Make 'Em Pay!

Fight For Funding!

This Is A Working System!

"There’s this misguided myth that unions and management don’t get along. It’s a business bottom-line issue. Right-to-work is going to compromise my quality, my competitiveness. The unions are my partner. They’re almost like a screening agency. This is a working system. I have never understood this right-to-work agenda." -Bill Kennedy, Rock Road Companies

From Fate Of The Union (NY Times, June 2015)

Victory In LA

"Tuesday’s vote to raise Los Angeles’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020 is being called “the most significant victory so far” in the push to increase the minimum wage nationally. The City Council passed the ordinance 14-1, which will boost the current minimum of $9 in roughly $1 increments annually over the next five years. The first increase would happen in July 2016, boosting minimum wage to $10.50 an hour."

From The Atlantic, May 19th

Rise With Workers, Not Rise From Them

"Ten thousand times the labor movement has stumbled and bruised itself. We have been enjoined by the courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, traduced by the press, frowned upon in public opinion, and deceived by politicians. But not withstanding all this and all these, labor is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun."

Never Forget The 145

"On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City burned, killing 145 workers. It is remembered as one of the most infamous incidents in American industrial history, as the deaths were largely preventable — most of the victims died as a result of neglected safety features and locked doors within the factory building. The tragedy brought widespread attention to the dangerous sweatshop conditions of factories, and led to the development of a series of laws and regulations that better protected the safety of workers."

Quote excerpted from History.com

This Makes Sense

"From the time I was kid, I saw the broader context of how we live here in the U.S. When I was twelve, I saw Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest Of Shame and that was it. It led me to uncover the image versus the reality of how people live. I then learned to pronounce "apartheid" and saw the treatment of blacks here in this country as they struggled for civil rights. It made me question deeply and ask myself: How can people like migrant workers who are helping us eat not have a pot to piss in? I started learning about countries that have a "share-the-wealth" system and I said to myself, There is nothing wrong with that. This makes sense.

Capitalism’s problem is that it has nothing to say about how to combat greed. For all the moralizing this country does, people don’t get it: They’re greedy. And it's gotten worse in my lifetime. You don’t even have to have socialism. I am talking about minimal things. Put money aside to fund playgrounds and high school football teams. Are you kidding me? The Grammy Awards has to make a plea to keep music in schools? I mean, what planet are we on? I guess I am asking another question in my work as well: What happened?"

From Lewis Black's interview in The Progressive, April 2007

A Systematic Imbalance

"For millions of people, 'wealth' amounts to little more than a few weeks’ wages in a checking account or low-interest savings account, a car, and a few pieces of furniture. The inescapable reality is this: wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence, so that some people imagine that it belongs to surreal or mysterious entities..."

Quotes from Capital In The Twenty-First Century, 2013

Freie Arbeiter Stimme

"The Free Voice of Labor: The Jewish Anarchists traces the history of a Yiddish anarchist newspaper 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."

Revolution Is Inevitable!

"The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers, the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labour... Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."

Excerpted from Albert Einstein's Why Socialism (Monthly Review, May 1949)

Photograph of Washington Square Park by Nancy Cricco (NYU Archives, 1980)

Low Pay Is Not Okay!

Fight For 15!

"According to a new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the CEOs of America's top 25 restaurant corporations, including McDonald's, Burger King, the Cheesecake Factory, Chipotle, and Jack in the Box, took home an average of 721 times the money minimum-wage workers did, and 194 times the take-home pay of the typical American worker in a production or nonsupervisory job. Restaurants and food services employ nearly half of all American workers who earn the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour (or less)."

Quote from Mother Jones (July 14th, 2014)

Workers Unite For A Fair Workplace!

"We work at Guitar Center and we are organizing across the country to improve wages and working conditions for all Guitar Center employees.

We love our jobs and our passion is helping our customers achieve their musical dreams. But we often have trouble making ends meet, thanks to the low wages and fluctuating hours we receive. We are asked to do many non-selling tasks which hurt our commissions, sales workers do not receive sick days, health benefits are expensive and part timers are not even offered them.

It’s been an exciting year for the Guitar Center campaign: workers in New York, Chicago and Las Vegas have successfully organized a union at their workplaces, over 100 bands and artists have endorse the campaign, and tens of thousands of people have signed petitions supporting us.

However, the company has responded by refusing to give us a fair contract and has launched an aggressive campaign to bust the union. The company's last offer is even less than what non-union stores have and is meant to punish us for standing up for ourselves. Our union has been forced to file charges detailing the company’s bad faith negotiating and union busting.

