I personally was carrying the P & L in this FB clip… Bus arrives in Hilo for the Hawaii Democrat Rally 10/26/12…

The Northern California council of the ILWU, otherwise known as the Longshoremen, announced its support for Prop 19, California’s marijuana legalization initiative. The 25,000-member council cited the extraordinary “waste” of money and lives in the war on marijuana, including marijuana prohibition’s disproportionate impact “on the backs of workers, poor people, and people of color.”

Today, I’d like to introduce Marcy Rein, a retired member of OPEIU Local 29, who worked in the ILWU Organizing Department for most of the Blue Diamond campaign she describes below. The Blue Diamond workers’ years-long effort to gain a union recently ended with a loss, and Rein vividly describes how that experience demonstrates yet again why we need passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

For four years, the workers on the organizing committee at the Blue Diamond Growers (BDG) plant in Sacramento, Calif., had done everything they could to avoid being where they were on the night of Nov. 19.