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.
Award-Winning Author to Discuss King’s Quest for Economic Justice
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Michael Honey, award-winning author of Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign, will talk about the Memphis sanitation strike and King’s unfinished quest for economic justice and workers’ rights at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Md., March 17 at 7 p.m.
Going Down Jericho Road (available from The Union Shop OnlineTM in hardcover and paperback) won the prestigious 2008 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. In the book, Honey, a professor at the University of Washington-Tacoma and president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association, recounts the 1968 walkout of 1,300 sanitation workers, nearly all of them African American, in Memphis, Tenn. The workers were demanding recognition of their union (AFSCME), an agreement that the city would withhold union dues from workers’ paychecks, a small pay raise and improved safety standards.
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.
King Day Participants Celebrate 2008 Wins, Plan for Future
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The inauguration of the nation’s first African American president next week is just the beginning of a historic shift in the nation’s politics, and civil rights activists from across the country are gathering this weekend to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and discuss how to complete King’s dream of a just society.
During the annual AFL-CIO King Day celebration, which begins today and runs through Jan. 19 in New Orleans, more than 200 participants will examine what the 2008 election means for our nation and working families. Responding to President-elect Obama’s call to honor King with community service, the participants will join with hundreds of area union members and roll up their sleeves in more than 20 different community service projects in a city that continues to suffer three years later from the effects of Hurricane Katrina.
