Greetings from the International Solidarity Commission (ISC) of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and welcome to the second digest of our monthly international news letter.

The purpose of this newsletter is to keep our allies around the world informed of our activities, solidarity campaigns, and relevant international labor struggles. It is our hope that this newsletter will contribute to building worker-to-worker solidarity through strengthened communications and exchanges of information.

If you would like to contribute story ideas or news for the bulletin, or wish to contact the ISC, you can email solidarity@iww.org.

In this digest:

• 1. ISC News and Activities
• 2. IWW News
• 3. Solidarity Statements and Appeals

The International Solidarity Commission of the Industrial Workers of the World is sending a delegation of five workers to Haiti to meet with labor groups and observe conditions in the country. We'll be there from April 23 to May 5, 2008. This blog will record the delegation's experiences and impressions.

The link to the blog is iwwinhaiti.blogspot.com. Check it regularly for updates!

Disclaimer - The opinions of the author do not necessarily match those of the IWW. The image pictured to the right did not appear in the original article, we have added it here to provide a visual perspective. This article is reposted in accordance to Fair Use guidelines.

By Staughton Lynd - WORKING USA, March 2008

What is the problem? What needs to be set right? The mother of all wrong solutions is card-check voting, which would give more access to unorganized workers for the same top-down unions, with the same unaccountability to the membership because of the dues checkoff, with the same ever-readiness to give up the right to strike. Equally misguided in my view is the notion that Taft-Hartley represented a decisive turning point and that its repeal would release the original pristine impulse of the Congress of Industrial Organizations to flower again. All major trade union leaders beginning with John L. Lewis have devised means whereby workers would give up the right to collective self-activity embodied in Section 7 in exchange for a mess of pottage. So we, labor lawyers and labor historians, can only begin to be useful when we forego our endless apologies for the latest hoped-for "progressive" union leader. Our task is to envision an institutional" "embodiment of the class self-activity discovered and imagined by E.P. Thompson and colleagues and partially realized by the IWW in work that desperately needs updating."

The new worldwide movement against "globalization," meaning, U.S. imperialism, and for a better day, has come up with a defining slogan: Another World Is Possible. The words remind us that a social movement is unlikely to bring about what it does not even try to achieve. Current efforts to revive the labor movement in the U.S. define their objectives so narrowly, that even if successful, they would not change anything fundamental.

To the Comrades of IWW

We would like to introduce ourselves to you; we are the Freeters'* Union. We are a Tokyo-based general union, established recently in the face of the out-of-control global situation that the neo-liberal capitalism is running rampant. As precarious workers suffering from working conditions that are becoming more and more fluid and amorphous, we are intensifying our struggles for freedom and survival.

At this moment one of our new campaigns is to organize the "Gas Station Union" to confront Kanto Toyu Co., LTD. – a Japanese member of the Shell Oil Group – that has begun to lay off an increasing number of part-time workers on the pretext of the rise of oil prices and financial instability. It is a necessity to fight gas station chain and the oil driven conglomerate which forcibly lays off its employees in order to make even bigger profits. We will continue to inform you about this campaign, so please keep an eye on our efforts.