Labor

The Wild Oats natural food chain claims to be progressive, enlightened, worker- and environment-friendly. The truth is, Wild Oats is anti-union.

“Step One is to recognize that there is a problem.” When a movie star is kidnapped and put through a 12 step recovery program for addiction to Western Civilization, reality gets turned on its ear. The fugitives careen headlong through passion, betrayal, and assassinations toward an explosive event that will transform the world. Everything you know can change in an instant. Are you ready for the next step?

The battle now is to win an override. A two-thirds majority is needed in both the Senate and Assembly. The bill passed with votes to spare
in both, but this will not be easy, especially in the Senate. We write with an almost overwhelming sense of disgust and anger.

July Street Festival to Commemorate 70th Anniversary of Strikes that made Minneapolis a Union Town

One Day in July will take place at the intersection of 3rd Street North and 6th Avenue North, a block south of Washington Avenue in the Warehouse District. The street festival will be free and open to the public from 2 to 10 p.m. on July 24.

JULY 1, 2004 Washington, DC—A group calling themselves the Party Liberation Front (PLF) took over the lobby of the World Bank Headquarters this morning and threw a party to “celebrate” the 60th birthday of the World Bank and the success of its global capitalist agenda.
60 years ago finance leaders from the major world powers met in Bretton Woods, NH to establish the World Bank and IMF. Since then wealthy elites in the US and elsewhere have reaped billions of dollars from countries forced to abide by World Bank policies.

The group brought with them a cake, champagne, party hats and horns, and a large card to present to Bank President James D. Wolfensohn, thanking the Bank for their excellent work in helping replace colonial rule with free market exploitation to ensure the wealthy stay on top.

“The Bank is a wonderful institution. Since 1944, we can see that the Bank truly has helped thousands of global corporations and wealthy elites to realize their potential for profit in peace,” said Matthew Kavanagh, one of the organizers with the PLF.

"Kohl's sources its clothing from such places as Burma (aka "Myanmar"), where teenage girls receive 4 cents/hr in sweatshop factories jointly owned by the Burmese military. Workers at Kohls' subcontractor, Chentex, in Nicaragua's Las Mercedes Free Trade Zone, get paid just 30 cents per hour for twelve hour shifts six days a week and only 20 cents for every pair of jeans that has a final border customs value of $7.14. Nicaraguan workers sewing jeans for Kohl's are paid $65 a month and live in "utter misery,'' Kernaghan said. He said many work as many as 50 hours overtime, added to the 47.5 hours week.

Las Mercedes Free Trade Zone is the largest FTZ in Nicaragua. It is made up of 15 enterprises that employ approximately 20,000 workers. Large US retailers, like Wal-Mart, Kohl's, J.C. Penney, Target, Sears and Gap, contract production to factories in the Las Mercedes Free Trade Zone."

We don't want this in our city, do we? Yes, there are plenty of stores in Rochester who support sweatshops, but this one hasn't opened yet, and we should try to prevent it from opening, or at least let people shopping there know where their products are coming from. So email if you are interested in helping flyering or maybe even protesting; I am not sure when the opening day of the store is, but if you want to you can email me or IM me with your name, and number or email address, and i will email you back with info. Thanks.

*PS. I'd appreciate it if someone would help me with this, I've never organized a protest or anything like it before.*

For eight days in May, the Port of Oakland was virtually shut down by truckers striking for better conditions. The same port had been closed down by antiwar protesters just three weeks before, so a small contingent of us from Direct Action to Stop the War (DASW) joined them as a community support group and reported their struggle on Indymedia.

Photos by: Matthew Rosenberg

Photos by: Matthew Rosenberg

Photos by: Matthew Rosenberg