038. Marches

On Valentine's Day 2011 Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker proposed his Budget Repair Bill.  This bill would eliminate the ability for several labor unions to collectively bargain with the state.  

The bill would also limit groups allowed to bargain to be able to negotiate only base wages for their members.  Additionally, this bill forced state employees to increase the percentage they would pay for health insurance from 6% to 12%, and retirement pension from less than 1% to 5.8%.  

For many years in Sri Lanka, tensions have existed between the Tamils, 12.6% of the total population, and the Sinhalese, representing 74% of the population. One of the main root causes of this conflict could be traced back to British colonization, which saw partiality displayed by the British toward the Tamils through concessions and the subsequent marginalization of the Sinhalese.

In the spring and early summer of 2009, the Rochester City School District faced serious budget cuts to its schools. Among the schools to be affected was the magnet School of the Arts (SOTA), one of the highest performing schools in the district, which placed a special emphasis on the inclusion of arts in the student curriculum.

There was a scheduled School Board Meeting to be held regarding the budget cuts on June 10, at which time a vote on whether they were to pass was to take place.

The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) is the largest university in Latin America, with over 270,000 enrolled students. It is credited with educating a number of Mexican presidents as well as prominent Latin American academics. In 1999, students attending UNAM paid approximately $0.02 for semester tuition.

After fighting in World War One, American soldiers returned home to find that they had missed out on the chance to earn a significant amount of money while away. The average soldier was paid much less than the average factory worker during the First World War, and in an effort to win back some level of equity, WWI veterans lobbied Congress to compensate them for the wages they had lost out on while serving the country in combat. They carefully used the phrase "adjusted compensation" (instead of "bonus", a term used by their opponents) to describe the money they argued they were owed.

In the summer of 1990, Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Canadians gathered at a “Peace Camp” in Oka, Quebec, Canada and a “Peace Village” in Winnipeg Manitoba, Canada. Their goal was four-fold:

1. To support the Mohawks of Kanehsatake and Kahnawake Quebec who were in a stand-off with the Canadian government and military

2. To bring attention to issues of injustice towards Aboriginal people in Canada

Phnom Penh, Cambodia, is situated on the confluence of four rivers: the Upper and Lower Mekong rivers, the Bassac River and the Tonle Sap river. The surrounding area is flat and low-lying, subject to annual flooding. Natural lakes formed as the rivers changed course over time and communities grew up around the edges of these lakes, using them for fishing and aquatic agriculture. 

In January 2011, in the wake of the Tunisian revolution and in the midst of the Egyptian revolution, Yemeni students and youth began a yearlong revolution to oust the regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh, president for the past thirty years. This revolution did not come without great cost. More than 2,000 people were killed (including protesters, military defectors and children) and more than 22,000 people were wounded.

Formed in 1995, the WTO serves as an organization that facilitates trade amongst 123 nations. The first major protest against the WTO occurred in 1999 in Seattle, Washington. United States citizens were protesting the WTO’s ministerial conference because they claimed that the WTO was breaking down nation states’ sovereignty. Specifically they were concerned with workers’ rights and the concept of the “race to the bottom”, in which countries companies compete to pay their employees the lowest wages, resulting in massive employee exploitation.

Dissatisfied with lack of democracy and the Soviet Union’s influence on their country, Ukrainian university students in L'viv established the Student Brotherhood in March of 1989.  In December students in the capital city of Kiev formed the Ukrainian Students Union. 

In Fall 2007, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) ordered the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) to spray an experimental pheromone-based pesticide over counties on the Central Coast of California.  In doing so, the USDA aimed to eradicate the Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM), a pest deemed highly destructive by the USDA.  In order to conduct the test sprays, the USDA added $90 million to the CDFA budget. 

This campaign was part of a greater movement of international opposition to Apartheid in South Africa. The divestment from South Africa was advocated in the United States in the 1960s, but support for divestiture did not reach full scale until the 1980s. The Stanford student solidarity sit-in campaign of 1977 came early on in the rise of this economic pressure.

In 2003, the University of California-Santa Cruz (UCSC) began the process of creating a Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) for the University.  The LRDP, which was revised in 2005, would destroy 120 acres of redwood forest in the University’s upper campus and add 4,500 students to the school.  Many students, faculty, staff, and Santa Cruz community members were outraged over the plan, seeing the destruction of the forest to be more than a development project; the area is home to endangered species such as the Burrowing Owl and the Red-Legged Frog.  Additionally, the increase

Nepal is a small Himalayan country that borders China and India with a population of about 20 million and with a famous ethnic and religious diversity. Established as a monarchy in the mid-18th century, its form of government was hotly contested in 1972 with the death of King Mahendra and the accession of his son, Birenda. The king maintained power but promised a national referendum on the panchayat system of councils, which then allowed the king almost total autocratic control.

