Launch Southern campaign for union rights
By
Monica Moorehead
Raleigh, N.C.
Published Apr 14, 2005 10:59 PM
Left to right, BWFJ leader Angaza Laughinghouse, Clarence Thomas, UE 150 member Larsene Taylor, Larry Holmes, Saladin Muhammad and Monica Moorehead.
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A significant
pro-labor, anti-racist event occurred here in Raleigh on April 2. It was the
22nd annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Support for Labor Banquet hosted by the
Black Workers for Justice (BWFJ).
About 200 union, community, student and
political activists and supporters from the local area, as well as from other
parts of the South and the U.S., filled a hall at the North Carolina Association
of Edu cators building. Among the invited delegations were the Raleigh FIST
(Fight Imper ialism, Stand Together) youth group, Inter national Action Center
and Workers World Party.
BWFJ, founded in 1981, played a national role in
helping to build the Oct. 17 Million Worker March rally in Wash ington, D.C.,
last year. It mobilized workers from the South to heed the call to build an
independent workers’ movement free from the shackles of the pro-big
business Democratic and Republican parties.
Decorating the walls inside
the banquet hall were a wide range of political signs: “Fight for a living
wage.” “Stop the war on Palestine.” “Stop
privatization.” “Resist war, racism and repression. End
discrimination.” “We need living wages and collective bargaining
now!” “Demand peace, justice and reparations.” “Honor
Dr. King with working class political actions.” “Jobs, not jails;
educate, not incarcerate.” And “Stop the execution, save
Mumia.”
Musical numbers were performed by the Fruit of Labor
singers—the cultural component of BWFJ—along with Wash ing ton,
D.C., vocalists Pam Parker and Lucy Murphy.
Saladin Muhammad,
BWFJ’s national chairperson, introduced the keynote speaker: Clarence
Thomas, co-chair of the Million Worker March and a leader of Local 10 of the
International Longshore and Warehouse Union in San Francisco.
Thomas
recalled that a similar call for a Million Worker March was made in 1941 by the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Por ters, led by A. Philip Randolph and C.L.
Dellums. These two Black union leaders wanted to bring 100,000 Black workers to
Washington, D.C., to demand an end to racist discrimination in hiring practices.
The plans for the march forced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to sign an
executive order prohibiting discrimination in the hiring of people of color in
the federal government and by federal contractors.
Thomas praised the
first president of the ILWU, Australian-born Harry Bridges, who practiced what
he preached when it came to building anti-racist class solidarity. Bridges, whom
Thomas refer red to as a Marxist, made a conscious effort to bring unorganized
Black workers into the ILWU back in 1934. At that time, the majority-white trade
unions still maintained an openly racist policy of shutting their doors to Black
and other oppressed workers. This meant that Black workers, through no fault of
their own, were forced to cross picket lines during strikes to put food on the
table.
Thomas ended his talk with a resounding, urgent call to revive May
Day, or International Workers’ Day, which grew out of the struggle in this
country for the eight-hour day.
A group of Latino workers associated with
the Farm Labor Organizing Com mittee received one of the self-determination
awards at the banquet. FLOC won a hard-fought historic union contract for 8,000
immigrant farm workers last year, the first of its kind in North Carolina, with
the growers.
Larry Holmes, co-director of the Inter national Action
Center, gave a solidarity message in which he praised the BWJF and ILWU Local 10
in their ongoing efforts to build the MWM movement.
He, along with other
members of the New York committee of the MWM, accep ted a self-determination
award on behalf of Brenda Stokely, AFSCME District Council 1707 president and
MWM leader, who was unable to attend the banquet.
Ashaki Binta, the
BWFJ’s director of organization, focused her remarks on a very important
campaign that BWFJ, along with the North Carolina Public Service Workers Union,
UE Local 150, initiated last August. It is called the International Worker
Justice Campaign for Collective Bargaining Rights.
Battling horrendous
conditions
Why is an initiative like the IWJC so desperately needed in
North Carolina?
