Labor's Growing Anger Fuels Its Antiwar Plan
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Speakers explained the real cost of the Federal administration's attack on working people. 2.8 million manufacturing jobs have been lost under Bush Junior, jobs supplanted with low skilled, poor paying service jobs, WalMart jobs. The minimum wage, barely enough to maintain an urban family of four at the poverty line, hasn't been increased in 8 years. Investment monies have gone, not to capital renewal supporting industry nor to education and health care supporting workers, but to the military and to corporations close the administration, like Bechtel, Halliburton, and oil companies. The real cost, 1500 working class sons and daughters dead in Iraq, thousands more maimed and wounded. One in six come back from the war traumatized, unable to work because they're suffering the daemons of post traumatic stress. The SF Labor Council has passed an antiwar resolution, calling for the immediate end to the war and to bring the troops home now. Jack Hammond, an International Longshoreman Union journalist said, "We intend to shut down the war machine." Unions will be organized so that labor, nationally and internationally, as an organized body, rather than as isolated units committing civil disobience and open to retaliation, will act to stop the shipment of war materials. Labor leaders explained that if workers do not organize on their own behalf to defend themselves from the deliterious effects of this war, no one else will do so. Labor will run its own political candidates opposed to the war, candidate who defend workers and worker rights. To this end, American unions are organizing to bring Iraqi unions into the fold of international labor organization and work together to stop the war.
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