Extra

May Day Marches Call for Workers Rights, Unconditional Amnesty

By Judith Scherr
Monday April 28, 2008 - 04:39:00 PM

Posted Mon., April 28—Three Bay Area marches on May Day—and an eight-hour shutdown of West Coast ports—will merge traditional calls for better pay and benefits with support for the rights of immigrants and a call to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  

Separate but coordinated Bay Area events are planned:  

• Oakland Sin Fronteras (Oakland Without Borders): Participants will gather at 3 p.m. at the Fruitvale BART Plaza, with speakers on the rights of immigrant workers; a march will go down International Boulevard to Oakland City Hall, where a second rally—with elected and union representativeswill be held at 6 p.m.  

• “No Peace—No Work” on May Day: Participants will meet at the ILWU Hall at Beach and Masonic in San Francisco and march along the Embarcadero to Justin Herman Plaza where there will be a noon rally; 

• Movement for Unconditional Amnesty: At 2 p.m. there will be a rally at Dolores Park in San Francisco followed by a march to Civic Center. At 5 p.m. there will be a rally and music at Civic Center. 

• Longshore workers plan to shut down West Coast ports all day. 

• A rally will be held in Berkeley at noon at Sproul Plaza on the UC Berkeley Campus to demand full and equal rights for all immigrants, an increase in under-represented minority student enrollment at UC-Berkeley, the right to financial aid for undocumented immigrants (Dream Act), and the end to the occupation of Iraq. 

“They say immigrants are stealing jobs, that the economy is going down because of us,” Manuel Depaz, spokesperson for Oakland Sin Fronteras, told the Planet on Monday. What is true, however, is that immigrants do jobs citizens don’t usually want, such as working in the fields or cleaning hotel rooms, he said. 

In Oakland, a number of labor unions have endorsed the march including the SEIU 1877, the Oakland Education Association, United HERE 2850 and AFSCME 3299. The Alameda County Central Labor Council, La Clinica de la Raza, Black Alliance for Justice for Immigrants, and others have also endorsed the march. 

Speaking for the immigrant rights march in San Francisco, Alex Franco told the Planet that undocumented immigrant workers pay into Social Security and pay their taxes, but get no benefits returned to them, as workers with documents do.  

“Immigrants are workers too,” Franco said, underscoring that the marches are calling for unconditional amnesty for undocumented workers. 

Retired Berkeley letter carrier and union activist Dave Welsh has been helping to publicize the marches. Speaking to the Planet, he underscored the cooperation among the sponsoring organizations.  

“They each have speakers at each other’s rallies,” he said. Two of them are Cindy Sheehan, anti-war activist and candidate for Congress, and Cynthia McKinney, Green Party presidential candidate. 

Endorsers of the ILWU march include the San Francisco and South Bay Central Labor Councils, the California Federation of Teachers, the National Association of Letter Carriers and Grandmothers Against the War and more. 

Depaz told the Planet this is a critical time to fight for immigrant rights, with recent raids on work places picking up workers who have lived in the U.S. and paid taxes here for as long as 20 years. When undocumented workers get hurt on the job, they can’t say how they got hurt, he added.