Labor

Corona is union-busting, from the Solidarity Center:
"Vidriera Potosí

So, some folks may have noticed that there's a whole bunch of crap going on with the SEIU right now. They've got a civil war brewing in California, and SEIU and the CNA/NNOC (nurse's union) are taking out adjacent attack ads on progressive blogs. Very confusing. Whose side is right?

Well, I'm not going to tell you because fuck if I know, but here's a good article from In These Times, a very fantabulous lefty magazine (that we in fact carry, so come on in and support your friendly neighborhood radical bookstore AND a badass lefty magazine with great writing and magnificent journalism).

Dissent in the Ranks

From the publisher: This oversize manual is for workers who want to take control over their lives at work. In hundreds of first-person accounts, workers tell in their own words how they did just that.

The stories run from how to ridicule a pompous boss to a years-long campaign against a multinational corporation. The workplaces represented include factory and white collar, public and private, in the U.S. and Canada.

Each chapter ends with questions designed to get you thinking strategically about how to apply what you've read in your workplace.

Jane Slaughter has written for Labor Notes for 25 years, covering the auto industry and other topics. She co-authored Working Smart, and has written and spoken widely about participation programs and management-by-stress.
Contents include:

* Shop Floor Tactics
* Creative Tactics
* Fighting Discrimination
* Saving Good Jobs: Fighting Lean Production and Outsourcing
* Contract Campaigns
* Strikes

The California Nurses Association made a few headlines recently when a new nurses union out of Pennsylvania voted to affiliate with them. The CNA has become one of the fastest growing union in the country, bringing together nurses on conjoined demands of better work standards, patient care, and promotion of national single-payer health care. They currently represent about 75,000 nurses. Their greatest success to date has been capping the patient:nurse ration in the state of California. I'm going to repost the note on their new affiliation published in The Nation below. I'm also posting links to the recent AFL-CIO press release, their website, and the website of the national organizing organization. They're organizing in Texas right now.

5,000 Join California Nurses Association/Nurses Organizing Committee

I'll bet you'd be surprised to learn that the east Texas/west Louisiana region was one of the strongholds of the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical union based on direct action and workers' self-management of industry. The IWW is most famous for its work out west, and folks who know about it remember the Free Speech Fights in the northwest, the miner struggles in Rockies and southwest, etc. Lesser known is the work of radical unionists in east Texas and west Louisiana who formed the Brotherhood of Timber Workers, which affiliated with the IWW in 1912. Though short-lived, this union was militant and vibrant. It was known for its radicalism and its racial integration, laudable especially for the time.

Here's the story, straight from the online Handbook of Texas:

From the publisher: Long before Antonio Negri became famous around the world for his groundbreaking volume Empire, he was infamous across Europe for the incendiary writings contained in this book. Books for Burning consists of five pamphlets that Negri wrote between 1971 and 1977, which attempt to identify and draw lessons from new conditions of class struggle that emerged in the course of the 1970s. Conceived as organizational hypotheses intended for debate among the members of the political movements Workers' Power (Potere operaio) and Organized Autonomy (Autonomia organizzata), these texts were later misread and misrepresented by the Italian state in its attempt to frame Negri as responsible for the assassination of former Italian president Aldo Moro, as the leader of the Red Brigades, and as the mastermind of an armed insurrection against the state.

From the publisher: Storming Heaven is the first comprehensive survey of Italian autonomist theory, from its origins in the anti-stalinist and workerist left of the 1950s to its heyday twenty years later. Autonomist marxism was a political tendency which privileged themes--self-organization, construction of identity, grassroots politics, subjects in struggle--which in many ways can be seen as the precursor of today's debates around direct action protest. Emphasizing the dynamic nature of class struggle as the distinguishing feature of autonomist thought, Wright explores how its understanding of class politics developed alongside emerging social movements. Offering a critical and historical exploration of the tendency's emergence in postwar Italy, Storming Heaven moves beyond the crisis of traditional analytical frameworks on the left, and assesses the strengths and limitations of autonomist marxism as first developed by Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologna and others.

From the publisher: This accessible, critical history of the U.S. labor movement examines the hidden history of workers' resistance from the nineteenth to the present, from an unabashedly Marxist perspective. Workers in the United states have a rich tradition of fighting back and achieving gains previously thought unthinkable, but that history remains largely hidden. Subterranean Fire brings that history to light and reveals its lessons for today.
"A veteran worker-intellectual brilliantly addresses the crisis of the labor movement, skewering those who believe that renewal can come from the top down, and encouraging those who are fighting to rebuild it from the bottom up." [Mike Davis]

From the publisher: Many histories have been written of the Industrial Workers of the World, often called the Wobblies. Founded in 1905 in hopes of uniting the working class into One Big Union, the IWW promoted industrial organization at a time when craft unionism was the established pattern. The IWW welcomed all workers, regardless of ethnicity, race or gender when other unions boasted of their exclusionary policies. Its reliance on direct action on the job generated much of the strategy and tactics of the modern labor movement. Often referred to as the singing union, Wobblies wrote hundreds of labor songs and published millions of copies of their Little Red Songbook. The IWW's theme song, "Solidarity Forever," became the anthem of the entire American labor movement.

From the publisher: This is indeed an incredible endeavor. For sure the most comprehensive collection of rebel workers' songs and poems ever compiled in English. It includes ALL the songs that appeared in the IWW's celebrated "little red songbook" from 1909 through 1973, plus dozens of others that never made it into the songbook. Here are the songs of Joe Hill, T-Bone Slim, Dick Brazier, Ralph Chaplin, Covington Hall and other Wobbly legends; lesser knowns, but ought to be legends such as Eugene Barnett, Paul Walker, and Henry Pfaff; for the first time anywhere, a good selection of songs by women Wobblies: Anges Thecla Fair, Laura Payne Emerson, Sophie Fagin, Jane Street, Laura Tanne and others; songwriters from other continents, including Australians Bill Casey and Harry Hooton, the Englishman Leon Rosselson, Germans Ernest Riebe and John Olday, and the Scotsman Douglas Robson.