The past couple of weeks have been something of a roller-coaster for National Nurses United and it all culminates this Friday morning with the first major march and rally in what is expected to be a weekend of protest in Chicago. But it was a fight to get even there. Last Tuesday, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his administration announced that the National Nurses United (NNU) protest against austerity measures that benefit NATO, the G8, and other elites would not be allowed to end its May 18 rally in Daley Plaza. The anti-NATO-G8 protest—billed as “a rally to tax Wall Street and heal America” — will likely draw thousands into the Loop on a workday afternoon and, as such, was threatened to be marginalized to Grant Park’s Butler field, according to NNU organizers.

NNU Midwest Director, Jan Rodolfo, RN, speaking at a press conference last Thursday morning, spoke on the union’s plans to file for injunctive relief in federal court rather than succumb to the city’s demands of either to accept the permit changes to the route or have it rescinded entirely. The city gave the union two days to make a decision. Organizers and counsel decided to pursue legal avenues to assert their right to protest, but would rally in Grant Park if their legal challenge failed.

“The city wants to push us aside to Petrillo Bandshell, [in Grant Park],” said Rodolfo, “rather than have us march into the heart of downtown Chicago to Daley Plaza, clearly a center of symbolic protest. We will not be silent. We did not cancel our event when the G8 decided to hide at Camp David. We are not going to cancel our event now.”

Amidst the widespread outcries and protests on behalf of the NNU, the city reversed its decision earlier this week.

National Nurses United, with more than 170,000 registered nurses, is the largest nursing union in the country and allied with other unions across the globe — many of whom have expressed outrage at the Emanuel administration’s last-minute decision to change the permit conditions. Their event is shaping up to be quite the kick-off event to the NATO Summit as they advocate for a “Robin Hood tax” on Wall Street.

While Occupy Chicago and other groups have a week’s worth of events planned, the National Nurses United march — featuring Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello — promises to be the first mass gathering of protesters against next weekend’s NATO summit.

The city had cited the addition of Morello to the rally line-up as the reason for the change in permit status. But what the city should really be worried about is not the handful of well-known musicians, journalists, activists and other pseudo-celebrities of the left drawing large crowds. Rather, the Emanuel administration should worry about the way many movements are converging under the banner of resisting NATO-G8 policies.

The press conference, hosted by Occupy Chicago, included an impressive lineup of organizers and spokespersons united against the NATO summit, with representatives from the anti-war movement (CANG8, IVAW, and Network for a NATO Free Future) along with supporters from labor, independent media and community groups. This showing of solidarity is a force to be reckoned with, as days of action for education, the environment, immigration reform, economic justice, counter-summits, popular assemblies, concerts, marches and rallies will consume Chicagoans and visitors from across the globe for more than ten days.

Mainstream media is predicting smaller numbers of protesters filling the streets of Chicago than if the G8 summit would have remained in the city. But such an assessment is premature. The Obama Administration’s decision to move the G8 meetings was seen by many as victory for the converging economic justice and anti-war movements made possible by the Occupy movement.

Furthermore, the focus on NATO, in the words of CANG8 organizer Joe Iosbaker, “as the armed wing of the one percent,” combines the 99 percent meme of economic justice and anti-austerity protests with the kind of anti-militarism that made Dr. King’s prophetic condemnation of capitalism, racism, and militarism so volatile for the vital interests of the oligarchy. While such an analysis may have once been relegated to radical cafés and Marxists’ FBI dossiers, it is becoming a commonplace occurrence in occupations and dinner tables across the country as the dots between austerity and militarism are getting connected.

Everyday, more organizations and people are endorsing the NATO protests and planning to join in. Across the country, buses are being booked and church halls and couches filled as people are realizing just how historic of a moment this convergence is going to be. A number of protests have already occurred, including civil disobedience at the Obama campaign headquarters, immigration and foreclosure actions, and a Black Bloc FTP/Anti-Capitalist march on the Southside of Chicago.

NNU’s original plans for their protest was to focus on economic inequality and the G8 meetings. Now, the NNU and others are forced to broaden the scope of their analysis and protest to explain the connection between NATO and the G8 to their large constituencies. NNU’s commitment to protest at the NATO summits, and the allies they’ve found in their fight against the city, reflects the convergence — or spill over — across different movements that made the Seattle 1999 protests so well-attended and successful.

Administrative hurdles and legal challenges to impede the coming together of a real solidarity of interests — labor, environmental, economic, peace — while annoying, questionable, and unjust also reveals the emerging battleground between a movement, powerholders, and the public. So while National Nurses United are at their wits end with the Windy City’s bureaucracy, this is an unfolding drama that is just getting starting.

Have the Haymarket Martyrs gotten their due?

May Day has now come and gone. The big marches and the spontaneous protests and the insurrections of “Real Labor Day” are more than a week old now. But that does not mean that the struggles of working people are over… not in the least.

What began as a day to remember an American tragedy and travesty morphed into an international day of action largely ignored in the United States. Until recently, May Day was marked mostly by old Marxists. Latino immigrant rights groups took it up in recent years, turning May Day into a rallying day for the Dream Act, an end to repression and deportations, equal treatment under the law, labor rights and recognition, and other causes. This year, Latinos were joined by the Occupy movement and organized labor in a major way around the country. It looks like May Day is back in a real and powerful way.

During my first year at Hampshire College, Professor Eqbal Ahmad told his story of coming from Pakistan to the United States as a young man and searching all over Chicago for the memorial to the people killed at Haymarket Square in 1886.

As activist-historian Lawrence Wittner describes what happened in May of that year: “Protests erupted all across the United States, with some 340,000 workers taking part. An estimated 190,000 went out on strike.” The issue was the eight-hour work day, or as the workers sang, “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!”

In Chicago 80,000 workers stayed off the job, joining massive (and peaceful) marches that wound their way through the Windy City. But, a few days later, with thousands of Chicagoans still on strike and still in pen revolt, locked out workers at the McCormick Harvester plant were fired on by police and workers were killed. Another protest was called for the next day — May 4 — at Haymarket Square. Three thousand people gathered, and into their midst someone threw a bomb. The police blamed anarchists. The protesters pointed at agents provocateur. To this day, the culprit is not known. What is known is what happened next: Into the middle of this chaos, terror and throng, the police opened fire. Police and protesters alike were killed and wounded.

When the smoke cleared, prominent radical labor activists were arrested for the killings. Most were not even at the rally. Four were eventually executed.

Until my Pakistani professor told me, I had never heard of any of this. My parents were activists, but not labor activists. In fact, they were both happily, radically, revolutionarily under-employed throughout my lifetime. They admired Mother Jones, Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman, and they knew their labor history, but somehow I missed the rocking-chair lectures on Haymarket and the eight-hour day. Professor Ahmad had not. He grew up going to massive May Day marches and demonstrations in his native Lahore and wanted to see the monument to the workers who died in the bombing, to those framed and unjustly executed. He wandered all over Chicago with a bouquet of flowers, looking for the monument, only to eventually find a bronze statue of a Chicago policeman erected in the middle of Haymarket Square in 1889 by the Union League of Chicago.

