Over the last week, TWC peeps got to spend time with the author of Striking to Survive: Workers’ Resistance to Factory Relocations in China and his partner as part of their U.S. book tour. Before coming to the Bay Area, they did talks throughout the Northeast, then again in the Midwest, before coming out West. Along the way, they did several interviews with seasoned veterans of shopfloor struggles since the 1960s. One of us shares an account of our time together:

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Worker’s Perspective

Over the last week, TWC peeps got to spend time with the author of Striking to Survive: Workers’ Resistance to Factory Relocations in China and his partner as part of their U.S. book tour. Before coming to the Bay Area, they did talks throughout the Northeast, then again in the Midwest, before coming out West. Along the way, they did several interviews with seasoned veterans of shopfloor struggles since the 1960s. One of us shares an account of our time together:

The first event in the Bay Area was a dinner party at this writer’s San Francisco apartment, which included about 15 people, including tech workers, a half dozen teachers (including me), a restaurant worker, and a union representative for one of the more militant local unions. This week there were book talks at activist spaces, bookshops, colleges and universities, in Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, Cupertino, San Jose and finally last nights’ event co-sponsored by TWC at Stanford.

The dinner party involved a collective discussion that started with all of us introducing ourselves, stating our own work sectors and briefly describing some of our organizing experience. Then the author and his partner discussed the struggles in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) area of Guangdong Province that the book documents. It was a lively conversation, ranging from the experiences of class struggle around the world and how this has been transforming over the last several generations. For those whose personal account had a high point, it was usually around a strike. It was a lively exchange of ideas and a great informal kick-off for the book tour.

Most of the other talks were to wider audiences at colleges and universities, whose lack of organizing experience work was often simply because their struggle for survival involves the difficulties of getting by with multiple jobs while also studying. Most had yet to reach a point of open struggle, but there was a sincere desire on their part to learn from the experience of our guests. They too had once been university graduates, who opted to move from the north of China to work in factories and be part of the strikes and struggles of the working class of the PRD.

At the final event last night at Stanford, more of the participants had both organizing experience and an awareness of global struggles of the working class, which drove the discussion to deeper aspects of class struggle. Fan Shigang, the author, expressed his desire to learn from the experiences of American workers. To many of us, myself included, this seemed counter-intuitive based on the declining fortunes of “labor” in the U.S.; one question reflected this apparent contradiction. Fan’s answer bookended his whole week of talks in the Bay Area when he said that Chinese workers are good at organizing strikes at the slightest provocation, but they have not been able sustain the strikes beyond a single factory (with a few exceptions, like the storm wave of strikes sparked by the Honda parts factory strike in 2010) nor have they been able to build networks to coordinate struggles and to pass on the traditions and wisdom gained in these strikes.

Reflecting on this, I was able to ask the last question of the night about what lessons the author, his partner and their informal group had learned from their study of class struggle not only in the U.S., but throughout the world. He mentioned how they had translated the biography of South Korean labor martyr Jeon Tae-il and about how they had interviewed half a dozen militant railroaders in North America, members of Railroad Workers United (RWU) who are trying to bridge the 13 craft unions in their industry, and then his last example shocked even me. He said he had arrived in San Francisco and had met all the people at the dinner at my apartment and was impressed that he had sat in a room with over a dozen workers, from various sectors, with some in their seventies and others in their twenties (pointing to some TWC members who had been there). He said there was an inter-generational sharing of organizing ideas and experiences, mixed with stories of both successes and failures, and he emphasized that this doesn’t happen in China. In the PRD they are the “new working class,” starting from scratch, and they do not have militant elders to consult with and learn from. I was shocked into realizing that my older – and younger – working class comrades are a valuable resource that I will never again take for granted – our Chinese visitors certainly don’t.

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Upcoming Events

Learning Club: No Wall They Can Build
Saturday, 10/13 2PM at Omni Commons in Oakland
Facebook • Meetup •  Reading materials

Nonprofit workers: Discuss our workplace experiences
Saturday, 10/20 2PM at Omni Commons in Oakland
Facebook • Meetup

Learning Club: Tech Workers are Workers 
Sunday, 10/28 2PM at Cambridge Public Library
Facebook • Meetup 

Learning Club: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs Climate 
Saturday, 11/3 3PM at Douglass Truth Branch of The Seattle Public Library
Facebook

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

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In The News

Google is out of the running for the $10 billion JEDI Pentagon cloud project, a huge victory for the thousands of employees who stood up to say Google should not be in the business of war. TWC offers the following statement in support of these brave workers:

Google had every intention of bidding for, and possibly winning, the JEDI contract. They spent considerable resources and hours of top executive time courting military officials to do exactly this. They only dropped out due to sustained employee pressure. In their statement, Google points to its AI principles as the reason for this decision (principles that are themselves a response to internal dissent). The truth is that the project was stopped by the thousands of workers who demanded a say in what they build, and refused to contribute their talents to efforts they believed to be unethical, like Maven and JEDI. Tech workers have significant power, and are increasingly willing to use it.

A leaked transcript from a private meeting of Google execs contradicts their official story on censored search in China.

A Customs and Border Protection commissioner says they are feeling the squeeze of tech worker activism and that “it’s a huge problem” for the success of their work.

Toronto citizens are concerned about the entry of Google’s “smart city” subsidiary, Sidewalk Labs, calling it “a colonizing experiment in surveillance capitalism attempting to bulldoze important urban, civic and political issues”.

Amazon exercises total control over delivery drivers, monitoring and directing their every move through the use of package scanning and route navigation devices. Of course, the company takes zero responsibility for these workers’ wages and benefits.  

Amazon has scrapped their AI hiring platform after word got out that the algorithm showed bias against female candidates. The program also automatically downgraded candidates just for having attended an all-female college.

The recent swells of organizing in the food industry remind us that movements build on one another and through the relationships we are forming now. 

AFL-CIO employees have voted to authorize a strike in response to reduced benefits.

Members of San Francisco’s houseless community are successfully hotwiring scooters for any- and all-time free access. 

The #MarriottStrike has seen a global week of action with solidarity efforts and walk outs from sister unions and workers from across industries. Find a picket line near you; Bay Area folks are especially needed at the W Hotel near Yerba Buena between midnight and 6 AM for greater safety for night-time strikers.

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Song Of The Week

Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson - Three Miles Down

Here come the mine cars
And it’s damn near dawn
Another shift of men, some of them my friends, comin’ on
Hard to imagine workin’ in the mines
Coal dust in your lungs, on your skin and on your mind
I’ve listened to the speeches
But it occurred to me politicians don’t understand
The thoughts of isolation, ain’t no sunshine underground
It’s like workin’ in a graveyard three miles down

Damn near a legend as old as the mines
Things that happen in the pits just don’t change with the times
Work ‘till you’re exhausted in too little space
A history of disastrous fears etched on your face
Somebody signs a paper, every body thinks it’s fine
But Taft and Hartley ain’t done one day in the mines
You start to stiffen! You heard a crackin’ sound!
It’s like workin’ in a graveyard three miles down