Vous êtes sur le site officiel des Travailleurs Industriels du Monde. Ici vous trouverez à peu près tout ce dont vous avez besoin pour rejoindre l'IWW et commencer à organiser vos lieux de travail et construire un grand syndicat au sein de votre communauté. La plupart des informations contenues ici traitent des Etats-unis et du Canada, mais nous avons aussi des liens vers d.autres sites IWW gérés ailleurs.

L'IWW est une organisation syndicale pour tous les travailleurs, un syndicat dédié à l'organisation des travailleurs sur leur lieu de travail, dans leurs industries et leurs communautés. Les membres des IWW organisent les travailleurs pour obtenir de meilleures conditions aujourd.hui et construisent pour demain un monde économique démocratique. Nous voulons que nos entreprises fonctionnent au profit des ouvriers et des communautés plutôt que pour une poignée de patrons et leur exécutif.

Nous sommes les Travailleurs Industriels du Monde parce que nous nous organisons industriellement. Ceci signifie que nous organisons tous les travailleurs produisant les mêmes biens ou fournissant les mêmes services dans un syndicat, plutôt que de les diviser par secteurs d.activité, ainsi nous pouvons mettre en commun notre force et faire triompher nos revendications ensemble. Depuis que l'IWW a été fondé en 1905, nous avons apporté des contributions significatives aux combats des travailleurs à travers le monde et nous sommes fiers de notre tradition visant à nous organiser indépendamment de critères sexuels, ethniques et raciaux bien avant que de telles méthodes soient courantes.

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As part of the Global Day of Action against Starbucks called by the AIT/IWA and IWW Organise! and the WSM picketed Starbucks in Belfast today (5th July) to demand the reinstatement of Monica, a member of the anarcho-syndicalist member working in their central Seville outlet, and Cole Dorsey, an IWW member who was fired by Starbucks for organising in their Grand Rapids, Michican, shop.

Organise! and the WSM picketed Starbucks in Belfast city centre today from 12 to 1 pm. Despite the miserable weather around 12 people joined the picket and leafleted passers by and potential customers outside the coffee shop. At the start of the picket 3 people had gone inside to leaflet customers and staff. There was a very positive response to the picket however one person was falsely accused of assaulting a Starbuck's member of staff after leafleting staff and customers inside.

While Starbucks present themselves as a trendy, ethical corporation when it comes to their own workers they are ruthless union-busters determined to stop their employees organising. Monica was fired on the 24th of April without notice. She had worked in the central Seville branch of Starbucks for a year and a half when her manager suddenly claimed she "created problems with her workmates". She had resistged management when they made people work public holidays without extra pay. She refused to attend work meetings outside working hours where no pay or time in lieu was offered. Her sacking came after she asked about another worker who had ben fired. The store manager had told her on several occasions that she must have nothing to do with unions.

Barely a month later, in Grand Rapids, Michican, USA, Starbucks fired Cole Dorsey on June 6th. Cole had over two years of service and was active in the IWW Starbucks Workers Union.

Originally posted here

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July 1, 2008

Statement of the IWW Starbucks Workers Union on the Announcement of 600 Starbucks Store Closures

"The IWW Starbucks Workers Union is deeply troubled that management's numerous missteps are resulting in more serious hardships for baristas, bussers, and shift supervisors.

To ensure transparency, Starbucks should immediately disclose the locations it intends to close and outline its severance plan. Starbucks and its CEO Howard Schultz must minimize the number of layoffs, assure adequate notice to affected families, and offer severance pay which is fair. Employees and their families deserve to be able to safeguard their futures.

If Starbucks is serious about distinguishing itself from competitors like McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts, Schultz should stop prohibiting full-time status for retail hourly employees and improve a health care plan which insures a lower percentage of workers than Wal-Mart's. And the company should stop wasting millions of dollars on its union-busting lawyers and PR professionals at Akin Gump and Edelman."

