Sit-in strikers at General Motors’ Fisher No. 1 plant.

By Don Fitz

[See also With Babies & Banners, the classic 1977 documentary about the 1936-37 Flint sit-down strike, and the role of women in it.]

January 3, 2012 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — The year 2012 marks the 75th anniversary of the great sit-down strike wave of 1937. It also begins the second year of the Occupy movement, which has more than a few similarities to the time when hundreds of thousands of Americans occupied their workplaces.

The first recorded sit-down strike in the US was actually in 1906 among General Electric workers of Schenectady, New York. When three organisers for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies) were fired, 3000 of their fellow workers sat down and stopped production.

By the 1930s, the IWW was on the wane, but many of its organisers were active and workers across the US had seen its tactics first hand.

In 1933, workers in the Austin, Minnesota, Hormel plant had many complaints against the company: raises habitually went to foremen’s friends; workers were fired and then rehired in other departments at lower pay; before election day, foremen would threaten layoffs if Farmer-Labor Party candidates won, and employees who challenged the practices were told that they could quit. The final straw came when Jay Hormel, who fancied himself to be a “benevolent dictator”, attempted to impose a weekly pay deduction for an insurance plan.

When a worker in Hog Kill was pressured to sign up, other workers shut down the floor for 10 minutes, until his insurance card was torn up. News of the brief sit down spread throughout the plant. That July night, workers met at Austin’s Sutton Park to form a union.

The union charter followed the IWW pattern of grouping all workers into one big union regardless of craft. It invited membership from labourers throughout Austin and the surrounding area. The workers named themselves the Independent Union of All Workers (IUAW).

Jay Hormel promised to recognise the union, grant seniority rights and arbitrate grievances. But for six weeks, Hormel refused to put anything in writing and on November 10 workers voted to strike. The Farmer-Laborite Minnesota governor made public speeches backing the strikers while he secretly mobilised the National Guard 30 miles from Austin.

Support for the strike was overwhelming. Since the IUAW had endorsed farmers’ efforts to raise their prices, the Farmers’ Holiday Association patrolled roads leading into Austin to halt livestock and scabs. Strikers occupied the plant and, as Stan Weir recounted the story,

food, bedding, cigarettes, reading material and playing cards were brought to them by family and friends. They came out of the plant several days later with one of the first industrial union contracts in mass production history.

Great Goodyear Strike

The best-known early sit-down strikes were in Ohio. Jeremy Brecher described their humble beginnings in his book, Strike! Sometime in the early 1930s, two factory baseball teams in Akron, Ohio, objected to the umpire because he was not in the union. They stopped playing and sat in the field until a new umpire was found.

A few days later, a supervisor at a rubber factory insulted several workers. Remembering the ball game, they turned off their machines and sat at their work benches. The work stoppage spread throughout the plant and, in less than an hour, the company had given in. Between 1933 and 1936, the practice of sit-down strikes grew among Akron rubber workers.

Read the whole article here
http://links.org.au/node/2685

WASHINGTON – President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law today. The statute contains a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention provision. While President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had “serious reservations” about the provisions, the statement only applies to how his administration would use the authorities granted by the NDAA, and would not affect how the law is interpreted by subsequent administrations. The White House had threatened to veto an earlier version of the NDAA, but reversed course shortly before Congress voted on the final bill.

“President Obama’s action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law,” said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director. “The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield. The ACLU will fight worldwide detention authority wherever we can, be it in court, in Congress, or internationally.”

Under the Bush administration, similar claims of worldwide detention authority were used to hold even a U.S. citizen detained on U.S. soil in military custody, and many in Congress now assert that the NDAA should be used in the same way again.

The ACLU believes that any military detention of American citizens or others within the United States is unconstitutional and illegal, including under the NDAA.

In addition, the breadth of the NDAA’s detention authority violates international law because it is not limited to people captured in the context of an actual armed conflict as required by the laws of war.

“We are incredibly disappointed that President Obama signed this new law even though his administration had already claimed overly broad detention authority in court,” said Romero.

“Any hope that the Obama administration would roll back the constitutional excesses of George Bush in the war on terror was extinguished today.

Thankfully, we have three branches of government, and the final word belongs to the Supreme Court, which has yet to rule on the scope of detention authority.

But Congress and the president also have a role to play in cleaning up the mess they have created because no American citizen or anyone else should live in fear of this or any future president misusing the NDAA’s detention authority.”

The bill also contains provisions making it difficult to transfer suspects out of military detention, which prompted FBI Director Robert Mueller to testify that it could jeopardize criminal investigations.

It also restricts the transfers of cleared detainees from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to foreign countries for resettlement or repatriation, making it more difficult to close Guantanamo, as President Obama pledged to do in one of his first acts in office.

http://labornotes.org/2011/12/occupy-wake-call-caps-remarkable-year

It uses actual footage from local Palestinian crews
of the bombs falling, the terror of the Palestinians targeted and the
ensuing chaos of getting the wounded to overcrowded hospitals and overworked
medical staff while Israel continued its relentless attack without mercy.

