Students and Education Workers Rally Against Education Budget Cuts in San Francisco

Healthy debate is already taking place on this website about tactics, including a critical look at the role of this march as contrasted to the more militant, direct actions elsewhere across the region and state including in Oakland. The form and substance of the action was similar to many other big rallies at that site, with labor leaders, teachers, other workers, and students giving short, fiery speeches in a contained environment to a large, cheering crowd. Students held side rallies on the steps of City Hall and in-between and a drumming circle in the back.

Many groups organized. A growing recognition is emerging that activists need to organize not only to stop cuts to public education but to stop cuts to government budgets in general. Since these actions go well beyond the short-term revenue shortages which the state government has been completely unresponsive and inept at handling, the government has no intention of changing course without militant movements to force the changes we need. The politics of opportunism are at play in regard to current economic problems, including longer-term movements already in place to privatize and industrialize college, and to impose "structural adjustment"-type reforms throughout the country.

The rally was useful for unionized, public sctor workers to meet and discuss the dismal state of public sector work, including horrific problems with our increasingly unresponsive top-down bureaucratic unions, escalating hostile working conditions, and highly manipulated corporate media-driven anti-goverment worker sentiment.