Video from Thursday:  Hartford SEIU1199 Strike 4/15/10

Thursday, April 15 at 6:00 am, District 1199 workers at four nursing homes began their strike for a fair contract against the Spectrum Healthcare corporation.

In Hartford, the workers at Park Place nursing home will be on the picket line (5 Greenwood Street, off Park Street*).
I hope you will join us!

Here are some facts:

**Workers at 32 other 1199 nursing homes have successfully settled their contracts.  In contrast, Spectrum has avoided giving raises to the Park Place workers for more than 2 1/2 years.

**While union workers provide excellent care to their patients (Spectrum has a five-star rating!), the nursing home chain is one the the most dangerous places to work in the nation. Injuries at Spectrum are twice as frequent as the national average.

**At the same time, Spectrum is trying to cut light-duty pay for injured workers!

The Spectrum workers need your support. Please join us on the line Thursday, this weekend, and for as long as it takes!

Stay in touch with the strike.  Go to our website:

http://www.seiu1199ne.org

*Here are directions to Park Place:

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=cn5&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=0,0,17366308052694280939&fb=1&hq=park+place+nursing+home&hnear=hartford&gl=us&daddr=5+Greenwood+Street,+Hartford,+CT+06106-2110&geocode=15010557678215085335,41.755083,-72.709927&ei=denFS8TdG8K78ga44umXDw&sa=X&oi=local_result&ct=directions-to&resnum=1&ved=0CAsQngIwAA

photo credit: Steve Thornton

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

2:00pm – 3:00pm

HomeGoods Distribution Center

1415 Blue Hills Avenue

Bloomfield, CT

Basic Facts on the TJX/HomeGoods Distribution Center Workers’ Struggle

·        TJX, our parent company, is one of the most profitable retail chains in the country.

On Feb 24 the Wall Street Journal reported that …

o       For the quarter ended Jan. 30, TJX posted a profit of $395 million, or 94 cents a share, up from $250.7 million, or 58 cents a share, a year earlier.$

o       Gross profit margin jumped to 26.6% from 22.5%.

·        The recession has been very good to TJX.  More people than ever are shopping at their low cost, AJ Wright, TJ Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods stores.  The recession has not been good to working people and our families.

·        It’s great that the company is selling a lot of product, but they shouldn’t be making this level of profit twice on the backs of low wage working people:

o       They’re profiting from the hardships faced by low wage working families that is sending them to their stores;

o       They’re profiting by the low wages and poor health insurance they’ve paying to HomeGoods workers.

·        600 workers at the TJX/HomeGoods distribution center are asking for support from the community during our negotiations for:

o       a health insurance plan that allows us to afford to see a doctor and bring our kids to the doctor

o       wages that allow us to provide for our families. We currently make between $8.40 and 11.75/hour

·        Help stop the RACE TO THE BOTTOM.  TJX shouldn’t join the ranks of the exploiters of the poor like the HYATT and WALMART.

For more information or to get involved contact

Deya Garcia at  (401) 374-6636

For more than 100 years, May Day has symbolized the common struggles of workers around the globe. Why is it largely ignored in North America? The answer lies in part in American labour’s long repression of its own radical past, out of which international May Day was actually born a century ago.

The seeds were sown in the campaign for the eight-hour work day. On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thousands of North American workers mobilized to strike. In Chicago, the demonstration spilled over into support for workers at a major farm-implements factory who‘d been locked out for union activities. On May 3, during a pitched battle between picketers and scabs, police shot two workers. At a protest rally in Haymarket Square the next day, a bomb was tossed into the police ranks and police directed their fire indiscriminately at the crowd. Eight anarchist leaders were arrested, tried and sentenced to death (three were later pardoned).

These events triggered international protests, and in 1889, the first congress of the new socialist parties associated with the Second International (the successor to the First International organized by Karl Marx in the 1860s) called on workers everywhere to join in an annual one-day strike on May 1 – not so much to demand specific reforms as an annual demonstration of labour solidarity and working-class power. May Day was both a product of, and an element in, the rapid growth of new mass working-class parties of Europe – which soon forced official recognition by employers and governments of this “workers’ holiday.”

But the American Federation of Labor, chastened by the “red scare” that followed the Haymarket events, went along with those who opposed May Day observances. Instead, in 1894, the AFL embraced president Grover Cleveland’s decree that the first Monday of September would be the annual Labor Day. The Canadian government of Sir Robert Thompson enacted identical Labour Day legislation a month later.

