NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD NORTHEAST REGIONAL CONFERENCE

SATURDAY, APRIL 8, 2006

presented by the NYC and Columbia Law School chapters of the National
Lawyers Guild

10:00 am to 5:00 pm

with a free kickin' after party in Drapkin
featuring DJ Thadeaus!

COLUMBIA LAW SCHOOL - Jerome Green Hall
115th and Amsterdam

* This conference is FREE for students and activists. It is $25 for
lawyers and professionals. For more info or to pre-register, please
visit here*

Call to Attend the First National Workers’ Gathering
Event to Be Held April 29 in Mexico City

By Unions with the Other Campaign and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation March 26, 2006
To the urban workers that have adhered to the Sixth Declaration and the Other Campaign

To the workers that fight and to all the exploited:

We the undersigned, members of the Other Campaign that is being developed across the country, invite you to the First National Workers’ Gathering, which will be held Saturday, April 29, in the offices of the National Union of Uniroyal Workers, located at 95 Lago Plava, Huichapan neighborhood, Mexico City, to meet with the following goals:

1. Prepare for our participation in the commemoration of International Workers’ Day, May 1, across the country, in what we will call “The Other May 1.”

2. Democratically discuss a plan of struggle to defeat charrismo (corrupt union leadership) in all its expressions in our union organizations.

3. Promote the formation of a democratic, class-conscious, fighting international organization throughout the Other Campaign that allows us to face the struggle against the bosses and their government — both the current administration and the one that will be elected this July 2.

4. Strengthen our struggles through the formation of currents or groups based in the unions, in order to reclaim our organizations from the hands of agents of the bosses, the charros and the neo-charros.

5. Rescue the basic principles of the working class and our political participation in the life of the country.

6. Discuss a platform of struggle that allows us to reestablish the true role of the workers in society, independently and through struggle, with very clear goals, where the independence of the working class to develop its own political participation prevails.

7. Strengthen our unity with the poor peasant farmers, the indigenous, the popular sectors, the women, the youth, and other exploited and oppressed sectors of the prevailing capitalist society in our country, which are the only allies we can count on.

8. Surround with solidarity the different struggles that many of our compañeros are developing across the county, and create the necessary links with workers of other nations.
This call is completely open to the workers in general and to whoever is interested in this initiative, as long as it will be the workers who enjoy the space to reflect and reach agreements.

Sincerely,

National Revolutionary Union of Hulera Euzkadi Company Workers

National Union of Uniroyal Workers

Workers’ Group from the National Union of General Tire Workers

Workers’ Group from the Hulera Tornel Company

San Luis Potosí Solidarity Front for the Defense of Labor Rights

University of Guadalajara Union of Academic Personnel

National United Front of Active, Retired and Pensioned National Social Security Institute (IMSS) Workers

Collective of Trade Unionists with the Sixth Declaration

Central Unitaria de Trabajadores

Socialist Workers’ Party

Zapatista Army of National Liberation

If interested speak to the hosts of the gathering in Mexico City by calling 5591-0168 or 5703-2244, or by writing to posmex@prodigy.net.mx or
agnmex@yahoo.com.mx

Leopoldina Fortunati

Discussing The Meaning of the Mobile Phone

April 10th, 2006. 3:00-5:00pm

Department of Information Systems in Studio Ciborra, 5th floor, Tower One


Information Systems Department, LSE


ICTs in the Contemporary World: information, management and culture

This decade of research on the mobile phone has been very important in explaining its social co-construction and its subversive and regressive potential at the level of interpersonal, social and business relations. Its identity as an information and communication technology has been widely explored and it has turned out to be particularly ambivalent (attractive/unattractive), but also highly changeable (with rapid shifts from mobile to personal technology, from oral technology to written) and, in part, dissimulative. In fact, the mobile is a device that is only in part communicative, as owing to its costs it allows only rapid exchanges or otherwise written messages, these also very short. Looking at the mobile phone as a technological artefact, its body results largely the fruit of unexpected and innovative behaviour on the part of users.


The limit to this decade of research is that the research has remained so far at the descriptive level. Despite the greater part of empirical studies of this device being focused on its diffusion, use, and consumption in the domestic sphere, they have generally not been connected with any of the theoretical analysis of the domestic sphere which has been carried out in the last decades.


I wish to connect the analysis of the role of the mobile phone to this theoretical analysis, which will enable us to better understand that the mobile phone is a work tool for reproduction, that is, a machine used within the social process governing everyday life. People have certainly used the mobile phone to connect the world of work better with that of the family, by rationalizing organization here and there to their advantage, which means saving time, money and fatigue. But if we see it as a work tool, we will discover that its widespread use has taken on other dimensions. In fact it has had at the same time the effect of making people both in offices and factories and in the domestic sphere more productive, penetrating through the very pores of the working day of men, women, youth and children, sweeping away much rigidity and inertia, and eliminating many of those shadow areas in which people disappeared to “take a breather” as it were, thus avoiding the continuity of command and control by the organization of work or family and, in general, social networks. The widespread use of the mobile phone has had the unexpected effect of depriving workers, and people in general, both of the numerous times and spaces of social disconnection and the thousand defence strategies which counted on this disconnection.

Leopoldina Fortunati

Discussing The Meaning of the Mobile Phone

April 10th, 2006. 3:00-5:00pm

Department of Information Systems in Studio Ciborra, 5th floor, Tower One


Information Systems Department, LSE


ICTs in the Contemporary World: information, management and culture

This decade of research on the mobile phone has been very important in explaining its social co-construction and its subversive and regressive potential at the level of interpersonal, social and business relations. Its identity as an information and communication technology has been widely explored and it has turned out to be particularly ambivalent (attractive/unattractive), but also highly changeable (with rapid shifts from mobile to personal technology, from oral technology to written) and, in part, dissimulative. In fact, the mobile is a device that is only in part communicative, as owing to its costs it allows only rapid exchanges or otherwise written messages, these also very short. Looking at the mobile phone as a technological artefact, its body results largely the fruit of unexpected and innovative behaviour on the part of users.


The limit to this decade of research is that the research has remained so far at the descriptive level. Despite the greater part of empirical studies of this device being focused on its diffusion, use, and consumption in the domestic sphere, they have generally not been connected with any of the theoretical analysis of the domestic sphere which has been carried out in the last decades.


I wish to connect the analysis of the role of the mobile phone to this theoretical analysis, which will enable us to better understand that the mobile phone is a work tool for reproduction, that is, a machine used within the social process governing everyday life. People have certainly used the mobile phone to connect the world of work better with that of the family, by rationalizing organization here and there to their advantage, which means saving time, money and fatigue. But if we see it as a work tool, we will discover that its widespread use has taken on other dimensions. In fact it has had at the same time the effect of making people both in offices and factories and in the domestic sphere more productive, penetrating through the very pores of the working day of men, women, youth and children, sweeping away much rigidity and inertia, and eliminating many of those shadow areas in which people disappeared to “take a breather” as it were, thus avoiding the continuity of command and control by the organization of work or family and, in general, social networks. The widespread use of the mobile phone has had the unexpected effect of depriving workers, and people in general, both of the numerous times and spaces of social disconnection and the thousand defence strategies which counted on this disconnection.