North Carolina is a former Confederate state. It is home
to the arch-bigot and reactionary Jesse Helms who, while no longer in the U.S.
Senate, still has close ties to multi-billion-dollar agribusiness interests,
especially the tobacco industry.
North Carolina is one of 22 states that
passed a so-called “right to work” law—enacted there in March
1947. It states, in essence, that an employee “cannot be requir ed to
join or pay dues or fees to a union.”
This law gives the green
light to the profit-driven bosses and their repressive state apparatus,
including the Ku Klux Klan, to use all kinds of illegal scare tactics—from
carrying out physical terror against union organizers or those who are
sympathetic to unions to promoting the vilest anti-communist propaganda—to
keep workers from wanting to join unions.
Based on Department of Commerce
statistics from the year 2000, the second most profitable industry in North Caro
lina—after finance, insurance and real estate—is the government.
Govern ment workers are considered public-sector workers. Most public-sector
workers in the South are not
unionized.
Out of all 50 states, North
Carolina is ranked last in the percentage of workers in unions—less than 5
percent of all workers in the state are organized. North Caro lina also ranks
50th in state and local governmental workers having the right to collective
bargaining.
Government workers who have no union contract are left at the
mercy of the bosses. They can be fired without due process, suffer intense
discrimination, get starvation wages, no benefits and much more.
This
assault on collective bargaining is directly tied to the high poverty rate in
North Carolina. An estimated 20 percent of the nearly 2 million children in this
state live in poverty. In some counties, the child poverty rate is over 40
percent. (common-sense.org)
Organize the South!
Binta said
the banquet was “the expression of our ongoing unity in the fight to
‘Organize the South’; to build the new trade union movement in the
South; to support the building of UE Local 150, UE Local 160, the Carolina Auto,
Aerospace and Metal Workers Union (CAAMWU), and the non-majority union movement.
“It is our expression of unity to build a women workers’
consciousness and leadership movement; to build African-American and Latino
unity; to build the movements for environmental, health care, economic, social,
and political justice; to build the fight for Black political power and working
class independence. ...
“We must understand our work and cam paign
in direct relation to opposition to this unjust war being waged in Iraq, Central
Asia and the Middle East. The mas sive increases in military spending ... and
the massive cuts in taxes for the corporations and the rich are forcing these
huge deficits and directly resulting in the crises at the state budget levels
across this country. ...
“The United States and the State of North
Carolina must be held accountable! We will file charges this year with the
International Labor Organization against the United States and the State of
North Carolina for their violations of the Core Labor Standards and Conventions
on the Right to Collective Bargaining.”
She ended her talk with an
appeal to “collect 50,000 signatures on petitions by Dec. 1 calling for
the right to collective bargaining.” She also asked that IWJC committees
be organized in cities and towns across the state.
The AFL-CIO,
especially the Service Employees and the Food and Commercial Workers, are
targeting North Carolina and other “right to work” states with long
overdue union drives.
The BWFJ and UE 150 are appealing to these national
unions to join forces with them in mobilizing a mass, grassroots union
organizing drive throughout the state, from the bottom up.
On April 3
BWFJ hosted a strategy meeting to discuss concrete ideas of how to spread the
word about the IWJC to broader sectors of the progressive movement here and
worldwide.
Reports were given by Black workers from Georgia, Mississippi,
Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia and elsewhere about the uphill battle they
face to get their grievances challenging racism and sexism on the job heard when
there is no union backing them up.
Black Workers for Justice are on the
front lines in a state and region where the legacy of slavery is alive and well.
It is in the interests of progressive forces everywhere to assist them and their
union allies to support IWJC, which is also an appeal to globalize the struggle
against the super-exploitation of all workers. The IWJC is another glorious
example of why solidarity is not an act of charity but an act of necessity that
will lead to broader class unity against capitalism.
For more
information, contact International Worker Justice Campaign, c/o PO Box 3857,
Chapel Hill, NC 27515; phone (919) 593-7558; email [email protected].
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