Unions: Ensuring Social Justice for African Americans

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/speakout/schmitt_baker.cfm

By John Schmitt and Dean Baker


John Schmitt


Dean Baker

This month marks the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in Memphis, Tenn. As the country notes this tragic event, we also should remember why King was in Memphis that fateful day.

King was there to support municipal sanitation and sewer workers who were on strike for better pay, benefits and working conditions. The workers, who were nearly all black, were poorly paid and treated with contempt by the city government. The last day in January 1968, black sewer workers had been sent home without pay on a day with bad weather; their white co-workers stayed on the clock to wait out the bad weather. The next day, two black sanitation workers—Echol Cole and Robert Walker—were crushed to death on the job. Two weeks later, the city's 1,100 sanitation workers and 200 sewer workers went on strike, drawing national media attention.

Over the next several months, King made several trips to Memphis to support the strikers and their families. King saw the strike as part of the broader struggle for social justice. As he said on one of his visits to Memphis: "We know that it isn't enough to integrate lunch counters. 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?"

The Memphis sanitation and sewer workers did ultimately win their strike, including improved pay, benefits and working conditions. Their success was part of a period of U.S. history when union jobs helped lift millions of African Americans into the middle class.

Perhaps the best example of this upward mobility occurred in unionized manufacturing, including sectors like the auto and steel industries. In the three decades following the end of World War II, manufacturing offered good middle-class jobs to millions of African Americans who had themselves grown up in poverty. These newly middle-class workers were able to afford decent homes and cars. They had health insurance and pensions. They could take vacations and send their children to college.

Over the past three decades, however, this situation has taken a turn for the worse as both the number of jobs in manufacturing and the number of unionized jobs have declined sharply. In 1979, for example, manufacturing accounted for nearly one-quarter of all jobs in this country and about the same share of the total workforce was in a union. Today, only about one-in-10 jobs is in manufacturing, and roughly 13 percent of the workforce is in a union or represented by one at their workplace.

FULL article at link.