This morning my parents and I had breakfast with John Ambler. John is a member of my congregation and a retired professor of political science. He spent his career at Rice teaching about and researching French politics. He and his wife Joyce spend part of each summer in Paris. Since we were all in town at the same time, we thought it would be nice to meet up, though Joyce ultimately wasn’t able...
Today I met up with two anarchists to discuss French and American politics and social movements. I first met MN almost fifteen years ago when we part of the organizing committee for the Industrial Workers of the World Centenary in Chicago. He is currently splitting his time between Paris, where his partner works, and the United States. He is no longer a member of the IWW but he remains...
Yesterday the New York Times brought news that famed photo editor John Morris died at the age of 100. Morris was the photo editor of the New York Times during the Vietnam War and made the decision to publish two of the most famous images of the war on the newspaper’s front page–the informally titled “Napalm Girl” by Huỳnh Công Út and Eddie Adams’s “Saigon Execution.” He...
Note: I recently have become involved with the Industrial Workers of the World’s Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee. I am serving as their contact person for faith-based organizing. It is a volunteer role and one of things that I am doing as part of it is preaching some in support of the September 9, 2016 National Prisoner Strike. The following sermon was the first I preached in...
A few years ago I included a piece titled “It Takes More Than Direct Action” in the column I used to edit for the Industrial Worker called “Workers Power.” The good folks who edit Solidaridad, the Spanish language blog of the Industrial Workers of the World, have seen fit to publish a translation of it: “Se necesita más que la acción directa.” It’s the first text of mine that’s been translated...
Recently Juan Conatz put a copy of my 2007 article “The Chicago Couriers Union: a lesson for IWW solidarity union organizers” up on libcom. The piece appeared in the Industrial Worker and served as the basis for my “The Chicago Couriers Union: A Case Study in Solidarity Unionism,” which was published in Working USA. You can read the Industrial Worker piece here.
This past summer I had the opportunity to spend a few days with members of the Confederación General del Trabajo in Barcelona. With a membership of about 60,000, the CGT is the largest anarcho-syndicalist labor union in the world. It split with the more famous Confederación Nacional del Trabajo in the late 1980s over the issue of participation in government sponsored works councils. Without...