South Carolina AFL-CIO sends us this update: On Monday, more than 50 community members from Boiling Springs and Spartanburg, S.C., participated in a “dine-in” at Copper River Grill in support of the servers, bartenders, hostesses and other workers as they fight for a voice on the job and the right to self-representation at work. The community wore stickers today that read "I Support the Workers of Copper River Grill." 

Dozens of students, community food activists and food industry workers came out for the “Real Food, Real Jobs” march and rally, held by UNITEHERE! Local 23 yesterday at the African American Civil War Memorial on U Street. 

This a guest post from Saru Jayaraman,  director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-founder and co-director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, and Joann Lo, executive director of the Food Chain Workers Alliance.

Big Food companies and their lobbying groups have lied to us many times. They convinced Congress to include tomato paste on pizzas as a vegetable. They say we need industrial, chemical-laden agriculture to feed the world (check out Anna Lappé’s new video Food MythBusters to learn that we don’t). And Big Food has also spread the mythology that if the minimum wage is raised, food will become so expensive that none of us will be able to afford to eat out—or eat at all—again.

Sarah Seltzer writes for Alternet and other online publications and sends us this.

When a group of longtime food service employees of Pomona College in California—a prominent liberal arts school—lost their jobs due to their immigration status, it got an already tense campus talking. This wasn’t an ordinary firing, or even an unfortunate casualty of the nasty wave of anti-immigration sentiment. To people on campus who had been helping the workers speak up for their rights, it felt like union-busting. The terminated workers had been employed on campus for years, but only after they began a drive toward unionization with UNITEHERE! was their immigration status investigated by the college.