Starbucks to Require Employee Availability Around the Clock and Cut Workforce in Major National Initiative The Starbucks Coffee Co. is in the process of an extreme revamping of its workforce policies according to company documents obtained by the Starbucks Workers Union of the Industrial Workers of the World. The initiative, dubbed "Optimal Scheduling", will require employees to make themselves available to work essentially around the clock to obtain so-called full-time status. Even for workers able to make the extraordinary sacrifice to obtain "full-time" status, no work hours are guaranteed- identical to Starbucks' current system of part-time status for all retail hourly workers. In addition, Starbucks will lay off workers who cannot meet minimum availability requirements. As baristas learn of the new program, discontent is rising. "I've had to make myself available each week from Tuesday to Sunday starting at 4:45am until 11pm in the hopes of possibly getting 32 hours of work but not being guaranteed a single hour," said Liberte Locke, a Starbucks barista in New York and member of the IWW Starbucks Workers Union. "It's impossible for me to get a second job now even though I need one and impossible to have a life outside of work." Under the new system, baristas who opt for pseudo full-time status have to make themselves available to work 70% of the total hours their store is open during the week. In an example given in the company documents, a store open 115 hours per week requires a barista to be available to work 80.5 hours each week - over double the standard work week. Week-to-week Starbucks can then schedule workers anywhere within that availability. In addition, workers who cannot make themselves available for at least three shifts a week will be fired, absent a "compelling reason" which Starbucks has not defined. Weekend workers must be available for at least 16 hours to avoid termination.

Call for participation TURN*ON Artivistic 2009 (Fall) Montreal, Canada http://artivistic.org The world to come is so sexy. We are unstoppable for we are fueled with an incredible urge to embrace the pleasure provided by difference, exchange and freedom. Our actions today are charged with an energy that is animated by the rise of change and a movement that is simply irresistible. New movements are arising at the intersections of sex, politics and technology. These movements are inspired by, as well as critical of, the long traditions of struggle they stem from, remixing gender bending, sex work (and play), and media activism. From body hacking to the implosion of the service economy, where are we today and what new possibilities can we envision and nurture? For its upcoming fourth edition, Artivistic is going sexy. Discussing, questioning, and imagining the past, present, future, and infinite possibilities of sex. While keeping issues of power and control in question, we want to turn to the potency of pleasure, curiosity, humor, and desire in order to TURN*ON that which has yet to be thought and experienced differently.

A Shattering Moment in America's Fall from Power John Gray, The Observer Sunday September 28 2008 The global financial crisis will see the US falter in the same way the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. The era of American dominance is over. Our gaze might be on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis, however large. Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over.

"Hank Paulson and the State of Exception" Malatesta, The "bad loans" i.e. the tender of high interest money to people who could not make the payments, have caused a banking crisis and Henry "Hank" Paulson seeks to take complete control to impose decades of austerity on main street America; nationalize the insolvent companies and give a handout to the banks of "treasury" money. Hmmmm....first off, wouldn't nationalizing a profitable company like an oil company make the money available and hurt far fewer people? Well, besides the obvious there is an amazing Constitutional crisis and a time for boiling anger. I wonder where and when some protests will erupt?

*Commonplaces of Transition* Screening and talk by Joanne Richardson, D Media, Romania Wed, 24 Sept, 7pm - 9pm Mute, Main Hall, The Whitechapel Center, 85 Myrdle Street, London E1 *Films* In Transit (30 min, 2008) Precarious Lives (excerpt, 43 min, 2008) Two or Three Things about Activism (excerpt, 73 min, 2008) On the following night 'Two or Three Things about Activism' will be screened at RampArt, see http://therampart.wordpress.com/ Commonplaces of Transition is a collaborative project between D Media (Romania), Ak-Kraak (Germany), Interspace (Bulgaria) and K:SAK (Moldova) that has produced 8 videos about the remapping of borders, the transformation of labour and the evolution of activism. Joanne Richardson will screen In Transit (30 min, 2008), Precarious Lives (excerpt, 43 min, 2008) and Two or Three Things about Activism (excerpt, 73 min, 2008), and discuss the connection of the project to video activism and counter-documentary. 'In Transit' is a diary of a journey through space and time, composed of subjective impressions of the present, childhood memories and recycled fragments of the past. While traveling across Romania in the year of its EU accession, the monologue reflects on the meaning of transition, the re-writing of history and the relation between images and memory. Multiple layers of signification emerge in references other films by Guy Debord, Chris Marker and Peter Forgacs. Joanne Richardson is living and working in Cluj as a theorist, artist and program director of D Media ( http://www.dmedia.ro ). She is the editor of a webzine ( http://subsol.c3.hu ) and two books on digital culture, has written essays on the radical left, video activism, tactical media, copyleft and has made videos on issues ranging from globalization, to nationalism and postcommunism.

