victimisation

Where: Entrance to St. Pancras Station
When: Monday 19th November, 12:00 – 2:00
Contact: pret.staff.union (at) gmail.com or northlondonsf (at) solfed.org.uk

Since being formed earlier this year, the Pret a Manger Staff Union has faced harassment and victimisation.  In an all too familiar scenario, activists from the union have faced a series of trumped-up disciplinary charges.

Join North London SolFed in standing up to union-busting by helping us picket the Pret shop where the union was formed and where two members are in the process of fighting victimisation.

Solidarity is going to be key to fighting fast food exploitation, so spread the word.

Today saw the London Solidarity Federation hold a picket in support of a victimised Whole Foods worker. The action was held in conjunction with protests in Boston, New York, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, Reno and San Francisco.

The demonstration had been called in defense of Natalia, a San Francisco Whole Foods worker who was sacked for speaking up in support of herself and her workmates and took place outside the Soho branch of Whole Foods in London.

The North and South London Locals of the Solidarity Federation extend our solidarity to the workers at Queen Mary University. With the threat of redundancies across campus, workers have become energised, linked up with students, and exhibited a growing degree of organisation. In response, university management have suspended the Queen Mary UNISON branch secretary on trumped up disciplinary charges.

While the Solidarity Federation recognises the power of the union rests not in its officials, but in an active and self-organised membership, management clearly believe they can defeat their workforce by 'beheading' the union. Such attacks must be resisted.

In his 1992 book, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Noam Chomsky attributed the role of the US administration in its interventions in places like El Salvador, Chile and Nicaragua in part to the desire to negate the ‘threat of a good example’.

He argued that these countries were showing their neighbours that ownership of the means of production could be retained within the country rather than handed over to US multinationals, and that it was possible to run a country reasonably successfully without it being a de facto colony of the US. Such ‘good examples’ had to be crushed as soon as possible, lest the lesson should spread. Various methods have been used in pursuit of this purpose over the years, from ‘agent orange’ in chemical weapons used in Vietnam to the backing of violent coups by US henchmen such as Pinochet and the bloodthirsty Nicaraguan ‘Contras’. They have, by and large, been successful.