Since there is some new news about the Walmart Class action suit and I keep getting comments on my blog entry on the class action suit, I thought I woul post the actual page for the suit (thanks Debbie). Here is a snippte of the exciting news:

NEWS FLASH
June 22, 2004: Federal Judge Martin Jenkins certifies “historic” class, the largest civil rights class action ever certified, on behalf of over 1.6 million women who have worked at Wal-Mart anywhere in the United States since December 26, 1998.

Now we just need to get Jack Black to compose a song about the evil-doings of Walmart, and I am sure the lawyers representing 1.6 million women (Jack, can you imagine the upsurge in your fan base?) will rawk out with this one…

After an awfully stressfull week, I woke up today with throat sore and eyes stinging. Gads, at least it feels like a cold and not the flu so I don’t feel or look as hellish as my awful flu experience in Dec. I look more like

Unhappy and a little frazzled by the vicissitude s of life.

Speaking of which, I have recently noticed there is one entry of mine, the Walmart Class Action Suites that has generated a lot of comments, and it seems like a lot of the female employees of Walmart don’t know where to turn for their greivances. When I first wrote that entry there did not seem to be an accessible website about the class action suit that was reported in the BBC artcile. Now there is: The Walmart Class Website

I hope the provides some good information to those who need to link into what is looking to be a really case against America’s largest employer. I also hope their is a public type website where they can express their greivances.

Science.Infoshop is like
Slashdot with a critical edge

During the huge anti-war protests last winter, Chicago did not figure prominently. In the US context, NYC and San Francisco got most of the coverage, which is too surprising given America is really a bi-coastal nation with the middle being, you know, “just the flatlands” with nice wholesome people (the midwest) and those large states with big mountains, generous driving limitis, and a dearth of people (Utah, Nevada, Montana etc). And anway, the turnout was apparently not that high in Chitown, again not too surprising: you try protesting in the cold-and-wind-and-misery-factory that is a typical midwest winter.

So why not move the Chicagoans to the protest instead? That’s the idea behind ChicagoNewYork to bring Chicagoans in the boat-and-butt-load (really busload) to NYC for what is anticpated as the Mother Ship of Protests to “honor” the Republican National Convention, in a disproportionately Democratic city.:

Welcome to the mother of all protests

The reasons for going are immense. The numbers that will be there will be incredible. The event will be historic.

There will be hundreds of thousands. Most of them will be from New York City. Our goal here at chicagonewyork.net is to make sure that the second largest group is from Chicago.

This is not about being an activist or going to just any protest. This is about bringing everybody you know. Everyone you’ve ever talked to who cringes when they hear Bush’s voice. Everyone who ever expressed fear and anger at what’s been done in our name.

Worth checking out…

My head hurts. I am tired thanks to the monkey wrench that is insomnia which has plagued me for the last three nights usually in different forms (why do we only have one word with a possible add on to describe what is such an intensely complicated phenomena?). I had to take the day off as birds and bees and stars and comets were you know, metaphorically spinning around my eyes.

But some good news is on the horizon: SOSHI (Save our Student Health Insurance) that I helped start in the fall has drafted and released a petition asking the University to do something to deal with the inequity of health insurance provision for grad students. Right now, all the hard science students (physical and biological) get full coverage while the gimpy sciences (the social sciences), the “religious weirdos” (the divinity student who work harder than all of us combined imho), and the lit freaks (humanities etc), don’t. Most students don’t know this so we are letting them know and letting the University administration that 2000+ in health fees don’t fly with a student budget.

If anything I am interested in what the online petition will yield.

ps—> Thanks to the dmh-boy with all his help and patience…

My dad sometimes comes up with the funniest phrases when he sends me some NYTimes article about his favorite political topic of the day and then his short diatribe about it. This time it was about the French quest to be as Frenchie-secular as can by by outlawing religious symbols in schools, like Islamic head scarves. My dad’s analysis in a nut shell:

I would love to visit France, but I would never consider living there. I distinctly dislike their government and their policies. They are bigoted weasels.

UN’s clarion call for great apes

Looks like the great apes et al are soon to vanish… And what a shame, it looks like they just figured out dentistry!

