Join the 99% Spring Training and Take a Swing for Economic Justice

by Mike Hall

This is the 99% Spring and you can join with more than 100,000 activists from unions, community, faith and other progressive groups to take the economy back from the 1% and challenge corporate greed.

Starting Monday, April 9, and running through April 15, hundreds of training sessions around the country are set for activists to learn how to take back the economy. The sessions will prepare you to tell the story of what happened to our economy and who’s responsible and learn nonviolent direct action tactics. Click here to find a training session near you.

Participants in the training sessions will focus actions on Tax Day (April 17), when across the nation they’ll raise their voices to demand the 1% pay their fair share. To find local Tax Wealth not Work events, go to www.americawantstowork.org.

The 99% Spring activists will focus on at least 40 companies, including Verizon and Wells Fargo. In what’s been dubbed Shareholders’ Spring, activists will protest at shareholder meetings—including Bank of America’s annual meeting in Charlotte, N.C.

Other actions will include home occupations to prevent foreclosures and student-led protests against Sallie Mae and other entities that have profited from student loan debt.

The coalition of unions and progressive groups points to the Occupy movement and the fight for workers’ rights in Madison, Wis., that drew hundreds of thousands of ordinary people to the streets as inspiration for the 99% Spring. Jake Lake, a member of Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 1111 in Washington, D.C., says:

We definitely need to have people power and grow our coalition. That’s key to our future as middle-class Americans and the 99%. There are already a lot of commonalities between the groups, which is cool.

Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn.org, says history is already on our side.

From the labor movement to the struggle for civil rights, we have this incredible shared history in America of everyday folks using their own power and using nonviolent, direct action to create change at the moments that our country most needed it. And we think that’s what has to happen now, again.

Click here to find a training session near you.

Mike Hall is a writer for the AFL-CIO Now blog where this post originally appeared.