Today, this strike is largely forgotten, or worse, when remembered, dismissed as a long lost cause, sometimes reduced to a “disaster” – that is, a near fatal setback for Seattle’s working people. It was neither.
No Class is an op-ed column by writer and radical organizer Kim Kelly that connects worker struggles and the current state of the American labor movement with its storied — and sometimes bloodied — past.
Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants is calling on "conference activists from across the Labor Movement" to conduct a "general strike to end the government shutdown."
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If a new trade union law goes into effect, India will essentially abandon any commitment to workplace democracy. The workers do not want this. They are on the streets. They have other plans for their future.
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In other words, Brazilian elites – having plundered the country to the point where it was close to collapse – decided that the only viable solution was to force the country’s already-suffering population of workers and the unemployed poor to suffer further, by taking from them the meager protections and safety net they enjoyed. They engineered the cataclysmic impeachment of the country’s president to achieve this.
Calling for a general strike now bears no relation to what mass strikes have meant in the past. The flight from reality shows up in activists’ blasé attitude to history and their very distant relationship to the working class.
Millions responded to a strike called by seven trade union centers in India. According to one union leader, "this is reflection of disenchantment of the working class. The government should learn its lessons from the strike. We are ready to discuss and reach a consensus. If the government does not take its lessons, the movement will be intensified.
Commentators questioned the wisdom of inflicting further austerity on a nation where more than 1.3 million are out of work, salaries have been cut by an average 25%, and poverty has been imposed on more than a third of the entire population.
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