A-Infos (en) US, Anarchist journal WORKERS SOLIDARITY #3 - Immokalee Farmworkers Cotinue Fight for Justice By Mitch

After winning two major victories against Taco Bell and McDonalds, the Coalition 
of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has continued their struggle for farmworker justice 
by now taking on Burger King. --- The CIW is a  membership-run farm worker 
coalition based in Immokalee, Florida.  The W.S.A. has been an ally of CIW for a 
number of years now. ---- According to the CIW: "Fast-food giants like Burger 
King play an active role in creating the unconscionable conditions in Florida's 
tomato fields.  These massive chains are able to pool the buying power of tens 
of thousands of restaurants and leverage that enormous power to demand 
ever-lower prices from their tomato suppliers. This in turn puts a strong 
downward pressure on farmworker wages, as tomato suppliers squeeze their 
diminishing profits from their workers through ever-lower wages in order to meet 
the volume discounts demanded by their fast-food clients. As such, farmworker 
poverty feeds fast-food profits."

One of the CIW's slogan is "Consciousness + Commitment = Change". The CIW is
asking our readers, your friends and families to help create consciousness in
your community about the conditions in the fields and the important changes
being made through the CIW's Campaign for Fair Food.

CIW has a number of informative materials for screening and educational
materials for distribution. You can screen a DVD about the CIW  at
http://www.ciw-online.org/about.html.

We urge all of our readers to become active in helping the Immolalee
farmworkers fight for justice and become involved in their grassroots campaigns.

Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW)
P. O. Box 603
Immokalee, FL, 34143

Phone: (239) 657-8311
Fax: (239) 657-5055
E-mail workers@ciw-online.org

Coalmining in Appalachia:
 A Century of Class Struggle
By Gordon Simmons

Beginning in the late 1800's, local political elites, in combination with
financial speculators, effected the wholesale acquisition of mineral rights
throughout the Appalachian region. The resulting coal industry was characterized 
by absentee ownership, as well as a cyclical demand that persists to this day.

Early coal production was labor-intensive, and exhausted the available labor
market of the local population that was pressed into wage labor, many for the
first time. African American migrants from the agrarian South and European
immigrants were brought in to supply the growing need for workers.

> From its inception, the United Mine Workers union rejected the racial and
nativist approaches that had been commonplace in the craft oriented AFL. And,
given the economic, political, and social domination that coal companies
exercised in the Appalachian region, the UMW became the principal vehicle by 
which that domination was challenged. The struggle for unionization in West 
Virginia was bitter, protracted, and violent, and culminated in the defeat of 
organized workers at the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921.

 When the UMW did return in force to the southern coalfields, it was in the
wake of the New Deal, and the union was no longer the expression of workers'
autonomy it had once been. Now the union was an organization firmly under the
autocratic regime of John L. Lewis. Lewis set about to broker the terms and
conditions for the mechanization of coal production. At his death, control of 
the union was passed to Tony Boyle, who became ever more flagrant in corruption
and sweetheart deals.

 In the 1970's, rank and file insurgency, fueled by outrage over the murder
of activists, safety issues, and Black Lung, and coalescing around Miners for
Democracy, overthrew the Boyle regime. The coal industry responded by renewing
its efforts against the UMW. Today, nearly 90% of domestic coal production is
nonunion.

 Events and conditions leading up to and following Sago prove that things
have remained the same in some important respects. The only interest of the coal
industry is in maintaining control over production and the resultant profits.
The state and federal governments remain political vehicles of coal interests.
The only reliable source for coal miners' health and safety are the workers
themselves, and their interests can only be realized by their seizure of
control of the productive process. And they remain powerless to wrest that 
control from the owners with anything short of their collective self-organization.

So! So! So! Solidarité
Alternative unionism in Montreal
By the Workers Solidarity Network

The Workers Solidarity Network is a labour association based in Montreal. We
came to existence in May of 2005 and have since been involved in various
activities including direct action case work, strike solidarity and union drives.
Broadly, you could say that we try to promote solidarity within the labour
movement. We want to prove to ourselves and workers in general that it's
possible to fight the bosses with or without an established union.

Fundamentally, we think that what's needed is to make a list of demands and
grievances and act upon them collectively. This can be done in a traditional
union framework or in non-conventional rameworks that some struggles require.

We want to popularise what we call "un syndicalisme de combat", which
translates to solidarity unionism or class-struggle unionism in English. The 
basis of "le syndicalisme de combat" for us is to establish tangible rank n' 
file power before entering into a conflict with the bosses. We think it is no 
use to strike or to take significant action against the boss when the struggle 
is not led by the rank n' file. What's needed is active participation by all 
workers and an understanding that true labour power comes from there and not 
from the bosses negotiations table or the offices of the union bureaucracy.