We now say: enough is enough! We are asking the public to support us as we enter the final stages of negotiations! Sign the petition to help us get a fair contract."

Every Worker Deserves A Living Wage

Social and economic inequality in the US has reached historic proportions. The top 1% increased their income following capitalism’s Great Recession while the overwhelming majority of working people are still struggling or are even worse off than before. The movement for a minimum wage of $15/hour is an expression this enormous problem of inequality. The support for the fast food workers actions for $15 showed that the aspirations of Occupy to fight against poverty and inequality are alive and growing among millions.

15 Now was launched in January of 2014 by Seattle City Council Member, Kshama Sawant and Socialist Alternative to fight for a $15 minimum wage in Seattle. 15 Now chapters quickly spread across the country. It is a campaign that anyone can join and help build.

The Long Revolution

"It is our basic case, in this manifesto, that the separate campaigns in which we have been active, and the separate issues with which we have all been concerned, run back, in their essence to a single political system and its alternatives. We believe that the system we now oppose can only survive by a willed separation of issues, and the resulting fragmentation of consciousness. Our own first position is that all the issues, industrial and political, international and domestic, economic and cultural, humanitarian and radical, are deeply connected; that what we oppose is a political, economic and social system, that what we work for is a different whole society." -from The May Day Manifesto, 1967

"This is a language of socialist aspiration which is today scarcely uttered. At a time when many are coming to see that the triumph of neoliberalism — an unfettered version of capitalism — has come at enormous economic, social and environmental cost, it seems to me that The May Day Manifesto deserves to be read again as a contribution to the project of inspiring a concerted resistance to the system that now dominates much of the world." -from The May Day Manifesto, 1968 edition

Download: The May Day Manifesto

Let Freedom Ring

Martin Luther King, Jr.

January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968

"Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends. And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"

A Vision That Speaks To Working People

"What I’m saying is that I do not want to see the US significantly dominated by a handful of billionaire families controlling the economic and political life of the country. That I do believe that in a democratic, civilized society, all people are entitled to health care as a right, all people are entitled to quality education as a right, all people are entitled to decent jobs and a decent income, and that we need a government which represents ordinary Americans and not just the wealthy and the powerful... The corporate media ignores some of the huge accomplishments that have taken place in countries like Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway. These countries, which have a long history of democratic socialist or labor governments, have excellent and universal health care systems, excellent educational systems and they have gone a long way toward eliminating poverty and creating a far more egalitarian society than we have. I think that there are economic and social models out there that we can learn a heck of a lot from." -Bernie Sanders

From John Nichols' interview with Sanders for The Nation, March 2014.

Stop The Trans-Pacific Partnership!

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a secretive agreement being negotiated behind closed doors by government bureaucrats and more than 600 corporate lobbyists. It threatens everything we care about: democracy, human rights, workers' rights, the environment, healthcare, freedom of speech, and the Internet... All in the name of so-called "free trade."

The Persistent Commoner

Tony Benn

1925 - 2014

“It's the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you.”

A Collective Struggle

"This International Women's Day, we are highlighting the importance of achieving equality for women and girls not simply because it is a matter of fairness and fundamental human rights, but because the progress in so many other areas depends on it... Countries with more gender equality have better economic growth. Companies with more women leaders perform better. Peace agreements that include women are more durable. Parliaments with more women enact more legislation on key social issues such as health, education, anti-discrimination and child support. The evidence is clear: equality for women means progress for all." -Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary General

The Moral Choice?

"I'm utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument's over. But the idea that it's not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn't going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that's astonishing to me. And so capitalism is about to seize defeat from the jaws of victory all by its own hand. That's the astonishing end of this story, unless we reverse course. Unless we take into consideration, if not the remedies of Marx then the diagnosis, because he saw what would happen if capital triumphed unequivocally, if it got everything it wanted. And one of the things that capital would want unequivocally and for certain is the diminishment of labor. They would want labor to be diminished because labor's a cost. And if labor is diminished, let's translate that: in human terms, it means human beings are worth less. From this moment forward unless we reverse course, the average human being is worth less on planet Earth. Unless we take stock of the fact that maybe socialism and the socialist impulse has to be addressed again; it has to be married as it was married in the 1930s, the 1940s and even into the 1950s, to the engine that is capitalism. The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It's a juvenile notion and it's still being argued in my country passionately and we're going down the tubes. And it terrifies me because I'm astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are we all not?" -David Simon

Excerpt from a speech at the Festival Of Dangerous Ideas, December 2013