N.J.’s Wowkanech: Workers’ Rights, Civil Rights Same Struggle
At a jammed Electrical Workers (IBEW) hall in Trenton yesterday, New Jersey State AFL-CIO President Charles Wowkanech reminded the audience of union, community and civil rights activists that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:
“understood the link between economic justice and social justice, and that the fight for labor rights and civil rights was the same struggle.”
The We Are One event on the anniversary of King’s 1968 assassination included AFT President Randi Weingarten, Pulitzer Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, civil rights leaders and lawmakers.
King was killed in Memphis helping sanitation workers fighting for collective bargaining rights and a union. Weingarten tied King’s life-long struggle for equality to today’s struggles for workers’ rights.
Dr. King fought for civil rights, economic opportunity and educational opportunity, and that’s what we are fighting for today—not budget issues.
Speakers said the recent attacks on workers’ rights and middle-class jobs in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere are part of a coordinated effort to weaken workers and their unions.
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said that when Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) rejected economic concessions offered by union leaders—including reduced pensions and benefits for their members:
He made it clear that he was not concerned with balancing the budget, but with busting unions.
The labor movement, said Krugman, was the driving force behind the creation of a strong American middle class. He warned that unfettered corporate campaign cash is almost all earmarked for anti-worker politicians such as Walker, Ohio’s John Kasich, Michigan’s Rick Snyder.
But he said this spring’s growing activism can help counter corporate power.
Wisconsin shows that there are enough people in America who care about these things that we can turn this around.
Workers and their unions, said Weingarten, are:
a huge tool for both quality and economic dignity. They are worth fighting for, and our obligation is to take this moment and turn it into a movement.
