Democrats continue to deport us! Will you demand permanent protection for ALL now?

Join us at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn for an action and rally Sunday 3/13 at 3PM.

Los Demócratas siguen deportándonos. Te unirás a nosotr@s para exigir PROTECCIÓN PERMANENTE para TODXS? Venga con nosotros a Grand Army Plaza en Brooklyn para una acción de resistencia el sábado 13 de marzo a las 3 PM.

#PermanentProtection #AbolishICE #FreeThemAll #CloseTheCamps #ChingaLaMigra #DignityNotDetention #Somos11Millones #BlackMigrantsMatter

Called by Cosecha NYC

UPDATED INFO: Thanks to everyone who called, Mumia was tested for COVID. Results showed up negative. However, the prison health system is untrustworthy and Mumia still requires immediate medical attention as he is experiencing serious symptoms. We are awaiting updates from Mumia

THERE WILL BE AN IN PERSON PRESS CONFERENCE AT 11AM IN FRONT OF DA KRASNER’S OFFICE. FREE MUMIA!!!

LIVE STREAM WILL BE POSTED TO THIS PAGE

Or RSVP to stream: https://forms.gle/1Biy5U6wqyuRPaXK9 or linktr.ee/Mumia

#BringMumiaHome
#NoDeathByMedicalNeglect
#FreeMumia #FreeMaroon #FreeAllPoliticalPrisoners #FreeEmAll #BLM #CovidShouldNotBeADeathSentence #LetOurEldersGo

Minneapolis – On February 25, a coalition of more than 20 community organizations held a press conference at the Hennepin County Government Center in downtown Minneapolis to demand justice for George Floyd and to announce the intention to express their First Amendment right to protest on the opening day of the criminal trial of Derek Chauvin on March 8.

Coalition member organizations stand united in calling for the conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd and pressing that Chauvin receive the maximum penalty for his crime. The coalition also made demands for government agencies to remove barricades, fences, razor wire and the threat of deploying the National Guard, all of which are seen as means to keep the people away from the center of trial activity and to interfere with the people’s right to assemble and exercise free speech.

The crowd responded passionately to the words of Toshira Garraway, of Families Supporting Families Against Police Violence, as she spoke of her 11 years as an activist since the murder of her fiancé by police. She said, “They, [the government] value their buildings and want to call out $35 million dollars to protect their buildings when human beings are losing their lives in the middle of the street in the middle of day.” She also declared, “They have stolen something from us that we can never get back.”

Angela Rose from the Minneapolis NAACP reminded reporters and supporters about the core message from the people: “We are here to deliver justice because what we need to see is transformation. We are calling for change. The only way we are going to get justice is for our legislative system, our government, to recognize our humanity. This is human rights issue – the murder of Black people in America.”

People chanted “This is what democracy looks like” and “No justice, no peace, prosecute the police” in between coalition spokespeople from Twin Cities Coalition Justice 4 Jamar, Communities United Against Police Brutality, CAIR-MN, Black Lives Matter Minnesota, Racial Justice Network, Native Lives Matter, Families Supporting Families Against Police Violence, Minnesota Workers United, NAACP, Climate Justice Committee, the Anti-war Committee, and MIRAC.

Speakers carried messages that called for justice for all stolen lives, the conviction of all killer cops, dropping the charges against Amina McCaskill and all the MN-646 protesters, community control of the police, and the passage of nine community-supported bills currently at the legislature that would take the first steps toward police accountability in Minnesota.

The coalition plans to hold protests for all key stages of the trial. The Facebook event for the March 8 protest is at https://fb.me/e/3ie1T1oTo

Source: Fight Back! News

One of the largest unions in the United States is the Service Employees International Union. Two million essential workers belong to it.

Hospital workers belonging to 1199SEIU are on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic. So are the SEIU members keeping thousands of buildings clean coast-to-coast.

An important battle to build the 175,000 member strong SEIU Local 32BJ was a 1934 strike. Its spark was the firing of Black elevator operator Thomas Young, an immigrant worker from the Caribbean.

At the time there were 20,000 elevator operators in New York City. Their labor was essential for Manhattan’s old garment district.

Over 200,000 workers were employed there, often in 12-story high buildings. Ninety years ago they produced close to half of the clothing worn in the U.S.

Elevator operators were needed to move goods and workers from floor to floor.  By the 1920s, most of the elevator operators in the United States were Black men.

Landlords paid them miserable wages and demanded that they act like obedient servants. A. Philip Randolph ― who later led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and helped organize the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom ― tried unsuccessfully to organize elevator operators into a union.

1934 strike

In November 1934, Thomas Young was fired for saying “step in, please” instead of “down, please.” The operators and other building workers had enough.

