Public Employee Press

DC 37 joins week of workers’ rights demonstrations

DC 37 and other activists participated in a week-long global drive in December to highlight the need to protect workers’ rights.

The mobilization included protests, rallies, forums and teach-ins that culminated on Dec. 10, International Human Rights Day. That day is the anniversary of the 1948 passage of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which recognizes workers’ right to join unions.

Some 60,000 people took to the streets in over 120 events from Hong Kong to Bosnia to New York City.

A DC 37 contingent joined hundreds of unionists who rallied by candlelight during the early evening of Dec. 7 in Washington Square Park. The demonstration focused on the long-term attack on the right to organize in the United States and highlighted the plight of 1,000 teaching and research assistants who are on strike at New York University.

Brian M. McLaughlin, president of the city Central Labor Council, noted that U.S. companies illegally fired 15,000 employees in 2004 for organizing their co-workers. He pointed out that workers face dark times because corporations and the government have adopted aggressive anti-worker practices.

The percentage of unionized workers in the United States is at its lowest point in a century.

President George Boncoraglio of Region 2 of Civil Service Employees Association Local 1000 charged that the Bush administration has stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-labor members, the Labor Dept. sides with employers, and Republican governors in Missouri, Indiana and Kentucky have canceled bargaining rights.

Rally speakers also included locked out-hotel workers, a child-care worker, state AFL-CIO President Denis Hughes and national AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson.

Dozens of student workers from UAW Local 2110 at NYU kicked off the rally by marching to the park after a noisy demonstration at the university’s nearby library. The school had bargained with the employees until President Bush appointed a new NLRB member. The board then reversed its decision allowing graduate student teaching assistants at private universities to join unions.

History graduate student Sara Cornell recalled that under their previous contract, the pay of such working students went from $13,000 to $19,000 with a new health insurance benefit. Now that the administration is trying to bust the union, those gains are in jeopardy, she said.