by Jackie Smith
After three decades of stagnant wages, declining opportunities to join unions, and rising income inequality, American workers are being bullied into making even more sacrifices to their health and well-being so that the super-rich and corporations can continue to enjoy large profit margins.
The latest challenge to American workers is the threat to the basic right to form and join trade unions in order to bargain with their employers collectively, rather than as isolated individuals. This right is being threatened in several states and is part of a concerted national effort led by Republican officials and their corporate funders (such as the Koch brothers). State legislatures in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana, among others are seeking to eliminate public workers’ rights to organize.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
Many Protests, One Revolution
by Jackie Smith
PUBLISHED at: https://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/14-9
The massive rise of popular protests around the Middle East and North Africa coincides with the convening of the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal. While the former are the subject of deserved and extensive media attention, the latter has been virtually ignored by mainstream media. Yet all these gatherings of activists should be seen as part of a single, global movement that has been unfolding for over a decade.
While protesters in Egypt seek to topple corrupt and authoritarian rulers, activists at the World Social Forum have been doing the long-term and painstaking work of building a global movement to transform the basic structures of our world economy. It is those structures that both enable the greed and brutality of individual leaders and maintain the conditions against which Egyptians, Jordanians, Yemenis as well as Ecuadorans, Indians, and Detroiters are all resisting.
PUBLISHED at: https://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/14-9
The massive rise of popular protests around the Middle East and North Africa coincides with the convening of the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal. While the former are the subject of deserved and extensive media attention, the latter has been virtually ignored by mainstream media. Yet all these gatherings of activists should be seen as part of a single, global movement that has been unfolding for over a decade.
While protesters in Egypt seek to topple corrupt and authoritarian rulers, activists at the World Social Forum have been doing the long-term and painstaking work of building a global movement to transform the basic structures of our world economy. It is those structures that both enable the greed and brutality of individual leaders and maintain the conditions against which Egyptians, Jordanians, Yemenis as well as Ecuadorans, Indians, and Detroiters are all resisting.
World Social Forum Convenes in Dakar Senegal Feb. 6-11
The World Social Forum takes place in Dakar, Senegal February 6-11. It is the second World Social Forum to be held in Africa; the 2007 World Social Forum met in Nairobi. The fact that the Forum takes place as the world is mesmerized by tenacious protests around the Middle East highlights links between the dominant model of globalization and a variety of popular modes of resistance. The simultaneity of these gatherings is no coincidence, and it reflects the underlying contradictions and crises of the current world order.
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