Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee steering committee member Ben Turk, updating us on the expanding prison hunger strike to end administrative confinement.

Peoples Power Assemblies

http://fergusonresponse.tumblr.com/

http://portside.org/2016-07-28/labor-supports-blackslivesmatter-call-police-unions-accountability

AFL-CIO leaders have reached out to union members in support of actions that can be taken to stop and prevent police killings of people of color. Racism plays an insidious role in the daily lives of all working people of color. This is a labor issue because it is a workplace issue; it is a community issue, and unions are the community. Philando Castile was a union member, and so his family is our family. Ideas of what you can do from labor activists.

Sources: https://www.facebook.com/LeftLaborProject/

https://www.facebook.com/LaborAgainstWhiteSupremacy

Hard Times Are Fighting Times: Liberation, Revolution, & Socialism in the South

SAVE THE DATE! MORE DETAILS TBA

Hard Times Are Fighting Times: Liberation, Revolution, & Socialism in the South

Saturday, September 24 / Durham, NC

http://www.workers.org/wwp/vote-for-socialism/

http://fightfor15.org/the-fight-for-15-to-hold-first-ever-nationwide-convention/

Thousands of Americans doing all kinds of work for too little pay are heading to Richmond — the ex-capital of the Confederacy — to fight for for justice. Economic justice. Immigration justice. Racial justice.

Representatives of the country’s nearly 64 million workers paid less than $15 per hour will be there — McDonald’s cashiers and airport baggage handlers, truck drivers and early education teachers, retail employees and home care workers. And so many others.

We’ll be confronting our nation’s biggest, most important issues — the crisis of today’s low wages and the effects of racist policies that have held back working people of color. In anticipation of the convention, McDonald’s workers in Richmond walked off the job on Thursday and went on strike to demand $15 an hour and union rights.

“Workers like me – home care workers and domestic workers – have never had a shot at a good life because our jobs are a legacy of slavery and were excluded from basic labor protections,” said Lauralyn Clark, a 53-year-old home care worker from Ruther Glen, VA. “It’s been over one hundred and fifty years since we abolished slavery, but we still aren’t being paid what we need to survive.” 

“Decades of attacks on working people who organized unions mean that jobs that traditionally provided a path to economic security for some families now no longer do,” said David Wildbourne, library staff at East Carolina University. “America’s legacies of racism and corporate greed have always been intertwined, and because of those forces we’re all in the same boat now. Our chance for opportunity, if it ever existed, has been destroyed. And so we are coming together in Richmond to fight for an economy that works for all of us, regardless of income or the color of our skin. Our Fight for $15 is changing America and we won’t stop until we win a living wage and a path to a union for every working family.”

Read the Washington Post coverage of the announcement here>>

From garment workers in Bangladesh to fast food workers in the U.S. South: workers all over the world are rising up today!

Milwaukee, Wisconsin Oct. 15, 2011.