green industrial unionism

By Armineh Megroian - Solidarity in Motion, October 6, 2013

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

BART workers and their Unions are being forced into a strike which will begin on Thursday Oct. 11^th.  This will cause congestion on roadways and bridges of Bay Area. But while you’re sitting in heavy traffic and stewing, don’t curse the so called overpaid, lazy Union workers. Acquaint yourself with a few facts first. Of course you know, that you will not get actual facts from the corporate media, only melodrama.

Fact: For BART workers, a strike is a last resort. They are more than willing to sit down and negotiate. It is the Board of Directors who refuses to negotiate.

Fact: BART’s General Manager Grace Crunican sits on the Board of directors of the “Bay Area Council”. A group of CEOs and managers dedicated to lowering wages and deteriorating working conditions for all workers. In short, to put profit before people.

Fact: The Board has spent $400,000 to hire a consultant turned negotiator from a private corporation named Veolia Transportation Services. Thomas Hock was brought in through the back door in an underhanded way. He has a reputation for Union-busting. His general strategy is to push Unions into a strike, provoke public anger and frustration against them, forcing them into taking concessions and pay cuts. That is 400K not spent on safety measures and upgrades for the paying public.

Fact:  Managements’ proposed “raise”, is actually a pay cut:

“According to BART’s analysis of its own proposal, utility workers, who currently take home $36,000 a year on average after taxes, would only see their pay increase to about $39,000 by 2017, after contributions to retirement and medical care are factored in. Train operators, who on average earn $44,000 a year after taxes, would only see their pay increase to $48,000 by 2017… That’s about an 8- to 9-percent increase in take-home pay for utility workers and train operators under the four-year BART contract proposal. But when you factor in an annual inflation rate of 2.5 percent, BART’s offer actually represents a pay cut of 1 to 2 percent over four years.” (Darwin BondGraham, “Why BART’s Wage Offer Doesn’t Include a Raise,” East Bay Express.

By Truls Gulowsen - Originally published at OpenDemocracy.net, September 29, 2013

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Last Friday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change went public with their Fifth Assessment report in Stockholm. The report supplied us with more reasons to dread the coming effects of global warming, and even more reasons to urge politicians to act.

One of the key new features in the IPCC report is the global accumulative “carbon budget”. The IPCC confirms earlier findings that there is an allowence for less than 1000 gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere for the rest of the century, if we are to avoid dangerous climate change above two degrees warming. This is less than a third of proven fossil reserves, and will be consumed in less than 30 years at current emission levels.

In neighbouring Norway, often described as a “world-leader in the combat against climate change”, a population of just over 5 million reap the profits in being the world's second largest gas exporter and the sixth largest oil exporter. The investments in the sector are growing year by year.


Along with the rest of the world, we are debating how to manage a limited resource and how to achieve the necessary emission cuts to avoid disastrous global warming. 



Along with the rest of the world, we live in a carbon bubble, in which, despite increasingly urgent warnings from scientists and environmentalists, we keep pumping up fossil fuels at record speed, pushing greener industry aside as we do so. In Norway the fossil fuels industry is by far the country's largest, and our reliance on this industry is not just a threat to the green industry, but to our entire economy, as has lately been pointed out by various individuals and organizations, including the IMF.


Our goal is not to get rid of the oil industry tomorrow. Nor is it to set a date for when the last oil worker will be out of a job. On the contrary, we want to keep the industry going for generations, but at a significantly lower level than we see today. To achieve this in a way that does not lead to mass unemployment (an estimated 250,000 people - or one in twenty Norwegians - are involved in the fossil fuel industry) we need a plan that combines both environmental policy and the oil workers' interests. That was the starting point when labour unions and environmental NGOs sat down to draft a plan on how we might realistically deflate Norway's inflated oil industry in a way that also retains the interests of the industry's employees.

Ira Berkovic of Workers' Climate Action reports from a workshop at this summer's anti-fracking protest camp - Originally Published at Red Pepper Blog, 9 September 2013

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

A workshop on 'work and transition' at the Reclaim The Power protest camp in Balcombe, Sussex, was part of an ongoing conversation between the labour and climate movements. It is a conversation which, in Britain, has involved the historic links between the Reclaim the Streets movement and striking dock workers in the 1990s.  Lucas Aerospace workers’ transition plan in the 1970s, which proposed to repurpose their socially and ecologically unsustainable factories to produce socially necessary goods.

With the climate movement reviving in the context of the government’s newfound mania for expanding fossil fuel energy generation and 'extreme energy' solutions like fracking, it is a conversation which must be had again with a new generation of activists.

The workshop aimed to give activists who might not have engaged with the labour movement before to learn about trade unions and workers’ organisations, and to discuss questions around workers’ agency in fighting climate change and the potential for worker-led models of transition.

