realised i haven't caught you guys up with current affairs (work gossip) yet so here's a highlight reel:
bartender that used to be the manager's absolute fave hasn't been working in months and i never questioned why bc he was a pretty flakey worker so i just assumed he went elsewhere/finally got sacked off. turns out over the years he's worked there he's been stealing from the till, to the point the total stolen amount is £16k+ and it's now an ongoing police investigation. saw a copper in the office first shift back for xmas and got told to 'not worry about it'
30-something-year-old manager with a fiance and a child is having an ongoing fling with an 18 year old waitress
same manager apparently went to prison for 9 months bc he caught his old girlfriend with another man and battered him for it. so fun!!!
my favourite kp is STILL ON PROBATION FREE MY WOMAN SHE DID NOTHING WRONG-
all of the college kids are beefing each other? idk im not getting involved but i've heard every angle from every person at least five times
one waitress got so drunk last night (after she clocked off thank god) (not that that makes this any better actually) that she pissed in the gutter outside the restaurant... in front of the cctv
we all saw the cctv
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The Cost Of Profit
When you break the glass ceiling,
and sit amid those who call the shots,
when you talk of millions and billions,
and consider how to best spend them,
so they would swell even more...
... without ever trickling down
where they are most needed
... and from where they were stolen—
because how else does a starving nation
boast of billionaires and barons;
Do you think of
the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal?
or the Uphaar Cinema of Delhi?
or Mumbai's Kamala Mills?
or, perhaps, in your world,
tragedies happen only to others.
When you advise the new "dreamer"
to cut his costs to grow his enterprise,
when you reduce human beings to numbers—
Do you know then, that you are also preparing,
to reduce human beings to cinders?
For every corner cut, and an extra buck saved,
whose life did you use as a poker chip?
Those places of profit and privilege,
those places of greed and grind,
those places of money and might...
are graveyards waiting to be filled with corpses—
Ours, in a land where justice is a joke,
and Yours, in a land where ghosts still seek it!
.
.
.
.
.
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Americans are nostalgic for TV cereal ads that say their product is "part of a complete breakfast."
You will note that a "complete breakfast" is not a thing. People who eat an egg and drink orange juice just have "breakfast." With food. So they don't need to add additional food.
The product being sold here is processed wheat byproduct covered in corn syrup. It isn't food, in the pre-1980s sense of that word. So General Mills, and whoever else, was forced by the Government to put their food-type product next to actual nutritious fruit and bread and milk, and find a way to say "our part of this isn't actual food," without just saying that.
So "complete breakfast" was born.
We're nostalgic for a lie corporations and an enabling government invented, so that companies can sell us grain-milling waste as overpriced food.
The game was rigged from the start.
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"By the 1930s a considerable state apparatus had emerged to monitor and regulate industrial conflict. At both federal and provincial levels labour codes had come about, in part, to forestall direct workers’ actions and allow capital time to prepare for strikes. Thus labour legislation from the Industrial Disputes Investigation Act of 1907 up to the Industrial Relations and Disputes Investigation Act of 1948 increasingly hedged in the rights of unionization and collective bargaining, while simultaneously attempting to solve capital-labour conflicts by means of an innovative “soft” approach. The state central and subcentral units embedded industrial relations in a massive legal structure designed to prevent or delay strikes and lockouts by means of an investigation and conciliation process. As Panitch notes (1977, 19)
This places such tremendous strategy restriction on labour and gives such a large role for the law and the courts to play, that the legitimation aspect of labour legislation in Canada’s case seems at least balanced if not actually overshadowed by the coercive aspect.
Yet, the state sought legitimacy of its policies. It attempted to carve out an autonomous sphere for itself in the arbitration of industry and in so doing secured consent from fractions of capital and sections of the trade union movement. Unlike earlier periods, by the mid-thirties, the state was not an artifice; it was able to mount counteroffensives with its own adjudicative machinery, and it had established a fragile legitimacy to counterbalance its coercive features.
In understanding state intervention in the Blubber Bay dispute a number of preliminary points should be noted:
The autonomy of the state, exercised vis-a-vis its arbitrator role, was highly limited. Even in its moment of conciliation, the state acted to safeguard capital and circumscribe labour.
Labour slowly diagnosed the situation, insisted upon its rights to unionize, fought back against the employer, and in the process the class character of the state became transparent.
Unable to resolve the dispute through bureaucratic means, the state resorted to coercive means; the use of police, courts, and prisons, against labour. That is, criminal justice was differentially applied in order to further weaken the labour movement.
...
