This is the news page for our San Francisco Bay Area General Membership Branch. To get an overview about our contact info, news and events, please visit our home page.
Disclaimer - The following article is reposted here because it is an issue with some relevance to the IWW. The views of the author do not necessarily agree with those of the IWW and vice versa.
LABOR DAY PICKET and SPEAK-OUT at KPFA Radio.
Protest the Banning of the KFPA Labor Collective.
Monday, September 4, 2006, 1:00 PM
1929 Martin Luther King Jr. Way (at University Avenue)
Berkeley, CA
In March, the KPFA Program Council banned the KFPA Labor Collective for one year. The KPFA Labor Collective has been producing labor programming at KPFA for more than three years. The collective has members from SEIU 1000, NALC 214, SEIU 616, IBT 70, IUOE 39, SEUI UHW, and other locals.
At present, KPFA has 20 minutes a week of regular labor programming. The San Francisco Labor Council, the Contra Costa Labor Council, SEIU 790, SEIU 616 and other locals have endorsed calls for more labor programming. Hundreds of trade unionists have signed petitions for a weekly one hour labor show called "Workweek".
For more information and background on the Program Council and the KPFA Labor Collective, see my statement below, and http://www.kpfalaborcollective.org .
Upcoming KPFA ELECTION MEMBERSHIP DEADLINE - September 1, 2006.
Elections for the KPFA Local Station Board (LSB) will be held at the end of this year. Ballots are scheduled to be sent out October 16, and must be received back by Pacifica (NOT postmarked) by November 15.
More urgently, to vote, or to be a candidate, you must be a KPFA member of record on September 1. Make sure your membership is current!
To join or renew your membership, go to http://www.kpfa.org/pledge , or call 800-439-5732 or 510-848-5732.
Although most of the world allows same-day registration for voting, and the federal government requires registration 30 days before an election, the Pacifica bylaws require listeners to be members 45 days in advance.
This year, the General Assembly of the Industrial Workers of the World will be hosted by the San Francisco Bay Area General Membership Branch at the Humanist Hall in Oakland, California, at 390 27th Street. On Friday Sept. 1st, the day before the Assembly is called to order, the IWW will be recieving Fellow Workers from throughout the Union at its headquarters in the Grassroots House in Berkeley at 2022 Blake St., just west of Shattuck.
At 6:30 pm on Friday the IWW is conducting a rally and march, in Solidarity with IWW-Shattuck Cinema Workers, starting from the theater (located near the Berkeley Downtown BART station) and proceeding at a mischieviously Wobbly trajectory. Songs will be sung, the truth shall be spoken, and the power of Working Class Solidarity will once again rise from the rank and file of the world's toughest and most directly democratic radical labor union and its allies.
Shattuck Cinema workers and union representatives met with management on Wednesday to negotiate pay raises, and other basic demands including uniforms and grievance procedures.
Landmark Cinemas, the parent company of Shattuck Cinemas, and the owner of 58 other theaters all over the United States, had frozen pay increases for workers for over a year, citing problems with funds.
In an e-mail to union representatives on Aug. 4, Landmark announced that the pay increase freeze was being removed and that they were readjusting wages to be competitive in the market. Harjit Gill of Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the union for Shattuck Cinema workers, said that this was an effort to keep the workers from unionizing.
The Starbucks "investigation" of IWW member Daniel Gross concluded today with his termination after more than three years of organizing at the company.
Daniel's expression of solidarity at a union picket line with co-worker and fellow union member, Evan Winterscheidt, was deemed threatening by Starbucks despite multiple eyewitnesses who confirm that Daniel merely asserted to District Manager Allison Marx that Evan should not be fired. With the termination of IWW members Daniel Gross, Evan Winterscheidt, Joe Agins Jr., and Charles Fostrom in less than a year, Starbucks has demonstrated conclusively its intense hostility to the right of workers to join a union.
Disclaimer - The following is an editorial by members of the Bay Area; it is not currently the official position of the IWW.
By Dean Dempsey - Bay Area General Membership Branch, IWW
The Industrial Workers of the World was the first American union to truly welcome all workers, as equals, regardless if they were immigrants, women, or African Americans, with our organizational structure free of bias and segregation. We have always organized industrially, as a class, emphasizing the importance and potential of cross-cultural, ethnic, and national relationships. Some of the most influential members of the IWW have been immigrants, women, and people of color, such as Ricardo Flores Magón, Mother Jones, Carlo Tresca, Lucy Parsons, Ben Fletcher and even the token Joe Hill. The tradition of this commitment to include all workers carries on to contemporary union organizers of all branches of our union, from all parts of the globe.
LABOR DAY PICKET and SPEAK-OUT at KPFA Radio.
This year, the 
Shattuck Cinema workers and union representatives met with management on Wednesday to negotiate pay raises, and other basic demands including uniforms and grievance procedures.
TAKE ACTION NOW!
The Industrial Workers of the World was the first American union to truly welcome all workers, as equals, regardless if they were immigrants, women, or African Americans, with our organizational structure free of bias and segregation. We have always organized industrially, as a class, emphasizing the importance and potential of cross-cultural, ethnic, and national relationships. Some of the most influential members of the IWW have been immigrants, women, and people of color, such as Ricardo Flores Magón, Mother Jones, Carlo Tresca, Lucy Parsons, Ben Fletcher and even the token Joe Hill. The tradition of this commitment to include all workers carries on to contemporary union organizers of all branches of our union, from all parts of the globe.