'The labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a win-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.'

By BERRY CRAIG

AFT Kentucky Local 1360

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday is a federal holiday observed on the third Monday in January, is known globally as a principal leader of the modern American civil rights movement. 

But he often said the civil rights and labor movements were natural allies. "The labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a win-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth," King told the 1961 AFL-CIO convention. In 1968, he was assassinated in Memphis where he had gone to stand in solidarity with striking sanitation workers who were members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

King, who would have been 95 on Jan. 15, was onto the "right to work" scam. "In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as 'right to work,'" he warned in 1961. "It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights. Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone….Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped. Our weapon is our vote."

Under the RTW fraud, workers at a union shop can enjoy union-won wages and benefits without joining the union or paying the union a service fee to represent them. The idea is to weaken strong unions, destroy small unions and discourage workers from organizing.

One of the first perpetrators of the RTW con was Vance Muse, a Texas tycoon and white supremacist who hated "the doctrine of human equality represented by unions," wrote Roger Bybee in The Progressive. "Muse's hardcore racism led to alliances with groups like the Ku Klux Klan." 

Texas was one of the first "right to work" states.

In his speech at the 1961 AFL-CIO convention, King also said, "Negroes are almost entirely a working people. There are pitifully few Negro millionaires, and few Negro employers. Our needs are identical with labor's needs—decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor's demands and fight laws which curb labor."

In a 1962 letter to the Amalgamated Laundry Workers, he wrote, "As I have said many times, and believe with all my heart, the coalition that can have the greatest impact in the struggle for human dignity here in America is that of the Negro and the forces of labor, because their fortunes are so closely intertwined." 

In his 1967 book, Where do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Dr. King recalled that “the labor movement, especially in its earlier days, was one of the few great institutions where a degree of hospitality and mobility was available to Negroes. While the rest of the nation accepted rank discrimination and prejudice as ordinary and usual...trade unions, particularly in the CIO, leveled all barriers to equal membership. In a number of instances Negroes rose to influential national office.”

The late W.C. Young, my friend and union brother, was among them. A national civil rights and union leader from Paducah, he said he never went anywhere without his union card and his NAACP card in his wallet. I don't either. I am a member of the Mayfield-Graves County NAACP Branch and an American Federation of Teachers retiree.  

Young said civil rights leaders “have always known that with the labor movement they have a strong friend with clout.”