Solidarity

February 20: Day Of Action In Solidarity With Alabama Amazon Workers

February 17, 2021 Support Alabama Amazon Workers, Popular Resistance. Resist! Amazon, Labor Union, Solidarity, Worker Rights

From Mississippi to Connecticut, North Carolina to California, workers, labor and community activists have resoundingly responded to the call for a National Day of Solidarity with Alabama Amazon Workers issued by the Southern Workers Assembly. More than 40 actions (and counting!) are now planned to mobilize solidarity with the workers in Bessemer and to tell Amazon: Victory to the workers! Union-busting has got to go! The full list of actions can be found below. Amazon is spending tens of thousands of dollars each day on the most vile union busters around - Morgan Lewis - because they know this historic struggle being waged by the workers in Bessemer is inspiring Amazon and other workers to organize on their jobs, and they know that when workers build power, that means less profit for them.

Building Class Power By Fighting For The Common Good

January 13, 2021 Stephanie Luce, Organizing Upgrade. Organize! Community organizing, Labor Unions, Solidarity, Worker Rights

As activists orient to the post-election landscape, we’re having lots of conversations about building power for the long term. We’re taking stock of the types of power we need and how they can reinforce each other – narrative, organizing, mobilizing, and electoral power, to name a few. And despite the decline in union membership and strength, workers’ collective bargaining power also offers a means of making gains for broader communities. “Bargaining for the Common Good” (BCG) makes this real. Unions that adopt a BCG framework incorporate community demands alongside their workplace demands in contract bargaining.

How To Save Nature And Humanity Without Sacrificing Either

November 14, 2020 Charles Whitaker, Climate Conscious. Create! climate crisis, Consumerism, Food and Agriculture, Solidarity

Saving nature without sacrificing modern life is the preeminent challenge of our time. It is a complicated problem that must be attacked simultaneously from multiple angles. Failure to act on one angle will invalidate efforts on other angles. This problem must be addressed in two distinct phases. First, we must stop living in a manner that actively harms both ourselves and the natural world. Then we must learn how to create a world where both nature and humanity thrive. This two-part article will explore how we can reorganize our civilization to be compatible with such a vision.

Mutual Aid Is Essential To Our Survival

October 28, 2020 Dean Spade, Truthout. Organize! COVID-19, Mutual Aid, Participatory Dem, Solidarity

When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged as a crisis in the U.S. in early 2020, people all over the country started coordinating to deliver groceries and prescriptions to vulnerable people, making and distributing masks and hand sanitizer, and raising money for people who were losing jobs and ineligible for unemployment benefits. By the time the uprising against anti-Black racism and police violence brought people into the streets in early summer, the concept of “mutual aid” had gained significant traction in the media, and it was visible on the streets as people...

The Future Of Pandemic Solidarity

October 25, 2020 Colectiva Sembrar, Red Pepper. Create! Mutual Aid, Pandemic, Solidarity, Transformation

In their recent book Pandemic Solidarity, Colectiva Sembrar (Sowing Seeds Collective) collected first-hand experiences from around the world of people creating their own narratives of solidarity and mutual aid in our time of global crisis. Red Pepper interviewed members of the collective – carla bergman (she doesn’t capitalise her name), Seyma Ozdemir, Nancy Piñeiro, Emre Sahin and Marina Sitrin – to discuss what unites these diverse experiences, what can be learned, and where they might fit into a broader project of systemic change.

COVID-19 Is A Great Unequaliser

September 1, 2020 Ben Phillips, InterPress Service. Create! COVID-19, pandemi, Solidarity, wealth inequality

Rome - Any of the first names that the media reported as having Covid were those of the rich and powerful, from movie stars to political leaders. Be ye ever so high, the virus is above thee – or so it seemed. Now we understand that this perception, that came in part because at first only the wealthy and well-connected were getting tested, was misleading. The data is now crystal clear: Covid risk maps on to inequality, and Covid is a great unequaliser – in health, and in wealth. But just as the initial “optimistic” take about Covid – that it would equalize us – got it wrong, so too the now pervasive “pessimistic” take – that the huge costs of the crisis leave us simply unable to act boldly – also gets it wrong.

