Worker Protest at Burning Man Headquarters in San Francisco

Great video. Great protest. I do not think that the Burning Man LLC could have made themselves look any worse. People should really watch the video. It is so obvious that Burning Man LLC is exploiting their employees. It was also great to hear from Teeg, the artist who brought the mousetrap to Burning Man one year. He lays it down clearly that Burning Man has evolved into an elitist art venue. Why does Burning Man fund the same artists year after year? Art-Elitism.

Thank you so much, Caleb, for helping to get this movement off the ground.

burning man employees protest for worker rights
by Caleb Schaber
http://indybay.org/newsitems/2007/02/17/18364951.php

Stand Up, Fight Back!

Watch the video!
http://bpathvideo.blogspot.com/2007/02/worker-protest-at-burning-man.html

Crazy! I love how the anti-protesters come out fairly ignorant about what's going on, but just want to have in on the fun. Very burningman. In fact that is not far off from a representative burningman response to undue seriousness in general. One guy comes out shirtless with beads!

My two cents on the event:

The vast majority of people who are involved with burningman are involved because it's like that -- it operates from a consciousness outside our mainstream 'default world' mentality. Letting go of fears, loving community, spontaneous creativity, radical self-reliance, etc. -- the whole mentality runs against everything in this dominant culture of ours, and events like this, happening away from the playa, seem odd. The protesters have seemingly honest and earnest grievances in a traditional oppositional paradigm -- team A vs. team B. Union vs. Management. And they might be in the right. Maybe burningman has stiffed playa cleanup crews. I don't know. Certainly the "death waiver" is because running burningman shouldn't happen in this culture -- people are building huge fires and ill-advised art structures in the middle of an inhospitable desert and then playing with each other around them. It isn't a safe environment and there aren't seatbelts on the rides. Every year I go, I see at least one thing that makes me think, "wow, that's crazy shit. this could go wrong. this could fug something up bigtime and easily this could be the last burningman." And yet every year the "hippies and satanists" somehow manage to finagle a land use permit from the staid nevada bureau of land management, and the event continues.

For anyone who's seen the Walmart documentary, The High Cost of a Low Price, the "burningman = walmart" sign is obviously ridiculous. When I first saw it, I figured it had to be tongue-in-cheek. But then it wasn't.