WOMAN – LIFE – FREEDOM! زن- زندگی- آزادی

آدرس و اسامی صفحات مرتبط با فدراسیون عصر آنارشیسم

Federation of Anarchism Era Social Media Pages

Urgent appeal for unity and mass action: Demand Amazon and Starbucks recognize unions now!

 Support Amazon Workers Network, Workers World, 15/8/2022

The Support Amazon Workers Network issued the following call for mass solidarity actions Aug. 10. By Aug. 14 close to 200 organizations and individuals from many states and other countries have signed in support.

Pro-union Starbucks workers, Lansing, Michigan. Credit: Workers United

 Warning: The worker organizing wave is in danger because of union busting!

The national wave of union organizing and militancy spearheaded by Starbucks workers and Amazon workers is the biggest upsurge in worker organizing since the 1930s and 1940s. The organizing wave has spread to Trader Joe’s, Chipotle, Apple, REI and a growing list of chain stores and industries. 

However, this uprising of workers, which holds the potential of not only saving the labor movement but transforming it, is under life-threatening attack. We must unite in defense of the brave young workers that are the vanguard of this transformative workers struggle.

We propose these dates for coordinated mass actions across the country:

Monday, Sept. 5, Labor Day (or around that date, depending on the city): Organize a presence at Labor Day marches or organize your own action; the Amazon Labor Union is holding an action with Starbucks Workers United in New York City, Sept. 5.

Thursday, Sept. 8: Attend a national virtual planning meeting for the days of coordinated mass actions.

Thursday, Sept. 29: Put on a pro-union protest action on “National Coffee Day,” promoted by Starbucks management.

Saturday, Oct. 1: The six-month anniversary of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) election victory on April 1 (which up to this point Amazon has refused to recognize) (and also International Coffee Day).

Amazon Labor Union celebrates election win outside NLRB offices, New York City, April 1.

 From their corporate boardrooms down to their worksite managers, Starbucks and Amazon are engaged in an outright war to crush the organizing wave. 

Starbucks is firing union organizers, closing stores, cutting workers hours and denying pro-union workers wage increases and benefits. Starbucks workers are fighting back. Starbucks Workers United is still winning union elections all over the country and flexing its muscles with walkouts and strikes.

Amazon is determined to overturn the historic April 1 Amazon Labor Union victory in Staten Island, New York, and crush the ALU. At the same time, new ALU chapters are forming around the country. Amazon workers in North Carolina have formed Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment (CAUSE) and are getting stronger every day. Amazon workers everywhere, including in Amazonians United and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union in Alabama, are coming together in spite of their different approaches to organizing. 

In order for these groundbreaking battles to defeat union busting, immensely greater forces must join and strengthen them.

Howard Schultz and Jeff Bezos are this year’s poster boys for union busting. But efforts to crush the workers uprising are by no means limited to Starbucks and Amazon owners. Wall Street and the U.S. capitalist class are fully behind this war to destroy a new workers movement before it spreads further.

Our response to this threat must be equal to the danger. A level of mass solidarity and mass mobilization in defense of workers on the front line is required — greater than anything we have seen in our lifetimes. Unified organizing and widespread mass solidarity is absolutely central to the continuation of this historic transformation of the working-class movement.

At stake is nothing less than the long awaited and necessary evolution of the working-class movement, from its present weak state to a more radical, militant, inclusive and classwide movement that:

*Is led by rank and file workers;

*Is not dominated by business unionism;

*Is not dependent upon or subservient to the Democratic Party;

*Views all struggles as workers struggles, including the fight against racism, the fight for access to abortion, the antiwar struggle, the struggle to stop climate disaster, the struggle for LGBTQ2S+ rights, the struggle of incarcerated workers and the struggle for full access and justice for people with disabilities;

*Is a vital part of the struggle against evictions and all community struggles;

*Prioritizes the most oppressed workers, including migrant workers;

*Wants to be part of a militant global workers movement; and

*Is strong enough to smash the threat of fascism.

