#mcstrike

[politicalsci]

Find them here: https://waronwant.org/McStrike-near-me 

#McStrike

[batmanbeyondrocks]

Strike for Black Lives: Take action in solidarity!

Tomorrow, low-paid service and care workers will Strike for Black Lives across the USA. Their strikes, walkouts and worker actions will demand racial and economic justice, in the workplace and in wider society. Going on strike is never easy. It takes courage and determination. Please show your solidarity: share this image on social media to show US workers that you stand with them.

Every message will help them know that people around the world are with them. Groups across the UK are speaking out on social media from Sunday at 8pm to show workers that we are behind them. In the UK, Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic fast food workers in the McStrike have come together to demand change from fast food multinationals. They know that to win against corporations like McDonald’s, you have to build a global movement. That’s why showing solidarity across borders is so important. McDonald’s is global, but so is the resistance. Please share this image to show your solidarity on Twitter and Facebook, or download the image and share it with your friends by WhatsApp or email. Thank you for standing with black workers as they lead the fight against systemic racism and economic injustice in the fast food sector and beyond. In solidarity, Owen Espley Labour rights campaigner War on Want

[vintagebooksdesign]

NOW WE HAVE YOUR ATTENTION - Jack Shenker

Sick of Boris? Brexit? Proroguing? Parliament? These are the real voices of politics.

From a warehouse in Manchester to a pub in Essex, from the outskirts of Glasgow to a racecourse in Durham, Jack Shenker uncovers the root causes of our current crisis and the future direction of British politics through the lives of ordinary individuals. Taking us deep into communities hollowed out by austerity and decades of economic disadvantage, among a generation crippled by precarious work and unaffordable housing, he shows where the chaos at Westminster ultimately springs from – and how disillusionment with it is fuelling a passionate engagement with politics of a completely different kind: local, personal, effective and utterly fearless. Joining a ‘McStrike’ protest on a roundabout in Cambridge and a gathering of the London Renters’ Union in the aftermath of Grenfell, meeting hard-right bloggers in Newcastle and climate change protesters in Brighton, Shenker draws on exceptional access to campaign groups, activist movements and grassroots gatherings throughout the country – including unique access to Momentum, who have re-radicalised the Labour party from the outside in – to introduce us to the citizens and leaders of tomorrow: people who are changing things for themselves. Inspiring and terrifying in equal measure, Now We Have Your Attention uncovers a revolutionary transformation in attitudes and behaviour, and a future that will shape us all.

Published by The Bodley Head.

[cathkaesque]

Spread the Spoons Strike

An appeal from striking workers

This is the main article from the new Wetherspoons strike bulletin ‘The Spoons Striker’, avaliable in PDF form for real world distribution.

It can be hard to live on the money we make. We spend most of our wages on renting damp flats, we have to walk to work when we can’t afford the bus, and we have to choose between dinner and a haircut. We’re forced to work as fast as we can for long shifts with barely any breaks, even when we’re sick or injured. We’ve seen the people we work with struggling to make ends meet, sofa surfing and scraping by. Meanwhile, Tim Martin is worth £322 million. Our work has made him, the bosses, and the shareholders rich beyond our wildest dreams, but we’re left a few weeks’ pay away from poverty.

We won’t take it anymore. That’s why we’re fighting back. They won’t listen to us when we complain, so we’re taking the next step. In two Brighton pubs we’ve taken the decision to all stop work and go on strike on October 4th. We’re fighting for £10 an hour and union recognition for every Wetherspoons worker in the country.

On your own, you can’t change anything. Hiding in the freezer, stretching out your break time, getting another job – none of it solves the problem. The bosses have all the power and they don’t give a shit about us. We know that we will only win when we fight together.

How do we know that we win when we fight together? Because we’re already winning. The recent pay rises didn’t come out of thin air.

In the past, millionaire shitlord Tim has argued against the idea that all workers deserve a living wage. He thinks it’s ‘unrealistic’ that we get paid enough to get by. But suddenly, just after two pubs announced they were going to vote on strike action, he changed his mind. Now we’ve shown we can stick up for ourselves, generous Tim is willing to give us a couple of quid extra out of the profits we make.

The abolition of 18-20 youth rates means than some workers will be going £6.60 an hour to £8.26. That’s two pounds an hour better – all because workers at just two pubs stood up to Tim and the bosses. Night shifts will get paid a pound extra per hour, and the tiny annual pay rise has been brought forward a few months. But it’s not enough. At minimum, we deserve £10 an hour – because everyone deserves a wage you can live on in comfort.

But as well as the national pay rise, we’ve managed to get stuff changed in both of our pubs. At the Post and Telegraph we gave our pub manager a letter signed by half the staff complaining about the way our rotas were done, and things were changed immediately. At the Brighthelm, we handed in a letter complaining about the introduction of night shifts and they were stopped straight away.

If just two pubs in one city can force the bosses to give us a national pay rise, then what could ten pubs do? What about twenty?

We need the get organised all over the country if we want to win more. Tim can afford to give up a bit of his £322 million to the people who work hour after hour making food, cleaning toilets, closing up and taking stock. But he won’t do it unless we force him too. The only way to force him too is to organise and fight back.

In Brighton, we’re members of the Bakers Food and Allied Workers’ Union (BFAWU). Unions are groups made up of lots of workers. Together, as part of a union, we can organise to immediately change our own lives. When you’re in a union, you don’t have to put up with a bad job, terrible wages, bullying managers or the rest of it.

We’re asking you, workers at other pubs across the country, to join the union and organise where you are. There are over 900 spoons across the UK. Workers in as many of those as possible need to get organised and take part in the movement. There are tens of thousands of us and only a few of them – together, we can run our pubs for the many not the few.

Weatherspoons workers will be taking coordinated strike action with McDonalds and TGI Friday’s workers on Thursday 4th October. 

[dailymarx]

When the working people ask for more than “the prime necessaries of life,” when they pretend “to share” in the profits resulting from their own industry, then they are accused of communistic tendencies.

Marx - on strike action, New York Daily Tribune 1853

[opificem]

"The national strikes of mcdonalds workers taking place are actually just a statistical error the mcdonalds worker never goes on strike. Strikey Georg, who lives in cave & strikes over 10,000 each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted”

[mysharona1987]

[generalelectionmusings]