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WSQT Guerrilla Radio in DC
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 enterign 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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