Note:This covers the history of A Job Is A Right Campaign from its inception up to around mid-1996. For more recent information, see the AJRC newsletter articles or other publications.
Since founding the Milwaukee Regional Office of A Job is a Right Campaign in January of 1994 , we believe we have built a solid record of struggle.
When Briggs & Stratton announced its decision in May of 1994 to lay off 2,000 more workers, we mobilized community support to try and save the jobs. Our suggestion to make the Briggs struggle the theme of the city’s annual Labor Day March and to open the march to the community resulted in a Community Contingent with the slogan Stop the Briggs Layoffs! We need Jobs, not Jails! A front-page article in the Shepherd Express newsweekly written by one of our members was used as an outreach tool by the union. A similar article in the Shepherd was used by the United Electrical Workers (UE) to help build community support for the campaign to win a union at Steeltech Manufacturing on Milwaukee’s North Side. As a member of the Committee for Justice at Steeltech, we also helped bring other workers and community members to the union’s rallies and demonstrations. In November of ‘95 we arranged for representatives of striking Detroit newspaper unions to speak at events co-sponsored by AJRC and the Central Labor Councils of Milwaukee, Madison and Racine, Wisc. We travelled repeatedly to Labor’s War Zone in central Illinois, attending rallies and marches in support of striking Caterpillar and Firestone/Bridgestone workers. Members of AJRC were pepper-gassed by the cops in Decatur, Ill. with the locked-out Staley workers. In September of ‘95, the union locals representing these three struggles in Decatur hosted the final stop of the Caravans for Justice in September of 1995. (More on this below.)
Our first action as a group was to protest against the Ku Klux Klan when they rallied on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in Springfield, Ill. in January of 1994. We played a leading role in helping to organize the successful anti-Klan protest in Rockford, Ill. that August. Mr. James Cameron, Director of America’s Black Holocaust Museum, was the featured speaker at the protest rally, which drew 1,000 people, many of them African American and working class white youth. Outnumbered 50 to one, the Klan announced they would not be coming back to Rockford. On Aug. 19, 1995, we helped organize a protest against a KKK recruitment rally in Elkhorn, Wisc. Again, Mr. Cameron was the featured speaker at the protest. That fall we also accompanied Mr. Cameron to an anti-Klan protest in Marion, Ind., the site of his near-lynching by the Klan in 1930. We have made the fight against racism a central part of our program and the basis for our multinational unity.
AJRC was one of the only multinational organizations to speak out against the police repression against the Milwaukee Black community that followed the shooting death of a white police officer in September of ‘94. In addition to attending and speaking out at community meetings and vigils, we initiated a statement condemning the police violence that was signed by 20 prominent activists from the Black, Latino and Indian communities, progressive white trade unionists and peace activists. The statement received news coverage in the Milwaukee Sentinel, Shepherd Express, City Edition and the Rockford Vital Force. We supported efforts to bring to justice the killer of Leonard Young, a Black man shot to death by the police in Milwaukee in 1993. We attended the trial of African American activist Michael McGee, accused of turning over a police car in a protest against that murder. We helped arrange for counsel for Rev. Joe Fox, also arrested in that protest. We later spoke out against the Milwaukee police killings of 17-year-old Isaiah Bell in September of ‘94 and of 15-year-old Tommy Bell a year later. We also attended the funerals of both youths. We marched in Riverdale, Ill. in support of a campaign there to oppose police brutality. We have supported the work of the Committee for Equal Justice for the Minnesota 8, attending trials in Minneapolis, providing leaflets, petitions and a pamphlet on the case and helping to publicize it nationally.
In March of 1994 we sponsored a public forum on the uprising by Indians and poor peasants in Chiapas, Mexico. In May we organized the Milwaukee leg of the first U.S. tour by a Zapatista representative, sponsored by the International Action Center of New York. 200 people attended the forum we initiated at UWM. In June we helped arrange a meeting between a second Zapatista representative and elders of the Oneida and Menomonee Nations on the Oneida reservation. In August we held a rally at Milwaukee’s Federal Building to oppose the sending of U.S. arms to Mexico to be used against the rebels.
