| 20 Fired from Flaum
By Stephanie Basile 
May 28, 2008
Flaum Appetizing, a kosher food distributor, terminated 20 IWW members last week. The IWW had a strong presence at Flaum, with about two-thirds of the warehouse being union members. Workers had been struggling for respect from the boss for almost a year before the firings occurred.
The chain of events began last Thursday when the boss fired a woman known for being a strong union member. When her fellow workers decided to confront the boss about her termination, they were all fired on the spot.
The IWW is putting up daily picket lines this week and will fight the terminations through direct action, media pressure, and legal action.
Supporters can write letters to management at:
Flaum Appetizing
288 Sholes Street
Brooklyn, NY 11206
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Folksinger, Storyteller, Railroad Tramp Utah Phillips Dead at 73
By Utah's Family 
May 26, 2008
The official Obituary as provided by the family.
From utahphillips.org
May 24, 2008
Nevada City, California:
Utah Phillips, a seminal figure in American folk music who performed extensively and tirelessly for audiences on two continents for 38 years, died Friday of congestive heart failure in Nevada City, California a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains where he lived for the last 21 years with his wife, Joanna Robinson, a freelance editor.
Born Bruce Duncan Phillips on May 15, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, he was the son of labor organizers. Whether through this early influence or an early life that was not always tranquil or easy, by his twenties Phillips demonstrated a lifelong concern with the living conditions of working people. He was a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as "the Wobblies," an organizational artifact of early twentieth-century labor struggles that has seen renewed interest and growth in membership in the last decade, not in small part due to his efforts to popularize it.
Phillips served as an Army private during the Korean War, an experience he would later refer to as the turning point of his life. Deeply affected by the devastation and human misery he had witnessed, upon his return to the United States he began drifting, riding freight trains around the country. His struggle would be familiar today, when the difficulties of returning combat veterans are more widely understood, but in the late fifties Phillips was left to work them out for himself. Destitute and drinking, Phillips got off a freight train in Salt Lake City and wound up at the Joe Hill House, a homeless shelter operated by the anarchist Ammon Hennacy, a member of the Catholic Worker movement and associate of Dorothy Day.
Phillips credited Hennacy and other social reformers he referred to as his "elders" with having provided a philosophical framework around which he later constructed songs and stories he intended as a template his audiences could employ to understand their own political and working lives. They were often hilarious, sometimes sad, but never shallow.
"He made me understand that music must be more than cotton candy for the ears," said John McCutcheon, a nationally-known folksinger and close friend. In the creation of his performing persona and work, Phillips drew from influences as diverse as Borscht Belt comedian Myron Cohen, folksingers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and Country stars Hank Williams and T. Texas Tyler.
A stint as an archivist for the State of Utah in the 1960s taught Phillips the discipline of historical research; beneath the simplest and most folksy of his songs was a rigorous attention to detail and a strong and carefully-crafted narrative structure. He was a voracious reader in a surprising variety of fields.
Meanwhile, Phillips was working at Hennacy's Joe Hill house. In 1968 he ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. The race was won by a Republican candidate, and Phillips was seen by some Democrats as having split the vote. He subsequently lost his job with the State of Utah, a process he described as "blacklisting."
Phillips left Utah for Saratoga Springs, New York, where he was welcomed into a lively community of folk performers centered at the Caffé Lena, operated by Lena Spencer. "It was the coffeehouse, the place to perform. Everybody went there. She fed everybody," said John "Che" Greenwood, a fellow performer and friend.
Over the span of the nearly four decades that followed, Phillips worked in what he referred to as "the Trade," developing an audience of hundreds of thousands and performing in large and small cities throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. His performing partners included Rosalie Sorrels, Kate Wolf, John McCutcheon and Ani DiFranco.
"He was like an alchemist," said Sorrels, "He took the stories of working people and railroad bums and he built them into work that was influenced by writers like Thomas Wolfe, but then he gave it back, he put it in language so the people whom the songs and stories were about still had them, still owned them. He didn't believe in stealing culture from the people it was about."
A single from Phillips's first record, "Moose Turd Pie," a rollicking story about working on a railroad track gang, saw extensive airplay in 1973. From then on, Phillips had work on the road. His extensive writing and recording career included two albums with Ani DiFranco which earned a Grammy nomination. Phillips's songs were performed and recorded by Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez, Tom Waits, Joe Ely and others. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Folk Alliance in 1997.
Phillips, something of a perfectionist, claimed that he never lost his stage fright before performances. He didn't want to lose it, he said; it kept him improving.
