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August 19, 2004

Black unions organize march on Washington

Yawu Miller

When organizers of the Million Worker March came to AFL CIO Chairman John Sweeney seeking support in June, the president of the nation’s largest labor organization was cool to the idea.

A June 22 AFL CIO memo sent to federations and labor councils directed them not to sponsor or devote resources to the march. Sweeney reportedly told organizers that the union would be devoting resources to helping John Kerry’s campaign for the presidency.

Undeterred, the organizers of the Oct. 17 march are pressing ahead with their plans to take their crusade for workers’ rights to the capitol.

“Sweeney makes more money than any of the people he represents,” said Brenda Stokely, president of the District of Columbia 1707 American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. “His interests are not our interests.”

Stokely and other black labor union activists are the driving force behind the march, which is open to both union and non-union workers. They’re calling on the country’s elected leadership to provide universal health care, a national living wage, to guarantee workers’ rights to organize and more funding for housing and education.

“People are losing their jobs, losing their homes,” Stokely said. “Fifty percent of African American men in New York don’t have jobs.”

The organizers are also supporting the anti-war movement and calling on the government to cut military spending.

“The purpose of the Million Workers March is to put forward a workers agenda,” said Clarence Thomas, a member of the executive committee of the International Longshore and Warehouse Workers Union Local 10 in San Francisco.

While much of the leadership of the march is African American, Thomas points out that their demands are for all workers.

“The key to this is that this is a class struggle,” he said. “You look at the policies of Bush and Kerry and you see that they’re unleashing corporate greed and that the government only serves to provide subsidies to corporations.”

Thomas and other organizers say they’re responding to an atmosphere in the United States where workers’ rights are rapidly eroding.

Despite the cold shoulder from the AFL CIO boss, the march has garnered support from numerous labor organizations, anti war groups, immigrants groups and social justice organizations. High profile endorsements have come from actor Danny Glover, Boston University historian Howard Zinn, comedian Dick Gregory and MIT professor Noam Chomsky.

For more information on the march, visit the web site: www.millionworkermarch.org.

 

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