STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY postcards and trifolds are ready now. Email stealfromworkday@gmail.com to receive a box of the postcards; the trifolds are ready to print out and photocopy.

The first printing of the stickers flew; we’ve just printed 8000 more. They’re still available from Wild Nettle Distro: email distro@wildnettle.com. We’re still soliciting photos of STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY materials in action at that address.

WORLD DAY OF STEALING FROM EMPLOY

Thanks to the mixed blessings of Google Translate, even the monolingual can enjoy endorsements of STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY from elsewhere in the world, such as Barcelona:

Work disorienting you. Enslaves you. Alienates you. You tired. You disgusting. It makes getting up early. I fuck with both loose climbs. I kill that bitch shit coffee and eating makes you fucking evil. You down. It gives you headaches for things that should be crap.

Inspirational Quote of the Week

“The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates that 75 percent of all employees steal at least once, and that half of these steal repeatedly. The Chamber also reports that one of every three business failures is the direct result of employee theft. According to the US Department of Commerce, employee dishonesty costs American business in excess of $50 billion annually.” Hire Power Associates

Call for Buildup Actions on March 15

We’re calling for actions a month before STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY to build up awareness of the campaign. Here are some options for what you could do, right now or on March 15:

-Tell a friend or coworker about the campaign -See that trifolds, posters, and stickers appear everywhere -Take photos of posters, graffiti, or banner drops -Announce STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY over the public address system in a retail outlet -Organize a flash mob in a shopping mall, or—better—an office building or warehouse district: march behind a STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY banner, or leaflet all the customers, or… -Send an outraged email about STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY to a talk show or news program, or send your local paper a letter to the editor.

If you want to warn corporate media outlets about Steal Something from Work Day, here are some appropriate venues:

townhall.com

Fox News has a drop-down list under “We love to hear from our viewers,” including email addresses like these:

glennbeck@foxnews.com Hannity@foxnews.com Oreilly@foxnews.com Ontherecord@foxnews.com Atlarge@foxnews.com

CNN offers a more limited contact list. MSNBC offers more contacts:

Today@NBCUNI.com Nightly@NBC.com Dateline@NBCUNI.com rachel@msnbc.com countdown@msnbc.com hardball@msnbc.com ed.msnbc@nbcuni.com

ABC news offers links to contact forms by show. CBS also offers a series of contact forms.

April 15 Isn’t Just Tax Day Anymore: Small-Town Texans Endorse Steal Something from Work Day

This appeared in a weekly paper in the small town of College Station, Texas:

Before anyone gets up-in-arms, this is not a call for you to steal from work. It’s an article saying that most of you already steal from work. It is a piece attempting to shine a light on why such a large percentage of the workforce breaks the law in such a socially unacceptable manner. Acceptable methods of breaking the law are running red lights and refusing to vaccinate children.

Steal Something from Work Day is a small movement. Its Facebook group has little more than five hundred members [*] and, regardless of how many are anonymous participants are out there, it would be naïve to think of SSWD as a mass movement. People that actually steal from work are the mass movement.

According to the US Chamber of Commerce, over 75 percent of employees steal from their workplace. And National Retail Security shows that almost 50 percent of lost retail merchandise can be traced back to employees. This raises the question:

Are workers in the United States just a bunch of thankless thieves?

CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective is trying to answer that question by spearheading an awareness movement through this new holiday. While, for some, the goal is to get their own few proverbial miles out of the corporate jet, for others, it is simply a symbol. It is a statement aimed at employers that are stealing from their labor pool by refusing to pay them a fair amount.

Why is this necessary? It’s necessary because many of you have forgotten that labor is a voluntary service and that a job interview is just as much an assessment of the employer as it is of the employee. It’s a mutual relationship that has been bastardized by bare-bones wages in a market where there simply aren’t enough jobs to go around. In a culture that prides itself on soul-sucking, endless labor that makes everyone feel guilty for every day that they don’t produce, produce, produce, employers know that you need the job more than they need to hire you. So, you get paid dirt and treated like eels.

Actually, eels get better treatment. They don’t have to work.

For example, Best Buy, as a whole, makes over $300,000 per employee every year. If one of those employees makes $20,000 a year, working 160 hours a month, they are not only getting less than 10 percent return on their labor, but they’re really only being paid for about ten to twenty minutes of the time they work each day, depending on how many hours they put into each shift. When it is acceptable for someone to work an eight hour shift and get paid for ten minutes of it, it’s pretty obvious that every day at Best Buy is Steal from Your Employees Day. While they’re not the only offenders, they are particularly egregious in their constant hunt for impressionable teenage minds that lack any knowledge of labor rights and legal consent.

[…]

My advice is, if you’re going to steal, aim high. While it might pay a little to get out the door at Wal-Mart with an armful of CDs, it’s just not smart to go to jail for a pittance when the real money is in legal theft. Try becoming a corporate banker. If you get into financial trouble, you can legally hold an entire nation hostage until its citizens pay you ransom. Start a hate group. The amount of money spent to stop gay marriage numbers in the tens of millions in California alone. Go into marketing for civilian defense contractors. You can make money by recruiting the next generation of non-military personnel that can murder without all those pesky laws and rules to stop them.

Take your pick.

[*the number doubled within a few days]