Labor's Growing Anger Fuels Its Antiwar Plan
Return to this page during the week of March 21st
to find additional coverage, including audio recordings,
additional pictures, and movie clips of the protest.
NEXT
19 March 2005 --
On the morning after a drenching storm that brought
San Francisco 24% above normal rainfall, an extra quart for every gallon of
water, thousands gathered in the Mission District to protest the war on Iraq.
A.N.S.W.E.R (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) and Labor Union organizers
worked for weeks to assemble the antiwar rally and march on Civic Center.
anticipating the second anniversary of the U.S. led invasion.
By the time the rally got underway at 11 AM, the weather
lightened and even more people showed up to hear speakers invited by
A.N.S.W.E.R. and the unions explain why the war is wrong, wasteful, brutal,
and an attack on working people here at home.
Tim Paulson, Director of the San Francisco
Labor Council, and Sharon Cornu, Secretary/Treasurer of the Alameda County
Labor Council welcomed members of many unions. Among those represented: Teamsters, Service
Employees International Union members, Iron Workers, Plumbers, Brick Layers
and Tile Setters, Teachers, Longshoremen, American Federation of State,
County, and Municipal Workers, Glaziers, Carpenters, Nurses, and
Machinists. Unions brought organized cadres who paraded with signs and
collected signatures of people who want to help organize workers in
defending themselves against the injustice of this war.
|
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.
|