Blogs

Earlier today I had an unpleasant experience. I was forced to remember that Carol Malone, her yachting blazers, and bouffant wig, still existed.

Ordinarily, an individual, who in the name of journalism – claimed that illegal immigrant receive free cars, and that the Philpott deaths were an accident waiting to happen because they claimed benefits – would live long in the memory.

Much thinking in the United States around how to work against this system tends to speak as if our tasks are fairly fixed. Generally, people searching for how to organize look to radically different contexts than our own.

Trigger Warning: Rape

It is certainly not a coincidence that Electrolux’s proposal came just after the signing of the new agreement on union representation, when in the eyes of big business the Italian unions look friendlier than ever.

There were logistics workers not only from Granarolo’s own warehouse but also from other warehouses across Northern Italy, where strikes and protests have been taking place almost every day for months.

Recent waves of protests in the US have given us useful examples to understand how American revolutionaries can work out our politics in practice. IWW members and branches in particular have witnessed renewed interest and potential in class conflicts, organizing, and aspects of its politics.

This month there has been news from Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. This month I haven't provided my own summaries or filtered articles for some countries.

[i]This entry is a two-part story from contributor Phinneas Gage about a wildcat strike by contractors at the Canadian postal service, and continues our coverage of struggles within Canada Post. In the course of the strike, union workers had to figure out how to relate to contractors and where scabbing starts and solidarity ends.

The court has ruled, so the legalized looting of Detroit will go ahead as Governor Snyder has planned. The Emergency Manager has ordered the DIA to provide him with a list of the values of the many artworks in the institute. The city water works are also probably going to be sold, as well as city parks and anything else they can get a nickel for.

OK, so the “little person” has been fighting against wage theft, low wages, and harsh working and living conditions for years. Sometimes alone and lonely, sometimes collectively and in a self-managed way. For the past year or so, mainstream labor, through various grass-roots and top-down efforts has tried to coordinate the fight against poverty wages.

Golden Dawn supporters returned to the streets of Athens on Saturday 25th January. Dozens of fascists once again marched through the neighbourhood of Keratsini, the same area where Golden Dawn members murdered Pavlos Fyssas in September.

All four can now resume their old jobs because, thanks to various cover-ups which slowed the case down, they have not been dismissed from the police force.

On January 23, after four days of picketing, around a hundred of them organized by the base union SI COBAS together with other logistics workers, activists from local radical organizations and social centers, blockaded the road connecting the warehouse to the city and the national highway network.

After reading Wotsits experiences of the Jobcentre, it got me thinking about my own time there too. But I don't really have much to add, in fact mine would be rather tame since I left the Job Centre before they brought most of that stuff in.

The strikers, according to spokesperson Sergio Vargas, will return to work tomorrow (Sunday) after the bosses agreed to make a one-time retroactive payment for unpaid meal breaks going back to 2005.

PCS is best known as the civil servants’ union, however it has members in various areas of the private sector due to privatisation and outsourcing. This includes workers for Hewlett Packard who before 1995, with several contract transfers in between, were civil servants in the Department for Social Security’s (now the DWP) IT Services Agency.

Background

This year, there will be a referendum on Scottish Independence. Next year, there will be a UK general election. Both of these events are the source of considerable hope and excitement on the left, because either or both offer the opportunity for change.

On the morning of Thursday, January 9, 2014, 7500 gallons of a coal cleaning chemical known as Crude MCHM (principally composed of 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol) leaked from a storage tank and then from a containment wall at a facility on the banks of the Elk River in West Virginia.

Fabio Zerbini is a co-ordinator for the SI Cobas, a base union that is active in the logistics and warehouse sector. A few days before he had found his car’s side-view mirror broken. A note had been left on his windscreen with an apology and a phone number to call to arrange a meeting to refund the damage.

The agreement regulates relations between Confindustria (the major employers’ organization in Italy) and the three confederal unions CGIL, CISL and UIL, and limits workers’ trade union rights severely. It sets out that only those unions which signed the 31 May agreement can take part in negotiations about workers’ future. What’s more, it has introduced a system of ‘certification’ for members.