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UPPNET News Editorial on Labor Media Book Review Interview: Mike Konapacki Talks About His Labor Cartoon Animations Interview with South Korean Labor Media Activist '97 LaborTECH Points To Use of Technology
Editorial on Labor Media Let's Discuss This for Crying Out Loud by Howard Kling, Pres. UPPNET Raise your hands if you think public relations and commercial spot buys should be the only media strategy of organized labor. Thank you. OK. Now raise your hands if you think building more independent labor media and communications capabilities is the way to go. OK. Raise your hands if you think labor should find ways to challenge capital's nearly total domination of mass information and communications. OK. Thanks. I think there's room for discussion. I've got a confession to make. I created a bunch of commercials for a few unions earlier in my media career. The locals involved paid a gazillion dollars to get them on TV a few special times a year. I don't know anybody that ever saw the things at 6 and 11, though plenty of people must have. They were pretty good, really. I know there are lots of union commercials out there. I guess they kinda work, after all politicians use the technique. They certainly seem harmless enough. And they're fun to do. Expensive though. See, I'm easy. On the other hand, we do a rather inexpensive weekly labor cable show that gets all around the state of Minnesota. And we create videos for other venues as well; and web pages. We're members of IATSE. I have no idea how many workers watch our program on Channel 6; or how many anybodies watch it for that matter. But, I do know that we get phone calls from state officials, and legislators and the governor's office and business leaders and tycoons all wanting a certain program or complaining about a certain program or wanting us fired or whatever. And union folks I run into mention a show every now and then. And a neighbor I don't know very well thought a program we did about a transit strike was the best coverage he'd seen. I also know that we use other union producer's stuff, like Labor Beat in Chicago. That's some of what UPPNET is all about. I'd say the labor movement is pretty lucky to have independent labor video and radio programs and production units dotted around the U.S. There are all kinds of advantages. And possibilities. But back to reality. The Broadcast folks at the AFL-CIO told me that they received lots and lots of valuable 1-800 calls as a result of the commercial spots they ran during the elections. So they work. And their public relations with the mass media has worked pretty well so far as well; look at all the coverage. And if organizers do their job well and PR is handled right, the mainstream media will cover the story and workers and unions won't have to figure out how to get the message out themselves (sort of like Field of Dreams, or was it Wayne's World?) And it is important that the union message be tightly controlled from the top so that it is coherent and consistent. Quality control is important as well. Beautiful images and perfect video are preferred to the ragged stuff found on union public access shows. Not the right image for labor. Like Mr. Jefferson's Report says, "image" is the key if you want your message to fly. And image is our business, said the PR spider. You know, I get excited about beautiful lighting and a great interview and the perfect shot and terrific editing too. I've produced and edited feature films that were purchased by big bad Disney Corporation. I know about this stuff. A lot of it is about money. But you only have to tune into some of the popular network shows like Cops to realize that this discussion is a minefield of contradictions. For the AFL to embrace the beautyboys imagespeak and use it against their own out in the field is really sad. The pattern developing in AFL-CIO media policy relies heavily if not exclusively on embracing the world of corporate media. There doesn't seem to be much room for being critical of the conglomerates any more, either in style or substance. Not even PBS. There also doesn't seem to be much room for being involved with grass roots labor media, either. For Pete's sake, you can't even get a media list from them anymore. D.C.'s reasoning starts with the observation that all the money that was spent on labor television during the reign of LIPA did little to help the labor movement. Media fiddled while labor burned out and lost millions of members. Who can argue with that. Public Affairs feels it needs to go in a different direction. OK, but, didn't LIPA back off from grass roots media all by itself? Didn't they instead do all those expensive commercials not so back when that didn't really work? If so, then how is this new direction a different dir. . . but . . . But I guess I'm still easy. There are some positive changes like coordinating commercial buys with organizing activities and so on, and I can see value in a variety of approaches. Spots and public relations handling of leaders are useful tactics, no doubt about it. But shouldn't there be some perspective, some caution, some recognition of the big picture tagging along with this activity? Shouldn't we worry about the fact that the corporate media can shut us out any time they like? As in: did the Detroit solidarity rally really happen in medialand? There's a PR success. As in: could the striking union members in Detroit buy spot time and ad space to run their own local announcements? As in: will Out At Work by Tami Gold appear on PBS? No. Whoops. How do we confront this unless we develop our own independent media further and get in the face of those who silence the stories of working people and labor instead of giving in to their gameplan. What's the long