CWA 1180 - Solidarity Works

The legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: Defending the
right to organize

By Michael K. Honey, UW Tacoma professor of humanities

http://blogs.uwnews.org/politics/CategoryView,category,Labor.aspx

The legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. casts a shadow
over events in our country, and never more
appropriately so than in this electoral season of 2008.
In a real sense, King paved the way for Sen. Barack
Obama's presidential campaign of hope. Using the Bible
and the Constitution, King argued and demonstrated that
ordinary people can change history, by organizing
themselves into a coherent force for change.

At the same time, many of the democratic advances of
the 20th century are in jeopardy today, none more so
than the right to organize unions, without which
working people cannot raise their incomes and improve
their lives. We have a long way to go before people at
their workplace are afforded the constitutional and
human rights that the civil rights and labor movements
struggled for, and that King died for.

Many of this year's presidential candidates seem to
want to demonize illegal immigrants. Former senator
John Edwards, who quit the race last week, is almost
alone among them in explaining that our "immigration
problem" is actually a labor problem. "Free trade" laws
have helped U.S. agribusiness to undersell corn farmers
in Mexico, sending them streaming north in search of
work; those laws make it easier for multinational
corporations to outsource unionized jobs with wages
that support a family to cheaper labor markets abroad.
Families on both sides of the border are hurt by the
catastrophic destruction of the farming economy and
well-paying working-class jobs.

In Immokalee, Fla., immigrant fruit and vegetable
pickers work six days a week, 12 hours a day, for about
$13,000 a year, poverty wages by anyone's standard.
Florida's growers have invested millions in a campaign
to stop them from getting just one penny per pound more
for the crops they pick. In Smithfield, N.C., black,
Hispanic and white meatpacking workers get poverty
wages while employers fire, harass and intimidate, and
federal officers raid the homes of immigrant workers
and deport them.

South of our border, Mexican authorities beat up
teachers in Oaxaca; Guatemalan authorities kidnap
unionists at Coca-Cola plants; Colombian death squads
kill hundreds of union leaders. Elsewhere in the world,
China too often crushes union organizing.

Repression in the United States is not as severe, but
Americans are similarly challenged when it comes to
guaranteeing people union rights. In Washington,
Republicans in the Senate killed the Employee Free
Choice Act last year, which would have allowed workers
to unionize if a majority sign cards expressing their
consent. President Bush's National Labor Relations
Board has twisted labor law to make it almost
impossible to organize. Tennessee's "right to work" law
prohibits the union shop, allowing "free riders" to get
union benefits without paying union dues. The laws are
stacked against workers.

No wonder that only about 12 percent of American
workers belong to unions -- 7.5 percent of those in the
private sector and nearly 36 percent of workers in the
public sector. Many in the private sector are
especially scared to join unions, because so many
people have been fired or blocked for promotions when
they do.

Low union membership translates to poverty wages linked
to high infant mortality and low high school graduation
rates for the working and unemployed poor.

Wary of a possible return to the violence that had
convulsed Downtown Memphis one day earlier, National
Guardsmen blocked off Beale Street as striking
sanitation workers protested on March 29, 1968. "All
labor has dignity," Martin Luther King Jr. preached.
"You are ... reminding the nation that it is a crime
for people to live in this rich nation and receive
starvation wages."

The Rev. James M. Lawson Jr. joined King at a press
conference on March 28, 1968, where they vowed that the
sanitation workers' protests would continue. "We know
that it isn't enough to integrate lunch counters," King
had told a crowd at Mason Temple days earlier. "What
does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated
lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a
hamburger and a cup of coffee?"

Workers in the United States and across our borders are
not enemies. We have a common interest in enforcing the
right of workers to organize, so that wages will rise,
consumer spending will increase and our economies will
move forward.

What does all this have to do with King and his legacy?
A great deal.

'All labor has dignity': King's quest for labor rights

In January, AFL-CIO union members from all over the
United States gathered in Memphis to remember King and
honor sanitation workers Taylor Rogers, Joe Warren,
William Ross, Baxter Leach, J.B. Trotter and others who
stood up for their rights with union organizer T.O.
Jones in 1968.

