Day Laborers Resist! --Fathers' Day Rally For Fundin

Fathers' Day Rally For Funding (in english)

Today at City Hall, on the second anniversary of the Day Labor Program's Fathers' Day protest, 50 day laborers and allies rallied to demand Gavin Newsom return the city funding of the Day Labor Program.

On Fathers' Day in 2002, day laborers went to city hall to protest the increasing police harassment of workers and families in the Mission. Then-mayor Willie Brown retaliated by illegally yanking the Program's funding. Since then, the DLP has been functioning on 2/3 funding, endured massive staff cuts, and continues to provide a wide range of medical, legal, employment and educational services to the day laborer community while operating out of poor facilities.

Today's rally brought together workers from the DLP including the Womens' Collective with allies from POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights), Mission Agenda, the Day Labor Program of Mountain View, CA, Food Not Bombs and the Heads Up Collective. Speakers addressed the crowd, demanding that Newsom correct the funding situation and return the funds legally set aside for the workers, which have gone unspent for the past two years. This as governments throughout the country balance budgets on the backs of the hardest-working and lowest paid people.

As Newsom continues shifting money away from workers and low-income San Franciscans, cutting welfare, services, he refuses to address the massive tax theft by corporations and downtown big business. They shave budgets by a few million here or there, but ignore the billions of revenue owed by these power brokers. The denial of funds to DLP, along with escalating INS raids in San Francisco (supposedly a “sanctuary city” from immigration raids), represent two of the main strategies of the war against immigrants: major cuts of social spending, along with increasing state repression and violence against communities of color.

Organizations like the Day Labor Program are in the heart of resistance to the war at home. Fighting the economic and police repression of immigrants here in San Francisco is an integral piece of fighting Bush & Co's plan for world takeover. Bush's “endless war” relies on the money stolen from immigrants and other workers. It also rests on the continuing racist denial of the humanity and civil rights of targeted peoples at home and abroad.

We encourage all people who oppose Bush's wars, to come out next Wednesday to the ICE (formerly INS) building to support the DLP and other immigrant organizers in challenging state violence by immigration “officials.”
(link)
http://indybay.org/news/2004/06/1685855.php

clare b and jeff g heads up
photos by chris crass