Monthly Archives: April 2019

Stop and Shop Workers Strike for Sustainable Jobs

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Stop and Shop workers striking right now all over New England, we salute you, and say solidarity now and for as long as it takes.

Bosses cause strikes, not workers.  Profits cause strikes, not workers’ greed.  

The corporate spin-doctors are already at it. They try to paint workers who are struggling to survive on crap wages as unreasonable and hurting customers.

    Stop & Shop spokeswoman Jennifer Brogan said that “we are disappointed that the UFCW chose to order a work stoppage in an attempt to disrupt service at our stores.”

    That’s right Jennifer, workers are striking because they want to hurt the customers that they interact with everyday while you drink latte’s in the corporate PR suite. Does it get any worse than a corporate PR stooge………OMG

    Meanwhile in reality, we learn that according to a representative for the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), the company has proposed “drastic and unreasonable” cuts to workers’ health care benefits and take-home pay and increase to their health care costs.  They also want to take away premium pay on Sunday—something that many food service workers rely on to make ends meet.

    Nancy Peska, who has worked at Stop and Shop for 39 years said, “This is a tough day for me because I love my job, but they want to double what we pay in health insurance premiums and co-pays. And they won’t take that off the table.”

    And Peska is not just worried about herself,

    “I’m able to make a comfortable living, but I’m not getting rich,” she said. “I want the younger people I work with to be able to have that.”

    It’s not the workers who are greedy. It’s the bosses. Stop and Shop is owned by Dutch-Belgian conglomerate Ahold Delhaize. Stop and Shop raked in $2 billion in profit last year and got a US tax cut of $225 million in 2017.  The company is claiming that the attack on workers’ wages and benefits is necessary, but they refuse to provide any financial information to prove it.  We’re supposed to believe them and that Trump pays his taxes too. Nope, we ain’t falling for that malarkey.

Workers strike to fight for their livelihoods and to try and protect their family’s future. Bosses force workers to strike to increase profits and the value of their stock options.  We know which side we’re on, how about you?

Stealing Wages, not Sustainable

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Capitalism is thievery, even by its own laws, but some lowlife bosses are not satisfied with the ill-gotten gains and unfair advantages that the law already provides. No, some bosses not only exploit their workers, filling their baskets with the majority of the fruit that a worker produces, they also coerce or trick workers into working hours for free or accepting less than the already woefully inadequate minimum wage.

This wage thievery hurts “honest” and “hard working” small business owners as well, by giving an unfair advantage to the lowlife pick pockets who take money from their workers’ paychecks.  The thieves can lower their “operating expenses” and undercut their honest competitors. So “honest” bosses are getting screwed too while lowlife bosses can thrive.

Any business which doesn’t a pay living wage has no right to exist. They are a detriment to society.

But bosses who run businesses and steal from their workers already meager earnings are criminals and should be put in jail. And I don’t mean Club Fed type country clubs.  Lets’ take a page Lisbeth Salander and tattoo “this asshole steals wages from poor workers” across their chest and back and maybe on their foreheads too. Wage stealing bosses live in the same hole as pedaphiles, along with scabs and Pinkertons and Eric Prince.


There is no doubt that all wage labor is wage slavery under the menace of capitalism, but since we still have a fair amount of work to do before we are ready to challenge the rulers for control of society, bills like NJ Senate bill S1790 and Assembly bill A2903 are a baby step and offer workers some cheesecloth like armor of protection.  We reiterate the best way to fight for workers’ rights is to organize in the workplace and at the point of production. Building egalitarian structures in an IWW rank and file union is the real hope for change.  But if this proposed wage theft law in NJ can relieve some of the suffering of so many mostly low wage workers than we support it and call on the legislature to pass it immediately.

Wage theft, in the US, is a huge criminal enterprise.  The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the wage theft that revolves around the minimum wage alone is $15 billion a year. That’s more than “shoplifting” and if bosses paid a living wage “shoplifting” would most likely be even less of a problem.

,All threads connect in the fabric of capitalist oppression, and when we pull one, wage theft, we find that it is tied to another, low wages.  Laws that regulate the level of theft tolerated are not a bad thing, but we need to rid ourselves of exploitative social relations entirely. All we need is the strategy and the movement to start to make it happen.