Download or read book Solidarity Unionism at Starbucks written by Staughton Lynd and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Legendary legal scholar Staughton Lynd teams up with influential labor organizer Daniel Gross in this exposition on solidarity unionism, the do-it-yourself workplace organizing system that is rapidly gaining prominence around the country and around the world. Lynd and Gross make the audacious argument that workers themselves on the shop floor, not outside union officials, are the real hope for labor’s future. Utilizing the principles of solidarity unionism, any group of co-workers, like the workers at Starbucks, can start building an organization to win an independent voice at work without waiting for a traditional trade union to come and “organize” them. Indeed, in a leaked recording of a conference call, the nation’s most prominent union-busting lobbyist coined a term, “the Starbucks problem,” as a warning to business executives about the risk of working people organizing themselves and taking direct action to improve issues at work. Combining history and theory with the groundbreaking practice of the model used by Starbucks workers, Lynd and Gross make a compelling case for solidarity unionism as an effective, resilient, and deeply democratic approach to winning a voice on the job and in society.

Download or read book Solidarity Unionism at Starbucks written by Daniel Gross and published by PM Pamphlet. This book was released on 2011 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Legendary legal scholar Staughton Lynd teams up with influential labor organizer Daniel Gross in this exposition on solidarity unionism, the do-it-yourself workplace organizing system that is rapidly gaining prominence around the country and around the world. Lynd and Gross make the audacious argument that workers themselves on the shop floor, not outside union officials, are the real hope for labor's future. Utilizing the principles of solidarity unionism, any group of co-workers, like the workers at Starbucks, can start building an organization to win an independent voice at work without waiting for a traditional trade union to come and "organize" them. Indeed, in a leaked recording of a conference call, the nation's most prominent union-busting lobbyist coined a term, "the Starbucks problem," as a warning to business executives about the risk of working people organizing themselves and taking direct action to improve issues at work. Combining history and theory with the groundbreaking practice of the model used by Starbucks workers, Lynd and Gross make a compelling case for solidarity unionism as an effective, resilient, and deeply democratic approach to winning a voice on the job and in society.

Download or read book Solidarity Unionism written by Staughton Lynd and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2015-04-15 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Solidarity Unionism is critical reading for all who care about the future of labor. Drawing deeply on Staughton Lynd's experiences as a labor lawyer and activist in Youngstown, OH, and on his profound understanding of the history of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Solidarity Unionism helps us begin to put not only movement but also vision back into the labor movement. While many lament the decline of traditional unions, Lynd takes succor in the blossoming of rank-and-file worker organizations throughout the world that are countering rapacious capitalists and those comfortable labor leaders that think they know more about work and struggle than their own members. If we apply a new measure of workers’ power that is deeply rooted in gatherings of workers and communities, the bleak and static perspective about the sorry state of labor today becomes bright and dynamic. To secure the gains of solidarity unions, Staughton has proposed parallel bodies of workers who share the principles of rank-and-file solidarity and can coordinate the activities of local workers’ assemblies. Detailed and inspiring examples include experiments in workers' self-organization across industries in steel-producing Youngstown, as well as horizontal networks of solidarity formed in a variety of U.S. cities and successful direct actions overseas. This is a tradition that workers understand but labor leaders reject. After so many failures, it is time to frankly recognize that the century-old system of recognition of a single union as exclusive collective bargaining agent was fatally flawed from the beginning and doesn’t work for most workers. If we are to live with dignity, we must collectively resist. This book is not a prescription but reveals the lived experience of working people continuously taking risks for the common good.

