All Out In Boston In Support Of The Fired 31 Saint James Street SEIU Janitors On May 24th At 4:00 PM

Remarks made by a member of Veterans For Peace at the May 9th 31 Saint James Street Boston rally in solidarity with our embattled SEIU sister and brother janitors.

Sisters and brothers, hermanas y hermanos, we of Veterans for Peace stand in solidarity with our hard-working fellow workers trying to get some justice in this wicked old world and not let them lose their jobs to some faceless corporation seeking to play “the race to the bottom” for their own profits.

I, personally, stand in solidarity as well, because back in the day I too worked for a time as a janitor right over here at Emerson College in the dark of night. That was just to earn some dough. Later, when I got more politically savvy, I was a janitor in a unionized automobile plant. So I KNOW that the brother and sister janitors working at 31 Saint James Street are hard-working. Buffing the floors, vacuuming the rugs, dusting this and that, emptying wastepaper baskets, and, well, cleaning the restrooms, and no offense to the mujeres, in the audience, theirs were the worst to clean. You janitors know what I mean, right? The office buildings, the factories, the industrial and high tech parks don’t just clean themselves. It takes honest work by the forgotten and unseen obreros to do it. And they should be paid well and have job security for their efforts.

Now Veterans for Peace is best known for its militant anti-war work, especially in these days of permanent war just now centered in Afghanistan but next year who knows where once the imperial government rears its hind legs. But VFP has also participated in the anti-capitalist struggles around Bank of America and home foreclosures and the like. Think about it though, the struggle against war, the struggle against the profit-gouged banks and their predatory practices and the struggle against the race to the bottom capitalists for labor dignity and some social and economic justice. Mi amigos they are all the same struggle, the same fight. So as the old time militant labor slogan goes- an injury to one is an injury to all. Venceramos.