Related Stories:

• Starbucks axes stores to get out of hot water
• Starbucks May Rise on Plans to Cut Staff, Stores

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• Media Matters - Fox News airs altered photos of NY Times reporters
  Oh man. These people really are incredibly stupid.
• Mapstraction - mapping-service-indepentent mapping apps
  Provides an "abstraction layer" for client-side mapping, letting developers build mapping apps that can utilize multiple mapping services or switch between mapping services.

Professional anti-teacher union blogger Michael Antonucci recently took his advocacy to the pages of the New York Daily News in an Op-Ed entitled “Fewer students divided by more teachers = very costly math.”

Antonucci’s claim is that from 2001 to 2006, New York City public schools lost 52,458 students, but added 5,647 teachers. On this basis, he concludes:

Over the long term, the trend is unsustainable. Revenues for public education are appropriately tied to student enrollment. It doesn’t take an economist, however, to see that shrinking revenues and increasing expenditures are a recipe for future budget deficits and fiscal meltdown… Shuttered schools, massive layoffs, early retirement buyouts and other attrition lead to dissatisfaction for everyone involved. It’s hard to tell an angry union rep or an overwrought parent that a laid-off teacher probably should not have been hired in the first place.

There is one little problem: Antonucci’s numbers are wrong. According the New York City’s Department of Education payroll records, the number of teachers actually decreased from 79,027 in March 2001 to 77,147 in April 2006. [Since 2006, in the period after that Antonucci cites, the number of teachers have risen modestly once again, so the overall figures for the decade are flat.] Further, according to the Mayor’s Management Report, the population of students declined 49,100 over Antonucci’s time period, not 54,458. This decline is a drop of approximately 4%.

Antonucci says that he obtained his figures from the U. S. Census, and has nothing more to say on the subject. It doesn’t take more than a minute or two on the Census web site to understand that it is an extraordinary warehouse of statistical information, such that identifying it in a general way as the source of a statistic is next to meaningless: finding the actual statistic is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Consequently, it is impossible to know if the statistics Antonucci cites are for all New York City schools [which appears to be the case for virtually all of the educational data compiled by the census] or if they distinguish public district schools from private schools and charter schools. Whatever their basis, the numbers he provides do not jive with the most authoritative data available. He has failed to do his homework, and bases his argument on claims that are not supported by the data.

The real story here, which Antonucci completely misses, is why the NYC Department of Education has not taken advantage of the opportunity posed by declining student enrollments to lower class sizes. Based on his numbers, Antonucci says there is a 14:1 teacher to student ratio in the NYC public schools. Even if Antonucci were using accurate figures to calculate the ratio, it would still be a misleading figure, since an overall ratio includes special education classes with mandated class sizes that are much lower than general education, as well as programs like universal pre-K with mandated lower class sizes — a statistician would say that in this case, there is a great deal of variation from the mean, so simply citing it is misleading. The general education class sizes, especially in the upper grades, remain all too high, and as we have shown here at Edwize in the past, the larger the school, the larger the class size. The bottom line is that with an opportunity to bring New York City class sizes closer to those in suburban schools, the NYC Department of Education has failed to act. It has not even spent the C4E funds it receives for lowering class size in this area. A commentary without an ideological axe to grind would have asked why the Department of Education has been wasting this opportunity.

There are times when one wonders whether the Fordham Foundation blog, Flypaper, is the work of an agent provocateur designed to discredit conservatives in the world of education.

How else do you explain posts designed to insult the maximum number of educators?

And what do you say when the defeat of France by Nazi Germany in the early stages of World War II is laid at the feet of… teacher unions? Are Checker and the boys in a competition to publish the ultimate reductio absurdum?

   My first reaction looking at the grim news all around--say, that American is going to cut 7,000 jobs by the end of the year--was to write about the litany of awful crap coming down on workers around the country. But, it being the day before Independence Day (and, as a result, yours truly gets one less day of my two-week grand jury term--don't get me started on that experience...it is an abusive system to defendants...ooopppsss, there I go), I thought: more good news out of the world of the Beast of Bentonville.

