LABORThese are articles previously published by Toward Freedom related to this category.
Fifteen years ago, the super power that had once ruled over more than a fifth of the earth's surface collapsed in a conflagration of economic chaos and social upheaval. After all manner of frenzied reforms and adjustments, the entire economic and political apparatus of the USSR imploded in the process ushering in a whole new era of global politics.
Javier Armas: Everyone can see that the politics of California has changed with the growth of a huge immigrant rights movement that exploded on May 1. This being the case, how does this change your role, and the Green party's role, in California politics?
During Argentina's financial meltdown, many unemployed workers occupied their closed factories and forcibly reopened them - under employee control. Four years later, Argentina's economy is well on the road to recovery, and many worker-run factories are seeking permanent legal status. Workers from the Zanon ceramics factory in the Patagonian province of Neuquen held a rally on July 4 to demand the government expropriate their plant and give permanent legal status to FASINPAT (Factory without a boss), their worker cooperative. If there's no action, it will lose its temporary legal status in October.
In the middle of the campaign that is being carried out with respect to the national boycott in support of immigrant rights, one of my parishioners asked me about the historic meaning of May 1.
One day before Argentina's economic crash on December 19, 2001, fifty-two workers from the Brukman Textile Factory, the majority of them women, refused to continue working until their bosses handed over their back-wages. Plagued by debt and gradual bankruptcy, the owners hadn't paid the workers their weekly pay check for fifteen days. The bosses demanded that the workers returned to their stations, but the sewing machines remained silent.
In America there are disturbing trends emerging, which highlight the expanding inequality and shrinking class mobility of the country's people. Poverty has been steadily increasing since the turn of the century. Household income has decreased. Inflation consistently outpaces compensation gains; simultaneously, productivity expectations are increasing. Manufacturing and high tech jobs continue to go overseas and the prison population has reached its highest level in U.S. history.
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