Across the country, activists from United Students Against Sweatshops staged Halloween actions in solidarity with Rite Aid Workers in Lancaster, CA.
The nation’s most effective student action network, United Students Against Sweatshops, launched a campaign on October 29th in eight major cities that aims to make Rite Aid executives more respectful toward employees – including better treatment for the 550 workers at Rite Aid’s giant distribution center in Lancaster, CA, who have joined the ILWU and are determined to win a first contract.
“We represent students around the country who refuse to allow corporations to profit from exploiting their workers and we organize to build power for working people who are willing to push back to protect their families and communities, whether they be Nike workers in Honduras or Rite Aid employees in Lancaster,” said Teresa Cheng, International Campaigns Coordinator for USAS.
Cheng says students are particularly concerned about Rite Aid’s history of union-busting and the health care insurance rip-off that Rite Aid officials have proposed to workers at the Lancaster distribution center. The scheme would overcharge employees for health care – essentially cutting take-home pay – by charging workers up to 28 times above the actual cost increases for a worker’s share of health insurance.
Cities where students organized their “Day of Action” at Rite Aid stores included: State College, PA; Mountain View, CA.; Boston; Los Angeles; Ithaca, NY.; Seattle; Chapel Hill, NC; and Washington, D.C.
The Day of Action represented an escalation that went beyond the previous solidarity action on October 22 when USAS sent an e-mail blast to students and supporters that generated hundreds of messages to Rite Aid executives. The messages blasted Rite Aid officials for “sweatshop abuse” and criticized the company for failing to respond to previous letters of concern sent by USAS leaders.
USAS has an impressive record of victories against large corporations that profit from sweatshop conditions. This past July, USAS forced Nike to pay their 1,800 subcontracted college apparel workers in Honduras millions of dollars in severance pay. That settle- ment came on the heels of a successful USAS’s campaign against Russell Ath- letic, in which the company re-opened a union plant it had illegally closed. The company also agreed to stop anti- union campaigns in all of their Hondu- ran garment factories, ending the largest university boycott of a corporation in the history of student activism.