Public Employee Press

Labor marches on Wall Street:
Good Jobs Now!

By DIANE S. WILLIAMS

Close to 10,000 fired-up unionists rallied April 29 for good jobs and tighter regulation of the Wall Street greed that tanked the economy and threw millions out of work. The demonstration was one of the largest in many years to hit the world’s capital of finance.

“People in New York and across the country who did nothing wrong and want to work have paid for the misdeeds of the big banks with their jobs, homes and retirement savings,” said Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, the labor federation that called the protest.

With DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt-Baker and New York City Central Labor Council President Jack Ahern at his side, Trumka led a coalition of labor, community and religious groups in a noisy march from City Hall down lower Broadway’s Canyon of Heroes to the Wall Street Bull.

“Americans are counting pennies, while bankers are counting billions. This is just not right,” Ahern said. “Main Street needs jobs, consumer protections and trust in our financial institutions. So, it cannot be back to business as usual for Wall Street. It is time to put people over profits!”

Marchers came from factories and offices, large cities and small towns hard hit by the worse recession since the Great Depression. They held signs and placards saying “No Bonuses for Big Banks,” “I am not your ATM,” and “Wall Street: Fix the Mess You Made.” Plastic pigs clad in bankers’ stripes and laden with moneybags hovered above the crowds.

DC 37 members from all boroughs came in green shirts and marched side-by-side with demonstrators from dozens of other AFSCME and AFL-CIO unions and activists from National People’s Action and MoveOn.

School Crossing Guards and construction workers, laid-off city workers and auto workers united to demand that Wall Street bankers and brokers live by the same set of rules as the rest of America. The AFL-CIO held simultaneous rallies in six major cities and tens of thousands more participated virtually via cell phone.

11 million jobs lost

In 2008 President Bush propped up Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase and other firms labeled “too big to fail” with a $700 billion taxpayer-funded bailout. Less than a year later bankers paid their top executives more than $145 billion in end-of-year bonuses, while millions of working families were left jobless, homeless and broken. The collapse of Wall Street’s high stakes financial follies added more than 8.5 million people to the unemployment rolls, and this year another 2.5 million vitally needed jobs were not created.

With Wall Street enjoying a publicly funded rebound, real economic recovery continues to elude Main Street. Millions of Americans are trapped in the nightmare of job loss, mounting debt, shrunken retirement funds, devalued and foreclosed homes — with relief coming slowly. The recession is crushing states and cities, which are considering new rounds of cuts in vital services and layoffs that would undermine President Obama’s job creation efforts.

“We’re 11 million jobs in the hole,” Trumka said. “It’s time for the financial industry to pay up to create them.”

As the U.S. Senate began debate on a financial regulation bill, the fed-up demonstrators demanded real reform — transparency, accountability and fiscal responsibility from global banks. After Goldman Sachs sold investors bundled home mortgages it knew would fail, the Obama Administration hit back in April as the federal Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil fraud suit.

Banks are pouring millions of dollars into lobbying Congress against financial reform.

Labor leaders called for new taxes on bankers’ bonuses and demanded that Congress and New York State begin to tax short-term financial transactions.

“It was uplifting to see labor and community forces united in demanding that the financial giants pay their fair share to bring back jobs and restore the economic health of our cities and states,” Roberts said after the demonstration.

The April 29 protest challenged politicians to choose sides: stand with the American people or with the Wall Street bankers.

“The voters we organized in 2008 have not forgotten,” said NAACP President Ben Gilles. “Change is what we make happen every day.”