Well,, I'm glad to see so many of you read my piece about the event involving the Coalition of Immolakee Workers.
I wonder why none of you responded with stories of actions in which you, yourselves, participated.
Well, in any event, Rhode Island Jobs with Justice (
rijobswithjustice@gmail.com) will be protesting outside the Renaissance Hotel (fittingly, the old Masonic Hall) at 5 Avenue of the Arts, Providence, at 4:30PM EDT on Wednesday, 18 August, 2010.
The reason for the protest: JP Morgan/Chase is a major financier of this hotel, which is refusing to recognize the union cards of its employees, in violation of a prior neutrality agreement.
The leaflet reads (in part) as follows (their grammar, not mine):
JP Morgan Chase was bailed out
Homeowners were forced out by them
They target the unemployed
They don't support working families
Don't let JP Morgan Chase benefit off the crisis they helped to create.
***
I fully realize that at least some of these union members may be undocumented workers, but my entire argument against illegal immigration lies in our rulers' use of them as an economic wedge to undermine the wage scale within the United States and to interfere with labor organization. (I've long been frustrated by those "respectable Republicans" who oppose illegal immigration while supporting the humongous US prison population without caring that these two phenomena are inseparable components of the same corporate program, just as the young leftists with whom I dealt today simultaneously handed out stickers opposing corporate greed and Arizona's immigration laws without realizing their own ensnarement by the same contradiction.) (And forgive me for seeing the attitude of the "respectable Republicans" as being born of evil, while chalking up the leftists' complementary attitude to naivte, but that's the way I see it!) So, I find this action, which seeks to support the rights of this hotel's workers versus the hotel itself without regard to the workers' employment status, to be entirely supportable, as it seeks to eliminate the wage-and-benefit disparity which makes undocumented workers so desirable by the corporate power in the first place.
(Oh, by the way, thanks a ton for not telling me how to hear "The Rage".)