King’s Legacy: ‘We Get More Organized Together Than Apart’

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/02/24/kings-legacy-we-get-more-organized-together-than-apart/



by James Parks, Feb 24, 2008

With the issues of economic equality and immigration high on the agenda in this election, author Michael Honey reminds us that the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. carries some important lessons for today’s political leaders and activists.

Honey, humanities professor at the University of Washington-Tacoma, is author of Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last CampaignIn an article first published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, he says King’s life demonstrated that labor rights, human rights and civil rights are indivisible. He quotes King as saying, “We can get more organized together than we can apart.”

Honey says many of the democratic advances of the 20th century are in jeopardy today, none more so than the freedom to form 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.

Click here to read the entire article and here to read Honey’s Point of View column on the AFL-CIO website.

The need for the freedom to join unions is very clear, Honey says, on the issue of immigration. While some candidates are trying to demonize undocumented immigrant workers, he says the reality is that so-called “free trade” laws have helped U.S. agribusiness to undersell corn farmers in Mexico, sending them streaming north in search of work.

Those same laws make it easier for multinational corporations to export union jobs. As a result, he says:

Families on both sides of the border are hurt by the catastrophic destruction of the farming economy and well-paying working-class jobs. 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.

FULL story and working links at link above.