Eqbal Ahmad told this story at a 1968 demonstration in Chicago. A few days later, he was questioned by the FBI on his own doorstep. The Weathermen had blown up the statue.

Since then, new monuments to the workers have been erected, but it is emblematic of how little labor history is taught in U.S. public schools that I first learned of this sad and shameful episode in American history from a Pakistani college professor, not my sixth grade history teacher.

This just reminds me how ignorant we often are of the struggles of working people in different parts of the globe, even parts of the globe where our country is intimately involved. War Resisters League organizer Ali Issa, for instance, has published a groundbreaking interview with one of the most prominent union organizers in Iraq, Hashmeya Muhsin al–Saadawi. She is the president of the Electrical Utility Workers Union in Iraq, and the first woman vice-president of the General Federation of Iraqi Workers in Basra. The interview offers us an all-too-rare opportunity to hear an Iraqi voice speaking on the impact of U.S. war and occupation and now (partial) withdrawal on Iraqi culture, society and politics.

Ms. Al-Saadawi describes the rule of Saddam Hussein as a “repressive, all-encompassing” dictatorship that went on for three decades bringing “great suffering to Iraq and the entire region.” She continues, “We wanted to get rid of this regime, but not through war and occupation. Because all the occupation did was bring new pain.”

Few people in the United States know that before the 1987 imposition of harsh anti-union laws, Iraq had a vibrant and powerful organized labor movement. That labor movement is now rebuilding and reasserting itself in Iraq as it tries to put decades of war and occupation behind it.

Ms. Al-Saadawi relates in the interview how the union suffered under Saddam and under U.S. occupation. “After [the Saddam Hussein] regime fell,” she says, “the workers quickly put together unions in the public sector, worked very hard, but faced many agendas the U.S. occupation brought with it. The occupation launched several consecutive attacks against the union movement.” Not only were union headquarters destroyed by U.S. bombs, but the “occupied” parliament froze union bank accounts and declared that anyone organizing in the public sector could be charged under anti-terrorism laws. Not exactly the so oft and loftily promised Western-style democracy.

In the wake of the withdrawal of most combat forces, the Iraqi labor movement is churning ahead. “The General Federation of Trade Unions in Iraq launched a campaign to pass a labor law that is fair for workers and that matches work standards and international agreements,” says Ms. Al-Saadawi. “Most recently, the electrical worker unions in Basra launched a campaign called ‘Social Security is the Right of Every Iraqi’ relying on constitutional rights, which is supported by some international friends, the Federation of Unions in Holland being one of them.”

The interview goes on from there, and I highly recommend a close reading of it.

In the meantime, let us all consider how we can live in deeper and more meaningful solidarity across national borders, language barriers, religious divisions, class caste systems and the other things that keep us from working together for fundamental rights. And let us sing, as the workers in Chicago sang 126 years ago:

We mean to make things over; we’re tired of toil for naught. 
But bare enough to live on: never an hour for thought. 
We want to feel the sunshine; we want to smell the flowers; 
We’re sure that God has willed it, and we mean to have eight hours. 
We’re summoning our forces from shipyard, shop and mill; 
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!

"The Scream" on auction at Sotheby's, via The Fiscal Times.

Amidst a crowd of protesters and oversized signs, Pat Walsh shouted, “What’s disgusting? Union busting?”

At a glance, Walsh, a woman with well-kept gray hair and an open smile, didn’t strike one as the usual angry protester. But that night, Walsh was fighting.

“My husband, John, has been locked out from Sotheby’s,” says Walsh. “He’s been a worker for 30 years. I’m here to fight for him.” Currently, the couple lives on the money and benefits from her part-time job at Hunter College.

On July 29 of last year, 42 art handlers at Sotheby’s Auction House were locked out after the expiration of a three-year contract. The art handlers, members of Local 814 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, have been without jobs, paychecks or benefits for almost nine months.

In an effort to bring the board of Sotheby’s back to the negotiating table, the art handlers and members of Local 814 met on May 2 to protest and picket at Sotheby’s in New York City. Allies from Occupy Wall Street and other unions joined them. That night, also, Sotheby’s auctioned off Edvard Munch’s The Scream for a record-setting price of almost $120 million.

Protesters were kept away from Sotheby’s entrance door on 72nd Street and York Avenue. While attendants filed inside, protesters were directed by police officers to the corner on 71st and York Avenue. This location, and the presence of the officers, kept protesters from engaging directly with those entering the doors of the auction house.

Shop steward David Martinez has worked for Sotheby’s for almost 20 years. Art handlers like him are trained to transport art from homes and archaeological sites to the auction house. “We handle everything from major Southeast Asian stone artifacts that just came out of a temple to tribal artifacts from Native Americans,” Martinez says. “We handle fragile, immovable things. That’s something you just can’t get anyone to do.”

“I’m trying to send a simple message — I want to go back to work,” Martinez adds. “There is no other choice. They want to keep us out like that, I say bring it on.”

The idea for the protest emerged from the “99 Pickets” that were organized by OWS as part of its May Day actions. The intention of the pickets was “to connect May Day with the workers’ struggle,” explains Rose Bookbinder, an organizer with OWS and the United Autoworkers Union. “The pickets started on Tax Day, and we kept going. We organized 99 Pickets to make the people of New York aware of the injustice that’s going on in labor.”

The picket at Sotheby’s occurred on May 2 in order to show New Yorkers that the struggle for workers’ rights would not end after May 1, Bookbinder notes.

People from OWS have participated in actions with the Sotheby’s Teamsters since last September as a way of building stronger relationships between the movement and organized labor. According to Harrison Magee, who is part of OWS and the International Workers of the World, actions against Sotheby’s in recent months have “involved a lot of different formations within the organizing community.” Union organizers wanted to broaden the scope of the Occupiers’ struggle. Artists and labor activists within OWS recognized the importance of targeting the influence of corporate wealth in the art world. According to Magee, getting OWS to support the Sotheby’s struggle is a critical way of developing the movement’s capacity for meaningful organizing.

“The fighting mentality and brand of toughness that the Teamsters have is the kind you only learn as an employee — someone who is in direct, physical confrontation with the 1 percent,” says Magee. “Not a lot of OWS has that at its organizing core, which is made up of people who are dedicated to OWS as if it was a full-time job.”

By uniting with the Sotheby’s Teamsters, OWS not only supports workers who have been wronged by the 1 percent, but also strengthens itself for an ongoing role in labor and arts activism. In the process, OWS is “creating a cross-movement that is more coordinated and able to deal with its future as a strong grassroots movement,” Magee says. “Even though the [Sotheby’s] outcome is hugely important, I think we should realize that the lockout itself is really just the red herring for everything to come.”