They went on strike to get a union and dignity. Strikers went from building to building in midtown Manhattan pulling out workers. 

But how could they win? A quarter of the working class was jobless. There was no unemployment compensation.

Solidarity was the answer. The garment workers, most of whom were women, had reestablished the International Ladies Garment Workers Union the year before in New York City’s dress shops. (Eighty years later the ILGWU joined other unions to form UNITE HERE!) 

One of the ILGWU members who joined a sit-down strike was a teenager named Ethel Greenglass. At the age of 15 she graduated from Seward Park High School but had to go to work to support her family. 

Within a generation the vast majority of ILGWU members were Puerto Rican and Black. Later, thousands of Dominican and Chinese workers were employed. 

But in 1934, most of the workers came from Eastern and Southern European immigrant families. Many spoke Italian or Yiddish.

Garment workers and Teamsters refused to cross the picket lines of the strikers, many of whom were Black. New York City’s then largest industry was shut down tight.

The Communist Party’s daily newspaper in Yiddish, “Morgen Freiheit” (Morning Freedom), was read by thousands of garment workers. It called for all-out support for the strikers. Within four days the landlords were forced to sign a union contract with the elevator operators and other building workers. (“Local 32B-32J: Sixty Years of Progress”) 

The struggle continues

Ninety years later Manhattan’s Garment District is a memory. Sure, there’s still some sample shops open.

But the vast majority of clothing sold in the United States is produced by super-exploited workers overseas. They need our solidarity just like the elevator operators did in 1934.

Global capitalism gets more and more deadly. The March 25, 1911, Triangle Shirtwaist fire in Manhattan killed 146 workers, the vast majority of whom were women. The April 24, 2013, collapse of the Rana Plaza in Dhaka, Bangladesh, killed 1,134 workers ― eight times as many.

The elevator operators are almost all gone as well.  Black workers are often the first victims of automation. 

Twenty thousand elevator operators lost their jobs in New York City. The jobs of 50,000 Black coal miners were eliminated between 1930 and 1980. (“Black Coal Miners in America,” by Ronald L. Lewis)

The young striker Ethel Greenglass married the electrical engineer Julius Rosenberg. Both activists were burned to death in the electric chair by the U.S. Government on June 19, 1953.

The Rosenbergs were framed during the anti-communist witch hunt for giving “atomic secrets” to the Soviet Union. W.E.B. DuBois gave a eulogy at their funeral, declaring these martyrs died because “they would not lie.”

Justice for janitors

Despite these tragedies the working class continues to fight. Over the past 35 years, hundreds of thousands of building workers have joined the SEIU.

A hallmark of the union’s organizing efforts has been its “Justice for Janitors” campaign that was launched in Denver in 1985. In 2001 alone, 10,000 janitors working in the suburbs of cities like Washington D.C., Philadelphia and New York joined the SEIU.

Los Angeles was this movement’s crucible. On June 15, 1990, the LAPD viciously attacked a demonstration of striking janitors, most were Latinx,  who cleaned the gleaming office towers in Century City. 

At least 148 people were injured, including a pregnant woman who miscarried. The city was eventually forced to pay $2.35 million in damages to these SEIU Local 399 members and supporters.

The massive police violence was the turning point in a two year long organizing campaign. Visiting Danish trade unionists were appalled at the anti-union hostility of Danish-owned cleaning contractor ISS, which employed 250 of the 400 janitors in the Century City complex.

This outfit signed a union contract the same day its unionized New York operations were threatened by SEIU Local 32B-32J following the cop attack.

The 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion was sparked by the acquittal of sadists-in-blue who clubbed Rodney King 56 times. But the Century City police riot was part of the social tinder of the uprising. Just as the LAPD attack on the Nation of Islam’s Muhammad Mosque No. 27 in 1962 — in which Ronald X. Stokes was killed — helped lead to the 1965 Watts Rebellion..

The struggle at Century City stopped a decade of union busting in Los Angeles office buildings. The number of janitors more than doubled there between 1980 and 1990, reaching a total of 28,883 

Scab cleaning contractors were the norm in new office buildings. Already unionized outfits demanded wage cuts. 

Building workers, many of whom were immigrants, revolted and organized. Ten years after the 1990 police riot they marched up Wilshire Boulevard — named after a real estate developer who became a socialist — and returned to Century City.

After nearly three weeks on strike they won a 26% wage hike for workers employed at 900 buildings across Los Angeles County. 

Ninety-eight percent of these strikers were immigrants. Eighty per cent from Central America. Fifty-five percent women.  (“A Clean Sweep”, by Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect, June 19, 2000)  

The fighting spirit of these Latinx immigrant workers, overwhelmingly women, revitalized the labor movement throughout Southern California. There’s a little bit of Thomas Young and Ethel Rosenberg in “Justice for Janitors.”

