retail and food
News and articles about work, policy and workers' struggles in retail and the food industry around the world.
Movement for Living Wages, Community Space, Organizing Rights Grows at Queens Center Mall
The coalition fighting for living wages and community space at the Queens Center Mall confronted the mall owner, the Macerich Company, today demanding a meeting to begin discussions on how to transform the publicly subsidized poverty wage center into a responsible development that pays employees a living wage and benefits the community.
The Making of a Bad Attitude: An Abridged History of my Wage Slavery
Tales of toil and occasional termination from offices and stores in San Francisco in the 1970s and 80s by Lucius Cabins for Processed World.
I've been working for money since I was fourteen years old. I've held a variety of jobs: caddie, baker, house painter, furniture refinisher, bookstore clerk, environmental door-to-door canvasser, warehouseman, information desk clerk, temporary word processor, secretary, and now typesetter/graphic artist.
Turkey: Tekel workers take on the government and the unions
A detailed account an analysis of the struggle of thousands of Tekel workers in Turkey against mass closures, who have been on strike for weeks and have now occupied the headquarters of the country's main union confederation.
On December 14th 2009, thousands of workers of Tekel[1] enterprises from dozens of cities in Turkey left their homes and families in order to travel to Ankara. The workers of Tekel took this journey with the aim of struggling against the horrible conditions forced upon them by the capitalist order.
Urgent Call for International Solidarity: FAU Berlin Banned As Union
As of yesterday, December 11, 2009, FAU Berlin (FAU-B) has essentially been banned as a union. The decision was made by the Berlin Regional Court (Landgericht Berlin) without a hearing. FAU-B was not even informed that the Neue Babylon GmbH – which is involved in a labor dispute with FAU-B – had started legal proceedings against them. The court’s decision goes beyond merely taking away FAU-B’s rights as a union within the Babylon cinema. From this point on they are no longer allowed to call themselves a union!
Background
Marx on the piss; a London pub crawl with Karl Marx in the late 1850s - Wilhelm Liebknecht
An account by Liebknecht of a smashing drunken evening in London town, written some 40 years after the event...
One evening, Edgar Bauer, acquainted with Marx from their Berlin time and then not yet his personal enemy […], had come to town from his hermitage in Highgate for the purpose of “making a beer trip.” The problem was to “take something” in every saloon between Oxford Street and Hampstead Road – making the something a very difficult task, even by confining yourself to a minimum, considering the enor
Flaum Workers Attempt to Return to Work
Update on the NYC foodstuffs campaign: workers at Flaum attempt to return to work this morning.
November 25, 8am: Workers along with members of the NYC-GMB march to Flaum, a kosher food distributor in Brooklyn, after a Labor Board ruling which ordered the boss to reinstate the workers with back pay. Instead, the boss wrongfully demanded that the workers reauthorize their immigration status and denied them their right to return to work.
Employee sabotage in a copy shop
Alan, a shop clerk's account of unofficial wage enhancement in a Minneapolis photocopy outfit.
I've never dealt with so many fucked-up managers as when I started working at a busy, downtown Minneapolis copy shop. We had to do a lot of work, took a lot of shit from customers and got paid beans. Actually, it was one of the best jobs I've had because everybody that I worked with was really fun.
Flash mobs as a form of struggle
The obedient shopper subverts their role to disrupt the circulation of commodities... flash mobs enter the terrain of class conflict.
"A flash mob ... is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse." (Wikipedia.)
Racist comments spark walkout, sit-in at chicken proccessing plant
Racist comments by security guards have led to wildcat action at Two Sisters Foods in Smethwick, UK.
Workers at a Black Country food processing firm are hailed the success of an unofficial walkout, after management sacked a security guard accused of making racist comments and agreed to come to the negotiating table.
More than 100 staff at Smethwick-based Two Sisters Foods staged a wildcat strike and police were called as their protest threatened to get out of hand.
Home Depot and the Farce of the "Manager" Title
A group of former Home Depot employees filed a class-action lawsuit against the company to win overtime pay.
It is common practice for companies to misclassify employees in order to be exempt from paying overtime. Employers are required to pay time-and-a-half to employees who work over 40 hours per week. However, those employees classified as "managers" are exempt from the overtime pay.