Download or read book New Forms of Worker Organization written by Immanuel Ness and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bureaucratic labor unions are under assault. Most unions have surrendered the achievements of the mid-twentieth century, when the working class was a militant force for change throughout the world. Now trade unions seem incapable of defending, let alone advancing, workers’ interests. As unions implode and weaken, workers are independently forming their own unions, drawing on the tradition of syndicalism and autonomism—a resurgence of self-directed action that augurs a new period of class struggle throughout the world. In Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe, workers are rejecting leaders and forming authentic class-struggle unions rooted in sabotage, direct action, and striking to achieve concrete gains. This is the first book to compile workers’ struggles on a global basis, examining the formation and expansion of radical unions in the Global South and Global North. The tangible evidence marshaled in this book serves as a handbook for understanding the formidable obstacles and concrete opportunities for workers challenging neoliberal capitalism, even as the unions of the old decline and disappear. Contributors include Au Loong-Yu, Bai Ruixue, Shawn Hattingh, Piotr Bizyukov, Irina Olimpieva, Genese M. Sodikoff, Aviva Chomsky, Dario Bursztyn, Gabriel Kuhn, Erik Forman, Steven Manicastri, Arup Kumar Sen, Verity Burgmann, Ray Jureidini, Meredith Burgmann, and Jack Kirkpatrick.

Download or read book A History of America in Ten Strikes written by Erik Loomis and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recommended by The Nation, the New Republic, Current Affairs, Bustle, In These Times An “entertaining, tough-minded, and strenuously argued” (The Nation) account of ten moments when workers fought to change the balance of power in America “A brilliantly recounted American history through the prism of major labor struggles, with critically important lessons for those who seek a better future for working people and the world.” —Noam Chomsky Powerful and accessible, A History of America in Ten Strikes challenges all of our contemporary assumptions around labor, unions, and American workers. In this brilliant book, labor historian Erik Loomis recounts ten critical workers' strikes in American labor history that everyone needs to know about (and then provides an annotated list of the 150 most important moments in American labor history in the appendix). From the Lowell Mill Girls strike in the 1830s to Justice for Janitors in 1990, these labor uprisings do not just reflect the times in which they occurred, but speak directly to the present moment. For example, we often think that Lincoln ended slavery by proclaiming the slaves emancipated, but Loomis shows that they freed themselves during the Civil War by simply withdrawing their labor. He shows how the hopes and aspirations of a generation were made into demands at a GM plant in Lordstown in 1972. And he takes us to the forests of the Pacific Northwest in the early nineteenth century where the radical organizers known as the Wobblies made their biggest inroads against the power of bosses. But there were also moments when the movement was crushed by corporations and the government; Loomis helps us understand the present perilous condition of American workers and draws lessons from both the victories and defeats of the past. In crystalline narratives, labor historian Erik Loomis lifts the curtain on workers' struggles, giving us a fresh perspective on American history from the boots up. Strikes include: Lowell Mill Girls Strike (Massachusetts, 1830–40) Slaves on Strike (The Confederacy, 1861–65) The Eight-Hour Day Strikes (Chicago, 1886) The Anthracite Strike (Pennsylvania, 1902) The Bread and Roses Strike (Massachusetts, 1912) The Flint Sit-Down Strike (Michigan, 1937) The Oakland General Strike (California, 1946) Lordstown (Ohio, 1972) Air Traffic Controllers (1981) Justice for Janitors (Los Angeles, 1990)

Download or read book Wobblies and Zapatistas written by Staughton Lynd and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2008-09-01 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wobblies and Zapatistas offers the reader an encounter between two generations and two traditions. Andrej Grubačić is an anarchist from the Balkans. Staughton Lynd is a lifelong pacifist, influenced by Marxism. They meet in dialogue in an effort to bring together the anarchist and Marxist traditions, to discuss the writing of history by those who make it, and to remind us of the idea that “my country is the world.” Encompassing a Left-libertarian perspective and an emphatically activist standpoint, these conversations are meant to be read in the clubs and affinity groups of the new Movement. The authors accompany us on a journey through modern revolutions, direct actions, antiglobalist counter-summits, Freedom Schools, Zapatista cooperatives, Haymarket and Petrograd, Hanoi and Belgrade, “intentional” communities, wildcat strikes, early Protestant communities, Native American democratic practices, the Workers’ Solidarity Club of Youngstown, occupied factories, self-organized councils and soviets, the lives of forgotten revolutionaries, Quaker meetings, antiwar movements, and prison rebellions. Neglected and forgotten moments of interracial self-activity are brought to light. The book invites the attention of readers who believe that a better world, on the other side of capitalism and state bureaucracy, may indeed be possible.

