The audio for our panel at the Left Forum is available now!
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Monique Goodman. “End this strike and let these advocates keep helping people like me!”
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Community voices rally. Legal services workers help folks who can’t afford lawyers
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Striking legal services workers & clients.
BBC News - Analysis: The hopes that blaze in Istanbul
Friend, comrade, and author of Why It’s (Still) Kicking Off Everywhere Paul Mason reports from Istanbul.
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It’s a revolution,” says a man in a mask, face lit by the flames of a burning car. And some people are clearly high on it. I have covered Syntagma, the Occupy protests and reported from Tahrir Square. This is different to all of them. First, it is massive. The sheer numbers dwarf any single episode of civil unrest in Greece. Second, the breadth of social support - within the urban enclave of Istanbul - is bigger than Greece and closer to Egypt. “Everyone is here - except the AK party,” insists one young woman. People nod. In Greece, the urban middle class was split. Here the secular middle class are out in force, united across political divisions, to say nothing of football hatreds. All eyes on the workersIs this the Turkish Tahrir? Not unless the workers join in. Turkey has a large labour movement, and a big urban poor working population, and Monday is a work day, so we will see. It is certainly already something more than the Turkish version of Occupy.
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People have killed their fear of authority - and the protests are growing
Turkish journalist Ece Temelkuran’s report from Turkey, found via the brilliant Alia Malek on Twitter.
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As I write, Istanbul, Ankara - Turkey’s capital - Izmir and Adana are burning. Massive police violence is taking place. And in my middle class Istanbul neighbourhood, like many others, people are banging on their frying pans to protest. People are exchanging information about safe places to take shelter from police, the telephone numbers of doctors and lawyers. In Taksim Square, on the building of Atatürk Cultural Center, some people are hanging a huge banner. There are only two words on it: “Don’t surrender!
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Bad Green Jobs - In These Times
As New York’s CitiBike program launches, the company that runs to program is accused of wage theft by its Washington, D.C. workers.
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Samuel Swenson says he was excited when he was hired at Capital Bikeshare in the summer of 2011. He and his new colleagues were enthusiastic about bicycles and alternative transportation, he told In These Times. “We helped sell the program as much as we helped make it work.” Things quickly started to go wrong. According to Swenson, he was hired with the expectation that he would become a full-time bicycle mechanic and that he would receive health benefits, but the benefits didn’t materialize. The warehouse where he and the handful of other mechanics worked was housed next to a concrete mill in a Superfund site. The hard work and the silica dust from the concrete made him concerned about when his healthcare would kick in. When he never got a satisfactory answer from the company, he began researching Alta’s contract with the city. “I found out that I was entitled to health benefits, based on federal law, that my employer had agreed to, that I had been paid less than they had agreed [in their contract] to pay me, again according to this federal law,” he says.
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The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (I’ve covered their work before, here) hit NYC on Saturday ahead of Wendy’s shareholder meeting to protest the fast food chain’s refusal to sign their fair food agreement. The agreement requires that companies pay a penny more per pound of tomatoes purchased, to be paid back to the workers. It’s certainly not enough to lift them out of poverty, but it helps.
The CIW’s actions are always raucous, joyful and full of music and great art. This one was no exception. Check it:
Sharecropping on Wheels - Working In These Times
I wrote about Savannah’s port truck drivers, who are classified as “independent contractors” by their bosses but don’t get to make their own schedules or control the work that they do. What they DO get is the “right” to pay for their own trucks and equipment, charged for the cell phones the companies require them to use and other miscellaneous “repairs” to their trucks that they’re never sure were actually performed.
But they control a very important part of the supply chain, and they’re getting organized. So much for those who say we can’t organize the South.
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The workers have to pay for and maintain their own trucks, effectively forcing them to pay to work. Because of that, and because the workers are mostly black, a 2010 report [PDF] from the National Employment Law Project and the labor federation Change to Win calls the situation of the truckers “sharecropping on wheels.” Some of them are forced to lease trucks from the companies they work for, meaning that they’re literally paying their bosses to be able to do their jobs. The report estimates that these costs can run up to 60 percent of the drivers’ income. “By the time we’ve taken out for fuel, insurances, our cell phones that we have to have at the companies that we’re with, by the time we get all those deductions, then it’s time to pay bills, we’re down to nothing,” says port truck driver Carol Cauley, another member of the organizing committee. “We kind of have to choose bills or family.” Lewis Grant, also a driver and committee member, adds, “With funds being low there’s some tough decisions that I have to make on a weekly basis. Do I buy new tires for my truck or do I put food in the refrigerator? Do I send my kids to day care this week?
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