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From: Collective Action Notes <cansv@igc.apc.org> COLLECTIVE ACTION NOTES #9 JAN-MAR. 1996 POB 22962 BALTO., MD 21203 USA E-MAIL: cansv@igc.apc.org FAX: (410) 685-9008 STRIKE AND STRUGGLE CHRONOLOGY - U.S.A. MAY- JULY 1995 UNITED STATES EARLY MAY: A strike by several thousand mostly Latino immigrant framers shuts down 80-90% of home and apartment construction in four of California's most populous counties. Framers build the wooden infrastructure of residential housing. Strikers have organized flying pickets traveling from construction site to construction site, pulling out other framers in solidarity. Immigration officials have isolated and picked-off through individual arrests under immigration laws several organizers traveling in their private cars. In response, workers turned to using a school bus donated by the Carpenters Union to travel collectively to organize work sites. MAY 5: Hundreds of supermarket workers and community supporters rally outside of Ultra grocery store in Washington Heights section of Manhattan protesting the company's firing of 80 workers for signing union cards. Store shuts down mid-day as a result of noisy protests. Many of the workers were illegal immigrants working 72 hours a week for less than minimum wage. MAY 8: Oregon public workers begin a state-wide strike demanding a 6.5% pay raise. Strike ends May 14 when State officials agree to open talks on reaching a "compromise". MAY 15: Several hundred predominately Guatemalan workers at the Case Farms chicken processing plant in Morgantown, North Carolina walk out protesting poor working conditions. MAY 19: Striking Bridgestone/Firestone workers in five midwest locals including Decatur, Illinois end their ten month strike in defeat by offering to return to work "unconditionally." The United Rubber Workers union stated it had to cave in out of fear that company would use scabs to decertify union; only 60 out of nearly 700 workers are being called back to work. MAY 19: Division. of Motor Vehicles workers in New Jersey walk-off job to protest lay-offs due to state's policy of privatization and sweeping tax cuts. In the process, they defied both a court injunction and a no-strike clause. MAY 23: Thirty mostly Latino workers at Valley Manufacturing Homes (makers of mobile homes) plant in Sunnyside, Washington walk out protesting management's refusal to discuss working conditions and wages. The next day, 120 other workers join picket line, citing speedup and racist treatment. Police have arrested several workers for blocking plant entrance and have used pepper gas to disperse strikers. MAY 25: Over 1,000 high school students at Lane Tech High School in Chicago stage a walk-out to protest school budget cuts, the Contract on America, and Proposition 187. MAY 26: Wildcat strike in form of a 24 hour unofficial "sick- out" shuts down most of Long Island Railroad, the nation's largest and busiest commuter line, stranding thousands of commuters. MAY 30: Militarizing the on-going battles with squatters, New York police use an armed personnel carrier to evict squatters from East Village in New York. JUNE 2: Migrant farm workers at Moorehouse Strawberry Farm in Mollara, Oregon strike over demands for an increase in the existing piece rate. JUNE 10: Washington Gas Light Co. locks out half its workforce after union turns down company's final contract offer. The company wanted contract provisions allowing more "flexibility" in work rules and assignments. State of Virginia steps in on company's side by denying unemployment benefits to strikers, although the District of Columbia had awarded unemployment benefits to workers living in Washington, D.C. JUNE 18: Hundreds of mostly immigrant garment workers hold rally in Brooklyn demanding an end to sweat-shop conditions and the enforcement of wage laws, which are widely skirted in the industry. JUNE 19: Four hundred clerical and sales workers at U.S. West Direct in Albuquerque, New Mexico return to work after a five week strike over company contract violations and unfair labor practices. JUNE 21: First year anniversary of national Caterpillar strike (the second strike in four years.) Union (U.A.W) has accused company of using convict labor in two plants in an attempt to keep production going. JUNE 21: Seven hundred Teamsters ( drivers, warehouse and production workers) strike Pepsi in Los Angeles area over company refusal to liberalize early retirement benefits. Shortly afterward, three other locals in Southern California begin honoring picket lines. JUNE 23: Thirteen hundred inmates at Lorton Prison in Washington, D.C. held a four day work stoppage to protest deteriorating work and prison conditions. JUNE 25: Second anniversary strike support march occurs in Decatur, Illinois "War Zone". Between four and seven thousand union members and supporters rallied on behalf of striking A.S. Staley and Caterpillar workers. Despite the verbal support and physical presence of several AFL-CIO big-wigs - a first since the strikes began - march is about the same size as the previous year's as AFL fails to widely mobilize it's rank and file to turn out for the march and rally. In contrast to last years event, not even a token civil disobedience action is held this year JULY 1: Mostly Third World hotel workers at the ritzy Drake Swissotel in New York City