King’s Dream of Economic Justice Still Far From Reality
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| Rep. John Lewis called for working people to “make some noise.” |
Devon Lomax, a member of the Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) District Council 9 in New York, hasn’t worked for more than a year. One of his colleagues lost his home and ended up panhandling in the subways.
Katie Hofmann, a teacher in Cincinnati, Ohio, says more and more of her students are homeless. Teachers who have not had a pay raise for five years regularly go into their pockets to buy lunch for children who are hungry and whose families have no money.
Lomax and Hofmann were two of the panelists who spoke at the AFL-CIO and The King Center symposium on “Jobs, Justice and the American Dream” this morning. Participants in the first panel, Jobs and the American Dream, agreed that 48 years after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the nation is still far from achieving his vision of a nation where everyone who wants to work has a good job and the freedom to achieve to the best of his or her abilities.
Watch Live Webcast of Historic National Symposium on Jobs, Justice and American Dream
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On Aug. 26, two days before the official dedication of the historic Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in Washington, D.C., the AFL-CIO and The King Center will host a national symposium to explore how far we have come in fulfilling King’s dream of a nation of economic equality and justice for all people.
Watch a live webcast of this important symposium on jobs, justice and the American dream. Click here Friday morning at 9 a.m. to join the webcast. Also, check out the live Twitter feed during the symposium on the AFL-CIO website and follow the events on Twitter with the hashtag #jobsjustice.
Two panels of experts, workers, political leaders and activists will talk about the steps we need to take as a nation to make King’s dream a reality. Martin Luther King III, president of the King Center will make remarks along with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler and Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker.
The first panel will discuss the threat that a lack of jobs presents to the economic progress for which King fought most of his life. Civil rights legend Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), will highlight the Read the rest of this entry »
Academics, Activists Search for New Ways to Revitalize Labor Movement
More than 200 academics and labor activists came together yesterday to discuss strategies for revitalizing the union movement.
AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler set the tone for the conference, sponsored by Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.
Union membership numbers aren’t a popularity poll, nor a reflection of a declining need for unions—just a sad reflection of how incredibly difficult it is for workers to form unions in our modern corporate environment. It’s a tragic commentary on today’s economy that good, middle-class union jobs have left America.
Human Rights Day: Workers Ask, ‘What’s Gone Wrong at Chase?’
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Today is International Human Rights Day and hundreds of union members, religious leaders, activists, farm workers and victims of bank home foreclosures are protesting at 100 JPMorgan Chase Bank branches across the country to demand the bank respect the basic human rights of people to have decent places to live and work.
Large banks such as Chase are flush with cash and protestors handed out fliers asking, “What’s Gone Wrong at Chase?” and demanded the bank declare a one-year moratorium on home foreclosures. The Wall Street Journal reports that Chase has $19.5 billion worth of home loans in foreclosure, more than any other bank.
Outsourced: No Laughing Matter
Sarita Gupta is the executive director of Jobs with Justice.
Last week, NBC launched a new show that tries to find comedy in the all-too-real conditions of outsourcing. While the first episode was witty—making light of age-old cultural clashes and stereotypes, there is nothing funny about the reality of outsourcing and the impact it has both on the American worker and their counterparts around the world.
For decades, big companies like the one portrayed in “Outsourced” have been engaged in a global race to the bottom, constantly seeking to maximize their profits by cutting wages, benefits and working conditions. Corporations have learned to avoid local worker bargaining power by organizing themselves globally and exerting a downward pressure on wages along the supply chain that brings goods from manufacturing to consumers.
Sept. 15 Day of Action: We’re in a Jobs Emergency!
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With their six-figure salaries and government-paid health care, members of Congress may not feel the pinch of a 9.6 percent unemployment rate. But millions of Americans are in pain, and on Sept. 15, they will shout loud and clear that we are in an emergency and Congress must act immediately to create good jobs.
Sept. 15 is the day workers, students and community and religious groups in dozens of cities across the country will revive one of the key demands of the 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” by calling for full and fair employment and demanding the government declare a national “jobs emergency.”
“It’s time for corporate apologists in the Senate, who are blocking a recovery for the rest of us, to recognize what workers already know: we are in a jobs emergency that requires a bold, emergency response,” says Sarita Gupta, executive director of Jobs with Justice, the main organizer of the protests.
With record long-term unemployment and communities losing vital public services, it is time to put full and fair employment and a massive federal works program—core demands from the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom that Glenn Beck wants us to forget—back on the national agenda.
Jobs with Justice Week of Action: Demanding Real Economic Recovery
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This week marks the one-year anniversary of the Wall Street bailout, and Jobs with Justice (JwJ) is launching a Week of Action to demand that the banks use our taxpayer dollars to finance the recovery and not their own corporate agenda.
During the Sept. 24-Oct. 1 week of action, working people will join with students, activists, community leaders and others across the country to highlight Big Banks’ misuse of tax dollars. So far, few of the billions in taxpayer money that went to Big Banks have reached Main Street. Instead, executives of banks that were bailed out with taxpayer dollars have lined their pockets with stock options that guarantee them huge windfalls for years. While they get richer, they have laid off more than 160,000 employees since Jan. 1, 2008.
To top it all off, Bank of America, which received $45 billion in taxpayer-funded bailout support, has spent more than $1.5 million lobbying on Capitol Hill against the reforms that would protect consumers from a future financial crisis, such as restrictions on executive compensation, home mortgage lending and credit card fees. The bank also is lobbying on a consumer rights bill, on student lending issues, on a bill that would’ve allowed bankruptcy judges to alter mortgages and on a proposed federal regulatory oversight agency.
