Drop the lawsuit and pick up a picket sign.

CIBC bank teller Dara Fresco is tired of working unpaid overtime. To that end she's filing a class-action lawsuit against her employer. For those of you scoring at home, this is probably the saddest example of working people's ignorance of their own history this page has seen in quite a while, both because of Ms. Fresco's ignorance and the pitiful chances her and her co-workers would have in court against a major international financial institution who can use their connections and deep pockets to crush them like so many misprinted deposit slips.

When workers aren't being paid overtime, or being underpaid, or being subjected to unsafe working conditions and/or harassment, we don't cry to a lawyer or run to the courts. We organize, damnit! While a bank may not be the most ideologically predisposed environment to pass around the union cards, it hasn't stopped workers at credit unions or the Alberta Treasury Branch. The bank can tie up a lawsuit in court as long as they want, but they can't screw around with their own workers once their union allies start talking about moving their formidable pension funds.

However, if Ms. Fresco and her colleagues think they're somehow 'better' than forming a union, they should try to remember where laws concerning overtime, pensions, safe working conditions, vacations, and everything else that makes our working lives bearable came from. Power yields nothing without a demand, it never has and it never will.