Our 2013 Workers Unite Film Festival Schedule is Online!

April 10, 2013

After many months of searching out great new worker/labor films and going through the archives of historical labor films, we here at The Second Annual Workers Unite Film Festival have come up with an eight day long program plus an extra evening at one of the biggest unions in NYC, SEIU1199.

Our eight day schedule, which you can find on our website under "2013 Schedule" tab, covers many of the themes that effect working people today as the stuggle to make ends meet, or to find a new job, during this very difficult economy. We have films on being fifty and out of work, films about immigrants seeking to find a decent job in their new home - anxious to make a contribution to their new communities. Our films are as close as our own backyard, here in NYC (Cafe Wars and Judith:Portrait of a Street Vendor) to as far away as the men who tear apart de-commissioned oil tankers with their hands and simple tools in the deserts of Pakistan (Iron Slaves).

We have films about the African American men who fought for dignity on the job and in their union as steelworkers - one of the most dangerous jobs in America, to mothers in Bangladesh who must put their children with their own parents due to 15 hour days in the sewing factories of high fashion sweatshops. These are the same women who survived a recent "Triangle Shirtwaist" style fire in Bangladesh, where over 111 young women perished because the exit doors to the factory were padlocked shut. One hundred years plus after the deaths at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in NYC and we are still fighting the exact same battles.

Please look through the whole schedule. Find some programs that look intereseting, then go online - by next week - and buy tickets!! We have kept ticket prices as low as possible so as many of you as possible can attend at least one program, or one full day of amazing films. Tickets are $7.50 for one show (online sales may incur a service charge) $11.50 for a full day of films!! And $59.00 for a full 8 days of educational and emotional programming about the lives and struggles of workers and their unions all over the globe.

This year we are particularly honored to join with twenty other worker/labor film festivals around the world - known as The Global Labor Film and Video Festival on May 16th. On that day we will screen films on labor issues in China, Pakistan, Mexico, Slovakia, from all over the U.S. and a film about the merchant marines whose work took them from one end of the earth to the other. And that's just one day of the festival!

We plan to have either the directors or speakers at most of these events, many of them currently engaged in the worker struggles for labor rights and dignity in the workplace. We want to put these films into context so that we all come out of the theater with both a better understanding of our places in the global fight for labor rights and the motivation to get out their and participate in whatever actions are possible to make these rights a reality.

So please take a few minutes to check out the huge list of films and pick out at least a few to come view. If you can afford it, we'd love to have you visit our homepage and make a small donation to help keep building the festival for this year and coming seasons.

Finally - on April 17th at the Gap on 34th Street

Apr. 17: Protest at Gap in NYC -- End Sweatshop Death Traps Now!

April 17 • 12:00 pm

Gap store, 60 West 34th St (near Herald Square), New York, NY

Liana Foxvog (liana@ilrf.org, 413-320-7276)

Since 2006, more than 600 garment workers have died in preventable fires while sewing clothing for companies like Gap, H&M, and Walmart. Two years after 29 workers died in a fire at a Gap supplier in Bangladesh, Gap is still refusing to pay for reforms and join with other companies in a binding fire safety agreement that includes worker representation. Until there is real change, any day there could be another factory fire with workers locked inside.

JOIN A BANGLADESHI FACTORY FIRE SURVIVOR AND LOCAL ACTIVISTS TO CALL ON THE GAP TO PAY 10 CENTS MORE PER GARMENT TO SAVE WORKERS’ LIVES!

At the protest, meet:

SUMI ABEDIN is a Bangladeshi garment worker who survived the November 24, 2012, fire that killed 112 workers at Tazreen Fashions, a factory that supplied Walmart, Disney, Sears, Dickies, and produced US Marines logo apparel for Delta Apparel / Soffe. Sumi was working on the 4th floor of the factory at the time of the fire and survived after jumping from the burning building.

KALPONA AKTER is the executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity (BCWS), one of Bangladesh’s most prominent labor rights advocacy organizations, and is herself a former child garment worker. BCWS is regarded by the international labor rights movement and by multinational apparel companies as among the most effective grassroots labor organizations in the country. Levi Strauss & Co. calls BCWS “a globally respected labor rights organization, which has played a vital role in documenting and working to remedy labor violations in the apparel industry in Bangladesh.” Kalpona is an internationally-recognized labor rights advocate and has traveled widely to speak about the deplorable conditions that Bangladesh garment workers face every day. She was interviewed extensively by local and international media following the deadly fire at Tazreen Fashions in November 2012.

