Safwy seinfeil
Thanks to Colin MacIntyre for sending this our way. Check your nearest Safeway for spelling shenanigans.
Gimme (a reason for) Sympathy
Letter to the editor: By Janine Edwards
Where's the strike?
Alright Edmonton, I’ll admit it. I went to get groceries yesterday. And do you know where I went? Safeway.
Why Safeway? Because they don’t need me to buy cloth hipster grocery bags. They don’t charge me for the plastic ones either. And it’s about 2 blocks from my house. (See? I’m eating local.)
When I trudged home with my arms laden with groceries, a thought came into my head. Sure, there are a bunch of distribution centre workers on strike. (I think some make ice cream?) But how are they going to rally my support?
All of them are picketing in front of some warehouse I didn’t even know existed until this strike. Sure, if they were blocking the Yellowhead I’d notice. But where are they? I don’t see them, therefore they don’t want me to care.
However, I heard this morning that Safeway hired up some Scabs. Great! Now, you can picket those Scabs… OR you can rally the city by picketing rotating Safeway locations.
If I rolled up to a Safeway and there were tons of people standing with signs, perhaps chanting… my instincts to avoid conflict would kick in, and I’d immediately consider my options for other grocery stores. I don’t want to risk walking up and getting pummeled with produce, which is what I hear usually happens when distribution workers go on strike.
Even better – they could hand out hand-drawn maps to locations of other grocery stores! That would sure show Safeway! And, because they’re out where the people are, we could see them.
Who knows? Maybe that would make us start to care about the fate of these workers.