Manuel Cortes, general secretary of transport union TSSA, spoke about the links between the fight for a top-quality, publicly-owned transport system and the fight against climate change. Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) assistant general secretary Chris Baugh introduced the Campaign Against Climate Change’s 'One Million Climate Jobs' pamphlet, a campaigning publication which argues for investment in and expansion of 'green collar' jobs in sustainable, socially-necessary industries like transport, social housing construction, and renewable energy.

PCS officer Clara Paillard recounted her experiences as a workplace environmental rep fighting for sustainability in the workplace, making links with local environmental campaigners to fight the construction of a privately-operated, for-profit waste incinerator in their local area. Green Party activist Derek Wall discussed models from economic theory, including Karl Marx and Elinor Ostrom, which could help develop a vision for democratic collectivism and a sustainable future.

I spoke to tell the story of Workers’ Climate Action (WCA), a direct-action solidarity network active between 2006 and 2010 which aimed to bring a working-class political approach to the climate movement and radical ecological politics to the labour movement. WCA sought to make links with workers in high-emissions industries like energy and aviation, because we knew that a conversation about transition was only possible from within a framework of basic solidarity with workers’ day-to-day struggles.

Small-group discussion in the workshop covered a range of topics. It would be disingenuous to deny the difficulty of discussing the potential power of aviation, construction, and energy workers in a workshop made up of participants who had little or no experience of working in such industries. However, with participants working as teachers, journalists, and in local government – all sectors and industries with high levels of trade union organisation – there was plenty of opportunity to discuss applying workplace and union-focused models of environmental activism to participants’ own workplaces and experiences, rather than seeing them solely as something we can engage some alien worker 'other' with.

By Ewan Kerr - Scottish Left Review #77, July & August 2013 (used by permission of the author).

“Outside party politics new social movements, including environmental, anti-cuts and feminist groups, have not come together sufficiently with the old, defensive organisations of the working class to produce the coalition that might make them an effective political force” (S Hall, The Guardian 2 April 2013)

As the above quote by Stuart Hall illustrates, contemporary social movements and progressive organisations face an on-going problem: they struggle to form effective and inter-movement forms of organisation and collective action. It is widely recognised now that the political left’s main failings are by in large a result of the often fragmented identities of different groups. This in itself should not be cause for concern, as left-wing political theory and action depends upon the mantra of unity in diversity. It can though prevent groups who share a natural affinity with each other from organising coalitions which are both effective and long term, while also limit the ability to develop strategies for deeper and more meaningful co-operation. Some explanation for such divisions I believe can be found through an examination of a well-established approach to coalition forming, that of framing. Framing, in essence, seeks to align values, ideology and activities in order to construct common viewpoints and form a stronger sense of collective identity.

Featured in the last issue of SLR was an excellent article by David Eyre, which offered a useful introduction to the idea of framing. The article provided a concise and tidy description and explanation of framing, although focused very much upon values on a national basis, and efforts to change people’s attitudes. This brief article seeks to build upon this, and offer an example drawn from labour-environmental coalition building. This will involve two distinct discourses which are used to frame such blue-green coalitions, that is the Jobs Vs. The Environment dilemma and Just Transition. Each illustrates that though the creation of frames groups can either be framed as having mutually exclusive or inclusive interests, which on one hand can act as a barrier to potentially prevent effective coalition work, or on the other facilitate co-operation though the creation of a discourse which appeals to the deep seated interests of both environmental organisations and organised labour groups. As Jakopovich (2009) states in his 2009 article Uniting to Win;

“The construction of shared experiences and common or complementary perceptions of interest… is at the heart of more successful and permanent coalition building.”

That past efforts towards co-operation between environmental and labour organisations have often been characterised by conflict and distrust is an unfortunate reality. On the face of it, it’s difficult to understand how two groups who subscribe to many of the same values have such acrimonious relations. Burgman’s (in 2013’s Trade Unions in the Green Economy) evaluation of this is lengthy, but worth quoting in full:

“Capitalist economies are characterised by the underuse of labour resources and overuse of environmental resources. Corporations tend to both reduce labour costs and to use the cheapest production methods possible, regardless of ecological consequence. Thus employment options are restricted at the same time as the planetary environment is degraded.”

Join us at the Holdout for a presentation about the BLF "green bans" in Australia and Redwood summer in California. The powerpoint will be followed by a discussion about strategy and tactics to build a social and ecological revolution.

• When - Saturday, July 27, 6:00 PM
• Where - The Holdout: 2313 San Pablo Avenue, Oakland, California 94612

Facebook Event - To RSVP

By x372712 - July 2, 2013

Industrial Unionism Now!

