Make it a Union-Friendly Holiday Season for Retail

You can make a difference in the lives of retail
workers this holiday season.

The holiday season is the low-point of the year for
retail workers. For the same meager wage, we are
forced to work extra hard to cope with the busiest
shopping period of the year. While most retail
employees will work straight through the holidays with
no time-off, few will receive overtime. Predictably,
store managers become even more abusive to meet their
holiday sales targets.

In sum, the absence of union representation is felt
most acutely during the holiday season. A
staggeringly low 2% of retails workers are union
members. In fact, many of those who work retail are
unaware of the right to form a union because no union
has ever reached out to them.

This holiday season help change this sorry state of
affairs. Shopping at unionized locations is ideal,
but given the paucity of union density in the industry
not too easy.

The Retail Workers Union of the IWW has designed a
business card-size information sheet to facilitate
union conversations with folks working retail. You
can download the card at http://www.starbucksunion.org.
Here’s what you can do to help make this a
union-friendly holiday season:

While you are doing your holiday shopping this year
hand the workers you encounter the union card. If you
can, start a conversation about the right to form a
union and ask for the worker’s contact information to
follow up. When you get home, describe your
experience in an e-mail to starbucksunion [at] yahoo.com so
we can share insights and stories with other
participants.

Together we can organize the so-called “unorganizable”
to achieve both dignified conditions in the retail
industry and a powerful voice for all working people
in society.

More information:
http://www.retailworker.com
http://www.starbucksunion.org
http://www.iww.org