016. Picketing

By the start of the 21st century, there were 53
active industrial plants in the area around Tonawanda, New York. Residents of
the area had complained about air quality problems for decades, but regulators
failed to intervene to ensure plants complied with federal law. Many people
living in the area reported severe and chronic health problems, such as
fibromyalgia, asthma, and cancers—including lung cancers in non-smokers.

Apartheid was a legal and political system of racial segregation in South Africa in which the National Party used violence to uphold political and economic control by the white minority. Apartheid began under colonial Dutch rule and was officially introduced as an official policy in 1948.

As Haverford College became more racially diverse in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the actions of minority students protesting against discrimination became increasingly visible. 

On 18 February 1960, the High Point Biracial Committee was formed to ease racial tensions in High Point. As the group gained more legitimacy, more facilities desegregated thanks in part to negotiations between the committee and city officials. By 1963, nearly all government and public institutions were integrated. The remaining stronghold of segregation was privately-owned buildings such the town theaters.

Many West Indian settled in England during the 1960’s due to looser immigration restrictions. In Southwest England West Indians easily found menial jobs in Bristol, but found themselves shut out of higher positions. It was hardly a secret that the Bristol Omnibus Company constantly turned away black and Asian applicants for drivers and conductors, but neither management nor the union, the Transport and General Worker’s Union, seemed interested in dealing with the “colour bar”.

On 12 February 1960, nearly two weeks after sit-ins at Greensboro, North Carolina (the Greensboro Four) began, over 100 students at the historically black school Barber-Scotia College started sit-ins in the lunch counter at Belk’s department store and three other lunch counters in Concord, North Carolina. In addition to sit-ins, the students organized pray-ins, where they gathered for prayer in public areas and places reserved for whites. Aside from white teenage hecklers, the students did not face much initial repression.

In early May and June of 1960, students from Howard University, a historically black college, joined the ongoing civil rights movement by picketing the White House in D.C. and conducting sit-ins and pickets at segregated Woolworth chain stores in the D.C. area. These early actions led by Paul Dietrich, Stokely Carmichael, John Moody, Jan Triggs, Dion Diamond, Gwendolyn Green, Joan Trumpauer, and others spread interest for a more organized form of action by Howard students. 

In March 2012, the parliament of the province of Ontario in Canada notified public schoolteachers that they would have a two-year salary freeze.   Premier Dalton McGuinty, the head of the provincial government, announced this initiative as a step toward reducing the government’s $14.8 billion deficit. On 11 September, the Ontario Parliament passed Bill 115, called the “Putting Students First Act,” which locked all public school teachers into a two-year contract with frozen wages, decreased teachers’ sick days, and prohibited teachers from going on strike.

Since the 1980’s, the University of Johannesburg (UJ) in South Africa has held institutional ties with Ben Gurion University (BGU) in Israel. For most of this time, these ties were little more than a formality, with no active meaning. Then in August 2009, the two institutions signed an academic cooperation agreement to work together on water purification and a biotechnology research project. 

In the 1960’s, San Francisco was a center of the youth counterculture that was spreading across the United States.  The civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, the Red Power movement, the Feminist movement, and LGBQT movement had all been challenging the dominance of the governing political elite.  

Marshall, Texas, despite having a black majority, practiced public and private racial segregation like most of the South in the 1950’s. The town included two historically black colleges: Bishop College and Wiley College. 

Huntsville, Alabama, grew quickly during the United States’ Space Race with the Soviet Union. From 1950 to 1960, the population tripled from 16,000 to 72,000, with 30% black citizens. With Redstone Arsenal and the National Aeronautics (NASA) bringing scientists and middle class citizens to Huntsville, the city administration tried to present the city with a progressive image.  However, instead of improving conditions for black citizens, the administration claimed that a racial inequality did not exist.

In March 2009, British Prime Minister (PM) Gordon Brown of the Labor Government proposed to reform the Civil Service Compensation Scheme (CSCS). The Superannuation Act of 1972 governed the CSCS and provided cash compensation for civil servants who lost their jobs and established early retirement terms.