A growing section of the left is now engaged in varying levels of solidarity work with these critical workers struggles. But as of yet, the left’s commitment to this struggle is alarmingly insufficient. While some in the organized labor movement are taking the need for solidarity against union busting seriously, unfortunately most of the top leadership of the labor movement remain unmoved by this threat and have focused on electoral politics and reliance on the Democratic Party. 

This must change. Now is the time to intensify the pressure to compel that change.

This week’s PDF

 

International appeal of support for the people of Sri Lanka!

We are activists, workers, students, intellectuals, artists and internationalists who live in France and in various countries of the world due to economic, social or political conditions.

We salute the first victory won by the people at home.

We salute the general strikes (haartal) on 28 April and on 9 May called by all the trade union organisations.

We salute the mobilisation on 9 July of the people in Colombo who, on a united basis between Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and all faiths and ethnicities, drove away the President and forced the Prime Minister to resign.

The people rose up because they couldn’t stand it any longer, because they want to be able to eat, to have electricity in their homes, to be able to obtain medicines and petrol. 

We heard the slogans in the demonstrations: "Seventy-four years is enough! "Enough of the divisions! "Power to the people!"

Yes, the people are right. The President has left. All the institutions of which he was the heart must go with him. The interim President has no mandate to call on the army to repress the people. We firmly condemn comments saying that “the protestors are fascists”. We warn him that any attempt to repress the people in a bloodbath will provoke massive mobilisations in all capitals of the world until the Sri Lankan people have achieved total victory. 

All political prisoners must be amnestied. The members of the law enforcement agencies and the military who refused to fire on the people must be reinstated with full compensation. 

Seventy-four years ago, the question of the Constituent assembly was raised. It is being raised again today. The people were able to drive the corrupt out of power. They have the capacity to run the country.

Statement on the occasion of the Palestinian Prisoner’s Day (17 April)

European Alliance in Defense of Palestinian Prisoners, 17/4/2022

 

 

 

The Palestinian Prisoner’s Day that falls on 17 April is commemorated this year, amidst a brutal campaign by Israeli occupation authorities against the whole Palestinian people, against the freedom fighters held captive in Israeli jails. 

It is estimated that there are over 4,400 POWs still in Israeli occupation’s prisons, including 33 women and girls, about 160 children under the age of 18, and over 500 administrative detainees, including 8 elected MPs.  At least 600 POWs suffer from terminal or serious illness, such as cancer, and partial or total paralysis. The Israeli treatment of Palestinian POWs and administrative detainees may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity if properly investigated by ICC. 

 Israel continues to deny Palestinian POWs and detainees their basic rights guaranteed by international conventions and norms, and continue its repressive measures and practices that include solitary confinement, torture and the use of force that has escalated significantly since the escape of 6 Palestinian POWs from the high-security prison center of Gilboa.

OLMEDO BELUCHEPanama’s 1964 popular anti-imperialist explosion

 Olmedo Beluche, The Panama News, 8/1/2022
Translated by John Catalinotto, Workers World 

On January 9, 1964, a true popular revolution in the full sense of the word caused a turning point in U.S. policy in Panama, when 60 years of accumulated contradictions exploded. The mass action shattered the dream of riches that the Panamanian oligarchy had painted in 1903 to impose what they called an “independent” state. 

In reality, Panama was a “protectorate,” that is, a U.S. colony, and then the disgraceful Hay Bunau Varilla Treaty [of November 1903, that] handed over the canal to the U.S., “as if they [the U.S.] were sovereign.” 

It should be remembered that the grandparents of our oligarchy, since 1903 felt comfortable with the colonial situation, believing themselves to be Yankees at heart. The popular sectors, on the other hand, found it difficult to find clarity in the construction of their own political project. Nevertheless, from the beginning the masses devoted themselves to the defense of sovereignty, because they understood that the prosperity of the country and their own prosperity depended on it. 

