Suffocated by the steel giant

Tony Buttaro’s battle for dignity in life and work

Stan Gray | September 10th 2009

Tony Buttaro is a Hamilton steelworker who injured his back at work. He later became a supervisor who had compassion for his workers. Tony paid dearly for these two things. He ended up physically and mentally traumatized. The retirement he had long dreamed about was destroyed.

In 1968, 21-year-old Tony started working in the foundry at Dofasco, a major steel producer, non-union. He was injured four years later when lifting a heavy steel plate. Tony recalls experiencing an “explosive” pain across his lower back and hip. He immediately hit the ground, unable to breathe. He was off work for a while. When he returned, the pain was still there. The pain was constant and unremitting: it plagued him all day, every day and is still with him 37 years later. Spinal movements became stiff and difficult. Further workplace recurrences added to that distress.

McMaster University Post-Docs Win First-Ever Contract in Canada

Finally! After nearly two years of hard nosed organizing, my TA union, CUPE 3906, can announce the signing of the first ever union contract by Post-doctoral fellows in Canada. 9 months ago, McMaster University post-docs became the first in the country to form a union. Now they have now won their first contract with significant gains (see the press release below for more details). More importantly, they have established a union beachhead in the sector with organizing at other universities (U of Toronto) already on the way.

Anarchism, Class Struggle and Political Organization
by Tom Wetzel
" In this reply I want to describe a particular sector of North American anarchism not discussed by Cindy Milstein in her well-written overview. ..."
for more: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/22097

a response to the article
Anarchism's Promise for Anticapitalist Resistance
by Cindy Milstein
"For many, a "new anarchism" seemed to have been birthed amid the cold rain and toxic fog that greeted the November 1999 World Trade Organization protest. Yet rather than the bastard child of an emergent social movement, this radical politics of resistance and reconstruction had been transforming itself for decades. ..."
for more: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/21738

On Tuesday July 14 Deputy Premier, or according to him “Citizen”, George Smitherman launched “One Toronto” a website networking volunteer scabs to pick up garbage in Toronto in the midst of a 4 week long strike by the civic workers unions CUPE 416 and 79.

Posing for media photos with a broom in hand, Smitherman had the bald faced audacity to claim that he wasn't taking sides in the strike but rather ““We’re taking one side and one side only — the side of clean streets in our city,”

Smitherman knows he can't come out and say he's organizing brigades of volunteer scabs to further his political career but that's exactly what he's doing.

http://ocap.ca/node/739

Man severely beaten and dumped on sidewalk over dispute about a sandwich.

Press Conference
Dare: Thursday, July 9
Time: 11:00 am
Location: Seaton House, 339 George Street
(east of Jarvis Street, south of Gerrard Street)

OCAP to hold press conference; please come and support OCAP and condemn the assault of homeless man by City management at Seaton House.

Man severely beaten and dumped on sidewalk over dispute about a sandwich.

On June 24TH, 2009, Brian DuBourdieu went to The Seaton House men's shelter in downtown Toronto, to get something to eat and a night's sleep. Instead, he ended up spending the night in the emergency room of St. Mike's hospital.

A good overview of recent workplace occupations around the world by the makes of the documentary, the Take. A hopeful trend amidst the crisis.

------------------------
Naomi Klein
Avi Lewis

In 2004, we made a documentary called The Take about Argentina's movement of worker-run businesses. In the wake of the country's dramatic economic collapse in 2001, thousands of workers walked into their shuttered factories and put them back into production as worker cooperatives. Abandoned by bosses and politicians, they regained unpaid wages and severance while re-claiming their jobs in the process.

As we toured Europe and North America with the film, every Q&A ended up with the question, "that's all very well in Argentina, but could that ever happen here?"

This was circulated anonymously on the Anarchist Black Cat forums. I highly recommend it. I hope it is a sign of an important shift in US anarchism.

Where there's smoke....
Anarchism after the RNC

I.
We've got the numbers, they've got the guns..
Our chants reverberated under the St. Paul skyway. The 2008 RNC protests were underway, the culmination of two years of anarchist/anti-authoritarian organizing materializing before our eyes. For once, we were many, and they were few... or maybe not. With 3500 cops and an uncounted number of National Guardsmen and Secret Service agents on the streets, this time they had both the guns and the numbers.

IWW/CWA dual-carders in the heart of the struggle

At midnight April 5, 2009 contracts for most of the component groups represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) at the telecom giant AT&T have expired. After weeks of mobilizing, around 90,000 workers are poised to strike one of the largest and most profitable multinational corporations. A job action by CWA would be the largest and among the most significant labor action in the United States since the UPS strike in 1997. It would also be the first major strike under the Obama regime. The brewing confrontation could set the tone for class struggle in the U.S. for the near future.

[...]

The View from the Floor

Our sister organization in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement (AWSM) has just released the second issue of their news sheet. Topics covered include water privatization, prisons, loan sharks, migrant workers and strikes. There is also the first part of an anarcho-communism 101 series.

You can read it here: http://www.awsm.org.nz/solidarity/issue2.pdf

also see:
- http://toronto.nooneisillegal.org
- http://toronto.nooneisillegal.org/node/278

Article from rabble.ca:
http://rabble.ca/news/2009/04/protests-respond-ontario-immigration-raids

Protests respond to Ontario immigration raids
By Syed Hussan Faria Kamal Chris Ramsaroop
April 8, 2009

Nearly 200 outraged community and labour activists rattled the fences of Rexdale Immigration Detention Centre on April 5, demanding the release of over 100 undocumented workers arrested during unprecedented immigration raids across southwestern Ontario.