Union members and their supporters gathered outside the State House last week. In the crowd were Pawtucket firefighters Matt Ream, left, and Lance Dumont, right; Patricia Rocha, left, and Laurie Chace, right, with the Pawtucket Teachers Alliance.

The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

American scene: Labor rally at the Rhode Island State House.

On a gorgeous spring afternoon, 2,000 people gathered on the brick and marble apron on the capitol’s north side.

It was Tuesday, June 3, 2008, but it just as easily could have been ages ago.

The crowd included state workers, local teachers and firefighters. The firefighters contributed the most striking touch of color: their red-plaid bagpiper and drum corps.

Those folks in blue were from the National Education Association Rhode Island. Their message: “The rich got tax cuts and all I got was this lousy t-shirt!” The event’s focus was on complaints that hard-won labor gains in pensions, health care and job security are under attack by Republican Governor Don Carcieri (the unions’ chief villain) and even the Democratic General Assembly. There were references to layoffs and furloughs and people Carcieri had stashed in high-paying jobs.

The extent of the threats isn’t clear. For example, although the governor has laid off 137 employees, he has, for now, dropped plans to ax another 426. Furloughs — unpaid days off that Carcieri hoped to put through in the fiscal year about to end — have not materialized. But, for the new fiscal year, labor is engaged in negotiations that may see it agreeing to some furloughs and some increase in health premiums, though apparently not as much in savings as the $60 million the governor has been seeking.

The rally was intended as a show of labor strength and resolve, as if to say, “We’ve had enough; don’t do any more to us.”

However contemporary the event was, there was also a timeless quality to it. The speakers were mostly longtime veterans of the labor movement, and many of the themes could have been voiced — have been voiced — over decades of union activism.

Here was George Nee, Rhode Island AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer, thundering:

“We’re proud to be union members. And there are some people in this building, in the media and those nitwit talk shows, and they think we have too much power. We don’t have enough power!...

“We cannot allow politicians, the media, corporate executives — we can’t allow anybody to divide us. … There’s an old labor song, and that’s where we are right now, and it came from the mineworkers’ struggle… and it’s very, very simple: ‘Which Side Are You On?’

“We’re on the side of justice and fairness and truth and democracy itself, and if you’re on that side, you’re with us, and if you’re against us you’re on the other side, and we’re going to prevail.”

I remember exactly where I was when I first heard people sing, “Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?”

It was in Atlanta, which I was visiting while a college student. Civil-rights activists had appropriated the song. It was 1964, and the song already was more than 30 years old.

I told Nee there was something very retro about the rhetoric and the passion of the rally, that here were unions fighting to maintain advances you’d think had been solidified long ago.

He said, “We’re very conscious that the improvements, the gains, the progress that we’ve made are always tenuous. What we have achieved we have fought for, and you can’t get complacent.”

However militant the rally, Nee described as “meaningful” the contract discussions that labor is having with the Carcieri administration. Things are going in a “positive” direction, Nee told me. But even so, “That doesn’t mean that we’re very happy with his policies.” Hence, all the noise at the event.

Well, the noise and some signs, like the placard that said, “Hey Don: Furlough your friends & family.”

Speakers stood beneath a banner of Working Rhode Island, the labor movement’s political coalition. Nearby was a banner for Council 94, the largest state employee union.

In the pre-game chatter, so to speak, I had a chance to schmooze with Frank Montanaro, AFL-CIO president. He is the old lion of the union scene here, with a gift for skewering Carcieri and for drawing his ire.

I asked Montanaro, a prominent Democrat, how he thinks the governor is doing. “He’s doing lousy,” was the reply. “Because I just don’t think he knows what he’s doing up there. You can’t name one thing that he’s done or put together for the State of Rhode Island since he was elected.”

Montanaro added, “There’s no economic development going on.”

And he assailed the governor’s crackdown on illegal immigrants. “It’s horrible. Because I don’t think he cares about people. People are people. What do you have against a child who’s born from immigrants who are not documented. … You don’t give that child health care? What kind of person are you?”

(The Democratic Assembly went along with this health-care cutback.)

When the rally began, the emcee, Marcia Reback, president of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals, incorporated a similar note of alarm in her introductory comments:

“We don’t want to see children knocked off RIte Care. We don’t want to see services for the disabled taken away. We don’t want to see adults with low incomes have their insurance taken away from them. But we also don’t want to be in poverty. We don’t want our pensions taken away. We don’t want our health care taken away….

“We want for everybody what we have….

“We want fair taxation in the State of Rhode Island. We pay our taxes and so should the very wealthy in the State of Rhode Island pay their fair share.”

Now she ushered Montanaro up, and he sought to allay the fears of taxpayers who might think labor piggish: “It isn’t like we’re fighting for more health care. It isn’t like we’re fighting for [more] pension benefits. It isn’t like we’re fighting for big pay raises. What we’re trying to do is keep what we have.”

Now Larry Purtill, of the National Education Association, called for long-term economic solutions:

“We don’t grow the economy and prosper as a state by cutting health care for children, by trying to furlough and privatize state workers, cutting benefits for municipal workers, firefighters and police, people who take care of our most fragile, our elderly, our veterans and our disabled. And we certainly don’t grow the economy by taking away money from the middle class and giving it to the wealthy.”

He said he looks to the day when a millionaire walks down the street in attire that says the middle class and the poor got tax breaks and all he or she got was a lousy T-shirt.

Next up: Council 94 president Michael Downey:

“The only friends of this administration are people making over $100,000 while we’ve been sent home, laid off, furloughed.”

Downey can be affable enough, but he told the rally, “I know that everybody doesn’t like me. … I don’t like the governor and I don’t care if he likes me. What he’s done to the people I represent is wrong.”

Now here’s something that will drive conservatives or business interests crazy: the president of the Providence Teachers Union — part of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers — is a state legislator: Rep. Steven Smith.

In introducing him, Reback said the Providence teachers, who have been without a contract for a year, are being “tortured” by Mayor David Cicilline. In case anyone missed the point, she added, “tortured by David Cicilline” — the crowd booed — “who wants to be the governor.” More boos.

Smith declared, “Every time we talk about tax breaks for the wealthiest, we’re thrown back with, ‘Well, that’s class warfare.’ We didn’t declare war on the wealthy. The wealthy have declared war on us. ”

And still another speaker, Karen Malcolm, of the advocacy group Ocean State Action, asserted, “We don’t have to accept tax cuts that only benefit our most wealthy while making the load heavier for working people like you and me.

“We don’t have to be deceived by unfair attacks on union families, on immigrant families, on low-income single moms.”

Reversing the moves of recent years to benefit the rich by reducing capital gains taxes and phasing in a flat-tax income tax rate to benefit high earners hardly would solve Rhode Island’s budget deficit. But reversing the moves could provide money for social services.

Of course, proponents of the tax breaks say they’re designed to keep wealthy people here and stimulate job development. I don’t know that I buy this theory.

I certainly don’t buy everything that the labor rally speakers said. But I do give the organizers credit for attracting a crowd and for airing their views in the open.

If you disagree with their views, if you think these people are unfairly tarring Carcieri or legislators, if you think the state’s tax policies are smart, if you think it’s a good idea to cut social services, do yourself a favor:

Stage your own rally. Draw 2,000 people. Attract media coverage. Air your opinions in the free marketplace of ideas.

That’s the American way.

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com