I know you’re wondering. But it’s hard to imagine. Kind of like a fish imagining life without water. We’ve known corporate media for generations. Since the advent of psychology and marketing, the influence/manipulation of corporate media is ubiquitous. And not in a good way.
But let’s take a few moments to imagine the features of post-corporate media, where increasing the audience [by a variety of questionable, sensationalist means, sometimes] to increase ad revenue isn’t the goal.
Whenever I read stories about corporations wanting to do the right thing, I never hold my breath. Clothing corporations, the sector where “sweatshops” originates, want us to believe they care. They don’t.
Read what nonsense they are trying to peddle to get us off their back for exploiting people so we can have cheap t-shirts. Then, hold your breath for this, scroll all the way to the bottom to see how it comes all the way back to keeping Stephen Harper in power.
While I’m also sad that the Kamloops Daily News is closing, I think Warren Kinsella is over-simplifying a few things [see below] with respect to how the media climate will be affected by the closing of this for-profit business, earning shareholder value by producing mass media content, while sometimes allowing its corporate revenue-generating employees to produce some adequate-to-good journalism.
Below is a notice of an important event happening on Saturday in Vancouver. If something is labelled as “Made in Israel” but is really made in an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank of Palestine, where does it really come from? Nowhere that I would want to buy from. You?
I’m only as free as everyone is free. Don’t tolerate occupation. The boycott alternative information is here.
Nelson Mandela has died, but the memory of his commitment to universal freedom and justice lives on. Mandela championed justice for the oppressed not only of South Africa, but everywhere.
In an address to the ANC in 1997- three years after the demise of apartheid in South Africa – he reminded his listeners of the UN’s strong stand against “this iniquitous system” and how, over time, an international consensus grew which helped bring about its end. Describing the UN’s 1977 inauguration of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People as a demonstration of its “recognition that injustice and gross human rights violations were being perpetrated in Palestine,” Mandela added: “But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians . . .”
Hopefully this memory will inspire shoppers to buy responsibly and ethically, as they choose last-minute gifts this Christmastime and “Boxing Week.” That includes refusing to buy SodaStream home carbonation devices, which – although fraudulently labelled “Made in Israel” — are actually produced in the industrial park of the illegal Israeli settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim in the occupied West Bank of Palestine.
Boycotts of SodaStream, already widespread throughout Western Europe and the United States, are now gaining ground in Canada. Independent Jewish Voices–Canada, the United Church of Canada, district and provincial labour councils, student groups, and many others have called on their supporters to refrain from buying SodaStream. In the lower mainland, local affiliates of the Canadian Boycott Coalition for Justice in Palestine/Israel (www.canadianboycottcoalition.ca) and the United Network for Justice in Palestine and Israel (www.UNJPPI.org) have held two public actions so far. The next will be on Saturday, December 21 at 2:00 p.m. in front of London Drugs, 525 W. Broadway, Vancouver. Please join us and help spread the word.
As Tyler Levitan, campaigns coordinator for Independent Jewish Voices-Canada, has stated: “It is vitally important that we support nonviolent struggles against systems of mass oppression. The Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the ongoing theft of Palestinian land and resources, is a serious crime that we all must acknowledge.”
Balloons are a threat to civil order. The police must protect themselves from you with riot gear. You are a bad person.
You. You enemy of the state. You radical environmentalist. Or worker rights advocate. Or whatever cause you are promoting.
You. You are a threat to order. When you gather, you are a threat to civil order. You may escalate your activities to the criminality you harbour in your mind.
You. You are a threat to unquestioned profitability for the 1%.
Why? Because you think Walmart is a bad employer. And maybe even bad for the planet.
Workers in Canada and around the world have been under assault for decades, but most of our recent tactics to stop the bleeding have been ineffective. Are we lazy, complacent, overworked, obedient, compliant, subdued, afraid, docile, or fully tamed and intimidated by the one per cent?
If we don’t get a lot more of our boots on the pavement, and soon, our union density will continue to decline to an impotent level. Just look at the United States. Union density does not have to be zero for workers there to consistently lose against employers and anti-worker legislators. Density just has to be low enough to dissuade against a meaningful push back.
