IWW

Grand Rapids, MI (06/06/2008) - Starbucks terminated a barista active in the IWW Starbucks Workers Union today as part of its ongoing effort to combat a growing movement of employees pushing for a living wage and secure work hours. The barista, Cole Dorsey, was fired after two years of service while he was coordinating a union recruitment drive at Starbucks stores in Grand Rapids.

Day to protest recent firing of CNT member in Spain and continuing anti-union discrimination in Grand Rapids

May 28, 2008

Flaum Appetizing, a kosher food distributor, terminated 20 IWW members last week. The IWW had a strong presence at Flaum, with about two-thirds of the warehouse being union members. Workers had been struggling for respect from the boss for almost a year before the firings occurred.

IWW launches second phase of fight against blood service centralisation plans.

The IWW is fighting the closure of 10 blood processing centres across England. This is the largest campaign yet attempted by the IWW in the UK (the BIROC), and has led to large scale regional mobilisations, and the distribution of 55,000 leaflets and 5000 targeted workplace bulletins.

The One Big Union was founded a mere two months before it was baptized by the Winnipeg General Strike. The founding Convention was held in the Calgary Labour Temple (which still stands today, though it has been converted into a Chinese Restaurant).

In May of 1919 a heat wave crossed the province. Edmonton had reached temperatures of 85 degrees. Like the heat wave a mood of union militancy was in the air across Alberta, indeed across Western Canada. A strike wave would soon erupt sweeping the West like a prairie fire.

"It was perhaps a natural development that one of the strongest branches of the Advocates of Industrial Unionism should be in the Singer Sewing Machine Works at Kilbowie, Clydebank, which employed some 12,000 workers. Singers was primarily an American firm, but it had established itself in Europe, and exerted an effective monopoly in the manufacture of sewing machines.

In this wide-ranging interview with IWW organizer Daniel Gross conducted by the UK-based Now or Never!, Gross discusses the innovative worker-controlled organizing model, known as solidarity unionism, that has made gains for Starbucks workers where the bureaucratic union model has failed.

This June looks likely to see a resurgence in organising for the education sector, with an anarchist networking meeting involving three federations and individuals from around the country.

This text is taken from the December 2006 issue of the Industrial Workers of the World Australia's newsletter, Direct Action.

Requests have been routinely made and ignored for the purchase of a stepladder. It is vital for our safety that we have a stepladder available to use for such tasks as changing light bulbs, reaching boxes on high shelves, and cleaning ceiling tiles. Currently, we are forced to balance ourselves on unstable café tables to accomplish tasks in hard to reach places.

Published in the IWW's One Big Union Monthly, August, 1937

On January 2nd 2007 at 5:00AM workers from the Food Industry and Allied Workers Union (Industrial Workers of the World, I.U. 460/640) and supporters will bring in the New Year with a march and picket line.

Our perspective... was simple: “What will it take to win this strike?”

"Why I'm a wobbly" - Three members of the Industrial Workers of the World, from different political and working backgrounds, explain why they joined the IWW, and how they see their union.

Agricultural labour in the hop fields of California was amongst the most strenuous, badly paid and time consuming labour that a worker could undertake in early 20th century America. The situation of the hop pickers who worked at the Durst Ranch, the single largest employer of agricultural workers in the state, near the Northern California town of Wheatland in 1913, was no different.

For the fifty years prior to 1927, the struggles in the Colorado mines had been a flashpoint for labour relations throughout the mining industry and had been marked by many strikes, aborted uprisings and confrontations between miners and mine owners, and the state militia.

By Mischa Gaus - In These Times, October 4, 2006

When Joe Tessone and his fellow Starbucks baristas walked into a pep rally with management at their store in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood in August, the bosses were ready.