Submitted on Sat, 01/20/2007 - 2:02pm
Rockville, Maryland- Employees at a Starbucks store here announced their membership in the IWW Starbucks Workers Union [www.StarbucksUnion.org] today and served a list of demands on their manager including a living wage, secure work hours, and the reinstatement of union baristas illegally fired for organizing activity. The action marks the expansion of the SWU to a third state- baristas began joining the union in New York City and the campaign grew to Chicago last August. Starbucks cafes were completely non-union in the United States before the Industrial Workers of the World initiated its organizing drive in 2004.
"No worker should have to deal with understaffing on one hand and the inability to get enough work hours on the other," said Seth Dietz, one of the Maryland baristas who declared his union membership. "Only an independent voice on the job will win baristas the respect we deserve and that's why the expansion of the organization to Maryland is so gratifying."
Submitted on Fri, 06/24/2005 - 11:40pm
(This event was endorsed by the Baltimore IWW)
On June 17, 2005 the United Workers Association held a protest against Orioles owner Peter Angelos at Camden Yards. More than 100 United Workers Association members and their supporters threw “peanuts for poverty wages” at a model of Angelos and passed out peanuts to fans arriving for Friday’s game.
“Peter Angelos is a lying cheat, full of broken promises. He’s a cheating billionaire who says one thing and does another when it comes to ending poverty wages at the ballpark,” said James Riddick, a member of the United Workers Association.
Earlier that day members of the United Workers Association went to Angelos’s office on deliver package of peanuts for poverty wages. Security at Angelos’s office refused the shoe and the peanuts for poverty wages. Afterwards Angelos’s top aide, Tom Murudas, made a veiled threat to sue the organization of homeless and other low-wage workers for saying that Angelos “cheats workers.”
The United Workers Association would welcome a lawsuit between a baseball billionaire like Angelos and the homeless workers who clean up after Angelos’s baseball games.
Angelos’s top aide Marudas called Todd Cherkis, an organizer with the United Workers Association, and left a voice mail to imply that a lawsuit may be in the works over signs charging Angelos with cheating workers and paying peanuts for poverty wages. On the voice mail (which is available for reporters to listen to), Marudas said that the United Workers Association is “on legal softground” and that Angelos is “not going to take kindly to it [the signs].”
“We call Angelos a cheat for lying to workers, and he threatens to sue us. If he thinks we’re going to back down, he’s wrong,” said Riddick.
The United Workers Association organizes the low-wage workers of Maryland.
Why is the United Workers Association focusing on Peter Angelos?