view? Problems in paradise. Then there is the point of view that the very existence of the TV box creates alienated and isolated individuals, destroys community, and substitutes a powerful, fictitious, ideologically motivated image of ourselves and our neighborhood that keeps people from acting in their own better interests. I agree with the notion of challenging our passive, isolating culture and think we should be cautious about the physical and structural realities of mass media as we create our own vollies in the media war. The danger is that the very rules of engagement constrain the cultural and ideological expression of one side in the confrontation - our side? TV is alienating. We need community. Now what? If that's too extreme, it's certainly not so extreme to wonder whether the exclusive way to go is a total capitulation to the most superficial, the most alienating, the most symbolically greedy form of capitalist media, the commercial spot and its comrade, PR. Are unions just one more commodity straight from the electronic bazaar to be consumed by the public: take Rogaine for thinning hair and Union for thinning wallets? Or are unions part of a movement that thrives at its heart from a value system that resists the commodification of everything that moves and doesn't move. Our humanness is insulted by crass commodification. Do we want public relations? Or do we want information, interaction, transformation, and solidarity? Do we want to be handled, or should we just handle it ourselves? Of course this is not a new debate, just a missing one. Somewhere in there is the stuff of a great renewed discussion that is just not happening, a discussion we in the labor movement ought to be having while we are in the process of reinventing and reinvigorating organizing and union building. It is almost as important as the debate over organizing styles, and business unionism vs. organizing unionism itself, and should similarly be taken seriously. The cultural and media context within which organizing takes place is crucial. Clearly I'm for the debate because I think the current national priorities could use a little adjustment. The end product I'd hope for would be a better thought-out media and cultural strategy that is informed by an understanding of how both content and form influence people's way of seeing and thinking, a plan that recognizes the special nature and advantages of this huge collection of workers voices we call organized labor. It doesn't have to come down to whether we should ever do commercials, or whether we should never gain PR advise when entering the minefield of the commercial media. Such absolutes are not very practical and give up a lot for some fairly academic principles. The media debate ought to be about how we understand such behaviors, about priorities and context and a vision that goes well beyond expediencies. Let's reexamine the nature of the labor movement itself and the character of labor media in all its facets? Is there anything unique, even precious, about it? The resulting strategy I'd like to see would include more, not less, support for independent labor media. I don't think it would be at all crazy if the AFL sought to reinvent the project of developing localized labor media throughout its domain. Every state or region or area should have what Minnesota has, at the very least. Or what Missouri has. It's practical. It works. A larger network of producers and production facilities with slots on the dial in more communities would be very cool. How could state feds and central bodies be the vehicles, or, like ours, how could university labor centers be utilized? How could Public Affairs help with networking and sharing footage and radio segments and the like? There could be a plan. In the longer run, how could this kind of multiplied activity result in enough programming to warrant a national labor cable channel to compete with all those right wing stations? One more point. I would hope that we haven't made such a pact with the PR devil that our responsibility to challenge the undemocratic nature of the whole shebang has been silenced. Shouldn't labor be at the forefront of pointing out the biases of the networks, the dangers in the concentration of media ownership, the corporatization of PBS, the continual erosion of alternate voices in the phony pundit battles, the actual censorship of working people's voices? I'm just gearing up for the debate. It'll happen, won't it? Let's discuss this for crying out loud! Book Review WCFL: Chicago's Voice of Labor, 1926-78 by Nathan Godfried, University of Illinois Press, 1997 At midnight on March 21st, 1976 WCFL, one of Chicago's big time rock-and-roll radio stations, played an hour of the sounds of soothing ocean waves as a transition from the station's rock-and-roll era to beautiful music. Within two years the station was sold by the Chicago Federation of Labor to Amway Corporation, thus ending labor's premier experiment in owning and operating a mass media outlet whose goals varied from establishing a national network of progressive labor radio stations to using the station as a cash cow. The history of WCFL, as told in Nathan Godfried's well researched and well presented book, gives us a sense of the hopes and aspirations not only of the station but of the Chicago Fed as well. We also see the business aspects of unionism specifically with the Chicago Fed, but more generally in the union movement as a whole. The story of WCFL begins with the Chicago Federation of Labor's interest in progressive political activity after World War I. CFL President John Fitzpatrick's advocacy of independent political activity and a Cook County Labor Party gave him the incentive to develop an interest in mass media and in radio. This concern with politics and media was