strike over management attempts to undermine job rules and working conditions and contract out to temporary firms. JULY 3: Turnpike and parkway toll takers in New Jersey strike immediately before the busy Fourth of July holiday. A sick-in on July 4th - the heaviest traveled holiday on New Jersey highways - lasted two shifts until the State obtained a court injunction forcing workers back to work. Sick-in had mixed effect; many of toll booths are automated and the Highway Authority brought in temps and part-time workers to staff the remaining. Union is protesting "union-busting" stance of the State. JULY 9: According to a study conducted by the Cambridge Human Resources Group, the U.S. economy lost $27.6 billion in worker productivity as a result of the first six months of the O.J. Simpson trial as workers spent a conservative estimate of 5 minutes a day on company time discussing, listening to or watching the trial. Researchers warn productivity will drop even more as the trial drags forward towards a verdict. JULY 11: Detroit public transit bus drivers stage a sick-in, forcing the entire system to shut down for 24 hours. Drivers were protesting working conditions (mandatory overtime, unsafe buses and a management history of harassment and suspensions) and a 10% pay cut imposed on June 10. JULY 13: Twenty-five hundred workers represented by six different unions strike the two Detroit daily papers after management repeatedly stalled negotiations in an attempt to force through concessions, wage freezes and job cuts. In the first few days of the strike, the strike quickly turned "ugly" in the words of the New York Times as12 union members were arrested for blocking scabs from entering premises, several strikers separated scab carriers from their bundles of papers and companies brought in beefed-up security forces in an attempt to intimidate strikers. Observers claim strike was provoked by management as an excuse to close one of the daily papers, which are run as a joint management exercise between two former rivals. On July 17, two thousand turned out to a strike support rally. JULY 25: Thousands of county workers and supporters take to the streets in Los Angeles to protest sweeping budget cuts which threaten to gut Los Angeles County's health care system and other essential services in poor and working class neighborhoods. Police in riot gear were stationed through out the march route. If cuts go through, over 18,000 county workers will lose their jobs and the county's largest hospital (the biggest in the country) will close along with dozens of satellite clinics serving predominately low-income communities. JULY 27: Protesting the police beating of a Black youth, riots break out in Indianapolis for two nights. Bricks and bottles were hurled at police, shop windows smashed and stores looted before order was restored. On the same night, across the country, masked youth in the predominately black Coconut Grove area of Miami set up barricades, threw concrete blocks at cars and set trash cans on fire to protest the police shooting of a 17 year old July 18. The rioters wore pillow cases over their heads and some were estimated by neighborhood observers to be as young as 12 years old. JULY 28: Cabdrivers in Prince Georges County ( Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.) return to work after a six day strike. During the strike, cabbies blocked highways and repeatedly demonstrated outside of county offices, citing huge cab insurance increases and profiteering by cab companies as causes of the strike action. END OF JULY: More than two hundred clerical workers at the Detroit regional Red Cross strike after contract negotiations break down. Workers accuse the company of trying to union bust and impose unnecessary concessions. _ SOME THOUGHTS ON THE CURRENT SITUATION IN THE US: A TRANSITIONAL PERIOD - BUT TO WHERE? Perhaps at no time in the past several decades has American society been so palpably polarized and ripe for social explosions.True, social conflict has yet to erupt on any significant scale but the preconditions are increasing and showing no signs of diminishing any time soon. So far, much of this simmering tension and frustration has been tentatively diffused, recuperated and otherwise fragmented into either safely controlled scapegoating channels (for the time being at least) or else directed out of sheer necessity into privatized individual survival strategies. As an example of the first tendency, the ruling class has largely (but not completely) succeeded in making welfare recipients and immigrants in particular 'responsible' for the decline of living standards by portraying welfare recipients as freeloaders and work-shy. Current welfare 'reform' will effectively translate into a post-prosperity capitalist militarization of labor policy designed to impose the norms of work discipline and force the poorest sectors into the labor market at any cost, where they will be in direct competition with unionized workers particularly public sector workers. For example, aalready in several major states welfare recipients have been driven into so-called workfare programs which are used by municipal governments as a way to cut costs by supplanting decently paid workers with a cheap replaceable source of labor. Along with this use of welfare-waged labor, state and city governments have also