Oct 4, 2006 12:55 PM
Some 200,000 New York unionists, including more than 1,200 UFT members, marched up Fifth Avenue, bringing labor’s economic justice message to the public in the Sept. 9 Labor Day parade.
So who cared if it wasn’t Labor Day on the calendar? It was Labor Day in the streets as thousands of members and retirees took part in the annual New York City Central Labor Council-sponsored event — the active members on foot and the retirees riding a double-decker London-style bus.
There were also Teamsters in big rigs blowing air horns and scattering the hawks and pigeons along Fifth Avenue, and plenty of “Don’t Shop Wal-Mart” placards, too. The Jewish Labor Committee was there, as was the Irish American Labor Coalition, with a banner quoting from Irish transport union leader James Connolly that read, “The cause of labor is the cause of Ireland.”
The day’s unity theme was set earlier, after Parade Chair Stuart Appelbaum, president of the retail workers’ union, said it was great when “labor leaders don’t turn on each other, but to each other” — a reference to labor leaders from two now-separate and sometimes competing organizations, the AFL-CIO and Change to Win (CTW), working well together in New York.
Speaking to the overflow crowd at the event’s Tavern-on-the-Green breakfast ,CLC Executive Director Ed Ott reminded listeners that “no boss ever recognized a union because they wanted to, but because they had to.”
In introducing UNITE-HERE Vice President and CTW Secretary-Treasurer Edgar Romney — who along with state AFL-CIO President Denis Hughes were named the parade’s co-grand marshals — UFT President Randi Weingarten told the crowd that “whether our enemies are in the White House, in Congress, in Albany or in City Hall — and it’s beginning to look as if Congress and Albany will be much more labor-friendly after the November elections — a unified, growing and militant labor movement is the best weapon and the best defense for working people. With all the hard times we’ve been through, we can still say that New York is a union town.”
Sens. Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic nominee to succeed Spitzer as attorney general, also spoke.
Wearing a UFT T-shirt and munching on a UFT-proffered sandwich during the parade, Miriam DelMoor, a technology instructor at CS 134 in the Bronx, said she was attending to send Tweed a message.
“We need to tell the business people running the schools what needs doing, and we need to tell them the union is still here,” she said.