The sale of The Scream inspired the picketers to do their own “people’s scream,” raising their arms and screaming for two minutes. One Occupier said that the scream was a way for “all of us to bring creative tactics to the pickets to sustain visibility and express our anger.”

It remains uncertain, however, when or if Sotheby’s will start negotiating again. “[Sotheby’s] needs experienced people, and these are the experienced guys,” Pat Walsh said. “So why do [the board members of Sotheby’s] have to be greedy? Give them their jobs back, give them their retirement, give them their benefits, give them something. They put heart into the place.”

There are over 200,000 migrant domestic workers living in Lebanon today — a large number when you considered that Lebanon’s population is only a little over 4 million. Most migrant workers live with their Lebanese employers, cleaning their houses, washing their clothes, cooking their food and looking after their children. Yet these workers are not included under Lebanon’s labor laws — they are not entitled to basic rights such as minimum wages, maximum working hours, and holiday or sick pay. Many never get a day off. Those that do are often not even allowed to leave their employers’ houses.

The suicide last month of Ethiopian domestic worker and mother of two Alem Dechasa, who was publicly beaten in front of the Ethiopian embassy she had been trying to escape to for help, caused a wave of outrage around the globe after a film of the beating was circulated. But hers is by no means an isolated case.
According to a report by Human Rights Watch migrant domestic workers in Lebanon are dying at a rate of more than one person a week. The report revealed that many of these deaths are suicides; most of the rest are accidental deaths caused by workers falling from high buildings while attempting to flee abusive employers.

Last Sunday over 1,000 people gathered in Beirut in a march organized by the human rights watchdog Anti-Racism Movement, along with the migrant workers’ communities and several non-governmental organizations, among them the Danish Refugee Council, the Insan Association, the Nisawiya women’s rights group, and Pastoral Care of Afro-Asian Migrants.

The event was intended to raise awareness of migrant workers’ unfair treatment and demand improvements to their situation, in particular that migrant domestic workers be included under Lebanese labor laws and the abolition of the kafala, or sponsorship system which ties workers to a single employer. The event, also intended as a celebration of Labor Day, was held two days before the national holiday since most migrant workers get only Sundays off — if they get time off at all.

The march was followed by a cultural celebration in which migrant communities from Sri Lanka, Nepal, Cameroon, India, Madagascar, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, the Congo and the Philippines performed dances and served traditional food. Domestic workers from Nigeria, Sudan and several other African and Asian countries were also in attendance, along with Lebanese and international activists and supporters.

The sponsorship system in Lebanon means that migrant workers’ immigrant status in the country is dependent on them working for a single employer who is legally responsible for them. As a result the majority of domestic workers live as well as work in their employers’ homes “for their own protection,” leaving them subject to human rights abuses. These commonly include confiscation of their passports and other papers, restriction of movement — the majority of employers do not allow workers to leave the house or even make phone calls — late payment or even non-payment of wages, no restriction of working hours, as well as physical, sexual and verbal abuse.

The system makes it extremely difficult for migrant workers to seek legal aid. They are not allowed to leave the country or change employers without consent from their sponsors, who often demand enormous sums of money to return their documents. If they leave their employer, even under abusive conditions, they automatically lose their immigration status in the country because the kafala system legally binds them to their sponsor.

Workers from a large number of communities came together to promote their common cause in Sunday’s march, carrying signs which read “Stop human trafficking of migrant workers in Lebanon,” “When will we start criminalizing racism?” and “Workers not slaves.”

“The migrant workers make an important contribution to society and to the individual households,” said Pendaline Pinero, a Filipina community leader. “Their work should be recognized by the government. They should be part of the labor law.”

The atmosphere in Sunday was festive, as crowds gathered to watch traditional dances, eat, drink and celebrate the attendance at the peaceful protest.

In spite of the difficulties they face, however, the domestic workers attending Sunday’s event were the lucky ones — those who have time off and are allowed to spend it outside their employers’ houses.

A 2011 report on human trafficking in Lebanon by non-governmental organization and women’s rights group KAFA, quoted excerpts of telephone interviews with domestic workers unable to leave the house, many of whom are still working in Lebanon, but unable to attend events such as Sunday’s march.

“I cannot leave my employer’s house and I cannot even call my family,” one Filipina worker told KAFA, while an Ethiopian worker said: “I was beaten by my first sponsor and sexually harassed by the next one. I worked long hours and did not get proper food.”

Another Ethiopian worker reported: “I have been working for one year for my employer, but he has paid me only $500 so far. When I asked for my salary once my sponsor hit me. I want to change my employer. But I don’t know how. I don’t know how to get help.”

While Sunday’s event was a step in the right direction there is still a long way to go. NGOs such as the Insan Association and KAFA hold peaceful demonstrations in Beirut on a regular basis, aiming to raise awareness and increase pressure on the Lebanese government to make some much needed changes to the current situation.

Rola Abi Mourched, program coordinator at KAFA, said Thursday that the government has yet to respond to Sunday’s protest. “We’ve been having meetings with different stakeholders and ministers,” she said. “The next step is to continue putting pressure on the government and raising awareness to encourage the public to support these changes… We plan to continue putting pressure on the Lebanese government by conducting individual meetings with decision makers to advocate for alternatives to the sponsorship system.”

In February KAFA held a public discussion with the former Minister of Labor, Dr. Charbel Nahhas, who announced that he had submitted a number of suggested amendments to the labor law to the government before his resignation earlier that month. These include changes which would require domestic workers’ salaries be paid into a bank account subject to scrutiny to ensure wages are paid in full, that a translator be present when workers sign a contract at the Ministry of Labor, and allow workers to terminate their contracts through a notification system.

Prior to his resignation Charbel had announced that he would look at abolishing the sponsorship system, stating that migrant household and agricultural workers should be included under the labor law. “Any law that takes into account the nationality of workers,” the former minister wrote on Twitter, “is tantamount to racial discrimination.”

Charbel’s replacement as labor minister, Salim Jreissati, has yet to announce any plans to put an end to discrimination against migrant workers.

A leaflet published by the Insan Association and its partner AIDA states: “Much more needs to be done. Migrant domestic workers need to be able to socially integrate into Lebanese society and enjoy their rights as full citizens in this country.”

From StrikeEverywhere.net's "Efforts of the General Strike Public Redecoration Committee."

“So are we in solidarity with each other, or are we united?”

This question came up yet again on Monday night, at the final coalition meeting for May Day that included people from organized labor, immigrants’ groups and Occupy Wall Street. It came in the midst of a debate about whether or not we should designate separate zones for various coalition partners during our joint evening march. Trying to mash everyone into one giant group might create a sense of unity, but then the groups’ individual needs might not be met. Occupiers whispered to each other about how the lack of a defined OWS zone would mean the unions would end up marshalling our contingent. In the end, everyone agreed that separate zones were most appropriate; true solidarity with one another meant recognizing our diverse methods of organizing and tactics for resistance.

