I posted this yesterday on Dailykos and thought, I needed to also do it on my site.

I grew up in the union movement. I’ve been lucky to have grown up in the US because being a unionist here doesn’t always mean death, jail time or torture, it has in our past as evidenced with the treatment of Mother Jones, Joe Hill and Wesley Everest, but it’s better today than it is in many countries around the world. Countries, like Turkey.

In Turkey’s push to assist in the “war on terror” and to put aside their own internal struggles against terrorists, they have brilliantly decided that a woman in the labor movement is a terrorist.

Have you ever heard about Kevser Mizrak?

Kevser Mizrak

On 10 December 2007 a human being, a woman named Kevser Mizrak was killed in police raid to her home in Ankara

Outraged by the brutality and death of another union organizer, a group spoke out for justice. Among them was Meryem Özsögut

PSI is concerned to learn about the arrest of Ms Meryem Özsögüt on the morning of 8 January 2008. Ms Özsögüt is a management board member of the SES –the trade union of public employees in health and social services –and PSI believes that her arrest was motivated solely by her activities as a trade union leader. There are also concerns about Ms Özsögüt’s safety whilst in police custody.

The Turkish government responded to PSI noting that Ms. Özsögut

had been arrested in connection with “being a member of a terrorist organisation” and “for making propaganda in favour of the terrorist organisation”.

PSI also learned that she is being held in an “f” type prison. And what is an “f” type prison, well, it’s:

To prisoners and families with such experiences, the introduction of isolation units in prisons looks very much like an indefinite extension of the system of incommunicado detention which has facilitated abuse in police lock-ups. Indeed, accounts by prisoners and their families suggest that, as in police custody, guards in F-type prisons have taken advantage of the closed environment to beat and abuse their charges. Legal and medical institutions that could document, challenge, and prevent such abuses have had only limited access.

A union activist in Turkey is jailed for showing up at a press conference to denounce the death of another union activist and the world outside of Turkey and PSI seems silent. Silent, until Labourstart took up the cause.

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from Eric Lee of Labourstart about Ms Meryem Özsögüt and I promptly put up a post on her confinement. And I feel like that’s all I can do. Sign the petition and put up a post. Then I got to thinking about our Foreign Policy and how the “war on terror” is used to jail enemies of all shapes, sizes, creeds and well, you get the picture.

I’ve been thinking that if the US government could get away with the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib or the continued detention without charges or how many people in Guantanamo, then what hope is there really for Ms Meryem Özsögüt. And when I got to this point - the hopelessness of the cause point- I figured, this is where we fight. It only starts with the petition but it doesn’t end with the release of Ms Meryem Özsögüt, it ends when violence and silence of dissent are no longer tolerated. But it starts today, and it starts with all of us.

So, sign the petition:

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoðan
Republic of Turkey
Ankara
Turkey

cc Mr Besir Atalay, Minister of Interior
Mr Faruk Çelik, Minister of Work and Social Security

I write to urge you to secure the immediate release of Ms Özsögüt and to take any necessary steps to guarantee her safety.

I have been informed that Ms Özsögüt was arrested following her participation in a press conference on 14 December 2007 to denounce the killing of Kevser Mizrak. Ms Özsögüt’s attendance at the press conference was the result of a fax message received by her trade union, requesting that the union participate in the press conference. I understand that at no time before or during this press conference did the police or other authorities issue a warning that such a gathering or activity was viewed as 'illegal'.

I have been further informed that several other people who were arrested at or around the same time as Ms Özsögüt, ostensibly for the same reasons, have since been released. However, Ms Özsögüt remains in custody and her trial has now been postponed several times.

I call on your Government to secure the immediate release of Ms Özsögüt, to take any necessary steps to guarantee her safety, to take the appropriate steps to ensure that all public sector workers are fully guaranteed their right to organise, form trade unions and carry out legitimate trade union activities both in law and in practice without State interference.

Yours sincerely

Sign the petition and join me in letting the Government of Turkey know that jailing and killing union activists isn’t acceptable. But even more importantly, I want to make it clear that when we are able to elect Obama President, we’re holding him accountable, and his administration, for trade agreements with countries that behave in this manner.

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This weekend is the rememberance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Although he is most remember as a civil rights leader, I remember him most for his fight against Poverty.

We have ancient habits to deal with, vast structures of power, indescribably complicated problems to solve. But unless we abdicate our humanity altogether and succumb to fear and impotence in the presence of the weapons we have ourselves created, it is as possible and as urgent to put an end to war and violence between nations as it is to put an end to poverty and racial injustice.

When he was murdered (which always sounds much more scaring and real than Assassination to me, I wonder why), he was on a mission to end poverty in America. We have yet to meet that goal. But during that time, he spoke of economic freedom, worker's rights, in general, he spoke of the American condition.