We don't pretend to be more important then we are. And we don't want to take
the place of existing unions. Usually what we propose is double membership,
both within an established and legal union and within the Workers Solidarity
Network. We believe trade unions and the current the labour movement can be
radicalized from within, so we don't see the need to establish a more
leftist/syndicalist union that would out-seed the business and reformist unions. 
However, we do think it is important for radical workers and the non-unionized 
to have a specific point of convergence in the movement, that 's why we formed 
the Workers Solidarity Network!

We think it's putting your head into the sand to see unionism as only an
"economic struggle". There's a great deal of politics that go on within unions 
and radicals activists will be confronted against more moderate and even
conservative members within their unions and the broader movement. Without
specifically declaring itself anarcho-syndicalist, the WSN is inspired by those 
politics and is certainly ready to defend the principles of direct democracy and 
direct action when faced with conservative elements of the movement. Different
political tendencies are represented in our group (social democratic, marxist,
anarchist). While remaining united under the banner of class-struggle unionism, 
we try not to shy away from internal political debates.

The Workers Solidarity Network came out of a long process of supporting
strikes and discussions on how unions can become more democratic and combative 
and how, we as working people, can actually start winning some fights against 
the bosses after a few decades of defeats. When we first founded the network in
February 2005 (before that discussions were had amongst smaller groups of labour
activists), we set the goals of adopting a platform and a constitution,
producing a pocket-sized pamphlet on basic rights, studying the labour code and
publicly launching the network on Mayday.

Over time and during the course of our practical work,we hope to more clearly
define our positions on revolutionary unionism, our relationship to the
mainstream labour movement and decide between remaining a solidarity network or
becoming an "actual union" that would independantly represent its members in
shops.

We would like to end this by thanking the Workers Solidarity Alliance for
giving us the opportunity to have our network be known in their publication.

Notre solidarité est sans frontières!

"A fighting union!"

Workers Solidarity Network
rst.wsn@gmail.com, 514-859-9092

Book Reviews

Solidarity for Sale: How Corruption Destroyed the Labor Movement & Undermined
America's Promise by Robert Fitch, Public Affairs Books, cloth, $28.50

Not since Louis Adamic's classic book, Dynamite, has there been an attempt to
thoroughly understand corruption in American unions. Fitch is not just out to
revise labor history, but also to explain the debates in the stagnating
AFL-CIO and its recent split. The upshot is a scathing critique of the sort of
exclusive territorialism spawned by the AFL craft unionism. The principal result
is entrenched bureaucracy. Whether the resulting structure is mobbed up or not,
it easily settles into a version of a protection racket. Radicals and other
reformers who enter into the higher ranks are inevitably coopted. Despite the
author's social democratic sympathies, workers interested in genuinely
transforming the labor movement will find a lot of ammo here.

Reviewed by Gordon Simmons

Poor Workers' Unions, by Vanessa Tait, South End Press, paper, $20

"Poor Workers' Unions: Rebuilding Labor from Below" by Vanessa Tait. What
Tait refers to as poor workers' unions are organizations that have generally 
been thought of as marginal to the labor movement, including unions of low-wage
workers and community-based organizations that have fought for workplace rights,
wages, and benefits. These organizations have developed into unions, worked
in harmony with unions, and struggled against unions. They include civil
rights, women's rights, welfare rights, and community organizations, as reform
movements within unions and as independent self-managing unions. What distinguishes
poor workers' unions, as Tait has described them, is not just the organizing
of those earning low or no wages, but also a focus on social justice and
direct-action - capturing the best characteristics of the radical American labor
movement when  it was developing. A must read for those interested in building a
self-managed and self-directing workers' movement.

THE GLOBAL SCENE

International Solidarity Conference
by Indymedia

Anarcho-syndicalists and revolutionary unionists from all over the world met
in Paris from April 28 to May 1 2007 for the third International Solidarity
Conference. Following the conferences of San Francisco (i99) and Essen, Germany
(i02), the I-07 took place with the goal of starting to build links between
different organizations and unite workers of different countries, to struggle
and take action through organizing international solidarity. I-07 was organized
by the French National Confederation of Labor (CNT-F, independent).

The weekend included discussions and debates in various union meetings (eg.
'Revolutionary syndicalism, anarchosyndicalism and institutions', 'Precarity at
work'), branch meetings (building industry, education etc.) and thematic
discussions (eg. 'Struggle against imperialism and neo-colonialism', 'Migration').