Achieving apparent unity is easy; whoever shouts the loudest or lobbies the hardest typically wins over the group. It is solidarity — respecting each other’s particular methods and skill sets — that is truly revolutionary. Trying to impose unity over the entire action would leave no one satisfied, and it would actually serve to divide us. This solidarity-versus-unity struggle has been playing out inside OWS as a whole for a while now, as well as in our May Day planning meetings. After months of trying to impose decisions upon each other, which was serving only to divide us, the May Day planning committee has quietly moved away from unity and towards solidarity. It’s about time.

The call to help organize a national general strike on May Day had no lack of interested parties in New York City from a diverse cross-section of activists. The first call to meet as an “exploratory committee” brought together around 75 people back in January, including radicals from Occupy Wall Street and across New York City, alongside seasoned labor organizers and others. This diversity has persisted throughout the planning process, resulting in some incredible breakthroughs and synergy, as well as deep reflection and sometimes painful challenges.

Anarchists like myself are accustomed to striving to create “safer spaces” where we do our best to check our privileges of every kind at the door. This compels us to develop particular strategies to raise up marginalized voices by adhering to consensus process and respecting each other’s autonomy to make our own tactical and strategic choices. Becoming accustomed to these ways of interacting with one another can make it difficult for anti-authoritarians to organize in other types of spaces, where people are more used to organizing hierarchically. The first few OWS May Day meetings were well-populated with radical feminists, queer anarchists, insurrectionists and others from the New York anarchist community. As has been happening in OWS as a whole, many of these people began feeling uncomfortable and marginalized in those meetings and, by and large, stopped attending. But many of us did remain in the project and continued working with an ever-growing coalition of OWS folks, labor and immigrant worker justice groups. This coalition, in itself, is historic.

Our coalition partners wanted to set up a “4×4” steering committee with four representatives from each of the four groups: organized labor, the May 1st Coalition for Worker and Immigrant Rights, community-based organizations and Occupy Wall Street. But since the Occupy movement tends to operate on the core anarchist principles of horizontality and consensus, having formal representatives of any kind at the 4×4 wouldn’t work for us. We informed our partners that we would feel more comfortable using a spokescouncil at these meetings. This would mean that as many OWS folks as wished to attend would be welcome, and the four people empowered to speak at a given time would act as non-autonomous spokes, reflecting to our partners the will of the group seated behind them. For large decisions, we would need to take a brief break and come to consensus as a group before reporting back to the coalition.

Our partners were very receptive to us operating in this manner, and it even seemed like a bit of our horizontally rubbed off on them. When it was time to open up the process and call large meetings to plan the details of the solidarity march, they at first suggested that each group should get only one vote — total. OWS balked at this, and an agreement was reached to use a two-thirds-majority, modified-consensus system. This means that, first, we check for full consensus from the group, and if there are people opposed, we hear them voice their concerns before moving to a vote. Whether these processes will have a long-term effect on our partners remains to be seen, but it is something of which I am very excited and proud to have been a part.

Many of the radicals who stopped attending the early meetings moved on to work with Strike Everywhere, an autonomous group of anti-authoritarians who were agitating for a general strike in New York, outside of OWS. This model of working with exclusively like-minded folks was appealing to many of the anarchists in the OWS group, many of whom had started to feel similarly disenfranchised. A lot of the remaining anarchist organizers began working almost exclusively in clusters that featured a distinctly anti-authoritarian bent, with names like Action, Mutual Aid or Strike. Over time, as the character of each became more well-defined, all the various clusters in the project began to respect each other’s autonomy, unique skills and interests. Once we stopped constantly trying to make decisions for each other, our meetings became much more cohesive, and coordination went much more smoothly.

Meanwhile, both of the main decision-making bodies in OWS — the Spokes Council and the General Assembly — gradually became non-functional and were disbanded. Movement-wide projects are now being organized in more decentralized ways, with various groups simply coordinating with one another rather than trying to make decisions together. While some see this as a failure of process, I think it’s really one more stop in the movement’s ongoing experimentation toward a directly-democratic society. Trying to impose “unity” over the movement with the GA and Spokes led to infighting and marginalization. Being in solidarity with one another allows different groups with different backgrounds to work together effectively without trying to control one another.

Despite the struggles and the experimentation, the successes of the May Day planning group and the larger coalition are undeniable. A broad coalition of labor, immigrant worker justice groups, community organizations, Occupy assemblies and students has been forged. Through a decentralized action model, there will be dozens of simultaneous direct actions across the city, creating time and space between ones that are family-friendly and others that are more aggressive. Thousands of people will be sharing resources and skills, practicing and learning about mutual aid in Bryant Park and Union Square. Students will be walking out of their schools and opening a free university. Workers will be occupying their workplaces, kicking out exploitative bosses and managing the businesses for themselves. A call for a general strike was made, and endorsed by the largest labor organization in New Jersey, the Industrial Labor Council. Ways have been found for other labor groups to participate without breaking laws against striking, by calling for a “99 Pickets” action that will aim to shut down the flow of finance capital in Midtown on the morning of May Day.

I’m proud to have worked beside hundreds of others on this project, and I am confident that the effects of May Day will bellow out across the globe. But I can’t help but wonder how much more we could have accomplished if it hadn’t taken us three long months to realize that we needed to act in solidarity with each other, not in some kind of unity. Regardless, I count this gradual discovery among the many successes of anarchist organizing models in the brief history of this movement.

• Tens of thousands of Czechs staged one of the biggest protests since the fall of Communism on Saturday, marching in Prague against spending cuts, tax rises and corruption, and calling for the end of a center-right government already close to collapse.

• On Sunday, 150 Palestinian prisoners joined with 1,200 others being held in Israeli jails who started an open-ended hunger strike on Tuesday to protest the conditions in which they are being held.

• In Montreal, 89 people were arrested Saturday after trying to disrupt the second day of a conference on the development of northern Quebec.

• Tens of thousands of Egyptians demanded on Friday that their military rulers stick to a pledge to hand over power by mid-year after a row over who can run in the presidential election raised doubts about the army’s commitment to democracy.

• In Bahrain, tens of thousands people marched along a motorway from Budaiya, an area to the west of the capital, Manama, on Friday to demand an end to the crackdown on dissent, ahead of the Formula 1 Grand Prix on Sunday.

• Thousands demonstrated in the Rome on Friday to protest government plans to introduce legislation that will make it easier for companies to sack employees.

• Less than 24 hours after their release, University of Texas students arrested after staging a sit-in at President Powers’ office gathered with supporters Thursday on the steps of the UT Tower to continue in their campaign against sweatshop labor.