On 30 June 1998, the contract between Service Employees International Union Local 200A (SEIU) and Syracuse University (SU) expired. Preceded by two months of negotiation, SU made a final offer for a new contract before the 30 June deadline. 

Jackson was the largest city in Mississippi in 1960, with 250,000 residents, 50,000 of whom were black. Medgar Evers, a field secretary for the Jackson chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began to build up NAACP Youth Councils at colleges and high schools in the area since 1961. Since the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were in other parts of Mississippi, the NAACP was the only consistent nonviolent group in Jackson.

Visteon is a global automotive company that spun off from Ford Motor Company in June 2000. In the U.K., during this transition period, Ford and the trade union Unite made a deal to guarantee that all former Ford employees – now Visteon workers – would keep the same wage and pension conditions. However, Visteon placed all newly hired employees under inferior contracts.

Maggie Henry and her husband Dale have managed an 88-acre organic farm in North Beaver Township, Lawrence County—located in western Pennsylvania—for the past three decades. The Henry’s produce pork, poultry and eggs, and service Pittsburg area restaurants. 

Ciba-Geigy was an international chemical corporation based in Europe, specializing in the production of dies and pharmaceuticals. During the 1930’s, Ciba-Geigy established a secluded factory in Toms River, Ocean County, New Jersey, where it synthesized vat dies and other pigments. The Tom’s River operation was a major employer in the community, while secretively disposing of toxic factory waste in unlined pits on site. The operation expanded over three decades, and, in 1966, Ciba-Geigy constructed a ten-mile long, subterranean pipeline to the Atlantic Ocean for disposing liquid waste.

As the nationwide struggle for civil rights in the United States, led by
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr,  continued into 1964, tension between civil
rights activists and the city government was rising in St. Augustine,
Florida. Public institutions remained segregated, and Klu Klux Klan
violence against African Americans increased, despite activists’
protests and pleas to the government.

President Kim Young Sam started his first attempt at changing labour laws in April, 1996. The government formed the Labour-Management Relations Reform committee composed of labour group leaders, management community, academics, and civic groups. It was the first attempt by the South Korean government to reform the country’s authoritarian labour relations, and labour unions were hopeful of structural changes that would guarantee their long-delayed rights.

The South Korean railway strike began when Korea Railroad Corporation (KORAIL) revealed plans to establish a new affiliate rail company to manage the bullet train line from Suseo to Pyeongtaek. The Korean Railway Workers Union (KRWU) claimed that this government initiative was the first step in privatisation of the rail company and called for the government to retract its plans. The South Korean government denied such plans for privatisation.

Starting with Ecuador’s founding as a republic in 1822, the country’s
economic policy  oppressed Indigenous citizens through measures that led
to the concentration and destruction of Indigenous lands.  In 1986,
Luis Macas founded the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of
Ecuador (CONAIE) to advocate for the underrepresented Indigenous
Ecuadorians. CONAIE focused particularly on protecting land and water
rights of Indigenous communities. CONAIE leaders of the 1990s emphasized
demands for a plurinational state, collective rights, and territorial

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many artists, particularly visual artists in New York City, struggled to contextualize their work in an era filled with civil rights, labor, and anti-war campaigns. Artists reconciled their non-representational artwork with a desire to act politically in line with these campaigns by  performing non-artistic types of work. This type of work took the form of nonviolent tactics directed at the museum system.

 In 2008, when plans were made public to open the Las Brisas Refinery in Corpus Christi, the city’s residents felt the pollution produced by a refinery using petroleum coke, an abundant byproduct of oil refining, was simply too much in addition to the pollution produced by the refineries already there. The proposed refinery would potentially provide 80-100 permanent jobs and 1,300 jobs during the construction phase, and produce 1,200 megawatts of lower cost electricity. Las Brisas’ parent company, Chase Power, stressed these positive results when introducing their building plans.