HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS MASS
AT ‘WE ARE ONE’ RALLIES, EVENTS
By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer
Hundreds of thousands of people, many of them wearing red or sporting red-white-and-black pins, massed at rallies, teach-ins and other events nationwide on April 4 in a show of strength for workers’ rights.
The “We Are One” events, backed by organized labor, community groups, civil rights groups, religious groups and their allies, were also designed to show the Radical Right that the mass of the U.S. population is not going to sit idly by and let the rich, big business and their political puppets strip either their rights or their livelihoods.
The April 4 events were meant to kick off a concentrated week of lobbying and marching and demonstrations even at plant gates, particularly around the theme of the right to organize and bargain collectively. Some events, including a key rally in St. Louis, got started the weekend before.
And union leaders Larry Cohen of the Communications Workers and Randi Weingarten of the Teachers – whose unions took the lead in marshalling united labor support for what the two called a grass-roots movement – made it clear that labor intends to keep the pressure up.
“Today is about showing we have this unity. Today we demonstrate our strength and build from there,” Cohen told Press Associates Union News Service in answer to the only question asked in a nationwide telephone press conference on the events.
The activists will turn their efforts to legislation, electoral impact, Cohen said. And Weingarten added that, “We want to take this moment and transform it into a movement for all who want the American Dream to be revived,” for all.
April 4 saw events in more than 1,000 cities nationwide, including rallies, speeches, teach-ins and demonstrations at plant gates. The whole movement is in reaction to a Radical Right-business-GOP agenda that strips workers of their rights – and their pay, pensions and standards of living – state by state around the country.
The bellwether state for the Radical Right campaign, Wisconsin, is also the one where the union response has gone on the longest and where the political impact is showing up first, Weingarten said. That’s because the GOP-run state senate, with only Republicans voting, approved Radical Right GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s law to kill collective bargaining rights for 200,000 state and local workers, 18-1.
As a result, besides the constant protests in the state capital of Madison, unionists there are well on the way to gathering the needed signatures – and recruiting candidates to run against – eight of the 19 GOP state senators, Weingarten said. There are 14 Wisconsin state senate Democrats, who had decamped to Illinois, to try to block Walker’s law by depriving the senate of a quorum. The governor and GOP evaded that.
The continuing labor effort “will manifest itself as soon as the recall efforts in Wisconsin,” Weingarten said. It may be even sooner than that: Wisconsin held elections April 5 for a key state supreme court seat – the court must ultimately rule if Walker’s law is legal –- and for Walker’s successor as Milwaukee County Executive.
The labor effort that started April 4 “is a marathon, not a sprint,” Weingarten said. “It will take many forms over the next 12 to 24 months as labor groups, environmental groups, civil rights groups and others come together.”
Among the events scheduled for April 4:
* A noon rally, followed by a silent march and vigil in Duluth, Minn. The Twin Cities hosted their own march for preserving the Middle Class, following by the gathering of petition signatures for workers rights in Peavey Plaza in downtown Minneapolis. The petitions are aimed at anti-worker legislation being pushed by the GOP majority there.
* A noon rally and a picket line outside the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County, N.C., government center.
* Rallies and teach-ins at the University of California at Berkeley, along with picketing of KPFA in Oakland, a supposedly progressive radio station whose board is arbitrarily firing workers. There are also rallies in the East Bay for teachers who are getting pink-slipped due to state and local budget cuts. The entire week featured 49 events in northern California alone.
* The International Longshore and Warehouse Union flew flags of Solidarity with Wisconsin workers at ports all up and down the West Coast.
* Worksite events at plant gates in Collinsville, Ill., across the Mississippi River from St. Louis.
The pro-worker events also spread abroad, with a march for the middle class in Paris, a demonstration in the Afghanistan capital of Kabul and a solidarity dinner at 6:30 pm local time in Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia.
Jobs With Justice sponsored the rally and teach-in in downtown St. Louis on April 3 in anticipation of another key vote: An April 5 referendum on keeping the state law that lets cities – St. Louis and Kansas City – impose their own local sales taxes. The revenue funds local services; the GOP, of course, wants to repeal the sales taxes, starving the cities, forcing them to lay off workers. Kansas City held its own rally April 1.
Yet another April 3 event was a religious convocation in Portland, Maine. Maine’s Tea Party-backed governor introduced anti-worker legislation and even ordered a local muralist’s depiction of state workers taken down from the state Labor Department’s wall. Another backer of We Are One, the NAACP, held voter registration at three colleges in Jackson, Miss., on April 1.
Other events, after April 4, include:
* A mass rally on April 9, starting at noon, on the lawn of the Ohio state capitol building in Columbus. The rally will kick off a statewide petition drive to put Ohio’s new anti-union package of laws, pushed through the GOP-run legislature by former bond trader and Right Wing GOP Gov. John Kasich, on the November referendum ballot.
Ohio banned collective bargaining and strikes by all 350,000-400,000 state and local workers, said local contracts with pay raises must go to public votes, allowed “free riders” and stripped home health care aides of their rights, among other things.
* At least six events in Chicago alone, including a “stop union busting” campaign sponsored by AFT Local 4100 at Northeastern Illinois University and a statewide rally on April 9 at 1 pm in the Loop.
* In a reminder that workers’ rights include the right to job safety and health, the Sierra Club of Minnesota is sponsoring testing of people’s hair for the buildup of mercury, a toxic substance, on April 13.
“The November elections were supposed to be about jobs, but too many of the Republicans are governing by ideology and by settling old scores,” said Wade Henderson, of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which also backed the “We Are One” activities.
Henderson described a workers’ roundtable he hosted several weeks ago in Columbus. Featuring teachers, fire fighters nurses “who have worked 25 years, earn $50,000 a year and get small pensions, which are threatened.
“It’s clear conservatives in Ohio and elsewhere are attacking workers rights, voting rights, human rights and civil rights,” Henderson added.
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