shared by CFL Secretary Ed Nockels who became the main advocate and organizer within the Chicago Fed and Chicago's labor community until his death in 1937. By the founding of WCFL in 1926 much of the politics of Chicago's labor movement had changed and, while Fitzpatrick and Nockels might have continued to be seen as independent and therefore loose cannons on some issues by elements of the Chicago and national labor movement, their outlook and perspective became closer to mainstream labor with the passage of time. For the radio station this meant inspiration from the more radical post-World War I days came to fruition at a more conservative time. Notwithstanding the very real difficulties of finance and organization faced by WCFL as described by Godfried, this conflict in orientation made the station a difficult project for the Chicago Fed. Fitzpatrick and Nockels' original hope of making the station Chicago's "Voice of Labor", the station's identifying tag, ran into the reality of developing programming that would appeal to a mass audience. Much of the "sound" of the station was similar to Chicago's other superstations of the time with music, sports and humor being the staple of WCFL. Specific labor oriented programs were always broadcast, especially in the 1920s and early 1930s and many of the more popular shows were given a labor twist, such as the children's daily variety program, the Junior Federation Club, which was co-sponsored by the Chicago Teachers Union and the Chicago Board of Education. These labor programs were often successful (the Junior Federation Club received 40,000 letters from Chicago children in the fall of 1930) but they were the exception on the station. This need to develop a mass audience came not only from the politics of the CFL's desire to reach a large number of workers but also from the imperative of being able to sell the station to advertisers and justify the station to the government regulatory agencies which were often not pleased to give valuable air space to the labor movement. Originally conceived as a listener-sponsored station with a small dues tax on the Fed's union members, it soon became clear that the unions were not interested in continuing to pay for the upkeep of WCFL. Much of Nockels work as soul and spirit of WCFL was in keeping the station financially solvent, sometimes by getting union sponsorship for specific programs, more and more often by getting sponsors who were looking for an audience. Protecting the station from the government wolf at the door was no less of a task than developing funding for the station. Continually challenged by the corporate networks, WCFL had to prove its right to the airwaves. It had to prove it could deliver programming to a mass audience - just as the corporate networks did. One aspect of the increasingly obvious contradiction between the hope of the CFL to build a grassroots radio station and the economic imperative for audience was the discussion the CFL entered into with archenemy NBC in the late-1930s. With NBC, the CFL could find a distribution network for WCFL; with an increasingly conservative Chicago Federation of Labor, NBC hoped to find a strong station for its own programming. Although this relationship did not move beyond the discussion stage, it did show the distance the CFL had traveled from its original intention of being a progressive media voice for labor. This point can be emphasized if we know that at the same time the CFL was talking with NBC, it was also refusing air time to the newly organized CIO which was forced to buy time on a spot basis on other stations for its own shows. As the Chicago Fed became more closely linked with the national American Federation of Labor, it paralleled the AF of L's hostility to the challenge the new industrial organizing was presenting to established labor. WCFL had a long ride as an important attempt of labor to have its own voice on the airwaves. Fighting the political and economic realities of its time, the station, as well as the CFL itself, lost its way as a vehicle for a progressive labor movement. Nathan Godfried has given us a good story and he ends his book with a challenge to those of us trying to use our own media as a voice of labor: our efforts must be dependent on the varied cultures of our working class communities. When our efforts cease responding to the movements of working people and their needs, we will more easily succumb to the obstacles placed in our way by corporate society and its media. - Wayne Heimbach
Mike Konapacki Talks About His Labor Cartoon Animations Mike Konapacki, of the labor cartoon team of Huck and Konapacki, has been cartooning for about 20 years. H&K are probably the best-known labor cartoonists in the U.S. Recently, Mike Konapacki has produced labor cartoon animation. UPPNET Newsletter's Larry Duncan conducts this interview. L.D.: You've been successful as a labor cartoonist for some twenty years. Konapacki: I started drawing cartoons for a strike newspaper in Madison in 1978, and Gary Huck was working for the Racine labor paper, so we started Huck-Konapacki Cartoons in 1983. L.D.: You've been using a traditional technology which is, I guess, about 30,000 years old if we start from cave drawings. Konapacki: Yea, except drawing with crayon on paper, that was at the turn of the century with photo engraving. You didn't have to have a block of stone and a big company to print cartoons. You could take a black crayon and draw on a piece of newsprint and you could have a political cartoon printed. That's how the Wobbly cartoons became so prolific because before that Thomas Nast had to engrave everything on a stone, drawn backwards. L.D.: What set of circumstances led you to getting into cartoon animation? Konapacki: Computers. A friend of mine and I once