Hundreds of Labor Activists Taking Part in U.S. Social Forum June 22-26

by James Parks, Jun 22, 2010

While the leaders of the world’s top economies are meeting in Ontario this week, across the border in Detroit, nearly 15,000 grassroots activists and organizers are coming together to share strategies to transform the nation and create lasting economic and environmental change.

Organizers say the second U.S. Social Forum (USSF) held June 22-26 in Detroit is designed to develop the people’s solutions to our nation’s economic and ecological crises. To illustrate the forum’s commitment to real change, this year’s theme is “Another World Is Possible. Another U.S. Is Necessary.” Activists will participate in more than 1,000 workshops, assemblies and trainings and 300 cultural events and performances. You can check out streaming video, radio and uploaded photos from the events here.

Union members will play key roles in many of the forum events. In the first major action, thousands will march through downtown Detroit June 23 to demand urgent action on the creation and protection of good American jobs. Workers impacted by the economic crisis will call on Congress to take action to protect Americans from privatization, layoffs, outsourcing, furloughs, foreclosures and Wall Street greed. They will specifically call for the passage of the Local Jobs for America Act (H.R. 4812), which would create or save more than 675,000 local community jobs and more than 250,000 education jobs, and the emergency extension of jobless benefits.

UAW President Bob King; Metropolitan Detroit AFL-CIO President Saundra Williams; Al Garrett, president of AFSCME District Council 25; and Armando Robles, president, UE Local 1110, will lead the march.

“Detroit will welcome everyone who feels the time is now to find ways out of this crisis that work for working people, not for Wall Street bankers,” said Marian Kramer of the Detroit-based Michigan Welfare Rights.

Detroit is ground zero of our failed economy with almost 30 percent unemployment, and severe, ongoing environmental threats to our air and water. But we’re also a city of solutions, as this Social Forum process will show.

On June 25, faith activists will lead a protest against JPMorgan Chase & Co., calling on the Wall Street financial institution to declare a moratorium on foreclosures in Michigan and sever its ties with R.J. Reynolds. The tobacco giant refuses to meet with the Farm Labor Organization Committee (FLOC) to discuss the slave-labor working conditions of contract growers in North Carolina.

Throughout the week, workers and union staff will lead discussions on building communities by rebuilding U.S. manufacturing and on the fights for justice for domestic workers, Immokalee farm workers, immigrant workers and sweatshop workers. Activists will talk about ways to gaining full employment in a new economy and strategies to change our trade policies and create safe workplaces.  

The forum follows the Great Labor Arts Exchange, which ended yesterday in Detroit, the first time in three decades that it was produced on the road.   

The USSF grew out of the World Social Forum movement, which began in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001 as an alternative to the annual World Economic Forums in Davos. The first U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta in 2007 attracted some 12,000 people.

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