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Why Are We Marching?
Only our own independent mobilization of working people
across America can open the way to assressing our needs and
our agenda.
Join us, Brothers and Sisters, in a historic movement
to restore our democracy, secure power for the overwhelming
majority of working people and restore America.
Our Mission
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.
Our Demands
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.
- Amnesty for all undocumented workers
- Increase in federal funding for the Arts in public schools
- For a democratic media that allow labor and all voices
to be heard and oppose monopolization and union busting of
media workers.
Resolution
Whereas: our ancestors fought tirelessly in this country
for the right to organize unions and ensure that our government
recognized this right because it is a cornerstone of democracy,
and
Whereas: that because of unions and solidarity among working
people we have been able to win basic human rights, including
employer paid health care, social security and retirement
benefits, safe working conditions, decent hours and wages,
education for our children, social services for the disadvantaged,
civil liberties, and most important, the right to political
influence over our nation's foreign and domestic policies,
and
Whereas: Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his State of the Union
address in 1944 acknowledged our rights, saying, "We
have come to the realization of the fact that true individual
freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.
Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and
out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made."
and
Whereas: the current administration, with the complicity
of congress, has cooperated with big business in attacking
our rights, using legislation such as the Patriot Acts I and
II, denying the right of hundreds of thousands of Federal
employees to belong to unions and bargain, forcing long shore
workers to work under a Taft-Hartley Act injunction and threats
of Federal intervention, and
Whereas: the administration, with the complicity of congress,
has negotiated trade agreements costing the jobs of hundreds
of thousands of US workers, calling this a move towards a
healthy economy, while promoting other economic policies,
such as privatization and deregulation which has resulted
in the loss of over 3 million jobs since taking office, and
Whereas: the administration, with the complicity of congress
has given corporations and the wealthy huge tax breaks, while
cutting billions of dollars in spending for social services,
education, and other government programs won by working people
through decades of effort, and
Whereas: the Bush administration, with the complicity of
congress, has excused all these policies by using the terrible
events of September 11 to label any opposition unpatriotic
and a threat to national security, has taken our country into
an unjust war under the false assertion that Iraq possessed
weapons of mass destruction, costing the lives of hundreds
of US service members and innocent Iraqi civilians, and is
whipping up fear and even further to try to stampede the public
into giving it another term in office,
Be it therefore resolved: that Local 10 of the ILWU calls
on unions and working people generally to go to Washington
DC for a Million Worker March, to demand that politicians
and the administration listen to the people who pay their
salaries, rather than the voices of big business and the rich,
and more
Be it further resolved: that this resolution be forwarded
to unions, labor councils and labor organizations, as well
as other organizations to which workers belong, whether organized
or not, so that they can take similar action to organize this
March as soon as possible.
Be it finally resolved: that this event coincide with all
labor organized voter registration drives planned for the
next election.
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