• Tens of thousands of teachers, doctors, police officers and other public workers went on strike on Wednesday in Slovenia over proposed pay cuts under austerity measures to rein in the euro-zone member’s budget deficit.

The manager of a Hot and Crusty bakery on New York’s Upper East Side watched through the window as a handful of workers speaking broken English passed out fliers to customers inside. Across the street, a private detective in a shiny black SUV surveyed the scene as potential customers and well-dressed women scanned the quarter-sheets detailing the chain restaurant’s abuses: below-minimum-wage paychecks, threats of cutting hours, refusal to negotiate with the workers for safer conditions. (Other violations were left off, including multiple accounts of sexual harassment.) One of the workers exiting the restaurant flashed those flyering a discrete thumbs-up.

The workers were from another branch of the chain bakery 20 blocks south, where they launched a successful organizing campaign with the help of the Laundry Workers Center. Now, as they continued to push for negotiations, the team was expanding to other restaurants to put pressure on the owners.

A coalition including Occupy Wall Street, unions and community groups have called for “a day without the 99%” on May 1. One of the greatest challenges in preparation for that has been organizing precarious workers — those in non-unionized sectors like restaurants, domestic care, retail and freelancing, where jobs turn over fast and some lack U.S. work permits. Yet the Laundry Workers Center, which is part of the May Day coalition, is organizing worker-led campaigns capable of escalating to actions such as walkouts and facility takeovers if wages and conditions don’t improve. Even within unionized sectors, these types of workplace actions are rare in the United States. Yet this is just the kind of radical, unsanctioned organizing that the Occupy movement is trying to help spread through the call for a general strike that many assemblies have issued for May Day.

The Laundry Workers Center (LWC) formed last year to fill the gap between unions and charitable service providers, which help provide workers with additional skills or U.S. work permits but little more. The mission was to organize laundromats — a sector that has never been organized in New York City on a mass scale — and the group plans to launch a 15-laundromat campaign later this year.

Workers from Hot and Crusty approached the young LWC in the fall, after being turned away by a handful of other organizations. Following an eight-week crash course in political consciousness and race and gender equality, the 14 workers launched their first action on January 21, the coldest day of the winter.

Amid the falling snow and bitter temperatures, a crowd of 50 workers, family members and Occupy Wall Street activists gathered a few blocks north of the restaurant at 63rd Street and 2nd Avenue, stamping their feet and blowing hot air into cupped hands. The week before, LWC organizer Virgilio Aran had laid out his honest expectations: it was almost a certainty that the workers would all be fired. The group marched toward the restaurant chanting “Jefes, escucha, el pueblo esta de lucha!” (Bosses, listen, the people are in the fight!) Inside the building, the remaining workers walked off their stations and, together, they presented the manager with the list of their demands: improved workplace conditions and wage increases.

“You don’t know what you just did,” the manager hissed at one of the workers. Yet within months, instead of being fired, the workers had been offered keys to the store by corporate higher-ups, the branch manager asked to join the campaign and Aran won the right to organize in the restaurant — an unprecedented victory for a non-unionized workplace. Yet, behind the scenes, management is building its resistance, hiring an anti-union lawyer and threatening every worker and organizer with a lawsuit.

As the campaign builds, the stakes of repression are getting higher, with organizers warning of conspiracy charges and managers using the police and immigration offices to intimidate the workers. At one of the last actions, for example, a manager tried to disperse the protest by calling the cops. Yet the workers stayed put, even ridiculing their boss when the police couldn’t prevent illegal flyering.

“When he saw that, the boss was so nervous,” says one of the workers.

The Hot and Crusty workers are prepared to escalate as well, through walkouts, lock-ins and a possible occupation of the workplace itself — all tactics that might be expected in Buenos Aires a decade ago, but hardly in today’s mid-Manhattan. Today, the workers and their supporters plan to occupy restaurant chain owner Mark Samson’s Park Avenue office.

The workers’ fearlessness in the face of harsh consequences suggests that the campaign has become about much more than negotiating for these particular jobs at this particular chain store. Rather, it’s the beginning of a renewed struggle for precarious workers everywhere to gain power and control in their own workplaces, on their own terms.

Watch a video of a discussion about immigrant worker justice at an Occupy Wall Street planning meeting for May Day:

Poster by Nina Montenegro, via Occuprint.

An Occupy Wall Street organizer I know — one of the original ones, from the planning meetings before the occupation began last September 17 — has a striking banner atop his Facebook Timeline. It’s from the History Channel series Life After People, an artist’s rendition of a cityscape after which all the humans in it somehow disappear. It’s quiet, and still, with trees growing out from the sides of crumbling towers.

To say that this image has anything to do with the movement’s plans for May 1, which the person who posted it is involved in making, might cause both paranoid-style right-wing radio hosts and the most anarcho- of primitivists to froth a bit at the mouth. And so they should. Ever since the idea of working toward May Day started catching on in Occupy Wall Street last January, it has been infused with the impulse of creating the vision of a radically different kind of city.

The visionary impulse, however, has also mixed with things more mundane. Over the course of the May Day planning process in New York, in at least two meetings each week, OWS organizers have been patiently patching together an historic joint rally and march with labor unions, immigrants’ rights groups and community organizations, many of which were invited to participate in the planning process since the beginning.

The members of this tenuous coalition, however, have refused to demand the impossible together — which is to say, a general strike. Instead, the coalition speaks of “a day without the 99%” and the slogan, “Legalize, Unionize, Organize.” But at just about every other opportunity, people from OWS have been echoing the call for a general strike on May Day, which originated from Occupy Los Angeles’ General Assembly in December. During the April 4 press conference announcing the New York coalition’s plans, the OWS representative avoided saying those words, but after his speech he stripped down to an undershirt with “general strike” scrawled on it in red.

Meanwhile, a group called Strike Everywhere, consisting of “anarchists, anti-capitalists and autonomists,” has made a general strike its unapologetic mission, and it is busy covering the city and the Internet with propaganda, both beautiful and obscene, to agitate for revolt. Some of its members have even constituted a tantalizing Central Park Exploratory Committee, which has yet to disclose its intentions to the public.

Such calls for a general strike raise challenging questions about what a strike could even look like in a society with the lowest rates of union membership in generations. Employment is often episodic, inadequate and undemocratic, yet people seem to lack any inkling that things could be otherwise. Unlike more traditional union-based strikes, also, OWS offers no provisions for long-term support for strikers who suffer retaliation from bosses. What, then, could feasible striking mean? What new forms of workplace organizing could there be, besides unions that have their hands tied in contracts and repressive laws?

