Philly Comcast Workers Walk Out to Protest Trump’s Muslim Ban

February 10, 2017 
By Steven Wishnia and Neal Tepel

Philadelphia, PA – Carrying signs saying “Tech Has No Borders,” several hundred Comcast workers in Philadelphia left work Feb. 2 for a demonstration they’d organized against President Trump’s executive order prohibiting people from seven Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States.

About 500 to 600 joined the four-block march form the Comcast Center to City Hall, police estimated. “This is absolutely employee-organized and initiated,” said software engineer Aaron Martin-Colby, who led the march with Vietnamese immigrant Hai Thai. They put the half-hour protest together within two days, with workers at the cable-TV and Internet company’s Philadelphia headquarters communicating by electronic messages with others in Silicon Valley, who held a smaller protest there. Martin-Colby told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the march had met “no resistance” from Comcast management, and a company spokesperson said employees would not be docked pay for the time they’d left work. Read more