Thursday: Labor and the Strikes to Come

[Year Zero]

LABOR AND THE STRIKES TO COME

Thursday, March 14th 2013 – 7PM
Brecht Forum
451 West Street, New York, NY 10014

All across the country, the bosses are burning our contracts.
Documents that once offered a guarantee of steady if modest raises and
some measure of protection against arbitrary employment policies today
find better use as kindling. Only one question remains: Will we choke
on the ashes or dance on the flames?

As capitalism’s economic crisis continues we see increased
confrontations with the police, more and more arrested and imprisoned.
Increasingly, city, state, and federal governments, locally and
internationally, use labor contracts as further forms of state
repression. As the economic crisis continues to ripple through the
public sector, Illinois and California have torched covenants with
teachers and imposed unpaid furloughs. Wisconsin and Indiana singed
key contract provisions like automatic dues check-off and agency fees.
This crisis becomes more and more one of governance and management, as
the political economy of the bourgeoisie is not just something
experienced but rather enforced.

Public sector workers all over the world, typically the most unionized
forms of employment, and those who operate many core infrastructural
and institutional jobs in society, are often the first to come under
attack with austerity. As a result, their labor disputes often seem to
have the most at stake, as they represent direct confrontations
between workers and governments, with labor stoppages in any sector or
workplace potentially shutting down the normal function of an entire
city or even country. In New York City, two major unions recently
resume work under concessionary contracts after protracted strikes.
Meanwhile, nearly 300,000 teachers, firefighters, transit, sanitation
and other municipal workers continue to labor under expired contracts.
Newly added to this total are school bus drivers, who returned from a
month-long strike empty-handed, disaffected, and contractless.

Our present moment demands a question: “What can we do to resist the
intimidation of this repressive system, to coordinate and mobilize
within our existing networks, and to build new forms of solidarity
strong enough to continue the struggle?” All of these conflicts lead
us to a similar analysis and strategy: get organized, build a force,
and develop a form of communism as the life we start to live as we
resist and attack capitalism.

Featuring:
–Jocelyn Cohn of Unity and Struggle, http://gatheringforces.org/
–James Frey, http://libcom.org/tags/james-frey
–John Garvey of Insurgent Notes, http://insurgentnotes.com/
–Ursula Levelt, staff attorney for TWU Local 100, http://www.twulocal100.org/

Suggested Readings:
-“Our Friends with Benefits: On The Union Question” – Jocelyn Cohn &
James Frey, 2013:
http://gatheringforces.org/2013/03/04/on-the-union-question/
-“The 1% of the 99%” – Anonymous, 2011: http://libcom.org/news/1-99-27122011

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