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DESCRIPTION:Summer of Solidarity Concert & Forum In SF On August 30, 
 2013\nhttp://www.laborfest.net/2013/SolidarityConcert-8-30-13.htm\n\nAs 
 part of a national Labor Solidarity Tour\n\nAt ILWU Local 34 - 801 2nd St., 
 SF, CA\n\n4:30 PM\nLabor Journalists And Covering the Labor Story\nwith 
 Mike Elk and other labor reporters\n\n6:00 PM \nReport on Labor & Community 
 struggles nationally & locally\n\n7:30 PM \nSummer of Solidarity Tour 
 Concert \nfeaturing Anne Feeney, Michael O’Brien and others\n\nILWU Local 
 34 \n801 2nd St., Next to AT&T Stadium at King and Embarcadero \nSan 
 Francisco \nDonation\nUnite All Labor And Working People\n\nFor information 
 contact \n(415) 642-8066 \nCo-sponsored by LaborFest, Summer of 
 Solidarity\nhttp://www.laborfest.net 
 \nhttp://www.SummerofSolidarity.org\n\n\nRank-And-File Unionists Converge 
 in Detroit as Part of ‘Summer of Solidarity’ In Bay Area/SF On August 
 30\nTUESDAY AUG 20, 2013 5:39 PM\nRank-And-File Unionists Converge in 
 Detroit as Part of ‘Summer of 
 Solidarity’\nhttp://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/15488/rank_and_file_unionists_converge_in_detroit_as_part_of_summer_of_solidarity/\nBY 
 MIKE ELK\n\nAt Monday's stop in Detroit on the 17-day Summer of Solidarity 
 tour, union activists put Bank of America on trial. Playing the role of 
 defendant? Blood-sucking 'Bankula.' (Photo from Summer of Solidarity Tour)  
 \n\n“Work is the curse of the drinking class,” 62-year-old folk singer 
 Anne Feeney told me as our car encountered heavy rush hour traffic early 
 Monday morning on Pittsburgh's Parkway West.\n\nFeeney was tired from a day 
 of playing songs and mooning scabs during a rallly on the picket line at 
 Pittsburgh’s locked-out Neville Chemical plant during the second stop of 
 the “Summer of Solidarity,” a 17-day tour of 13 cities across the 
 country. Now she, along with Canadian rapper Michael Fraser O’Brien of 
 Kill the Autocrat and five other union activists, was moving on to the next 
 leg of the tour, in Detroit.\n\nUnlike the typical largescale labor events 
 organized by international unions' central staff, the tour is being put on 
 by locals and rank-and-file members of various unions, including United 
 Electrical Workers (UE), the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and 
 Grain Millers union (BCTGM), UNITE HERE, the International Longshore and 
 Warehouse Union (ILWU) and United Steelworkers (USW). And instead of being 
 bankrolled by a large union with the financial resources to easily cut a 
 check for tens of thousands of dollars, the caravan has been funded through 
 crowdsourcing efforts on IndieGoGo. The aim, the activists say, is to 
 connect “the grassroots” of various unions. \n\nThe ultimate goal, 
 Summer of Solidarity organizers say, is to connect with community groups 
 engaged in struggles that all too often are overlooked by union activists 
 mired in the day-to-day work of grievances, arbitration and contract 
 bargaining.\n\n“All of these struggles are connected. This tour is all 
 about a life-or-death struggle against corporate greed,” says Summer of 
 Solidarity organizer Mike Zielinski, a member of United Steelworkers Local 
 3657 in Pittsburgh. “So it’s connecting struggles on the job, contract 
 fights, labor disputes, community battles over housing and education and 
 ensuring that our society meets its promise. We are organizing to bring 
 these struggles together into an irresistible force of change.”\n\nAt its 
 third stop in Detroit, the caravan linked up with labor and community 
 activists holding a people’s trial of Bank of America for its role in the 
 economic decline of the city. The dire straits of Detroit’s economy were 
 underscored by a recent bankruptcy filed by the city’s unelected 
 emergency financial manager, Kevyn Orr, who was appointed by Michigan’s 
 Republican Governor Rick Snyder.\n\nOrr has indicated that he intends to 
 cut the pensions of retired public employees as part of the restructuring 
 of Detroit’s finances. On Monday, the Michigan Chapter of AFSCME argued 
 in federal court that Orr’s move was an “unconstitutional, unlawfully 
 authorized Chapter 9 proceeding seeking the haven of bankruptcy to 
 illegally attempt to slash pension and other post-employment benefit 
 obligations and cram such reductions down the throats of current and former 
