London, October 17 (RHC)-- The ‘One Day Without Us’ strike being organized in the U.K. for February 2017 aims to show the indispensability of immigrant labor and to protest the surge of racism and xenophobia that followed the Brexit vote. 

Matt Carr, one of the organizers of the labor boycott, said it has received broad support with about 6,000 people responded to the Facebook event. 

“We live in frightening times indeed, when government ministers can describe immigrants as ‘negotiating chips’ and threaten to ‘name and shame’ businesses that employ foreign workers, as if these workers were something shameful,” Carr wrote on the event’s Facebook page. 

“It is now clear that our government has chosen to pander to fear and hate in order to manage the U.K.’s exit from the European Union.  “These developments not only pose a direct threat to the millions of immigrants who have made the U.K. their home—they have also unleashed forces that may do incalculable harm to British society itself.” 

The organizers plan to reach out to community and religious leaders across the country to have the largest mobilization by February 20, the day of the strike. 

“For one day, we are inviting immigrants and their British supporters to absent themselves from the activities they normally do,” he added.  “To close their restaurants and businesses, leave classes, universities, and workplaces, and demonstrate by their absence what they have created, what they have given to British society and how essential and valuable they are."