Come gather \'round people, wherever you roam....

Come gather \'round people, wherever you roam/and admit your employers strike too close to the bone....

Have you ever spent the better portion of your waking hours engaged in low-paying work that is both physically exhausting and psychologically demanding? Have you ever felt financially compromised by participating in your employer\'s healthcare plan, or have you ever decided that the price of admission to the plan was prohibitive? Have you ever found yourself without a healthcare plan at all, and have you ever had to rely on scarce public resources and/or take on substantial personal debt in order to receive necessary medical attention? Do you strain to make ends meet, and worry about unforeseen crises that may compromise your ability to care for yourself and/or your family? Do you wonder why, in such a wealthy country, so many of us are being so tightly squeezed while corporate profits thrive and public resources allocated to serving the basic needs of tax-paying citizens amount to so little?

Please come out to Friday\'s rally and show your support of the over 30,000 Bay Area grocery workers who are struggling to hold on to affordable healthcare benefits as contract negotiations with Fortune 50 grocery conglomerates Safeway, Albertson\'s, and Kroger\'s get underway. Help hold the line - not only for the Bay Area grocery workers and for the thousands of Local 2 members currently locked out of their jobs at San Francisco\'s major hotels - but for yourselves, as well. An injury to one is an injury to all ( an exclusive and ever-dwindling minority excluded, of course ).