tried to do some film animation. You had to send the film away someplace to have it developed. But if you wanted to do a pencil test you had to wait a month before you got the film back to see where you made all your mistakes. So computers changed all that. You don't need film anymore. You could do it all on a desktop. And with all this animation software and with paint programs like Photoshop and with scanners you can do all this digitally. L.D.: Can you tell us about your new demo tape with cartoon animation? Konapacki: Well, a couple of years ago I was working for a labor lawyer, a guy named Ed Garvey. And he was adept in computer and video equipment. So he started a video studio. Right now his studio does political commercials for candidates, and industrials, and videotapes for labor unions and so on. So I started experimenting with just using some drawings in a video format. The tape that I sent out was really very early stuff. Mouseconsin was done in 1993 or '92 I think. And all that was a slide show. We were trying to see if we could put digital drawings into videotape and would it work. In the meantime, I took a couple of classes at the local tech school on a program called MacroMedia Director, which is an animation program. Then I stated thinking 'Why not animate my labor cartoons?' and 'Why couldn't they be animated in full color?' Then the Web came along, and I found that I could animate a couple of cartoons and put them on a website, so that way I could experiment and teach myself how to do this animation, and have a place to show it. But there are a lot of labor video producers, and I thought, well nobody is using animated political cartoons in their videos. Now that this technology exists, that's what I want to try. I want to see if I can provide something like that. As the labor press gradually shrinks, more and more communicators are using video, and so for a cartoonist it just seems logical that we evolve. It used to be the International Labor Press Association, and now, because there's video and audio and radio, it's the International Labor Communications Association. So as a labor cartoonist, I felt that it only makes sense to keep the art of labor cartooning current, and try to adapt it to the new technologies that people are using to communicate. We want to be able provide labor cartoons for the world wide web and we also want to be able to provide them for video. L.D.: In the demo tape you have two samples of 30 second spots dealing with a political campaign. Then you have Mouseconsin, which is about 5 minutes. In Mouseconsin how much time, how many scenes were done, what kind of a project was that for you? Konapacki: Well, again, Mouseconsin really wasn't an animated cartoon, it's really more of a slide show. The characters don't move, it's really a series of different pictures. We were commissioned by some political activists, and they had some money, and I did it in about a week. Unfortunately, I think in some ways it looks like that. But what the demo tape does is show an evolution of the kinds of things I've been teaching myself. So I first started out doing the slide show, and then the other stuff are really considered web animation. L.D.: It's like animation on Saturday morning cartoons. It's not a full-blown frame-by-frame animation like Disney, with 3,000 underpaid animators in Taiwan working on it. Konapacki: Just one underpaid animator in Madison. But the reason I did that tape is not to provide anything on the tape for use, it was just to get people thinking: 'Hey, maybe we could put some animated cartoons on our videos'. And so I wanted the tape to show it's possible. L.D.: When I do cinema verité videos, I feel that often I'm locked into the surface appearance of visual reality, and am prevented from getting too far into imaginative treatment of the subject or into abstraction. But with cartoons, for example, you can even present graphics, pie charts, and so on as animations that are visually interesting, entertaining. Konapacki: That's all part of it. Also, the labor movement needs to become part of popular culture. Why aren't there labor comic books? Why aren't there labor comedy shows? L.D.: Why isn't there a labor cable tv channel nationally? Konapacki: Yes. If you had a national labor tv channel you wouldn't have John Sweeney and Richard Trumka sitting at a table doing talking heads all day long. You'd have to have something in it. So what would you have? You'd have maybe labor films, a half-hour comedy show, even an animated kid's show. Everything that's on commercial television could be adapted to a labor channel. Because that's what people grew up with. There's no reason that the labor movement couldn't do it. The point I'd really like to make is that this stuff should become more and more available. I was talking with Patrice O'Neil at We Do The Work, and was trying to get her to think that they produce the kind of shows you might see on a labor tv channel. Why couldn't they have animated political cartoons? I don't know anybody who has animated political cartoons. I don't see them on tv. You see a lot of animation, but you don't see animated political cartoons. I sent the tape out to her and the members of her board just to say 'What if you could have animated political cartoons on your show?' You have to almost hold people's hand and say this is what you can do, then actually show them this is what can be done. Because people really can't conceptualize it. We did a comic book on the World Bank that was commissioned by a labor secretariat in Europe and we showed it around to people at the AFL-CIO and they all said 'Well, that's really neat' but really didn't take the next step and say, 'Well, how can we use popular culture in the same way?' L.D.: They didn't get the hint. Konapacki: