The high-spirited group of teachers, health care workers, police and firefighters, building trade workers, city and state employees, elected officials and union leadership waved signs and chanted "we are one" and "we are Wisconsin" at the lunchtime rally Thursday adjacent to City Hall.
The message - repeated by nearly a dozen speakers - was that Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker's plan to strip collective bargaining rights from nearly all public employees is part of a deliberate attempt to destroy the middle class.
"When did it become wrong to earn a decent wage to support your family, to have decent medical benefits," Philadelphia firefighters union president Bill Gault exclaimed to the fired-up crowd. "We did not create this mess, (expletive) bankers created this mess."
Pete Matthews, president of the Philadelphia's largest municipal union, called the struggle in Wisconsin part of a larger "class war" waged by conservatives that will hurt all working people - union and non-union - if nothing's done to stop it.
"This is not just about public sector workers, this is an assault on all workers," he said.
Similar rallies were held in cities across the country in response to Walker's proposal, which would take away the ability of Wisconsin's state and local public employees to collectively bargain for working conditions, benefits, or anything other than their base salaries. Tens of thousands of people have protested the bill for nine straight days, with hundreds spending the night in sleeping bags on the hard marble floor of Wisconsin's Capitol.
Several speakers in Philadelphia also ridiculed Walker's assertion that his proposal is needed to help solve a looming budget deficit. They cited a prank call that quickly spread across the Internet in which Walker was duped into discussing his strategy to cripple unions, promising never to give in and joking that he would use a baseball bat to go after political opponents.
Walker believed the caller, actually the editor of a left-leaning online newspaper, was billionaire conservative industrialist David Koch. Labor leaders allege that brothers David and Charles Koch are pulling the strings in Wisconsin as part of a conservative agenda to break unions.
"Big business has done all it can to gain control of this country and union-busting is the last phase of their plan," city teachers union president Jerry Jordan said. "Enough is enough is enough is enough."
