On this day, 20 May 1978, 15,000 demonstrators attempted to blockade the Narita airport in Japan on the day of its official opening. A march of children around the site began, followed by a procession of disabled protesters in wheelchairs. The demonstrators were met by 13,000 riot police, and violent clashes broke out as police fired water cannons and protesters responded with petrol bombs. One group of helmeted radicals attempted to crash through a gate with flaming vehicles, and a group of left-wing students cut a cable at a traffic control centre near Tokyo, halting all air traffic in Japan for several hours. Protesters were angry at the development displacing farmers.
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just lettin y'all know from a legal standpoint this is super not legally binding, they gave you that money and it’s yours now UNLESS YOU SIGN THIS. theyre obviously trying to make this look like a notice but it’s not, it’s a legally binding contract if you sign and return it so SHRED THAT SHIT
At the height of the Greek crash in 2011, staff at Viome clocked
in to confront an existential quandary. The owners of their parent
company had gone bust and abandoned the site, in the second city of
Thessaloniki. From here, the script practically wrote itself: their
plant, which manufactured chemicals for the construction industry, would
be shut. There would be immediate layoffs, and dozens of families would
be plunged into poverty. And seeing as Greece was in the midst of the
greatest economic depression ever seen in the EU, the workers’ chances
of getting another job were close to nil.
So they decided to occupy their own plant. Not only that, they turned it upside down.
For
a start, no one is boss. There is no hierarchy, and everyone is on the
same wage. Factories traditionally work according to a production-line
model, where each person does one- or two-minute tasks all day, every
day: you fit the screen, I fix the protector, she boxes up the iPhone.
Here, everyone gathers at 7am for a mud-black Greek coffee and a chat
about what needs to be done. Only then are the day’s tasks divvied up.
And, yes, they each take turns to clean the toilets.
When
the workers consulted the local community about what they should start
to produce, one request was to stop making building chemicals. They now
largely manufacture soap and eco-friendly household detergents: cleaner,
greener and easier on their neighbours’ noses.
Staff use the
building as an assembly point for local refugees, and I saw the offices
being turned over to medics for a weekly free neighbourhood clinic for
workers and locals. The Greek healthcare system has been shredded by
spending cuts, its handling of refugees sometimes atrocious; yet in both
cases, the workers at Viome are doing their best to offer substitutes.
Where
the state has collapsed, the market has come up short and the boss
class has literally fled, these 26 workers are attempting to fill the
gaps. These are people who have been failed by capitalism; now they
reject capitalism itself as a failure.
![merelygifted:
“ Among the interesting items found in the wrappings of the king’s mummy [Tutankhamon] are two wonderful daggers with their sheaths.
http://www.globalegyptianmuseum.org/record.aspx?id=15090
”](https://64.media.tumblr.com/cc0b25d22ba7d6bbd3624f37112cc63b/db0b718570cbaeae-be/s500x750/ebed501abcb67f10917789644a770bd04b8359ec.jpg)
