THE ORGANIZER

December 2008 / January 2009 • Issue #14.

Franklin and Nicollet Starbucks Goes Union!

Baristas from the Starbucks Coffee located at the in-tersection of Nicollet and Franklin Avenues in Minnea-polis walked off the ﬂoor Wednesday morning to pre-sent a petition to management, signed by more than500 concerned customers and community members,demanding Starbucks hire a security guard to ensurethe safety of its patrons and partners.

The workers inturn declared their afﬁlia-tion with the StarbucksWorkers Union, becom-ing the ﬁrst Starbucks inMinneapolis, and the sec-ond in Minnesota, to gounion.A press conference wasthen held on Thursday infront of the store tocelebrate the solidarity of the workers and demandthat Starbucks hire a se-curity guard.

The work-ers were supported byseveral friends and fellowworkers from the IWWwho were in attendance.Initially, the workers circulated an internal petition,compiling signatures from most of the store's employ-ees, requesting a meeting to discuss the security situa-tion. For weeks, they were told that regional manage-ment was "discussing" the problem, and "taking it veryseriously."

Still management refused to arrange a storemeeting to even discuss the possibility of a securityguard, or any other solutions. After receiving no pro-ductive response from either the store or district man-ager, the employees turned to the customers for moresupport.Nancy Athanasselis is a regular customer known toeveryone at the store.

She comes from NortheastMinneapolis specifically to visit theFranklin and Nicollet Starbucksdaily because of the strong senseof community in the store. Still,she, like the workers, is well awareof the security problems, and wasgratified to see someone finallydoing something about theproblem.

"The baristas are verybusy running the store.

Itshouldn't be up to them to takecare of security problems, but thatis what ends up happening.

If Starbucks is not going to look atthe human aspect, they should atleast look at how much time theyspend dealing with security," shesaid.Since the beginning of 2008, therehave been more than 500 policereports ﬁled for the immediatearea surrounding Starbucks.

OnAugust 3, the McDonald's restau-rant located two blocks south of Starbucks was held up at gunpoint.

On November 3, theMoney Xchange less than oneblock from Starbuckswas robbed at knife-point at 8:30 in themorning.After the press confer-ence, the response bymanagement against theworkers was swift.

Thefollowing day, the Dis-trict manager for Frank-lin and Nicollet, and 12other Minneapolis andEdina stores, informedthe store manager thatshe would transfered toa store in Hopkins - bythe very next monday.

Such a sudden transfer isalmost unheard of.

Shewas replaced by the openly anti-union manager from City Center,who thinks he, as a manager, rep-resents most workers in saying"we don't need a union."

The next anti-worker action cameon Sunday and Monday, when fel-low worker Bliss Benson was theonly of many workers who werewritten up for being late to astore meeting, and for being "un-professional" at the meeting,

continued on page 5Editorial

Editor Ericco Hedake onthe Republic Window and Door workers’ occupationand broader issues of direct action.

Page 2Why ‘Abolish theWage System’?

An examination of theage-old Wobbly slogan by a dual-card unionmember.

Page 3 & 5Solidarity Unionism

What constitutes a unionand what makes theIWW different.

Pages 4 & 6Republic Window and Door Occupied!

A recap and analysis of the factory occupation by UE workers.

Pages 7 & 8

Direct Action Getsthe Goods

The infamous “Direct Action Roundup” sectionmakes its return. Find out what Wobblies are doing in their workplaces!

Page 8

A monthly publication of theTwin Cities General Membership Branch of theIndustrial Workers of the World.The IWW is a union for all workers, dedicated to organizing on the job for better conditionstoday, and a world without bosses tomorrow.You are invited to contact theBranch Secretary-Treasurer or any Delegate listed below for no-pressure conversations about your issues on the job.

