Tuesday, October 16, 2012

SeaTac, Macklemore, and Economic Justice



I want to update everyone on a few of the things that have been happening with our sites in the last few weeks. It's been exciting!

Alaska Airline Fuelers:

SeaTac Fuelers, who work for one of Alaska Airline's contract companies (ASIG), may be going on strike because of public safety concerns, despite being non-unionized. One of the fuelers, Alex Popescu was indefinitely suspended for speaking out about the safety concerns, which include “everything from trucks with soft or no brakes, leaking fuel hoses, trucks that spark when they're being driven when they're hauling fuel.” After Alex’s suspension the workers took a vote and unanimously decided that they would be striking if the safety concerns were not addressed.  Marianne, Stephen and I (in addition to our site placements and our UCC pastors Lauren Cannon and Mike Denton) participated in a march on ASIG offices at SeaTac, which was covered by a lot of the major news channels. Even though a little time has passed, the issue isn’t going away and it is still unclear what will happen. Below is some of the media coverage of the event- you can even see the three of us holding a large sign and walking in the Q13 coverage!

Kiro TV

King 5

NBC NEWS

Q13

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis - SAME LOVE

This is an awesome music video supporting marriage equality. I’m guessing that a lot of people have seen this music video but did you know that it was filmed (in part) at All Pilgrims Church (the church we live in)?! We were all pretty excited when it came out earlier this month. All four of the interns are in the background of the scene with sparklers- you might just have to believe us on that though because we can’t quite be sure if we recognize ourselves in the crowd. Maybe Stephen though. He’s tall.


Economic Justice Presentation:

One of my main projects in the last few weeks has been getting in touch with congregations to see if they would be interested in hosting a training on economic justice. It is a very cool program provided by Rev. David Bloom that can run from a single, one hour session, to multiple sessions and provides a new way to read both the bible and the newspaper. It leaves individuals and congregations with specific actions that they can take based on what they learned in the class.

If this sounds interesting to you please let me know! I would be happy to coordinate with anyone who wants to bring this to a congregation in King County- and you’d be helping me out.

------Jenn