Read more

Above graphic shows photo from Jan. 22, 1964 issue of Workers World: Youth Against War and Fascism in solidarity with Panamanian struggle. New York, Jan. 14, 1964.

 

JOHN CATALINOTTOIs the U.S. working class on the edge of a new unionization drive?

John Catalinotto, 31/12/2021

Workers at three Amazon locations have opened drives to form a union in this mammoth corporation that employs over one million workers in the U.S. alone. Workers at two Starbucks cafes in Buffalo, N.Y. have won union representation in a vote. 

Amazon and pro-union supporters held protests in the U.S., Western Europe and Bangladesh on Nov. 26 − so-called Black Friday − at Amazon warehouses to demand workers’ rights and union rights. The actions focused on logistics workers in the U.S. and Europe, and textile production workers in Bangladesh.

Other actions are planned for Jan. 12, birthday of the centi-billionaire top boss of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and for the Martin Luther King, Jr holiday.​ (https://supportamazonworkers.org/jan12/)​

Demonstration in Times Square, Dec. 22.  Photo: Workers World/Mundo Obrero

This may seem like a small beginning. Still, it has already raised the hopes of millions of workers in the U.S. and thousands of union activists that something big is underway. It has raised the hopes of worker organizers that of reversing decline in union membership over the past 68 years.

Some voices, among communists and unionists, and among observers in the corporate media, have spoken of the history of the upsurge of the CIO industrial un​i​on in the 1930s and are asking if a new wave might be coming.

The New York Times, The Boston Globe, for example − have reported the Starbucks and Amazon organizing drive with big headlines and mentioned the 1930s. The Times normally reports labor news in the business section. Most articles are about strikes that were lost, or splits between rank-and-file workers and union leaders. 

In the fall of 2021 unionized workers in the U.S. struck more than they had for decades. In the big strikes at Kellogg’s cereal manufacturers and John Deere tractors and bulldozers, the striking workers forced their unions’ leaders to continue strikes after leaders had reached agreements with the bosses. 

WORKERS ASSEMBLY AGAINST RACISMAmazon: Recognize the Union Now!

Amazon: Recognize the Union Now! 
Wednesday, December 22 @ 8pm
Times Square at the Red Steps 

 Support Staten Island Amazon Workers Who Will be Conducting a Walkout That Day

 

On Wednesday, Dec 22, at 8 PM at Times Square: come show solidarity with Staten Island Amazon workers who will be walking off the job earlier that day! 

The demand of the rally is that Amazon immediately recognize the union. This call has been underscored by the heartbreaking deaths of workers at the tornado-destroyed warehouse in Edwardsville, IL, whom Amazon prevented from using cell phones or even leaving!

"As a matter of public health and a matter of reparations, Amazon should immediately recognize the union without a drawn-out NLRB election," Amazon Labor Union leader Chris Smalls said. 

The needless deaths in Edwardsville underscored Amazon's reckless profit-over-people practices, which range from other instances of forcing workers to stay on the job in extreme weather (Hurricane Ida) to having more than double the average rate of warehouse injuries.

This week The Intercept reported that Amazon warehouses barely even have fire drills because the bosses don't want to take time away from production. The same company that drags workers into anti-union captive audience meetings tries to get away with not scheduling life-saving drills.

Other Reasons We Demand That Amazon Immediately Recognize the Union:

SKIP THE VOTE The Amazon Labor Union has already signed up thousands of Staten Island Amazon warehouse workers who want a union. Amazon should recognize the union now. Last year's Bessemer experience shows that long drawn-out voting processes are controlled by the bosses who use that period to lie to, intimidate and threaten the workers into voting no for the union.

AMAZON CAN’T BE TRUSTED NOT TO UNION-BUST Amazon was found by the National Labor Relations Board to have denied a mostly Black workforce in Alabama the right to vote for a union.

AMAZON WORKERS NEED A UNION TO RESIST RACISM & GENDER BIAS Amazon is the target of multiple lawsuits from workers subjected to racist and anti-woman harassment. This includes the racist treatment of Amazon Labor Union president Chris Smalls after he spoke up about lack of COVID safety. It also includes the placement of hundreds of Amazon's pollution-spewing warehouses in communities of color, who are subjected to the toxic exhaust emitted by massive vehicles coming and going.

