ILWU10 Calls For Million Worker Rally

by Million Worker March Committee Wednesday, Apr. 14, 2004 at 6:30 PM
www.millionworkermarch@comcast.net ILWU Local 10, 400 North Point, San Francisco, CA

San Francisco ILWU Local 10 has voted to initiate a call for a million worker rally during mid-October in Washington DC. It will demand an end to privatization, deregulation, the repeal of the Taft-Hartley, Patriot Act and other issues.

ILWU Local 10 has initiated the call for a million worker rally in Washington DC in mid-October. The protest has been called to demand an end to privatization, deregulation, the Taft-Hartley and other issues.

MILLION WORKER MARCH MISSION STATEMENT

Thirty-six years ago Martin Luther King, Jr. summoned working people across America to a Poor Peoples’ March on Washington to inaugurate "a war on poverty at home."
"The United States government," he proclaimed, "is one of the greatest purveyors of violence in the world …America is at a crossroads in history and it is critically important for us as a nation and society to choose a new path and move on it with resolution and courage"


The crisis facing working people today is even more acute. Under the cover of systematic lies and deception, wars of devastation have been launched at the expense of working people everywhere.


In our name, a handful of the rich and powerful corporations have usurped our government. A corporate and banking oligarchy changes hats and occupies public office to wage class war on working people. They have captured the State in their own interests.
The vast majority of working Americans are under siege. Social services and essential funding for schools, libraries, affordable housing and health care are slashed and eliminated.
Decent paying jobs are disappearing through outsourcing and privatization whose real purpose is to break unions and roll back the gains of one hundred years of struggle.
Sweat shops and starvation wages are imposed on workers across the world and deployed against workers at home to undermine our jobs and our benefits.
This undisguised class war is waged without restraint against working families and our children, enforced by anti-labor legislation and decrees, and by courts serving our exploiters.
The aim of repressive legislation such as the Patriot Act is to terrorize and suppress the struggles of working people for their rights, and to destroy democratic control of the economy and of society. The pretext of enemies afar becomes a smoke screen for repression and autocratic rule.


The time has come to mobilize working people for our own agenda. Let us end subservience to the power of the privileged few and their monopoly of the political process in America.
Come together, brothers and sisters. Join The Million Worker March on Washington as we launch a great movement for social change. Let us forge together a social, economic and political movement for working people. We are the many .The secretive and corrupt who control our lives are the rapacious few.


Let us mobilize together through our unions, labor councils, social and community organizations, friends and neighbors everywhere. We are on the move and we shall not be denied.


We Seek to Secure:

- Universal single-care health care from cradle to grave that ends the stranglehold of greedy insurance companies and secures health care as a right of all people in America.
- A national living wage that lifts people permanently out of poverty.
- Protection and enhancement of Social Security immune to privatization.
- Guaranteed pensions that sustain a decent life for all working people.
- The cancellation of all corporate "free" trade agreements, including NAFTA, MAI and FTAA.
- An end to privatization, contracting out, deregulation and the pitting of workers against each other across national boundaries in a mad race to the bottom.
- For workers' right to organize and for a repeal of Taft Hartley and all anti-labor legislation.
- Funding public education in a crash program to restore our decaying and abandoned schools with state of the art school facilities in every community.
- Funding a vast army of teachers to end functional illiteracy in America and unleash the talent and potential of our abandoned children and adults.
- Launching a national training program in skills and capacities that will enlist our people in rebuilding our country and putting an end to both the criminalization of poverty and the prison-industrial complex.
- Rebuilding our decaying inner cities with clean, modern and affordable housing and eliminating homelessness in America with guaranteed housing and jobs for all.
- Progressive taxation that increases taxation on corporations and the rich while providing relief for the working class and poor.
- An end to the poisoning of the atmosphere, soil, water and food supply with a national emergency program to restore the environment, end global warming and preserve our endangered eco-system.
- Creating efficient, modern and free mass transit in every city and town.
- Repeal of the Patriot Act, Anti-Terrorism Act and all such repressive legislation.
- Slash the military budget and recover the trillions of dollars stolen from our labor to enrich the corporations that profit from war.
- Open the books on the secret budgets of the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies in the service of corporations and banks and the pursuit of imperial war on the poor everywhere.
- Extend democracy to our economic structure so that all decisions affecting the lives of our citizens are made by working people who produce all value through their labor.
- An aggressive enforcement of all civil rights and a national education campaign and mobilization against all racist and discriminatory acts in the work place and in our communities.
- For a democratic media that allow labor and all voices to be heard
and oppose monopolization and union busting of media workers.

ONLY OUR OWN INDEPENDENT MOBILIZATION OF WORKING PEOPLE ACROSS
AMERICA CAN OPEN THE WAY TO ADDRESSING OUR NEEDS AND OUR AGENDA.

JOIN US, BROTHERS AND SISTERS, IN A HISTORIC MOVEMENT TO RESTORE OUR
DEMOCRACY, SECURE POWER FOR THE OVERWELMING MAJORITY OF WORKING
PEOPLE AND RESTORE AMERICA.
www.millionworkermarch.org