Praveen wrote me this really interesting email about Walmart, which though not unique to launch serious FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) campaigns against its workers, it perhaps brings it to an art form and is iconic of what workers face today:

Praveen writes:
Walmart has been making considerable news lately with it’s continuing
plans to rollout mega-super-centers in otherwise untapped markets.
This article is a morbidly fascinating article on the borg like effect walmart has had
on the American economy. From a tactical viewpoint, walmart is leveraging
it’s position as a man-in-the-middle and playing by the numbers in a borg
like manner on all fronts: They are rabidly anti-union, fire workers for
any form of dissent all the while paying them sub-living wages, buying off
local governments… And then on the backend importing as much custom
cheap labor and material from overseas and decimating american suppliers.

My question: how do you stop them??

I have a provisional answer that may not stop them but it might help.

Ok, I have recieved two requests from Walmart women looking for information about the class action suit that I wrote about on my blog september

Great that they contacted me, deplorable they had to contact *ME.*When I went to do a search about the class action suit to see if there was a main webpage, there was not. It was hard to find information about it.

I makes me think that we have a long way to go before activists use the web properly not as a tool in and of itself but a tool to make stuff happen, to facilitate other activities. Just as people naturally go to the web to “click” and shop and get their news, it is key that workers of each and every company and of Unions have central sites where they go to to find out information about what the company is up to. I mean you have something like WalmartWorkers.org blog style which simply LISTS everything that a walmart worker might find useful, lawsuites, union organzin, etc.
More important, is that the site is run NOT my a Walmart Worker so that they don’t get FUD (that is fucked) by Walmart and that it takes on a status as a brand. People, like it or not work through brand recognition and we need to take that for our projects.

So h0mee, basically what I am saying is start that frikken site! And start a movement around the idea that EVERY company needs such a site…. Then folks can post anonymously about the shannanigans of the corporation in such a way that it shames the company and it provides frankly USEFUL information for the workers. It is thier site, a central place that people can go to which wont take too much time which is KEY because part of the reason people cant do anything is that there is NO TIME in this country. You can strike in France every other day becaue you wil still get paid. They work us to the Bone in the US so that folks as much as the will is there, the body is trapped in thre reality of time constraints.

As you know this is the tactic that I am taking with Stories of Shame which is generating some stories by University of Chicago students but it will take some offline campaigning to get folks to the website. I mean you and I are bloggers, we are IRC chatters, the net is a place of sociality for us in a way that it is not for many. We need to bring sociality to people, a form of sociality that gives them information, a type of transparency that otherwise is hard to grope for individually but using branding tactics so that there is name recognition over time.

This is Brin’s argument in The Transparent Society which I thought was quite compelling argument for openness and transparency as forms of direct political action. If they are keeping tabs on us, we then too need to keep info on then and expose it. And in such a way where it is only natural to go you your “companyworker.org” website.

If I were not in school right now, I think I would try to get a grant precisely to launch such a campaign. I mean I think it is a really good idea. Meet with Union organizers and activists organizers at the top 10 companies with the lousiest labor practices, teach them how to set this shit up, get a server up at the Community Colo and finally really try to join labor activism with the power of the anonymity and flexibiity of the web.

So that is my answer.

I am finally back in the swing of things reading articles on the relationship between software and speech (yep, not your ordinary layperson’s treatment of software) and going about my business in Chicago. Luckily I have less obligations here in Chicago than I did in SF and PR so I can concentrate on finishing, I mean starting so that I can finish my dissertation…

One of the things I get to do again is read websites galore again. Before I blogged, I used to, believe it or not, print articles about Linux, free software, intellectual property, hackers and now I am filing so many articles, it is unreal. What is more unreal is that I a kinda enjoy the filing despite the ache in my back but I am sure my pleasure will wear out soon.

But now I can just read and blog not having to worry about pieces of paper anymore. Today, when catching up on the RIAA lawsuits, I read an article about LL Cool Jay and Chuck D testifying at a Senate subcommittee hearing about the “Evils” of file Swapping (LL (Not So) Cool’s position) and of the P2P really being “Power 2 the People (Chuck D’s position)…

I saw Chuck D talk nearly 2 years ago and Seth is right, he said some really provocative and funny things in a talk that if I recall correctly was like 3 hours long. The man is brilliant and you would think that with his humor he also takes an occasional gig with da onion.

The best is when Chuck D mixes humor with critque and insight:

P2P to me means power to the people,” said Chuck D. “I trust the consumer more than I trust the people at the helm of these (record) companies.”

“LL’s a staunch American,” Chuck D added in a brief interview. “He’s my man and all, man, but when you solely have an American state of mind, you’re increasingly bec oming a smaller part of the world.”