Here are two examples of just how bad it is getting, in Canada.
In 2012, Labatt’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch, made $9 billion in profit. Not revenue, but profit! That’s a lot of Stella, Becks, Lowenbrau and Blue. Yet, last April, they tried to demand concessions from their workers in Newfoundland and Labrador, because $9 billion was simply, incredibly, not enough money for their shareholders. (A boycott campaign has begun, but it won’t work until thousands or millions take part AND communicate their boycott to retailers and the corporation.)
In Richmond, B.C., on the day before the provincial election in May, and in the media frenzy of that campaign, IKEA locked out its unionized workers, members of Teamsters Local 213, and then began bargaining in reverse: the longer the workers stayed out, the more concessions they would have to eat. Then IKEA was also caught hiring scabs.
The warm and fuzzy Swedish company is calling it a strike because workers can come back in any time. The rhetoric is galling, but we don’t have the luxury of having our sensibilities bruised.
By the way, IKEA’s 2011 profit was $3.85 billion. Profit, not revenue. Again, not enough money for the family-owned company! Its founder is worth $52 billion.
Despite IKEA’s charming, suburban, global reputation, they have been busting unions around the world. The only unionized IKEAS in Canada are in Richmond and Montreal. If IKEA breaks the Teamsters in Richmond, what happens to the workers in Montreal and to any other organizing drives around the country? They fizzle. Seventy per cent of IKEA workers in Sweden are unionized. They’re at risk. Every retail worker in Canada, including at IKEA, should be in a union.
Abandon Ineffective Tactics
Petitions and email campaigns are convenient for activists who are busy. Sending stern emails also feels good and helps us feel involved, but they’re often just form letters. Even if we all added our own unique preface to the form letter, how often do they cause employers to back down. Armchair activism has run its course.
We are rarely able to get more than a few dozen of the usual suspects out to rallies. What does this accomplish? Why do we even have rallies any more? The media rarely show up. Even if they did, they often end up mocking the issue by looking for sensational personalities to put on camera. The employers are often just inconvenienced for a few hours, then it’s back to union busting. If rallies never lead to a victory, why should we be surprised that members and their families and activist networks won’t show up for them.
Despair is a luxury we cannot afford. It’s also self-indulgent and extremely unproductive. But futility is a feeling that we can learn from. So is fatigue, burnout, complacency, cynicism and exasperation. So, let’s stop asking members to show up for actions that don’t work.
Smarter Activism
We need to get back into the streets, and not for 45-minute rallies. Unions have often merely endorsed exciting new approaches to pushing back against the Canadian and global elite, like the Occupy Movement and Idle No More, but we haven’t delivered our members, their families and activist networks. Here’s why: we haven’t drawn the connections so that our members can understand that real wage growth in the last two generations has declined while the one per cent are becoming obscenely rich. We will keep losing if we don’t fight back, and a lot more.
What if there was strike support at every IKEA in Canada from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. every Saturday until the end of the lockout in Richmond. And not just a rally, but real engagement, taking advantage of the opportunity to inform IKEA’s beloved customers about how awful the company’s labour policies are, and how rich IKEA’s owners are.
But why stop there. Why not continue the rallies until every IKEA in Canada is unionized.
I know, we are exhausted. We are trapped in a hyper-consumerist society and we make less money than our parents did. So, we’re behind and we aren’t catching up, and we have little free time and we miss our families and friends. Still, we could be more effective with the time we’ve got. We can’t turn this around until we help our members understand that every lockout or anti-worker piece of legislation is an attack on them, on all of us. It needs to be our job, as labour activists, to help people make the connection that it is worth several hours every other Saturday to do something like occupy the sidewalks outside all the IKEAS.
One-off rallies are not effective any more. Regular, unpredictable rallies and occupations would be better, but only if we can show our members how they will be successful.
This piece appears in the current issue of Our Times.
Work to enrich students’ lives and minds, not teach them to be serfs!