From the onset, police, courts, and state departments operated in a visibly instrumental pro-company manner. Police constables enforced illegal eviction notices against Chinese workers so that the company could accommodate strike-breakers. They actively supported company blacklisting by directly recruiting a labour force of strike-breakers for the company. One constable recruited twenty new men by threatening to cut them off relief. The police further aided the employer by seldom enforcing public access regulations to telephone and telegraph service that were located on company property. Civil rights were not protected, indeed they were abused by illegal intimidation and arrest, and police violence against strikers. Some three months into the strike, and before the major riot in September, the community, the I.W.A., [International Woodworkers of America] and an opposition political party were calling for a government investigation into the activities of the police. Some twenty affidavits alleged police wrongdoings. Thus through commission and omission the police protected the property interests of the employer and ensured the maintenance of their operations.
Arrest charges are a further area revealing the instrumentality of the criminal justice system. In a minor fracas (separate from the riot to be discussed later) between police, strikers, company officials and strike-breakers, thirteen charges were laid (by the police) against the pickets, two against picket sympathizers, and none against the strike-breakers. It took the police six days to lay the charges. They were assisted in this by the company time-keeper, who was a party in the dispute, and four charges were against top union officials. Ten of the thirteen pickets were convicted of either obstruction or assault (three were top union officials), the two sympathizers were acquitted, and in the one case where the union charged the manager of the company with assault, he was not tried by a stipendiary magistrate, but by a nonprofessional, and was acquitted on the basis of police and company testimony (Burnell 1980, Ch. 4).
The judiciary itself was manipulated in favour of the company. In the aftermath of the riot in September, twenty-three strikers were arrested and charged, fifteen went to trial, three were acquitted, and twelve were convicted (eight for unlawful assembly and four for unlawful assembly and riot). Twenty-three strike-breakers were also charged; ten had hearings, but none went to trial. All were acquitted. The sole police constable facing legal procedures was, however, prosecuted and convicted. The differential outcomes are a result of direct intervention in the criminal justice process (Burnell 1980, Ch. 4). First, the Attorney-General’s office appointed judges and prosecutors in such a manner as to secure convictions against the union. They appointed competent lawyers as prosecutors, and selected the father of the Assistant District Prosecutor as trial judge. In the cases of the strike-breakers, they made sure (by order-in-council) that an “anti-strike” judge handled the hearing, and they appointed an elderly, ineffectual lawyer as the prosecutor. Second, they ordered the trials in a sequence that would maximize convictions of union members while minimizing the likelihood that strike-breakers would have to be tried. By having the strikers tried first, then the police constable, and finally preliminary hearings for strike-breakers, they were able to use police testimony (which was a large part of the prosecution’s case) before it became suspect. Moreover, by having the strikers prosecuted first, the defense at the preliminary hearings of strike-breakers could present the strikers’ testimony as unreliable (since they were convicted) and justify acquittals of all (Burnell 1980, Ch. 4). Third, the Attorney-General refused the request to try the strikers en masse or individually. Instead they opted for multiple trials by three’s or four’s which allowed frequent repetition of details of participation and grouping of easy convictions with the more problematic. Finally, the summing up of evidence favoured the police position. In the case of the first and only striker tried alone, the judge omitted recounting evidence of police “showdowns” and bolstered the moral character of the force.
... the police, Canada’s representatives of law and order, were faced with a serious situation at Blubber Bay... . If we had a venal police a corrupt one, or one so cowardly that it would not be prepared to take its life in its hands, then there would be no rule in Canada.
Moreover the same judge stated that the basic fact was whether the strikers were there at the time of the riot. He charged the jury that they should not be concerned with the context or aftermath.
It’s not important to decide who struck the first blow.... The testimony on ambushes does not belong here. . . .
In contrast, the hearings of strike-breakers did not find against them because they were on the wharf at the time of the riot. On the contrary, the judge provided the context of self-defence:
Company men did nothing to start trouble when they arrived. The disturbance was provoked by the strikers, and when it began the employees went to the assistance of the police, as it was their duty to do so.
To conclude, the judiciary reinforced the police and the company. Despite a multitude of charges of police misconduct, no summons were issued against them and attempted judicial enquiries were stymied. As Premier Pattullo put it:
What sort of force would we have if every time they took action they were met by irresponsible affidavits. We are not going to destroy their morale by having a threat held over their heads of a judicial enquiry over everything that may happen.
- John L. McMullan and R.S. Ratner, “State, Labour, and Justice in British Columbia,” in Thomas Fleming & L.A. Visano, Deviant Designations: Crime, Law and Deviance in Canada. Toronto: Butterworths, 1983. p. 30-33.
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