Download or read book Lucasville written by Staughton Lynd and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2011-03-07 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucasville tells the story of one of the longest prison uprisings in U.S. history. At the maximum-security Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, Ohio, prisoners seized a major area of the prison on Easter Sunday, 1993. More than 400 prisoners held L block for eleven days. Nine prisoners alleged to have been informants, or “snitches,” and one hostage correctional officer, were murdered. There was a negotiated surrender. Thereafter, almost wholly on the basis of testimony by prisoner informants who received deals in exchange, five spokespersons or leaders were tried and sentenced to death, and more than a dozen others received long sentences. Lucasville examines the causes of the disturbance, what happened during the eleven days, and the fairness of the trials. Particular emphasis is placed on the interracial character of the action, as evidenced in the slogans that were found painted on walls after the surrender: “Black and White Together,” “Convict Unity,” and “Convict Race.” An eloquent Foreword by Mumia Abu-Jamal underlines these themes. He states, as does the book, that the men later sentenced to death “sought to minimize violence, and indeed, according to substantial evidence, saved the lives of several men, prisoner and guard alike.” Of the five men, three black and two white, who were sentenced to death, Mumia declares, “They rose above their status as prisoners, and became, for a few days in April 1993, what rebels in Attica had demanded a generation before them: men. As such, they did not betray each other; they did not dishonor each other; they reached beyond their prison ‘tribes’ to reach commonality.”

Download or read book Homestead Steel Mill the Final Ten Years written by Mike Stout and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2020-06-01 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning the famous Homestead steel strike of 1892 through the century-long fight for a union and union democracy, Homestead Steel Mill—the Final Ten Years is a case history on the vitality of organized labor. Written by fellow worker and musician Mike Stout, the book is an insider’s portrait of the union at the U.S. Steel’s Homestead Works, specifically the workers, activists, and insurgents that made up the radically democratic Rank and File Caucus from 1977 to 1987. Developing its own “inside-outside” approach to unionism, the Rank and File Caucus drastically expanded their sphere of influence so that, in addition to fighting for their own rights as workers, they fought to prevent the closures of other steel plants, opposed U.S. imperialism in Central America, fought for civil rights, and built strategic coalitions with local environmental groups. Mike Stout skillfully chronicles his experience in the takeover and restructuring of the union’s grievance procedure at Homestead by regular workers and put at the service of its thousands of members. Stout writes with raw honesty and pulls no punches when recounting the many foibles and setbacks he experienced along the way. The Rank and File Caucus was a profound experiment in democracy that was aided by the 1397 Rank and File newspaper—an ultimate expression of truth, democracy, and free speech that guaranteed every union member a valuable voice. Profusely illustrated with dozens of photographs, Homestead Steel Mill—the Final Ten Years is labor history at its best, providing a vivid account of how ordinary workers can radicalize their unions.

Download or read book Solidarity Divided written by Bill Fletcher and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-10-19 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The US trade union movement finds itself on a global battlefield filled with landmines and littered with the bodies of various social movements and struggles. Candid, incisive, and accessible, this text is a critical examination of labour's crisis and a plan for a bold way forward into the 21st century.

Download or read book Red State Revolt written by Eric Blanc and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An indispensable window into the changing shape of the American working class and American politics Thirteen months after Trump allegedly captured the allegiance of “the white working class,” a strike wave—the first in over four decades—rocked the United States. Inspired by the wildcat victory in West Virginia, teachers in Oklahoma, Arizona, and across the country walked off their jobs and shut down their schools to demand better pay for educators, more funding for students, and an end to years of austerity. Confounding all expectations, these working-class rebellions erupted in regions with Republican electorates, weak unions, and bans on public sector strikes. By mobilizing to take their destinies into their own hands, red state school workers posed a clear alternative to politics as usual. And with similar actions now gaining steam in Los Angeles, Oakland, Denver, and Virginia, there is no sign that this upsurge will be short-lived. Red State Revolt is a compelling analysis of the emergence and development of this historic strike wave, with an eye to extracting its main strategic lessons for educators, labor organizer, and radicals across the country. A former high school teacher and longtime activist, Eric Blanc embedded himself into the rank-and-file leaderships of the walkouts, where he was given access to internal organizing meetings and secret Facebook groups inaccessible to most journalists. The result is one of the richest portraits of the labor movement to date, a story populated with the voices of school workers who are winning the fight for the soul of public education—and redrawing the political map of the country at large.

