Dec. 2, 2006

TAR HEEL, N.C. — Close to 1,000 Smithfield Packing Co. workers walked off the job here Nov. 16 to protest illegal firings, and they won against big odds.

Folks were still eating turkey sandwiches when the AFL-CIO issued its call for a Dec. 8-9 labor summit and march in Washington, D.C., to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, a top legislative priority for labor. Among the summit’s goals is training 250,000 “trusted messengers,” worksite-based labor activists, to force veto-proof enactment of EFCA.

FORT BENNING, Ga. — More than 22,000 people from all over the United States and Canada, half of them young people, gathered here Nov. 17-19 to demand that the Defense Department’s School of the Americas (SOA) be shut down and that justice prevail in Latin America.

HOUSTON — Nationwide pressure — everything from pending strikes elsewhere to a strong statement from a key U.S. senator — plus images of Houston’s mounted police beating and arresting unarmed janitors forced this city’s top cleaning firms to bargain and finally give striking janitors here a big win on Nov. 20.

BOSTON — Newspapers headlines throughout the Commonwealth of Massachusetts unanimously proclaimed the Nov. 7 electoral victory of Deval Patrick as “historic.” And right they were. Patrick, a former assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Clinton administration, became only the second African American elected governor of a U.S. state.

NEW YORK: Police kill groom in hail of bullets
AROUND THE NATION: NOW leaders elected to office
MAMARONECK, N.Y.: Court rules town discriminated against Latinos

At press time, with official tallies showing he had won 57 percent of the vote, Rafael Correa of the left-leaning Alianza País party claimed victory over right-wing millionaire Alvaro Noboa in the Nov. 26 run-off election for the presidency of Ecuador.

India: Union to organize IT workers
Sweden: Unions resist gov’t attacks on workers
Zambia: Gov’t seeks revenue increases, expanded social services
Great Britain: Oxfam condemns rich nations for putting patents before people

Anger is spreading across Florida that once again, as in the 2000 election, vote theft has put the wrong candidate in office in Washington.

NEW YORK — “The right-wing stranglehold on Congress has been broken,” Joelle Fishman, chair of the Communist Party USA’s political action commission, told a meeting of its national committee here, Nov. 18-19.