Beginning in early 1995 we began to concentrate our energies on fighting the state and federal budget cuts and reactionary social legislation. Over 200 union state workers and community activists attended a Feb. 14 protest in Madison we initiated to coincide with the presentation of the state budget by Gov. Thompson. We attended the March 4 kick-off rally of the National People’s Campaign to Defeat the Contract on America in New York City. We worked to bring people to the May 1 march and rally against the state cuts organized by the Madison May Day Committee and played a leading role in organizing the May 6 regional march and rally in Chicago against the Contract on America. Both the Madison and Chicago actions were part of the NPC’s National Day of Protest.
In June of ‘95 we took up the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Black political prisoner who was scheduled to be executed on Aug. 12 by the state of Pennsylvania. Mumia, a well-known writer and activist, was one of the original co-conveners of the NPC. Together with other local organizations we formed the Milwaukee Coalition to Free Mumia, which sponsored meetings and rallies, wrote newspaper articles, gathered lists of supporters and travelled to Philadelphia for the Aug. 12 Emergency National rally. (As a result of the national and international outpouring of support, Mumia won a stay of execution on Aug. 5.) In February of ‘96 we co-sponsored a visit to Milwaukee by Ramona Africa, survivor of the 1985 bombing of the MOVE compound by the Philadelphia Police Dept. and a principal spokesperson for the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
In September of 1995 we organized the Upper Midwest Route of the Caravans for Justice, sponsored by the NPC. Our route started on the Mole Lake reservation of the Sokaogon Chippewa Indian community in northern Wisconsin and travelled through Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee, Rockford, Chicago and Peoria. In Peoria we joined up with Caravans from the East and West Coast and headed to Decatur, Ill. for a Labor-Community Solidarity Rally sponsored by the union locals representing the Caterpillar, Firestone/Bridgestone strikers and locked-out Staley workers. As a follow-up to the Caravans, we co-sponsored an Oct. 19th protest at the Milwaukee offices of the law firm of Foley & Lardner, which represents the Exxon corporation in its attempt to build an environmentally dangerous copper sulfide mine next to the Sokaogon’s reservation.
Other major events we have worked on included picketing the Milwaukee office of the FBI to demand freedom for imprisoned American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier; initiating a public address on The Tragedy of Bosnia by Sara Flounders of the International Action Center; co-sponsoring a book reading by transgendered activist Leslie Feinberg, author of Stone Butch Blues; bringing labor support to a strike by Minnesota prisoners demanding the minimum wage; and supporting efforts to defeat Wisconsin’s proposed English Only bill, AB 688.
AJRC is a volunteer organization of labor and community activists. We believe everyone in society has the right to a job, a decent job that pays a living wage and benefits. And that those already working in unpaid labor, such as caregivers, and those unable to work have the right to an income that allows them a dignified and secure existence. AJRC struggles to make this principle a reality by fighting to keep the jobs that already exist and by forcing corporations and the government to create new jobs. We support union organizing campaigns and fight for a livable minimum wage. In order to forge the Unity necessary for effective action, we struggle against all forms of racism. We support affirmative action and the right to self-determination for oppressed peoples. We struggle against police brutality. We fight sexism in all its forms. We oppose the oppression of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trangendered people. We fight discrimination against youth, the elderly, the disabled, the undocumented, prisoners and former prisoners, welfare recipients and any other prejudice or discrimination that divides poor and working people. We further oppose the use of the U.S. military in conflicts that only benefit the same big banks and corporations that oppress working people here at home. Under the banner of Money for jobs, not for war, we work to build solidarity with the struggles of all poor and working people in whatever land. AJRC is funded through the monthly pledges of its members and supporters. (In 1995 we were also awarded a one-time grant of $1,000 by the Wisconsin Community Fund.) AJRC is a member of the Wisconsin Fair Trade Campaign, the Milwaukee Coalition to Free Mumia, and the Milwaukee Coalition to Normalize Relations with Cuba. We publish a bi-monthly newsletter, available by sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to our office. To get involved in the work of AJRC, please E-mail us.
Click on these links to see photos of events that AJRC has been a part of:
