I didn't really know much about the labor rally that was held at the capitol Tuesday before I attended. It wasn't widely advertised or promoted on new media sites or in the traditional media. I think the idea was to have it fly under the radar so that no one could plan a counter-protest. But to organize a good rally without much public promotion, you need an intense network of organizers and supporters already in place. And who has that? Labor.
And they pulled this one off in awesome fashion. When I was walking up to the park across from the capitol where the rally was to take place, I saw people lined up along Monroe Street in larger numbers than I had ever seen and more and more people were arriving from the capitol, where they had filled the rotunda to make their presence known to legislators. Later groups of students from Florida A&M and Florida State would march from their respective campuses to join the rally. In all, easily more than 1000 people participated, which I understand is the largest rally at the Florida capitol in a decade.
This was far from a dull rally that you might come across when the Tea Partiers, showed up, this was an event where a series of songs with labor themes were blaring out of loudspeakers, people were dancing and chanting and waving signs at cars passing by, and any number of cars and trucks honked to show their support for the workers in attendance. There was a sea of green shirts with the AFSCME logo and matching signs that read "Let's Pull Together," blue TWU signs, ATU signs that evoked the famous Barack Obama "Hope" poster, but with a fist raised in the air and the phrase "We Are One" in bold letters, and colorful shirts of a variety of other unions and organizations. The crowd was diverse in age, race, and part of the state they came from. If you looked around, you saw local elected officials, legislators and a Congresswoman, seniors and children, party officials and political novices. The two over-riding feelings you got, though, were unity and anger, not random anger or political anger, but the righteous anger of a group of people who knows they have been wronged and refuses to take it anymore.
Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said that we all needed to stand up against the privatization of the state's prisons, fight for unions and the rights of workers to organize, to have fair wages and quality benefits. Florida Democratic Party Chair Rod Smith told the crowd that Rick Scott spent $70 million dollars to win the governorship, but it only took him 60 days to prove he couldn't do the job. And he reiterated that the people who drive our buses, teach our children, fight fires, police our streets and take care of our families are not the enemies of the people that Republicans are suggesting that they are. State Senator Tony Hill roused the crowd by saying that we didn't show up in 2010, but that we were going to raise hell in 2012. He said that the elected officials in the capitol come and go, but that the labor movement is forever. He told the rank-and-file union members not to wait for someone to give them direction, but for them to stand up and fight now, that what the legislature and governor have done this year may be the best thing to happen to the union movement, because it will wake people up and they'll take back the government.
The NAACP was on hand to express their solidarity with unions and to call for a massive campaign to register new voters for 2012. AFSCME leader Jeanette Wynn called for people to come together and not to forget what Republicans did in 2011. Student speakers pointed out that the governor does not have the consent of the people to pursue the agenda he is now pursuing, thanked the unions for the weekend, overtime pay, equal pay for equal work and for fighting for people who can't fight on their own and without solidarity. Mike Williams of the AFL-CIO called for a moment of silence for the workers who die or are injured every day on the job because the politicians aren't providing the resources to create safe workplaces. He said that the legislative leadership doesn't care about the people, but rather the CEOs and lobbyists and corporate funders that put them into office. He said that the one voice that is unified and has a voice to fight back against the right is organized labor and that that voice was not going to be silenced.
The crowd regularly called for a recall of Rick Scott, but no one I talked to was under the impression that this was something we could do yet, it was clear they favored the creation of a law to allow the recall of officials and that Scott would be the first to go if such a law passed. As I left the rally, I saw Rick Scott outside the capitol at the National Guard event and it was clear that he had to be able to hear the thousand Floridians calling for his removal and supporting the people of Florida and not his regressive policies.
This article appears in Mar 31 – Apr 6, 2011.