Branch Contacts

Twin Cities IWW P.O Box 14111 Minneapolis, MN 55414Tel. (612) 336-1266email. twincities@iww.org web. twincities.iww.org

Branch Secretary-Treasurers

Steve Holmstephanholm@earthlink.net Kieran Knutsonredblack@riseup.net

Editors

Errico Hedake Alexander Graham

Policy

Stories, letters to the editors,and belly-aching can beaddressed totc-organizer@riseup.net Unless otherwise stated, theopinions expressed are not necessarily the ofﬁcial positionof the local branch or the unionas a whole. Many of our members areengaged in active organizing campaigns, and some use analias, occasionally their unioncard number, or ‘x’ number. Weprefer transparency over secrecy whenever possible, but will always honor requests for anonymity .

Editorial

Another Starbucks in Minnesotawent union this month, withworkers pairing their announce-ment with an action to improvesecurity at their store. In Chicago,as I write this, workers at Repub-lic Windows and Doors just wona labor dispute by engaging in afactory occupation. Greek anar-chists are in full-scale revoltagainst the police, who murdereda teenager in the streets a fewdays ago. Canadians are attempt-ing to defeat a neo-fascist gov-ernment (go ahead, google Ste-phen Harper) by rallying in thestreets of major cities, includingMontreal. Those are just some of the movements that are under-foot and crossing my mind at themoment. It's on, people.Yes, Obama won. And immediatelystarted appointing Clinton-eraneoliberals to his bloated cabinet.Some are spinning this as a Lin-colnesque "team of rivals" cabinet,while others see it as a relativelystraightforward expression of thenew American empire, in smarterdress and politer speech. Obamamade one good move this week,when he announced his supportfor the workers at the RepublicWindows factory.But what are the politicians reallysaying? Obama and the politiciansare not making the proper claims:that Republic and the banks areparasitic criminal enterprises, im-poverishing their workers and thecitizens of the United States. In-stead of identifying the precisemechanisms through whichbosses suck the wealth out of their employees, or by describingthe bailouts the government engi-neers for the banking sectorswhile denying to productive sec-tors, like Detroit, these politiciansare reacting to worker initiativesand expressing their support infuzzy terms.When Argentina's economy beganits rapid fall in 2001 (a conse-quence the neo-liberal economicregimes perpetuated by manymembers of Obama's new cabi-net), Argentinians from all classesbegan to withdraw their moneyfrom the banks, which respondedby refusing to let the citizens havetheir money. The consequent po-litical crisis toppled multiple gov-ernments in a matter of months;Argentinian workers, many of whom were not particularly radi-cal before the crisis, occupiedfactories and continued to pro-duce after owners abandonedboth factories and payrolls. Someof those projects succeeded andcontinue, in spite of repressionand legal shenanigans from theformer owners, who, like theowners of Republic, closed downin order to preserve their ownwealth by impoverishing theiremployees.We cannot rely on the boss, thepoliticians, or the lawyers, to saveus. The workers at Republic knowthis - without their severance,they might not feed their familiesor keep the heat on in Chicago'sbrutal winter. They didn't wait forothers, but took the initiative,forcing the bosses and the politi-cians to respond to them. Weneed to support their brave stand,and we need to replicate it. Or-ganization, like that taking place inthe IWW/SWU campaigns inStarbucks all over the world, musttake priority. Direct action, likethat taking place so dramaticallyand effectively in Republic Win-dows and Doors' Factory rightnow, must be the tactic of organ-ized workers. And revolt, like thattaken by Greek anarchists andcommunities in Athens and else-where in Greece, must followevery assault on our lives andliberties.-FW Ericco Hedake

THE ORGANIZER

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As a Wobbly, I often hear and use the term

