The theme was “workers over billionaires,” and it was repeated over at over at the San Francisco Labor Day rally, one of more than 1,000 across the country. “Billionaires suck,” chanted the more than 3,000 people marching from 16th and Mission to Dolores Park on a perfect sunny day.
It’s an important message, nationwide and locally: A united and fed up labor movement is taking on the fealty to great wealth of the Trump Administration and its allies. Here in San Francisco, where billionaires have taken control of the Board of Supes, the Mayor’s Office, and the local Democratic Party, the politics have been less clear, as a lot of elected Democrats who claim to be allies of labor have sided with the oligarchs who now dominate City Hall.
I saw three supervisors in the march—Connie Chan, Cheyanne Chen, and Jackie Fielder. Others may have been there; it was crowded. Nothing from the mayor (I would have noticed him). You would think that at a massive Labor Day rally against Trump, the San Francisco Democratic Party would have had a visible presence, with banners and a march contingent—but that would have required the party operatives to denounce and defy the people whose money put them in office.
I ran into an old friend on the march, someone who has worked on tenant issues for decades, and he was shaking his head. “How come we have a billionaire mayor,” he said, “and New York is getting Zorhan Mamdani?” Good question.
So let’s see over the next few months if this energy and outrage trickles down, so to speak, and the people who filled the streets to oppose the authoritarian billionaires in Washington also use this energy to support local candidates who favor protecting immigrants, funding education and social services instead of more cops and jail, and taxing the rich—right here at home.
