Lumber Workers Industrial Union 120

All workers in forests. All workers engaged in logging operations, in saw and shingle mills, and in preparing wood for fuel and manufacturing purposes. Bark and sap collection.

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.

Free Speech Riots 1909 & 1911

Posted Sat, 10/22/2005 - 2:10am by x344543

Disclaimer - The following article is reposted here because it is an issue with some relevance to the IWW. The views of the author do not necessarily agree with those of the IWW and vice versa.

Riots: Part of your Vancouver heritage - By Michael Barnholden, Oct, 20 2005

“The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth. We find that the centring of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever-growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

Revolt of the "Timber Beasts" - IWW Lumber Strike in Minnesota

Posted Sat, 10/22/2005 - 1:43am by x344543

Disclaimer - The following article is reposted here because it is an issue with some relevance to the IWW. The views of the author do not necessarily agree with those of the IWW and vice versa.

The footnotes are unfortunately unavailable at this time.  We will add them as soon as we can locate them.

By John E. Haynes - Minnesota History Quarterly, Spring 1971 (Volume 42, number 5, pages 163-174)

The brawny lumberjack who tells tall tales, fells giant trees, wears checkered shirts, and loves flapjacks is familiar in American folklore. This romantic image, though based partly on fact, glosses over dark and frightful features of the lumberjack's life that in 1917 prompted Minnesota's sons of Paul Bunyan to down their saws and axes and walk out of their camps. Led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical labor group advocating industrial unions and the overthrow of capitalism through strikes, sabotage, and eventual revolution, the jacks' strike for a time paralyzed the lumber industry of northern Minnesota. The resolution of that strike helped redefine the boundcanes of permissible political and economic dissent in Minnesota, virtually erased the specter of strong IWW influence on the iron range, and served as a precedent for the state's treatment of dissenters during World War I. 1

Radical Ecology and Class Struggle: A Re-Consideration

Posted Sat, 08/06/2005 - 11:57pm by x344543

Disclaimer - The following article is reposted here because it is an issue with some relevance to the IWW.  The views of the author and the publisher do not necessarily agree with those of the IWW and vice versa.

By Jeff Shantz (Toronto-NEFAC)

INTRODUCTION

In recent years a variety of social movement and environmental commentators have devoted a great deal of energy to efforts which argue the demise of class struggle as a viable force for social change (See Eckersley, 1990; Bowles and Gintis, 1987; Bookchin, 1993; 1997). These writers argue that analyses of class struggle are unable to account for the plurality of expressions which hierarchy, domination and oppression take in advanced capitalist or what they prefer to call "postindustrial" societies (See Bookchin, 1980; 1986). They charge that class analyses render a one-dimensional portrayal of social relations. The result of this has been a broad practical and theoretical turn away from questions of class and especially class struggle.

In my view, both orthodox Marxist constructions of class struggle and the arguments raised against that conceptualization have been constrained by conceptually narrow visions of class struggle. Commentators have either taken class to mean an undifferentiated monolith (Bookchin, 1986; 1987) which acts, or more often fails to act, as the instrumental agent in history or else as a fiction generated to obscure hopelessly divided and antagonistic relations within the working class (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Bourdieu, 1987). What is generally missing from these otherwise disparate accounts is a dynamic understanding of people as workers and workers as activists.