SEIU demonstrates downtown
I saw Miya Shay's 6pm KTRK-13 news report that the SEIU/janitor people were planning to demonstrate downtown last night, so I decided to go down and check the thing out.
What appeared to be a few hundred people were gathered outside the Chase tower.
They were making quite a racket, whistling and beating drums and playing music and occasionally breaking into chants.
All of the chants were in Spanish. That doesn't seem like a very effective way to communicate the message, whatever that message was. All I understood was, "When?! NOW!" a couple of times.
The demonstration seemed lawful. Unlike their previous protests, there was no attempt to disrupt traffic or otherwise interfere with the normal goings on downtown. Of course, there wasn't actually much foot or vehicular traffic downtown at 7pm on a Friday (can we say deserted?), so it's not clear that much would have been disrupted anyway.
Maybe the SEIU organizers shipped in from out of town to handle these matters are from cities where downtown is actually busy in the evening, and the protests therefore might get noticed.
There was quite a police presence, though. Given the previous protests, HPD obviously had to deploy manpower to handle any illegal nonsense. Unfortunately, that's manpower that's pulled away from fighting real crimes in the city during a crime wave. Thanks, SEIU! We appreciate it.
BACKGROUND: An L.M. Sixel column earlier this week made clear that SEIU is importing lots of outsiders to help with these protests:
Dozens of union organizers have come to Houston to participate in nearly nonstop protests, and more are coming.
[snip]
About 50 out-of-state union officials and janitors are to arrive in Houston this week to participate in an escalating series of actions, Tran said.
As Callie notes in the comments, some SEIU people are now indicating they want to go back to the negotiating table. That can happen when all you've managed to do with your imported protestors is annoy people (and when the freeloaders you've imported from elsewhere want some of mommy's Thanksgiving cooking!).
PREVIOUSLY: If a tree falls in the forest....
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/18/06 11:06 AM | Print |
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