Holt Baker: McCain’s Not Living Up to King’s Legacy

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/04/04/holt-baker-mccains-not-living-up-to-kings-legacy/

By Seth Michaels, Apr 4, 2008


Today, we remember the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated 40 years ago in Memphis, Tenn., where he was helping striking sanitation workers form a union.

Video: http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1378314715?bctid=1373284584

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) went to the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis today to speak about the anniversary of King’s death, and AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker offers a powerful response to McCain’s speech. McCain’s words just “didn’t ring true,” she says, noting that McCain is largely silent about the crises of poverty and economic injustice that were the focus of King’s mission.

Dr. King led the fight against starvation wages, yet, just a year ago, Sen. McCain voted against an increase in the minimum wage and even moved to abolish it completely. Dr. King said injustice in health care is “the most shocking and inhumane” of all inequalities, yet Sen. McCain has shown no interest in providing health care for the 47 million Americans without coverage. Dr. King strongly supported unions as a means to lift our nation’s workers out of poverty and give them the opportunity for a better life. Sen. McCain has voted against workers’ freedom to form unions and collective bargaining rights for our nation’s first responders.

Indeed, King made fighting for workers’ rights an integral part of his lifetime quest for social justice. He always believed that civil rights and workers’ rights were inseparable. AFSCME, the union with which King fought his last campaign, has a great collection of quotes from King on the dignity of labor and the need for workers to organize. As Dr. King said in 1961:

Our needs are identical with labor’s needs—decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor’s demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.

FULL story at link.