by James Parks, Jan 12, 2007

School children in Houston play on new playground equipment donated by nine unions.

Martin Luther King’s dream of a world in which everyone has economic opportunity and where violence is rare still is a long way away, according to a longtime civil rights leader.

In an electrifying speech that had an audience of more than 500 union activists standing on their feet, the Rev. Joseph Lowery told participants at the AFL-CIO annual Martin Luther King Day celebration in Houston:

“We need to apply action to the three areas Dr. King warned us about: poverty, racism and violence. Poverty is much too prevalent, and it’s spreading among working people,” Lowery said. “Racism is pervasive in our public policies and practices, and violence threatens to destroy us both from within and from without.”

Lowery, 85, was a close aide and confidant of King. He  served 20 years as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights group King founded.

Lowery says the nation needs to recommit itself to the message of economic justice.

We’re entering an era when everybody must be fighting for civil rights. What was not on the national radar screen has exploded onto television screens. We know now that the faces of poverty are black, brown and white, painful and anguished. Let this nation rise up to eliminate poverty and make the faces of poverty vanish from the American scene.

Lowery’s speech began the busiest day of the celebration, which ends Monday.

This afternoon, conference participants, including James Little, president of the Transport Workers (TWU), visited the Thurgood Marshall Elementary Magnet School, an early childhood school with pre-kindergarten and kindergarten. They toured the school and participated in a special dedication ceremony for playground equipment donated by nine unions. The unions gave $52,575 for the new equipment for the school, one of Houston’s poorest, and donated in-kind contributions for other area schools.

Little, whose union was among those donating the equipment, said at the dedication:

Working people and especially union members feel a special bond to Dr. King. Few people remember that Dr. King had just returned from a union picket line before he was gunned down in Memphis. He was our ally, and we are still his ally.

Dr. King dreamed of a society that offered children equal opportunity for success. We hope by donating this equipment and supplies we are creating an opportunity for a better life for local school children.

In addition to TWU, the unions that donated funds included AFGE; AFSCME; AFT; Amalgamated Transit Union; Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers; Bricklayers; Communications Workers of America; Glass Molders, Pottery, Plastics and Allied Workers; Seafarers; United Steelworkers (USW) and the unaffiliated Laborers.

Saturday, activists will go into the Houston area’s low-income communities to work on projects such as fixing up homes and buildings in disrepair and supplying paper and food products for soup kitchens.

To ensure that the Nov. 7 election victories that changed the Congress result in significant gains for workers, activists discussed key issues on the working families agenda: voting rights, the global economy and the impact of the Iraq war on people of color.

Speaking at the conference today, Economic Policy Institute (EPI) economist Jeff Faux said globalization has failed to meet the hype of its supporters who claimed it would bring prosperity around the world. Faux said:

The mismanaged policies of the last two decades have severely damaged U.S. competitiveness and plunged the nation into a spiral of trade deficits.

Until recently, Americans were united by a social contract that assured that the benefits of economic growth would be widely shared through collective bargaining and programs like Social Security, minimum wage and workplace health and safety. The social contract recognized that workers and employers needed each other.

But there is no social contract in the unregulated global economy. So, corporations can find workers elsewhere—in countries where workers have no rights or protections. As they outsource and offshore, they see their future disconnected from the average American. In effect, globalization is producing a new class system in which people at the top in each country have more in common with each other than with the people that share their nationality.

Faux recently authored a paper on the global economy for the Agenda for Shared Prosperity, a network of progressive economists backed by the nonprofit EPI to address the growing gap between America’s promise and its problems.

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