Today's Stories

May 24, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

Subscribe Online

The Dangerous Side of Retail Work

Remembering the Wendy's Massacre

By DANIEL GROSS

This Sunday marks the eighth anniversary of what has come to be known as the Wendy’s Massacre.  On that fateful day, workers at one of the hamburger chain’s locations in Queens were busy closing down the store – wiping down counters, emptying the trash, and all the rest to prepare for the next day. 

Retail workers know that closing the store can be a dangerous part of the job.  It’s often late at night, no customers are around, and workers may be counting money.  In addition to wanting to get home, security concerns are why retail workers can get a little bit edgy around closing time.  The possibility of violent crime is why retail workers don’t open the door after closing for a passerby pleading to use the restroom.

Just after closing time was when John Taylor, a former employee of the Wendy's restaurant, chose to strike.  Taylor, who was joined by an accomplice, knocked at the locked front door of the restaurant and called out for the store manager whom he knew by name. The manager subsequently went to the basement with one of the assailants.  The rest is tragic, gruesome history.

The Wendy’s night crew was lured to the basement, bound and gagged, and shot at point-blank range inside the walk-in refrigerator.  Four of the workers, Anita C. Smith, Ramon Nazario, Jeremy Mele, and Ali Ibadat were killed.  The night manager, Jean Dumel Auguste, was also killed.  Two workers, Jaquione Johnson and Patrick Castro, were shot in the head and face, respectively, and left for dead.  They miraculously survived.

The families mourned and the city mourned with them.  The mother of one of the victims sued Wendy’s for being negligent in its security precautions.

As chilling and heart wrenching as the Wendy’s tragedy was, it does not stand alone.  In 2000, the year of the Massacre, there were three mass fast food killings in the United States leaving 14 workers dead.

John Taylor himself was a serial armed robber of fast food chains going back to 1996; he hit five restaurants the year before the Massacre including McDonald’s and Burger King.

Retail work can be deadly.  351 retail workers in the United States suffered fatal injuries on the job in 2006, according to government statistics.  By contrast, 190 workers died in the mining industry that year, the year of the horrific tragedy at the Sago Mine.  138 of the retail worker deaths were by homicide.

In December of last year, the nation was transfixed as details emerged of a shooter entering an Omaha mall and opening fire with an assault rifle.  Six of the fallen were department store employees.  One of the surviving employees attempted to explain her grief.  She was quoted in a news report sharing, “In retail, co-workers become a family of sorts because of the long hours spent at work.”

The 19-year-old murderer dressed in camouflage had recently been cut loose from his job at McDonald’s.  He ended the rampage by turning the weapon on himself.  It was the second massacre at a U.S. mall that year.

This year, Wendy’s has seen another high-profile mass shooting, this time at a Florida location which left a paramedic dead and four others injured.  The day before, two Wendy's employees in Illinois were robbed at gunpoint and forced into a freezer by two masked men.  The day after the shooting spree in Florida, a drive-through employee at a California Wendy's was confronted by a robber with a gun.  Earlier this month, Wendy’s workers in Delaware were victims of an attempted robbery – at closing time.  The list could go on and on. 

The other chains are no different: just try logging on to a news search engine and typing “robbery” and “the name of a fast food chain”.

Retail work is undervalued and under-respected in our society thanks in large part to the global retail corporations.  They use lobbying and slick public relations to block initiatives which would improve the standing of retail workers such as legislative reform to help workers achieve an independent voice on the job with a labor union. 

The threat of violence is but one of the many, many reasons why retail workers deserve greater respect and recognition.  In mourning the victims of the Wendy’s Massacre and all retail worker victims, I hope we are mindful of the danger of workplace violence which while often obscured from our customer experience is a very real part of workers’ daily lives.

Daniel Gross is the founding director of Brandworkers International, a non-profit organization protecting and advancing the rights of retail and food employees across the supply chain.  A former retail worker, he is an active member of the Industrial Workers of the World.  Daniel is co-author with Staughton Lynd of the revised and expanded Labor Law for the Rank and Filer: Building Solidarity While Staying Clear of the Law, forthcoming from PM Press in the Fall.  He can be reached through http://www.Brandworkers.org.

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

The Occupation
by Patrick Cockburn

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont