What Came After the PCC Picket Line
Justice Wornum
Since the union contract was ratified at the beginning of last month, employees at PCC Community Market are facing intense retaliation from their management for displaying anything that may reflect solidarity with the suffering people of Palestine.
UFCW 3000 initially intervened to defend Greenlake Village workers wearing a watermelon union pin to show solidarity. Since then, PCC management has decided to blatantly disregard the federal legal protections guaranteed to all union workers by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and send workers home without pay for wearing the union labeled watermelon pins. They sent an announcement to all employees about their intention to crack down on any “violations of the appearance policy”, even going so far as to claim any “political slogans” such as something as innocuous as a pin with the phrase “no war” will result in reprimanding and being sent home.
In a stunning display of hypocrisy this policy is written so that pins provided by management in the break room (specifically the rainbow pride colors, pronoun pins, the trans pride flag, or “Black Lives Matter”) aren’t considered “political slogans” and thus PCC gives the impression to shoppers that employees simply choose to support all these progressive causes EXCEPT for Palestine.
This policy is nothing short of a betrayal of the founding and espoused values of the cooperative as written, including a statement of inclusion and diversity recognizing “racism and colonialism continue to play a significant role in shaping food systems” and committing the co-op to “justice-centered relationships without exploitation”. In an unsurprising but disappointing turn of events, now that the contract is settled the UFCW 3000 union bureaucrats have left their members out to dry, refusing to print any more pins to grow this fight into the other stores and dismissing any requests to enforce the NLRA by filing an “Unfair Labor Practice” out of concerns that the Supreme Court may side with PCC, seeing an opportunity to overturn existing labor protections.
Where the union bureaucrats let their workers down, however, the socialist movement must answer the call! Already, rank and file socialists working at PCC have begun producing and distributing more copies of the UFCW 3000 watermelon pins at their coworkers’ request. A GoFundMe “solidarity fund” has been set up to restore the missing wages of any worker sent home for a violation of this policy. A petition has been drafted by PCC employees to be delivered to store management on Saturday 8/8 at 4pm. Community solidarity pickets will take place at the same time outside the Columbia City and Greenlake Village locations to spread awareness to PCC shoppers.
PCC CEO Krish Srinivasan and Chief People Officer Dana Montanari (HR) believe they stand to profit more by bending over backward and breaking federal labor laws to prevent any expressions of sympathy for the Palestinians being slaughtered each day by Israel and the US. They believe “their” co-operative grocery store cannot be moved to take a stand against injustice, and have flatly refused calls not only from the community but from their own employees to boycott Israeli products. It is up to us to prove them wrong, to stand with PCC workers, and to show that betraying any remaining goodwill that has been cultivated among those who support progressive causes, like the BDS movement, will be much, much, more costly.
Please sign the petition, donate to the solidarity fund, and attend the solidarity pickets this Saturday at 4pm to add your voice to the powerful message to PCC management that “An Injury to One is an Injury to All!”
Support PCC Workers!
Sign the petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/tell-pcc-hands-off-our-pins
Donate here: https://gofund.me/9b26f7c63