This action is sponsored by Corporate Action Network, International Labor Rights Forum, Retail Action Project, SumOfUs, SweatFree Communities, and United Students Against Sweatshops.
More info: http://laborrights.org/gappetition

Spread the word on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/360229954083676/

For more than a decade, Gap, Walmart and other major brands have produced clothes in Bangladesh factories that they know are fire traps. As a result, since 2006, over 600 apparel workers, mostly young women, have died in what could have been preventable factory fires. Now, two major apparel makers—PVH/Tommy Hilfiger and the large German retailer, Tchibo—have signed a legally-binding fire safety agreement that calls for independent fire inspections of all of the Bangladesh factories they use and requires them to pay for the necessary measures to make these factories safe, and to give their workers a say in how to accomplish this. Gap and Walmart have refused to join that agreement and Walmart continues to obstruct efforts to achieve fire safety in the factories it uses in Bangladesh as reported in The New York Times on December 5, 2012 (“Documents Indicate Walmart Blocked Safety Push in Bangladesh”). It’s time for Gap and Walmart to address their history of deadly negligence and take responsibility for workers’ safety before one more avoidable tragedy occurs.

The Fast Food Workers Show Us the Way

April 4th, 2013

Fast food workers across NYC, organized by Fast Food Forward and supported by many pro-labor groups in the city, including Unite NY, MoveOn and Align NY. But it was the courage of low wage workers, recently at Walmart, now at fast food outlets including McDonalds, Wendys and Burger King, who walked off their jobs today demanding a decent starting wage in the $15 range.

As NPR reported towards the end of last year, strikes, once a mainstay of labor's arsenal, were on the rise for the first time since labor came under corporate/government attack in the 1980s.

http://www.npr.org/2012/12/08/166748366/sign-of-the-times-labor-strikes-may-make-comeback

As corporate profits have risen through the roof, in tandem with outsized CEO pay packages, workers who fuel those gains with their great productivity, have lagged far behind these gains with stagnating and declining paychecks. It is hard to imagine that any logical person thinks it is possible - even for a working student - to make ends meet on $7.25 an hour. Throughout the day random folks interviewed on the street were usually quite supportive, saying that $15 an hour was not too much to pay for standing behind grease laden french fries and burgers for an eight hour plus shift. Those that bought the corporate line that a decent minimum wage would somehow harm these multi billion dollar in profit corporations, felt that though an increase was a good idea, $15 an hour was too rich for such unskilled work.

Nobody asked the follow-up question about how "skilled" those jobs of top management are who rake in the big bucks. Anybody seen Undercover Boss? On that charming show the CEO apparently doesn't know his kitchen workers slave in hot dangerous conditions for minimum wage - a wage so bad that cooks with ten years of experience must take second and third jobs to make ends meet at home. And for this level of brilliance they receive literally millions of dollars from the exploitation of these frontline workers. Then to top it all off - this "brilliant" CEO is made to look thoughtful by dropping $10K to 20K on each of those recently abused employees. No mention is made of the thousands of others not so lucky to be on camera who must still work for the original crap minimum wage. And if they even whisper union? They're out the door in a minute.

Who is kidding who? If the top dogs, just like everywhere else, weren't pigs feeding at the trough, then all the workers down the line, from cooks, to cleaners, to servers could get that $15 and hour wage, serve with dignity, low turnover and everybody would be relatively happy.

But this is America 2013, if somebody at the top isn't crushing somebody at the bottom, then apparently they're being soft on their employees and are open to punishment from Wall Street. Time to Re-Occupy brothers and sisters and teach those manipulators a lesson.

So the fast food workers showed them today and all of us: organize or die. You can force employers to do things if you stand united and stand together and fight back against this ridiculously unequal system,

Hooray for the Fast Food Workers! Hooray for Our Walmart and three cheers for all those organizers and workers out there across the country every day, in tough times, showing us all that it can get done.