A strike, if it actually happens on May 1 or thereafter, may not look like one ever has before. Strike Everywhere, for instance, has been holding assemblies for “precarious and service workers” as a way to create new solidarity networks, and numerous social media accounts are trying to do the same online. Tumblrs have appeared  collecting people’s various ideas for how and why they plan to strike. For those who can’t skip work or school, OWS recommends at least a consumer boycott: no housework, no shopping, no banking. And, of course, “TAKE THE STREETS!!!!!” Much like the Adbusters call that resulted in Occupy Wall Street itself, the logic of May Day has been to start with the impossible and figure out the possible from there.

The plan for the day, insofar as there is any single plan, starts at 8 a.m. in Bryant Park, in Midtown. From there, Occupiers and allied organizations will break off into pickets and other kinds of groupings, each targeting one or several of the many corporations with offices in the surrounding skyscrapers. Meanwhile, in the park, there will be a bazaar of “mutual aid,” with food, trainings, medical care, teach-ins, radio transmitters, massages, bike repair, free stores and more. Over the course of the afternoon, the theater of action will shift (likely by way of a ruckus march) down toward Union Square, where the unions and immigrants’ rights groups will by rallying. From there, at around 5:30, there will be a safe, taxi-led, permitted march further down, through Foley Square and into the Financial District. The general consensus seems to be that the bulk of arrests will be saved for after that — for whatever the night will hold.

When the subset of Occupiers preparing for May Day aren’t planning, or wheatpasting posters, or viral-video making, or negotiating, or tweeting, they’re studying history — the Haymarket Massacre, Rosa Luxemburg, and so on — through old films, teach-ins, zines and the movement-made magazine Tidal. They’re also warming up in the streets.

Every Friday, there are “Spring Training” marches to greet the closing bell of the Stock Exchange, and at each Occupiers test out a new creative tactic, like “civilian,” in which they revert to non-protester status so as to evade police blockades, or “melt,” in which they collapse into a disarming die-in or cuddle-puddle. Spring Training culminates in the “people’s gong,” replacing the NYSE’s bell with the voices of Occupiers standing in concentric circles and crying, “Ding!”

On April 17, too, Occupiers will be testing their synergy in the streets for Tax Day actions with many of the institutional allies who will come out in much greater force on May 1. This comes at the end of a nationwide effort called the 99% Spring, in which 100,000 Americans are supposed to be receiving training in nonviolent action, and it will be the first test of a newly-trained populace, just in time for May Day.

After the big day itself, though, nobody knows what will happen. There is a suspicious, almost apocalyptic silence about this among organizers. They call for a general strike on May 1, but is the idea to go back to work on May 2? They talk about building power for the 99 percent, but for what? Some, at least, have been murmuring about the international days of action called for in Europe on May 12 and 15. The 12th, in New York, is also the anniversary of a major march on Wall Street last year. A few Occupiers here are planning to go to Chicago to protest the NATO summit on May 20 and 21. But above all there’s the feeling that if May Day goes well — as, for the movement not to suffer a crushing disappointment, it must — then what follows will unfold organically from there, in a city somehow not quite like the present one and which, from this side of May 1, we cannot really imagine.

• Trayvon Martin protesters on Monday blocked the front doors of the Sanford Police Department in Florida for nearly five hours but walked away peacefully after convincing city officials to hold a community forum.

• In Tunisia, police fired tear gas Monday to disperse a rally of hundreds on a central Tunis avenue where demonstrations are banned.

• Pilots for Spanish airline Iberia, part of International Airlines Group, went on strike on Monday, grounding 150 flights in the first of 30 one-day strikes to protest against the start-up of low-cost carrier Iberia Express.

• Egyptian train drivers staged a sit-in in Cairo’s Ramses Train Station on Monday, bringing rail traffic across the country to a halt for more than seven hours, to demand an additional allowance for working on Saturdays, bonus increases and risk allowances.

• Opposition supporters wearing white ribbons walked in a circle during a Red Square protest against the rule of Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Sunday. At least three activists were arrested after pitching a tent near Lenin’s Mausoleum.

• Thousands of Shiite Muslims from Islamabad and Rawalpindi on Sunday participated in a sit-in outside the parliament to protest the killings of Shiite Muslims in Pakistan and government crackdown against the innocent people of Gilgit City.

• Bahraini security forces fired tear gas and water cannons at thousands of protesters marching Friday in support of a jailed human rights activist whose nearly two-month hunger strike has become a powerful rallying point for the tiny nation’s Shiite-led uprising against the Sunni monarchy.

• On Friday, police in India dispersed protesters who staged a sit-in protest against the gang-rape of a woman.

A march in Madrid during the general strike, via the FotogrAccion collective.

Last Thursday, people across Spain made a show of force in a general strike, at a scale ranging from the government estimate of 800,000 to the 4 million claimed by the unions. It was timed to challenge new reforms that are expected to make it easier for employers to fire workers, dealing a blow to organized labor.

The 15M movement, which began with occupations in the central squares of cities around the country last year, played an important role in the strike’s success. Despite ongoing conflicts between the largest unions and 15M, several weeks ago the movement’s key organizations — including neighborhood assemblies, Democracia Real Ya, Yo No Pago and the Platform of People Affected by the Mortgage (PAH) — announced their support for the general strike and started working to make it a success.

Early on, there appeared an anonymous blog called 29M sin Miedo (M29 without Fear). It invited workers to speak out against intimidation from their companies about the prospect of the strike, such as threats of dismissal or demands for signed statements about whether they intended to strike or not. The blog, which collected as many as 250 complaints, achieved a double objective: it made these abusive practices visible, and it provided a list of companies to picket on the day of the strike.

The 15M movement’s collectives followed suit with their own initiatives, including leafleting, public meetings about the overhaul of labor rules, caceroladas (the banging of pots and pans) and bicycle pickets. In Barcelona, these were organized through the Acampada BCN website and, in Madrid, through Toma la Huelga (Take the Strike). On Toma la Huelga, too, an independent media team covered the general strike, documenting the movement’s actions minute by minute. This became one of the movement’s major victories that day; Toma la Huelga received more than 150,000 visits, finally prompting RTVE, the Spanish public TV channel, to turn to those working on the site for information.

A bicycle picket in Madrid, via the FotogrAccion collective.

Although the main Spanish newspapers tended to credit the large unions alone, people from 15M played an important role throughout the strike. The night before, in fact, various neighborhood assemblies began picket lines at night spots and transportation centers. By 8 a.m., the picketers were out again and moved through Spain’s main cities all day long, often blocking street traffic.

In most cities, the 15M movement organized their own demonstrations or joined the calls of the smaller unions. In Madrid, at 4:30 in the afternoon, people from the neighborhood assemblies went to centrally-located Cibeles Square and practiced a favorite Spanish pastime: the siesta. Nearly 500 people spent the evening there, enjoying the good weather and causing the area to be closed to traffic for hours. Afterward, several thousand marched to Sol square, followed by the demonstration of the main unions. In this strike, as in other protests before it, 15M and the unions are both in the streets, but it doesn’t mean they get along.