Download or read book Reviving the Strike written by Joe Burns and published by Ig Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the revival of the classic production-halting strike is the best hope for a revitalization of the labor movement.

Download or read book Rebel Voices written by Joyce L. Kornbluh and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 1426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Welcoming women, Blacks, and immigrants long before most other unions, the Wobblies from the start were labor’s outstanding pioneers and innovators, unionizing hundreds of thousands of workers previously regarded as “unorganizable.” Wobblies organized the first sit-down strike (at General Electric, Schenectady, 1906), the first major auto strike (6,000 Studebaker workers, Detroit, 1911), the first strike to shut down all three coalfields in Colorado (1927), and the first “no-fare” transit-workers’ job-action (Cleveland, 1944). With their imaginative, colorful, and world-famous strikes and free-speech fights, the IWW wrote many of the brightest pages in the annals of working class emancipation. Wobblies also made immense and invaluable contributions to workers’ culture. All but a few of America’s most popular labor songs are Wobbly songs. IWW cartoons have long been recognized as labor’s finest and funniest. The impact of the IWW has reverberated far beyond the ranks of organized labor. An important influence on the 1960s New Left, the Wobbly theory and practice of direct action, solidarity, and “class-war” humor have inspired several generations of civil rights and antiwar activists, and are a major source of ideas and inspiration for today’s radicals. Indeed, virtually every movement seeking to “make this planet a good place to live” (to quote an old Wobbly slogan), has drawn on the IWW’s incomparable experience. Originally published in 1964 and long out of print, Rebel Voices remains by far the biggest and best source on IWW history, fiction, songs, art, and lore. This new edition includes 40 pages of additional material from the 1998 Charles H. Kerr edition from Fred Thompson and Franklin Rosemont, and a new preface by Wobbly organizer Daniel Gross.

Download or read book Globalization and Labour in the Twenty First Century written by Verity Burgmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license.Globalization has adversely affected working-class organization and mobilization, increasing inequality by redistribution upwards from labour to capital. However, workers around the world are challenging their increased exploitation by globalizing corporations. In developed countries, many unions are transforming themselves to confront employer power in ways more appropriate to contemporary circumstances; in developing countries, militant new labour movements are emerging. Drawing upon insights in anti-determinist Marxian perspectives, Verity Burgmann shows how working-class resistance is not futile, as protagonists of globalization often claim. She identifies eight characteristics of globalization harmful to workers and describes and analyses how they have responded collectively to these problems since 1990 and especially this century. With case studies from around the world, including Greece since 2008, she pays particular attention to new types of labour movement organization and mobilization that are not simply defensive reactions but are offensive and innovative responses that compel corporations or political institutions to change. Aging and less agile manifestations of the labour movement decline while new expressions of working-class organization and mobilization arise to better battle with corporate globalization. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of labour studies, globalization, political economy, Marxism and sociology of work.

Download or read book That Precious Strand of Jewishness That Challenges Authority written by Leon Rosselson and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2017-07-01 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “For my parents and grandparents, Jewish identity, in religion, culture and language, was a given. Not so for me. I’m not religious, not a Zionist, so in what consists my Jewishness? Is a love of chopped liver and a belief that chicken soup cures all ills enough? And does it matter? This is the story of my search for answers. It is an argument with myself, with song lyrics to embellish the argument.” Like so many of those others in Britain of Jewish lineage, songwriter and award-winning folk singer Leon Rosselson is descended from antecedents who fled pogroms in eastern Europe. Pertinently, he questions what being a Jew means—is it adherence to Judaism as a religion, an ethnicity, a citizen of Israel, or someone who eats “chicken soup with knedlach”? He describes clearly and with historical insight how any concept of “Jewishness” can involve all of those things and more. In his own life, he has decided to pick and choose from this tradition and history and build on what he deems to be the progressive, humane, and universalist values of that Jewish background. Rosselson is a strong supporter of Palestinian rights, seeing in the victimization of Palestinians by the state of Israel parallels with historical Jewish persecution. He concludes this short essay by stating: “I share with the growing number of Jews in the diaspora who place solidarity with the oppressed above demands of tribalism and with those in Israel who dare to stand against the powers that be.”

