Freightliner Five solidarity: Target Daimler’s Mercedes dealers, May 9

Dear friends:

Support is building for the international day of action in support of the Freightliner Five on Friday, May 9. The workers need your help in putting pressure on Freightliner’s owner, Daimler, by protesting at your local Mercedes dealership.

The national solidarity committee to support the Freightliner Five has concluded that by focusing on Daimler, we can show our solidarity with the demonstration in Cleveland, N.C., on May 9. There, civil rights, labor and social justice activists will come to support the illegally terminated five workers—Franklin Torrence, Glenna Swinford, Allen Bradley, Robert Whiteside and David Crisco. The five were terminated as the result of a brief, legal strike in April 2007, and have been fighting for their reinstatement ever since.

Among those speaking at the rally will be International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1422 President Ken Riley, South Carolina AFL-CIO President Donna DeWitt, Woody Woodward of the Statesville, N.C., branch of the NAACP, and Tom Adler, a representative of the Daimler works council in Germany.

If you can’t come to North Carolina, you can still show your support by leafleting at a Mercedes dealership near you. Use the fact sheet included in this message to explain why we’re speaking out.

By targeting Mercedes—like Freightliner, a Daimler subsidiary—we can send a message that anti-union policies won’t be tolerated, and that this fight will continue until the five are reinstated with full back pay.

For more information, visit justice4five.com