2018-forum-reading

Come to share an inspiring labor event or leader in your life. It could be in San Francisco or elsewhere in the U.S.A. or the world. Photos, news clippings, prose, and poems are welcome. This will be an open regular meeting of FORUM (Federation of Retired Union Members), an organization of retirees affiliated with the […]

Millions of workers have come to the Bay Area and Silicon Valley to work and live. The conference will hear from workers who are fighting for union and worker rights in Silicon valley from service workers to tech workers. While billionaires are being made every year in Silicon valley the workers who make their money […]

The collection includes a selection of works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by writers Phyllis Holliday, Margaret Cooley, Keith Cooley, Adele Kearney, Nellie Wong, Jerry Path, and Alice Rogoff. Hear stories about the lives and struggles of laborers, farmers, cooks, cowboys, and coalminers from China, Ireland, Britain, rural Wisconsin, and the Old West. The anthology […]

The escalation of open racist attacks is happening not only in our communities but on our jobs. There is a national epidemic of “hanging nooses” and workplace bullying to terrorize African American workers and other workers on the job. At the same time there is systemic racial discrimination in many industries and in the City […]

Two independently produced videos will explore San Francisco labor movement history and current efforts to protect the Redstone Labor Temple (yet again!) from redevelopers and keep it as a community resource. We will trace major events that led to construction of the San Francisco Labor Temple in 1915, some of the history it has created […]

Presented by Robbin Henderson Matilda Rabinowitz’s memoir challenges assumptions about the lives of early twentieth-century women. In Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman, Rabinowitz describes the ways in which she and her contemporaries rejected the intellectual and social restrictions imposed on women as they sought political and economic equality in the first half of the twentieth century. […]

The deregulation of taxi workers began in San Francisco during the 1970’s. It has escalated with the introduction of tech platforms for Uber and Lyft, which have allowed the massive introduction of drivers, pitting workers against workers for the profits of the billionaires who own these platforms. It has also led to massive gridlock and […]

This commemorative event honors the 50th anniversary of the San Francisco State Strike. What are the lessons of that strike for today when students have to go into debt to attend college? The mass SF State Strike, which was supported by campus unions including the AFT Teachers Union, was the longest student strike in the […]

Videos and Presentation The privatization of public services, transportation, and education is a threat not only to unions but to the public in the U.S. and globally. This forum will look at privatization elsewhere in the world on a global scale, and how workers are organizing and educating to stop these policies. Partial list of […]

By Donna T. Haverty-Stacke The 1934 Minneapolis Teamster general strike coincided with the San Francisco General Strike. After the Minneapolis strike, the government, the companies and more conservative union officials sought to go after the leadership of the Teamster Local 544 for organizing the strike and fighting against corporate unionism. Donna T. Haverty-Stacke who is […]

Airbnb has had a profound effect not just in San Francisco but around the world. For cities, it has turned neighborhoods into hotel districts. One example of the role of Airbnb is in North Beach where the elderly have been evicted to move tourists in. It has also threatened local businesses that make San Francisco […]

San Francisco Bay Area is ground zero for the world tech transformation from platforms at Uber and Lyft to social media networks like Facebook and search engines like Google. The collection of big data without privacy rights, or the introduction of automation by Tesla and AI without any real controls and regulations, is not only […]

Presentation and Discussion of Sol Nitzberg:Sponsored by California Historical Society Join Barry Nitzberg, grandson of tar-and-feathering victim Sol Nitzberg, and historian Ken Kann, for a retrospective on early farm labor organizing and vigilante terror in Sonoma County, California. Learn about the 1935 Sebastopol apple pickers strike, the assault on Barry’s grandfather and other labor organizers, […]

Whistleblowers on the job are under attack. This forum will hear from whistleblowers about their struggle to defend health and safety and the public. Their actions are taking place in a period of growing financial corruption in our society. One of the whistleblowers, Darrell Whitman, who is a member of AFGE and worked as an […]

Book reading by Jonathan Karmel Writer and labor lawyer Jonathan Karmel has written a book about the cost to workers and their families of the lack of health and safety protection on the job. He visits workers and gets their stories on the deaths and permanent injuries that have destroyed their lives. He also looks […]

Slavery, observed Frederick Douglass, is a “hydra-headed monster.” In California this monster appeared and reappeared as if shape-shifting. The history of slavery in California unsettles the North/South view of American slave labor. This is a history of captivity, flight and resistance, of Indians held captive at the missions, Alaska natives brought to Fort Ross in […]

Sharat Lin is an international labor researcher looking at the lessons of the Spanish Mondagron Cooperative system. He reports on how it works and how workers who are using their collective control can innovate and develop their enterprises. The Mondagron cooperative forum. Additional information http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/9/8/eu-law-puts-a-dent-in-scandinavian- labor-organizing.html is the tenth-largest Spanish company in terms of assets […]

American-Swedish trade unionist Jordin Williams will discuss how workers are organized across the Nordic spectrum: Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark. He will give a Powerpoint presentation to discuss labor rights and labor laws and the issues that they face. The rights of Swedish workers on the job allow greater unionization and solidarity than is […]

Part of the so-called American Dream is the notion that if you work hard and get a good education you will make a decent living. However, many of our most educated workera are teachers in higher education institutions and suffer from the worldwide trend, endured by an increasing number of workers, of being grossly underpaid […]

Thousands of drivers now come into San Francisco and other cities on the coast to drive for Uber and Lyft. These workers are forced to leave their homes because they cannot make enough where they live. The technology is now being used to further the exploitation of the drivers. This has led to gridlock, environmental […]

Workers Rights has no borders and the struggle and lives of Palestinian workers are the focus of this forum. Palestinian journalists have been targeted by Israeli snipers in increasing numbers. At the same time, Palestinian workers face brutal slave-like discriminatory conditions, not only in the occupied lands, but also inside the state of Israel. Unions […]