Million Worker March

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The Million Worker March on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

The Resistin Radicatz perform a cheer in front of the AFL-CIO headquarters before joining the main march.

The Million Worker March was a rally against perceived attacks upon working families in America and what organizers described as millions of jobs lost during the Bush administration with the complicity of the Congress of the United States. The event was spearheaded by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), Local 10, and held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on October 17, 2004. The event included speakers Ralph Schoenman, Larry Holmes, Ramsey Clark, Heidi Durham, Dick Gregory, and Mumia Abu Jamal (pre-recorded), and musical groups Billionaires for Bush, Emily Baloney, Ngoma Hill, Jack Chernos, and Judy Gorman [1], among others, in front of a banner reading, "Repeal the Taft-Hartley". There was also a very strong anti-war sentiment at the rally, with a number of speakers speaking against the war in Iraq, people setting up tables with anti-war literature, and a large number of anti-war signs. In addition, the antiwar4themillionworkermarch.org Web site (now no longer active) explicitly stated that the Million Worker March was an anti-war event.

Despite the name, derived from the Million Man March, the Million Worker March neither consisted of a million workers (attendance was estimated at 10,000 people according to local news reports), nor an actual march. The event also did not have the endorsement of the AFL-CIO.

Through the course of the day, however, there were two unofficial marches to and from the rally site. Early in the day, an anarchist and anti-capitalist contingent marched on a feeder march from a meeting place in front of the headquarters of the AFL-CIO to the main rally site at the Lincoln Memorial, via Lafayette Square and the World Bank. Towards the end of the day, a second contingent of participants, many of whom had participated in the earlier march, including a small black bloc, marched via Constitution Avenue to the Hotel Washington, as a show of solidarity with the hotel's workers, who, represented by UNITE HERE Local 25, were on the verge of going on strike.