increasingly turned to temporary and contractual workers to break strikes and work actions. This past summer, for example the governor of New Jersey broke a strike by turnpike toll collectors on a busy holiday weekend by bringing in with brutal swiftness contractual replacements to man the tollbooths thus effectively forcing the union to its knees. Far from being exceptions, this sort of treatment is being increasingly doled out as a first resort by bosses in the private sector as well. The gentleman's accord of ritualized strike action followed by negotiations, cemented by several decades of labor peace, is being swept away, with employers in even previously safe sectors going for the jugular. Even the Wall Street Journal noted earlier this year that provoking strikes has increasingly become the employer's weapons in the present period to impose changes in work rules, getting rid of "inflexible" workers, etc. THE OLD WORKERS MOVEMENT The old workers movement, represented by the AFL-CIO is in serious decline, a decline and disarray that probably will not be reversed by the election of Sweeney to the head of the AFL. Even what is being hailed as a new commitment to militance is limited to token and often symbolic law-breaking i.e. blocking traffic and courting arrests as a form of carefully orchestrated pressure politics. But significantly, such tactics do not extend to mobilizing for wider, more generalized disruptions of production, which in any case the existing union bureaucracy would be absolutely incapable of organizing. But perhaps of even more significance is the erosion and accelerating break-up of what passed for worker's culture and community in the United States. With some important exceptions, most serious strikes in the past decade and a half have broken out in outlying areas relatively far removed from major urban concentrations. We refer here to Phelps-Dodge, Austin, the Pittston miners strike, Bath shipyards in Maine, etc. and today, the ongoing Decatur struggles. These hard fought and bitter strikes, most of which went down to defeat were often waged in what amounted to single industry towns. The era of tightly constructed working class communities organized around industry, in which people lived and worked in communities often linked in close proximity to the workplace, a set of circumstances which permitted a distinct worker's identity specific to this long boom phase of capitalist development to emerge has all but disappeared, probably forever. Particularly in the large cities. Traditional working class institutions, such as the corner bars are steadily eroding, casualties of the increased privatization of leisure, which in itself was both a measure of technological development (i.e. VCR's being both widely accessible and relatively cheap, at least if you were working) and changing standards of entertainment. You no longer go down to the corner bar and discuss problems over a beer - instead you stay at home and pop in a video in the isolated privacy of your living room. And hope you don't get shot looking out your living room window. This has created a nostalgic longing for a return to an idyllic "community" that would replace Capital's relentless march into colonizing more and more of every day life. This nostalgia is being cynically exploited by the State, who, as we noted in previous issues of CAN , would love to transfer as many social welfare functions as possible to the beloved "community." Perhaps no where has this been taken to such absurd extremes as in the Fairfield section of Baltimore, which is now a designated federal "empowerment" - once again, that magical word! - zone. Here, less than a couple miles from the glittering array of yuppified shops (or, excuse us- "shoppes", as they are now properly called) and tourist attractions of the Inner Harbor lies what is arguably the most developed post-industrial ghost town in the United States. Fairfield makes similar decommodified urban war-zones such as East St. Louis, Detroit, and Camden, New Jersey look positively gentrified in comparison. The juxtaposition is startling. Once a prosperous, bustling industrial area with a smattering of residences in between the chemical factories and storage tanks, the area is now practically empty of both industry and people. Miles of abandoned infrastructure (including a whole public housing project now overgrown with weeds) stretch in eerie silence. One expects a sagebrush to come tumbling down the deserted streets. Even at the height of prosperity, Fairfield - a Black majority town -was woefully underdeveloped. The sidewalks were unpaved and many of the houses lacked basic sewage facilities. Today, the area has been gutted and scattered among the ruins remain a few surviving mostly elderly homeowners. But as a result of it's empowerment zone status, small outside armies of social workers and urban planners have now descended on an area empty of people to "recreate community", starting with the setting up of a "village center" to prepare Fairfield for it's new economic role: recycling toxic industrial waste. What a future! But to return to our original point, it is more than just working class leisure and "community' that is being affected. Indeed, it is a contradictory curiosity that at the same time the work ethic is being eroded - by capitalism itself (i.e. what we mean is pride in