by James Parks, Jan 15, 2008

Working people have been concerned about the economy long before recent polls put the issue back into the spotlight. As AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker says: 

Americans want to talk about the issues. Americans aren’t stupid, they know the economy is not working.

 Speaking last week at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Holt Baker, recently elected as the AFL-CIO’s first African American officer, says the subprime mortgage crisis and the health care crisis are both symptoms of a broken economy.

The causes of this crisis and of the failing health of our entire economy are obvious: stagnant wages, disappearing pension benefits, and runaway health care costs. People who have decent incomes and benefits don’t have to resort to sub-prime loans in order to buy a home.    

Our economy isn’t working for anyone except the privileged few, and our health care system is in nearly the same fix. 

(Click here to read a full copy of Holt Baker’s speech.)  

African Americans are especially hard hit in this economy. Holt Baker cited a new report by the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education that found more than half of black workers in the United States have jobs that don’t pay well, don’t provide retirement and health benefits or offer avenues for advancement. 

One of the ways for these low-wage jobs to become good-paying jobs is unionization. And blacks are one of the groups most likely to form and join a union if there weren’t so many obstacles. 

Holt Baker quoted  Martin Luther King Jr.’s remarks to the AFL-CIO Convention in 1961: 

A duality of interest of labor and the Negroes makes any crisis which lacerates you a crisis from which we bleed. 

The best way to stop the bleeding is for all of us in the union movement to mobilize this year in the 2008 elections—and this weekend, 900 activists are getting a head start on the process. Union members and allies from around the nation are gathering Jan. 17–21 for the annual AFL-CIO Martin Luther King Jr. celebrations in Memphis, where they will take part in political mobilization training before going back into their communities to get out the vote. (Click here to see several videos that chronicle Dr. King’s support for striking sanitation workers in 1968.)   

The AFL-CIO Political Department projects that in the 2008 elections, one-quarter of voters will come from union households. Says Holt Baker:

There are huge stakes in this election for all working people and all of our communities. This is why our AFL-CIO Labor 2008 effort is the most ambitious we’ve ever undertaken.

 

We, along with our Working America partners, are determined to educate, mobilize and motivate our members and their families and turn our country around—knocking, calling, door-to-door, worksites.

 

We are organizing around three basic issues:  turning our economy into one that works for working families; reforming health care so it provides affordable, high quality care for all; and restoring the freedom of every worker to join a union so we can regain our strength as a movement and restore our middle class.

 The enemies of working people also are the enemies of people of color, Holt Baker says, pointing out that the ultraconservatives of King’s day targeted labor, liberals and African Americans. 

The big change is that the list of those most disdained by the ultra-conservative right wing has only expanded. It no longer includes just labor and the Negro and liberals—it now includes new immigrants of all races, gays and lesbians, and the working poor, who are disproportionately single mothers and people of color. It is precisely those on this list that we in the labor movement have aligned ourselves with, in a coalition that will make possible the realization of the dream we all share for the economic and social justice Dr. King lived and died for.  

A unified union movement can be the difference in turning around the nation’s priorities, Holt Baker says: 

To demand and get what our families deserve, we must be a unified labor movement that is bigger and stronger, one able to demand and get the changes that working families so desperately need. There may be differences among us on specific issues, but the record is indisputable––when labor unions have been the strongest in our country, our economy has done better and our communities have thrived. 

The 2008 election is alive with the possibility of doing that by starting to turn our country around and get us back on the track of social and economic justice. 

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