GETTING JUSTICE FOR THE WORKERS THROUGH OFFICIAL CHANNELS TAKES FOREVER After the Alabama union vote in which Amazon lied to, cheated and intimidated its workers, it took until August for an NLRB report to be completed finding Amazon guilty – then it took another three months for the decision that a new vote should be held. This is now a full year from the start of the Bessemer campaign, during which time the notorious 150% worker turnover rate has meant the quitting or firing of union supporters. In the meantime, people have suffered more wear and tear on their bodies or were simply fired for not making rate or having too much "time off task" in Amazon’s impossible standards.

“MAKING RATE” INJURES WORKERS Amazon has sky-high rates of injuries, more than double the average of other companies doing the same work. Many of those injuries are musculoskeletal disorders that come from repetitive lifting. These are the kind of injuries that linger, sometimes for the rest of a worker’s life. Ambulance responses to Amazon warehouses increase by almost 50% in the weeks leading to Black Friday because of the punishing demand.

AMAZON DRIVES DOWN PREVAILING WAGES Because the minimum wage is so appallingly low at $7.25 an hour, Amazon claims to pay decent entry wages. But it only pays more than $15/hr after being shamed into doing so by Bernie Sanders in 2018. And the breakneck expansion of Amazon warehouses poses a danger to wages in surrounding areas. One of the worst examples is in Minnesota, where real wages for warehouse workers declined 14 percent from 2015 to 2018, after the Amazon plant opened. A union in Staten Island or anywhere will help keep wages higher for all workers.

AMAZON ISN'T PROTECTING ITS WORKERS FROM COVID Amazon has actually rolled back the few COVID safety protocols it put in place in 2020. This is a company that lied and hid COVID information from OSHA, reporting that of 20,000 infections of its workforce, only 27 occurred on the job.

 

Workers Assembly Against Racism
Solidarity Center
147 W 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

Achille Lollo: farewell to a fighter

Fausto Giudice, Basta Yekfi!, 4/8/2021
Translated by Andy Barton

I have just learned, via common Brazilian comrades, of the passing of Achille Lollo, yesterday in Trevignano Romano, to whom I wish to pay tribute.

 

Achille was born in Rome on 8th May 1951. Salvatore, his father, had been a resistance fighter, a deported communist and an anti-fascist guerrilla fighter in Italy and Yugoslavia. Should Achille have been born just 30 years earlier, he too would have taken up arms against fascism. And yet more, should he have been born 130 years earlier, he would doubtless have been an Italian Redshirt, among the Garibaldini defenders of Montevideo besieged by the cruel Argentinian general Juan Manuel de Rosas.

Yet his actual biography has little to envy of the adventures of the heroes of Alexandre Dumas or Victor Hugo. He belongs to a long Italian tradition of causing trouble in every corner of the world. His 50 years of adult life played out on three stages: the suburbs of Rome, Angola and Brazil.

It all began in 1973 in Primavalle, a volatile suburb in Rome. Achille, together with some of his comrades from the operaista movement Potere Operaio, was accused of having started a fire in the apartment belonging to the local head of the fascist party, the Italian Social Movement, in which two of the fascist leader’s sons died. Achille was arrested. He denied having wanted to kill anybody; rather, his aim was to intimidate the local fascists with whom leftists were locked in an endless conflict. After two years of preventative prison, he was paroled, going on to seek refuge in Angola in 1975. Achille participated in the anti-colonial struggles together with the MPLA, the SWAPO and the ANC. In 1986, with his Angolan wife and their four children, he emigrated to Brazil. There, he was an active member of the PT (Brazilian Worker’s Party) as part of the Força Socialista tendency. Later, he would participate in the founding of the PSOL (Socialism and Liberty Party) in 2004. A few years prior, in 1994, he was arrested after an extradition request from Italy, being freed after one year in prison.