one's work being rewarded by a decent pay scale, with periodic increases and a long term, if not life-long commitment on the employer's part to hire you), its ideological virtues are being trumpeted so loudly, much in the same pathological way that a fever often rises right before it is ready to break. And this will be the source of future contradictions. Since people's consciousness often lags behind changed reality, it may take a little while for this sets in fully. But the traditional bond is gone with even once formerly stable life-long employers such as IBM and ATT throwing workers away like so many discarded tissues these days. And the delinking of the work ethic is a two way street with important ramifications lost in the usually one-sided coverage of corporate downsizing. It is impossible to accurate judge how widespread some of the social indicators for this new worker refusal are. Absenteeism, theft, sabotage broadly defined, drug use on the job; actions which are usually narrowly dismissed as being individualistic and not signs of class consciousness are usually ignored by both traditional leftists and right-wing industrial sociologists alike. Typically, what few articles have appeared on the subject in the management and "human resources" press have generally focused on upper echelon white collar employees and not on blue collar or the more exploited sectors of the white collar and service proletariat. But the indicators are that such behavior is on the upswing. One of the rare exceptions to this general neglect that openly tackled the question of employee disaffiliation was a survey conducted by Kepner-Tregoe, a management consulting firm who interviewed more than 1500 workers and managers. The results so startled the firm that they brought in yet another set of pollsters to double-check the findings. According to the president of Kepnoe-Tregoe, "The vitriolic response was amazing. . .Workers don't like their companies and there is a very fundamental social change going on in this country regarding workplace relations. . .The workers hear the verbiage about how 'our people are the most important assets we have' and they want to throw up." In almost every single category, ranging from overall job satisfaction to opinions on the new team assignments, an overwhelming majority of the workers interviewed clearly rejected management views on the new 'empowerment' i.e. polite words disguising ruthless downsizing and increased exploitation through over-work. If at present such views are becoming widespread, they still are at the level of individual discontent and have yet to find collective expression. But as we have noted before, the line between privatized despair and collective mass action is a very fine one indeed. And the U.S. working class in particular has a history of sudden upsurges after periods of seeming calm. Certainly, the growing alienation at the workplace is a necessary precondition for future contestation.. THE ROLE OF IMMIGRANT LABOR IN POST-PROSPERITY US CAPITALISM: Concentrated in most larger US cities are growing numbers of foreign -born workers mainly of Latino and Asian descent who occupy the lowest rungs of the labor force and have brought their own traditional ways of struggle with them. In some ways, they have been much more militant than native-born workers. For example, we heard anecdotally of a 1991 strike in Los Angeles at American Racing Equipment where all the striking workers were former teachers from a particular impoverished area of Mexico who had immigrated to the States. Their strike, which was won in 5 days, evidently drew on militant labor traditions they had learned in Mexico. At the same time it is important not to overestimate such developments - or set-up some particular sector of workers as a "vanguard." As one L.A. reader noted: ". . with the Janitor For Justice militants (and there are hundreds), their leaders are using their mass actions - which can be very effective disrupting production to negotiate deals with corporate bosses which give the workers peanuts! E.g.: their latest contract said many janitors would see their pay rise from something like $5.25 to $6.80 an hour over the next few years. But the older janitors making $6.80 an hour plus already would see their pay virtually frozen! The Duranzo 'progressive' leadership of SEIU Local 399 and their 'left' apologists hailed this as showing how 'workers would make sacrifices for their fellow workers.' What about the bloated capitalists making 'sacrifices'? Also expanded health care was negotiated though there may be work hour extensions to 'qualify' for it." THE MILLION MAN MARCH To understand some of the contradictions of the March, you have to first understand the oceans of pain that convulse the Black community.. For nearly twenty years as a result of deindustrialization, there is an atmosphere of nihilistic and fratricidal warfare in the ghetto; an implosion of anger and frustration compounded by the visible success of a growing minority of the black middle class who are used as an example that America has indeed overcome racism and if you haven't gotten ahead it is your fault and not the system's. It is impossible to convey the frightening and senseless violence that occurs as a result of this hopelessness turned inwards. The only comparison is that of a war zone, although the enemy is