During a 65-day strike, the sanitation workers'
families lived on very little. Memphis police clubbed
people senseless and sprayed them with Mace, a blinding
chemical made for use in war. Yet the workers kept
marching. Until recently, their story was almost lost
to history. But increasingly, others across the country
want to hear it.

Americans are also coming around to seeing King as more
than a civil rights leader who "had a dream." Most
people know King died in Memphis, but many now want to
know why. What was going on in this city anyhow? Most
people don't know King died fighting for the right of
workers to organize unions, in one of the most dramatic
and significant battles of the 1960s.

King was far more than a dreamer. He said a union is
the best anti-poverty program available to poor people
with jobs, and he supported unions all his life. He
knew most of the major union leaders in the country and
recognized that unions had paved the way for the civil
rights movement. He always had a black working-class
constituency, from maids in Montgomery to teenagers
without work in Birmingham to sanitation workers
exploited in Memphis. Time and again, King gave voice
to the voiceless, hope to the hopeless.

When King came to Memphis, he shone a beacon of hope,
and media attention, on underpaid, overworked laborers
for the city of Memphis. "King was like Moses," said
striker James Robinson.

"It was just like Jesus would be coming into my life,"
said striker Clinton Burrows. "I was full of joy and
full of determination. Wherever King was, I wanted to
be there."

Five weeks into the strike, on March 18, 1968, King
delivered an impromptu speech at Mason Temple of the
Church of God in Christ. More than 10,000 people
crammed the auditorium, many overflowing into hallways
and stairways, creating the largest indoor mass rally
of the civil rights-era South. "All labor has dignity,"
King preached. "You are reminding not only Memphis but
you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for
people to live in this rich nation and receive
starvation wages. And I need not remind you that this
is our plight as a people all over America."

After passage of the civil rights and voting rights
bills in 1964 and 1965, he said, "One era of our
struggle came to a close and a new era came into being.
Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means
economic equality."

King came to Memphis in the midst of his Poor People's
Campaign, whose goal was to organize the unemployed and
desperately poor of all colors in America's ghettoes,
barrios, Indian reservations and rural areas. He wanted
them to go to Washington to demand that money allocated
for the Vietnam war be spent instead to abolish
poverty. King left Memphis to focus on the Washington
campaign, but when he returned to lead a mass march on
March 28, chaos occurred.

Black youth, street people and provocateurs broke out
downtown windows with picket signs; the police
attacked, randomly beating, Macing and shooting people;
one youth died and hundreds went to the hospital.

It was a disaster for King, and the city of Memphis. He
returned a few days later, planning to lead a
nonviolent march, and gave a brilliant speech to a
crowd on the stormy evening of April 3. Under immense
pressure from multiple death threats, King called on
people to be like the Good Samaritan going down Jericho
road. Stop to help a stranger in need, he said, even if
it imperils your own life. "The question is not, 'If I
stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?'
'If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what
will happen to them?' That's the question."

King lived by that creed and died by it. The next day,
an assassin cut him down.

The same cause: Labor rights, civil rights, human
rights

We need to recall King's warning: "Injustice anywhere
is a threat to justice everywhere." Instead of
denigrating immigrants, we need to renew King's call to
"planetize our movement for social justice" by helping
workers in other countries organize to improve
conditions so they don't have to emigrate. At home, we
need to regain the right to organize at the workplace.
We need to strengthen laws to allow organizing, and
reignite our own multiracial coalition. We need to
return to King's campaign to end war and poverty and
support union rights.

This may sound hopelessly unrealistic to some, yet hope
is born from large, idealistic goals. Public-sector
workers organized effectively because King and others
raised their hopes and eventually government became
more accepting of their right to a union. King said
that organizing is the only sure way for low-wage
workers to raise their wages and change their lives. We
can still hope that King's larger goal of a "beloved
community" is possible.

But it won't happen unless we remember and understand
our history. For most of those who lived through the
epic 1968 strike, the lesson of the past to the present
is clear: Labor rights, human rights and civil rights
remain indivisible. "We can get more organized together
than we can apart," King told Memphis workers and their
supporters.

Rev. James Lawson, a key ministerial leader in the
Memphis strike, called it a "watershed moment" that
brought the plight of the working poor to the attention
of the country. We should remember that moment and
honor its legacy.

This article initially appeared Feb. 3, 2008 in The
Memphis Commercial Appeal.

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