an update on the truth about Sisters’ Camelot. Published on February 14, 2017 with love and solidarity with the working class

It’s 2017 and it’s become clear that Sisters’ Camelot is trying to make a comeback since the organization crumbled because they union-busted their own workers.



It seems they are recruiting people to help them fundraise and rebuild…but they’re not being honest to the people they are recruiting.



This is being published to help set the record straight and warn people to not support Sisters Camelot.



Sisters’ Camelot is a union-busting organization run by class-traitors. Their unionized workers are still on strike and there is still a full social and economic boycott of Sisters’ Camelot in effect which is endorsed by bodies of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), AFSCME (American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees), CWA (Communication Workers of America), and the Teamsters.



Working with or helping Sisters’ Camelot is crossing a union picket-line and ignoring a union boycott. Raising money for them is scabbing on union workers who are still on strike.

THE FACTS:



-Near the end of 2012, the canvass workers (door-to-door fundraisers) at Sisters’ Camelot had organized themselves to confront oppressive working conditions and to fight for a more democratic workplace. They were what labor activists refer to as a “hot shop”. The organized workers chose to contact and join the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). They made this decision themselves because they (as a group of self-proclaimed radicals and leftists) felt that the IWW was the union that best represented their values. Members of the IWW started attending their weekly worker meetings to help prepare them for when they would “go public” as unionized to their bosses.



-The canvass workers at Sisters’ Camelot went public to their bosses on February 25, 2013 as unionized with the Industrial Workers of the World.



-On March 1, 2013 the unionized workers sat down with their bosses to begin negotiating the terms of their unionization. In that meeting the bosses refused to recognize the workers right to collectively bargain as a union and flatly refused to even attempt negotiating. Because of this the union canvassers were forced to go on strike.



-On March 4, 2013 the union workers attended the bosses weekly management meeting at their request and in hopes that the bosses had changed their mind and would negotiate with the union. This was not the case. Instead of recognizing the union, the bosses read two prepared statements.

One of these statements offered specific concessions to workers if they would abandon the union and come back to work without collective bargaining.

The second statement fired one of the striking union workers…a social leader who had worked there off and on for 12 years. This statement also stated lies about why the worker was fired which would later be admitted to in court. A classic attempt at divide and conquer by union-busters.



-On March 5, 2013 an anti-union statement was published online. It became a notorious document as it was clearly anti-union, repeated some of the lies the bosses at Sisters’ Camelot told the prior day, and was signed by a group of co-authors who were somewhat well known self-proclaimed anarchists. More specifically they were self-described green anarchists and insurrectionists. Many of these people would be documented as attending meetings with the Sisters’ Camelot bosses during the upcoming months (whom they were close friends with), acting as free consultants in a brutal union-busting campaign. These people’s names as listed as the co-authors of the union-busting statement were:

Carrie Feldman, Garrett Fitzgerald, Jaime Hokanson, Luce Guillén-Givins, Rob Czernik, and Ryan Nelson.

-During the strike the bosses refused numerous attempts by the striking workers to get them to the negotiating table



The bosses at Sisters’ Camelot have never even attempted to negotiate with their worker’s union — they even refused a package deal offered by the striking workers to remove all financial grievances from the table and end the strike if the bosses would acknowledge their union and give them more democratic control over their working conditions.



-That summer the National Labor Relations board took Sisters’ Camelot to court claiming the firing was illegal and retaliation for union organizing.



The administrative law judge from that trial ruled that Sisters’ Camelot had in fact violated the workers rights under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) by firing a worker for union activity and offering striking union workers concessions to try to break a strike without negotiating with the union. Despite those assertions, the Administrative Law Judge let Sisters’ Camelot off on a technicality. He ruled that the striking workers were not protected by the NLRA because they were independent contractors and not employees.



The highest board within the NLRB reviewed the case and overruled the Administrative Law Judge. The final ruling was that the workers were misclassified as independent contractors while they should have been employees. Sisters’ Camelot was ruled to have broken federal labor law by firing a worker for union organizing, and offering concessions to striking workers to try to break a strike without negotiating in good faith with the union.



Sisters’ Camelot was ordered to re-hire the fired worker, pay him back-pay, apologize publicly, and put up posters in their workplace admitting to the labor laws they violated and promising not to in the future.



-Before the NLRB trial Sisters’ Camelot agreed to work with right-wing union-busting lawyer John C. Hauge and they are still working with him now in 2017 to argue the details of how the ruling is to be enforced.



Sisters’ Camelot’s lawyer is an anti-worker lawyer. He claims on his website to help protect employers from union incursion in the workplace. His career includes defending bosses against sexual harassment lawsuits, defending bosses in discrimination lawsuits, helping employers take workers pensions away from them, and even making sure a family received no compensation when a worker died in a workplace accident.



-In 2014 Sisters’ Camelot was told by In The Heart of the Beast Puppet Theatre that they were not allowed to participate in the 2014 May Day Festival. This was because the festival’s theme was a commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the 1934 Teamsters strike in Minneapolis and they did not want an anti-union organization involved whose workers are on strike.



Sisters’ Camelot decided to show up at the festival anyway, parked their kitchen-bus on the public street next to the park, and begin serving food.



Soon after Sisters’ Camelot showed up an ad-hoc picket formed in front of their bus. This was unsurprising. It was common knowledge in the local labor scene that they were told not to come because their workers were still on strike.

It was later reported that some of the same people who were known for writing the public anti-union statement where there when the picket started. They were frantically calling their friends at the festival to try to get help in what would become a violent attack on a non-violent picket.



Once enough of the union-busters friends arrived they surrounded the picket. Some of them taunted the picketers with sexist and homophobic language. Some of them ran through the picket line intentionally shoving and bouncing off the bodies of union supporters…and then finally one of them decided to tackle an IWW member to the ground and throw punches into their head.



Nobody on the Sisters’ Camelot side of this confrontation did anything to de-escalate the violence. It was IWW members who physically pulled bodies out of the fight, separated them, and stopped the violence. This was done while anti-union folks were calling them “bitches” & “faggots” and taunting them about how greedy they are to care about workers jobs while Sisters’ Camelot was cooking free meals.



That week the Twin Cities IWW General Membership Branch had a meeting where they approved a public statement in response to that attack and endorsed a full social and economic boycott of Sisters’ Camelot. Soon after that boycott was announced bodies of AFSCME, CWA, and the Teamsters also endorsed the boycott which is still in effect today.



WHERE ARE THEY NOW?





THE STRIKING WORKERS

-A group of IWW members, consisting mostly of striking canvassers from Sisters’ Camelot, formed a new nonprofit in July of 2013 called North Country Food Alliance.



North Country Food Alliance (NCFA) is a democratically IWW worker-run 501(c)3 nonprofit, which thrives to this day providing union jobs while doing meaningful charitable food justice work in the Twin Cities.



NCFA redistributes large amounts of surplus produce from groceries, co-ops, farmers markets, and distribution warehouses every week. This food gets redistributed to neighborhood organizations ranging from soup kitchens to homeless shelters to neighborhood food shelves.



NCFA has also put work into 9 different community garden projects in the past 3 and a half years.



You can find more about NCFA and support them at northcountryfoodalliance.org



You can read more about the struggle of the

Sisters’ Camelot Canvass Union at canvassunion.org