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View Full Version : NY Transit Workers Union votes to support "Occupy Wallstreet" protest



Nothing Human Is Alien
30th September 2011, 15:55
MANHATTAN — Occupy Wall Street, the group of demonstrators that has stationed itself in a Lower Manhattan park for nearly two weeks, got a vote of support from one of the city’s most influential unions Wednesday.

The executive board for the Transport Workers Union Local 100, which boasts roughly 38,000 bus and subway workers plus an additional 26,000 retirees, voted Wednesday night to support the demonstrators, who have been camped out at Zuccotti Park, near the World Trade Center, since Sept. 17, according to spokesman Jim Gannon.

Gannon said the union would invite its members to join the Occupy Wall Street crowd for a march and rally at 4:30 p.m. on Oct. 5. The Working Families Party is also expected to participate in the Oct. 5 action, according to spokesman T.J. Helmstetter.

The TWU vote seemed to represent a growing sense of mainstream legitimacy for the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, who have been criticized as lacking organization and political focus.

Celebrity activists Susan Sarandon, Cornel West and Michael Moore haven also given a boost to the demonstrators, who say they are there to protest corporate greed, among other things, by joining them in Zuccotti Park.

http://www.dnainfo.com/20110929/downtown/transit-workers-join-occupy-wall-street-protesters#ixzz1ZRpUlgKz

RadioRaheem84
30th September 2011, 16:21
Exciting news.

Binh
1st October 2011, 05:11
The TWU members made some great speeches. I think they were taken aback to be standing in front of a full park with 2,000 or so mostly white kids repeating their every word (the TWU members who spoke that I saw were all black).

Tablo
1st October 2011, 06:26
Shit just got real.

RedTrackWorker
2nd October 2011, 01:04
While I'm glad to see my union endorse this protest, without a fight it will mean little more than a paper endorsement and some staffers visiting. Of course, with the recent police "press assistance", the planned union march for Wednesday would probably be big anyway. But my union leadership has a record of endorsing left-type stuff and doing nothing with it. Hell, they couldn't even mobilize more than a few hundred to prevent layoffs against our own union brothers and sisters. BUT this event has become a kind of lightening rod for the sense of injustice at Wall St. and I hope the chances are good that their paper endorsement turns into something they really don't want: a united struggle of workers and youth against these attacks.