occupycali:

One of the reasons Californians should still be Occupying, as if school tuition increases, locking up students and professors for protesting on campus, and police brutality weren’t enough on May 12th 93,000 (according to CBS News) lost extended unemployment benefits. According to the US Bureau of labor (Feb 2012) almost 11% (That’s about 4,147,000 people) of the entire state of California is unemployed. This number 11% is calculated by taking a sample of unemployed families every month across the nation and measuring the amount of change over time. To read more on how the US Gov. calculates unemployment and to try to make an educated decision on whether or not you think 11% is the actual number go here: Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Here is the article from CBS: 

(CBS News) MERCED, Calif. - “A lot of Americans are still suffering from the investment disasters of 2008. Back then, Congress extended unemployment benefits to 99 weeks in many states — but tomorrow, that extension ends and 236,000 Americans are about to get notices that the checks are over, as CBS News correspondent John Blackstone reports.

At the Community Action Agency in Merced, Brenda Callahan-Johnson is bracing for a flood of long-term unemployed seeking emergency food, housing and financial aid.

“A lot of these people are not going to know that they are not getting unemployment until they get the letter in the mail, and they’re going to be scared,” Callahan-Johnson told CBS News.

Tomorrow 93,000 Californians are losing extended unemployment benefits.

Callahan-Johnson told CBS News correspondent John Blackstone that she had never seen anything like this.

“In 19 years, I have never had this many cuts in unemployment at the same time,” she explained.

In California’s agricultural heartland, Merced is being hit hard by federal law that cuts extended benefits in states where unemployment has fallen. In the last year, California’s rate has dropped from 11.9 percent to 11 percent. But, in Merced, it’s 20 percent.

“Merced County is experiencing dire unemployment,” Callahan-Johnson said.

While finding work in Merced is difficult, finding places where people used to work is easy. One plant, which made ladders, closed in October — taking with it 140 jobs.

The closed Pepsi bottling factory once employed 40. Sixty people used to make parts for Toyota at another closed location.”

Continue reading: Thousands to lose long-term unemployment benefits, even where it remains sky-high

occupycali:

“Clashes have broken out at 14th & Broadway next to Oscar Grant Plaza as riot police snatch squads attempted to grab comrades out of the swelling crowd gathering for the noon strike rally. Police fired tear gas and flash bang grenades in an unsuccessful attempt to clear the intersection.

The morning started at 8:30am with strike actions kicking off from three points around the perimeter of downtown. On 4th and Broadway, Oakland Occupy Patriarchy swarmed Child Protective Services who recently seized the children of an Occupy Oakland comrade citing her involvement with OO as an act of child endangerment. A massive police presence had already surrounded the building effectively shutting it down. The action continued on to the Alameda County Court House setting up a picket there…

The mood is tense but festive here as the mid day rally begins. Riot police have retreated on some streets near the plaza but are keeping a heavy presence on others. At 1pm another set of strike actions are set to kick off and the large Dignity and Resistance march will be making it’s way from Fruitvale BART in East Oakland at 3pm. Organizers have asked that everyone come help hold the plaza and the intersection of 14th and Broadway as well as converge back downtown at 6pm upon the arrival of the march.” Via and for more: StrikeMay1st.org

#Time magazine retracts person of the year cover twitpic.com/7t9dgs #OccupyVancouver #OO #BlackBloc #OWS #OccupySeattle #OccupyPDX

(Source: )

anonmedics:

A series of photographs of two Anon Medics taken at last night’s #D12 Oakland port blockade, by photographer Steve Rhodes. Featured is some of our new protective gear, which should protect us better in the event of police violence than plastic masks.

Upon arriving to an action, we do our best to link up with other medics present and provide support in whatever way we can. The buddy system is a must in a potentially chaotic protest situation, especially for medics. 

Yesterday’s blockade in Oakland saw almost no police response whatsoever after the very early morning, unlike the blockades in Seattle and Long Beach. Our services were thankfully unneeded, although we did give out some band-aids.

