Thursday, August 29, 2013

Dearius Merritt & Also The NYCC Are My Heroes! YOU GO DEARIUS!!!

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Crossing that fateful line, back to morality.

Dearius Merritt, a striking Church’s Chicken assistant manager in Memphis, Tenn., .. described fast food workers in his city as “fed up.”

“They’re tired of coming to work and having to work eight hours, nine hours, and them coming home and they can barely provide for their kids,” he said. When asked whether he was afraid of retaliation from management, he shrugged the question off, saying, “It’s bigger than me and it’s bigger than the workers that are standing up. It’s not just going to help my generation, it’s going to help the next generation that’s going to come, and the generation after that.”


[Face it, you've NEVER heard Hank Paulson utter such words. Nothing's bigger than his ego ... or his pocketbook of illicit gains.]

.......

While the fast food movement has received some assistance from traditional union outfits - with the large Service Employees International Union acting as a particularly key supporter - it has never relied entirely on established channels for labor organizing. The very first fast food workers strike, which occurred in late November, was put together in large part by the community group New York Communities for Change. Subsequent strikes have received crucial support from grassroots progressive groups, churches, and other non-union institutions.


.......

ps: The 1% lobby is already at work here, getting in a dig at supposedly failed unions. However, a look at the AFL-CIO's site shows that they've been covering the strike efforts since their planning stages, and urging union members of all stripes to either boycott the targeted establishments and/or not cross picket lines.

ps: These efforts are all NECESSARY, but none will be SUFFICIENT, if they don't also co-tune all points of a culture's agility spectrum - tools, tactics, strategies, policies, goals and desired outcomes. At least we now have a beachhead.

ps: ps: ps: Note that "people did get together"
can others besides the most oppressed also "get together" ?
     when?

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