A strike by hotel workers in LA, SF, and DC will probably start early next week. The crucial demand by workers is for a two year contract which would expire in 2006. This would insure the contracts for all hotel workers nationwide would then expire on the same date, a major advantage in dealing with the multi-nationals who run the hotel chains.

Unite Here, the union, is smart and savvy, and has been lining up community support nationwide. ANSWER LA, for example, will “adopt” one hotel one day a week and bring people to the picket lines. On the first two days of the strike, the union asks everyone to join the picket lines. Expect several actions nationwide early on, with mass civil disobedience and arrests.

Among other demands, the union wants work schedules, which have been drastically increased due to staffing cutbacks, reduced to something manageable. They also want the hotels to hire more African-Americans. Y’see, a while back, the hotel chains began hiring primarily immigrant women of color, in hopes they would be more malleable. Were they ever wrong! One union organizer, an Anglo, says “these are the strongest women I’ve ever met.”

Now these same immigrant women want the chains to hire more African-Americans. That’s what is known as “solidarity!”

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Slavery abounds in U.S., rights group says

Modern-day slavery is alive and well in the United States, say the authors of a report on forced labor that was released Thursday.

According to the report, “Hidden Slaves: Forced Labor in the United States” — which was conducted by researchers at the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley and Free the Slaves, a nonprofit group in Washington, D.C. — at any given time, at least 10,000 people are forced to work against their will through threats or violence.

PoliZeros has learned of cases where mentally ill homeless people in the US were recruited on the streets for “jobs”, transported to farms, then held in bondage and forced to work without pay.

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Stop Bush postcards

Direct from the streets of NY to postcards

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BadArchitecture.com

An investigation of the not-so-subtle in Beijing architecture.”

Welcome to Beijing: a world of random chaos, a fitting and fascinating laboratory for contemporary architecture.

While our exercise is playful, it ultimately aims to observe this particular place, which produces a contemporary architecture that impulsively pulsates with so much bombast, flamboyance and bravado.

Much of it is non-Western architecture certainly, freed from the strictures of the Bauhaus school which decreed that office buildings have no ornamentation and be glass boxes. See Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House for more on this.

Beijing ain’t the West. Good!

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