Tag Archives: wages

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?

A Living Wage is a Requirement of a Sustainable Ecconomy

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We need $15 an hour, and we need it now, not five years from now like most democrat politicians want. A sustainable economy requires wages that sustain a healthy,productive and rewarding life.

We shouldn’t walk into the the bosses’ office with our hats in our hands, nope. We need to walk in with our fists in the air. We have the power. All we lack is the organization. No small thing for sure, but easily attainable if we work together.

But that’s our problem. We workers let the bosses divide us by nation, race, gender, orientation. We let them divide us based on how much money we earn or the perception that “skills” are what should determine the value of labor. But the idea of skilled vs. unskilled workers is just another wedge driven through our unity. It is based on the false perception that there is an unlimited amount of jobs for “skilled” workers and that all an individual needs to do is get the right “skills.” This is just another trick of the neoliberal pseudo economists and lackey pundits.

The bottom line is this. Workers create the value and thereby the wealth in the economy, but because bosses are greedy and often too incompetent to make profit and still pay workers a wage that allows them to meet living expenses, many workers are forced into a situation where they can barely survive. In the upside down world of capitalist economy the bosses are turned into the producers of value and labor is an “expense.” But if all the bosses disappeared tomorrow the economy would continue to operate. Their demise might cause a bump or two as workers reorganized our work places without the boss, but we would carry on. If all the workers disappeared, however, the engine would seize and the profit would stop. When it comes right down to it most bosses, and all of the big bosses, are little more than parasites living off blood of workers, sucking the life out of us so they can consume far more than they need.

There is no need to detail the corporate profits accumulated by the one percent or more accurately the the tenth of one percent over the last forty years. They have made unfathomable measures of wealth, while most of the rest of us have had to strap flippers on our feet to simply stay afloat and avoid breathing in the water that presses against our throats.

We don’t have to accept this. We are the many and they are the few. We need to organize, to see through the bosses’ lies that divide us and demand our share of the wealth we create: the vast majority of it. We can get  $15, a living wage and helluva lot more.

Time and Money, Money and Time

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How do we measure the value of time. Time is a limited resource for all of us even though there seems to be an unlimited supply from the universal perspective. When we look at time in relation to our labor we can see that we trade our time, our lives, to earn the meager necessities of out existence.

In my daily toil, for instance, my coworkers and I produce great amounts of value measured in revenue for the company and the capitalist but only receive in return a fraction of what we produce in wages. I can create revenue to pay my entire yearly salary in one day —not everyday, but on certain days when I do a certain kind of work. There is no doubt that in one month’s time I and my coworkers create value well in excess of our salary What about the other eleven months. Capitalism takes our lives from us to sustain itself and its profits,then uses the proceeds to both oppress us with state power and confound us and fool us into accepting its presentation of reality with education, media, history and culture.

We must rebel!