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KC Labor Newsletter
The Week In Review,
Monday,
February 2, 2004
California Strike/Lockout Still Has
Life
On Saturday some say as many as 20,000 workers rallied at an Inglewood Von’s
store. The California Attorney General has announced he will sue the grocery
employers for violating antitrust laws in their collusion against the UFCW.
Students Against Sweatshops,
with 158 campus chapters across the country—including 21 in California—have
taken up the cause and are sponsoring a
National
Labor Day of Student Action
this Thursday. Of course financial support for the
strikers remains an urgent need. You can contribute
here.
Tyson Defeat
Unfortunately the strike at Tyson in Jefferson, Wisconsin ended last week in
defeat. Under threat of imminent decertification, a contract was approved that
gave the company virtually all of their draconian takeaway demands and placed
the "permanently replaced" strikers on a preferential hiring list. The Tyson
workers put up a hell of a fight and had the backing of their home town
community. They won some interesting victories such as getting the state to back
off forcing parolees to take jobs as strikebreakers. But, as is too often the
case these days, the fight between one small local union and a global corporate
giant was just a mismatch. Broader struggles are needed.
Worker Rights Conference Shaping Up
The upcoming
Worker Rights At Home and Abroad, in Kansas
City, March 19-20, is shaping up. I’m pleased to report that Ed Bruno—wearing
two hats—will be coming in to speak. I’ve known Ed since we worked together on a
successful UE
organizing campaign at Litton Microwave’s plant in Sioux
Falls, South Dakota in 1980. Soon after, Bruno went on to serve a stint as
national Director of Organization for the UE. Now the New England Organizer for
the Labor Party
he has played a central role in the LP
Worker Rights Campaign.
He has also been deeply involved in
US Labor Against the War and the USLAW
campaign in support of worker rights in occupied Iraq. Bruno will be the lead
speaker at both the Worker Rights At Home and the Worker Rights in Occupied Iraq
sessions. Judy Ancel, director of the
Institute for Labor Studies
and president of the
Cross Border Network,
will be the lead speaker for the Worker Rights Where American Bosses Offshore
session. Other panelists are being lined up and we are hopeful we may get a
representative from an Iraqi trade union group.
Chili For Choice A Big Success
I don’t have any official figures but I would estimate that over one hundred
braved a winter storm warning to plunk down five bucks for a bowl of home made
chili. This was a fund raiser to help send folks from Kansas City to the
March For Women’s Lives
in Washington, DC April 25.
KC Labor
is an official endorser of the march and we put our
chili where our mouth is.
Overtime Protest
The Greater Kansas City AFL-CIO and the
Coalition of Black Trade Unionists are
sponsoring a protest against the Bush administration’s change in overtime rules.
We’re to meet at the Bolling Federal Building, 601 E 12th Street,
4:30-5:30, Thursday, February 5.
Some Changes To Our Picks At
Powell’s
We’ve done some freshening of our top thirty picks at
Powell’s books.
We got tired of looking at Michael Moore and have added instead two recently
published works giving a working class analysis of foreign policy issues:
Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global
Dominance (the American Empire Project)
by Noam Chomsky
Bush in Babylon: Recolonizing Iraq
by Tariq Ali
Any purchases made through
our links to
Powell’s helps us to
pay our bills at kclabor.org
In closing let me apologize for the
late posting this week—we’ll try harder next week.
Bill Onasch
webmaster, kclabor.org