   A couple of days ago, and you may of heard of this already but the aforementioned grand jury has slowed me down, a state judge in Minnesota ruled that Wal-Mart had--get this--broken the law...again. This time to the potential price-tag of $2 BILLION dollars:

The company required hourly employees to work off-the-clock during training and denied full rest or meal breaks in violation of state wage and hour laws, Hastings, Minnesota, District Judge Robert King, Jr. held today following a non-jury trial. King ruled Wal-Mart broke labor laws more than 2 million times and ordered the company to give employees $6.5 million in back-pay.

``Wal-Mart's failure to compensate plaintiffs was willful,'' the judge wrote in his 151-page decision. ``Wal-Mart was on notice from numerous sources of the wage and hour violations at issue and failed to correct the problem.''

The lawsuit is one of more than 70 cases, including class actions, or group suits, in which Wal-Mart has been accused of wage-law violations. The retailer lost a $78 million jury verdict in Pennsylvania in 2006 over rest breaks and unpaid work and a $172 million verdict in California in 2005 over meal breaks. Both verdicts have been appealed.

   Speaking for myself, when I lift a cool one this weekend (hopefully, while watching my woeful Yankees play the also woeful Red Sox), I'm going to toast Judge King. Then, we get to wait til October:

King's decision means Wal-Mart will face a second trial in Minnesota state court, this time before a jury. Minnesota labor law allows a fine of up to $1,000 per violation of wage and hour rules. With 2 million violations, that may total as much as $2 billion. At the Oct. 20 trial, jurors will determine how much each violation is worth, and also consider punitive damages.

   Can't wait.

   My first reaction looking at the grim news all around--say, that American is going to cut 7,000 jobs by the end of the year--was to write about the litany of awful crap coming down on workers around the country. But, it being the day before Independence Day (and, as a result, yours truly gets one less day of my two-week grand jury term--don't get me started on that experience...it is an abusive system to defendants...ooopppsss, there I go), I thought: more good news out of the world of the Beast of Bentonville.

   A couple of days ago, and you may of heard of this already but the aforementioned grand jury has slowed me down, a state judge in Minnesota ruled that Wal-Mart had--get this--broken the law...again. This time to the potential price-tag of $2 BILLION dollars:

The company required hourly employees to work off-the-clock during training and denied full rest or meal breaks in violation of state wage and hour laws, Hastings, Minnesota, District Judge Robert King, Jr. held today following a non-jury trial. King ruled Wal-Mart broke labor laws more than 2 million times and ordered the company to give employees $6.5 million in back-pay.

``Wal-Mart's failure to compensate plaintiffs was willful,'' the judge wrote in his 151-page decision. ``Wal-Mart was on notice from numerous sources of the wage and hour violations at issue and failed to correct the problem.''

The lawsuit is one of more than 70 cases, including class actions, or group suits, in which Wal-Mart has been accused of wage-law violations. The retailer lost a $78 million jury verdict in Pennsylvania in 2006 over rest breaks and unpaid work and a $172 million verdict in California in 2005 over meal breaks. Both verdicts have been appealed.

   Speaking for myself, when I lift a cool one this weekend (hopefully, while watching my woeful Yankees play the also woeful Red Sox), I'm going to toast Judge King. Then, we get to wait til October:

King's decision means Wal-Mart will face a second trial in Minnesota state court, this time before a jury. Minnesota labor law allows a fine of up to $1,000 per violation of wage and hour rules. With 2 million violations, that may total as much as $2 billion. At the Oct. 20 trial, jurors will determine how much each violation is worth, and also consider punitive damages.

   Can't wait.

Earlier this week we have closed our special 80 Euro early bird offer with 335 registered participants! A great big thank you to all the people that already signed up!

With 8 more weeks to go we thought it was a good time to do some preliminary evaluation about our progress. We took the sign-up data from the past four Drupalcons and compared that with what we have so far. As was to be expected there has been some "nice action" in the last week of the first early bird offer. (Note that the registration was twice as long in Barcelona, so the numbers shown here are the sums from week 1 and 2; 3 and 4; 5 and 6).

