We just celebrated one more Bread and Roses Heritage Festival, an annual outdoor festival in Lawrence, Massachusetts, that celebrates labor history, cultural diversity and social justice.
Since its inception in 1986, this festival is held every year on Labor Day and is the only widely multicultural festival in Lawrence, the City of Immigrants. The name of the festival refers to the Bread and Roses Strike of 1912, when more than 20,000 immigrant workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts protested wage cuts.
This strike resulted in Lawrence being the cradle of labor justice, or better yet, wage justice. Perhaps this is the reason why today on 2019, Massachusetts is one of the three states where the worker has managed to reach a minimum of $12.00 an hour, along with California and Washington. Unfortunately, the other states that make up New England, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island and Vermont have not yet succeeded at it.
If it is true that this movement has assured workers’ wages in a certain way, it is also true that they have not been able to guarantee jobs, and nobody better than Gilda Duran, in her article entitled “I am tired of manipulation” explains it and which was published in the #452 edition of Rumbo, on August 8, 2014.
“I think it all started with the installation of ATMs or Automatic Cashiers,” Gilda begins, “since every day we see fewer human cashiers and more ATMs in function.” And it is true; you used to go to a bank where there were at least half a dozen cashiers, if not more. They counted the money from the deposits by hand and we don’t remember having to wait forever in line to make a simple operation such as cashing a check.
Today, if there are three cashiers it is a lot, they count the cash by machine, which is supposed to be faster and still, the lines are endless. “The long lines force us to say forget it better I go to the ATM,” says Gilda.
But there is more, “then they were installed at the gas pumps to refuel your own car. In Southwestern Florida (where I now reside) there are no full-service gas stations,” says Gilda, and she laments, “We can put so many men and women to work if each gas station hired two people to refuel. The unemployment rate will fall very fast.”
“A few years ago the automatic cash registers started in stores. I have never used one and I refuse to use them. I think these machines are taking jobs of people who are unemployed and willing to work. When the workers ask me if I want to use the machine, my answer is always, ‘No, thanks, I’m saving your job’“.
“I love traveling”, said Gilda, “but manipulations in the travel business is the worst. They want me to make my own reservation to eliminate travel agents, print my own reservation and confirmation on my computer, so they can save paper and ink. I’m waiting for the day to ask me to fly the plane.”
“The United States, by design, sends most manufacturing jobs out of this country. However, if we were going to be a country of just the service industry, why did customer service disappear? I came to the conclusion that every time I help myself, I am contributing to the elimination of jobs, the work of the cashier, the person who supervises it, the manager who supervises the cashier’s supervisor and so on.”
