April 15 is the big one! This rally will be worldwide for the fight for $15 an hour minimum wage. This fight is for not only fast food workers, but for all low-wage workers, such as adjunct professors at colleges, who are now part-time and non-tenured with no pensions, home healthcare workers, airport workers, childcare workers, Walmart-Target-Kmart-Home Depot, workers, car wash workers, auto lube workers and the list goes on. Corporations have decimated the pay of workers by demeaning the jobs as only unskilled or uneducated or student work jobs as if that had anything to do with the work being done.
There will be actions on 170 college campuses, as well as cities around the U.S. and abroad. There will be around 2,000 groups, including Jobs with Justice and the Center for Popular Democracy will show their support, as well. This will be the largest mobilization America has ever seen in decades.
This push is being headed and supported by the Service Employees International Union. This rally should be supported by people and money by all unions and labor councils, like the AFL/CIO, for this is labor’s chance to show the workers’ union and non-union that we, the labor unions, are for all workers and that we have the power to win.
We, wage slaves, will not let the Scott Walkers pit worker against each other—hence the right to work laws he recently signed. Also, this is the right time for the Democratic Party to take a stand for the workers. It is time to show just which side you are on: big money or the workers and their families. If Elizabeth Warren and Al Franken can do it, so can the rest of the Democratic politicians. Even Socialists like Kshama Sawant and Bernie Sanders have taken a stand for workers, so you can also.
There should be letters to the newspaper editors supporting the $15 and hour minimum wage, the right to form a union, as a civil right, and don’t forget we are owned the rent for the use of our Commons from the corporations making huge profits from what belongs to all of us.
What do you plan to do on April 15—fight for $15 or just pay your taxes?
Yes, they are coming for us. Workers need to have one another’s backs because no one else will. Neither the broader labor movement nor the Democratic party are prepared to meet the urgency of this moment. So it’s going to fall upon the rest of us to mount a real resistance against Trump’s authoritarian takeover. We’re going to have to get our hands dirty. I don’t care if you have a good, well-paying union job and you are in the middle class now—if you see a worker being dragged out of his workplace regardless of how skilled the job and potentially taken to another country, you should be ready to be there for that worker. When I.C.E. shows up, gather around and shame them into leaving. It has worked in other places. America is sleep walking into authoritarianism, and if there’s anyone out there who is a member of a labor union that is safe—at this point— and doesn’t think this applies to them. Understand that they just haven’t gotten to you yet. They’re coming for all of us. There are ...
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