Well, a new school year is about to begin, so it’s time to analyze just how much destruction the 1% will visit upon public education this year. Defunding, corporatization of curriculum, standardization of curriculum and experience, high-stakes testing, homogenization of experience…you know, the same old nonsense that drove me from teaching high school about a decade ago.
And it’s getting worse.
But who is is this vague 1%? Neoliberal governments and their “apostles,” which includes the BC NDP of the 1990s with some of their “reforms” as well as the usual suspects of the global power elite.
If the right-wing billionaires and apostles of corporate power have their way, public schools will become “dead zones of the imagination,” reduced to anti-public spaces that wage an assault on critical thinking, civic literacy and historical memory.
McMaster’s Henry A. Giroux has written this foundational piece, which all school teachers, administrators and parents ought to read before Labour Day. You can agree with it, disagree with it [with whatever ulterior motives you carry], or debate it, but don’t ignore it.
And if you haven’t been one of the 10.4 million viewers of the graphic adaptation of a portion of Ken Robinson’s brilliant lecture on why schools were designed as factories for obedient workers…and how to fix them!, then enjoy this. It will inspire you after reading Giroux’s piece!
Ikea, that family-friendly darling of home decor and Swedish innocence is trying to break its union, Teamsters Local 213.
They have locked out their Richmond, BC workers for two months now, while deciding to bargain in reverse: Start with a pathetic offer, then as time goes by, if locked out workers don’t come back, the concessions and contract stripping INCREASE!
By the way, Ikea’s 2011 profit was $3.85 billion. Profit, not revenue. Again, not enough money for the family-owned company! Its founder is worth $52 billion.
Tia reviewed Ikea’s anti-social shenanigans when the lockout hit Day 17. Her piece detailed some of the issues and helped us understand what we can do to help the workers while Ikea tries to smash their union here, before likely taking on their only other unionized store in Canada, in Montreal. This lockout is also an attempt to undermine other union organizing drives, despite the 70% unionization rate of Ikea workers in Sweden.
One thing we can do is to boycott every Ikea in the world, particularly the ones in Richmond and Coquitlam. We can also Occupy Ikea at a rally on July 20 at 11am. Here’s a poster for the rally.
And here are a few other things we should keep in mind.
The BC minimum wage is $10.25/hour, but less if you get tips on the job, minimum wage is $9/hour. This increase in 2012 came after the minimum wage was frozen at $8 for a decade under the business-friendly government.
In Washington, DC, the city council passed a living wage by-law [see below] DESPITE Walmart [Ikea’s labour relations mentor] threatening to cancel 3 stores planned for the area.
Should the bill be signed by Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) and pass a congressional review period, retailers with corporate sales of $1 billion or more and operating in spaces 75,000 square feet or larger would be required to pay employees no less than $12.50 an hour. The city’s minimum wage is $8.25, a dollar higher than the federal minimum wage.
If Washington, DC can face down Walmart threats to support a living wage, we should be proud of them and stand up for worker solidarity internationally.
And while we’re figuring out how to fight the repression of the working class, check out this Ikea management training video:
Generating enough media spin to rival a jet engine at take off, the management and PR folks at Ikea Canada want you to believe that their poor little corporation is being held hostage by greedy, soulless union workers in Richmond.
Meanwhile, back in Lotusland, 300+ workers of the mega-Ikea store in Richmond are embroiled in a rapidly degenerating labor dispute. Members of the Teamsters Local #213 are locked out, and the store continues to skeleton crew it, while management utters threats in the news about further reducing the contract on the table if their slaves picketing staff doesn’t roll over and take the pounding.
It looks like some assembly may be required as things get tense in a labour dispute between some 300 union workers and management at the Richmond Ikea.
Manager Janet McGowan says the store has been operating on limited hours as Teamsters take job action.
But McGowan says they will now play hardball by gradually reducing the contract on the table if the union doesn’t sign soon, “So, on June 3rd, our co-workers would have a phase one offer that they could, in fact, be accepting and then we would give co-workers an additional five days before implementation of phase two and then an additional five days before the implementation of the phase three.”
