internecine war and the subsequent defection last year of four unions from the AFL-CIO threatened to cripple the federation by decimating its budget and putting it in direct competition with a rival labor group.

But so far the AFL-CIO seemingly has avoided any pitfalls caused by the departure of the Teamsters, Unite Here, United Food and Commercial Workers, and Service Employees International Union.

"I believe we all would be better under one house of labor, but I also never thought the split would be the end of the world for labor,"
International Association of Firefighters President Harold Schaitberger said.

The defection of the four unions to form the Change to Win Federation began when the Teamsters and SEIU made their dramatic announcement in July during the AFL-CIO's convention, where union members re-elected Mr. Sweeney.

Continued...

SWAZILAND: Zabalaza’s claims of bombing police van

SWAZILAND: Zabalaza’s claims of bombing police van
by Mduduzi Magagula - The Times of Swaziland Wednesday

MBABANE—While many might have been forgiven for breathing a sigh of relief over the arrest of suspects in the cases of spate of petrol bombings, people will be alarmed to learn that there is an underground political organisation that claims to be even mightier than PUDEMO or SWAYOCO.

MBABANE—While many might have been forgiven for breathing a sigh of relief over the arrest of suspects in the cases of spate of petrol bombings, people will be alarmed to learn that there is an underground political organisation that claims to be even mightier than PUDEMO or SWAYOCO. Even more alarmingly, this organisation has sensationally claimed to have petrol-bombed a police van. However, the police vehemently denied this last night, saying this was far from the truth as no police vehicle was ever petrol bombed, and there are no records of this having happened.

Continued...

ZACF Response to The Times of Swaziland

ZACF Response to The Times of Swaziland
by Jonathan - ZACF

Zabalaza DOES NOT claim bombing of police van

A letter to the editor of The Times of Swaziland, which carried an article in the January 15th edition falsely saying that the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Federation claimed responsibility for bombing a police van.

In The Times of Swaziland, Sunday Edition of January 15, under the headline "Zabalaza's claims of bombing police van" by Mduduzi Magagula it seems to us that he has misread the report when he says "Also shocking in the claims is that they stoned and petrol bombed a police vehicle in Manzini during a PUDEMO organised demonstration recently."

The newspaper quotes our website as saying “Our organisation together with PUDEMO comrades took control of a certain territory around Manzini and it is then that an armored police “hippo” wandered into comrade controlled territory, was stoned and petrol bombed,”

What Zabalaza actually said can be read at http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=1462 :

"Countering Saturday's SWAYOCO demonstration in which the ZACF participated, the Royal Swazi Police fired warning shots and in the resulting chaos, arrested "MK" and seven SWAYOCO comrades. Last month, however, the shoe was on the other foot, when an armored police "hippo" that wandered into comrade-controlled territory found itself stoned and petrol-bombed."

Nowhere did we claim, nor have we ever done so, to have stoned or petrol bombed a police vehicle, or any other symbol of oppression for that matter. In fact the ZACF has consistently been against terrorism in favour of mass popular mobilisation. Which can be seen in our public statements on the September 11 WTC attacks (found online here: http://www.zabalaza.net/recent/wtc_911_attacks.htm), the bombings in Madrid (found online here: http://www.zabalaza.net/news/news02.htm) and in London (found online here: http://www.zabalaza.net/news/news03.htm).

Continued...

The deadliest industry -- a close look a coal miners

The deadliest industry -- a close look a coal miners
We are bound to an economy on their backs
Melanie Light
San Francisco Chronicle

We Americans don't see the faces of these people or hear their voices in the kitchen when we flick on the light in the morning and start the coffee. But they are there nonetheless.

When we pull some "juice" from the wires, it has been supplied, about half the time, courtesy of the coal-mining communities. Whenever we pop a couple of aspirin, drive down a street, shine a flashlight or brush our teeth, we are using one of several thousand by-products generated by the coal economy. We are all inextricably bound to these coal-mining communities, and yet we all know so little about them.

Continued...

Taking On the Hotels

Taking On the Hotels
By Harold Meyerson
Washington Post

Company by company, in quickening succession, the social contract in America implodes. Verizon and IBM scrap their pensions; Delphi floats a tidy two-thirds cut in pay; profits surge while wages sag and benefits vanish in broad daylight.

