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Battle for Civil Rights Similar to Today’s Fight for Workers’ Rights
UAW President Ron Gettelfinger says there are parallels between the congressional battles in the 1950s and 1960s over civil rights legislation and today’s fight over workers’ rights and the Employee Free Choice Act.
In a column in the Detroit News, Gettelfinger writes:
Time and again, civil rights measures were passed by a majority in the U.S. House and supported by a majority in the U.S. Senate—only to be defeated by a filibuster used by a minority of senators.
The effort to stop social progress was led by Dixiecrats—Southern Democrats who stood for the privileged elite against the will of a majority of the American people. Today, their spiritual heirs have changed political parties, but they still reward the fortunate few who hold wealth and power and trample the needs of everyone else.
Like civil rights legislation, the Employee Free Choice Act, has won majorities in the House and Senate and is backed by the president. But a minority of Republican senators will use the same civil rights-era filibuster tactics to block the bill. Asks Gettelfinger:
Is the fight to expand workplace rights truly a part of America’s civil rights heritage? Martin Luther King certainly thought so. In the last days of his life, he traveled to Memphis to support a strike by municipal sanitation workers.
The only way to win better conditions was to empower men and women to organize their workplaces. “The labor movement,” he said, “was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress…and above all, new wage levels that meant not mere survival, but a tolerable life.”
Click here to read the entire column.
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2 Comments
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Quote.. only to be defeated by a filibuster used by a minority of senators.
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Minority rule does not benefit working people – democracy does. Politicians are not the voters friends. Politicians are the voters employees. The voters should remember that employees do not naturally love their bosses!
The greatest divide in this nation is not between Democrats and Republicans, but between democrats and non-democrats. Sometimes words can divide us, and I have nothing against our former people’s republic, but that died about a 100 years ago.
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President Obama’s bipartisanship in accepting Sen. Gregg as his Sec of Commerce without demanding a Democratic Senatorial appointment signals weakness. Bipartisanship as surrender is not good. If some political deal was made I don’t know what it was.
We must rally to support strong labor leaders and we will overcome all obstacles. There is no distiction of voters so every vote counts.