Ever since, May Day and Labour Day have represented in North America the two faces of working-class political tradition, one symbolizing its revolutionary potential, the other its long search for reform and respectability. With the support of the state and business, the latter has predominated – but the more radical tradition has never been entirely suppressed.

This radical May Day tradition is nowhere better captured than in Bryan Palmer’s monumental book, Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression [From Medieval to Modern] (Monthly Review Press, 2000). Palmer, one of Canada’s foremost Marxist labour historians, has done more than anyone to recover and analyze the cultures of resistance that working people developed in practising class struggle from below. He’s strongly critical of labour-movement leaders who’ve appealed to those elements of working-class culture that crave ersatz bourgeois respectability.

Set amid chapters on peasants and witches in late feudalism, on pirates and slaves during the rise of mercantile imperialism, on fraternal lodge members and anarchists in the new cities of industrial capitalism, on lesbians, homosexuals and communists under fascism, and on the mafia, youth gangs and race riots, jazz, beats and bohemians in modern U.S. capitalism, are two chapters that brilliantly tell the story of May Day. One locates Haymarket in the context of the Victorian bourgeoisie’s fears of what they called the “dangerous classes.” This account confirms the central role of the “anarcho-communist movement in Chicago [which] was blessed with talented leaders, dedicated ranks and the most active left-wing press in the country. The dangerous classes were becoming truly dangerous.”

The other chapter, a survey of “Festivals of Revolution,” locates “the celebratory May Day, a festive seizure of working-class initiative that encompassed demands for shorter hours, improvement in conditions, and socialist agitation and organization” against the backdrop of the traditional spring calendar of class confrontation.

Over the past century communist revolutions were made in the name of the working class, and social democratic parties were often elected into government. In their different ways, both turned May Day to the purposes of the state. Before the 20th century was out the communist regimes imploded in internal contradictions between authoritarianism and the democratic purpose of socialism, while most social democratic ones, trapped in the internal contradictions between the welfare state and increasingly powerful capital markets, accommodated to neoliberalism and become openly disdainful of “old labour.”

As for the United States, the tragic legacy of the repression of its radical labour past is an increasingly de-unionized working class mobilized by fundamentalist Christian churches. Canada, with its NDP and 30-per-cent unionized labour force, looks good by comparison.

Working classes have suffered defeat after defeat in this era of capitalist globalization. But they’re also in the process of being transformed: The decimated industrial proletariat of the global North is being replaced by a bigger industrial proletariat in the global South. In both regions, a new working class is still being formed in the new service and communication sectors spawned by global capitalism (where the eight-hour day is often unknown). Union movements and workers’ parties from Poland to Korea to South Africa to Brazil have been spawned in the past 20 years. Two more book out of Monthly Review Press – Ursula Huw’s The Making of a Cybertariat (2003) and the late Daniel Singer’s Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours? (1999) – don’t deal with May Day per se, but capture particularly well this global economic and political transformation. They tell much that is sober yet inspiring about why May I still symbolizes the struggle for a future beyond capitalism rather than just a homage to the struggles of the past.

Leo Panitch, Canada Research Chair in comparative political economy at York University, is co-editor of The Socialist Register and author of Renewing Socialist Democracy, Strategy and Imagination.

Photo credit: pixonomy – http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixonomy/3014063274/

Hartford City Council member Luis Cotto addressed the crowd of mostly Hispanic workers and union representatives.   Picketers circled the sidewalk at one of Hartford’s busiest intersections carrying signs and shouting slogans like “si se puede.”

Union leaders are urging people to contact Pablo Villareal of P & J Cleaning Services directly at (860) 778-1009 to ask the company to respect the rights of workers and to re-hire the cleaners who were let go.

SEIU Local 32 BJ can be reached at (860) 560-8674.   Hartford IMC will follow this story as more details emerge.

Click here to download the MP3

West Hartford- On a cold December 8th morning, bus drivers for the West Hartford public schools held a “freezin’ for a reason” picket outside town hall on South Main Street.

In late May, the workers who are employed by First Student, Inc. overwhelmingly voted to join CSEA/SEIU Local 2001, a union representing almost 25,000 Connecticut Service Employees.  Monday’s rally, which attracted about 50 supporters and union members, was a response to the workers having been without a contract for six months. As of Monday morning, First Student has yet to sit down with their employees to negotiate a contract and the United Kingdom based company has canceled the last two scheduled meetings with the union. Some of the concerns that are hoped to be addressed during the talks are pay increases and affordable health care.

“We just want what’s fair” said Sor Flores, one of the bus drivers and organizers on the negotiation committee who hopes to have a contract in place by the end of the year.

For more information visit www.SEIU2001.org