Phase one would see a 500-dollar signing bonus go bye-bye, by phase three paid sick days would be cut in half.
If Ikea is so moral and fair, as their media relations people would have you think, why have the staff overwhelmingly rejected not one, not two, but THREE different offers by the company to date?
Simple.
Ikea is attempting to drag workers back into the dark ages. Not just because they’re cheap, but because, according to their track record, they also enjoy it.
(Never mind that Richmond-area retail workers reside in one of the most expensive cities in the world. It’s not like they have homes or families, right? Who needs to eat?)
Ikea is not about ensuring fair living wages. It’s about profit. Not people.
I stand in solidarity with these men and women on the picket line.
Having been locked out by my employer for over a month in the summer of 2000, I understand what these people are going through. Spending your nights and days on a picket line, in all kinds of weather, all times of day, and not knowing what comes next is scary.
Here is what happens:
The first few days are adrenaline-fueled and high-energy. There is solidarity. There is power in numbers. Everyone is prepared to stick it to the man.
As time slithers on, and the rhetoric from the employer grows increasingly hostile, infighting starts. Division.
People start to blame each other. Blame the union. Question whether they made the right choice. Side with the employer. Discomfort and unknowns don’t bring out the best in people.
When weeks near months, people become afraid. Union stipends/wage replacements are not enough in Vancouver. People start looking for other jobs.
The ones who hang in there start to feel guilt, and become compelled to accept whatever comes down the pipe from corporate, just to end the sustained duress.
The media portrays the workers as lazy, ignorant and willfully spiteful. Goodwill diminishes. There is a lack of public support.
The union organizers work hard to rally, but the morale just isn’t there, and their job grows increasingly difficult.
They need support. Your support. Our support. These are families and community members, not a faceless corporate entity.
Ways in which we can help boost the cause of the locked out Ikea workers in Richmond/Teamsters Local 213:
Boycott Richmond Ikea. Don’t shop there. Don’t give them your money.
Boycott ALL Ikea locations. Don’t go running down the road to Coquitlam. (The breakfast is cheap for a reason.)
Don’t cross their picket lines. Ever.
Walk the picket line WITH them.
Bring by some food and beverage, especially if it is really hot or really cold.
If the weather becomes inclement, pop by with some shelter or weather related implements like umbrellas, ponchos or sunblock.
Respond to online editorials, radio talk shows, newspaper articles that spin in favour of Ikea and demonize labor unions/workers.
Use social media to counter the spin.
Write to them and let them know you support the workers.
Keep fighting the good fight, folks. Remind them that people need to come BEFORE profit.
The Role of The State in Gentrification, the Housing Crisis, and its Ability to Relieve or Maintain the Current Situation
by Rachel Goodine
Pidgin, a new fine-dining restaurant located on Vancouver’s Downtown East Side, moved in to the neighbourhood on February 1 of this year, prompting plenty of controversy. It’s located right off of East Hastings on Carrall Street, directly across from the notorious Pigeon Park. Many who do not live in the neighbourhood regard Pigeon Park as a drug haven, however for many residents the park is known as a gathering spot that hosts various festivals and street markets organized by the community. Pidgin is just one of many establishments actively contributing to the current gentrification squeeze. Although many regard gentrification as a good thing, it is ultimately contributing to the life and death situation that is the housing crisis in British Columbia. The idea that money accrued from business will trickle down to the poor through tax revenue is a common one. So is the idea that British Columbia simply does not have the money to put into social housing to address the needs of residents of the neighbourhood. In reality the priorities of this government, and the resulting hegemony seen in the majority of citizens, leaves the state with plenty of cash to be funneled to corporations as well as the military, in addition to funding coercion and repression tactics that maintain the status quo.
I know you’re wondering. But it’s hard to imagine. Kind of like a fish imagining life without water. We’ve known corporate media for generations. Since the advent of psychology and marketing, the influence/manipulation of corporate media is ubiquitous. And not in a good way.
SodaStream boycott informational picket