City by city, in a now-steady drumbeat, labor and other working-class advocates fight back, with living-wage ordinances, health care mandates on employers and, now coming at the state level, universal health coverage for children. With the federal government supremely uninterested in such minutiae, the battle for a life of middle-class dreams and security is fought region by region, even town by town.

Time was, of course, when it was fought contract by contract, but that was in an America where unions mattered, where they represented one-third of the private-sector workforce rather than today's anemic 8 percent. In a global economy, the conventional wisdom would have it, the bargaining power of unions is the ultimate spent force.

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Was the LA Times series on the United Farm Workers a misrepresentation?

Was the LA Times series on the United Farm Workers a misrepresentation?
By Leilani Albano
WINews

The LA Times four-part series about the United Farm Workers has sparked a fury among those in the progressive community.

In last week’s articles, Times author Miriam Pawel lodges a host of allegations against the UFW.

Most damaging of all, the Times author says that the union has abandoned founder Caesar Chavez’s mission of aiding farm workers.

Unlike the UFW of the 1960s and 1970s, when the organization launched the widely successful grape boycotts and implemented major changes for workers, today’s union does little to help farm laborers, Pawel reports.

However, not everyone agrees with her assessment. "It is one pack of lies after another."

That was long-time UFW spokesman, Marc Grossman.

"The fact is, thousands of farm workers benefit everyday from the United Farm Workers efforts…32 election victories, dozens of news UFW contracts, with some of the largest strawberry, rose, winery, mushroom firms in California and the nation. We dedicate up to fifty percent of the union’s resources to organizing, which is among the highest of any union."

Grossman also points to the organization’s recent successes in passing major farm worker protections including last year’s regulations to prevent heat deaths in the fields, binding mediation laws in 2002, new remedies for workers cheated by contractors, the Agjobs bill, as well as an upcoming immigration reform measure.

Despite the union’s achievements, the conditions of most farm workers remain grim. As Pawel points out, the UFW represents only 1 percent of the 450,000 farm laborers in the state. A majority of them, she reports, still earn poverty wages and lack decent housing.

Continued...

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

An oldy but a goody

Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm
By Murray Bookchin

For some two centuries, anarchism -- a very ecumenical body of anti-authoritarian ideas -- developed in the tension between two basically contradictory tendencies: a personalistic commitment to individual autonomy and a collectivist commitment to social freedom. These tendencies have by no means been reconciled in the history of libertarian thought. Indeed, for much of the last century, they simply coexisted within anarchism as a minimalist credo of opposition to the State rather than as a maximalist credo that articulated the kind of new society that had to be created in its place.

Which is not to say that various schools of anarchism did not advocate very specific forms of social organization, albeit often markedly at variance with one another. Essentially, however, anarchism as a whole advanced what Isaiah Berlin has called 'negative freedom,' that is to say, a formal 'freedom from,' rather than a substantive 'freedom to.' Indeed, anarchism often celebrated its commitment to negative freedom as evidence of its own pluralism, ideological tolerance, or creativity -- or even, as more than one recent postmodernist celebrant has argued, its incoherence.

Anarchism's failure to resolve this tension, to articulate the relationship of the individual to the collective, and to enunciate the historical circumstances that would make possible a stateless anarchic society produced problems in anarchist thought that remain unresolved to this day. Pierre Joseph Proudhon, more than many anarchists of his day, attempted to formulate a fairly concrete image of a libertarian society. Based on contracts, essentially between small producers, cooperatives, and communes, Proudhon's vision was redolent of the provincial craft world into which he was born. But his attempt to meld a patroniste, often patriarchal notion of liberty with contractual social arrangements was lacking in depth. The craftsman, cooperative, and commune, relating to one another on bourgeois contractual terms of equity or justice rather than on the communist terms of ability and needs, reflected the artisan's bias for personal autonomy, leaving any moral commitment to a collective undefined beyond the good intentions of its members.

Indeed, Proudhon's famous declaration that 'whoever puts his hand on me to govern me is an usurper and a tyrant; I declare him my enemy' strongly tilts toward a personalistic, negative freedom that overshadows his opposition to oppressive social institutions and the vision of an anarchist society that he projected. His statement easily blends into William Godwin's distinctly individualistic declaration: 'There is but one power to which I can yield a heartfelt obedience, the decision of my own understanding, the dictates of my own conscience.' Godwin's appeal to the 'authority' of his own understanding and conscience, like Proudhon's condemnation of the 'hand' that threatens to restrict his liberty, gave anarchism an immensely individualistic thrust.