Like students at many other colleges and universities at the turn of the millennium, students at Macalester College began to react against sweatshop and anti-union corporations that supplied the school store with apparel in 2000.  Inspired by student activism at Duke University the previous year and a highly publicized sit-in at the University of Pennsylvania the previous month, Macalester students escalated their campaign on Monday morning, March 6, with a sit-in on the steps of the President’s office.  

The year 1997 marked the start of a nation-wide anti-sweatshop movement led and fueled by college and university students from over 200 campuses. Inspired by early movements on Georgetown and University of Pennsylvania campuses and enraged by Bill Clinton’s attempt to mollify the public’s anger with the creation of the corrupt Fair Labor Union (FLA), University of Iowa students established a Students Against Sweatshops (SAS, or UISAS) chapter in 1999.

In December 1994, the city of Baltimore passed a city ordinance mandating that employees of companies receiving city contracts be paid a living wage (defined as a wage that keeps a family of four above the federally determined poverty level adjusted yearly for cost of living increases and inflation).

In 1917, the government of Alfredo Gonzalez Flores was overthrown in a coup d'état, wherein Minister of War Federico Tinoco seized power and appointed his brother, Jose Joaquin Tinoco, the new Minister of War. During this time the Tinoco regime severely curtailed civil liberties and the freedom of the press and assembly.

Morocco is a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament. Political reforms in the 1990s expanded parliamentary power in 1992 and 1996, and in 1996 a bicameral legislature consisting of two chambers was established. On his accession to the throne in 1999, King Mohammed VI promised to enact a series of reforms democratizing the monarchy, but this was seen as largely unfulfilled. King Mohammad VI succeeded his father, King Hassan, who had ruled for thirty-seven years. Hassan’s rule, known as the “Years of Lead,” was largely marked by violence against state dissidents.

In 2011, the Independent Electoral Commission of Benin organized a new electronic voting system for the upcoming presidential election, which would require voters to be pre-registered in order to fill out their ballots. The Commission registered people by going door to door in 77 different Beninese counties. This method didn’t prove to be effective enough however, as around 1.3 million Beninese citizens were still not registered to vote. Many questioned the credibility of the voters role when such a large number of voters were unregistered by the end of February (close to election time).

Bolivia’s transition to a democratic government began in 1978 when then military dictator Hugo Banzer Suarez stepped down after international and internal pressure for Bolivia to hold democratic elections. While the Democratic Popular Union (Unidad Democratica y Popular, UDP), led by Hernan Siles Zuazo, won the 1978 elections, Juan Pereda Asbum, Banzer’s chosen successor, launched a military coup and declared the elections invalid.

On 21 December 1963, the Greek-Turkish controlled island of Cyprus experienced extreme intercommunal violence between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots. The capital, Nicosia, was thereafter divided into two sectors by a “Green Line”, separating the two communities. 

Artificial baby milks—so called “infant formula”—became widespread commercial product during the early decades of the twentieth century. Among many companies involved, Nestlé’s was the biggest promoter, controlling more than 40% of the estimated $1.72 billion market. Nestle aggressively pursued the interest from infant formula with indiscriminate marketing. The marketing that evoked popular indictment was their promotion of infant formula in the Third World.

Prior to the 1893 Belgian general strike, some miners and other workers had gone on strike sporadically, first in 1890 and most notably in 1891 in Liege, Charleroi and Borinage.  Most of these labor skirmishes lacked the strength and the impact to really challenge the Belgian parliamentary system.   In 1890, leaders of the Belgian Worker’s Party did issue a call to spread the strike and then quickly called it off when the parliament agreed to consider a proposal to constitutionally enact suffrage reform.

Since the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement Party (MNR) overthrew the military junta in April 1952, Bolivia underwent major reformations in its political and institutional structures and economic policies. Aside from establishing universal suffrage, the government nationalized the tin mine business. It also set up the Mining Corporation of Bolivia (COMIBOL), a semi-governmental company, to take control of the mines. Because the miners made up a large part in the revolution and the tin mine was the most lucrative business in Bolivia, miners were granted great political power.