Come see some incredible films next month - May 10th through 17th @ Cinema Village and The Brecht Forum.

You'll see that workers around the world are fighting back, organizing and not taking the crap of the corporate ruling class.

While Walmart Sues Workers, The NLRB is Hijacked

March 28th, 2013

The news of the last week has been somewhat of a letdown, but the seeds of rebirth are out there, brothers and sisters. Walmart, the nation's largest retail services employer, notorious for underpaying it's workers, denying them adequate healthcare coverage and shuttering profitable locations in the face of successful union organizing (as they did last year in Canada), has decided to seek protection from OUR Walmart (Organization United for Respect at Walmart) and their friends at the United Food and Commercial Workers International union (UFCW). Despite public relations efforts on the part of Walmart to deny any effect or impact from a two year grass roots organizing campaign by OUR Walmart (workers from within Walmart disgusted by the company's anti-employee working environment), apparently this organizing campaign has irritated Walmart executives enough that they decided to file a suit at the 9th Judicial Circuit Court of Florida to stop OUR Walmart and the UFCW union from aiding or abetting any more store related actions of OUR Walmart to disturb the sales environment at individual stores in Florida. You might remember that this grass-roots action to bring public attention to the state of working conditions at their favorite bargain store reached a crescendo last Thanksgiving, on "Black Friday," when some estimates placed over 100,000 Walmart workers outside stores around the country that day to demonstrate their anger at their Walmart bosses.

See the rest of the story here:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/25/walmart-sues-protesters-florida-stores_n_2950992.html

While this is a small percentage of the million plus employees of Walmart throughout the country, it was clearly enough of a start to get Walmart's attention. Walmart is in a difficult spot, having to cater to the low end of the retail spectrum at a time when their own policies of paying minimum wages, with little or no benefits, have paved the way for an economy where these working folks don't even have the discretionary funds to shop at Walmart. Costco, which covers a similar market, is unionized, pays benefits and maintains a workforce with a fraction of the turnover and unhappiness on the job as Walmart. It is easy to see that despite OUR Walmart being a relatively small organizing drive, they have already brought this message of inequality to the public. Walmart's decision to bring a legal case against the UFCW , which has never actually announced any real organizing drive, shows how rankled these corporate types can get when even a small group of workers start effectively organizing for better working conditions. Imagine what would happen if a coalition of national service unions actually pooled their resources to publicly organize over one million Walmart retail workers? That would be a really exciting and momentous event in our recent labor history. I think that type of effort alone could shift the worker/corporate landscape during the next election cycle by reaching millions of voters on their home turf and talking about daily issues of what it means to be able to survive with dignity in this increasingly unequal society.

This leads me to the issue of the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB, set up as part of the Wagner Act and then the National Labor Relations Act during the height of the Great Depression, finally created an impartial federal hearing board where both workers and employers might get a fair hearing on issues related to organizing unions and ever part of workplace existence. Though always imperfect, sometimes weighted to the employers, under Republican administrations, sometimes claimed to tilt towards workers under Democratic administrations (though the corporate types always forget to mention how after the Taft-Hartley revision to the NLRA in 1947, they had all the "legal" tools they needed to throttle union drives under the law), the NLRB had until recently survived intact since the 1930s as a balancing force in the battle for worker's rights.

Until now. Since the start of President Obama's first term in office there has been a concerted plan on the part of right-wing business allied forces to not only block any appointments of labor/worker friendly judges to the NLRB, but the Republicans in Congress have filibustered every single Obama appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The end result of that effort was a lopsided three to zero vote by the all Republican appointed court to overturn President Obama's recess appointments of three NLRB judges to fill the NLRB to a working majority over the last three years. Those appointments have allowed the board to settle hundreds of cases that had been stalled for years due to a lack of the necessary three judge quorum required by the NLRA in order for the NLRB to operate. A recent article, again thanks to The Huffington Post, points out in detail how the failure to reform the filibuster rule in the US Senate has directly affected the lives of thousands of workers. In this case, the US Court of Appeals, by throwing the NLRB's decisions into question, has once again delayed and extended the retirement pay and health benefits settlements for hundreds of coal miners in West Virginia. These miners were the victims of the corporate sleight of hand at the Cannelton coal mines in West Virginia. When these mines were purchased by Massey Energy - an anti-union mining conglomerate famous for running the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia where 29 miners died in a collapse due to lack of adequate safety precautions - hundreds of UMWA members were fired and not invited back to their jobs when Massey reopened the Cannelton Mine.

