12Mar - Reportback from "An Evening of Solidarity and Culture with Workers and Students"

Across the state students and workers are struggling for justice in their workplaces and their communities. This statewide conference brings together student and community activists to strategize, develop new skills, and build a powerful statewide student labor coalition.

This unique gathering challenges the “pale, male, and stale” image of the labor movement in welcoming and valuing the diverse and critical contributions of all our communities and struggles. We invite students, workers, academics, organizers, and members of our communities of all backgrounds and orientations to come and help create this active, powerful space for solidarity and collective action.

For more info visit: http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/connecting/

The following is a brief reportback from the first night of the conference, “Connecting Campus & Community: California Student Labor Teach-In!”. The program was an amazing blending of poetry and solidarity with poems shared by fillipino poets from up in Northern Cali (Davis I believe), members of Poetry for the People, artwork provided by the Beehive Collective. Workers also spoke of local and international struggles currently going on; an SEIU 250 nursing home worker spoke of how they recently won a campaign against a company that owns a couple of nursing homes, an Albertson's worker spoke of the recent grocery worker fight down south and how it will soon be coming up to our area of Cali, and a trade unionist from Colombia spoke about their battle with the Coca Cola company and the ongoing collusion between paramilitary deathsquads in Colombia and the Coca Cola company.

Pictured Above:
A SOJista, Students Organizing for Justice in the Americas, and Poetry for the People member shared a poem about the ongoing international struggle against the Coca Cola company for their collusion in the ongoing murders and intimidation of trade unionists in the Coca Cola bottling companies in Colombia. SOJA is leading the fight on the UC Berkeley campus to demand that the Coca Cola company is held accountable for their ongoing abuses of workers in Colombia.

For more info: http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~soja/