Siesta in Madrid during the general strike, via the FotogrAccion collective.

The day was generally peaceful, but there were some episodes of violence, especially as police cracked down on 15M actions. Before the strike, the government announced that it had prepared a large police force “in anticipation of the picket lines organized by the movement.” In the end, 176 people were arrested, along with more than a hundred injuries. Police repression started the night before, when the 15M picket lines in Madrid arrived at Santa Ana, a square in the city center where foreigners go for the nightlife. The first police charge was there at about 1:30 a.m., with five arrested and several injuries.

Violence was especially notable in Barcelona, where police used rubber bullets and tear gas against thousands of demonstrators in Plaza Catalunya, the same place where Barcelona’s encampment was evicted at the end of May, leaving hundreds injured in one of the most violent episodes of the 15M movement. By evening, some demonstrators responded to the police violence by burning containers, tires, bank offices and Starbucks stores. In Paseo de Gracia, one of the main streets in Barcelona, several hundred demonstrators tried to drive the police away. This fed a media portrayal of the movement as violent and has become an excuse for the government of Catalonia to announce an “anti-guerrilla” plan that would further limit the rights of demonstrators — though the details of it are not yet clear. The use of tear gas against protests is not common in Spain, for instance, but this may change; last December, the Spanish government purchased a $2 million supply of it.

Despite a large turnout for the general strike, the government has already made clear that the proposed labor reforms will go forward. This doesn’t come as a surprise to the 15M movement, which saw value in showing discontent in the streets but didn’t expect the government to alter course. The movement still sees its main objective for now as working locally in neighborhoods to create a system outside the system.

Meanwhile, the main unions have said that they will give the government a month to change its posture. If it does not change, they have threatened a new mobilization in May — a month that will already be full of actions organized by the 15M movement. Once again, these two factions may run into each other in the streets.

By John Bennett, via Flickr.

“What do you do for a living?” — or its shorter (and more annoying) cousin, “So, what do you do?” — is the kind of question I avoid these days.

In my head, I tend to get snotty: “I live for a living, duh!” But out loud I am glib: “I am a woman of leisure”; or vague: “This and that”; or inaccurate: “I’m a housewife”; or an oversharer: “Well, it all started in 2009 when I realized I wanted a radical change in my life…” I can go on in this vein until the listener’s eyes literally fall out of their head with boredom. But on the forms I have to fill out, I am much more succinct. Occupation: unemployed.

In this, I am not alone. The official unemployment rate in the United States — calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — is currently 8.3 percent, or about 12 million people.

But I am actually not part of that statistic, because the BLS only counts people who are not working and actively looking for work as unemployed. According to Ezra Klein, who edits the Wonkbook at The Washington Post’s website, a more accurate and telling unemployment statistic would be closer to 11 percent. Today, only 62.7 percent of the population is either employed or looking for a job and can be labeled “the workforce.” The other piece not included in an unemployment rate of 8.3 percent is those who are involuntarily working part-time; the “underemployed.” If you add in all those folks, you are talking about a real un- and underemployed rate of closer to 15 percent, or about 22 million people.

Forgive the detour into statistics. Back to me! I am very unemployed. I got a W-2 recording $500.00 in income for 2011.

I used to have a very good answer to the question of what I do; I even had business cards, a title (two actually: Senior Research Associate and Deputy Director for Publicity and Outreach) and bio on a webpage. All of this meant that I spent most social engagements — wedding receptions, birthday parties, open house brunches — stuck in a corner talking politics with a middle-aged man. I am not complaining. It was a great job. In fact, it was more than that; it was a career and an identity. I had a mentor, a community, offers to write books, invitations to lecture and teach, and the goal of becoming a public intellectual (all with a B.A. from Hampshire College).

When I was a kid, my brother and I had a lot of folk music records by Charlie King — who, with his wife Karen Brandow, is still touring. He had a great song back in the day in which he sang, “Our life is more than our work, and our work is more than our job.” Another record that we wore out was Cris Williamson’s The Changer and the Changed. In it, she asks, “What do you do for a living? Are you forgiving? Giving shelter?”

Those lyrics were my soundtrack as I transitioned from young(ish) wonkette with a 401K, a nice salary, and health and dental coverage to a crack dishwasher and soupmaker at Mary House Catholic Worker on the Lower East Side. I dropped out. I turned on. I did not want to make money or words or ideas anymore. I wanted to make change and soup and beds.

It was a privilege. I know that. I’m not saying everyone should do it. Now I am married, and we live on my husband’s salary. I only have healthcare because I’m pregnant and there is still some semblance of a safety net. We don’t have a lot of money, but I have time and energy and skills to spare and the freedom to apply those where they are needed (and where they make me and others happy).

This makes me think about freedom and happiness a lot when I read newspaper articles about joblessness.

Last weekend, The New York Times Magazine looked at recent college graduates and their job prospects. The picture is not good: 1.7 million people graduated from college last summer, and they carried an average school debt burden of $25,000. Recent graduates with liberal arts degrees have a 9.4 percent unemployment rate. The article focused in on Drew, an expensive (more than $50,000 a year), exclusive university in suburban New Jersey:

17% of our sample of Drew University’s Class of 2011 is unemployed.
39% have full-time jobs, including six who have both full- and part-time jobs.
35% of students who are employed part time have two or more jobs.
74% of students who are interning are unpaid.
22% of students are in graduate school.
34% of jobs involve food service, retail, customer service, clerical or unskilled work.

This is bleak stuff, but it is also the stuff of revolution. Right? One of the things that made the Occupy movement blossom so beautifully and quickly and diversely last fall is that there were large numbers of people who walked away from unsustainable or untenable homes and jobs and positions in society — or did not have any of that to begin with — to join this burgeoning, anarchic community. They were young people still smarting from bruising and fruitless job searches with their new degrees, middle-aged refugees from professional jobs handed a pink slip five years before retirement, and the chronically homeless with no illusions about America but happy to not be alone in the parks anymore. And many more — people so hungry for meaning, community and connection that they would sleep out in the heat and cold and rain, endure long meetings and even longer periods in police holding cells, in order to be fed by one another. People so alienated from traditional forms of appeal and persuasion that they jumped in with both feet, going from never having written a letter to an elected official or a newspaper editor into protesting in front of a multinational bank or pharmaceutical company or arms manufacturer. We might not have this rich fervor in a rollicking economy with 5 percent unemployment.

The “Aims and Means” of the Catholic Worker consider work carefully. From the vantage point of the soup line and the picket line, it is obvious that labor is exploited:

Human need is no longer the reason for human work. Instead, the unbridled expansion of technology, necessary to capitalism and viewed as “progress,” holds sway. Jobs are concentrated in productivity and administration for a “high-tech,” war-related, consumer society of disposable goods, so that laborers are trapped in work that does not contribute to human welfare. Furthermore, as jobs become more specialized, many people are excluded from meaningful work or are alienated from the products of their labor. Even in farming, agribusiness has replaced agriculture, and, in all areas, moral restraints are run over roughshod, and a disregard for the laws of nature now threatens the very planet.