In our third week we had 185 new sign ups of which over a hundred happened on the last day of the early bird offer. We didn't achieve Sunnyvale's peak signups of week two (212 signups), but our total of 335 registered participants did set a new record for the total amount of participants registered after three weeks of registration!

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• Bike-friendly mapping directions in NYC
  This gives starting point/destination directions in NYC, tailored for bikes. That means it routes you on "bikeable" streets (not highways). Neato.
• Neat video of a train that doesn't need to stop to board
  With a secondary entry/exit car on a raised platform, this train is designed not to stop for boarding or existing passengers. Pretty neat.

We are excited to announce that three key modules, Views, CCK, and Organic Groups, have published release candidates today, ready for testing. If you are interested in speeding the transition to a full release, install and test the Release Candidates (RC). Many months of work have gone into extensive rewrites of these modules, leading to major improvements that will make Drupal 6 an even more attractive platform for building websites.

As always, you should upgrade these modules on a test site first, and make sure to make a complete backup. You never know how your site's customizations will affect things, or what silly little thing nobody else caught.

More details about these pivotal module releases follow...

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Between my work on NewsJunk and PDF last week, I’ve been mulling over the state of political campaigning and technology. On the Dean campaign, the campaign’s blog – Blog For America – was a critical communications implement. We built a big daily readership and we thought of it like our own cable channel or major newspaper. There was an explicit understanding that it was our media outlet, and that Matt Gross, Zephyr Teachout, and Joe Rospars (among others) were our “reporters on the ground”, covering the campaign – inside the headquarters and out on the road.

Dean desperately needed alternative sources of media. When I joined the campaign, every single news story about the presidential primary started something like: “John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, Joe Leiberman and five other presidential candidates…” Dean never got any press of any kind. But Trippi noticed that the blogs were writing about Dean. There was even an unofficial Dean campaign blog. Now here was a way to get ink, even if it was the virtual, blog kind of ink! Trippi started by posting on the unofficial Dean campaign blog as the campaign manager. And then there was an explicit decision: if the mainstream press isn’t going to write about us, then we’ll cover our campaign ourselves. Our rallying cry became: To the blogs!

Recognizing the power of new media to build our own work-around the “gatekeepers” of the modern political process gave the Dean campaign critical fuel, and the energy of the entire blogosphere was gasoline on the fire of Dean’s growing grassroots momentum. I’ve long thought that the secret sauce of the Dean campaign were the monthly in-person Meetups that Michael Silberman managed, but watching this election unfold I’m realizing that our blog’s end-run around traditional media (with the help of the rest of the blogosphere) was equally important.

All of which leaves me mystified why the campaigns haven’t built their own media operations. And I don’t mean just blogs. Why not a 24-hour newsroom, with anchors and field correspondents and commentators? The technologies needed – and even the distribution – are not expensive any more. You can buy a lot of consecutive time on cable with the kind of budgets we’re seeing this election cycle. Presidential campaigns of either party could attract top talent to create and manage the content. Not to mention the grassroots power of utilizing your supporters to create content.

Feeding NewsJunk over the last few weeks has made me recognize some of the gaps in media coverage – and the opportunities the campaigns are missing. There remains a mysterious and much revered relationship between the political campaigns and the political press corps, but I’m unconvinced that it serves the people well. And in all honesty, I’ve been disappointed by most of the blog coverage and commentary of the election; that’s why on NewsJunk you see mostly mainstream news sources. The blogs seems to mostly repeat items from the mainstream press – not just the news, but the commentary as well.

And it’s not just political news, commentary, and policy debates. Have you ever listened to Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell sportscast one of the Eagles’ football games? It’s fun. Give Al Gore a show on how to go green. Who would host “Deal or No Deal” on Obama’s network?

The great challenge of creating a news organization – or if it’s going to be broader than news, let’s call it a media organization – the great challenge is honesty. Campaigns are famous for spin and obscuring the hard questions. Even on our Dean campaign blog, it was hard to find an accurate and serious accounting for our loss in Iowa the morning after. But the radical transparency and honesty of your own media outlet would say volumes about the kind of President you might make, and the opportunities to set the agenda seem enormous.

