Civil Rights Leaders Urge Passage of Employee Free Choice
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Martin Luther King Jr. often drew the parallels and connections between the civil rights and union movements. Today, on the eve of the anniversary of King’s assassination, national civil rights leaders called for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would give workers the choice of how to form a union.
During a telephone press conference, Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), a coalition of some 200 organizations, pointed out that unions have been one of the main vehicles for African Americans to move into the middle class.
The Employee Free Choice Act has been largely written about as a labor bill but those of us in the civil rights community know it is so much more…workers’ rights are civil rights; and that the right to organize is a civil and human rights issue of the first magnitude.
Message to Solis: Get Tough with Labor Law Violators
Yesterday, Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo filed a 176-count criminal case against two Los Angeles carwash owners for allegedly abusing and intimidating workers, and for failing to pay the minimum wage. Delgadillo said the work conditions “bordered on indentured servitude.”
With Hilda Solis poised to become the next secretary of labor, Art Levine, writing on Huffington Post, asks if Solis will be equally as tough on companies that violate labor laws. Writes Levine:
One of the challenges for Solis is whether she’ll be tough enough in cracking down on such rampant abuses with a Labor Department gutted by eight years of pro-business GOP hacks in charge. It’s not that likely, though, that the moderate Solis will pursue criminal cases against the top CEOs who have yet to face the prospect of jail time over wage theft.
Even so, as the AFL-CIO’s general counsel, Jon Hiatt, observes, “My dream is that the first act of the new Secretary of Labor would be to identify top executives of companies that routinely violate wages and hours laws—and take them out of their offices in handcuffs. The deterrent value would be enormous.”
