The sit-in was part of a rally to support striking warehouse workers who walked off the job Sept. 15 to protest unfair labor practices at the massive warehouse.
About 38 workers who joined the strike are picketing the warehouse every morning.
The rally organized by Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ) drew an estimated 600 people — including many from unions, community organizations and faith-based groups in Chicago — to the Elwood site.
They gathered in a park on Deer Run and walked, sang and chanted along Mississippi Avenue on their way to the warehouse’s shipping entrance on Centerpoint Drive.
Once there, squad cars from the Will County sheriff’s police and Elwood police flanked the group to the north and south and about 25 riot police from a Mobile Field Force Team gathered on the other side of the fence in the Walmart warehouse parking lot.
The police team, which one onlooker said resembled a paramilitary group, used a bullhorn to ask the group to disperse or risk arrest and “chemical or less lethal munitions being deployed.”
The protest was an escalation of three years of
work by WWJ to improve conditions for warehouse workers in Will County,
which with its two intermodals has become the largest inland port in
North America in recent years.
The group has helped workers file 11 lawsuits
against the companies that own, manage or staff warehouses. Six of the
lawsuits are against companies hired by Walmart to run its warehouse. By
the end of the year, several of the lawsuits will settle for about $1
million in back pay, said Leah Fried, a WWJ spokeswoman.
Walmart has been targeted more and more in recent
months by the group because “They are the worst of the worst,” said WWJ
community organizer Cindy Marble.
Workers complain that they’re paid “poverty wages,”
they aren’t paid overtime, they’re kept as temporary workers for years,
they face sexual harassment and racial discrimination and they have to
work in extreme heat and cold.
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