Phillips began suffering from the effects of chronic heart disease in 2004, and as his illness kept him off the road at times, he started a nationally syndicated folk-music radio show, "Loafer's Glory," produced at KVMR-FM and started a homeless shelter in his rural home county, where down-on-their-luck men and women were sleeping under the manzanita brush at the edge of town. Hospitality House opened in 2005 and continues to house 25 to 30 guests a night. In this way, Phillips returned to the work of his mentor Hennacy in the last four years of his life.
Phillips died at home, in bed, in his sleep, next to his wife. He is survived by his son Duncan and daughter-in-law Bobette of Salt Lake City, son Brendan of Olympia, Washington; daughter Morrigan Belle of Washington, D.C.; stepson Nicholas Tomb of Monterrey, California; stepson and daughter-in-law Ian Durfee and Mary Creasey of Davis, California; brothers David Phillips of Fairfield, California, Ed Phillips of Cleveland, Ohio and Stuart Cohen of Los Angeles; sister Deborah Cohen of Lisbon, Portugal; and a grandchild, Brendan. He was preceded in death by his father Edwin Phillips and mother Kathleen, and his stepfather, Syd Cohen.
The family requests memorial donations to Hospitality House, P.O. Box 3223, Grass Valley, California 95945 (530) 271-7144
www.hospitalityhouseshelter.org
Jordan Fisher Smith and Molly Fisk
Molly Fisk, 530.277.4686 molly AT mollyfisk DOT com
Jordan Fisher Smith 530.277.3087 jordanfs AT gv DOT net
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Make the Road, IWW Unite in Call for Immigrant and Workers’ Rights
By Alex Kane, Indymedia 
May 03, 2008
From NYC Indymedia:
150 people march over Brooklyn Bridge to demand an end to deportations of immigrants
Brooklyn, New York—Around 150 people marched across the Brooklyn Bridge with Make the Road New York and the Industrial Workers of the World NYC Branch for a May Day immigrant rights demonstration. Flanked by red and black Wobbly flags and signs that read “Opportunity for Immigrant Workers,” the demonstrators chanted slogans like “Si se puede,” and “El pueblo, unido, jamas tera vencido.”
There was a boisterous rally held before the march at Cadman Plaza Park in Brooklyn, with music, dancing and chanting. One song’s lyrics, roughly translated, said “we will overcome misery” and “we’ll have to break the chains.”
“[Immigrants should] have the same rights as any other working person,” said Stephanie Basile, a member of IWW, the radical Wobbly union that has been around since 1905. Basile emphasized that workers should have the right to unionize without intimidation, and that deportations of immigrants must stop.
After the rally ended, participants marched across the Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian and bicyclist area with a police escort. The march ended with loud chants outside of City Hall that translated to “Bloomberg, listen, we are in the struggle.” In front of City Hall were at least 10 police officers, ready with nightsticks in hand for any disturbances. Make the Road NY provided transportation for the protestors from City Hall to Union Square, where a bigger rally for immigrant rights was being held.
“[Immigrants] and working people are the backbone of the United States…At the end of the day, we have to make sure that the politicians, the community and the United States know that we’re still fighting for [immigrant and workers’ rights],” said Julissa Bisono, a worker organizer with Make the Road NY, a grassroots organization that advocates for low income people and immigrants in New York City.
One young intern for Make the Road NY, Jefferson Lopez of Flatbush, spoke of the work that Make the Road NY has been doing to provide better health care for immigrant communities. “They are helping immigrants in a way that no other organization can help,” said Lopez, 18. Make the Road NY, with other immigrant rights’ groups, were instrumental in pushing for new state regulations that require hospitals to have translators for people who can’t speak English.
The new regulations, which took effect in September 2006, have improved health care services to immigrant New Yorkers who don’t speak English as their first language.
The protestors looked back in admiration at the May Day 2006 immigrant rights demonstrations, where hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their supporters protested anti-immigration laws and practices perpetrated by the federal government. The emphasis on deportation in American immigration policy seems to have chilled protests from immigrants, according to some activists.
According to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in fiscal year 2007, over 200,000 undocumented immigrants were deported from the United States.
Many immigrants live in fear of deportation, and talk of their struggles against the often racist and xenophobic political climate in the U.S.
Felipe Romero, a restaurant worker in NYC who carries carts and a member of the IWW NYC branch for a year, spoke of discrimination in his workplace. “The manager discriminates against Hispanic people…We’re in a struggle now, trying to unionize in the workplace to be able to get better benefits and better working conditions…[Because of the union struggle], we are now getting our holidays paid, overtime paid and better wages,” said Romero, through a translator.
Other demonstrators said they hoped the struggle for workers and immigrants would continue after May Day.
“I think the more people in the streets, the bigger the statement is. And that is something that is missing in this country, people thinking and acknowledging the fact that they do have power whether they know it or not,” said Valerie Carmel, a student and activist who participated in the protest.
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