Fed up with being the last to know about the fate of their stores and jobs, supermarket workers marched on Giant headquarters in Landover on Wednesday, accompanied by religious, political, community and labor allies. “We’ve had enough!” shouted UFCW 400 president Mark Federici, noting that “We don’t know any more today than we did six weeks ago,” when Giant workers were first notified that eight metro-area Giant stores may be sold because of a corporate merger between the European-based parent companies of Giant Food and Food Lion. A group of workers met with executives at Giant headquarters but emerged unsatisfied. “Promises don’t put food on the table,” Federici said, “we want to see written commitments to keep these good union jobs.”
On today's labor calendar, Verizon strike picket lines continue daily throughout the metro Washington area; go to dclabor.org and click on calendar for the latest list of locations and times. There’s a “Don’t Let McConnell Trump the Supreme Court” rally today at 11:15am outside Republican national headquarters and tonight at 6pm the International Labor Rights Forum holds their 2016 Labor Rights Defenders Awards; the rally is free but you’ll need tickets for the awards. Complete details at dclabor.org, click on Calendar. Today’s labor history is actually yesterday’s, because I accidentally switched them up; sorry about that! So on May 11 in 1894, a nationwide railway strike began at Pullman, Illinois. Nearly 260,000 railroad workers ultimately joined the strike to protest wage cuts by the Pullman Palace Car Co. And on May 11 in 1953, seventeen crewmen on the iron ore freighter Henry Steinbrenner died when the ship, carrying nearly 7,000 tons of ore, sank during a violent storm on Lake Erie. Another 16 crewmen survived. Today’s labor quote is by Al Ekblad, Executive Secretary of the Montana AFL-CIO “I think we're at a turning point in history. We're not talking about just the survival of the labor movement. We're talking about the survival of the middle class.”
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