"The Social Factory" Otonom “Meanwhile, and incidentally, there opened up for us the prospect, which cannot be sharply defined yet at this point, of a specific relation of capital to the communal, general conditions of social production, as distinct from the conditions of a particular capital and its particular production process.” (Marx, Grundrisse Notebook V, 1973)1 This emphasis by Marx which has mostly remained unrealized among the lines of Grundrisse has not been paid attention and reflected upon by Marxists in general except Negri. Even if it may have been reflected upon, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that the implications of such a reflection have been very few in political theory and practice. This is not a problematic which is disregarded intentionally. As Marx has already said, this is related to the insufficient historical and social development of the specific relation of capital to communal, general conditions of social production, which is a prospect for us that cannot be defined yet at this point.

"The Climate Camp at Kingsnorth" Shift Mgazine The Climate Camp at Kingsnorth was great! These were our initial thoughts on arrival at the first German climate camp in Hamburg, which took place just one week after Kingsnorth. The Hamburg camp seemed less organised, there were far fewer people and the lack of a clear neighbourhood structure meant that we aimlessly walked around the site for a good half hour before finally pitching the tent in the ‘anti-barrio’ barrio.

"Corruption in Tanzania" Albanie Marcossy, Dar es salaam, Tanzania Under the Local Government Reform Programme (LGRP), the local government authorities, including the sub-council level authorities, are undergoing the following reforms: (i) Capacities enhancements to either provide the services directly or facilitate their delivery through other actors and players. (ii) Restructured and re-organized to become more efficient in carrying out their new functions. (iii) Acquiring more legal and administrative powers and freedom, in formulating their plans, budgets, activities and in managing their human and financial resources. (iv) Acquiring powers to mobilize their own resources.

"From the Edge of the Blade" New Documentary on Oaxaca On June 14th 2006, when police forces attacked thousands of striking teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico, the annual strike turned into a widespread popular rebellion, demanding the governors' resignation. A broad social movement of teachers, social organizations, unions, students, activists, and indigenous communities took over the city in an effort to change the devastating conditions imposed on them by international trade agreements and corrupt politicians. To watch a preview, and for more info, go to http://www.trickleupfilms.org. "From the Edge of the Blade" tells the story about the 2006 popular uprising in Oaxaca, as put by some of the teachers, activists, workers, students, human rights workers, tortured and imprisoned. Do you want to arrange a screening? I can help! Send an email to contact@trickleupfilms.org.

borders 2.0 - future, tense Angela Mitropoulos* Mute Magazine Arrayed beyond and around the obvious walls of migration control, the architectures and technologies of the border proliferate. These technologies seek to sort, expunge, confine and delay; to sift potential value from non-value; to fix the border inside and round both states and selves; to foreclose the future to versions of an infinitely stuttering present. Just as new instruments of financial debt and the offshore internment facility were exported from their post-colonial laboratories situated beyond Europe and the United States, so 'civil', metropolitan spaces have, in turn, been restructured by devices once reserved for those declared to be 'uncivil'. The partitioning of 'third' and 'first' worlds, colony and empire, the zoning of regular, waged work and that of precariousness and slavery – these are some of the divisions that have been shaken by the unprecedented movements of people around the world since the late 20th century. Flows shifted course, reversed, the (ex-)colonised moved toward the colonisers. And so, there is the militarisation of policing, the amplification of the prison lockdown as urban crowd control, preemptive surveillance and simulated warfare, a diffused fear and suspicion no longer confined to the 'margins'. To be sure, these expanding technologies oftentimes multiply death and suffering in an attempt to re-impose the ways in which misery was previously displaced to others, elsewhere – that is, marginalised. They aim to reinstall the borders, to fine tune the ramparts of wealth and its extraction, sometimes by new means, often as retrofits. Yet, as such, this expansion indicates the failure of the walls to hold firm against a future which is contingent upon movements that cannot be identified before they occur.