The end effect of filibustering Democratic nominated federal judges and attacking the last bastion of federally run workplace rights adjudication (the NLRB) is the destruction of any real path to workplace rights and dignity.

All unions and all workers should be out there screaming about this travesty now. The one thing I would say to the right-wing corporate types that think they are gaining the upper hand: be careful what you wish for. Remember 1934, before the National Labor Relations Act and the NLRB. Workers will only take being stomped upon for so long and then they will fight back with every tool in their kit, including strikes, sit-ins, work stoppages. Workers across many industries outside the NLRB are organizing every single day as we speak. If short-sighted legislators and CEOs think they can legislate and filibuster worker's rights for the long haul - they've got a big surprise coming down the road.

Read the full article here and write to your elected officials! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/23/nlrb-senate_n_2934910.html

Sequester Nation: Workers and Their Unions

March 8th, 2013

The first day of the right-wing GOP plan to destabilize our government by continually creating hostage situations over the federal budget and our economic recovery.

Despite everything you've read, this is part of a long term plan by the group that can't really win democratic elections fair and square, the only reason they control the House is by rigging state election districts in easily corruptible state legislatures. That 1% corporate money goes a long, long way in Madison and other Midwest capitols.

We are likely to muddle our way out of this mess once the cuts begin to hurt and regular folks wake up to the mess and call their robotic. mid-controlled Congress people to complain. Hopefully. But this would not happen if unions were some 40% of the workforce instead of 7%. As we've pointed out previously, the low union member rate and the ability of a hard-core right-wing corporate party to create fake societal convulsions to try and hijack the democratic process to get their way are not disconnected. These are two sides to the same plan to destroy the ability of working folks to organize for fair wages and a dignified work existence. The flip side is the effort to scuttle government services, through any means necessary, including this form of economic terrorism, in order that more and more of these previously public, and often unionized services, are handed over to "private enterprise," meaning the 1%ers who pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the election process.

The one and only way to fight this is for workers to organize. Trying to answer emails from MoveOn, or any of the many other well-meaning left-wing groups, in their calls to protest this despicable behavior by both parties, is like spitting in the wind folks. When workers organize into union groups, or even like union groups - they gain power and leverage. They can tilt the playing field towards their needs and their causes. Without a growing and healthy labor movement we end up where we are right now, on the cusp of no labor protections and at the mercy of corporate serfdom. 

Make no mistake, as we will show during The Second Annual Workers Unite! Film Festival, in NYC from May 10th through May 18th, there are many victories happening for workers below the radar of the corporate mass media machine. The one in particular I want to highlight tonight are the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA). Bhairavi Desai, Javid Tariq, Beresford Simmons, Bill Lindauer, Victor Salazar, Ryan Richardson, Melanie Lindauer and an amazing Organizing Committee have brought dignity, workplace rights and imminently a first-time healthcare plan for taxi drivers and their families. This is all done by a group of workers completely outside the protections of the National Labor Relations Act, contract employees. Besides this type of workforce being the wave of the future, as employers try their best to shed any responsibility for their workers, organizing independent workers who do not share a factory or office space is incredibly hard. But these dedicated organizers succeeded. And while they followed many of the basic rules of organizing, the one that stands out so boldly to me is a typical interaction that I was privileged to witness - totally by accident - during a brief visit to their NYC headquarters on 28th Street.

As organizers and activists we can talk for days about strategy, getting workers to think like a working class and a thousand other threads, which are all important in the process. But what many unions forget, especially as they grow in size, is that the original mission was to improve the lives of the workers they wanted to organize. That means they had to deal with them as individuals, banding together to get a better deal, but as individuals, with their own issues and problems that needed to get dealt with in order that their lives might actually get better.

