Workers Rally at Giant Food in Greenbelt, Maryland

When you buy a box of cereal or a roll of toilet paper from a Giant in Maryland or the District of Columbia, chances are those products were stored at a warehouse in Jessup, Maryland before they went to your neighborhood grocery store.   More than 500 employees of that warehouse in Jessup are in danger of losing their jobs.  Giant plans to turnover operations of the shop to a notoriously anti-union company, C & S Wholesale Grocers, who will more than likely outsource the work to a non-union warehouse in Pennsylvania.  This fear is justified by C&S’s closure of a distribution center in Woodbridge, N.J., which resulted in more than 1,000 layoffs.

To stop the loss of area jobs, hundreds of grocery and wholesale workers held a rally at a Giant in Greenbelt Maryland last Sunday, March 13, demanding that Giant respect the community that supports it by employing locally.  If you weren’t able to attend the rally but recognize that the loss of jobs in the region is none too good for the local economy or if you feel solidarity for the workers because you yourself or someone you know has been or is at risk of being outsourced, you can at least keep yourself informed thanks to the following audio report produced by Netfa Freeman: Giant Food Worker Rally

For more information on the campaign itself and how you can get involved go to the Justice at Giant campaign website.

Giant is hoping this little maneuver will save them $10 million annually in non-labor costs.  Turnout at the rally was perhaps better than it’s been for most labor demonstrations because of events taking place in Wisconsin, Ohio and as far flung as Egypt and Tunisia.  It seems that workers around the world are finally coming to the conclusion that those of us on the relatively far Left have understood for a long time––the corporate oligarchies that control our economy don’t really have the best interest of the working- and middle-class at heart.  Our elected officials, who are bought and paid for by those same oligarchies, will put the interests of their corporate masters ahead of the electorate every time.

So, when corporations like Giant Foods and elected officials like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and DC Mayor Vincent Gray say, “times are tough.  We all have to take a hit.”  We know they don’t really mean we as in everyone, todo el mundo.   This may seem like common sense to your average progressive, but we haven’t been good at convincing most of the working- and middle-class of these facts.  By bailing out those that caused the worst economic calamity since 1929 and having no empathy for the rest of us, our elected officials are making the case for us.

The sizable rally against Giant and the support for striking nurses at Washington Hospital Center are ripples of this growing realization that we are feeling here in the District of Columbia.  Will it translate into a growing fight against austerity measures proposed to balance the city budget?  Will more people get on board the effort to keep the city from selling off publicly-owned properties to developers or stop the corporate take over of public schools?

We as individuals cannot be at every rally.  We cannot stay on top of every issue but we can get the word out about the events that we are able to attend in just the same manner as Netfa Freeman.   Netfa Freeman is a volunteer radio producer at WPFW.  He co-produces the public affairs program Voices With Vision.  I am quite pleased to announce that he will be teaching a radio production class for the Grassroots Media Project which will meet on four consecutive Wednesdays starting March 23, 2011.   There schedule is as follows:

Wednesday March 23 ………………..  6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Wednesday March 30 ………………..  6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Wednesday April 6 …………………….  6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Wednesday April 13 …………………..  6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Class will be held in the media lab at Empower DC, 1419 V Street NW, from 6-8pm.  To sign up, email the coordinator at liane@grassrootsmediaproject.org.  There are only six slots available.

If this movement that we are finally seeing is to be sustained, it will need a voice.  Sign up for this radio production class and help give the movement, locally at least, the voice it needs to sustain itself.