labor

Study Group: Fast Food Workers, Recent Strikes, and "Alternative" Labor

Photo: Jenny Brown Originally posted on Labor Notes

Saturday September 21st: 6-8 PM
Community Church of Boston
565 Boylston Street, Boston, MA (Copley Square)

This Summer, fast food workers across the country have launched strikes and pushed for unions and better jobs. SEIU has played a large role in this movement, utilizing a "new" or "alternative" labor model, supporting smaller, independent workers' initiatives, organizing symbolic strikes, and pushing for a higher national minimum wage. Locally, workers at Insomnia Cookies recently launched a strike and joined the Industrial Workers of the World.

"I work on what’s called a “recirculating” aquaculture farm. We’re still trying to maximize fish production, but we deal with the waste problem by closing the loop, doing our own water treatment on site and re-using as much of the water as we can. We have very high stocking densities -- let’s say twenty to thirty thousand fish, in tanks the size of swimming pools. Dozens of these tanks can fit together within one warehouse building. The water they swim in is constantly flushed out, filtered or treated in several ways, and pumped back in clean. The solids that are removed in the treatment process are stored and sold for fertilizer. So the water in the tanks “recirculates,” in parallel, and the tanks share a number of supplementary systems that help maintain an optimal growing (“culture”) environment: heating, feed, chemical regulation, and so on. We grow them for about a year, with each fish ending up as about a pound of meat when fileted. The idea is that this basic design can be scaled up to make really huge farms. Ours is a really huge farm."
Red Herring, fish farmer interviewed by Flint Arthur

THE SCHOLARSʼ MESSAGE OF SOLIDARITY TO IMPRISONED IRANIAN WORKERS
To imprisoned workers of Iran:

Dear friends,

This yearʼs International Workersʼ Day is approaching at a time when you are in prison. We know that among you there are many like Farzad Kamangar who sacrificed his life to defend the human dignity of the humble masses that are forced to sell their labour for meagre wages. And there are many more of you who like Mansour Osanloo, Ebrahim Madadi, Behnam Ebrahimzadeh, Reza Shahabi and others, have languished in prison with many dark years still ahead simply for defending workersʼ basic human rights.

Others who have gone to prison for organizing workers have continued to be punished by the ruling legal and political regime after their release, being forced out of work and thus deprived of their only source of income, creating unbearable conditions for them and their families. The government, judiciary and intelligence machinery in Iran have proven that any attempt by workers to establish independent labour organizations and defend their livelihood will be met with swift vengeance, a fact that violates both international agreements Iran is a party to and tramples on the governmentʼs own laws.