In the midst of a schedule that was hectic beyond belief, during a meeting dealing with the fine points of part of the huge healthcare plan to come, a young driver walked into the NYTWA office looking confused and a bit frightened. Bhairavi Desai, who has a dedicated and hardworking staff to help such walk-in drivers - with issues from speeding tickets, to license issues, to immigration and health issues - looked up from the healthcare meeting and saw his level of upset. She asked a few brief questions, then quickly realized that the young driver was being railroaded into something by the owner of his cab that was way beyond anything he should reasonably be expected to shoulder. She promised she would do nothing to jeopardize his livelihood, but made clear he was being set-up in an unfair and possibly financially damaging situation. Basically, she took the time out to really give a shit about what happened to this young man. No theory, no strategy, no platitudes. She quickly and efficiently got to the root of the issue, got a plan into place to help the young driver meet the issue head-on, but with educated support behind him and had him settled down and relaxed by the time he was ready to leave the office. You build a true union one member at a time, not from decisions made between employers and union presidents high-up, but from intervening in the hard daily interactions of workers getting abused by their employers. Not rocket science, but so few really do this job well.

This was not easy work and it wasn't phoned in, and it happens in that office every single day. That is why this workers group is now an Alliance, a union, over 16,000 members and achieving negotiating results that older established unions would envy. In fact, the NYTWA is the first nationally chartered union by the AFL-CIO since the United Farm Workers in 1965. There will hopefully be many more of these, though the AFL-CIO has been far less supportive of this new and growing union than they should be at this tough moment in labor history. But that is a topic for another blog post at another time.

We salute the New York Taxi Workers Alliance and all workers groups fighting to organize workers into alliances, unions, worker centers. They are doing the hard but necessary work of building back our decimated labor movement and without them, the sequester nation will happen over and over again.

Update on Saturday, March 9, 2013 at 2:39PM by Andrew Tilson

This excellent graphic from the AFL-CIO shows the comparisons between what automatic sequester cuts chosen by the House are, as opposed to what might have made a smarter, long-term cut to wasteful corporate giveaways.

Take a look, then write your congress person to suggest there is a better way out of our debt crisis than balancing it on the backs of the poor and unemployed.

http://act.aflcio.org/content_item/shocking-comparisons

 

Tell NY Times Writers: Workers and Their Unions Fight On!

February 10th, 2013

Adam Davidson, in a particularly annoying article in the February 2^nd edition of the NY Times titled, “Workers of the World, Sit Tight,” detailed why labor union membership had declined to its lowest levels since the passage by the Wagner Act in the 1930s.  According to Davidson, while there have been some minor successes in “some of the least likely industries,” he reasoned that the recent anti-union attacks by Michigan, the birthplace of the UAW, Wisconsin, Indiana and other formerly union-friendly states, could mean that “a world without unions is not hard to imagine,” though such a situation could  (my italics) make our inequality problems much worse.”

 It sure seems funny to me, that a newspaper that has recently tangled with it’s own union, The NY Newspaper Guild, over cutbacks and job security, as well as pension and health care responsibilities, (BTW the NY Times lost: http://www.newsguild.org/node/2730) should just randomly print an opinion piece so one-sided, so condescending towards workers, with so little information about the thousands of fights for worker justice and labor unity going on around the world as we speak.

 Mr. Davidson pretends that somehow this low point for the unions and workers is just some natural progression of global forces of an economy that sources goods and employees from wherever they are cheapest. He even quotes Gary Chaison, “a labor-relations specialist from Clark University,” who he quotes as saying, “There’s no way of really dealing with the global impact. There’ s really very little you can do.” Davidson goes on to mention that a post-union world, without collective bargaining would bring the vulnerability of individual bargaining. This trip back to every worker alone, at the mercy of a kindly manager, or a nasty one, would surely lead to greater income inequality and in the end, former union organizers, such as the workers profiled at the start of this article, would likely end up thinking only for their own advantage, back in the dog-eat-dog world of Gilded Age Capitalism, but now merged with the corporate world’s ability to manipulate and bend government regulations around the globe to their profit-driven will.

We are one small group in NYC, running a worker/labor film festival out of NYC, interacting with hundreds of labor activists, both locally, nationally and globally. While some of the attacks on workers and labor Mr. Davidson details are undeniable, all the workers and their labor groups that I come in contact with are committed to fighting even harder, smarter and longer to make sure that the “dystopian future of inevitable worker misery,” which Davidson envisions, rightly so, is the left’s view of a union-free future, will never happen.

