Revolt on Goose Island by Kari Lydersen

Author:Kari Lydersen [Lydersen, Kari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-395-3
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2014-05-12T16:00:00+00:00

PARTY AT TEAMSTER CITY

This was also the refrain at the official victory celebration two days later, in the cavernous auditorium in Teamster City—the truckers’ sprawling union headquarters—on Union Row across the street from the UE building.

Kim Bobo took the podium. A slender, animated woman with fluffy long graying hair and bright eyes, dressed this night in a silky purple blouse, Bobo is executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice. She had just published Wage Theft in America, a book detailing how situations like Republic are far from an anomaly.56 “In the religious community we say Satan is alive and well and takes many forms,” Bobo declared fervently. “Sometimes the form is the Republic owners, sometimes it’s the Bank of America.”

Bobo is an old-fashioned faith-based leader, not afraid to talk about Satan and the battle of good versus evil in hyperbolic and militant terms, and to cast the bosses and the workers in their appropriate roles in the allegory. To Bobo, who has traveled the country meeting with workers toiling in hellish conditions at slaughterhouses and poultry farms, losing fingers and limbs on construction jobs, or even held in virtual slavery picking vegetables, this rhetoric probably doesn’t seem so hyperbolic. She led the crowd in a rousing sing-along: “I told Satan to get thee behind, I told Satan to get thee behind. I told Satan to get thee behind” (with an accompanying hand gesture telling Satan to get the hell behind) “Victory today is mine!”

Several hundred religious leaders, top union officials, local politicians, workers from other shuttered factories, and a wide range of activists and community supporters had turned out for the celebration, which featured numerous speeches extolling how the factory occupation had breathed new life into the labor movement and given hope to workers everywhere. It was yet another sign that a bold tactic that might have been frowned upon by politicians and the union establishment in different times is now being embraced with enthusiasm. A staffer said that Congressman Gutiérrez’s office had been flooded with calls from laid-off workers looking to organize since the occupation. Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky took the stage to declare the Republic workers had made her feel “humbled … thrilled … and grateful.”

“This is one battle in a long struggle to take back our economy and take back our country for working folks,” said Fran Tobin of Jobs with Justice, which had organized solidarity rallies nationwide during the occupation.

Chicano troubadour Chuy Negrete circulated among the crowd crooning a song he had composed specially for the Republic workers. Raul Flores, a baby-faced Republic worker, snapped photos with his cell phone, grinning ear to ear. A group of men who had been laid off from a bakery in 2005 with only one day’s notice also crowded around Negrete. Interfaith Worker Justice organizers were trying to help them collect money they were still owed, but it had been a long struggle. Managers of Heinemann Bakery, a major national chain, had told the workers they would get severance and vacation pay and extended health insurance, but the promises never materialized.

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