Community Activist Join Labor Against Phony "Trade" Deal (tags)
Progressive San Diego's official opposition to the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — a NAFTA-like agreement seeking to subject the U.S. and a wide range of other countries to corporate dictatorship — began July 2 with a rally outside the Bayfront Hilton Hotel, where the TPP's negotiators are meeting. Speakers from labor, environmental, women's and Queer organizations explained what the TPP means to them and why it should be stopped.
Longshore Workers, Truckers: Shut the Ports, Coast to Coast! (tags)
Following the nationally-coordinated police evictions last month of Occupy Wall Street and encampments across the country, on December 12 the Occupiers struck back. Ports up and down the West Coast were blockaded, from Seattle to San Diego. Despite a barrage of hostile propaganda in the media, opposition from union bureaucrats and heavy police repression in some places, overall the blockade was successful -- this time. The blockade was called in solidarity with longshore workers fighting a union-busting assault in Longview, Washington and port truckers seeking union recognition in the ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach. This support should have been greeted. But now the class war on the West Coast docks is coming to a head, and it can't be waged from the outside. Bay Area labor has called for a caravan to Longview. The goal should be a real occupation of the terminal by the workers to prevent the loading of the scab cargo. Longshore militants have called on the longshore unions to shut down every port on the West Coast, and the East and Gulf Coasts, to smash EGT's union-busting. Can it be done? Yes, but only though sharp struggle against the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy.
SEIU International Attacks Labor Gathering - Conference Goers Assaulted. (tags)
When you are trying to put the movement back into the labor movement, you’re going to meet resistance.
Third Circuit Court Upholds Frame-Up Conviction of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Orders Hearing to Reinstate Death Penalty or Entomb Him for Life ! Free Mumia Now!
Confronting U.S. Empire: Reviewing Filipino American Insurgent Intellectual Production (tags)
This new intervention by internationally renowned Filipino scholar E. SAN JUAN, Jr. signals a renewed self-reflection by the Filipino American community and the entire diaspora of nearly 10 million Overseas Contract Workers.
In the light of the profound economic and political crisis in the Philippines today, what could be the significance of celebrating the one-hundred year anniversary of the coming of Filipino contract labor to Hawaii? Are Filipinos the new compradors for the militarist U.S. Empire? Or are they harbingers of a new generation of combatants from the oppressed communities? At the turn of the century, the revolutionary organizer Rosa Luxemburg elegized the dismal plight of the subjugated natives. Today, US Special Forces are back to reconquer the neocolony, with the natives no longer smiling, now up in arms, united with people of color in Venezuela, Palestine, Hawaii, Nepal, Mexico, and other battlefronts of our beleaguered planet. Whither the Filipino diaspora?
THE FILIPINO PEASANT IMAGINATION VERSUS AMERICAN LEFTISM (tags)
The following remarks are intended to supplement the author's paper "Blueprint for a Bulosan Project" posted in the online journal OUR OWN VOICE. This essay critiques the position of "leftists" in the elite U.S. academies who claim a "manifest destiny" to civilize colonized subalterns and peasant radicals like the Filipino writer Carlos Bulosan who (they claim) have failed to take "America" out of a transnationalizing U.S. Studies. Are we seeing a replay of the "Thomasites" who produced generations of neocolonized "little brown brothers" now serving U.S. imperialist aggression in Iraq, Aghanistan, Palestine, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and in the Philippines, its former direct colony? "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea...."
Self-educated at the Los Angeles Public Library in the Thirties, Carlos Bulosan, the militant Filipino writer and labor activist, died on September 11, 1956. His death anniversary last month provided the occasion for the Filipino community to celebrate his contribution to the revolutionary struggle of peoples everywhere for justice, dignity, and self-determination. Bulosan was part of the community of progressive Los Angeles-based intellectuals (Carey McWilliams, Sanora Babb, Louis Adamic, Ring Lardner Jr. and others) victimized by McCarthyism and fascist reaction. His example of resistance continues to inspire people of color everywhere.
[gangbox] TROQUEROS REVOLT.... (tags)
TROQUEROS REVOLT....can the California port truckers wildcat strike lead to the reunionization of the freight industry???
[gangbox] THE JAVITS CENTER SHUFFLE (tags)
THE JAVITS CENTER SHUFFLE...discrimination, unequal distribution of work and the pitfalls of seeking workplace justice in the court system at New York City's convention center
Nautical Ecocide Threatens the World's Aquarium (tags)
(versión en Español pendiente) Analysis of the Escalera Nautica or Nautical Stairway project in Northwest Mexico, with regards to environmental impact and global economic forces.
The ILWU From Bridges to Spinosa (tags)
Great article on the dockworkers
Bush rewards bosses, invokes Taft-Hartley (tags)
LOS ANGELES – The labor movement reacted with outrage to George W. Bush’s decision to invoke the unionbusting Taft-Hartley Act to end an employer lockout of the West Coast International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). It was the first use of the law against the union since Richard Nixon invoked it in 1971 to interrupt a strike.
Networked Web/Microradio Broadcast of Major Portworkers Rally (tags)
The Portworkers Rally at the Port of Oakland at 11:00 am on June 27, 2002 will be broadcast over a web/microradio network along the West Coast. A live microradio broadcast from the Port of Oakland will be received by the SF IMC and web cast to other IMC's, where the streams will be picked up and broadcast via the Internet and microradio, such as on www.killradio.org.
Building Bridges Internet Radio presents:Update on the Case of the Charleston 5 (tags)
Building Bridges: Your Community and Labor Report in Exile presents this 58 internet radio program featuring the Ken Riley, President of Charleston, S.C. Longshore Local1422.BUILDING BRIDGES IS NOW BROADCAST OVER WBAI IN EXILE www.wbix.org ON TUESDAYS AT 9PM EST-