Capitalism has never been kind to us. The machines of industry have unleashed both great productive capacity and great social change, abolishing all classes but holders of the means of production and those who work those means. While the inevitable conflict of social classes has been at turns sidetracked by nationalism, concessions, and the endless attempt to turn working people against their own interests, we know well enough: there is one primary struggle in our time- the struggle of the disenfranchised, the exploited, and the disempowered against the privileged and the powerful; the struggle of labor, and the disenfranchised of every hierarchy built into the class system, against capital and whole of the establishment that enshrines it. Never since the dawn of the industrial revolution has this been more clear- in the age of globalized corporate capitalism, the velvet glove of progressive reform has been stripped away to reveal the iron fist that is the profoundly undemocratic system of capital property. Since the age of neoliberalism and 'trickle down' economics, the cut-throat dictatorial corporate rule that has been exported to the third world for decades has come back to cast its sick sights on the workers of the West, and each new crisis brings newer cuts, more austerity measures, and a further stripping of those programs and reforms that created the middle class- all the while accumulating previously unheard-of wealth in the hands of the megarich while the wages of the American laborer stagnate, the small business holders are driven into the ranks of the workers.

Let's not kid ourselves and think that ethical consumption or other indulgences is going to change the situation; fair trade and organic create a niche market selling to the sort of people who buy fair trade and organic (and, all too often, figure that this means they've 'done their part' in changing the world), but does not meaningfully challenge the paradigm of corporate capitalism. Something more is needed. Not mere consumers, we can act as producers, and exercise our power at the nexus of our own exploitation. We need the labor movement.

Unions have acquired a bad reputation, mostly unjustified, but there are legitimate reasons. Union bureaucracy and hierarchy can be a disempowering and work at odds with the interest of the union rank and file. Many unions are all too willing to sign no-strike clauses and compete with other unions. American unions worked during the second Red Scare to purge the anti-capitalists from their ranks and remake themselves as a reformist, pro-business force and have since spent a huge amount of their funds campaigning for the lesser of two evils and the anti-labor Democratic Party while ignoring the need to organize unrepresented workers and carry out the real work of the union.

Yet labor is needed, whatever the problems of modern business unions; and so, a better model must be found, and organized. A model for real effective labor must be based in grassroots union democracy (decentralized power, federated organization, and recallable, accountable delegates), industrial solidarity (meaning that the industry is not split among multiple unions, but acts as one union), and an unapologetic pro-labor agenda (no no-strike clauses, no abandoning change for moderate reformism- the goal of the union has to be workplace democracy, not just collective bargaining). We need to organize that sort of labor, and a place to organize is right here in central Minnesota.

Unionizing will not be easy. In the globalized neoliberal age, the dominant players of both our productive and consumptive forces are often controlled, not by workers, not by local petit bourgeois, but by multinational chains- chains of stores that make chains on the hands of labor. Such chains make it so any unionizing effort that has real effect on the lives of the people of this city needs to be not local, but regional, national, or international, and for this reason, this dilemma that faces every worker, the labor movement itself must be international. It is most important to note that in an age of global capital, no one community can become revolutionary. Globalization creates a race to the bottom- any attempt by a nation to institute progressive policies, or, even 'worse' (in the eyes of capital), real democracy will be met with the movement of business and capital from that nation to another, more desperate or more oppressed. As long as capitalists have people desperate enough or afraid enough not to demand change, they can always just move to the lowest bidder and make sure the labor market in the commodity of human lives works for them. Not to mention the IMF, the World Bank, and of rest of international monetary and exchange institutions set up by and for the wealthiest people in the world. Just look at what happened in South Africa or Poland after their revolutions; their entire economic reform program torn to pieces by these institutions, serving not the interest or the will of the people, but the interest and will of the capitalist class. Just look at America- you think closing the border will bring jobs? It's not immigration that's taking your job; it's globalization done capitalist style.

That's why labor movement doesn't only need to be democratic- it needs to international. It must be a labor movement that can fight capitalism on every front, can make sure that every stage of the production and industrial process is beset by the forces of labor, can, as labor movements have historically done, prove a dynamic force against totalitarian regimes, and can maintain itself as a genuinely democratic engine of popular power.

The IWW is the ideal union for the modern age- based in worker's democracy, industrial organization, international solidarity, and an unabashed yet inclusive revolutionary agenda. The IWW also is one of the few unions that really thinks outside of the box- recently, the Wobblies have lead the way in unionizing the food and service industries (for example, Starbucks and Jimmy John's), showing a drive to take up the cause of workers other unions are all too willing to ignore.  Ten IWW members in a community are all it takes to form a General Membership Branch, the basic organization from which further labor action, both local and, in solidarity with other communities, regional and international action can be taken. I urge readers, activists, and workers to join the IWW and building genuine labor resistance, across the world!