not external but the person next to you. For example, the numbers of people killed in Baltimore alone since 1970 surpass the numbers in Northern Ireland dead in the same period due to the civil war there. So the vague call for "atonement" struck a real chord with ordinary Black people. But is equally true that most American cities with large Black and Latino populations are potential tinderboxes, any one of which could spontaneously explode into a Los Angeles - as witnessed by the mini-riots that have broken out this year alone in Paterson, New Jersey, Indianapolis, Miami and Lexington, Kentucky, among other, smaller localized outbursts. Having said that, it was quite interesting to observe how the media essentially built the Million Man March. Even six weeks before the March, it appeared that there was very little grassroots infrastructure anywhere in place. Unlike any other national demonstrations on any issue, which are always ignored and downplayed both before and after they occur, the Million Man March was given surprisingly positive media coverage. This could be due to two factors. One, the demands of the March were considered non-threatening and thus safe to promote. Two, the media loves to exaggerate and sensationalize the growing and real racial divide (which of course, was compounded by the Simpson circus) so the March may have been viewed as a symptom of this gulf between Black and white America and thus focused on from this angle. Whatever their purpose for doing so, the sensationalistic media promotion had the effect - probably unintended - of turning the event into a spontaneous referendum on Black pride, which increased the turn-out all out of proportion to any actual organizing efforts. It is undeniable true that the participants appeared to be disproportionately better-off . Just the cost of traveling to D.C. would have excluded the poorest sector of the Black population. We personally witnessed a homeless man in Baltimore calling the local march organizers and inquiring if any free buses were being provided. He was told if he had really wanted to go, he would have saved up the money in advance since publicity for the march had been circulating for a couple months! Needless to say, he didn't participate. Nor, probably for the same reason did many others. The role of Louis Farrakan must be placed in perspective. He is widely viewed as a doctor who can make an excellent diagnosis but no one is going to line up to take the cure. In other words, thousands of people will turn out to hear him denounce racism, which alone among Black national figures he clearly denounces in a no-holds barred, fiery manner. However, very few people join the Nation of Islam or even become among it's periphery afterwards. The Nation is still a tiny group, with only an estimated 10-15,000 actual members. So for now. it's publicity is all out of proportion to it's actual membership. In the past few years, Farrakhan has subtly shifted from attempting to recruit from among the Black lumpen proletariat, which had previously composed the base for much of the NOI's support (ex-convicts, etc.) and focused instead on the Black middle class (students and the college educated professionals. His prominent role in the March is an example of one more attempt to shift himself into this strata and position himself to be a player for the interests of the Black petty bourgeoisie. Having said all of that, there is no denying that Farrakhan is potentially a very sinister and reactionary figure whose long term role could be that of an American version of Buthelezi in South Africa. Surprisingly few observers, either pro- or con-, point to Farrakhan's dependence on government money. The NOI gets millions of dollars in contracts to provide security services in the inner-city housing projects. Contrast this generous so-called "neutral" support with that accorded to the Panthers, Malcolm X and even Martin Luther King ! So whatever they may say publicly, the rulers clearly see this demagogue as someone worth supplying with an economic base. And needless to say, this umbilical cord of dollars will be very useful in ensuring Farrakhan also plays a role useful to them in return at some future point as well as feeding into Farrakhan's attempted metamprhosis into a power broker for the masses of Black people. It is not unfeasible to see Farrakhan providing the shock troops to put down future riots in the inner city for example. As for the long term effects of the Million Man March, it is too soon to tell, what if any these may be. Because it had a soft message which anyone could claim a vindication for their own political perspective, this will remain a clouded issue. The fact that the speakers on the podium included Black elected officials who have been the most responsible for administering budget cuts, layoffs and service cut backs in some of the largest cities - all of which have disproportionately fallen on the Black working class and poor - suggests that the conflict in class interests can perhaps be papered over for a one day March but not for a long range coalition. And whatever the self-blaming content of the self-help official message of the Million Man March, it is clear too that the March, despite itself, was perhaps the first and largest implicit protest so far against the Contract on America; a fact that the Republicans