Warren Mar Candidate Statement

I’m currently a faculty member at City College of San Francisco in the Labor and Community Studies department, but I’ve been organizing for social and economic justice for over 35 years – starting as a tenant and community organizer where I grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown. I moved on to do labor organizing with immigrants in hotels and restaurants and nurses in hospitals. When the AFL-CIO moved in a more progressive direction in the mid 90’s I joined the Organizing Institute to recruit and train new organizers. My activism did not start on a college campus. It started in the pool halls and tenement hotels of San Francisco’s Chinatown. I got my first union job right after high school at the phone company, where I became active in my first strike, and met other Asian American leftists fighting both the bosses and union bureaucrats.

Being a worker meant that I had to struggle with a poor education and have had to catch up with knowledge that intellectuals take for granted. In the movements of the late 60’s and 70’s I began to learn the root causes of oppression and injustice. KPFA, and other alternative media, were a key part of that education. I returned to college at the age of 38, went to graduate school at 40, and now I teach college students classes I hope will inform their activism. I want KPFA to do the same.

Now more than ever we need to reach working-class people in America with alternative explanations of why there’s so much injustice, poverty and war. To do this we need a stronger KPFA that embraces new audiences while maintaining its tradition of radical independence. Please vote for the Concerned Listeners slate so we can further KPFA’s mission, and educate in support of a broad-based movement for social change.

Endorsements: Eric Mar (no relation), SF School Board Member; Tim Paulson, Exec. Sec. Treasurer, SF Labor Council; Renee Saucedo, Exec. Director, SF Day Laborers; Mike Casey, President, UNITEHERE Local 2; Peter Olney, Organizing Director, International Longshore Union www.ConcernedListeners.org