Thousands gathered today outside City Hall in Los Angeles for a rally capping one week of over 30,000 public school teachers striking for smaller class sizes, more support staff, higher wages, and against charter expansion. The strike follows months of failed negotiations with the Los Angeles Unified School District and has seen picket lines and marches on campuses across the city. In a show of solidarity with the union, several musicians attended today’s downtown rally, including Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, who performed labor anthems and original music with a high school band to the crowd of red-shirted educators and allies.
Morello told those in attendance that he’s been a member of the Los Angeles Local 47 musicians union for 29 years and remembers his mother, a high school teacher in Illinois, striking when he was a child. “It’s an honor to be with you in the streets of Los Angeles today,” he said. “Somebody asked me earlier, why are you going downtown to play for the teachers? I said, because the teachers are making history downtown today.”
Below we have Morello performing Rage’s “Killing in the Name,” righteously queued up by the marching band’s brass section.
Here’s Morello leading the crowd in Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” introduced in the clip with, “One more time for the corporations.” Morello grabs the microphone to toss in a “Shut the fuck up Trump” in between refrains and closes by shouting, “See you all on the picket lines.”
Jane Addiction’s Perry Farrell was also there! (Farrell joined Morello for an Audioslave reunion Wednesday night at Chris Cornell’s tribute concert.) View more photos and clips from the rally below.
Source: “Los Angeles” – Google News