"You should blog more " Andrew says.
"I don’t have the energy to write" I say.
"Blog your pictures" he says.
"Ok, ok, I will" I say.
Archives: Blog entry
A <em>blog entry</em> is a single post to an online journal, or <em>blog</em>.
Mercedes Herrerra is a 39-year-old Mexican immigrant living in Houston, Texas. Working primarily for staffing agencies, she first started cleaning houses and sports facilities in 1996. Paid meager wages, working long hours and travelling some distance to get to new job sites, her staffing agency charged her as much as $100 per week for gloves, and cleaning supplies.
Over the Halloween weekend I attended the Claiming our Future event in the RDS along with a thousand or so other people. Today I got a card I sent myself in the post from the event reminding me I’d promised to write it up. This draft has been mulled over for a while so I guess its time to publish.
Thursday 16th December saw the European Courts of Human Rights finally announce its judgements on a very important pro-choice case taken to the court by 3 women supported by the IFPA. The WSM has been consistently involved in pro-choice struggles in the three decades of its existence and on Thursday as part of that involvement we were trying to provide coverage, analysis and background as the stories broke on WSM.IE.
The North American Anarchist Studies Network (NAASN) had its founding conference in Hartford, Connecticut in 2009. Over 350 people were in attendance throughout the weekend and open assemblies were held to discuss the future of the network. Out of these assemblies sprang some working groups, ideas for expanding the network, and its future direction. We also decided that we would have an annual conference to be hosted in different cities and organized by local groups.
First off, there have been two new articles posted since my last blog. First was “Mutualism: Fake and Real” which was written quickly in response to Tory proposals on turning public sector services into “mutuals” or “co-operatives.” It’s a con, a step towards yet more privatisation and little to do with mutualism.
Last night saw the latest 1% Network gathering when the Network met up once more at the Wolfe Tone statue for the short march down to the Dail for the budget day protests. The 1% Network was formed to highlight the fact that 1% of the population of Ireland own 34% of the wealth and to say this 1% should bare the costs of the crisis. In fact as Michael Taft has shown last night the 1% actually gained from the tax changes in the budget while the low paid were hammered.
Saturday 27 November saw in the region of 100,000 people take part in a demonstration called by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in Dublin. The day itself saw me juggling trying to help co-ordinate the 1% Network bloc on the demonstration, providing live coverage via the WSM twitter of the demonstration and taking what turned out to be a little over 200 photographs for the news article we published within hours of it ending. I’ve pasted in the final article below, the second half of it is mostly composed of sections of other articles, leaflet texts and the planned speech for the 1% Network. These had been saved the day before and were published with a general introduction and a twitter box an hour before the demonstration started. The twitter box displayed the latest tweets sent to WSMIreland which were coming from the spot via my iPhone. The first half of the article is now a text put together by Odhran, another WSM member right after the march based on what he saw and what was reported on our twitter feed.
This weeks leads editorial in the international business magazine ‘The Economist’ shrugs its shoulders and walks away from the idea of controlling Climate Change. This is very significant for The Economist is not a climate change denial publication, for some time (at least as far back as 2006) it has accepted the scientific consensus that human caused Climate Change is a real process with extremely serious implications. So it giving up the fight is a very big deal indeed, and one that contains serious lessons for the Climate Change reformists who continue to believe that if enough pressure is put on a deal can somehow be struck at five minutes to midnight.
Community organisation has been a staple of socialist activity for centuries, however, unlike workplace activism, community organising has been subject to less attention in terms of theory and strategising. This article will argue that the ideology and practice of workplace syndicalism has many concepts that apply equally to community organisation, and can provide a useful framework in which to operate.
So firstly, what is Syndicalism? In the workplace syndicalism stands for many things, primarily that workers should ultimately take power in society, using their own organisations, the trade unions, to wield this power. Syndicalism is also associated with industrial unionism, placing itself in opposition to unions drawing artificial divides between workers based on their skill set. De-emphasis of parliamentary politics is another key facet of Syndicalism, which instead advocates that major change will be primarily wrought through the struggle of trade unions on economic ground, avoiding political positioning that may alienate sections of the labour movement.