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Militant union takes aim at fast food

category north america / mexico | workplace struggles | non-anarchist press author Thursday October 21, 2010 18:54author by Mike Hughlett - Star Tribune Report this post to the editors

Workers at nine Jimmy John's locations will vote on joining the Industrial Workers of the World.

As union elections go, it doesn't get much rarer than what's being served up Friday at nine Minneapolis-area Jimmy John's sandwich shops.

About 185 workers are slated to choose whether they want to unionize under the banner of the Industrial Workers of the World. Organized labor is all but unheard of in the fast-food sector; most unions don't even try to make a run at burger or sandwich joints.

Of course, the Industrial Workers of the World isn't exactly a conventional union.

In its heyday in the 1910s, the IWW pioneered a fiery grass-roots style of unionism aimed at organizing workers that other unions shied away from. Its time in the limelight is long gone, but the IWW never went away and in recent years has resurfaced with a campaign to organize Starbucks workers.

The IWW has historically tended to eschew formal union elections conducted by the National Labor Relations Board, making Friday's vote at Jimmy John's particularly uncommon.

"Maybe it takes something on the fringe, like the IWW, to have the courage or craziness" to unionize fast-food workers, said John Budd, a labor relations expert at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management.

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Related Link: http://www.startribune.com/business/105312903.html?elr=KArksUUUoDEy3LGDiO7aiU
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