The antidote? Nonviolence, the works of mercy and a new relationship to work — one of manual labor and voluntary poverty. “In a society that rejects it as undignified and inferior,” the Catholic Worker reminds us of the Benedictine motto, ora et labora: “The work of human hands is a gift for the edification of the world and the glory of God.” Dorothy Day, foundress of the community, wrote that “besides inducing cooperation, besides overcoming barriers and establishing the spirit of sister and brotherhood (besides just getting things done), manual labor enables us to use our bodies as well as our hands, our minds.”

Yep, it’s a toughie, I agree. Why be poor when you can be rich?

A few reasons spring to mind: One: It is pretty hard to be rich without stepping on other people. Two: Being rich in this society pretty much means aping an empty lifestyle of mindless consumption and epic waste. Three: Being rich means (unless you inherit it) working for a living.

And I would rather be poor and live for a living.

Now that I am finished with my weekly Waging Nonviolence column, I have a long to-do list: wash the dishes, empty the compost, tend my community garden plot, stock loose tea at the local coop, add to the Witness Against Torture website, go for a walk, mend the five-year-old’s tights, prepare for Clarification of Thought at Saint Francis House on Friday… It doesn’t pay the bills, but it is work, and it is a life!

• Russian police arrested nearly 100 people on Sunday for picketing Moscow’s TV tower over footage that accused the opposition of paying anti-government protesters.

• On Sunday, after more than 150 protesters carrying signs calling for nonviolence and the rule of law began to chant the slogan that has echoed throughout the Arab revolts — “The people want the fall of the regime” — uniformed officers and men in plain clothes beat them with sticks and began making arrests.

• Argentina’s truckers called an indefinite strike on Monday to demand higher pay rates, parking their rigs in protest just as exporters were counting on them to haul freshly harvested soybeans to port.

• Thirty Palestinian prisoners have joined the hunger strike of Hana Shalabi, who was hospitalized on Monday evening after consuming only water for 33 days.

• In Cuba, three dozen members of the Ladies in White opposition group were detained on Sunday before their weekly march to press the government to free prisoners jailed for politically motivated  crimes.

• George Clooney was arrested for civil disobedience in Washington on Friday alongside his father Nick and other  protesters after a demonstration outside the Sudanese Embassy aimed at drawing  attention to the country’s president, Omar al-Bashir, and his government for provoking a humanitarian crisis and blocking food and aid from entering the Nuba Mountains from South Sudan.

• Some 200 Moroccan women staged an angry protest Saturday outside parliament a week after the suicide of a 16-year-old girl who was forced to marry the man who raped her.

• The April 6 Youth Movement declared on Saturday the start to an open-ended sit-in in front of Parliament’s offices, in which the group will demand the release of detained member George Ramzy.

• Several hundred Tibetans have protested against Chinese rule in the western province of Qinghai since a monk there set himself on fire earlier this week. The advocacy group Free Tibet has posted what it calls “unprecedented footage” of this highly restricted and restive part of western China.

• Between 5,000 and 7,000 Chilean high school students marched down Santiago’s main avenue on Thursday to demand free quality education and protest the expulsion of about 100 students who joined last year’s protests. Police broke up the march with water canons after a few hundred students crossed a police barrier and tried to march to the education ministry.

• Thousands of union workers gathered across Illinois on Thursday to protest Gov. Pat Quinn’s proposed budget cuts that include mass layoffs and the closure and consolidation of several state facilities, including prisons.

• Hundreds of people gathered in the Rotunda of the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City on Thursday to urge Gov. Gary Herbert to veto a bill that would forbid school districts to teach use of contraceptives.

• Russian opposition activist Sergei Udaltsov started a hunger strike on Thursday after being sentenced to 10 days in jail for disobeying the police following a rally against Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

• Afghans took to the streets on Thursday to demand a U.S. soldier accused of killing 16 civilians be prosecuted in Afghanistan as word spread that the American military moved him out of the country.

• A group of about 75 demonstrators assembled at LOVE Park on Wednesday to support immigrant rights. Two college students were arrested after blocking traffic with banners and refusing to move

• Hundreds of thousands of people in 60 cities across Spain took part Sunday in demonstrations called by the country’s main trade unions to protest the government’s tough new labor reforms and cutbacks.

• Hundreds of students in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday protested against the U.S. and the American soldier who killed 16 Afghan civilians in a shooting spree on Sunday.

• Tens of thousands of people joined an opposition rally in Bangladesh’s capital on Monday to demand that a nonpartisan caretaker government oversee the next general election.

• Tens of thousands of people rallied near Japan’s crippled Fukushima plant Sunday demanding an end to nuclear power as the nation marked the first anniversary of a disastrous quake and tsunami.

• Thousands of students at an all-female university in Saudi Arabia boycotted classes on Saturday, protesting against poor services in a rare display of dissent from women in the conservative Islamic kingdom.

• Tens of thousands of pro-union demonstrators descended on the Wisconsin Capitol on  Saturday to voice their anger at Gov. Scott Walker and his conservative agenda, using the anniversary of the passage of his signature collective bargaining law  to rally support for efforts to remove him and five other Republicans from  office.

• Tens of thousands of Bahrainis demonstrated outside the capital Manama on Friday to demand political reforms, a year after the Gulf Arab state crushed an uprising.

• More than 50,000 workers in Italy participated in demonstrations and a nationwide strike on Friday, calling for democracy in the workplace and accusing the government of acting in the interests of the banks and industrial groups.

• As part of a campaign to fight violence against women, pictures of victims were hung on walls in the Cerro Gordo neighborhood of Ecatepec, outside Mexico City on Wednesday.

• Tens of thousands of South Africans marched peacefully through their main cities Wednesday to demand the governing African National Congress do more for the poor.

• Hundreds of native Ecuadorans began a cross-country march Thursday to protest policies by President Rafael Correa they say will result in more mining in the Amazon region and threaten the environment and their way of life.

• Hundreds of Saudi women took part in a protest against discrimination and mismanagement at the King Khalid University, in Abha, on Wednesday. At least 50 women were reportedly injured when security forces and religious police moved in to break it up.

• South Korean female workers performed in penguin costumes in Seoul on Wednesday to protest growth in temporary employment.

• Thousands of Taiwanese farmers took to the streets Thursday, staging the nation’s biggest demonstration in years against the government’s plan to allow U.S. beef imports.

• With elaborate make-up depicting bodies bruised, bleeding and burned by acid, four FEMEN activists were arrested in Istanbul on Wednesday to protest domestic violence in Turkey.