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.
Unions Pave Way for African American Progress
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Union membership has been a pathway to the middle class and leadership for generations of African American workers. Unions have done more to provide jobs, physical safety, education, adequate housing and medical care for African Americans than any other institution, according to labor educator Edgar Moore.
In “African Americans Win With Unions,” a guest column at the AFL-CIO website, Moore, a faculty member at the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s William Brennan Institute for Labor Studies, writes:
Unions serve the African American community well. It is true that unions, like the rest of American society, delayed opening their doors to African Americans for too long, but enormous progress has been made since it happened.
In turn, the union movement benefits from African American membership, Moore points out. He cites a study that shows more African Americans hold leadership positions in labor unions than in any other social institution in America, except the black church.
