Department 100 - Agriculture and Fisheries

This is the news page for Department 100 - Agriculture and Fisheries. This page displays *all* news items from this Department and its Unions. To see news only from a particular Union, click on the Union title below.

For an overview of the IWW's Union structure, please visit the Unions homepage.

Darryl Cherney wants FBI to hand over evidence

Posted Thu, 09/09/2010 - 1:25am by x344543

Note: Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were IWW members at the time of these events in 1990.

By Kevin Fagan, Staff Writer, San Francisco Chronicle - September 8, 2010; Reproduced in accordance with Fair Use Guidelines.

It's an infamous case that never seems to go away, even after millions of dollars have been paid out in civil settlements and police say the trail has gone cold.

The case is the 1990 bombing in Oakland of Earth First environmental activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, who were nearly killed when a nail-studded explosive device blew up in their car.

Nobody was ever charged with the attack, and now, two decades later, the FBI wants to destroy the last bits of evidence it has been storing ever since the investigation dribbled dry - remnants of the bomb and one like it that blew up in a North Bay town a few days earlier.

Not so fast, says Cherney, 54, who has never given up trying to solve the case himself.

Saying in court briefs that the evidence "provides the last best hope for learning who bombed Judi Bari," Cherney and his lawyers were in federal court Wednesday in San Francisco to try to force the FBI to turn the evidence over to them so they can run DNA and other tests on it.

Baltimore's Human Rights Zone - Pittsburgh Baltimore Bangladesh living wages now!

Posted Wed, 04/29/2009 - 8:04am by x346812

Ten people from Pittsburgh traveled to Baltimore on April 18, 2009 for a B’More Fair and a Human Rights March hosted by the United Workers Association (UWA). The United Workers Association is the Human Rights Organization that organized the Camden Yards cleaners, part time workers, “temporary” workers hired through a contractor, by putting pressure on Maryland’s Stadium Authority and Peter Angelos, owner of the Baltimore Oriels Baseball Club. They coined the terms “SweatFree Baseball” in reference to the sweatshop working conditions at Camden Yards at the same time as the Pittsburgh Anti Sweatshop Community Alliance (PASCA) coined the term in reference to its demand that the Pittsburgh Pirates accept the testimony of sweatshop workers sewing Pirates apparel. The UWA came to Pittsburgh for the All Star Game in 2006 and joined with PASCA to make the demand that our local baseball teams respect the Human Rights of all workers.

The UWA interviewed 150 workers at three restaurants in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor development. The interviews demonstrated systemic violations of workers’ rights such as poverty wages and sexual harassment. The UWA has begun to process these worker rights violations by using the International Declaration of Human Rights like a union contract. By declaring the Inner Harbor a Human Rights Zone, the restaurant bosses, the developer, the public officials who provided subsidies to the Inner Harbor developers and the Baltimore community is made aware that the workers know and intend to exercise their Human Rights to remedy violations of their rights.

The enforcement of workers’ Human Rights is different from traditional union organizing in that it emphasizes workers knowing their rights and exercising them rather than a union contract. The emphasis is not on achieving a union contract but on the community of workers that educate one another and provide support to one another on a daily basis.

With Fewer Migrant Workers, Farmers Turn to Prison Labor

Posted Sat, 08/25/2007 - 11:32am by x344543

Disclaimer - The opinions of the author do not necessarily match those of the IWW.  This article is reposted in accordance to Fair Use guidelines. 

By Nicole Hill, Christian Science Monitor. Posted August 22, 2007.

Weren't employers who lose access to cheap foreign labor supposed to start paying Americans fair wages?

Picacho, Ariz. -- Near this dusty town in southeastern Arizona, Manuel Reyna pitches watermelons into the back of a trailer hitched to a tractor. His father was a migrant farm worker, but growing up, Mr. Reyna never saw himself following his father's footsteps. Now, as an inmate at the Picacho Prison Unit here, Reyna works under the blazing desert sun alongside Mexican farmers the way his father did.

Nyeri coffee farmers rage at Starbucks officials

Posted Sat, 12/09/2006 - 6:58pm by x344543

By Moses Njagih and agencies - The Standard, December 2, 2006.

Angry farmers from a coffee factory in Nyeri District have blasted officials of the Starbucks Coffee Company for refusing to respond to their questions on a project the multinational is undertaking in the area.

The American coffee retailer is involved in the Kenya Heartland Coffee project, to help farmers to improve the quality of their crop.

But during a visit by Starbuck officials, irate farmers of Kihuyo Coffee Factory accused Mr James Donald, the company’s president, of using them to rake in billions in profits. The American official had tough meetings with Ethiopian coffee growers earlier in the week.

Kihuyo and Kiamariga factories in Mathira division are involved in the Heartland project.

"Starbucks interests are only in making profits from our coffee, and yet they are not even mindful about our welfare," asked Mr John Kabira, a farmer.

"Bolshevik" union gave area a scare

Posted Sat, 11/11/2006 - 11:49am by x344543

Joe Blackstock - San Bernadino County Sun, October 31, 2006

There were no more sinister initials to an Inland Empire rancher than IWW.

Just a hint of the presence of the IWW - Industrial Workers of the World - in the neighborhood was enough to make employers quake in their boots. A strong, socialist-leaning union, sometimes nicknamed the Wobblies, it helped foment strikes throughout the nation especially during and immediately after World War I.

Some believed the IWW was associated with the Bolsheviks and the Soviet revolution in Russia, though that link was very tenuous, if one even existed. Nonetheless, most local newspaper articles did not hesitate to refer to its leaders as Bolsheviks.

The union did make some gains nationally, especially because it

welcomed minority and foreign workers that many mainstream unions did not.

In 1919, the agricultural Inland Empire was right in the sights of IWW organizers hoping to bring the area's farm workers - mostly Mexican, Japanese, Chinese and Asian Indians - into their fold.

As it turned out, the IWW never made much impact here because the combined might of ranchers and businessmen backed by the strong arm of police suppressed the union at every turn.