Assault on Unions Is Attack on Civil Rights
By Jesse Jackson, Reader Supported News
23 February 11

RSN Special Coverage: GOP's War on American Labor

http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/5056-assault-on-unions-is-attack-on-civil-rights

It looks like "Cairo has moved to Madison," said
conservative Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, as 50,000 citizens
took over the state's Capitol building. He got the spirit
right, but the location wrong. In Madison, folks wearing
Packers jerseys stand together with folks wearing Bears
colors. Madison is this generation's Selma, the epicenter
for the modern battle for basic human rights.

In 1965, the drive for basic voting rights was stalled in
the U.S. Senate. President Johnson pushed Martin Luther
King to stop demonstrating. Instead, Dr. King went to
Selma. Selma was not a big city, but it held a mirror to
the nation. There, on Bloody Sunday, peaceful
demonstrators were met with dogs, clubs and hoses, and
touched the conscience of a nation. Two days later,
Johnson, invoking the famous words, "We shall overcome,"
introduced the Voting Rights Act. Five months later it was
signed into law.

Today, the assault on basic rights is accelerating. The
economic collapse caused by the gambols of Wall Street
destabilizes public budgets at every level, as tax
receipts plummet and expenses caused by unemployment rise.
Yet Wall Street gets bailed out, and working and poor
people are squeezed to pay to clean up their mess.

In states across the country, conservatives have used this
occasion to assail public workers and their unions. They
demand not only rollback of pay and benefits, but push
laws to cripple - if not ban - public employee unions,
destroying the right of workers to organize and bargain
collectively.

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a self-described "Tea
Party governor," leads the most egregious of these
efforts. Upon election, he signed into law millions in tax
breaks for business. Then, pointing to the budget crisis,
he demanded not only harsh concessions from public workers
- dramatic hikes in what they pay for pensions and health
care - but crippling limits on their right to negotiate,
limits on any pay increases and an annual vote to see if
the union survives. As if to flaunt his power grab, he
exempted the unions - police and firefighters - that
endorsed him in the election.

The right to organize, to bargain collectively and to
strike are basic human rights enshrined in international
law. To this day, the U.S. champions independent free
trade unions across the world - even as Walker and his ilk
seek to crush them at home. With the U.S. suffering more
extreme inequality than Egypt, and the Supreme Court's
decision in Citizens United giving corporations and
billionaires a free pass to distort our elections, unions
are virtually the only counter that workers have. That's
why the right has targeted unions; that is why every
citizen has a stake in their survival.

In Wisconsin, the public employees accepted the harsh
concessions demanded by the governor, but rejected the
attack on their basic rights. Teachers, nurses and other
public workers stood up. Democratic state legislators left
the state, blocking the effort to ram the legislation
through. Students, ministers and progressives rallied to
their side. The demonstrations are now entering their
second week. Across the country, just as in the civil
rights movement, people of conscience are holding vigils
and protests in support. This is a Martin Luther King
moment.

The effort by the governor and his right-wing allies to
divide private sector workers from public sector workers
is an old trick. In the South, race was used to divide.
The tricks perfected in the South - right-to-work laws,
barriers to unions - are now coming north.

Madison, like Selma, is not a major city. It isn't Chicago
or New York or Los Angeles. And it isn't Cairo. It is the
epicenter of the battle for America's democracy, and it is
as American as Lexington, Concord, Gettysburg, Montgomery
and Selma.

___________________________________________

Portside aims to provide material of interest to people
on the left that will help them to interpret the world
and to change it.

Submit via email: [log in to unmask]

Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3

Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq

Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe

Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive

Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate