AOC is the new Mother Jones!

SEIU Service Employees International Union 

Fight for $15 and a Union fast food workers strike to demand $15/hour on MLK’s birthday

Asunta Cavallucci and her sister Maria lost her father, a baker in Baltimore MD, when she was 14 (about 1925. 

My Grandmother Isabella Cavallucci had relatives in Coatesville, The Teti family I think. 

Asunta and Maria had to go to work in the textile mills.

Asunta Cavallucci married James Anthony Pitcherella. I was born in 1943. 

My dad was born in 1910. He finished high school and went to work at Lukens Steel Company Coatesville, PA. 

My Dad on the ladder
of his gantry crane. Lukens
Steel Company.

I could see the pain on his face when he spoke about working 12 hour shifts 5 days a week and 10 hours on Saturday. He often worked "an extra." An extra was a 12 hour day shift 1/2 hour for dinner then a 12 hour night shift, followed by a day shift the next day, 36 hours straight.

Occasionally he did 2 "extras" in a week a 94 hour work week with no overtime.

My dad said, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the greatest president we ever had. 

My Grandma Cavallucci holding me at
my 1st. birthday party. Isabella Cavallucci 
was choir director and organist at the 
Holy Rosary Church about 100 feet down
Black Horse Hill Road from our house.

My mom, Sue and my Aunt Mary and my Aunt Lena lived with my dad, my brother Joe, My Grandmom Isabella Cavallucci in Coatesville, PA. 

Now and then I heard them say "the mill." The mill carried a heavy weight. As a young boy I could feel that "the mill" was hell on earth. 

On my Dad's side of the family, the Pitcherella side, My Aunt Angie the second oldest of my Grandmother Filomena Pitcherella's 7 children also worked in the silk mills.

As the first images of President Joe Biden’s Oval Office began to circulate online, a prominently placed bust of labor and civil rights leader Cesar Chavez drew swift comment. Nestled amid Biden family photos behind the president’s desk, the bronze statuette appeared to signal a commitment to the Latinx and worker struggles for which Chavez, founder of the union that would later become the United Farm Workers of America, fought...

Following decades of anti-worker, anti-union labor laws established in this country, the Hunts Point strike comes at a time of robust and potent labor organizing. Last February, the House passed an omnibus labor reform bill, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would overturn a number of anti-worker Supreme Court decisions.

The strike at the market, aimed at a key chokepoint of commodity circulation, underlines the necessity of collective action, the solidarity it requires, and the critical role of strong unions. This sort of high-stakes, hard-fought labor action — which entails significant sacrifices from workers — is the least that powerful business owners should face when workers are deemed “essential” but treated as disposable.

“We’re only essential when it suits them,” said Darren Brenner, a 52-year-old warehouse worker who has been a Teamsters member at the market for 31 years. “There were guys who died. I got the virus and brought it home to my family,” he told me on Thursday afternoon, standing at the barricaded entrance to the distribution center with a few dozen co-workers, maintaining the picket line through the quieter day shift. Brenner said that while he and his family fully recovered from Covid-19, numerous other co-workers “never came back” from the disease.

According to a Local 202 spokesperson, hundreds of workers were infected with Covid-19, and six died. “Our jobs are always dangerous. For them to offer us 32 cents — to think that’s what we’re worth to them. It’s an insult.”

The Bronx’s own Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez helped draw broader attention to Hunts Point, eschewing Washington, D.C., on Inauguration Day to join the picket line. And Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., while iterating as a thousand mitten-clad memes across social media on Wednesday, tweeted his support for the strike. “Essential workers should not have to go on strike for decent pay,” he wrote.

MORE AT:

Forget Biden’s Bust of Cesar Chavez: Hunts Point Strike Is the Bold Labor Action the Country Needs

Essential workers, ravaged by the pandemic as their bosses raked in millions, organized from the bottom up and won concessions.