[Onthebarricades] Fw: [EF!] Re: Adbusters Newsletter #34: BUY NOTHING XMAS!!/ VA grocery store action

[Andy]

from www.dc.indymedia.org:

AUDIO PIECE ON N. VA Grocery store action against Smithfield Hams

http://dc.indymedia.org/usermedia/audio/11/smithfield_harris_teeter_d1
6.mp3

Smithfield protest at Harris-Teeter exposes management hypocrisy

WSQT Guerrilla Radio 

Mid afternoon on December 16, protestors handed out fliers and asked 
shoppers at Harris-teeter on Glebe Road in Ballston, VA not to buy 
their house brand hams as they are supplied by Smithfield,where 
workers are losing limbs to safety violations at the Tar Heel plant 
in North Carolina, a notorious anti-union state. 

The previous week,a few activists visited the same Harris-Teeter 
grocery and spoke to a manager, who stated that Smithfield's union-
busting and horrific injury rate "doesn't sound like United States in 
2006."

Unfortunately, union-busting, siccing ICE on immigrant workers to 
remove "troublemakers" and "agitators," work speedups in violation of 
safety standards, and beatings and even sexual assaults of pro-union 
workers are very USA 2006.

So is sending the police to drive away or arrest protestors. This 
time, the manager responded to a protest consisting mostly of signs 
and handing out fliers(with a couple short chants) by calling the 
Arlington cops and declaring he had an "emergency" in the store!

Several carloads of cops responded, and ordered all protestors to 
approach and wait for the manager to order them to leave "private 
property" and take any protest to the sidewalk on the opposite side 
of the street where flierign would be impossible. 

Protestors stood firm and were able to get the cops to concede that 
everyone could stay on the same-side sidewalk, after one cop citing 
an obscure law called "curtilage" threatened arrest if we stayed on 
the same side of the street. He bailed out on that line of attack 
after being asked him who was responsable if someone slipped in the 
snow and fell there two weeks later and he refused to give a square 
answer.

The manager who read out the order to leave the sacred Private 
Property of the Temple of Shopping turend out to be the same guy who 
claimed to be so concerned about Smithfield's abuses just last week! 
Hey Virginia, whatever happened to "this doesn't sound like United 
States in 2006?" What a two-faced piece of work...

After everyone retreated to the sidewalk, three or four cars worth of 
cops stayed at the Harris-Teeter door for quite a while, keeping them 
off the street and stopping them from writing traffic tickets for 
such "offenses" as driving while Black. 

This was while we continued to give out fliers to people in cars 
entering or leaving the lot, risking more of that "no soliciting" 
bullshit that seems to plague political handbillign in Virginia these 
days.

The police harassment was but a tiny sample of what union organizers 
in the United States in 2006 in places like North Carolina are 
getting. Those 22 amputations in the past two years at the Tar Heel 
plant are the real emergency at Harris-Teeter so long as they sell 
Smithfield products.

How are workers losing limbs? In the Tar Hell slaughterhouse, the 
work speedups have led to a rise in the deep cuts that get infected 
when workers are ordered not to go to the doctor but to return to 
work instead, so the injuries get infected and gangrene sets in.

In other words, every piece of Smithfield ham comes with a free side 
order of gangrene, and is made with the blood, tears, and limbs of 
immigrant and nonwhite workers. Blood is truly on the table with 
Smithfield or Harris-teeter hams. 





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