have been forced to acknowledge even as they uncomfortably scramble to find some comforting common ground with the overall theme of "self-reliance". What all these admittedly partial observations suggest is that the old post-WW2 institutional framework which governed class conflict in the United States is steadily being frayed and whittled away - a process which has led to a shake-up in old allegiances and a process which only stands to continue accelerating in the foreseeable future. No new reforms, in the time old American tradition of buying off mass discontent through sectional concessions, are anywhere on the horizon. Instead the immediate choice looming is merely between how severe the cuts in living standards are going to be. As the L.A. Rebellion amply demonstrated, where in stark contrast to the urban rebellions of the 60's, no new cooling-off money in the form of poverty programs and other such measures trickled down to the streets. Ironically, what were once considered "ultra-left" tactics during the long boom of prosperity and thus confined to the largely ignored hopes of tiny and insignificant groups, tactics such as factory occupations, objectively are now suddenly very practical and realistic measures. Much in the same way that during the Depression era, sit-downs in the factories sprung-up as a common-sense response to the growing numbers of unemployed outside the plant gates whose desperation would have been used as a battering ram to smash traditional strikes. Today, and for the first time in decades, it is all the old reformist solutions (reliance on leaders, the Democrats, partial demands, etc.) which appear hopelessly utopian. Of course, these reformist solutions were not the result of "false consciousness" but the result of periods of relative prosperity where it was possible to force the capitalists to cough up the goods, at least in the short run. And in the short run, they indeed worked. But for all intent and purposes, now these tactics are dead as a doornail. There are no new crumbs to dispense anyone's way as the previously existing objective conditions for most partial reforms have been wiped out. When struggles break out, they will eventually be forced to confront this fact, especially if people are to avoid going down to defeat, as the recent debacle of the Bridgestone/Firestone rubber workers strike and now Caterpillar painfully demonstrate the exhaustion of all factions of the traditional labor movement. And in this transition period to what hopefully could signify the small beginnings of a new worker's movement, over time, lessons will have to be learned and conclusions drawn in the course of the struggle itself. Some Recent Publications Containing Useful Material On Different Aspects of the US RACE TRAITOR # 5 (Winter 96): An editorial on the militias with which we agree with wholeheartedly. Available for $5 from: POB 603, Cambridge, MA..,02140-0005 PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION #50 (Fall 1995): Good articles on Colin Powell and the Million Man March. Still, too wedded to the procrustean bed of orthodox Trotskyism. Available for $1 from: LRP, POB 3573, New York, NY 10008-3573 CHICAGO WORKER'S VOICE # 8 (October 1995): Articles on Sweeney and Labor Party Advocates. Available for $4 from: POB 11542, Chicago, IL, 60611. TRADE UNION POLITICS: AMERICAN UNIONS AND ECONOMIC CHANGE 1960S- 1990S. Edited by Kent Worcester and Glen Perusek. Humanities Press. $17.50 Excellent collection of essays on the U.S. labor movement in the past several decades. Highly recommended. WORLD-WIDE WEB RESOURCES: IWW: http://iww.org./ A-Infos: http://www.lglobal.com/TAO/A-Infos French Students and Workers On Strike: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~galt/france/ Anarchist Archives: http://www.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp/faculty/dwar E-MAIL LISTS RIOT-L This is quite a good list of material gleaned from Reuters using a range of search words (strikes, riots, etc. ) and then automatically reposted to subscribers. Subscriptions are free. To subscribe, send as message as follows: To: clyde@burn.uscd.edu Subject: sub riot-l Message Body: Type your e-mail address A-INFOS This is the international list of A-Infos, a world-wide network of anarchist groups and individuals who post information, mostly on current events and struggles, to recipients. To subscribe, send a message as follows: To: majordomo@global.com Subject: (Leave blank) Message Body: subscribe a-infos BOOK REVIEW RE-SHAPING WORK Edited By Christopher Schenk and John Anderson Published by the Ontario Federation of Labour and the Technological Adjustment Research Program The editors of the essays which comprise re-Shaping Work perceptively state in the introduction to this book that they believe we in the labour movement have to "devote as much time to battling the issues of technological change and work organization as we do on the front of free trade and economic restructuring." Consistent with this the book's authors analyze many of the profound changes in w3ork organization which are taking place and attempt to come to grips with them. The result is a potentially groundbreaking book for the labour movement in Canada. Re-Shaping Work is potentially groundbreaking because it is the first major work produced by the Canadian labour movement which takes a serious, in0depth