Stories are told through shell-shocked children who have lost parents and
other family members and who have been horribly maimed, physically and
psychologically.

This is not something that anyone should turn away from in
squeamishness because it is very real and continues to happen to
Palestinians who resist Israel’s inhuman oppression of their daily lives.

We just don’t hear about it in the mainstream media.

If you can absorb the
grotesque acts of inhumanity in Holocaust museums and talk about them
afterwards and say “never again”, then you have an obligation to see what is
actually happening today to people struggling to survive under Israel’s
ruthless military domination and occupation.

The criminality of it all
simply cannot be justified in any way – not in Gaza, not in Iraq, not in
Afghanistan, not in Libya, nor in the many other places of the world where
innocents endure the onslaught of modern warfare whoever perpetrates it and
for whatever reason.

The film is directed by Norwegian filmmaker Vibeke Lokkeberg.

From Australians for Palestine
http://www.australiansforpalestine.net/56077#more-56077

By Michael Moore

On this day, December 30th, in 1936 — 75 years ago today — hundreds of workers at the General Motors factories in Flint, Michigan, took over the facilities and occupied them for 44 days. My uncle was one of them.

The workers couldn’t take the abuse from the corporation any longer. Their working conditions, the slave wages, no vacation, no health care, no overtime — it was do as you’re told or get tossed onto the curb.

So on the day before New Year’s Eve, emboldened by the recent re-election of Franklin Roosevelt, they sat down on the job and refused to leave.

They began their Occupation in the dead of winter. GM cut off the heat and water to the buildings. The police tried to raid the factories several times, to no avail. Even the National Guard was called in.

But the workers held their ground, and after 44 days, the corporation gave in and recognized the UAW as the representative of the workers. It was a monumental historical moment as no other major company had ever been brought to its knees by their employees. Workers were given a raise to a dollar an hour — and successful strikes and occupations spread like wildfire across the country. Finally, the working class would be able to do things like own their own homes, send their children to college, have time off and see a doctor without having to worry about paying. In Flint, Michigan, on this day in 1936, the middle class was born.

But 75 years later, the owners and elites have regained all power and control. I can think of no better way for us to honor the original Occupiers than by all of us participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement in whatever form that takes in each of our towns. We need direct action all winter long if we are to prevail.

You can start your own Occupy group in your neighborhood or school or with just your friends.

Speak out against economic injustice at every chance you get. Stop the bank from evicting the family down the block. Move your checking and credit card to a community bank or credit union. Place a sign in your yard — and get your neighbors to do it also — that says, “WE ARE THE 99%.” (You can download signs here and here.)

Do something, anything, but don’t remain silent. Not now. This is the moment. It won’t come again.

75 years ago today, in Flint, Michigan, the people said they’d had enough and occupied the factories until they won. What is stopping us now? The rich have one plan: bleed everyone dry. Can anyone, in good conscience, be a bystander to this?

My uncle wasn’t, and because of what he and others did, I got to grow up without having to worry about a roof over my head or medical bills or a decent life. And all that was provided by my dad who built spark plugs on a GM assembly line.

Let’s each of us double our efforts to raise a ruckus, Occupy Everywhere, and get creative as we throw a major nonviolent wrench into this system of Greed. Let’s make the politicians running for office in 2012 quake in their boots if they refuse to tax the rich, regulate Wall Street and do whatever we the people tell them to do.

Happy 75th!

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/75-years-ago-today-first-occupy

By Liana Foxvog and Sean Rudolph, International Labor Rights Forum

Today we published our list of this year’s Scrooges for workers’ right to unionize. The companies that topped our list are Dole, Hershey’s, Philippine Airlines, and Wal-Mart.

These corporations use intimidation and sometimes violence, either in the U.S. or in their supply chains abroad, to violate workers’ internationally recognized right to organize.

Among other rights related to freedom of association, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states that “everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests” (Article 23, Section 4).

Despite the labor rights protections in the UDHR and national labor laws, workers continue to see their rights trampled on a daily basis.

In its most recent survey of violations of trade union rights, the International Trade Union Confederation reports at least 90 unionists were killed, 2,083 were injured, and 4,599 were illegally fired last year as a result of their union activities.

Additionally, as the employment crisis continues to grow, many labor rights advocates fear that companies are using the crisis to attack union workers and institute employment schemes that reduce the number of workers guaranteed union protections.

The 2011 Scrooge corporations’ violations include intimidating workers with severe threats, standing by while suppliers aggressively suppress worker organizing, collaborating with military forces to undermine democratically elected union leaders, illegally firing thousands of workers, exploiting foreign exchange students, and turning a blind eye to forced child labor in the supply chain.

The right to freedom of association is typically violated through the use of bullying tactics and the spread of anti-union propaganda but this year’s Scrooges have taken violating workers’ rights to new lows.

As we celebrate the holiday season, consumers and labor advocates can support workers by telling these Scrooge companies that they need to respect workers rights.