Compelling as such declarations may be -- and in the United States they have won considerable admiration from the so-called libertarian (more accurately, proprietarian) right, with its avowals of 'free' enterprise -- they reveal an anarchism very much at odds with itself. By contrast, Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin held essentially collectivist views -- in Kropotkin's case, explicitly communist ones. Bakunin emphatically prioritized the social over the individual.

Continued...

Report on S.O.S. and it’s January 8th Rally at International Auto Show

Report on S.O.S. and it’s January 8th Rally at International Auto Show
by By C. Alexander Saturday

SOS formed at a Dec. 4th Bay City, Michigan meeting organized by and for
UAW rank and filers. The Bay City meeting was one of the early meetings
organized to engage the UAW membership employed by Delphi and GM. The
purpose of the meetings are to raise consciousness, solidify a base, and
promote the idea of resistance to a) specifically, Delphi’s restructuring
bankruptcy that entails plant closures, pension cuts, immediate wage
lowering, and rolls over current labor contracts, and b) generally, the
broader restructuring that the US auto industry is hoping to initiate, the
results of which are similar to what is on Delphi’s agenda.


This was the first big public protest organized by Soldiers Of Solidarity,
the independent faction comprised of UAW rank and filers.

SOS formed at a Dec. 4th Bay City, Michigan meeting organized by and for
UAW rank and filers. The Bay City meeting was one of the early meetings
organized to engage the UAW membership employed by Delphi and GM. The
purpose of the meetings are to raise consciousness, solidify a base, and
promote the idea of resistance to a) specifically, Delphi’s restructuring
bankruptcy that entails plant closures, pension cuts, immediate wage
lowering, and rolls over current labor contracts, and b) generally, the
broader restructuring that the US auto industry is hoping to initiate, the
results of which are similar to what is on Delphi’s agenda.

Continued...

Not again?!

SDS: Why Now (Again)?
by Paul Buhle

It is fascinating for me to think about SDS. In fact, it's downright compulsory. I am gathering stories and pictures, trying to weave them into a script for an artist to make into a visual (or comic-book) history, mostly "from the bottom up," i.e., the chapter standpoint. Sometimes the national leaders were good, sometimes they were terrible, but what happened at the base is the vital story, from the historic moment when SDS became a real social movement.

Why SDS then? The arguments are familiar and I won't try to rehearse all of them. The Empire had pushed ever onward and -- as I encountered SDS in the flesh for the first time -- had badly overextended itself in Vietnam. The Old Left had come to a standstill. Liberalism had flopped and had become part of the war machine -- or rather had always been part of the war machine. It could be pulled leftward but not far. Certainly not by young people joining the Campus Democrats, hoping to become powerful politicians and speechwriters someday. To do anything good at all, the Democrats needed a fire to be set under them. And a larger vision to be set out independently, something vastly beyond their compromised and bureaucratic grasp.

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America's pension time bomb

America's pension time bomb
Commentary: Workers, employers, taxpayers, governments. Meet the key players in the coming battle.
By Geoffrey Colvin, FORTUNE senior editor-at-large

NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - Some of the nastiest conflicts in America's future have recently begun to reveal themselves. Let's call them, broadly, the pension wars.

They will be fought on a wide range of battlefields, involving not just workers and their employers but also governments at all levels, regulators, accountants and taxpayers. And these wars will be bitter -- because the combatants will be desperate.

A hint of what's to come could be seen in the New York City transit strike. Most of America didn't notice exactly what sparked the first such strike in 25 years, costing businesses, individuals and the city hundreds of millions of dollars. The answer is pensions. The transit authority and the workers were agreed on virtually everything except how much new employees would contribute toward their pensions--6 percent of wages vs. 2 percent -- and neither side felt it could give an inch on that.

The reasons illustrate the larger problem. The transit authority, like many private and public employers, is watching its pension costs rocket as longer-living retirees increase in number. That burden will become unbearable. On the other side, union members are watching employers nationwide dumping or cutting their pensions just as Social Security starts to look shaky. They figure retirement security is the one thing they cannot sacrifice. Result: war.