Whole Foods Is Quietly Telling Workers Not To Show Black Lives Matter Support

June 30, 2020 By Nicole Karlis, Salon. Resist! Black Lives Matter (BLM), Solidarity, Whole Foods, Workers Rights and Jobs

This week, a group of Whole Foods workers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, walked out after being told they couldn’t wear Black Lives Matter masks because they weren’t part of “the company dress code.” Prior to the incident, wearing masks with other symbols or logos, including ones that featured the New England Patriots, were reportedly acceptable. This is according to a report in the Boston Globe, which details how Whole Foods worker Savannah Kinzer and a few of her colleagues wore BLM-themed masks on Wednesday. A manager told them they either had to remove the masks or go home. Seven of them walked out. On Thursday, Kinzer showed up and passed out more masks, but they were met with the same fate. Dozens of workers were sent home again.

Why Is This Ongoing American “Revolution” Bound To Fail?

June 27, 2020 Andre Vltchek, Popular Resistance. Strategize! Rebellion2020, Revolution, Russian Revolution, Solidarity

Observed from outer space, the United States is in a revolutionary turmoil. Fires are burning, thousands of people are confronting police and other security forces. There are barricades, banners, posters, and there is rage. Rage is well justified. Grievances run deep, through the veins of a confused and socially insecure population, in both cities and the countryside. Minorities feel and actually are oppressed. Indeed they have been disgracefully oppressed, since the birth of the country, over two centuries ago (see my latest report carried by this magazine). There are some correct words uttered and written; many appropriate sentiments are expressed. And yet, and yet… It looks like a revolution, it feels like a revolution, but it is not a revolution. It definitely is not! Why?

Solidarity And The Absent State In Puerto Rico

June 17, 2020 Pedro Cabán, Dissent Magazine. Resist! Corruption, Mutual Aid, Puerto Rico, Solidarity

Puerto Rican artists, entertainers, and athletes have been conspicuous in calling for protests against the government, which the pro-statehood New Progressive Party (PNP) firmly controls. Indeed, January 2020 was uncannily similar to last July, when El Residente, Bad Bunny, Ilde, Daddy Yankee, Ricky Martin, and other artists roused scores of thousands of their fans to rise in opposition to Governor Ricardo Rosselló. Seven months later, as the government failed to take any decisive action toward a relief effort, anger was building against Rosselló’s hapless successor. Even more damaging for the practice of democracy is people’s awareness that Puerto Rico is ruled by an entrenched and hard-hearted political class that holds them in contempt. After a seemingly endless swarm of earthquakes battered the southwest coast, the colonial state was once again absent. The people were, as always, presente, caring for one another when the authorities failed to do so.

Residents Sheltered Dozens Of Protesters From Police

June 3, 2020 Colleen Grablick, Jason Fenston and Natalie Delgadillo, DCist. Resist! Police violence, Rebellion2020, Solidarity, Washington DC

Nearly two hours after the 7 p.m. curfew went into effect on Sunday night, dozens of people were corralled by police in a one-way block — Swann Street NW, between 14th and 15th — as they made their way north from downtown. As officers closed in on the group, they began setting off what appeared to be pepper spray and flash bangs, sending the crowd running. “I heard ‘bang bang’ and a lot of thumping and pepper spray everywhere, my eyes started burning, people screaming, and a human tsunami coming down the street, of piles on top of people,” says Rahul Dubey. Several residents opened their doors, including Dubey. “I flung open this door,” he said. “I was like, ‘Come in, get in the house. Get in the house.’ The police were running after these 20- and 30-year-olds and grabbing them. They’re tripping, coughing. And I was pulling them into the house.”