In response to Israeli Defense Minister and war criminal Benny Gantz’s designation of Samidoun as a “terrorist organization”, Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network affirms that we will continue to organize and mobilize internationally in defense of Palestinian rights and liberation. This is the latest manifestation of a smear campaign that is intended to silence international support for the Palestinian people and especially the nearly 5,000 Palestinians jailed by the Israeli occupation. This is an attack on the Palestinian prisoners’ movement as well as the right of Palestinians in exile and diaspora to organize. We affirm that we will not be silenced or deterred by Israel’s smear campaigns.

The Israeli allegations are replete with false, misleading and careless allegations, beginning with listing an incorrect date for the founding of Samidoun (we actually mark our 10-year anniversary this year, in 2021, as is easily learned from our website). Palestinian writer Khaled Barakat has expressed his support for Samidoun’s work on multiple occasions, and we are proud to share his writings and thoughts. However, Israel’s complete disregard for facts once again comes into play here: Khaled Barakat is not now, nor has he ever been, a director or “chief coordinator” of Samidoun.

We are a grassroots organization with no paid full-time staff and that does not fundraise for any organization except for sustaining our advocacy campaigns. We have chapters in the US, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Brazil, Greece and occupied Palestine, and a network of member organizations including the Collectif Palestine Vaincra in France. This is a blatant attempt to disrupt and undermine this growing mobilization of support for Palestine around the world.

We conduct our work openly, visibly and publicly, as is visible at our website, samidoun.net, and we are proud to call for the freedom of Palestinian political prisoners like Ahmad Sa’adat, Khalida Jarrar, and thousands of Palestinians of diverse political backgrounds. The entire Israeli campaign is based on a complete disregard for facts and reality.

In fact, most of the listed points appear to come directly from right-wing propaganda organization NGO Monitor, which aims to shield Israel from international accountability for war crimes by smearing human rights defenders in Palestine and around the world./ NGO Monitor’s “baseless claims and factual inaccuracies” are a long-standing feature of their defense of Israeli apartheid, extrajudicial killings, land confiscation, arbitrary detention, military occupation, siege and colonialism.

Samidoun is an independent international, Arab and Palestinian organization that mobilizes for the liberation of nearly 5,000 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails. We advocate for the boycott of Israel, and we uphold the right of Palestinians to resist occupation, apartheid and oppression, and the right of all Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands. We stand for a free Palestine, from the river to the sea.

It is for these reasons and these reasons alone that Israel’s Defense Ministry, engaged in daily war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Palestinian people under occupation, is attacking Samidoun’s work. This is a further attempt to use repression and threats against the Palestinian people and their international allies as a campaign activity for Benny Gantz’s party in the Israeli elections. This is also an attempt to divert attention from the serious problem facing hundreds of Zionist officials – including Gantz himself – who are afraid from the next steps of the investigations by the International Criminal Court (ICC) after its last announcement on 5 February 2021 affirming that it has the authority to investigate war crimes in the Palestinian occupied territories.

Further, it is no surprise that this public announcement comes only days after 300 international organizations have joined in a collective campaign to free Palestinian student prisoners.

In fact, this should not be conceived of as an attack on Samidoun alone: instead, it comes hand in hand with a series of smear campaigns directed at Palestinian human rights defenders and those who uphold Palestinian rights around the world — and the Palestinian prisoners and the Palestinian people themselves. The same designation has been levied against a number of international organizations engaged in public advocacy for Palestinian rights and freedom. This attack is an attempt to isolate the Palestinian prisoners, not only behind bars, but from their international base of support and solidarity. It is further an attempt to silence support for the legitimate resistance of the Palestinian people, targeting opposition to imperialist wars, the Oslo process and the ongoing colonization of Palestine.

We are among many activists and organizations who have been attacked by Israel — many of whom have paid a much higher price, including those Palestinians, Arabs and internationalists who have been jailed, tortured and assassinated by Israel. Always, the goal is the same: an attempt to undermine the growing international support for the Palestinian people and their just cause.

Almost every organization, movement and even individual activist that stands for Palestinian freedom is targeted by the Israeli occupation and its leading war criminals for harassment, threats and attempts to mobilize state power to suppress an anti-colonial, anti-racist movement for justice and liberation. We are proud to stand with all of those who face such smear campaigns and repressive attacks — by intensifying our work and coming together to confront Israeli apartheid, occupation, war crimes and colonization, and organizing for the liberation of Palestine. 

We invite activists and organizations to join the Samidoun Network and build together with us. Contact us at samidoun@samidoun.net. 

Source: Samidoun.net