-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the June 8, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
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HISTORIC LABOR SOLIDARITY: SERVICE EMPLOYEES DEMAND A NEW
TRIAL FOR MUMIA
By Greg Butterfield
On May 21, delegates to the annual convention of the
Service Employees union voted unanimously to support a
moratorium on executions and demand a new trial for Mumia
Abu-Jamal.
It was an historic decision and one that bodes well for
uniting labor's struggle with the fight against racism. Up
to now the big national unions and the AFL-CIO have held
back from joining Abu-Jamal's struggle.
Remarkably, the 1,100 Service Employees delegates were
meeting in Pittsburgh, in the state that holds Abu-Jamal on
death row and seeks his execution. The former Black Panther
and radical journalist from Philadelphia was framed for the
1981 shooting of a white cop, supporters assert.
Abu-Jamal is a member of the Auto Workers Local 1981, the
National Writers Union. From death row he has been an
outspoken defender of the labor movement, extending
solidarity to dock workers in Liverpool, England, and to
locked-out ABC-TV employees in this country.
The Service Employees union represents over 1.3 million
workers, many of them concentrated in low-paying jobs as
janitors, nursing-home workers and home-health aides. It
has been one of the most vigorous unions in organizing
women, people of color and immigrants.
In April the union's militant "Justice for Janitors"
campaign led a strike of 8,500 mostly Latino workers in Los
Angeles fighting poverty wages at commercial buildings. The
three-week strike, which had strong support from other
unions and the public, won a settlement that pushed back
the bosses nationwide.
Two affiliates--1199 Health & Human Services Employees in
New York and California Public Employees Local 1000--have
long been active in the Free Mumia movement.
With its largely African American, Carib bean, Latino and
immigrant membership, it's right and just that SEIU has
embraced Abu-Jamal's cause and the anti-death-penalty
movement. These workers' communities are the ones most
deeply effected by racist police terror, state-sponsored
executions and the monstrous expansion of the prison
system.
In backing Abu-Jamal's appeal for a new trial, the Service
Employees join other unions worldwide that collectively
represent over 4.5 million workers, including the Congress
of South African Trade Unions, French General Confederation
of Workers, United Farm Workers and International Longshore
and Warehouse Union.
Hopefully the Service Employees' vote signals more support
to come from large unions in this country.
This important detachment of the organized working class
has endorsed Abu-Jamal's struggle at the very moment when
the unity of the capitalist bosses to uphold the death
penalty is splintering. Mass actions like the May 7 rally
at Madison Square Garden and the May 13 international day
of protest have helped make the death penalty a hot issue.
The union vote is testimony to what Abu-Jamal wrote about
the movement in a May 17 letter to the organizers of the
Madison Square Garden Day for Mumia: "We really are growing
and broadening. We need to deepen it, for the battles and
wars to come."
The letter, addressed to rally coordinator Monica
Moorehead of Millions for Mumia/International Action
Center, said: "I just wanted to thank you and your comrades
for your hard work in bringing together the event for the
7th of May in Madison Square Garden. The corporationist
media did its usual whitewash, of course, but from every
indication that I've heard, it was `da bomb!'"
- END -
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