Freedom Inc‎

Welcome to Haunted Inc.!

Come join us at the Freedom Inc. office for an evening of spooktacular activties on Monday, October 30, 2017 from 5pm to 8pm. There will be a small haunted house, scary treats and delicious food.

This event is free and open to the public! Come dressed in your scariest/best costume!

Hosted by Brave Space Alliance

1434 W 51st Street, Chicago

Brave Space Alliance will be having our first official VOGUE NIGHT from 5p.m. – 7p.m. As well as introducing everyone to our new south side location!

Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association

In a powerful showing of strength, hundreds of MTEA members, parents, and community members flooded the MPS School Board auditorium October 24, 2017 to protect our students from harmful budget cuts.

Thank you to everyone who came out to support our schools!

To keep up the pressure, we need everyone to sign up for a rapid response shift to future board meetings.

Hosted by Confronting Mass Incarceration

2559 N Downer, Milwaukee (Boswell Book Company), 7 P.M.

he author will also be part of a panel Thurs. at 4pm in S120 MATC Student Center, 700 W. State St., MKE. See all events at http://tinyurl.com/y94w58f6.

As part of the Milwaukee Turners’ curated Mass Incarceration series, Daniel Karpowitz of the Bard Prison Initiative appears at Boswell to talk about his book College in Prison: Reading in the Age of Mass Incarceration.

College in Prison chronicles how, since 2001, Bard College has provided high-quality liberal arts education – with courses ranging from anthropology to Mandarin to advanced mathematics – to New York State prisoners who, upon release, have gone on to rewarding careers and elite graduate and professional programs.

Drawing upon fifteen years of experience as a director of and teacher within the Bard Prison Initiative, Daniel Karpowitz tells the story of BPI’s development from a small pilot project to a nationwide network. At the same time, he recounts the educational histories of individual students, tracking both their intellectual progress and the many obstacles they must face.

Daniel Karpowitz is the director of policy and academics for the Bard Prison Initiative and lecturer in law and the humanities at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. He also the cofounder of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison, an organization that launches and cultivates college-in-prison programs across the country.

Hosted by Milwaukee General Defense Committee

1428 N Farwell, Milwaukee, 2:30 P.M. (Affiliated Medical Services)

The Milwaukee General Defense Committee is calling for a counter-demonstration of the right-wing anti-abortion organization 40 Days for Life. 40 Days for Life “is a focused pro-life campaign with a vision to access God’s power…to end abortion.” They attempt to steer patients away from accessing safe and legal healthcare with messages of shame, and divert them to non-medical religious “counseling.” They will be at Affiliated Medical Services on Sunday October 29 at 3pm.

We typically do not confront these people at clinics to reduce the stress level for patients who are attempting to enter the clinic. On Sunday October 29, however, the clinic will be closed, so we’ll be taking a stand for free, safe, on-demand abortion in our community. Join us to show that Milwaukee won’t stand for their messages of shame. Our bodies are our own!

Affiliated is in need of comfortable and warm clothes for patients. Mostly winter coats, but also sweatshirts, yoga pants/sweatpants, long t-shirts, and new socks/underwear. If you have anything to give, please bring it with you on Sunday!

The Milwaukee General Defense Committee is not affiliated with or sponsored by Affiliated Medical Services.

The General Defense Committee is the community self-defense arm of the Industrial Workers of the World. The Milwaukee IWW is a member-run union for all workers, a union dedicated to organizing on the job, in our industries. and in our communities.

PDF OF UE LOCAL 150 “CALL TO ACTION” LEAFLET: Labor Durham Call-In Day 11-14-17

http://ue150.org/

https://www.facebook.com/UE150/

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United Electrical Workers Local 150 (North Carolina Public Service Workers Union)

National Call-In Day on November 14 as the Durham 15 stand trial!

Call Durham County District Attorney ROGER ECHOLS at: (919) 808-3010

Call NC State Senate President Phil Berger at: (919) 733-5708

1. Urge the state Legislature to repeal the 2015 law GS § 100-2.1 that prohibits local governments from removing Confederate statues and other vestiges of white supremacy.
2. Drop all criminal charges for the 15 anti-racist activists arrested for the events in Durham related to the toppling of the Confederate statue.

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UE150, NC Public Service Workers Union calls on the labor movement to stand in solidarity with the growing people’s movement that is challenging the racist rooted system that allows public monuments to white supremacist ideals and values in the form of Confederate statues to stand. On August 14, some residents took down the supremacist Confederate soldier statue in front of the Durham Courthouse. While everyone may not agree with this tactic, the state laws prevented the ability of people to address concerns to take down statues to their local governments. This occurred just two days after Nazi’s and KKK rallied in a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA to defend Confederate statues and killed an anti-racist protester, Heather Heyer.

The Durham action was another powerful expression of people’s anger and disgust with how the system uses its power to remind Black, Brown and oppressed people of their “place” and ongoing oppression and exploitation. Some feel they should take matters into their own hands when governments attempt to stop progressive social change. In 2015, the Republican-dominated NC State Legislature passed a bill that took away authority from local city and county governments to remove Confederate statues from their property, GS § 100-2.1. This is the same state Legislature that the US Supreme Court ruled gerrymandered voting districts based on race with “laser-like precision”. The state Legislature also passed similar legislation – HB2 — that eliminated local governments’ power to protect trans-gendered people from hate crimes, or enact protections for workers from abusive employers, like raising the minimum wage and improving working conditions for contractors.