“abolitionof

the wage system” . For those of us in the IWW;

that concept is fairly easy to grasp, and is the ultimategoal towards which we all work.As a dual-card member, I also have regular contact withtrade union staff and with the workers represented bythose trade unionists. For these people, “abolition of the wage system” is often perceived as being eithergibberish or sedition . There is an obvious clash be-tween the goals of trade unions and those of solidarityunions such as the IWW. Few things exemplify thosedifferences more clearly than how we look at the ideaof the wage system. Yet, trade unions are ﬁlled withworkers just like us...workers who have a right to berecognized and compensated for the real value of thework they do. If we want to reach the critical massnecessary to abolish the wagesystem, we need to bring theseworkers with us. And to do thatwe need to recognize how theyinteract with their trade unionsand how these workers differfrom Wobblies

in the way theyview themselves as union mem-bers.To understand those differences,we need to start with under-standing how trade unions work.Modern trade unions in theUnited States are empowered bythe federal government primarilyvia the National Labor RelationsAct (Wagner Act) of 1935 and agroup of amendments known asthe Labor-Management Relations Act (Taft-Hartley Act)which passed congress in 1947. Proponents of theWagner Act argued that this was a pro-labor act whichsolidiﬁed the right of workers to organize unions. Inreality, the Wagner Act was an act of desperation bythe capitalist system which served to drain the mili-tancy from worker-driven unions.

The Wagner Act was passed the year after

a series of bitter direct-action strikes in Minneapolis, Toledo, SanFrancisco, and elsewhere had threatened to undo thewhole system. With the Wagner Act, the bosses andpoliticians could see to it that unions would now berun by a group of

professional union employees. Theseunion employees

were given the sole authority to acton behalf of the workers they represent. This meansthat they negotiate contracts, agree to wage structures,file grievances, etc. Many of these “professional” union-ists are corrupt, others are sincere but caught-up in asystem far beyond their control. It is a legitimate argu-ment as to whether trade unions have done moreharm than good to workers; and undoubtedly, sometrade unions have worked for, and continue to fight forthe basic interests of their members. Yet, by acquiescingto the system put in place by poli-ticians and their corporate over-seers; trade unions have, ulti-mately, sold out the very workersthey represent. This is the unionenvironment recognized by mem-bers of trade unions.Trade union members are delib-erately kept in the dark abouteverything from contract negotia-tions to union budgets. The idea isto create a group of workers whosimply follow the direction of un-ion staffers, refrain from askingquestions, and fall in line with theobligations defined in their con-tracts. They are encouraged toview the trade union as a meansof fighting for their piece of thecorporate pie. What those work-ers seldom recognize, is that theinterests of trade union officersand staff are usually at odds withthe interests of the workersthemselves.However we view trade unions asa concept, the reality is that theyare, by design, anti-democratic.Trade unions vary in the amountof control passed down to theirworkers, but all of them are hier-archically structured to concen-trate power in the hands of a fewofficers who often achieve theirpositions non-democratically.Many of these union officers andstaff members receive pay whichis

comparable to that of the cor-porate officers with whom theynegotiate contracts.All of which brings us back to theidea of wages. When trade unionsnegotiate a contract, the first pri-ority is typically the setting of wage structures. The biggest prob-lem with the wage system is thatwages are completely arbitrary.The wage any of us receives isdependent upon a number of fac-tors including; what we do, wherewe live, when we work, and howthe employer/union have classifiedour position.For example, under my trade un-ion contract, a “full-time” em-ployee at top scale and working32 hours a week, earns about$22.00 an hour...with relativelygenerous benefits. A “part-time”employee working 32 hours aweek and doing exactly the same job, may earn as little as $7.00 anhour...with considerably reducedbenefits. The only difference be-tween the two workers is howthe employer and the union haveagreed to categorize these em-ployees during contract negotia-tions. Along with the basic ine-quality of this structure to theindividual workers involved, thereis a more expansive type of dam-age that is occurring: the death of worker solidarity. How likely is itthat someone making $22.00 anhour would risk striking over a 50cent raise for those making 7.00an hour? And would that part-time worker be inclined to forgotheir meager income in order toact in solidarity with a full-timerwho wants more money added totheir pension fund? The wage sys-tem creates a class structurewithin the workplace, a divisionwhich is intentionally designed toprevent workers from acting incommon interest.We all know that the wage sys-tem is in place to benefit corpo-rate and political interests. It'sthere to insure that the relation-ship between employers and em-ployees runs smoothly for the

continued on page 5

THE ORGANIZER

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What ‘Abolishing the Wage System’ Means