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

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2008/feb/03/defending-the-right-to-organize-t-the-legacy-of/

Employees, unions struggle for justice in a climate that favors business over people

By Michael K. Honey
Special to The Commercial Appeal
Sunday, February 3, 2008

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.


Associated Press files
Labor historian Michael Honey says the right to organize is under threat worldwide: "South of our border, Mexican authorities beat up teachers in Oaxaca" during protest marches like this one in July 2007.


The right to organize is under attack

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.

FULL story at link.