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US honours Martin Luther King, but kills dream of equality

US honours Martin Luther King, but kills dream of equality
· Harvard report says school segregation increasing
· Despite this, most citizens believe progress made

Robin Shulman in New York
The Guardian

Millions of Americans marked Martin Luther King Day yesterday with tributes to the civil rights leader, despite a Harvard University report showing that racial segregation in schools has been increasing since the early 1990s, when the courts made a series of decisions to dissolve desegregation orders.

Yesterday President George Bush and the Reverend Jesse Jackson were among the millions of Americans who paid tribute to King, who was assassinated in 1968. In New York, the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, said he had been inspired by King, and that he hoped for "equal opportunity for all" and "a first-class education for all our children".

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Will vital hotels union be next to strike?

Will vital hotels union be next to strike?
BY CHUCK BENNETT
amNEW YORK STAFF WRITER

Strike talk is in the air again. This time, it's not mass transit that's at stake, but the city's vital hotel industry.

The New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council, an umbrella group representing 28,000 workers in six unions, is threatening to walk out this summer. And with 41 million visitors to the city spending more than $21 billion last year, any disruption to hotel services would be a big blow to the economy.

"This is the most important contract negotiation in history for a variety of reasons: protecting pensions, resisting givebacks and preventing management from willful and repeated abuses of the contract," said John Turchiano, a trades council spokesman.

The union's five-year contract with 150 hotels and motels in the city expires July 1.

Vijay Dandapani, chairman of the Hotel Association of New York City, which represents the management of more than 200 hotels, acknowledged tough negotiations ahead.

"We don't know what will come to pass or whether there will be a strike or not," he said.

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Monday, January 16, 2006

Profiles of Legendary Anarchists #2


Profiles of Legendary Anarchists #2
Profiles of Legendary Anarchists is a recurring feature of P-CRAC's News and Information Blog

John Zerzan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

John Zerzan (born 1943) is an American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author. His works critique (agricultural) civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocate drawing upon the ways of life of prehistoric humans as an inspiration for what a free society should look like. Some of his criticism has extended as far as challenging domestication, language, symbolic thought (such as mathematics and art) and the concept of time. His four major books are Elements of Refusal (1988), Future Primitive (1994), Against Civilization: A Reader (1998) and Running on Emptiness (2002).

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SWAZILAND: Police deny bombing claims by unknown anarchist cell

SWAZILAND: Police deny bombing claims by unknown anarchist cell
Monday, 16 January 2006,
By ANDnetwork Journalist

As the people of Swaziland started breathing a sigh of relief following the arrest of suspects in connection with the recent spate of petrol bombings, they will be more alarmed to learn that there is an underground political organisation that claims to be even mightier than PUDEMO or SWAYOCO.

Even more alarmingly, this organisation has sensationally claimed to have petrol-bombed a police van. However, the police vehemently denied this last night, saying this was far from the truth as no police vehicle was ever petrol bombed, and there are no records of this having happened.

The Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Federation (ZACF) of Southern Africa has its headquarters in South Africa and claims to the international community to be operating in the country. The formation has a website where it publishes its propaganda.

In some of its writings, the formation appears to claim responsibility for some of the petrol bombing incidents that have terrorised the country recently.Again, this seems to be a smoke screen and the police have denied knowledge of this. Just a quick read through the website is enough to tell that the organization is out to paint a bad picture about Swaziland.

Also shocking in the claims is that they stoned and petrol bombed a police vehicle in Manzini during a PUDEMO organised demonstration recently. Such an incident was not observed by the local media.

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Breeders Talk more About Their Lives!

Parenting and Anti-Oppression Work
The Best Anti-Oppression Training I Got from a Two Year Old
By Clayton Dewey

Finishing up my B.A. in Humanities even the idea of having children was pretty much a far off, sporadic thing that would pop into my head. Like most of my peers I was concerned with how I would be able to make a living and have that fit with my radical politics as much as possible. Kids were something I could think about once I was settled down and had some sort of stability.

With that said, I was definitely interested in children, my girlfriend at the time wanted to be a midwife, my best friend had worked her whole life working with kids and the last summer I had worked as a camp counselor with youth as young as 5 to as old as 18. Still, in my activism I hardly worked with parents and kids. Many of the people I worked with on social justice issues looked strikingly similar tomyself- white, male college students.