In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, as 'right-to-work.' It provides no 'rights' and no 'works.' Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining... We demand this fraud be stopped.

What is often left out of the discussion about race in this country is how the owners of industry use Americans of color and immigrants to break unions and pit worker against worker. This, of course, is an example of scabbing.

Scabbing seems to have been almost a cottage industry in this country. Movies like The River, On the Waterfront, or the Replacements glorify the worker who must take a job to save his farm, take on corrupt union bosses, or to play a game they never thought they could. You know, man against the mountain themes. How very noble.

I personally have found that movies like Norma Rae, Matewan and Harlan County Wars, had much more realistic looks at what an organizing drive is and the kinds of things bosses and owners are willing to do just to prevent workers uniting.

Now, since I've brought it up, let's look at Matewan.

In an effort to break the miners' union, the mine owners brought in immigrant Italians and blacks from the south. The movie uses an organizer's voice to discuss the issues of race and strike breaking and does so in the same breath

"You think this man is the enemy? Huh? This is a worker! Any union keeps this man out ain't a union, it's a goddam club! They got you fightin' white against colored, native against foreign, hollow against hollow, when you know there ain't but two sides in this world--them that work and them that don't. You work, they don't. That's all you get to know about the enemy." - Joe Kenehan

The longshoreman took a similar approach:

...had to go into the whole question of Blacks. I said, "Look, fellas, the only way these guys ever got a job was as scabs. The bosses saw to that. Let's right now say, `You've got a job as a working stiff. No discrimination.'"

It wasn't pretty in 1934 when Harry Bridges talked about discrimination. It wasn't easy getting the longshore gangs (teams) to see scabs as equals. But they did it. They did it by isolating the scab gangs and bringing the gangs into the union, one by one. By the 1936 strike, there would be no more scabbing. Bosses couldn't use race baiting to pit whites and blacks against each other. They had to acknowledge the union and learn how to work with them.

Being in a union, organizing, working for workers' rights, it's what everyone of us should be doing. Like Valerie Taylor

I just did what I thought was necessary. I didn't feel like I was doing anything more advanced than anybody else, but somebody had to speak out. What's that saying about being ashamed to die if you haven't done some good for humanity or some such thing like that? I kept that in the back of my mind. Working to make this a better world for having lived in it has been my philosophy...

The history of the labor movement is a long bloody one. It was common place for local authorities to beat, raid and murder union activists or simply to make it possible for mobs to lynch men like Wesley Everest

The IWW was aggressive in recruiting and organizing, radical and offensive (to employers) in its literature. The chain of events that led to what has been called the "Centralia Massacre" probably began in 1915 when vigilante action against the IWW first took place in Centralia. Men looking for work and food were run out of town by "special policemen" who helped the authorities rid the town of the Wobblies. The Centralia Chronicle praised the "public-spirited" citizens for keeping the city clear of these people. Centralians mirrored the national sentiment about the Wobblies: they were considered "troublemakers, thieves, liars and bums." According to many newspaper editorials of the day, the IWW intended to destroy America's economic system. They were not entirely wrong-the IWW called for the abolition of the wage system in favor of then-unheard-of, worker-owned businesses.

In May of the year that would see the end of World War I, members of the Centralia Home Guard and Elks marched in a parade to raise money for the Red Cross. The marchers broke ranks in front of the IWW hall and raided it, throwing furniture, records and Wobbly literature into the street and setting it on fire. A desk and phonograph from the hall were auctioned off and the money donated to the Red Cross. The men inside the hall were "lifted by their ears" into a truck, driven out of town where they were forced to run the gauntlet while being beaten with sticks and ax handles....

[again] The hall was raided; the Wobblies defended their hall, and two legionnaires were killed. When Wesley Everest who was was armed and inside the IWW hall tried to make his escape, he shot two of the men who were pursuing him. Now there were four legionnaires dead. The need to exact instant retribution overcame the survivors; Everest was captured and almost hanged before he was taken to jail. That night the power was cut off in Centralia and Everest was taken from the jail there to a bridge over the Chehalis River and hanged.

I read stories like that of Wesley Everest and Harry Bridges and I think of Dr. King. The idea that both Everest and Bridges brought to this fight so long before Dr. King came to even be a whisper in the wind was that of fighting for what was right. Taking a stand and not backing down. These men knew what solidarity meant, they lived it, breathed it, they embodied it. And as I remember Dr. King this weekend, I also remember that we are all in this together, that

the poorest people in our country today, on the whole, are working every day. But they are earning wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation. We have thousands and thousands of people working on full-time jobs, with part-time incomes.

Long live Harry Bridges, Wesley Everest and Dr. Martin Luther King.


These quotes and other Dr. King quotes are available here.

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