I don't know what you have to do. Finally, the CWA got it, and they commissioned Alec Dubro, who's with the Writers Union, and me to do a full, four-color comic book on Murphy Brown does her FYI show on the Sprint workers at La Connecion Familiar. It was the Spanish-language telemarketing firm that Sprint had in San Francisco. Eight days before they were going to vote whether they were going to have the CWA, Sprint shut this place down and fired 177 workers because they didn't want them unionized. So we did a 4-page full color comic book on that story. And if you get America@Work, the AFL-CIO magazine, they're going to insert it in the next issue. Again, our point was, we can do this stuff, so why doesn't the labor movement use it? I was talking with Richard Bensinger at the Organizing Institute to see if he wont commission a 16-page comic book on organizing on why you should joint the union. L.D.: What kind of new toys would you like to have in developing computer animation? Konapacki: I'd like to have all this stuff at home. I take it now over to the video studio where they have an Avid and where they all the editing and sweetening. They have a recording studio, character voices, lay music on top of all this stuff. Technically I use MacroMedia Director and Premiere and Photoshop. So the software is there to create 2-D animation. And all you have to do then is just convert it to videotape. Premiere is a pretty good editing program, but when you go up to the Avid, which is this monster Macintosh with all this memory, you can do some really good fine tuning. Since everything is digital now, and non-linear it makes it that much more accessible. Right now I'm working on a 30-second animation called "Bill Clinton's Free Trade Fast Track". It's going to be a full-screen animation. L.D.: Would that be available as a PSA for public access? Konapacki: Yea. That's my intention. The other thing, instead of doing the three-minute cartoons like people are used to, we're doing basically what are almost commercials because they're 30 seconds spots. And in order to fit into a labor video show you want to have something short and sweet that's self-contained, just like a commercial. I've got a second one on China's most favored nation status. If I can get these two done and on tape and send out to people, and if it becomes something that people are interested in, I'm going to try to provide at least one a month if I can find the time to do it. For more information: Mike Konopacki, PO Box 1217, Madison, WI 53701, Mkonopcki@aol.com http://artcon.rutgers.edu/cwac/hkcartoons Interview with South Korean Labor Media Activist Paul Field interviewed Myoung-Joon Kim, film critic, political activist, Chief Producer of Labor News Productions and adviser to the Social Information Networking Group P. F.: What role did Labor News Productions perform in the recent general strike ? Myoung-Joon: During this strike, that symbolically represented workers' fightback against neo-liberalism, technologies that usually serve capitalist ideologies were used by activists for the empowerment of working people. Electronic communication and video were widely and effectively employed. LNP made two video reports on the strike, both immediately distributed throughout the nation using the network of democratic unions. Our newsreels combined reportage, analysis, local reports by each region, speeches by workers and citizens and music videos. Actual footage of struggle, that never appeared on mainstream TV, was captured by many un-named camera-persons. Working people used these videos as tools for information and discussion. They were also screened in other countries such as USA, Japan, Germany, France, Brazil and England. In addition, the videos were immediately placed on the Internet strike Home Page run by SING (http://kpd.sing-kr.org/strike/main.html) and were seen by a large foreign audience. P. F.: How does the state in South Korea attempt to control the flow of information ? Myoung-Joon: Under the current laws, any person who is in the business of producing Korean movies or of importing foreign movies must register with the head of the Ministry of Culture and Sports or face two years imprisonment. They must also be a corporate entity in possession of capital in excess of a standard amount determined by Presidential Order, and must deposit that amount with a bank. Before a movie is shown in theatres it must be submitted to and approved by the Public Performances Ethics Committee. Any person who fails to gain approval but still shows the movies in public can be imprisoned for two years Similarly, anyone who produces or imports video products for sale, distribution, lending or supply for viewing and listening must also receive approval from the Public Performance Ethics Committee beforehand, and failure to do so can result in three years imprisonment. Currently, the police are investigating LNP on the basis of the video law. They want to attack us using the notorious national security law, but it's not easy for them to make use of this so they may make use of the video law instead. When it comes to Internet and electronic communications, censorship is rather subtle, because this medium is new and its technology makes it difficult to censor. But some of the people who wrote in the electronic bulletin board have been arrested by the police using the national security law. Also, the government has formed a censorship committee on electronic communication. P. F.: You are an adviser to the Social Information Networking Group (SING) that produced the excellent general strike Internet website. Can you describe in more detail the contribution made by such groups? Myoung-Joon: The Telecommunication Taskgroup for General Strike (TTGS) was made up of volunteers from many