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| Global solidarity: Top: Eight UE young activists from Pennsylvania, Vermont and New Jersey were among the 21 UE marchers in the May 2 March for Nuclear Disarmament in New York City, which included 500 Zenroren members from Japan. Above: Part of the Zenroren delegation that visited UE in Pittsburgh. Near the center of the photo is UE Secretary-Treasurer Bruce Klipple, and to his right, Zenroren Secretary-Treasurer Yoshikazu Odagawa, UE Eastern Region Pres. Andrew Dinkelaker, and UE Director of Organization Bob Kingsley. |
For five days over the May Day weekend, a huge delegation of 500 members of the Japanese labor federation visited the U.S. to press the demand nuclear disarmament at the United Nations, and to build stronger ties of international labor solidarity. UE hosted Zenroren visitors to Chicago and Pittsburgh, and UE members joined them in the New York City peace march.
The major reason for Zenroren’s trip was a mass rally and march for nuclear disarmament on Sunday, May 2 in New York. The event was scheduled to coincide with a UN conference which is held every five years to renew implementation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The 500 Zenroren members were part of an even larger delegation of 1,500 from Japan. Because theirs is the only country ever to experience the horrors of nuclear attacks, Zenroren and the Japanese peace movement are committed and forceful advocates for the abolition of all nuclear weapons.
Following the march, Zenroren delegates met with representatives of U.S. Labor Against the War on May 3, and on May 4 a group paid a solidarity visit on UE Local 404 members at Hishi Plastics in Lincoln Park, New Jersey. UE members are locked in another tough battle with Hishi – a subsidiary of Japanese corporate giant Mitsubishi Chemical Holding Company. The company is charged with unfair labor practices in a recent attempt to decertify the union, and has fired a UE member.
PITTSBURGH
Before heading to New York, smaller groups of Zenroren members visited Chicago and Pittsburgh where they were hosted by UE. A delegation of 34 members, headed by Zenroren Secretary-Treasurer Yoshikazu Odagawa, met on April 30 with UE officers and staff in Pittsburgh. They received a briefing from the UE Research Department on the economic, political and labor situation in the U.S., and held fact-finding meetings with Pittsburgh United, a labor-community coalition, and with Pittsburgh leaders of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
UE and the Zenroren delegation also participated in a cultural event focused on peace and nuclear disarmament at Pittsburgh’s Creative and Performing Arts High School (CAPA). It included performances of music and poetry by CAPA students; comments by Brother Odagawa, by Rie Ohuchi, a union sister from Hiroshima, and by Brother Atsuchi Takeda, president of the Zenroren-affiliated Tokyo Youth Union; and an exhibit of posters from the Hiroshima Peace Museum, art by CAPA students and from prominent political cartoons on themes of peace and nuclear weapons. The exhibit was assembled and curated by UE NEWS cartoonist Gary Huck. On the morning of May 1, before leaving for New York, the Zenroren visitors toured labor history sites in and around Pittsburgh – including the scene of the 1892 Battle of Homestead between locked-out steelworkers and Pinkerton detectives hired by Carnegie Steel to violently break the union.
CHICAGO
Another group of 74 Zenroren members visited Chicago, where they participated in a huge May Day rally for immigrant workers’ rights, and Tamiko Komatsu, vice president of Zenroren, spoke. Earlier that day, in a ceremony with Chicago union leaders and members, Sister Komatsu had placed a permanent plaque, with a message of solidarity from Zenroren, on the base of the statue in Haymarket Square commemorating the 1886 rally there for the eight-hour workday that led to the arrest of seven worker activists. (See video here.) The seven labor activists arrested after Haymarket – most of them immigrants – were framed on charges of throwing a bomb at police officers, and in November 1887 four of them were executed. The Haymarket Affair gave rise to May Day as an international workers’ holiday. Zenroren members also took part in a conference on May Day at DePaul University and attended a jazz concert organized in their honor.
Also while in Chicago, the Zenroren delegates met with members of UE Local 1110 to learn more about their December 2008 occupation of the Republic Windows and Doors factory, and got a briefing on Warehouse Workers for Justice. They also had a guided tour, by the Illinois Labor History Society, of important places in Chicago’s rich labor history.