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Submitted on Wed, 05/07/2014 - 6:19pm
By the Twin Cities IWW
On May 4th 2014, members of the Twin Cities IWW and supporters withstood a violent and deliberate attack on a picket of Sisters’ Camelot, whose canvass workers went on strike in March of 2013 and have endured vicious union-busting efforts from the organization ever since. After some twenty minutes of peaceful picketing, Sisters’ Camelot supporters organized an escalating series of attacks and attempts to break the picket line, eventually tackling an IWW member to the ground and beating him until other Wobblies pulled them away.
Submitted on Wed, 05/07/2014 - 6:12pm
The International Solidarity Commission (ISC) of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) sends our solidarity to all workers occupying the Greif-Sanjut factory, a division of the US enterprise, Greif, since February 10. We condemn the police and gendarmerie raid in the early daylight hours of April 10. Due to this attack many workers have been taken into custody and abused, including, Mehmet Ali Karabulut, who was reporting for the left publication Kizil Bayrak.
The Greif factory, a manufacturer of packaging products, has been occupied by 500 workers who are members of the Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions in Turkey (DİSK). Workers at the Greif factory are struggling for several issues. The most urgent problems are: low wages, which are currently below the poverty line; 44 subcontractor companies working for the Greif bosses, and excessive workplace accidents. Workers, including the core workforce and subcontracted workers, decided to occupy the factory after the managers refused to negotiate concerning their problems.
Submitted on Tue, 05/06/2014 - 7:07pm
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Portland IWW banner (Read "Wages of Class War: Reflections on Portland’s May Day")
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Submitted on Wed, 04/30/2014 - 10:46pm
By Staughton Lynd
This article originally appeared in the May 2014 Industrial Worker
On May 1, 1886, the first general strike in U.S. history brought workers into the streets on behalf of one simple demand: an eight-hour working day. Their anthem was:
“We want to feel the sunshine;
We want to smell the flowers;
We’re sure (that) God has willed it
And we mean to have eight hours.
We’re summoning our forces from
Shipyard, shop and mill;
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest,
Eight hours for what we will.”
As is the case in the movement of low-wage workers today, the movement for eight hours was characterized by skilled and less-skilled workers, and workers in different trades, making common cause.
Submitted on Fri, 04/18/2014 - 2:55pm
We in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) have been approached by a group of hundreds of people currently incarcerated in Alabama who are launching a nonviolent prison strike beginning this Sunday April 20th to demand an end to slave labor, the massive overcrowding and horrifying health and human rights violations found in Alabama Prisons, and the passage of legislation they have drafted.
This is the second peaceful and nonviolent protest initiated by the brave men and women of the Free Alabama Movement (F.A.M.) this year building on the recent Hunger Strikes in Pelican Bay and the Georgia Prison Strike in 2010. They aim to build a mass movement inside and outside of prisons to earn their freedom, and end the racist, capitalist system of mass incarceration called The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and others. The Free Alabama Movement is waging a non-violent and peaceful protest for their civil, economic, and human rights.
