Progressive DUers in the KC area: KC Public Labor Forum series launches on February 13th.

[Better Believe It]

Weekly Column by Bill Onasch
Webmaster, KCLabor.org
February 6, 2011

Excerpt:

Next Sunday, February 13, we will take the plunge in to the great unknown by launching the KC Labor Forum series. While everyone knows working people are in trouble it’s not easy to get folks to come to meetings. A lot can be done through the Internet, social networking, and community radio, but, in our view, there’s still no substitute for live, in person gatherings.

We are planning to have substantial presentations by a speaker, panel, or film to frame each monthly Forum topic. There will always be at least an hour set aside for discussion from the floor. It should be a good opportunity to meet new thinkers and activists as well as renewing acquaintances with the “usual suspects.”

We’ll try to make the Forums easy to remember by having them at the same time and place each month. While not written in stone forever, initially we’re going with the second Sunday of the month, 2-4 PM, Room A at the North Kansas City Community Center. There will be no admission fee but we will pass the hat to cover room rental and union printing work.

One person suggested that our new series may be confused with the similarly named Heartland Labor Forum–something that simply never occurred to us. I want to clarify: the Heartland Labor Forum is a long-running radio show on KKFI-FM, produced by the Institute for Labor Studies at UMKC. The KC Labor Forum is a live audience event sponsored by a long-running website. There is no organizational connection between the two though there is an overlap of volunteers who work on both worthy projects.

I have volunteered to kick-off the new series with a broad overview of the state of the U.S. working class today, entitled, “The Class War On Workers–And How We Can Win.” You can view a PDF of the leaflet for this meeting–and print more out if you like--by going here:
http://www.kclabor.org/KC%20Labor%20Forum.pdf

I will later post the prepared text of the talk on the site.

Other speakers/panels at subsequent Forums will take up topics such as attacks on public sector workers; the education crisis; fiscal threats to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid; challenges facing transportation unions; a unified approach to solving the jobs and climate change crises; and, of course, any hot, unforeseen developments.

If you are in travel distance of North Kansas City I hope you will join us next Sunday. If you have any questions, need directions to the Community Center, or need transportation, give me a call at: 816-753-1672.

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http://www.kclabor.org/wir262011.htm