AFL-CIO to Join Rally at World Bank Meeting

The AFL-CIO said it will join a rally next month at a joint meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to build alliances with protesters forged at last year’s World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. “I think we recognize after Seattle that we need to build ties that go beyond the trade unions for many reasons,” said Thea Lee, assistant director of public policy at the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest trade federation with 13 million members. The AFL-CIO is working to send several thousand of its members to a Jubilee 2000 rally scheduled for April 9 in Washington to urge cancellation of debt for the world’s poorest countries, Lee said. Organized labor was among the groups that disrupted the WTO summit late last year in Seattle, and its foray into the issue of international debt relief signals a new strategy for building allies among like-minded political activists.