On April 11, hundreds of Stop and Shop workers in the Pioneer Valley went on strike. They joined 31,000 Stop and Shop workers in other parts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. The Pioneer Valley workers have a web site at www.ufcw1459.com. They need people to boycott Stop and Shop, and show up at their picket lines, if they are going to win.

Low wages are one of the main reasons workers went on strike. Stop and Shop is owned by a corporation based in Holland that has about 370,000 employees, including about 2,000 in western Massachusetts.

Workers who join a union in the USA make an average of 27 percent higher wages. That's according to www.bls.gov.

Non-union workers can be fired at any time for no reason. Most union contracts say that workers can only be fired for a good reason. If the boss and the worker disagree, a neutral third party decides.

Millions of workers in the USA are union members, including all the workers at UPS, public schools throughout the Valley, the Brattleboro Retreat mental hospital (600 of the 900 Retreat workers are union members), and the food co-ops in Brattleboro, Greenfield, and Northampton.

The middle class in the USA is disappearing. There are more rich people and more poor people than there have been since the 1920s. This allows billionaires more influence over politicians. Unions are one way to expand the middle class and increase democracy.