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NC Public Service Workers Union, UE local 150
For information about how to support this resolution, call 919-876-7187

http://ue150.org/

https://www.facebook.com/UE150/

Durham, North Carolina September 12, 2017 / Photo: WI BOPM

https://www.workers.org/2017/10/23/university-of-chicago-graduate-workers-win-historic-union-vote/

By Workers World Chicago bureau posted on October 23, 2017

In a decisive and historic victory in the struggle for graduate workers at private universities across the United States, the graduate workers at the University of Chicago voted overwhelmingly on Oct. 17-18 to form a union. Cast were 1,103 yes ballots and 479 opposed.

In August 2016, the National Labor Relations Board overturned its 2004 ruling that graduate students at private universities are not statutory employees. In the previous decision, the petition of graduate workers at Brown University to affiliate with the United Auto Workers was rejected, thanks in large part to union-busting efforts of Brown’s then-provost and current UChicago President Robert Zimmer.

Due to their victory, UChicago graduate employees will be represented by Graduate Students United, which is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors. Like their colleagues at New York University and Yale, the GSU had developed a longterm organizing presence on campus, even when the hope for official recognition as a union was dim.

GSU organizing for past decade

GSU was founded in 2007 after the university implemented a funding initiative that promised better financial support and working conditions to incoming students, without making any changes to that of existing students. Through extensive research, GSU organizers found that graduate student labor made up a third of teaching on campus — a substantially higher figure than the university boasted in its undergraduate recruitment literature.

GSU soon developed a democratic organizing structure and was a driving force in campus labor struggles, fighting for better financial support and wages, resources for graduate student parents and reductions in fees. In the absence of GSU’s legal union recognition, the university administration itself has taken credit for many of these concessions that would have been impossible without grassroots organizing.

Solidarity work has also been an important part of GSU’s campus presence, with members serving as key organizers in struggles against the university’s private police force as well as in the successful fight to reopen the UChicago Hospital’s Level 1 adult trauma center to serve the South Side of Chicago.

The UChicago administration deployed a largely legal strategy in their anti-union efforts. UChicago’s legal counsel on Sept. 22 filed for both a stay of the election, in an attempt to prevent graduate workers from voting together, and a review of the election order. The review sought to overturn the regional labor director’s decision for the election to proceed, by appealing to the NLRB where two Trump appointees have just been confirmed. The stay was not granted, and the review has yet to be heard.

UChicago administration and President Zimmer have made it clear that they will continue this legal route in an attempt to delegitimize and negate the election results. Provost Daniel Diermeier announced this plan in an email to graduate workers and faculty on Oct. 19. UChicago will join several other universities calling on the NLRB to reverse the August 2016 decision. The administration has further emphasized its legal strategy by hiring Proskauer Rose, the same legal team that fought graduate worker unionization at Cornell, Duke and Columbia universities.

Battling anti-union rhetoric

In a further attempt to undermine graduate workers, the administration has framed anti-union messaging as neutral intellectual debate. Their depiction of the union as a third-party entity, interested only in collecting dues at the expense of academic integrity, is a common thread in anti-union rhetoric throughout the U.S.

The administration has also leaned on faculty, many of whom are insecure in their own employment, to move graduate workers away from voting “yes” through one-on-one lobbying and department-wide emails. Representatives of the university have spoken at length in different forums about the unique and indispensable relationships between graduate workers and their faculty mentors. They depict a union as an interfering presence that would fundamentally change those relationships, while using faculty as their mouthpiece for this messaging.

The graduate workers’ win at UChicago is likely to have an invigorating effect on similar campaigns across the country. While the win is significant, so too will be the struggle to bring the administration to the bargaining table. No graduate workers on a private campus have bargained for or ratified their first contract yet, even though labor law requires administrations to come to the table in good faith. UChicago graduate workers have a fight ahead of them, but they also have considerable momentum from their victory.

(Photo: Graduate Student Union, UChicago)

University of Chicago graduate students as they began their victorious vote, Oct. 17, 2017

Voces de la Frontera

Flyer for Monday, Oct. 23 2017 Colombia University NYC rally (1)

Join us in support of students facing disciplinary action and demand that Columbia drop its investigation into the alleged “disruption” of the CU College Republican’s Tommy Robinson event. Columbia has a history of abusing its institutional power by intimidating students, workers, and the Harlem community. We refuse to let this be another opportunity for them to do so behind closed doors.

MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD:
CALL PRESIDENT BOLLINGER: 212-854-9970
CALL SUZANNE GOLDBERG @ the Office of University Life: 212-854-0411
CALL PROVOST JOHN COATSWORTH: 212-854-2404
TO DEMAND THAT OUR STUDENTS ARE NOT PUNISHED. TELL THEM:
Join us in support of students facing disciplinary action and demand
that Columbia drop its investigation into the alleged “disruption” of the
CU College Republican’s Tommy Robinson event. Columbia has a
history of abusing its institutional power by intimidating students,
workers, and the Harlem community.
We refuse to let this be another opportunity for them to do so
behind closed doors.
“I am calling to demand that Columbia drop its investigation into
students who protested a violent Islamophobe on Oct. 10. The students
were exercising free speech. I am concerned that the University is
punishing predominantly black and brown students for speaking up
against people who do not think their lives matter.”