Despite rain, spirited crowd rallies for jobs and safety net

As we were driving over to 6th and Holladay, it started to sprinkle. We worried, or I worried. Dave said not to worry.  It was supposed to start raining around 6pm. It stopped and then started a little again. Then early on, before 4pm, as more people showed up it started pouring. We had a winter rain that lasted for pretty much the whole event. Despite the dampening effect the rain had on turn-out we still had around 100 as we were marching. We got a bunch of honks and waves as we marched. Folks came from HERE who just completed a training and Mark brought workers and staff from SEIU.

The spirit was real good!  Arthur thought it was great. We did get the Drum Corps. Thank God. They were wonderful. And we had Bill Zimmerman on the Local 206 truck who brought Teamster spirit. We chanted a lot. The speeches at the ending rally were very good. Lise was fabulous. We also had Bruce Palamountain, HERE member, who works at the Hilton Hotel. He eloquently told about what life is like and would be like for hotel workers working until they are 70. Ron Williams was excellent with statistics on how people need social security. Bob Tackett from the Northwest Labor Council spoke briefly and it was great to have him. I think people liked the main message of the rally that we sorely need Congress to take leadership in the fight for jobs and fight against all attempts to cut social security, medicare and medicaid – and all safety net programs.

We ended up with 1400 signatures so far! People were impressed. We sent delegations to Senator Wyden’s office and Congressman Blumenauer’s office to deliver the petitions. We encouraged folks to take petitions and return them to JwJ and most took two sheets. So, I'd say overall the rally was good!  And it would have been better if the ole sun were out.

Eyewitness report from Laurie

Photos from the March and Rally