progressive communication groups, including SING. TTGS transferred urgent reports on the spot and regularly published news through the bulletin board system and the Internet. It used a mailing list to communicate between groups and individuals in Korea and all over the world, and constructed a WWW Home Page, that played a great role in arousing world-wide support. There was also the Black ribbon and Signature Campaign on the bulletin board and the Internet to protest against the amended labor law. TTGS also prepared on-line discussions about the amendments between leaders of the governing party and the trade unions. P. F.: As a long-standing political activist, how do you assess the balance of class forces since the January general strike? Myoung-Joon: Thanks to the general strike, the political power of the workers has become stronger than ever. But, as there is no political representation, such as a workers party, labor party, or any other progressive or left party, workers lack any institutionalised political power and are simply left with a rather big national union and a collection of very small political groups who want to form a party. So,in the near future, especially during the presidential election in December, Korean progressive activists and workers must form some kind of political organizing structure which will lead to the formation of a party. There are some arguments about strategy but all agree we need our own political representation and can never rely on the existing conservative parties. P. F.: What are the priorities and challenges facing the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions in the future? Myoung-Joon: In my personal opinion, the priorities are: 1. establishing political representation for labor; 2. strengthening internal democratic structures of the unions to involve rank and file workers in decision-making; 3. developing a counter-strategy against new management policies based on increased competition and globalization; 4. organizing the millions of non-union factory workers; 5. developing solidarity with foreign trade unions - indispensable at this time of globalization. In order to achieve these priorities, a modern communication strategy must play a key role. - July '97 Labor Left Briefing '97 LaborTECH Points To Use of Technology by Steve Zeltzer Over 150 labor video, computer and media communicators came together from around the world for the 1997 LaborTECH conference held at San Francisco State University on July 11, 12 & 13. Panelists reported on internet use for union democracy and solidarity. Daymon Hartley, a Detroit newspaper striker, reported on how he used the internet to mobilize for Action! Motown '97. Mark Hannibell, an American Airlines Pilot who helped establish a web page called APA Pilots Defending The Profession, told how the union prepared to fight AA and how he used the network to inform members of a proposed contract that would have made major concessions. The pilots using their network were able to get the deal voted down and also put in new leadership. Chris Bailey from Labournet UK had helped established the Docker's web page which was used to help build an international dockers strike on Jan. 20, 1997. There were workshops on a host of issues from developing labor tv shows on cable and how to finance them as well as on line labor communities on the internet. A panel on privatization of the internet reported that TCI and other media companies are dominating every aspect of broadcasting from the internet, cable television and PBS. One of the hottest debates was the labor communication and NAFTA and GATT panel. Jim Catterson, an information officer with the ICEM in Brussels, noted that the implementation of GATT and other trade agreements are a direct threat to labor rights internationally. Judith Barrish, Communications Director of The California Federation of Labor, pointed out that the effort to expand NAFTA throughout the hemisphere is opposed by more and more unions. Ed Rosario, president of the SF chapter of Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, announced a conference on November 14-16 in San Francisco of unionists from throughout the Western Hemisphere to organize against NAFTA and privatizations. A web page is also being set up to provide a report from each and every country that will have representatives on how these trade agreements have effected their members and the country as a whole. Myoung Joon Kim from the Korean Labor Video Production discussed video and the internet in South Korea [see interview on p. 5] Onder Ozdemir, from the Turkish trade union federation DISK, said the struggle against privatization in Turkey had been helped by his ability to get information about anti- privatization fights around the world. Ken Hamide, an organizer of Face Intel and a group of workers from Microsoft, reported on how the computer industry contracts out their work and seeks to isolate workers from each other through subcontracting. Hamide also reported on the racism at Intel where many of the technologists are immigrants yet when pictures are taken of the developers, they are white executives with the company. Conference reports would be available on video and on the web. There was also discussion of a future LaborTECH meeting and where it might be held and there was general agreement that it had provided an important vehicle to network and build stronger labor communication links. In September, 1997 the AFL-CIO will be holding its national convention in Pittsburgh. We would like to see these resolutions [continued on last page] or resolutions like them brought to the floor at the September convention. Labor Media Resolutions for AFL-CIO Convention
Resolution on Detroit Radio Stations
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