Download or read book Venceremos written by Gabriel San Román and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the socialist politician Salvador Allende dramatically won Chile’s presidential election in 1970, a powerful cultural movement accompanied him to power. Folk singers emerged at the forefront, proving that music could help forge the birth of a new society. As the CIA actively funded opposition media against Allende during his campaign, the New Chilean Song Movement rose to prominence, viscerally persuading voters with its music. Víctor Jara, a central protagonist at the time, became an icon in Chile, Latin America, and beyond for his revolutionary lyrics and life. Inti-Illimani, Quilapayún, and other musicians contributed by singing before audiences of workers outside factories or campesinos in Chile’s rural countryside. A short cultural history, “Venceremos“ charts the development of the movement from the years before Allende’s victorious campaign to the brutal U.S.-backed military coup on September 11, 1973, that overthrew his presidency and imposed the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Featuring interviews from key figures and lyrical analysis, “Venceremos“ gives insight into how the New Chilean Song Movement’s revolutionary anthems came to be. From the early folkloric documentation of Violeta Parra in Chile’s countryside to “Venceremos,“ the triumphant anthem of Allende’s Popular Unity Coalition, the music of Chile’s Nueva Canción was shaped by the larger history occurring all around it. Within the songs, all the hopes, dreams and apprehensions of the nation were reflected. At the same time, as its influence grew, the cultural movement claimed its own principal space as catalyst of not only Chile’s musical but its political future as well. So dangerous were its creations that the Pinochet dictatorship censored and attempted to destroy them. Most tragically, Víctor Jara’s life was taken in the bloody repression that immediately followed the coup.

Download or read book On Community Civil Disobedience in the Name of Sustainability written by Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2015-08-01 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humanity stands at the brink of global environmental and economic collapse. We have pinned our future to an economic system that centralizes power in fewer and fewer hands, and whose benefits increasingly flow to smaller and smaller numbers of people. Our system of government is similarly medieval—relying on a 1780s constitutional form of government written to guarantee the exploitation of the natural environment and elevate “the endless production of more” over the rights of people, nature, and their communities. But right now, people within the community rights movement aren’t waiting for power brokers to fix the system. They’re beginning to envision a new sustainability constitution by adopting new laws at the local level that are forcing those ideas upward into the state and national ones. In doing so, they are directly challenging the basic operating system of this country—one which currently elevates corporate “rights” above the rights of people, nature, and their communities—and changing it into one which recognizes a right to local, community self-government that cannot be overridden by corporations, or by governments wielded by corporate interests. This short primer from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund explores and describes the philosophy and underpinnings of the community rights movement that has emerged in the United States­—a movement of nonviolent civil disobedience based on municipal lawmaking.

Download or read book Events and Victims written by Bartolomeo Vanzetti and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work by Bartolomeo Vanzetti, edited and with a detailed introduction by Jon Curley, features a never-before-published short story by this famous anarchist and victim of legal persecution, xenophobia, and condemnation for his radical politics. That fact that Vanzetti, an Italian immigrant, learned to write in English while jailed for a capital crime is remarkable enough. What is even more astonishing is that he chose to use his new language skills to write creatively, inventing a parable about worker exploitation and environmental disaster that is as relevant today as it was almost one hundred years ago when this prisoner took up his pen. “Events and Victims” allows Vanzetti a new literary and historical voice, an important document that narrates the very injustice that its author suffered and fought. In a time of assault on immigrants, dissidents, radicals, and the environment, “Events and Victims” is as timely as ever.