Fast food workers in Rochester are joining thousands of workers in over 100 cities across the United States to demand an industry-wide $15 per hour wage and to form a union without retaliation.
Rochester is the 5th poorest city in the United States. Meanwhile multi-billion dollar corporations like McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King take millions in profits away from our city leaving behind only poverty wages. Fast Food workers and Metro Justice are standing up to form the front-line for the fight against poverty for all in Rochester.
By demanding fair wages, union rights, and real respect in the workplace fast-food workers are standing up to fight poverty for our entire community. With higher wages, fast food workers would be able to pull themselves, and their families out of poverty while further supporting local businesses. By seeking to form a union, they are helping to revitalize a labor movement that represents all workers.
Black Lives Matter rally at the Rochester Hall of Justice. see For Justin Delinois, all roads led to the Liberty Pole Way. And beyond.Shirley Thompson, Take Back the Land organizer see A gathering of students, educators, urban farmers and social entrepreneurs at the Bay Street Community GardenPoverty wages are making corporations billions of dollarsWhether whites are comfortable or not, Black Lives Matter has come to Rochester. As Martin Luther King Jr., once said, “It is always the right time to do the right thing.”As a community we need to come together to fight systemic injustice, institutional racism, and New Jim Crow laws and policies. In Rochester, we must end the “School to Prison Pipeline” and institute restorative justice practices into our schools.As for the Rochester Police Department, we need to actively engage and respect their role as servants of the public.
“If you’re in trouble, or hurt or need – go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
“The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty — it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.”
― Mother Teresa, A Simple Path: Mother Teresa
“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”
― Eugene V. Debs
“Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! – I have as much soul as you, – and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you!”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
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Welcome to Talker of the Town! My name is David Kramer. I have a Ph.D in English and teach at Keuka College. I am a former and still active Fellow at the Nazareth College Center for Public History and a Storyteller in Residence at the SmallMatters Institute. Over the years, I have taught at Monroe Community College, the Rochester Institute of Technology and St. John Fisher College.
I have published numerous Guest Essays, Letters, Book Reviews and Opinion pieces in The New York Times, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, the Buffalo News, the Rochester Patriot, the Providence Journal, the Providence Business News, the Brown Alumni Magazine, the New London Day, the Boston Herald, the Messenger Post Newspapers, the Wedge, the Empty Closet, the CITY, Lake Affect Magazine and Brighton Connections. My poetry appears in The Criterion: An International Journal in English and Rundenalia and my academic writing in War, Literature and the Arts and Twentieth Century Literary Criticism.
Starting in February 2013, I wrote for three Democratic and Chronicle blogs, "Make City Schools Better," "Unite Rochester," and the "Editorial Board." When my tenure at the D & C ended, I wanted to continue conversations first begun there. And start new ones. So we created this new space, Talker of the Town, where all are invited to join.
I don’t like to say these posts are “mine.” Very few of them are the sole product of my sometimes overheated imagination. Instead, I call them partnerships and collaborations. Or as they say in education, “peer group work.”
Talker of the Town might better be Talkers of the Town. The blog won’t thrive without your leads, text, pictures, ideas, facebook shares, tweets, comments and criticisms.
Rochester Free Radio 106.3 FM, and he publishes regularly in a variety of local and national publications including the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Pace e Bene Campaign Nonviolence, CounterPunch, The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester CITY Newspaper, Minority Reporter, and Talker of the Town.
