Carrying On King’s Work

By Allison Fletcher Acosta

At the time of his death in 1968, Dr. King was engaged in preparations for a Poor People’s Campaign that aimed to bring thousands of unemployed and working poor people to Washington, DC. At that time, the unemployment rate was 4% and fewer than 13% of Americans were living in poverty. Today, the unemployment rate is 9.4% and 14.3% live in poverty.

On the day he was assassinated, Dr. King was in Memphis supporting a strike of 1,300 black sanitation workers who walked off the job protesting years of discrimination, low or no pay, and dangerous working conditions. The workers sought union representation with the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), but the mayor’s office did not want to recognize the existence of public unions. The sanitation workers won their struggle for respect and dignity on the job shortly after King’s death. Today, Memphis sanitation workers face layoffs and cuts to their overtime and pensions.

Across the country, conservatives are pushing a corporate agenda that seeks to shift the blame for high unemployment and rising poverty levels away from their allies on Wall Street who are bringing record profits. The corporate bogeymen: unions and public workers.

In Ohio, Governor Kasich is threatening to take away the right of all of the state’s public employees to form unions. In New York, Governor Cuomo has said he wants to lay off 12,000 workers by the year’s end. In states across the country, including Indiana, Missouri, Michigan, Maine, Pennsylvania, corporate interests are trying to pass Right-to-Work-for-Less laws with the goal of keeping unions out of the workplace. This is the same Jim Crow-style legislation that has kept southern workers on the bottom of every national “standard of living” list since the civil rights era. Rather than holding Wall Street accountable for the financial misdeeds that caused the economic crisis, politicians want to balance their budgets on the backs of workers.

Speaking in 1961, Dr. King warned that we should not be misled by these deceitful rallying cries:

In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights… Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone. Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped.

Indeed, the attacks on unions and public workers are a scam that we must expose and stop. Workers are not to blame for high unemployment or rising poverty rates – Wall Street is. They’ve spent decades changing the rules of the game in their favor. It’s up to working people to take back control over our livelihoods. In Dr. King’s words, “Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 18th, 2011 at 3:55 pm. It is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.