https://archive.ph/2022.03.28-073505/https://www.npr.org/2022/03/28/1089110574/california-grocery-workers-vote-to-authorize-strike
The possible walkout would involve grocery clerks, meat cutters, pharmacists and pharmacy technicians represented by seven locals of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.
Good on you California, if you weren't full already, I'd love to move there when the US eventually balkanizes. Gotta get out of the fourth reich where I am.
Folks are surprised to learn how much private sector unionization California has - I mean it's not much but more than most places in the US other than maybe the Upper Midwest.
I don't know about it for sure, but does anyone know if there are lefty enclaves in the midwest?
I think most major cities in the midwest have at the very least some lefty-friendly radlib enclaves (and I'm not using radlib as a perjorative here, I mean it in the good sense like the folks who genuinely hate racism). My hometown (>2 million MSA) has a sizable part of town where you could openly be a socialist and most folks would probably be cool with it and you could probably find some like-minded folks. Meanwhile where I live in CA has a pretty solid reactionary base here. So things aren't all black and white. But yeah, if you're talking about a balkanization situation I can't think of a state I'd rather be in than CA.
If you want to know more about what city/enclave I'm talking about just DM me.
Which one, tho? By the time the US balkinizes, we're talking about 2, 3, maybe even six Californias
Fuck, I'd have walked off the job for twice that. If you can't even keep up with the price of gas, what are you even doing?
Supermarkets traditionally operate on thin profit margins of about 2%. But the pandemic turbocharged revenues as restaurants closed and more people ate at home. Kroger’s operating profit nearly doubled to $4.3 billion from 2019 to 2021.
In 2020, the company paid out $1.3 billion to investors — money that workers say should have gone to pay them more as they faced COVID-19 risks on the job. Kroger Chief Executive Rodney McMullen was criticized for collecting a $22.4-million pay package in 2020 — his largest ever — even as the company ended a $2-an-hour hazard bonus for frontline workers after two months.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-03-27/la-fi-kroger-albertsons-strike-vote-authorization-grocery-workers
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