I noticed that Linda Douglass, a major television journalist for ABC News, joined the Obama campaign as senior staff. [Full disclosure: EchoDitto does unrelated tech work for Linda’s husband, John Phillips.] It’s time to kill the 30-second spot and instead focus on the exciting opportunities and possibilities of the next generation of Fireside Chats. It’ll be fun. I promise.

   No surprise, really, that this poll would show that most Americans oppose so-called "free trade":

(CNN) -- As Sen. John McCain prepares to promote free trade during a high-profile trip to Colombia and Mexico, a poll out Tuesday suggests the issue may be a political hurdle as the general election campaign heats up.
 
Sen. John McCain's free trade stance could pose a problem in November, according to a new poll.
 
According to the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll, 51 percent of Americans view foreign trade as a threat to the economy -- the first time in a CNN poll that a majority of Americans report holding negative views on free trade.
 
That compares with only 35 percent of Americans who felt free trade posed a threat to the economy in 2000, and 48 percent who felt it was a threat in 2006.
 
Now, only four in 10 Americans say free trade presents an opportunity for economic growth, a sentiment that clearly makes the issue a challenge for McCain, especially in the crucial Rust Belt states most affected by the loss of manufacturing jobs over the last decade.

This actually does not come as a surprise. I've written before that Democrats won in 2006 in large part because of the trade issue and even Republicans have been rejecting so-called "free trade".

  We are finally looking at the possibility of the end of so-called "free trade", which is really a marketing phrase that obscures the reality that trade has been structured to simply protect corporate interests and promote trade based on one thing and one thing only--the search for the lowest wage possible.

   No surprise, really, that this poll would show that most Americans oppose so-called "free trade":

(CNN) -- As Sen. John McCain prepares to promote free trade during a high-profile trip to Colombia and Mexico, a poll out Tuesday suggests the issue may be a political hurdle as the general election campaign heats up.
 
Sen. John McCain's free trade stance could pose a problem in November, according to a new poll.
 
According to the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll, 51 percent of Americans view foreign trade as a threat to the economy -- the first time in a CNN poll that a majority of Americans report holding negative views on free trade.
 
That compares with only 35 percent of Americans who felt free trade posed a threat to the economy in 2000, and 48 percent who felt it was a threat in 2006.
 
Now, only four in 10 Americans say free trade presents an opportunity for economic growth, a sentiment that clearly makes the issue a challenge for McCain, especially in the crucial Rust Belt states most affected by the loss of manufacturing jobs over the last decade.

This actually does not come as a surprise. I've written before that Democrats won in 2006 in large part because of the trade issue and even Republicans have been rejecting so-called "free trade".

  We are finally looking at the possibility of the end of so-called "free trade", which is really a marketing phrase that obscures the reality that trade has been structured to simply protect corporate interests and promote trade based on one thing and one thing only--the search for the lowest wage possible.

What follows is Sol Stern’s rejoinder to our response [below]. We are giving Stern the last word here. Our position was laid out in the original post, Is the educational right capable of debating Obama’s educational program? and in our response, and there is nothing new to add to the discussion at this point.

Let’s recall that you started this by charging that in my City Journal article of two months ago I “smeared” poor Barack by associating him with Bill Ayers’ Weatherman days. In my response I showed, point by point, that my article was all about Ayers’ current views, not his past, and I challenged you to cite a single sentence in the article that might substantiate your claim of a “smear.” You failed to meet that challenge. Instead of doing the honorable thing and admitting that you goofed, you are now obfuscating with a lot of nonsense about how my account of Ayers’ current education views and his role in a destructive movement that harms children is somehow illegitimate. You say that this has no place in any discussion about Obama’s virtues as a presidential candidate and that my position on this is “unreasonable.” But you yourself provide one good reason why Ayers’ activities are relevant when you point out that he served together with Obama on the Annenberg Challenge, one of the most important recent education ventures in Chicago. What if it was revealed that Senator McCain and Charles Murray sat together on the board of some conservative education group? Wouldn’t it then be legitimate to ask McCain what he thought about Murray’s education views? How is the Obama/Ayers education connection any different?