(Source: secure.flickr.com)

#Anonymous #TentMonster at #OO! #solidarity #omel #d12 via: whitedork

“Dear friends in the West Coast,

We’ve carried out the 2nd protest action against ITOCHU, representing the attached protest letter.

Security guards handed in glove each other and inhibited us from entering the office. 

However ONODERA Makoto, a representative of Societal Management Dept. came out from the office at the end.

He received our protest letter and confirmed to forward the letter to a representative of the Food Company of ITOCHU and ask its prompt reply.

ITOCHU has been and is still persisting booster of privatization, outsourcing and casualization agenda of neoliberalism, and now makes a big push to join in TPP.

Let’s fight together!

International Labor Solidarity Committee of Doro-Chiba

H. Yamamoto”~Westcoastportshutdown

(Source: anonymissexpress)

Sorry to flood the dash with a long read guise.. but after the Washington post article I had to reblog this… It’s important to get all sides. <3

occupycali:

“We are the front-line workers who haul container rigs full of imported and exported goods to and from the docks and warehouses every day.

We have been elected by committees of our co-workers at the Ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle, Tacoma, New York and New Jersey to tell our collective story. We have accepted the honor to speak up for our brothers and sisters about our working conditions despite the risk of retaliation we face. One of us is a mother, the rest of us fathers. Between the five of us we have 11children and one more baby on the way. We have a combined 46 years of experience driving cargo from our shores for America’s stores.

We are inspired that a non-violent democratic movement that insists on basic economic fairness is capturing the hearts and minds of so many working people. Thank you “99 Percenters” for hearing our call for justice. We are humbled and overwhelmed by recent attention. Normally we are invisible.

Today’s demonstrations will impact us. While we cannot officially speak for every worker who shares our occupation, we can use this opportunity to reveal what it’s like to walk a day in our shoes for the 110,000 of us in America whose job it is to be a port truck driver. It may be tempting for media to ask questions about whether we support a shutdown, but there are no easy answers. Instead, we ask you, are you willing to listen and learn why a one-word response is impossible?

 We love being behind the wheel. We are proud of the work we do to keep America’s economy moving. But we feel humiliated when we receive paychecks that suggest we work part time at a fast-food counter. Especially when we work an average of 60 or more hours a week, away from our families.

There is so much at stake in our industry. It is one of the nation’s most dangerous occupations. We don’t think truck driving should be a dead-end road in America. It should be a good job with a middle-class paycheck like it used to be decades ago.

We desperately want to drive clean and safe vehicles. Rigs that do not fill our lungs with deadly toxins, or dirty the air in the communities we haul in.

Poverty and pollution are like a plague at the ports. Our economic conditions are what led to the environmental crisis.

You, the public, have paid a severe price along with us.

Why? Just like Wall Street doesn’t have to abide by rules, our industry isn’t bound to regulation. So the market is run by con artists. The companies we work for call us independent contractors, as if we were our own bosses, but they boss us around. We receive Third World wages and drive sweatshops on wheels. We cannot negotiate our rates. (Usually we are not allowed to even see them.) We are paid by the load, not by the hour. So when we sit in those long lines at the terminals, or if we are stuck in traffic, we become volunteers who basically donate our time to the trucking and shipping companies. That’s the nice way to put it. We have all heard the words “modern-day slaves” at the lunch stops.

There are no restrooms for drivers. We keep empty bottles in our cabs. Plastic bags too. We feel like dogs. An Oakland driver was recently banned from the terminal because he was spied relieving himself behind a container. Neither the port, nor the terminal operators or anyone in the industry thinks it is their responsibility to provide humane and hygienic facilities for us. It is absolutely horrible for drivers who are women, who risk infection when they try to hold it until they can find a place to go.

The companies demand we cut corners to compete. It makes our roads less safe. When we try to blow the whistle about skipped inspections, faulty equipment, or falsified logs, then we are “starved out.” That means we are either fired outright, or more likely, we never get dispatched to haul a load again.

