The amount of solidarity that has been shown to the Target workers has only increased over the last three days. Today we had members from the UFCW, the UAW, and the CWA. Other community organizations, such as NRV Indivisible, and two local Democrat candidates came and endorsed our strike, Chris Hurst and Steve McBride. Furthermore we have now been offered legal representation if workers feel so inclined as to pursue a lawsuit for the abuses they have suffered. The filing of an EEOC charge is also pending. With all this said we want to make some facts clear for all parties concerned. The Target workers on strike have done this action autonomously, we are not paid organizers of any union, of any NGO, we run entirely off a commitment to our principles of worker power and a knowledge of our legal rights.
We are members of this local community, born and raised, we attended the elementary, middle and high schools here, we are not transplants, we are not outsiders. We care about our community and what happens in it. This is the primary motivation for our efforts at holding Daniel Butler accountable for the worker abuses he has engaged in for years now. And while we support the solidarity shown to us by local politicians and the unions, we are committed to operating autonomously as empowered workers.
Some have encouraged us to turn this effort into a union drive, but to us this is less relevant for our situation. There are benefits at not having such a formal designation, which comes with further legal constraints that tie the hands of workers from taking direct and militant action. We don’t want to be caught up in a legalistic and bureaucratic way of organizing, instead we want to depend on the principled commitment of local rank and file workers, which entirely hinges upon our ability to unify and commit to one another, to where we are directly accountable to each other. This is what we are getting at with the second demand of an independent workers committee. Stay tuned for Day 4.
NRV Strike 