Social Forum Focuses on Workers’ Issues
Workers’ issues were the focus of five days of marches, rallies and workshops at the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, which ended over the weekend. Grassroots activists and progressives from across the country came together to build new alliances, create new strategies and put new energy into the movement to turn around the American economy.
Writing in Workday Minnesota, Howard Kling quotes a UAW leader who says the forum was an opportunity for labor to build relationships with other movements and encourage a “strong, fight-back attitude toward the intense corporate agenda that is blocking change on health care, labor rights, fair trade policies and a host of issues that we believe in.”
Immigrant Rights Are Workers’ Rights
 |
||||
|
||||
As long as America’s mostly immigrant day laborer workforce is discriminated against and denied their rights on the job, no workers’ rights are safe, a key organizer told the AFL-CIO Convention.
Pablo Alvarado, executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), said day laborers have become the symbol of what critics say is wrong with the nation’s immigration system. In reality, he says, they are the symbols of a drastically changing economy. While the economy depends on their labor, it refuses to allow them to fully participate in the American Dream.
Day laborers work in an economy that accepts the fruits of their labor but does not accept their humanity.