That reality was altered when I suddenly found myself profoundly in love with a woman, who along with playing many other incredible roles, is a single mom.

In my hopeless romantic sort of way I said that love could conquer all, including the fact that I couldn’t really change a diaper and had no clue how I would fit in with Obsidian’s life. Still, being with this woman made me feel like I could do anything, including entering the world of parenting.

Pretty quickly I discovered another reason that I thought I could do this and that was Obsidian. He was incredible. One year old at the time, he only had a few words in his vocabulary but would tug me around my house’s yard and we’d explore the tall grasses, weeds and flowers that were growing rampant that spring. I taught him how to blow the tops off of dead dandelions and from that point on a walk took 4 times as long because he wanted to stop at every flower to see the seeds spread to the wind.

Though I found so much of my joy with these people I soon found that my anarchist lifestyle and the lives of many of my anarchist friends conflicted with their anarchist lives. It took some effort to make our collective house child friendly and even after that we’d unintentionally leave things out that Obsidian could hurt himself with. When we went to other cities to visit friends it was oftentimes difficult to find safe spaces that were quiet at night so he could sleep. Even when people did make those accommodations others (housemates and/or visitors) failed to maintain that safeness. Also, just the way some people treated Obsidian was surprising.

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Don't count on your pension

Don't count on your pension
IBM's plan to freeze pension benefits and put workers into a 401(k) plan is seen by many retirement experts as pivotal.
BY LAURA SMITHERMAN AND MEREDITH COHN
The Baltimore Sun

As companies continue to drop pensions that have afforded generations of workers a comfortable retirement, a chorus of financial experts warns that workers must learn to save for themselves.

But like admonitions to exercise more and eat less, many workers aren't heeding the advice. One recent survey revealed that one-fifth of Americans think their best shot at amassing savings of several hundred thousand dollars is to win the lottery. And that's far short of the $1 million that some financial planners say baby boomers will need for a nest egg.

"You can stop anyone and ask them if they should be saving more for retirement, and none will say no," said Christine Fahlund, senior financial planner with T. Rowe Price Group Inc. "We've heard it and heard it and heard it. It's our own fault if we ignore it. We have to live with the consequences."

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In Memoriam: Clinton Jencks

In Memoriam: Clinton Jencks
By David Strom
SDS Universe

David Strom, a colleague of Clinton Jencks, reflects on the life of the SDSU professor and labor activist.

Clinton Jencks died Dec. 15, 2005. Jencks was the legendary labor organizer, who led mineworkers, mainly Latino, in a strike that lasted 15 months. The union demanded equal pay with white workers, better working conditions, employer-paid healthcare and paid holidays. The strike was ultimately successful, even though paid holidays were not written into the contract.

The movie "Salt of the Earth" heralded that strike and, looking back, it mirrored, to a great extent, the life of Dr. Clinton Jencks at San Diego State University. Clint fought for equal rights for lecturers — our academic underdogs. In the 60s and 70s, he stood tall in working for a women’s studies department and a Mexican American studies department. Clint helped our local union fight our national union's weak and unprincipled position of support of the War in Vietnam — we were later punished by the national AFT for our position. He helped organize an informal campus wide radical professors group to tackle city, state and national problems. We "agreed to disagree" and we did.

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MLK Jr. Died at a Union Picket Line

MLK Jr. Died at a Union Picket Line
By Nathan Newman
TPM Cafe

Most people have seen clips of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I've been to the Mountaintop" speech in Memphis where he died, but relatively few know that he was there as part of a sustained campaign to support an AFSCME strike of santitation workers demanding a union.

In the dumbing down of celebrations of Martin Luther King Jr. as a national icon, the relatively radical demands for economic justice that he was making in his later years tend to disappear.

But Martin Luther King Jr. had made a strike of public employees in Memphis a centerpiece of his efforts to launch the "Poor Peoples Campaign" of his final year. You can read more details about the strike at this website commemorating the strike, but it's worth understanding that Martin Luther King Jr., even as he rightly criticized the exclusionary rules of some individual unions, always saw a strengthening of unions and labor as critical to achieving long term justice for African Americans.

