San Francisco Bay Area GMB

This is the news page for our San Francisco Bay Area General Membership Branch. To get an overview about our contact info, news and events, please visit our home page.

Town Hall Meeting this Sunday, June 26, to organize a Social Strike on SF's MUNI.

Posted Fri, 06/24/2005 - 11:43pm by x344543
Disclaimer - This is not an official campaign of the IWW; it is reposted here in solidarity.   
 
This Sunday, June 26th we will have a Town Hall meeting to discuss strategy and logistics for a city-wide fare strike against San Francisco's MUNI. We also want to discuss the potential for a Bay Area-wide transit strike, involving AC Transit, SamTrans and BART employees, together with MUNI riders and drivers. We want to get the word out throughout the city for this with postering, leafleting and bus stop organizing. This is an effort to bring drivers and riders of public transit together against management, so we have invited MUNI drivers, as well as BART and AC Transit operators.

Join your fellow riders and drivers of public transit to organize for a social strike against fare hikes, service cuts, and attacks on MUNI workers.

Sunday June 26th, 7pm to 10 pm, at Cellspace, 2050 Bryant Street (cross street 18th) in San Francisco's Mission District.

WE CAN’T PAY -- WE WON’T PAY!

A wildcat social strike on all MUNI lines, where drivers don’t collect fares and riders don’t pay them, will stop attacks on working people
dead in their tracks!

$1.25 to 1.50? NO WAY!

CITY-WIDE FARE STRIKE ON MUNI! REFUSE TO PAY!

IU 670/Buyback Contract Negotiations Open With a Bang

Posted Tue, 06/14/2005 - 4:38pm by IWW.org Editor

BERKELEY, CA -  At 1:45 PM on Tuesday June 14, the recycling yard at Community Conservation Centers, Inc., better known as Buyback, grew suddenly silent.  The paper line stopped, followed by glass and plastic.  The forklifts and trucks pulled into parking spaces, and the roar of their engines died.

The workers gathered in the parking lot in front of the office, donning IWW pins and hats.  They chanted ¡Sí se puede! and filed into General Manager Jeff Belchamber’s office.  FW Jose Alvarez stepped to the front of the group.

“Yo Jeff, we’ve got some things we want to say to you,” Jose said.

Shop steward Randy Addison read the workers’ list of demands: a pay raise, an end to the job classification system that keeps some workers making far less then their fellow workers, more paid holidays (an issue that had resulted in a wildcat strike on MLK Day of this year), an end to the co-payment workers pay to see a doctor, more vacation time, and more opportunity for training and advancement.

Wobbly Resurgence in the Central Valley

Posted Wed, 05/11/2005 - 2:45pm by webadmin

Meet Joe Hill, By Tom Walsh - Sacramento News and Review Editor's note.

"Hello?"

"You've got to get down here right away. They're tearing down the Morrison grocery building."

"And the significance of that is ..."

"Geez. You don't know the story of the Wobblies and Joe Hill?"

I didn't, but I would. I was working as a reporter in Salt Lake City, and soon I would be fascinated by the Joe Hill arrest and execution. Like many people my age, I was woefully under-informed about the history of the radical labor movement in this country.