An open international meeting on April 30 brought hundreds of people together
at Place de la reunion. Speakers from Siberia, Guinea, Atenco and Palestine
reported on their current struggles. 'Le Choeur du Peuple' (the people's choir)
performed songs from the Paris Commune and a song about the famous Ukrainian
anarchist Nestor Makhno (he is buried just around the corner in the
Père-Lachaise Cemetery).

The CNT-F organized a fantastic cultural program too with several concerts
taking place over the weekend at the CNT's local and other places in Paris.
The International Workers Association

I.W.A.

The Congress of the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers Association
(international network of anarcho-syndicalist unions and organizations, such as
the National Confederation of Labor (CNT) in Spain or Regional Workers
Federation (FORA) in Argentina), took place in December 2006 in Manchester, 
United Kingdom. The Congress decided that the Secretariat of the IWA will be 
maintained, until the Brazil congress at the end of 2008, by the Serbian section 
Union Confederation "Anarcho-Syndicalist initiative"
(A.S.I.)

The first circular of the new Secretariat declared that, among other goals,
one of the primary tasks is the" Strengthening of communicational and
administrative infrastructure of the International". This will consist of using 
various electronic methods of communication and transfer to new electronic 
methods and extended usage of internet. This will result with speeding up of the
exchange of information's and thus response time to urgent actions.

During the transition of administrative functions from Norway to Serbia, IWA
Sections and Friends maintained their engagement in the struggle against the
State and capitalism. Apart from a joint IWA campaign against unstable work, in
which all IWA sections, from Spain to Serbia, and from Norway to UK
participated in, during the last two weeks of April including the First of May
demonstrations, different IWA sections were involved in their local struggles.

ASI's education union continued it's involvement in the massive student
uprising against tuition fees. This resulted in several main Belgrade faculties
being blocked for different periods, and a wake-up of the progressive segments 
of Serbian youth. CNT members in Spain continued their involvement in numerous
conflicts, including the longstanding fight against the Mercadona food
distributor. Members of the German Free Workers Union (FAU) were involved with
struggle against the management of the large hospital near Hanover, while Czech
members physically clashed with neo-nazis several times in period before, and on
the First of May demonstrations.

CLS (AIT-IWA)
Poštanski pretinac 6,
11077 Beograd, SERBIA
E-mail: secretariado@iwa-ait.org
Web: www.iwa-ait.org



____________________________________________________________________
What Is the Workers Solidarity Alliance?

W.SA. is an organization that believes in grassroots empowerment and strives
for a future self-managed society. We organize around the following
principles:

DIRECT DEMOCRACY - We advocate workers, tenant and community organizations
where the membership has direct control, charting their own direction. This
means that key decisions need to be made through assemblies of the members,
through direct democracy, not by hierarchies of paid officials and professional
staff. Delegates, representatives or shop stewards are directly answerable,
accountable and serve at the discretion of the membership. They are also subject 
to immediate recall by a majority of the members.

DIRECT ACTION - This  is not only the most effective action, but also the
most empowering. Through direct action we retain control  of our own struggle 
and avoid surrendering that control to so-called "experts" of often questionable
loyalty.

SELF-MANAGEMENT - We wish to participate in the building of a society where
all distinctions of class and privilege are eliminated. A  new, self-managed
society where the wealth we produce is shared equally and fairly by all. We do
not think it is possible to build such a society by surrendering authority to
any political party or politician. History has demonstrated that such parties,
however good their stated intentions might be, often backslide and act in
their own interests. We oppose any ruling elite . It  is only through grassroots
struggle that wealth and power can be fairly and  equally shared by all. We
therefore seek to create member-controlled organizations within the workplace 
and community. These organizations are the foundation upon which a society based
on direct democracy, solidarity and self-management can be built.

J o i n   U s !
W.S.A.
339 Lafayette Street - Room 202
New York, New York 10012
wsany@hotmail.com       www.workersolidarity.org.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


**************************************
Workers Solidarity is published by the
Workers Solidarity Alliance (WSA).

Submissions of articles, cartoons and graphics are welcomed. Submissions should 
be either mailed or emailed to the addresses below. All signed articles do not 
necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the
Workers Solidarity Alliance.

Editorial group:
Gordon S. (WV), Tom (SF), Pat (NY)  & Mike A. (RI),

Subscriptions are $10.00 for 4 issues.

339 Lafayette Street-Room 202
New York, NY 10012
Tel: 212-9798353 or email: wsany@hotmail.com
On the web: www.workersolidarity.org
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