Paper Tiger Exhibition OpeningCelebrating 30 Years of Collective Media Art, Activism and Analysis

Roarrrr... It's 30 years since the first "reading" of the New York Times by Herbert Schiller in October 28, 1981, the initial live transmission of Paper Tiger Television. Miraculously the ever-renewing collective is now celebrating their roaring history with an exhibition, a conference and series of events. Last spring, the many tapes, backdrops, photos, funding proposals, and meeting notes of the vast Tiger archive were donated to the Fales Library, a special collection within Bobst Library at NYU (always open to the public without an NYU pass!). To celebrate this acquisition, Fales is hosting an exhibition from February 3 (Save the date!) until May 4, 2012 in their third floor gallery. LINK

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Print and Demand #2

On November 7, [2010] Triple Canopy presented Print & Demand #2, the second in an ongoing series of conversations exploring how print culture is being changed by the manifold forms of online publication and how public spaces are being constituted around those forms. The discussion, which took place at The NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, included James Goggin, Jiminie Ha, and Rob Giampietro, and was moderated by Triple Canopy creative director Caleb Waldorf. It focused on the role played by design in shaping digital forms of publication: How are certain tropes of print publication—and the reading and viewing experiences they have engendered—being translated for new media (while others are being jettisoned entirely)? How has the shift from graphic design to user design, with its focus on interaction and interface, changed the way publications function? LINK

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Free Vector World Maps

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Your iPhone Was Built, In Part, By 13 Year-Olds Working 16 Hours A Day For 70 Cents An Hour

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Bread and Roses Strike 100 years ago

The International Labor Rights Forum posted a "Garment and Textile Worker Organizing,
Then and Now" handout for the 100 year anniversary of the Bread and Roses strike in Lawerence, Massachusetts. Here's the link. Thanks Liana.

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Happy New Year

The New Materiality: Digital Dialogues at the Boundaries of Contemporary Craft travels to the Asheville Art Museum is on view through March 2012. It was reviewed in the Journal of Modern Craft which I'll post once I get it.

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Outsourcing air traffic control

Trade unions and church groups in the Philippines have joined together in calling a boycott of Philippine Airlines and Air Philippines in solidarity with the Philippine Airlines Employees’ Association (PALEA).
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The PALEA union likens its struggle to that of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) union in 1981. Those familiar with U.S. labor history will recall: when 13,000 air traffic controllers went on strike, Ronald Reagan fired the union supporters and broke the union. As a result, the bargaining power of American workers and labor unions was severely undermined. Let’s act together for a better future for airline workers who are facing job loss and state-sponsored repression today. Now is the time to join with PALEA in their call for justice.

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I’m writing to ask you to make your voice heard in support of this boycott. Let Lucio Tan, owner of both airlines, know that you won’t fly PAL or AirPhil until locked-out workers have been reinstated to their regular jobs.

Philippine Airlines is putting into place a plan to outsource its ground crew, which would result in deep pay cuts and job insecurity with the downgrading of employees from regular to contractual hires. On September 27, the PALEA union launched a protest at Manila airport that paralyzed the operations of Philippine Airlines. In response, Philippine Airlines and the government forcibly evicted the protesting workers. Since then, Philippine Airlines locked-out 2,600 airport services, catering and call center workers, and terminated them from their jobs on October 1. The workers have set up protest camps and are running continuous picket lines. They are calling for our solidarity.

It’s time to up the pressure. The company’s line, as quoted in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, is: “No amount of rallies, protest actions or letters of support/complaints from sympathetic groups both within and outside the country could change the fact that PAL has already spun off and outsourced its non-core businesses.” But we know that the airlines cannot withstand a boycott. PAL and AirPhil rely on end-of-year holidays travel for their profit line. If a large enough group of us join the boycott publicly, we will have an impact.

Take a moment to click here to send a letter to Philippine Airlines and the Philippine government.

The PALEA union likens its struggle to that of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) union in 1981. Those familiar with U.S. labor history will recall: when 13,000 air traffic controllers went on strike, Ronald Reagan fired the union supporters and broke the union. As a result, the bargaining power of American workers and labor unions was severely undermined. Let’s act together for a better future for airline workers who are facing job loss and state-sponsored repression today. Now is the time to join with PALEA in their call for justice.

