D.C. Marchers Protest War, Rising Joblessness

By Petula Dvorak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 2, 2003; Page A07

A few hundred protesters in natty suits and union baseball caps snaked through downtown Washington during the evening rush hour yesterday in a labor-sponsored antiwar march that called attention to the rising unemployment rate.

"Make jobs, not war," read a sign carried by Nancy Lessin, a steelworker from Boston. "I'm here because I want to support the troops," she said. "And the way we support them is to bring them back home and give them jobs."

Many of the protesters who gathered at Farragut Square last night were new to the antiwar scene -- teachers in high heels, union bosses carrying briefcases and steelworkers in satin baseball jackets embroidered with union logos. The familiar protesters with drums and wild hair were there, too, but they were in the minority.

Computer systems analyst Noel Albert wore a green union T-shirt under his gray wool suit to his first antiwar rally last night.

"We have a hiring freeze in the county now," said Albert, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 1924 in Fairfax County. "We're about to have 160 employees laid off, and in this economy, we're paying billions of dollars for a war? That didn't make sense to me, so I had to come out here today."

The situation is also severe in the hospitality industry, where 15 percent of the 5,000 members of the District's Hotel and Restaurant Employees Local 25 have lost their jobs since the nation's first Code Orange homeland security alert a year ago, said John Boardman, the local's executive secretary-treasurer.

Because of a slowing economy and a 6 percent unemployment rate, many jobless men and women went into the military, looking for training and career opportunities, "only to find themselves cannon fodder in this war," said the Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler, senior pastor at Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in the District.

After nearly an hour of speeches at Farragut Square, the group formed a long queue to symbolize the nation's unemployment lines and marched about a dozen blocks. But police officers blocked off several streets and, after an hour, steered the protesters back to Farragut Square.

Harold Nelson, 70, shoved his hands in his jacket and marched the entire way, ready to be cuffed again after his arrest last week.

Nelson, a former teacher, said he has been going to demonstrations because the condition of D.C. public schools should be government's first priority, rather than a war. "The money spent on one day of war could do miracles for our public schools," he said.

Neither Nelson nor anyone else was arrested last night.