It may be difficult to comprehend the complex issues and nature of our employment. For us too. When businesses disguise workers like us as contractors, the Department of Labor calls it misclassification. We call it illegal. Those who profit from global trade and goods movement are getting away with it because everyone is doing it. One journalist took the time to talk to us this week and she explains it very well to outsiders. We hope you will read the enclosed article “How Goldman Sachs and Other Companies Exploit Port Truck Drivers.”

But the short answer to the question: Why are companies like SSA Marine, the Seattle-based global terminal operator that runs one of the West Coast’s major trucking carriers, Shippers’ Transport Express, doing this? Why would mega-rich Maersk, a huge Danish shipping and trucking conglomerate that wants  to drill for more oil with Exxon Mobil in the Gulf Coast conduct business this way too?

To cheat on taxes, drive down business costs, and deny us the right to belong to a union, that’s why.

The typical arrangement works like this: Everything comes out of our pockets or is deducted from our paychecks. The truck or lease, fuel, insurance, registration, you name it. Our employers do not have to pay the costs of meeting emissions-compliant regulations; that is our financial burden to bear. Clean trucks cost about four to five times more than what we take home in a year. A few of us haul our company’s trucks for a tiny fraction of what the shippers pay per load instead of an hourly wage. They still call us independent owner-operators and give us a 1099 rather than a W-2.

We have never recovered from losing our basic rights as employees in America. Every year it literally goes from bad to worse to the unimaginable. We were ground zero for the government’s first major experiment into letting big business call the shots. Since it worked so well for the CEOs in transportation, why not the mortgage and banking industry too?

Even the few of us who are hired as legitimate employees are routinely denied our legal rights under this system. Just ask our co-workers who haul clothing brands like Guess?, Under Armour, and Ralph Lauren’s Polo. The carrier they work for in Los Angeles is called Toll Group and is headquartered in Australia. At the busiest time of the holiday shopping season, 26 drivers were axed after wearing Teamster T-shirts to work. They were protesting the lack of access to clean, indoor restrooms with running water. The company hired an anti-union consultant to intimidate the drivers. Down Under, the same company bargains with 12,000 of our counterparts in good faith.

Despite our great hardships, many of us cannot — or refuse to, as some of the most well-intentioned suggest — “just quit.” First, we want to work and do not have a safety net. Many of us are tied to one-sided leases. But more importantly, why should we have to leave? Truck driving is what we do, and we do it well.

We are the skilled, specially-licensed professionals who guarantee that Target, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart are all stocked with just-in-time delivery for consumers. Take a look at all the stuff in your house. The things you see advertised on TV. Chances are a port truck driver brought that special holiday gift to the store you bought it.

We would rather stick together and transform our industry from within. We deserve to be fairly rewarded and valued. That is why we have united to stage convoys, park our trucks, marched on the boss, and even shut down these ports.

It’s like our hero Dutch Prior, a Shipper’s/SSA Marine driver, told CBS Early Morning this month: “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”

The more underwater we are, the more our restlessness grows. We are being thoughtful about how best to organize ourselves and do what is needed to win dignity, respect, and justice.

Nowadays greedy corporations are treated as “people” while the politicians they bankroll cast union members who try to improve their workplaces as “thugs.”

But we believe in the power and potential behind a truly united 99%. We admire the strength and perseverance of the longshoremen. We are fighting like mad to overcome our exploitation, so please, stick by us long after December 12. Our friends in the Coalition for Clean & Safe Ports created a pledge you can sign to support us here.

We drivers have a saying, “We may not have a union yet, but no one can stop us from acting like one.”

The brothers and sisters of the Teamsters have our backs. They help us make our voices heard. But we need your help too so we can achieve the day where we raise our fists and together declare: “No one could stop us from forming a union.”

Thank you.

In solidarity,

Leonardo Mejia
SSA Marine/Shippers Transport Express
Port of Long Beach
10-year driver

Yemane Berhane
Ports of Seattle & Tacoma
6-year port driver

Xiomara Perez
Toll Group
Port of Los Angeles
8-year driver

Abdul Khan
Port of Oakland
7-year port driver

Ramiro Gotay
Ports of New York & New Jersey
15-year port driver”~cleanandsafeports.org