Restaurant Workers ROC the Nation
With
Saru Jayaraman, Co-Director, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC)

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Tribeca’s Amish Market Accused Of Wage Theft in NYC

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Restaurant Workers ROC the Nation
With
Saru Jayaraman, Co-Director, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC)

Saru Jayaraman details the prevalence in the restaurant industry of wage theft, sub-minimum wages and widespread discrimination as well as ROCs innovative fightback which involved direct action, lawsuits, legislation, industry research and opening their own NYC cooperative restaurant “Colors”. Responding to demands from around the nation ROC has expanded operations to 8 cities nationwide.
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Tribeca’s Amish Market Accused Of Wage Theft in NYC

Wage theft is epidemic throughout New York and the nation.The NYS Department of Labor announced a $1.5 million enforcement action against the Amish Market, Park Place store among a number of others over stolen wages. To protect themselves from this and other abuses, the Amish Market’s low wage workers have been trying to unionize, but have been met with firings, harassment and intimidation from the store's management. Local 1500 of the United Food and Commercial Workers who the workers have been seeking to unite with rallied in protest and support of the workers, calling for a boycott of the store.

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Iran – A New Wave of Unionization?
With
Homayoun Poorzad, Central Council Member,
Network of Iranian Labor Unions (NILU)

Despite unrelenting state repression, there have been rumblings of
renewed labor organizing in Iran. While the most visible activities
are those of the Bus union of Tehran, the Sugar ‘Workers and
teachers unions, there is a good deal of spontaneous worker
protests that do not lead to any permanent organization. The current
recession is ratcheting up labor protests and the plan of the
Ahmadinejad government in March to do away with all subsidies
enjoyed by the population will increase prices to consumers and
produce huge layoffs which may be lead to a period of mass labor
unrest.

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Instruction, Not Destruction: Protesting Proposed School Closings
with
Carmen Applewhite, Teacher, Candidate for UFT President, Chancellor, International Assocation of Educators for Peace.
and
James Eterno, Teacher, Jamaica High School, UFT Chapter Chair, Candidate for UFT President
and
William Hargraves, Member Coalition for Public Education, Parent

The Department of Education’s Panel for Education Policy was meeting at Brooklyn Technical High School, and thousands of teachers, parents, students and concerned community members were out on a chilly January evening to protest the D.O.E.’s plan to close at least 19 city schools this year. All 21 of the schools slated to close are in largely Black and Latino areas and overwhelming populated by students of color. We’ll talk with parent and teacher representatives who were chanting “Instruction, not Destruction”, and claim there’s no justifiable reason for closing the schools and even raise the spectre of privatizing the public school system.

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Haiti’s Earthquake Exposes The Faultline of US Domination
with
Ray Laforest, Haitian-American labor leader
and
Kim Ives, journalist with the newspaper Haiti Liberté

Ray Laforest discusses how the earthquake in Haiti revealed the faultlines of United States intervention in Haiti’s governance and economic development and Kim Ives warns against reconstruction that proceeds under the supervision of foreign troops and international development agencies capable of usurping the interests of the vast majority of Haitians. Ives insists Haitian sovereignty must prevail and international aid must be oriented away from neoliberal adjustment, sweatshop exploitation and non-governmental charity, and towards systematic investment in Haiti's own government and public institutions.

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