Another thing that really bothers me about the conversations around ‘riots’ is the amount of people who have a binary image of ‘big capitalist store’ versus the romantized ‘honest local store’ and think they can tell the difference from a photo.
A lot of local stores feel the need to compete with the big stores and treat their employees like shit. There are so many ‘local’ stores out there exploiting teenagers and undocumented people, paying them less than minimum wage, pushing them to work without breaks and to unpaid overtime. And local activists often know exactly who the worst bastards in town are.
When I was young I worked at a cute little local bakery that exploited a hand full of underage workers, denying us basic workers rights and minimum wage and exposing us to constant emotional abuse. We worked long shifts on ovens placed much to close together without proper protective gear and we burned ourselves almost every day. We were given minimal time and no proper supplies to treat burns. I once burned myself very badly and dropped the bread I was holding and the boss made me sit through a ten minute shouting before I could treat my burn. I still have clear scars from that work after many years.
So if the riot ever comes to that town, you can bet I’ll be right in front leading the charge to burn that cute little local bakery.
a handful of years ago there was a pretty intense effort to establish a downtown workers union in my town with folks that worked along the central tourist hub and while it didn’t form for a lot of different complicated reasons one of them was that the local small business owners fought tooth and nail every step of the way
All of this. Capitalism was a problem long before the world was taken over by McDonaldization and MNCs. My small-business bosses were some of the worst: At least the sheer size of the corporate retail stores I worked at meant more accountability (and granted, I worked at one of the more humane options). In the small businesses, dirty management was rampant and the owners and managers had each others’ backs.
So many of the tags on this post are like this.
QueerAnarchism 