In solidarity,
Brian Campbell
Director, Policy and Legal Programs
International Labor Rights Forum

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#occupybaltimore Mic Checks Karl Rove

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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture Series proudly presents Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz speaking on the subject: “The City on a Hill, Where it All Began”

Friday, November 4th
1:30 p.m.
Dewey Square
Occupy Boston Encampment
Corner of Summer and Atlantic Streets

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (born 10 September 1939) is an American academic, educator, feminist activist, and writer. Born in San Antonio, Texas, Dunbar-Ortiz is of partial American Indian background. She spent most of her youth growing up in the rural community of Piedmont, Oklahoma. Dunbar-Ortiz's grandfather was an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, and for the Oklahoma Socialist Party during its brief era of success, between the beginning of statehood in 1907 and its repression following the Green Corn Rebellion of 1917.

She earned her Ph.D in History from UCLA in 1974. In the 1960s and 1970s, she was active in the anti-Vietnam War and radical left movements and worked closely with the SDS, the Weather Underground, and the African National Congress. She was also very active in the women's rights movement, and from 1968–1970 was a leading figure, along with Maureen Maynes, Dana Densmore and Betsy Warrior, in the radical feminist group, Cell 16.

In 1977, she and Jimmie Durham organised the Conference on Indians in the Americas in Geneva. She has authored a number of scholarly books and articles on Native American history, and has published three memoirs, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (1997); Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975 (2002); and Blood on the Border (2005), which is about what she saw during the Nicaraguan Contra war against the Sandinistas in the 1980s. Outlaw Woman won recognition from the Organization of American Historians as a 2003 finalist for the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award in the field of American civil rights struggles. Her writing has also appeared in Monthly Review and The Nation, and on the CounterPunch website. She is presently Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies at California State University, Hayward.

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The Free Voice of Labor

Documentary streaming on-line here

"The Free Voice of Labor: The Jewish Anarchists" traces the history of a Yiddish anarchist newspaper (Fraye Arbeter Shtime - The Free Voice of Labor) publishing its final issue after 87 years. Narrated by anarchist historian Paul Avrich, the story is mostly told by the newspaper's now elderly, but decidedly unbowed staff. It's the story of one of the largest radical movements among Jewish immigrant workers in the 19th and 20th centuries, the conditions that led them to band together, their fight to build trade unions, their huge differences with the communists, their attitudes towards violence, Yiddish culture, and their loyalty to one another. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freie_Arbeiter_Stimme

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#OccupyBoston

The struggle for justice is what love looks like in public. -West with Nat'l Nurses United union.

#Occupy Boston is supported by the unions at UMass Boston, the MTA, the Mass Nurses Association, Jobs for Justice, the Boston Labor Council. UMass Boston students participated on the 5th and members of the FSU will march Monday.

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Activists peacefully protesting on Wall Street get maced.

Phone Story

Forced labor in Vietnam

Today, some 40,000 men, women, and children are being held against their will in forced labor centers all over Vietnam. They are forced by the government to work for little or no pay. The daily work quotas are impossibly high, and when workers fall short of the target they are beaten with clubs, forced to kneel on sharp stones, denied food or baths, or held in an isolation cell. Even more shockingly, this is happening with full sponsorship of the government and for corporate profit. Much of the fruit of the labor is for export, including cashews, garments, mosquito nets, and soccer balls.

]]> The centers are thinly disguised as providing treatment for drug users. But most of the victims are brought in on the basis of a single positive urine test or are picked up in "street sweeps." They become detainees, forced to stay for up to five years, without ever receiving a hearing or trial in a court of law.

Now the US and Vietnam are discussing a Trans-Pacific Partnership – a new free trade agreement that would give Vietnam benefits in its trade with the US. Tell the USTR that any trade deal with Vietnam should not move forward while Vietnam practices state-sponsored forced labor.

Take action

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Happy Labor Day

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microRevolt reBlog