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Submitted on Fri, 09/15/2006 - 3:50pm
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.
By Betsy Schiffman, AP Business Writer - Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Waiting tables is a stressful job and sometimes not even lucrative, given servers' sticky reliance on tips for income.
In some states, restaurants are only legally required to pay as little as $2 or $3 an hour. So if a server earns $30 in tips on a bad night, he could feasibly walk out having earned less than minimum wage after tipping out the bartender and busboys (a common practice in most restaurants).
Submitted on Fri, 05/05/2006 - 4:20pm
A group of Tracy restaurant workers were fired this week after they failed to show up for work to protest against tougher immigration laws.
Fernando Martinez, a kitchen supervisor at Chevy’s Fresh Mex restaurant near West Valley Mall, said four others at the popular Mexican restaurant also have left their jobs after eight of their co-workers were dismissed.
“No one’s going to stay knowing that the whole team got fired,” he said.
Martinez, who said he was still employed at Chevy’s as of Wednesday, spoke on behalf of his co-workers, who risked their jobs when they went to Stockton on Monday to protest proposed changes in national immigration law.
The people who were fired, including cooks — prep cooks and dishwashers — said through an interpreter that they are all legal residents and had asked for the day off so they could join the protest in Stockton that drew an estimated 10,000 people.
Submitted on Thu, 03/23/2006 - 12:49pm
Reposted from Labourstart.Org.
Last week we urged all of you to send off messages in support of the heroic effort by a plucky New Zealand union to organize workers at McDonalds -- and we mentioned their high-profile strike at Starbucks as well.
We have been asked to clarify that (a) in several European and Latin American countries, strong union movements have succeeded in organizing McDonalds, and (b) in Canada, an effort was made to unionize Starbucks by the Canadian Auto Workers, leading to a well-publicized 'unstrike' back in 1999.
That having been said, McDonald's must surely be on the top of everyone's list who is concerned about the growth of the non-union, low-paid workforce -- which is why we all need to send off thousands more messages to McDonald's in New Zealand in support of the Super Size My Pay campaign:
http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/show_campaign.cgi?c=80
Submitted on Fri, 02/03/2006 - 3:17am
Industrial Worker - February 2006
A majority of the 15 workers at Handyfat Trading, Inc., a food wholesaler in Brooklyn that serves the Chinese food industry, have joined the IWW, and will have an NLRB election on Jan. 17. The boss has circulated a letter to Spanish-speaking warehouse workers warning that they will be replaced if they vote union and try to “interfere” with how he runs the business.
The New York IWW’s organizing in the food and warehouse industries led to an article in the Jan. 4 New York Sun, which quoted a New York City Central Labor Council official saying they are following IWW organizing closely.
“If they are now declaring themselves to have a better way to organize, I hope they’re right,” said public policy director Ed Ott. “The labor movement needs new ideas.”
Submitted on Thu, 11/10/2005 - 3:25pm
http://www.petitiononline.com/bauen/petition.html To: The President of Argentina, Nestor Kirchner

The struggle of Argentinian workers to recover factories and companies abandoned by their owners has become an inspiring model worldwide, and an important symbol that another world is possible. The Bauen Hotel is a concrete example. Its future and significance were recently recognized by the government of Venezuela, with an agreement signed with the Ministry of Tourism and the National Ministry of Popular Economy to work together in the development of a cooperative tourism venture. At the Bauen Hotel there are 120 men and women who every day demonstrate how to build self-managed alternatives that create jobs, dignity and justice where neoliberalism has resulted in devastating failure.
Following a fraudulent bankruptcy and after exhausting all legal paths for a year and a half, they decided to take their futures into their own hands and they built what we can see today: a fully functioning hotel with a restaurant, bookstore and cultural galleries, along with spaces that they lend to social organizations for meetings, conferences and assemblies. If you want to demonstrate your pride in a symbol of the movement right in the centre of Buenos Aires, all you have to do is let the Bauen Hotel continue to operate the way its workers, with efficiency and solidarity, have planned it.