I wanted to open the floor to the discussion on the district organizing that is exemplified by the South Street (Philly) campaign. So long as we don’t mention specific sites except with the public campaigns we should be good.

We just started working on ours in local area.  About two weeks ago we started with a plan.  That was to map out the 4 blocks of the district (46 businesses). We created a basic survey based off of the original South Street Plan by FWs Buss and Miller of Philly-GMB.  It included the following:

Business Name; Address; Industry; Products; Ownership (National, Single etc.); Approximate # Employees; Notes and Difficulties.

Then we put on our Sunday Bests and hit the streets.  Working in pairs one FW went into the store posing as a job seeker the other held the clip-board with out data.  Attempts to extract information from the workers or manager were made.  Sometimes questions such as; are you hiring, lead to questions such as what are the shifts, starting pay even how many co-workers and do you own any other locations were extracted?  Too many times we just got a “no” and therefore had to speculate on how many employees were actually there.  We have already hit the front-house/back-house divide; I hope we can negotiate these challenges.  We may want to go back in a few months and try again.  Does anyone have any other ideas on how to get this info?

Since this is a special zone that gets a tax break we are allowed access to information through the local government that may prove useful.  However our attempts to obtain this information has been slowed by the lack-luster efficiency of the city government. 

We are planning to head to Philly to do some shadowing of the organizers there, who engage workers on their smoke breaks.  That should prove to be productive.  Just wondering if this will mean your organizers are also smokers....

We had been kicking around the idea of producing a survey to give to workers to find out the key issues in the corridor, wages, and whatnot.  But we had not come up with a good delivery method to the workers.  Any ideas?  Perhaps its best to just talk to them informally on their breaks.

 Solidarity,

X351912