What I said at the rally

Tracy, Bob and Carlos

Pastor Heidi and Sarah

Councilmember Gale Brewer

Tracy

Hope

11/16

Brothers and sisters...

We live in an age, a time, a day, of Occupy. And we know that it is not just Zuccotti Park, or New York City or even the United States. All across the world voices are being raised up against a global economy that doesn’t work. That has no future.  A global economy that makes its profits on the backs of exploited workers. It’s a sweatshop world. 

But we are not here today to occupy Wall Street. We are here to Occupy Verdi Square. Because the struggle for economic justice does not take place just inside the walls of 

congress or the chambers of City Hall. The struggle takes place in our own neighborhoods, where we live out our daily lives. Every decision we make, which restaurant to eat at, where we order our take out food from, where we get our nails done, where we get our hair cut, where we buy our groceries....every one of these decisions is a choice for or against economic justice.

What we are here for today is not radical. Please. We are not here to demand the overthrow of an entire system. (Well, not today.) We are not even here to demand a new law or a change in public policy. No. We are only here to demand that one business, one global business in this city that makes its profits on the broken backs of its workers simply obey the law. Simply provide for its workers the basic minimum requirements of fair labor. That’s all. To treat all its workers, citizen and immigrant, papers or no papers, with the same dignity that any human being deserves.  And that across this city we will refuse to support a business that will not treat ts workers with the minimum of fairness. 

Look around you. It has been exciting to me to see in my own neighborhood Chinese, Latinos and now West Africans crossing boundaries to join together in solidarity, to declare that the struggle of one is the struggle of all and that labor cannot be divided.  Look around you. You are a sign of the future. A day when workers across the world will demand...and recieve...justice. Only then can there be true community. 

We in the faith community support you because we believe that we are called to create a more just, humane and sustainable world. And that we must do that here where we live.

And so on this day, we call on all our fellow New Yorkers to boycott Dominos Pizza until they agree to honor the most minimum of fair labor standards.

Justice will be served. 

We will be sweatshop free.

Boycott Dominos Pizza, now.