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Sunday, January 15, 2006

P-CRAC's Worker & Parasite # 2 - Revolutionary Does Not Mean Fringe



Worker & Parasite # 2
Revolutionary Does Not Mean Fringe:
The Modern IWW "Revolutionizes" Syndicalism

Worker & Parasite is the weekly Editorial of P-CRAC's News and Information Blog.




Greetings Comrade-Enemies,

Let's be clear... The IWW is Fringe Unionism. No. We're wrong. The IWW is not Unionism, fringe or otherwise. Lets all be honest... just for once here in McAnarchy World. Can we? Seriously…

The IWW does not actually exist as a Union. It exists as a tiny leftist propaganda group and labor support network. There are less than 2000 people in the whole "Union" and most of them are either crazy old lunatic labor historians masturbating to Big Bill Heywood pictures in the dark or hippy-punk lefty Anarchists that have a friend that has a friend that once read the first four pages of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's Sabotage pamphlet and are busily organizing themselves and their siblings against the oppression of having to do chores at home.

The IWW is not a Revolutionary Union.
The IWW is not a Radical Union.
The IWW is not a Mainstream Union.
The IWW is not a Fucking Union.

The IWW is a reactionary and counter-revolutionary organization, as are all Syndicalist and Anarcho-Syndicalist "Unions."

Syndicalism has two possible outcomes:

One is that the Union in question will remain true to its ideological underpinnings of Revolutionary Unionism. This forces a reality that it cannot grow seriously as a base membership requirement must be to believe in the union's ideology. People's social understanding and consciousness’ change while in struggle not before engaging in struggle. This deliberate ideological isolation forces Syndicalist unions that are honest and true to themselves to remain a tiny force of agitation within a larger labor movement which can be a good thing, but isn't even Unionism, never mind not being Revolutionary Unionism;

The other option is that a Syndicalist Union can choose to forget about its ideological underpinnings. When that happens, the Union actually becomes successful. It organizes lots of people. Takes on the boss. Builds to a force in society. However, that’s done by increasing in size without requiring that members of the Union actually believe in the Union's ideas and mission. So as the Union grows and becomes successful there becomes an internal division. The majority of the membership doesn't give a shit about Revolutionary Unionism and a small inner core does. This creates hierarchy and conflict with democracy while simultaneously removing the practical application of revolutionary ideology to the Union's decision making. This is Unionism, but it isn't Revolutionary Unionism.

So the only two possible outcomes of Syndicalism are:

1. Remain a Marginal Fringe “Union” That’s Completely Useless.
2. Become a Mainstream Union and Pretend You Aren't.

However, having said that, we at P-CRAC have been modifying our analysis slightly. We now believe that there is a third possible outcome of Syndicalism in practice as exemplified by the modern IWW. The IWW is actually becoming the worst of both of those two scenarios.

Congrats Fellow Workers! You've done something new in the history of Syndicalist organization. The IWW sucks more effectively than anyone has sucked before.

With this new theoretical understanding of the eventualities of Syndicalist Organization, we now have three possible outcomes for the Syndicalist "Union:"

1. Remain a Marginal Fringe “Union” That’s Completely Useless.
2. Become a Mainstream Union and Pretend You Aren't.
3. Become a Marginal Fringe Mainstream Para-Union That's Useless and Pretends it Isn't.

So the IWW is an organization of innovation. They remind me of that famed American artist Walt Disney who once said, “I believe in being an innovator.” Which holds a beautiful symmetry if you think about it for a second.

The IWW and Walt Disney were/are both committed to innovation and both believe(d) in innovating by creating cartoons, one of them on the page and one in the world.

Go Fellow Workers! Go!

Immigrants may save organized labor

Immigrants may save organized labor
Wooing workers who fear deportation is real battle
By Tom McGhee
Denver Post

Carpenters union pickets last week included homeless Michael Murphy, front right, who was paid $10 an hour to pick up a sign and join the march. (Post / Jerry Cleveland)

Unions are reaching out to the foreign workers who crowd U.S. construction sites, and some see them as a heaven-sent solution to sliding membership rolls.

As employers turn to cheaper nonunion workers, some unions that represent the construction industry are trying to organize the immigrants who take those jobs - regardless of their immigration status, said Jim Gleason, executive secretary of the Mountain West Regional Council of Carpenters.

Adding the newcomers to union rolls could mean the difference between survival and extinction for a labor movement that is struggling to remain relevant.

