http://gangbox.wordpress.com/2009/02/07/more-on-the-stella-doro-bakers-strike-in-the-bronx/Stella strikers seek support
By Kate Pastor
Stella D’oro workers are used to the cold.
They have watched summer turn to winter picketing outside the Kingsbridge cookie factory as replacement workers come and go from jobs some strikers had held for decades. On Saturday, neighborhood residents and supporters from throughout the city lent some body heat to the workers’ cause. Roughly 200 people walked along Broadway in the numbing cold from the factory’s entrance on 237th Street, to 225th Street in Marble Hill.
The message they carried with them was clear. Those in support of the striking workers should put their money where their mouths are and stop buying Stella D’oro products.
Workers have been asking people to steer clear of the cookies ever since all 136 union members went on strike on Aug. 13. They walked out because they say factory owners Brynwood Partners handed them an unfair contract that cut some salaries, reduced benefits and eliminated sick days and some holidays.
But only now, six months after they traded in work for shifts on a 24-hour picket line, has the call for a boycott reached a full-throttled cry.
Concerned citizens have formed the Committee in Support of the Stella D’oro workers and have been gathering since December at the Church of the Mediator in Kingsbridge to discuss the strike, and organized Saturday’s event.
“I live in this community,” Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez, the group’s founder and a nurse and union leader at Montefiore Medical Center, told the crowd on Saturday. “Our neighbors have been out in the street for a long time. We thought we had to do more than bring them coffee.”
FULL story at link.
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