look at the issue of work organization. This is a truly noticeable development because prior to this book's publication the issue of work organization had been sorely neglected by most of the labour movement despite its claims to be seriously challenging the corporate agenda. Indeed, the movement's failure to adequately address the issue of work organization has epitomized the shallowness of its opposition to the global corporate agenda. This said it is not surprising that the authors fail to map out a visionary strategy for dealing with the changes being made to the way work is organized. The strategies they do present are little more than prescriptions for coping with and trying to mitigate the adverse effects of work re-organization. What we need but do not get is a truly comprehensive multi-faceted strategy of resistance to work re-organization which thoroughly recognizes that it is integral to capitalism. One must ask why the authors did not dare to attempt to map out such a strategy? Is it because they fully understand the radical implications of seriously challenging the global corporate agenda (i.e. capitalism)? Or is it because the book's editors were carefully selective about what to include in a book funded by the previous Ontario government? Whatever the case there is a real danger that this significant book and the important analytical work included within it will soon be forgotten like so many other documents produced by the labour movement. But hopefully this won't be the case. Hopefully Re-shaping work will be widely read by workers and, despite its weaknesses, encourage the long overdue publication of a multitude of material on the subject of work organization. In short, it remains to be seen whether the appearance of Re-Shaping Work will mark a real turning point for labour in Canada or prove to be just one more non-event. Bruce Allen is a Shop Committeeperson and member of CAW Local 199 PRIVATE PRISON FACTORIES By D.A. Shelton Fred Gaines, a former factory worker of the Wackenhut Corporation, was recently laid off from his job as an assembler of computer circuit boards. He is 52, with two small children, a wife to support and a $40,000 mortgage owed on his house. The corporation denied Gaines ' request for severance pay, despite 10 years of loyal service. Given his 10th grade education and lack of employment opportunities, this family of four will surely experience hard times in the near future. A Wackenhut official explained, "Due to budgetary constraints, downsizing was appropriate if we are to stay competitive in the computer assembly market." Yet a few months later, Wackenhut announced that its former assembly operation was being transferred to the Lockhard Work Program Facility in Lockhart, Texas. Lockhard is a private prison managed by a subsidiary of Wackenhut. It was never mentioned that the inmate workers at this private prison are paid drastically lower wages than the former employees at Wackenhut - about 10% lower. Fred Gaines is but one of many victims affected in the last decade as U.S companies increasingly tap into the lucrative multibillion dollar prison industry. As prison populations across the nation explode, the growth of private prisons has expanded by 500% between 1985 and 1995. Eighteen companies have constructed or rehabbed 93 private prison facilities, thus creating space for 51,000 prisoners incarcerated in an already overburdened criminal justice system. For these companies to compete, they are required to bid on federal, state and local grants. Once a grant is awarded, company officials examine exploitable, cost-cutting measures to maximize their profits. Last June, Esmore Correctional Services Inc., which operates four brutal private prisons in the U.S. discovered the consequences of its actions when over 300 immigrants at the INS Processing Center in Elizabeth, N.J. rebelled against inhumane conditions. these men and women immigrant prisoners were stored in a converted warehouse where they were underfed, sexually mistreated and subjected to daily brutality and abuse. After a six hour riot, the prisoners were quickly transferred to county jails and INS facilities in New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland. Shortly thereafter the Elizabeth facility was closed down. This incident is an example of what to expect in the future, as this new "Fortune 500" industry grows. Reprinted from "News And Letters" Dec. 1995 WORLD-WIDE WEB RESOURCES: IWW: http://iww.org./ A-Infos: http://www.lglobal.com/TAO/A-Infos French Students and Workers On Strike: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~galt/france/ Anarchist Archives: http://www.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp/faculty/dwar E-MAIL LISTS RIOT-L This is quite a good list of material gleaned from Reuters using a range of search words (strikes, riots, etc. ) and then automatically reposted to subscribers. Subscriptions are free. To subscribe, send as message as follows: To: clyde@burn.uscd.edu Subject: sub riot-l Message Body: Type your e-mail address A-INFOS This is the international list of A-Infos, a world-wide network of anarchist groups and individuals who post information, mostly on current events and struggles, to recipients. To subscribe, send a message as follows: To: majordomo@global.com Subject: (Leave blank) Message Body: subscribe a-infos