I can’t help concluding that the reason you launched this factually unsupported attack on me, is that the union is now shilling for Obama, as it previously shilled for Clinton. You still haven’t explained why you never said a word about the Clinton campaign’s overt efforts to link Obama with Ayers’ terrorist past, but then decided to dredge up an old article of mine which never even came close to making that link. I guess it’s all politics Leo, and politics makes for strange bedfellows. In that regard I see that one of your new boosters in this argument is none other than that good friend of the UFT, Mike Klonsky. Don’t you think Al would be turning over in his grave?

   I do like those ironic coincidences that happen in the media. Generally speaking, when it comes to economic issues, I don't think the editors have a clue that they have captured unintentionally the gist of our crisis. And, so, let me turn to today's New York Times. The front page has two stories headlined:

and

  What do we learn from each story? First, you ain't seen nothing yet--and we've been saying that all along here:

As automakers dropped their latest batch of awful sales numbers on the market on Tuesday, reinforcing the gloom spreading across the economy, the troubles confronting American workers seemed to intensify.

Plummeting home prices have in recent months eliminated jobs for hundreds of thousands of people, from bankers and real estate agents to construction workers and furniture manufacturers. Tighter lending standards imposed by banks in the wake of huge mortgage losses have made it hard for many Americans to secure credit — the lifeblood of expansion in recent years — crimping the appetite of consumers, whose spending amounts to 70 percent of the economy.

Joblessness has accelerated, and employers have slashed working hours even for those on their payrolls, shrinking the size of paychecks just as workers need them the most.

   No great surprise. When you have an economy that hasn't generated real increases in wealth for most people over the past two decades--because of meager, if any, raises in wages, increasing loss of health care and an ever-rising on faux pensions also known as 401(k)s--people are not going to be in a happy place. Why does that seem so obvious to us but seems to escape the notice of pundits, prognosticators and politicians who were all happy-go-lucky during the time when bubbles that would pop expanded and wages that didn't expand contracted? It makes me long for the days of the guillotine...

   And, then, right below that story comes this:

   For nearly five years, Richard A. Grasso was vilified for the riches he reaped while running the New York Stock Exchange.

  But on Tuesday, a court ruled that Mr. Grasso could keep the $139.5 million he was paid.

   Mr. Grasso, who symbolized for many the exuberance and excess of the now-faded bull market, won the final round in his long legal battle over the compensation he amassed during his eight years as head of the Big Board, when the New York State Court of Appeals threw out the remaining claims against him.

   Only in America would there be a fight over whether $139.5 million is too much money for one person to be paid, and there is an additional $48 million he was to be paid in subsequent years that apparently he will also get so, far be it for, Grasso to have to scrimp by like the rest of us--it looks like a nice figure of $187 million, give or take half a mil. Thank god for Grasso because we have now saved the glorious free market where anyone can earn obscene amount of money. Long live America! Ironically, the case ended not so much in a vidication of Grasso but because of a technicality:

The appeals court concluded that the attorney general has no standing to sue Mr. Grasso since the exchange has been converted from a nonprofit entity to a for-profit corporation, negating the attorney general’s ability to sue on behalf of the public rather than for private shareholders.

   But, still Dick--yes, Dick--gets to count his millions.

   So, there we have it, in a nutshell. Most Americans are headed for a very dark future, certainly in the short term, in part because Dicks like Grasso, who fancied themselves as great managers of American capitalism, could, and can, only see one goal in the American enterprise--how do I get the most for myself, regardless of the pain being felt my 99 percent of the people?

   Okay, so, I wasn't being entirely comprehensive: there is also another story on the very same front page of the paper of record that says that Leona Helmsley (I assume no one needs to be reminded who she was) directed that her $5-$8 billion trust be used for the care of dogs and cats--this is the woman who left $12 million to her dog. I'm just going to leave that one  in the "mentally ill rich person who hated people" category.