This is Bigger than Public Employee Unions

Address to rally on 43rd Anniversary of Martin Luther King's
Assassination

April 4, 2011, Madison, Wisconsin

By Will Jones, Associate Professor of History, UW Madison

http://wi.aft.org/ufas/index.cfm?action=article&articleID=74c80f8a-3c8b-43ca-bcde-2145cff09d50

Some have suggested that history professors should not be
speaking out about what is going on here in Wisconsin and
across our land, but I have been studying public employee
unions for five years and I know what they have done to
improve our society. So I will not be silent as people try
to take that away from us, by destroying the unions that
have stood up not just for public employees but for the
public services that we all rely upon every day.

When Martin Luther King went to Memphis in 1968, he hoped to
build a new movement. He argued that the goals of that
movement would be more expansive and more difficult to
achieve than the civil rights movement that he led in the
previous decade.

It was an interracial movement of poor and working-class
people. It aimed to ensure that all Americans had access to
good jobs, a safe and healthy place to live, high quality
education and affordable health care.

That movement was weakened by King's assassination 43 years
ago today, but no institution has carried on his vision,
kept that movement alive, more than public employee unions.

AFSCME, which was founded right here in Madison, Wisconsin,
helped win that strike in Memphis. That set the stage for
the rapid growth of the union in the 1970s; not just among
garbage workers but maids, janitors, food service workers
and laundry workers. They won decent wages and benefits and
gave dignity to those jobs. The benefits were not just
economic. They won workplace health and safety regulations,
protection from discrimination based on race, gender and
sexual orientation, limits on workload and grievance and
seniority procedures.

AFSCME worked with other public employee unions, including
the National Education Association, Police and Firefighters
Associations, the Teamsters, the Service Employees
International Union, and my own union, the American
Federation of Teachers. But those unions did not just fight
for their own members. They became critical political
voices for working people, particularly with the decline of
unions in the private sector. In many cities, public
employee unions were the only organized advocates for
African Americans and other people of color.

And in addition to fighting for working people, public
employee unions defended the public services that we all
rely upon. They resisted cuts to our public schools, our
health care system, our transportation and our public
safety. They have been on the front lines of the struggle
to realize Martin Luther King's vision of a society where
all citizens lead healthy, peaceful and productive lives,
where all people can live in comfort and in dignity.

And now those unions are under attack, and it's not hard to
see the broader issues at stake. The same people who want
to destroy public employee unions want to destroy our public
schools, defund our health care system, and deprive all
workers of decent wages and benefits.

And it is not just those gains that are under attack. While
we were focused on defending our collective bargaining
rights, the legislature passed a bill making it more
difficult to vote. That was a direct attack on the
victories of the civil rights movement. The legislature is
currently debating cuts to transportation and education that
will reinforce racial segregation in Milwaukee, which is
already the most racially segregated city in the United
States.

So it is not just the future of public employee unions that
is at stake here in Wisconsin. It is a struggle over the
legacy of Martin Luther King's dream. Too often we restrict
that dream to a simplistic goal of racial equality, but King
himself described his vision in far broader terms. As he
stated in 1961, before a group of union leaders in
Washington, D.C., his dream was the "American Dream." It
was "a dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and
property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men
will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to
the few."

That was King's dream, and it is that dream - the American
Dream-that is under attack here in Wisconsin and across the
United States. And it is that dream that we are defending
right here in Madison today.

___________________________________________

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