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F The LA Times

Falling down on the job on labor coverage
OUTSIDE THE TENT
An occasional feature in which The Times invites outside critics to beat up on a Southern California newspaper that is celebrating its 125th birthday.
By Peter Dreier, Peter Dreier is professor of politics and director of the urban and environmental policy program at Occidental College.

UNION ACTIVISTS and allies are buzzing about The Times' critical four-part series on the United Farm Workers, published last week. But many wonder why the newspaper devoted so many words and resources to this front-page attack on the UFW but fails to routinely cover the day-to-day work of union organizing and, equally important, the job conditions that workers face.

You can usually count on The Times to cover unions when they strike. When several major unions recently bolted from the AFL-CIO to form an alternative labor group, the newspaper ran several stories about internal union disputes that led to the rupture and the possible consequences for the labor movement. Two years ago, The Times' series on Wal-Mart's treatment of its workers and worldwide business operations won several top journalism prizes.

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Contest and Consequences

Contest and Consequences
A labor union's $100,000 contest inviting its networked community to submit fresh ideas on how to improve the lives of working Americans has sparked an online revolt.
By Jan Frel, AlterNet

It was supposed to be one of the Service Employees International Union's leaps into bottom-up online consensus building, but the community blowback at the Since Sliced Bread project that broke out this week has all the appearances of being an online revolt.

Since Sliced Bread is a $100,000 contest inviting people to send in ideas to improve the lives of working people in America. As described by SEIU on the site: The contest encouraged ordinary Americans, policy experts and economists to enter fresh ideas on how to create the kinds of jobs that allow people to raise families, obtain affordable health insurance, pay for college and save for retirement."

The design of Since Sliced Bread appeared in many respects fairly open and bottom-up oriented. Anyone could send in proposals. Visitors were encouraged to participate in the community blog.

A staggering number of ideas -- more than 22,000 -- were submitted in a matter of months. After the deadline for submissions passed, a group of "diverse experts" winnowed them down to 70. Then, each of the contest's judges, who come from a variety of fields and across the political spectrum, voted for 21 finalists, who will all appear in a "Since Sliced Bread" book with an introduction by SEIU president Andy Stern.

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Manifesto Finishes With Happy Ending

Sex Workers' Manifesto

We come from many different countries and many different backgrounds, but we have discovered that we face many of same problems in our work and in our lives.

Within this document we explore the current inequalities and injustices within our lives and the sex industry; question their origin; confront and challenge them and put forward our vision of changes that are needed to create a more equitable society in which sex workers, their rights and labour are acknowledged and valued.

This manifesto was elaborated and endorsed by 120 sex workers from 26 countries at the European Conference on Sex Work, Human Rights, Labour and Migration 15 - 17 October 2005, Brussels, Belgium.

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Grasping at straws is a sad existence

Direct Action Gets the Goods! IWW Chicago Victory for Unpaid Worker

On January 14, 2005, members of the Chicago General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World labor union (IWW) called for an informational picket to boycott the Ideal Hand Car Wash in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood after the managers and owners of the business refused to pay Neil Rysdahl, a longtime member of the IWW, the $227.50 he was owed for over 45 hours of work he preformed for them.

The highly visible protest began at 8 AM, with a small but dedicated group of picketers banging bucket drums, shaking noisemakers, passing out leaflets, and carrying signs reading, “Ideal Car Wash Cheats Workers,” and “An Injury to One is an Injury to All!” Notably, one picketer dressed in a clown costume held a sign reading, “Ideal Bosses Are Bozos!” to mock the clown Ideal usually uses to attract customers.

Humboldt Park Food Not Bombs showed up to serve bread, pastry, hummus, and coffee, and joined in the picket. “I knew this was an important picket to support because it was an opportunity to make a real difference in someone’s life through direct action,” said Robert Clack, a member of Humboldt Park Food Not Bombs.

The picket effectively shut down business at the car wash for the morning, as most drivers who intended to patronize Ideal drove away after talking with picketers or seeing signs blasting the business for unfair labor practices.

After only three hours of picketing, Eduardo “Eddie” Amanero, a manager of the car wash, agreed to pay Rysdahl in full, in cash, on the spot, in order to bring an end to the picket.

“The point of all this is, if you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us,” said Patrick Brenner, a members of the National Executive Board of the IWW. “We stick up for our members.”

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