Tag: Bay Area

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Communiqués

iSlaves: Presentation on Foxconn

Ralf Ruckus from the Gongchao Collective in China will be in the Bay Area this weekend doing the following public presentations (called iSlaves: Workers’ Struggles in Chinese Production):

San Francisco – Friday, May 17, 2013, 3pm, California Institute of Integral Studies, 1453 Mission, St. San Francisco, CA 94103

Oakland – Saturday, May 18, 2013, 8pm, Bay Area Public School, 2141 Broadway, Oakland CA 94612

San Francisco – Monday, May 20, 2013, 7:30pm, Eric Quezada Center, 518 Valencia, near 16th Street, San Francisco

from the Gongchao collective website:

The company Foxconn employs more than one million people in China alone. As the world’s biggest contract manufacturer it works for Apple and many other electronics brands. Foxconn’s workers are the iSlaves who face horrendous working conditions while producing communication tools like iPhones and iPads. In 2010 a series of worker suicides shook the Chinese Foxconn factories and drew world-wide attention. The management promised to improve conditions and pay higher wages, but the situation has not changed much since: Foxconn accelerated the relocation of factories to the Chinese hinterland, employs student interns as “cheap” labor, covers up work accidents, and still relies on its militaristic management regime. However, Foxconn-workers are far from being quiet victims. They have used every-day forms of resistance against the rhythm of the assembly line and have been able to stage strikes in various Foxconn-factories around China.

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Strike May 1st — Bay Area May Day Clearinghouse

Increasingly comprehensive overview of actions taking place in the SF Bay Area on May 1st. Listings of various planned direct actions, union and autonomous strikes, marches, occupations, shutdowns, etc. with the option to add/announce your own. Links to other similar sites : Chicago, Seattle, NYC.

More here: Strike May 1st — Bay Area May Day Clearinghouse.

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Communiqués

Video: The Oakland Commune

“On October 10th 2011, hundreds of people in downtown Oakland occupied Frank Ogawa Plaza in front of city hall. They built a self-organized tent city and began to meet some of the community’s most urgent needs. They renamed the plaza Oscar Grant Plaza in honor of a young African-American man who was shot and killed by BART Police in 2009. Although the action was partially inspired by Occupy Wall Street and austerity protests throughout the world, Occupy Oakland’s particular character resulted from years of struggle and repression in the Bay Area. This short documentary details the ongoing story of the Oakland Commune.

It was produced by Marianne Maeckelbergh and Brandon Jourdan with footage from Caitlin Manning, David Martinez, John Hamilton, and tons of archival footage.”

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Communiqués

The Call: On March 4, Escalate–Occupy–Reclaim

(from Anti-Capital Projects)

Occupy Everything Fight Everywhere Strike March 4!

The call has gone out. On March 4th, students, workers and teachers throughout the nation and across the globe will strike. Pre K-12, adult education, community colleges, and state-funded universities will come together in an international Strike and Day of Action to resist the neoliberal destruction of public education in California and beyond.

We stand beside all who wish to transform public education, and we seek to advance the struggle by generalizing the tactic that has, by far, been the strength of the movement: direct action.

In keeping with the spirit of March 4th, we call upon everyone, everywhere, to occupy everything—from collapsing public universities and closed high schools to millions of foreclosed homes. We call on all concerned students and workers to escalate the fight against privatization where they are, in solidarity with the California statewide actions. We envision a network of occupied campuses in multiple states across the nation.

We call upon all Bay Area students, teachers, and workers to unite on March 4 to march from Berkeley into downtown Oakland. We encourage all those in the Bay Area to organize actions alongside and in support of the occupation movement, so that March 4th becomes a day of blockades, sit-ins, mass marches to the streets and freeways, a day for reclaiming public spaces and institutions. In solidarity with hundreds of occupied schools and workplaces across the globe, we seek to make March 4th an international day of action demonstrating our collective resistance.

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