As we celebrate the holiday season, you can support workers by calling on the Scrooges to respect workers’ rights:

Urge Philippine Airlines to reinstate fired workers and support job security
Tell Wal-Mart to stop doing business with contractors that repress labor organizing
Ask Hershey to end trafficked child labor in its supply chain
Call on Dole to stop supporting military propaganda campaigns against legitimate worker organizations

Click here to read more about these companies in our Working for Scrooge report.

http://laborrightsblog.typepad.com/international_labor_right/2011/12/this-years-worst-companies-to-work-for-if-you-want-the-right-to-join-a-union.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+typepad/ILRF/international_labor_right+%28

‘On December 12th, the entire Occupy movement on the West Coast will blockade their respective ports to shut down “Wall Street on the Waterfront.”

This is both an effort to build a mass social struggle in the US against the 1% and a coordinated response to the coordinated attacks against our movement in the last few weeks.

If the police repress any of our actions on the West Coast that day, the blockade will continue up and down the coast.

This historic action is being taken on independent of existing authorities – from the mayor and police to the unions themselves, who are unable to legally support such actions even if they wanted to.

The 1% has been pulling every lever at their command to delegitimate and criminalize the movement.

On the 12th we will demonstrate our growing social power, attacking the 1% at their point of profit while expanding and deepening the movement in the workplace, communities, schools and the social imaginary.

The 1% is not simply an abstract slogan. They are the corporations that pay no taxes. They are the financial institutions that drove the economy into the ground. They are the bailed-out bank that won’t re-write your under-water mortgage with the taxpayer funds your grandkids will still be paying for decades from now. The 1% are embodied in the politicians that send your kids or spouses off to fight wars that defend nothing but the profits of the 1%, leaving hundreds of thousands dead all over the world, as veterans with PTSD and Gulf War Syndrome return home to shoddy services and no jobs.

When these veterans have stood up for the people of this country on the streets of Oakland, they have been beaten and shot in the head with police projectiles, from a police force freshly trained by the Israeli and Bahrainian military to repress popular protest.

The same bosses that have paid you less in exchange for longer hours and higher productivity for decades; the same politicians who have made you pay more taxes in exchange for de-funded or closed public schools, rising state college tuitions and gutted social services; this political and economic coalition that has brought about the highest degrees of inequality in US history; these are the 1%, and all of them must go.

The Class Struggle Pendulum Swinging Back

The last two major pivot-points in US class struggle were the 30s and the 70s/80s.

Workers gained the upper hand in the 30s, Capital gained it back completely in the 80s.

Both of these pivots came out of upsurges that transcended existing class struggle in the workplace, that were rooted in historic economic, political and social crises.

In the 30s, social unionism, community solidarity and agitation from the unemployed forced Capital’s hand into making concessions to stave off more radical potentials.

In the 1970s and 80s foreign competition, technological change and the beginnings of globalization gave Capital the upper hand, leading to deindustrialization and steadily declining real wages and union density.

Read the whole article here
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/09/occupy-and-class-struggle-on-the-waterfront/#.TuPFD9Bm-0E.facebook

US labor against war

by David Bacon, Truthout.

Oakland, California – When Occupy Seattle called its tent camp “Planton Seattle,” camp organizers were laying a local claim to a set of tactics used for decades by social movements in Mexico, Central America and the Philippines.

And when immigrant janitors marched down to the detention center in San Diego and called their effort Occupy ICE (the initials of the Immigration and Custom Enforcement agency responsible for mass deportations),people from countries with that planton encampment tradition were connecting it to the Occupy movement here.

This shared culture and history offer new possibilities to the Occupy movement for survival and growth at a time when the federal law enforcement establishment, in cooperation with local police departments and municipal governments, has uprooted many tent encampments.

Different Occupy groups from Wall Street to San Francisco have begun to explore their relationship with immigrant social movements in the US, and to look more closely at the actions of the 1 percent beyond our borders that produces much of the pressure for migration.

Reacting to the recent evictions, the Coalition for the Political Rights of Mexicans Abroad recently sent a support letter to Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the other camps under attack.

“We greet your movement,” it declared, “because your struggle against the suppression of human rights and against social and economic injustice has been a fundamental part of our struggle, that of the Mexican people who cross borders, and the millions of Mexican migrants who live in the United States.”

Many of those migrants living in the US know the tradition of the planton and how it’s used at home.

And they know that the 1 percent, whose power is being challenged on Wall Street, also designed the policies that are the very reason why immigrants are living in the US to begin with.

Mike Garcia, president of United Service Workers West/SEIU, the union that organized Occupy ICE, described immigrant janitors as “displaced workers of the new global economic order, an order led by the West and the United States in particular.”

Criminalizing the act of camping out in a public space is intended, at least in part, to keep a planton tradition from acquiring the same legitimacy in the US that it has in other countries.

That right to a planton was not freely conceded by the rulers of Mexico, El Salvador or the Philippines, however – no more than it has been conceded here. The 99 percent of those countries had to fight for it.

Continue reading here

http://www.truth-out.org/unions-and-immigrants-join-occupy-movements/1323183717

Also posted on the new Evatt website
http://evatt.org.au/news/reviving-strike.html

joe hill