One of the major reasons for the Workers Unite Film Festival and over 25 labor film festivals around the world, is to help counter exactly this type of defeatist and distorted view of the whole worker/labor union problem.

 As even Bloomberg.com, the business website explained, http://www.bloomberg.com:news:2013-01-23:the-real-reason-for-the-decline-of-american-unions.html), in an article by Kris Warner on declining union numbers in the US, it was not some magical drift towards anti-unionism by workers at all that cut union membership. In fact, when any polling of workers was done, time and time again it showed they would vote for union representation by wide margins –IF THEY WERE LEGALLY ALLOWED TO DO SO.

 Bloomberg, when comparing the Canadian unionized workforce to that in the US found that union membership was similar in both countries until the late 1960s. Soon after, business sponsored and government supported attacks against the ability of workers to organize and their collusion to prevent the legal rights of workers to use their labor rights, contributed greatly to the low union membership rate in the US. It’s not a mystery friends, we’ve been under an all out assault from business owners for over 40 years. As Kris Warner points out, there is no “right-to-work” concept in Canada at all. There are federal laws to protect all workers rights and every single province has to follow those laws.

We must ask ourselves. Why do allow this system of federal laws, The National Labor Relations Act, to be one of the only federal laws that a state can simply decide not to follow. We must organize to enforce this federal law across all fifty states. Acceptance of this is ridiculous and has allowed mostly Southern states, until recently, to draw large-scale manufacturing, particularly automakers, out of unionized states and into unprotected “right-to-work” states.

So Mr. Davidson, it is not that there is nothing that workers can do to stem this anti-union tide, but the laws are rigged heavily against us. Even so, I work with and see, every day of the week, successful organizing drives aimed at educating and organizing low-wage workers, most of whom are already not covered by the existing federal labor laws. That’s right! They are fighting from scratch, such as the recently victorious NY Taxi Workers Alliance, recently chartered as the first new national union by the AFL-CIO since the UFW in 1965. The Domestic Workers in NYC are organizing, the Restaurant Workers, there is a huge new push to organize all retail employees, called The Retail Action Project. Across the country: OUR Walmart, continues to do battle with the nation’s largest and most anti-worker employer. Community groups are forming alliances with labor groups to fight for their common issues.

Building service employees fight for their fair share from wealthy real estate tycoons, hospital workers from SEIU fight to play a role in the reorganization of the whole health care delivery system. And this is just here in the US. I receive stories and films from workers from China, Bangladesh, India, Egypt, Afghanistan, Turkey, Israel, the UK, France, Columbia, Brazil, New Zealand, Australia, virtually every corner of the globe where workers are exploited by the global corporate conspiracy.

 In every single one of these countries workers and organizers, who now thanks to the Net and social media are in closer collaboration and discussions than ever before, are fighting every single day to organize and fight for worker’s rights. Those rights, like right here at home, as you yourself have pointed out, are human rights. They are the right to have a fair shake and decent pay for a hard day’s work and not to be chewed up and spit out by the overarching greed of the business owning class.

These workers, just like you and me, from every place on this earth do not see the battle as over, not remotely. They are realistic and know this battle will be long and hard. But they know that the alternative is surrendering to a future where it really is every individual at the mercy of those who have the money and power to exploit them. I do not see that happening, not in the near term or the long term. I think that your article and articles like this, which periodically surface to pat their corporate masters on the back, are condescending and clueless as to the reality as it exists on factory floors and workplace centers around the country and around the globe.

I invite you to come to the festival this May, see the stories of workers fighting back, organizing and then tell me really if you think all there is for workers to do is to sit tight and accept a future where all their efforts have been for naught.

WORKERS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS AND CIVIL RIGHTS. WE WILL FIGHT FOR THEM FOREVER.

Locally: Fight back against the firing of 22 union activists at Cablevision. These workers have the right to organize and NYC should force the Dolan's, who control Cablevision, to bargain in good faith.

Read about it here and support their fight! http://www.thecablevision99.org/cwa-condemns-cablevision-optimum-for-illegally-firing-23-workers/