In 2005, the 18-year prison term he had been sentenced to in Italy expired, but the damages and losses he had been sentenced to pay (1 million euros) had not. This prevented Achille from owning anything (which perhaps is not such a bad thing).

In 2010, now with health problems, he returned to Italy, where he devoted himself to ecological agriculture. The irruption of COVID-19 would seriously compromise this activity. However, it was not the virus that eventually killed him: as a diabetic with cardiac problems, he was struck by pancreatic cancer, known for its aggressive development.

Achille leaves behind him an immense body of work, both written and audio-visual, primarily about Latin America, and scattered across many different media platforms. Hopefully, one day, someone will be able to draw it all together. 

 One of Achille’s last photos, with his son Achillinho

Que el último apague la luz/Let the last one turn off the light

 Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein, 5/5/2021 

Mi apreciado amigo Luis Casado me ha dicho varias veces que los títulos de mis artículos no se corresponden con su contenido. Razón no le ha faltado, reconozco que es una habilidad que no tengo. Al contrario, los escritos de Luis dicen mucho desde su propio enunciado. Uno de sus textos recientes fue denominado “Salvar el negocio” y tal vez no haya mejor forma de expresar los avatares que atraviesa el sistema neoliberal de democracia representativa para sostener el poder a cualquier precio, inclusive haciendo maquillajes para que “todo cambie sin que nada cambie” con el objetivo de mantener privilegios a costa de la exclusión y represión de las mayorías con uno de los pocos recursos que les va quedando: el de la fuerza. 

Al hacer un recorrido por algunos países de América Latina se puede percibir tal situación. Al escribir estas líneas, Colombia entra en su octavo día de manifestaciones populares de rechazo a la reforma tributaria que trató de imponer el gobierno de Iván Duque. Después de 31 ciudadanos asesinados por las fuerzas militares y policiales, 124 heridos, 13 personas con daños oculares, 6 hechos de agresión sexual, 726 detenciones arbitrarias, 45 defensores de derechos humanos detenidos o limitados para realizar sus funciones y 1089 casos de violencia policial, las manifestaciones han continuado y las demandas han crecido mientras se hacen desesperados llamados a que cese la masacre. Como respuesta, el jefe del ejército hablando como si estuviera en guerra informó que “480 hombres orgánicos, que son 16 pelotones tengo en este momento desplegados” (sic). A continuación explicó que eso es solo para cumplir la primera orden del presidente de la república. Y para la segunda, tiene helicópteros tanto de la policía como del ejército “que ya están dispuestos allá”, refiriéndose a la ciudad de Cali. Seguir leyendo

My dear friend Luis Casado has told me several times that the titles of my articles do not correspond to their content. Reason has not lacked, I recognize that it is a skill that I do not have. On the contrary, Luis's writings say a lot from his own statement. One of his recent texts was called “Saving the business” and perhaps there is no better way to express the vicissitudes that the neoliberal system of representative democracy is going through to sustain power at any price, even making makeup so that “everything changes without anything change ”with the aim of maintaining privileges at the cost of exclusion and repression of the majority with one of the few resources that they have left: that of force.

When taking a tour of some Latin American countries, such a situation can be perceived. As of this writing, Colombia enters its eighth day of popular demonstrations of rejection of the tax reform that the government of Iván Duque tried to impose. After 31 citizens murdered by the military and police forces, 124 injured, 13 people with eye damage, 6 acts of sexual assault, 726 arbitrary arrests, 45 human rights defenders detained or restricted to carry out their duties and 1089 cases of police violence, the demonstrations have continued and the demands have grown as desperate calls are made for an end to the massacre. In response, the army chief, speaking as if he were at war, reported that "480 organic men, which are 16 platoons, I have at this time deployed" (sic). He then explained that this is only to fulfill the first order of the president of the republic. And for the second, it has helicopters from both the police and the army "that are already ready there", referring to the city of Cali. Read more