Dear fellow workers,
Allow me to introduce myself, I am Jérémie, a freelance journalist based in Montreal, member of S’ATTAQ and your new Editor of the Canadian Regional Organizing Committee (CANROC) Bulletin.
Each quarter, I will attempt to interview officers from each of the CANROC branches and write a short post on the news and campaigns of each of them.
These stories will be published throughout the month.
I plan to use my journalistic training to give The Bulletin a little more pep, to add a bit of a human touch.
Expect to see more content written by our members as well.
I will not hesitate to follow up with you to publish your stories.
Tell us, how is the Boss screwing you over and what are y’all doing to change that?
In an effort to make this publication more attractive and accessible to members, I plan to make many changes to The Bulletin.
To start, instead of publishing a long document each quarter filled with reports interspersed with articles from your colleagues, I will be splitting the Bulletin in two.
The articles will now be posted on CANROC’s website, IWW.ca, in a blog-like format, while the full reports will be made available to you on Interwob, the Union’s private forum. All in both official languages, of course.
I will also try to show you what CANROC is for.
Thanks to many years of sound management and a strong growth of our membership, we have at your disposal* a surplus of several tens of thousands of dollars, for your campaigns, legal defenses or purchase of merchandise, name it!
*Certain conditions apply.
I’ll tell you more in my first piece “A CANROC, what’s it good for anyways?
By taking on Union tasks almost at random, I have gained privileged access to various committees of the North American Regional Administration (NARA), including the General Executive Board (GEB) and the Organizing Department Board (ODB).
I will therefore provide you with regular updates on the affairs affecting Wobblies living across Canada, Campaign updates, dispatches from our At Large Members, all that jazz.
Did you know that the GEB is finally planning to incorporate subsidiary of the IWW in Canada?
You will find out more in an upcoming column where I will attempt to interview FW Liss, GEB Chair and CANROC Liaison Officer.
CANROC is also there to represent the interests of wobblies living in Canada to NARA.
At the Bulletin, we will try to understand why the website is not yet translated into French and Spanish and why they don’t accept Canadian debit cards to pay our dues? What is to be done?
I’m hearing between the branches that soon enough, a joint Tech Committee will be launched with the help of Edmonton General Membership Branch, it’s a joint project between CANROC affiliated Branches and Edmonton GMB, which isn’t a member of CANROC.
Did you know that not every General Membership Branches in Canada are affiliated to CANROC but that strangely enough, Montréal GMB is? Yeah, that’s a thing.
So anyways, this Tech Committee will try to provide free Web hosting, email boxes and other nerdy stuff to all Branches who might need it, all of that for free!
I don’t have much details yet but it sounds like a good idea to share resources and (professional) humanpower for our Cyberinfrastructure, I’ll keep you posted with my Dispatches From The “Cyber Common Front” (Ok, I made that last thing up, no one actually says that).
I would like to thank all the work done by my previous editor, Felix Fuchs.
Felix was able to put together a Bulletin that had been neglected for several years prior to his arrival.
Despite his limited French language skills as a German-born speaker, with a little help, he managed to translate all the reports and articles that appeared in The Bulletin.
So much so that I assumed he was perfectly bilingual.
Without Felix’s hard work, it would have been impossible for me to take The Bulletin one step further.
I think I can speak for all Francophone wobblies when I express my deepest gratitude for all the efforts made by the largely Anglophone officers to francize CANROC.
That’s real Solidarity.
Don’t worry about bilingualism at CANROC, it’s here to stay.
As it is for you, this redesign of The Bulletin will be brand new to me, and just like it was for you, the last year has been a hard one.
I will have to develop a whole new workflow and build a network of contacts (as well as translate all your darn reports).
My apologies for posting a few days late, there was a death in the family last week and grief slowed me down.
So I would ask you to be a little patient while The Bulletin and I, we get back into shape.
Just by writing this, I’m getting all agitated!
I look forward to hearing from y’all!
Solidarity forever,
Jérémie, CANROC Bulletin Editor,
Montréal