Big Apple May Day

By Tim Wheeler

NEW YORK - Union Square resounded to the strains of "Hold the Fort" and "Solidarity Forever" as union members celebrated May Day 2000.

City Councilwoman Margarita Lopez who represents the Lower East Side angrily assailed the U.S. Navy for using the island of Vieques as a bombing range. "Puerto Rico has asked peacefully that the Navy vacate Vieques," she told the crowd.

"The Navy has chosen to ignore this appeal. Enough is enough!"

Catherine Fried, a councilwoman who represents lower Manhattan criticized Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for clamping a "lockdown" on demonstrations in her district because he lives in "mortal fear of the working people of this city exercising their rights of dissent."

City workers are wearing uniforms made in sweatshops. She urged passage of her bill requiring the city to buy its uniforms from shops that pay a living wage and uphold workers' basic rights.

Lewis Haggins and Anthony Williams, two homeless men who have set up a group called "Picture the Homeless" also denounced Giuliani for his harassment of the homeless. They led the crowd in chanting, "No Housing, no peace."

Gloria Freedman, a leader of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) District Council 37 retirees, said, "I remember 40,000 marching on Union Square on May Day. That day will come again. Let's keep the struggle going for universal health care, for affordable housing, for human rights."

Lester Muata Greene, a member of AFSCME Local 2507, which represents paramedics, denounced Giuliani for blocking a pay increase for city employees on specious grounds of lagging productivity. "We respond to one million 911 calls each year," he said. "I think that's productivity. When people have a heart attack, we are there! Giuliani just wants to bust the union."

Ed Ott, assistant to New York Central Labor Council President Brian McLaughlin, reminded the crowd that this is the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War "when the people of Vietnam marched into Saigon a free people."

Ott scorned Wall Street's loud boasts of economic boom and compared it to the robber barons of the 19th century. "Today, as then, the nation is being polarized between rich and poor," he said.

"Then, workers toiled 12-, 14-, 16-hour days and lived in squalor and poverty. If present trends continue, we could relive those 19th century conditions. Sweatshops are reappearing and people once again live in squalor and poverty ... Global capitalism is a code word for theft."

Workers struggling in their individual shops cannot solve the problems, he said. "We must commit ourselves to a broader movement" of coalitions that encompass all workers and communities.

Jarvis Tyner, executive vice chair of the Communist Party USA, spoke on behalf of the Black Radical Congress. The Union Square rally, he said, is part of a worldwide celebration by millions of workers. He told of speaking recently to a rally of 100,000 workers in South Africa.

"Millions are marching in Europe, Vietnam, China. In Cuba, one million people were in Jose Marti Square celebrating Elian Gonzalez' reunion with his father," he said.

The upsurge at home and abroad, Tyner said, "is a sign that a new movement is rising in this country. And it is going to turn the situation around."

There was also poetry and music, including poet Angel Martinez. People's Weekly World staff writer Amina Baraka sang "Old Man River" and recited her tribute to Paul Robeson, "a Black American hero ... the tallest tree." Accompanied by the jazz ensemble, Blue Ark, Amiri Baraka read his poem, "A Modest Proposal for Giuliani's Disposal."