The Plague Here And There

May 31, 2020 By Rosa Miriam Elizalde, Resumen English. Educate! COVID-19, Cuba, Health Care, Solidarity

The state of Pennsylvania has a population similar to that of Cuba, but has 35 times more confirmed cases of coronavirus and 63 times more lethal victims. From May 13 to this past Wednesday, the island has reported one death; Pennsylvania, 1,251. The figures, no matter what they are, are tragic, but the comparisons feed the perplexity; how are the statistics so disparate between the world’s richest country and the nation that is the victim of “the longest genocidal attempt in history?” as Gabriel Garcia Marquez called the U.S. economic blockade. Does it have to do with the fact that President Miguel Diaz-Canel does not play golf in the midst of a deadly epidemic, nor has he suggested that bleach is a “revolutionary drug”?

Emancipatory Mutual Aid: From Education To Liberation

May 23, 2020 By PReP / Neighborhoods, ROAR. Create! Collective Liberation, COVID-19, Mutual Aid, Solidarity

The COVID-19 pandemic has strained and even overwhelmed the public health, medical care and disaster response systems where governments and state agencies were ill-prepared to contain and suppress infectious outbreaks. In countries where emergency lockdown measures have been adopted without accompanying policies to guarantee income security and housing tenure, there is the additional problem of economic hardship. Already existing and newly formed non-governmental organizations and associations have mobilized to fill the gap. These formal and informal groups assist people forced into the margins by government neglect with free meals, grocery and medicine deliveries, safe housing and even cash.

Mutual Aid: Building Networks Of Solidarity Not Charity

May 11, 2020 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Clearing the FOG. Podcast COVID-19, Mutual Aid, Recession, Solidarity

In the face of the twin crises of the COVID-19 pandemic and economic collapse, people are organizing mutual aid networks to provide food, medicines and other basics to those in need. This is done in the spirit of solidarity, not charity, a non-hierarchical empowering approach versus a hierarchical exploitative approach. We speak with Eleanor Goldfield, an activist in Washington, DC who is active in her local mutual aid network and has written about it, about how they are organizing, the response from the community and government and how this fits into the bigger picture of resistance and building alternative systems to meet human needs. Some resources that Eleanor suggests are MutualAidDisasterRelief.org, ItsGoingDown.org and her website, ArtKillingApathy.com.

Across Class Lines: Amazon Tech Workers Join Warehouse Workers In Protests

May 2, 2020 Bryce Covert, Progress.org. Resist! Amazon, COVID-19, Solidarity, Worker Rights

At first, Gerald Bryson didn’t take the coronavirus all that seriously. But then, people he knew started dying. “People I’ve known all my life, big healthy men three times my size, are dead,” he said. “This thing is real.” He assumed that Amazon, his employer, would take the necessary measures to keep him and his fellow Staten Island warehouse workers safe. Instead, safety precautions “were almost nonexistent,” Bryson said. “When the virus first hit, Amazon didn’t move into gear. We were still doing the same things we were doing on a normal day, crowded.” Eventually, Amazon informed his warehouse that a number of employees had tested positive. The company didn’t release any of the names, however, so it was impossible for Bryson to know whether he’d been exposed to the people who were sick. It scared him.

Out Of The Coronavirus Tragedy May Come Hope Of A More Just Society

April 26, 2020 Michael D. Higgins, SocialEurope.eu. Create! Ireland, Pandemics, Solidarity, Transformation

The global loss of life and disruption to our daily lives resulting from the coronavirus pandemic is unprecedented in living memory. We have learned through tragedy that we have a shared, globalised vulnerability common to all humanity. We are learning how we, as a matter of urgency, must make changes to improve resilience in a range of essential areas: employment, healthcare, housing. We have been forced to recognise our dependence on our public-sector frontline workers, and the state’s broader role in mitigating this crisis and saving lives. The coronavirus has magnified the scale of our existing social crises and has proved, if ever proof were required, how government can act decisively when the will is there.

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