The Chicken Factory

Once upon a time there was a chicken factory, where, let us suppose, 1000 men and women work.

Live chickens come in one end of the factory complex, and cut up chicken parts and whole chickens come out the other end.

The people who cut up the chickens make about $3 an hour, work in cold, wet rooms, get sick a lot, and frequently lose body parts during the chicken cutting process. The managers are cold assholes interested in profits, and don’t give a shit how dangerous the equipment is. The supervisors are petty tyrants and frequently sexual predators.

If you get too sick or hurt to work, too fucking bad, you get put out the door.

This is not a desirable state of affairs.

You think maybe there should be some kind of organization of the work force to resist this shit. Maybe you can get more money, or insist that you have decent protection from being maimed or killed.

At that point you are alone, and powerless. So you have to very carefully find somebody else that agrees, and then somebody else, and all unnoticed by the assholes in command of the chicken factory, you slowly but surely build an organization.

You need meetings to talk over plans. Off company territory. You need security. You need some kind of way of communicating, maybe a newsletter, but you’re careful about that too.

You can take it from there.

But it is obvious that you do not want anybody to stand up in the middle of the third shift and loudly tell management, “I refuse to participate any further in your immoral enterprise and will defy all your orders.”

He or she is immediately gotten rid of, and is lost to organizing inside your chicken factory because he or she is gone. And the management is delighted, because they’ve just ID’d and fired somebody who could give them trouble in the future.

So, if you’re alone, organize. People who act together can have an effect.

And if somebody snaps and does an individual refusal, and gets arrested, in trouble, or whatever, your organization does not leave them behind; they’ve been hurt, and let no one judge them, because anybody can snap, anytime.

A soldier from the 1st ID summed up his job situation like this:

“Before any soldier risks going to prison he should realize that his ability to communicate with other troops will be limited.

“We choose our battles and continue to speak out in our underground action.

“There has to be a point when we reach a high enough number of troops in our peace effort that a unified boycott of all military action will have a desired effect.”

Use Traveling Soldier to serve your organizing purposes and say what you have to say. You say how. That’s what it’s for.

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