To quit or to commute? That’s the question that’s been weighing heavy on the minds of the workers and Local 400 members in the Portsmouth, Virginia Kroger store as they’re being forced to either relocate to the nearest union Kroger store, which is 50 miles away round trip, or quit. "All of us who work in the High Street store are members of the Portsmouth community,” wrote Shop Steward Laverne Wrenn in an op-ed for her local newspaper, The Virginia Pilot. "We live here and send our children to the neighborhood schools. Many of my co-workers walk or take the bus to work; they do not own a car. We have built our lives around this store and this community. But now Kroger is giving us just one month's notice to transfer to a store 25 miles away or lose our jobs." Read more at dclabor.org
On today’s labor calendar, I’ll be guest-hosting the Arise! show from 9-10am this morning right here on WPFW, focusing on "Art and Activism" with guests Elise Bryant, Ron Carver, poet Mark Nowak and more. And tonight you can catch a free screening of the new Ken Loach film, “The Spirit of '45”; starting at 7pm at American University with a reception beforehand at 6:30; go to dclabor.org and click on calendar for complete details. Here's today's labor history: On this date in 1880, Frances Perkins was born. Perkins was named secretary of labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, becoming the first woman to hold a cabinet-level office. In 1930, Dolores Huerta was born. Huerta was a co-founder, with Cesar Chavez, of the United Farm Workers . In 1997, dancers from the Lusty Lady Club in San Francisco’s North Beach ratified their first-ever union contract by a vote of 57-15, having won representation by SEIU Local 790 the previous summer. The club, which later became a worker-owned cooperative, closed in 2013. And on this date in 2006, tens of thousands of immigrants demonstrated in 100 U.S. cities in a national day of action billed as a campaign for immigrants’ dignity. Some 200,000 gathered in Washington, D.C. Today's labor quote is by Dolores Huerta: “Professional farmworkers who know how to do a number of different jobs, whether it be pruning or picking or crafting, they see themselves as professionals, and they take a lot of pride in that work. They don't see themselves as doing work that is demeaning.” Dolores Huerta, who said: “I think organized labor is a necessary part of democracy. Organized labor is the only way to have fair distribution of wealth.”
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