The purpose of the Labor Solidarity Committee is to facilitate communication and relationship building between labor and Occupy Portland. Labor and Unions are an essential part of the Occupy Movement and it is the goal of the Labor Solidarity Committee to make sure that they are included as much as possible.
1. Review our committee work, the process for taking on work and moving it forward, and identify changes we should make now to prepare for a busy spring.
“The mobilization of the Occupy Movement across the country, particularly in Oakland, Portland, Seattle, and Longview were a critical element in bringing EGT to the bargaining table and forcing a settlement with ILWU local 21.” --Jack Mulcahy, ILWU Local 8
Labor Support of Occupy Portland
Letter Carriers Support Occupy Portland! “We share the common value of people over profits, not the corporate value of profit over people. Know that we the letter carriers of the NALC Branch 82, Portland, Oregon, stand with you in this important time and this fight for the rights of the many, not the few.”Solidarity Forever! Laborers' Local 483 unites with Occupy Portland. "You are the hope for the future."
The Occupy Movement recognizes the dire economic situation the country is in and is not held back by mainstream politicians. This gives the Occupy Movement an amazing chance to lead labor down the right path. There is a wide gulf between the demands that the labor movement and the Democratic Party are putting forward and what working people desperately need. Occupy would not exist were this not the case.
The Occupy Movement will be crushed if the demands being fought for do not connect with working people. A key characteristic of any powerful social movement is the appearance of successive, large demonstrations that draw in new layers of working people, students, and the elderly. The average working person feels impelled to join such a movement because they see their own interests reflected in the movement, and once they join they learn that their interests are the same as those of the others involved.
“The collapse of the Soviet system was a pretty extraordinary event, and we are currently experiencing something similar in the developed world, without fully realizing what’s happening.”[1]
Let us name, then, the underlying object of the protests’ discontent. It is a society that fundamentally isn’t working, a system that coerces us into ruining the planet and exploiting its people, denying us life and liberty if we refuse to comply, and sometimes withholding them even if we do comply. It is a society where life is a little bleaker, gaudier, uglier, less authentic, and less hopeful with each passing year. It is a system of winners and losers, in which even the winners are less happy than a typical Ladakhi peasant or Amazonian hunter-gatherer. It is a society of pretense, image, and illusion. It is a society where more human energy goes to war than to art. Most tellingly, it is a society where it is normal to hate Monday. The discontent behind the protests comes from the conviction, “We can do better than this!”
Unions are in a death spiral. Private sector unionism has all but vanished, accounting for a measly 6.9 percent of the workforce. Public sector workers are being hammered by government cutbacks and hostile media that blame teachers, nurses and firefighters for budget crises...
Dr. Heiner Flassbeck, Director, Division on Globalization and Development Strategies, UNCTAD: European austerity policies past the point of no return, driving global economy towards deep and lengthy recession.
In this interview (video) for a Greek newspaper, Wolff explains how the Greek crisis is (among other things) an experiment by bankers and other neoliberal interests to see how much "austerity" a society will accept.
This document explains why and how organizations are the starting point for understanding power. It focuses on four main organizational networks -- ideological, economic, military, and political -- as the building blocks for power structures.
"...change agents have to understand a key difference between themselves and other people. Most people are focused on the joys, pleasures, and necessities of their everyday lives, and will not leave these routines unless those routines are disrupted, whereas change agents sacrifice their everyday lives -- family, schooling, career -- to work on social change every waking minute."
"(The) tendency toward so-called 'motivated reasoning' helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, 'death panels,' the birthplace and religion of the president, and much else."
Summary: On 27 Jan 2009, the Huffington Post ran a story by Sam Stein titled "Bailout Recipients Hosted Call To Defeat Key Labor Bill".[2] The story included around five minutes of an hour long recording between federal bailout funds recipients. The call shows the firms to be involved in lobbying, effectively, with public money. The file released here is the full hour long recording.