 city employees."\n\nOutside of the federal courthouse where the hearing was 
 held, the people’s trial argued that it should be Bank of America, and 
 not public-sector unions, in court defending themselves.\n\n“It’s all 
 the banks, including Bank of America, that have destroyed Detroit,” said 
 Chris Driscoll, a local member of the United Steelworkers who, despite the 
 sweltering heat, was dressed in a black garbage bag to play the role of the 
 trial’s defendant, the vampire-cum-bank Bankula. “They foreclosed on so 
 many homes, leaving the homes empty, reducing the tax base of the city and 
 then turning it around and lending money to the city at exorbitant rates 
 and helping create this bankruptcy crisis in which privatizers want to come 
 in and buy half of Detroit.”\n\n“We don’t owe them,” said Dave 
 Sole, a 65-year-old retired chemist with the Detroit Water and Sewerage 
 Department. “The banks should pay Detroit for the criminal activity that 
 destroyed it.... Any cut in our pensions—and my wife is a retired City of 
 Detroit Department of Transportation worker--would cause us to lose our 
 home.”\n\nSole says the workers will put a serious fight for the benefits 
 they were promised.\n\n“Everyone on the picket line this morning, we are 
 all veterans of the civil rights movement, the union movement and the 
 anti-war movement, and if we have to, we can show them something they 
 haven’t seen for years. Let me leave at it that,” says Sole.\n\nHe adds 
 that their fight will have repercussions far beyond Detroit.\n\n“They are 
 hoping that communities around Detroit will not lend solidarity to 
 Detroit,” says Sole. “They’re counting on racism. ‘Oh, the hell 
 with black people, Detroit, poor people...’ But if they get it in 
 Detroit, it opens it up everywhere in the country.... They want to make an 
 example of Detroit.”\n\nOrganizers with the Summer of Solidarity tour 
 hope they can illuminate how the seemingly isolated struggle in Detroit is 
 part of a larger battle against workers. Honeywell uranium plant worker 
 Stephen Lech, whose United Steelworkers Local 7-699 in Metropolis, Ill., 
 was engaged in a 14-month lockout from 2010 to 2011, says that the 
 solidarity his local received from other unions was vital.\n\n“We were 
 always looking to other struggles when we were locked out,” says Lech. 
 “Now we are always looking for ways that we can support other struggles 
 because in our struggle it was so critical to us.”\n\nThe tour also hopes 
 to highlight not only the ugliness of what is happening to so many workers, 
 but the beauty of the means by which they communicate their struggle. 
 Feeney and O’Brien displayed that beauty at a concert put on with several 
 Detroit bands at the art gallery Swords Into Plowshares. Activists shared 
 “class war stories,” beers, and laughs as they discussed the state of 
 their struggle.\n\nFeeney, who has participated in dozens of similar tours 
 throughout her decades in the labor movement, says that the 1986 march for 
 peace caravan that went through Pittsburgh inspired her to take part in so 
 many tours herself.\n\n“There is something about travelers coming into a 
 place that makes people vulnerable in a way that they normally would not 
 be,” says Feeney. “High energy people coming into a place, playing 
 music and doing stops has a real ripple effect. Some people will get 
 inspired to do even more as activists. We will never know truly what impact 
 this may have on people, but it may change people’s lives 
 forever.”\n\nThis is the first in a series by Mike Elk, who is traveling 
 for two weeks with the Summer of Solidarity tour. To help In These Times 
 cover his travel expenses and to send more reporters to cover grassroots 
 activism around the country, donate here.\n\nABOUT THIS AUTHOR\n\nMike Elk 
 is an In These Times Staff Writer and a regular contributor to the labor 
 blog Working In These Times. He can be reached at 
 mike@inthesetimes.com.\n\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/08/21/18741872.php
SUMMARY:Summer of Solidarity Concert & Forum In SF On August 30, 2013
LOCATION:ILWU Local 34\n801 2nd St/Embarcadero next to AT&T Stadium\nSan Fracisco
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/08/21/18741872.php
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DTEND:20130831T023000Z
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