Fifty years ago this May, over 10 million French workers joined protesting students in the largest general strike that ever stopped the economy of an advanced industrial country, and the first wildcat general strike in history. Striking workers occupied 122 factories all across France, crippling the economy and nearly toppling the government. The rebellion wasn’t participated in by a lone demographic, such as workers or students, but was a popular uprising that superseded ethnic, cultural, age and class boundaries.

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Worker’s Perspective

Fifty years ago this May, over 10 million French workers joined protesting students in the largest general strike that ever stopped the economy of an advanced industrial country, and the first wildcat general strike in history. Striking workers occupied 122 factories all across France, crippling the economy and nearly toppling the government. The rebellion wasn’t participated in by a lone demographic, such as workers or students, but was a popular uprising that superseded ethnic, cultural, age and class boundaries.

“The occupations movement was obviously a rejection of alienated labor; it was a festival, a game, a real presence of people and of time. And it was a rejection of all authority, all specialization, all hierarchical dispossession; a rejection of the state and thus of the parties and unions — the workers were leading, in their occupations and actions.”

Join us this Saturday at the Roxie in San Francisco for the only-ever screening (that we know of) of Confrontation: Paris, 1968, the 16 mm documentary film made during the events of May ‘68.  

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Upcoming Events

Learning Club [Film screening!] All Power to the Imagination: May ‘68 in France
Saturday, 5/26 4PM at Little Roxie on 16th St in San Francisco
Eventbrite • Learning Club • Facebook • Meetup

Learning Club: Pictures of a Gone City
Sunday, 5/27 4PM at Unite Here Local 2 in San Francisco
Learning Club • Facebook • Meetup

Stepping to Google: Two-day March
Monday, 5/28 through Tuesday, 5/29 marching from San Jose to the Mountain View Googleplex
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G.W.U. Bay Area - May Meeting
Tuesday, 5/29 7PM in Downtown Berkeley
RSVP

Logic Magazine Issue 4: SCALE Happy Hour
Thursday, 5/31 7:30PM at Temescal Brewing in Oakland
Facebook

Learning Club: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded
Saturday, 6/2 1PM at Montlake Branch of Seattle Public Library in Seattle
Learning Club • Facebook 

Seattle Tech Contractors: Know Your Rights
Sunday, 6/10 1PM at University Branch of Seattle Public Library in Seattle
Facebook 

Seattle TWC General Meeting
Thursday, 6/14 6:30PM at Seattle Labor Temple in Seattle The Code of Conduct is in effect at all TWC events.

The Code of Conduct is in effect at all TWC events.

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News

The terror of Amazon abounds. Its facial recognition technology, “Rekognition” is already in use by the city of Orlando and the Washington County in Oregon’s sheriff’s office, with agencies in Arizona and California in their customer pipeline. Amazon is not only marketing its facial recognition service as a “law enforcement service”, it is actively “helping governments deploy it.” Amazon touts the power and accuracy of the face detection model, but has taken no measure to combat or even acknowledge the fact that facial recognition systems have “higher error rates for women and people of color — error rates that can translate directly into more stops and arrests for marginalized groups”. There are no “big data” companies; there are only surveillance companies. This is why we organize. And this is why we acknowledge any brave workers within Amazon who are trying to put a stop to this gross violation of our civil liberties. 

This news follows the continued advocacy within and outside Google to call on Google leadership to cancel the Department of Defense contract to custom build a solution to use AI to identify and track potential targets, known as the Maven contract. We learned this week the contract is valued at $9m. We also learned Googlers are considering a work to rule action by refusing to conduct interviews in order to slow down company progress. We salute the brave Googlers contemplating this action and encourage them to keep going. No big win is won without sustained effort.  

From our streets into our homes, Amazon’s surveillance violates at every level: Amazon Alexa users reported yesterday that the device recorded their conversations and sent them to a random contact in their phone. 

Uber drivers make less than minimum wage.

The Supreme Court said no to workers and yes to corporations on Monday with a ruling upholding the arbitration clauses in place in so many of our contracts and employers that have “helped allow sexual harassment to flourish by hiding complaints”.

What StoryCorps’ anti-union campaign illustrates about the nonprofit industrial complex’s exploitation of workers. Relatedly, a tough pill to swallow from Planned Parenthood.

App developers are organizing a fight to change Apple App Store policies that make it hard for them to make a living. Read their non-union union manifesto here.**

**The pastor of First Baptist Church of Palo Alto is leaving his post after drawing negative attention for calling out the Palo Alto community for being a “ghetto of wealth, power, and elitist liberalism by proxy”. He writes: “The tech industry is motivated by endless profit, elite status, rampant greed, and the myth that their technologies are somehow always improving the world.” Preach!

“Activists in Amsterdam on Wednesday launched the ‘Datavakbond’ or “data labor union”, which hopes to elect leaders to negotiate directly with Facebook and Google over what they do with users’ data.”

Finally, a small win in the fight to counter the Tweeter-in-Chief. 

The profs speaking out against Project Maven have shared an in-progress syllabus on Silicon Valley, the military, and AI. Also see this reading list on everything we’re fighting against.

Right-to-work laws make inequality worse.

Unions reduce economic inequality.

ICYMI, send your NDAs to ProPublica to advance their investigation into the ways employers weaponize NDAs against workers.

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Song of the week

Paris s’éveille by Jacques Dutronc

Il est cinq heures
Paris s’éveille
Paris s’éveille
Les journaux sont imprimés
Les ouvriers sont déprimés
Les gens se lèvent, ils sont brimés
C’est l’heure où je vais me coucher
Il est cinq heures
Paris se lève
Il est cinq heures
Je n’ai pas sommeil
//
It is five o’clock (a.m.)
Paris wake up
Paris wake up
The newspapers are printed
The workers are feeling down
People get up, they are bullied
It is the time where I’m going to bed
It is five o’clock (a.m.)
Paris get up
It is five o’clock
I don’t want to sleep