Howdy Neighbor!
Emeryville has a well earned reputation as a place to do business. For decades, our reputation has proceeded us. Want a place where City Hall will help you maximize your profits? Emeryville would be a good selection. So what has that culture netted us? What kind of business community neighbors have we got in Emeryville? We've got Whole Foods, the purveyor of wholesome overpriced victuals with its wholesome union busting standard operating procedure.
Labor protests are now a regular fixture for more than a year at the Emeryville Whole Foods regional corporate headquarters on Hollis and 59th streets. The unions have told us of the unfair labor practises of Whole Foods, damaging to workers, their families and the community. For their part on this issue, Whole Foods has said....nothing. They're not required to tell Emeryville residents anything about how they treat their workers so they're not. How's THAT for being good corporate neighbors?
Seen this week (top photo) and from last year (Tilton Pacific is a Whole Foods contractor not honoring its contract with the unions):
Workers are getting the shaft all over the country because of the Affordable Health Care Act,or Obamacare. A single payer plan linked to Medicare would have been a much more humane way to go. That's what Bernie Sanders wants to put into place. As it is, employers avoid any mandatory health care payments by the simple ruse of giving workers fewer than thirty hours of work per week. This paves the way for bullying them into working any hours above that off the clock. So, not only are employees getting less paid work than before, they have to pop for Obamacare out of their own pockets, which don't have many coins rattling in them.
ReplyDeleteNo, Joe. It's called mobilized capital. Corporations all over America can promote and uphold worker's health and labor rights; compnaies like Whole Foods choose not to. WF's biggest investor is Goldman Sachs, so the company is beholden to its stock prices, and workers are really in the way of that. It's not ACA, that's a bunch of baloney concocted by corporations to sway thinking [read lying] and get the public to act [fear] in a way to ensure maximum profits. Mackay is fantically anti-union, anti American worker.
ReplyDeleteIf WH was a manufacturer it would have pulled up stakes for Mexico long ago. WF purports itself to be proudly progressively American - environmentally sourced, etc. It's labor practices tell a much different story.