Londrigan: Union rights guarantee human rights
By BERRY CRAIG
AFT Local 1360
“Workers’ rights are civil rights,” Kentucky State AFL-CIO President Bill Londrigan told about 125 protestors who had gathered on the Capitol steps in Frankfort. “Workers’ rights are human rights. Workers’ rights are women’s rights.”
Union rights, he added, “bring it all together.”
On June 11, Londrigan joined a parade of speakers, including civil rights and anti-poverty activists, clergy and educators at the fifth in a series of six weekly statehouse rallies sponsored by the Kentucky branch of the Poor People’s Campaign--A National Call for Moral Revival. The first rally was May 14; the last one is set for Monday at 2 p.m.
In the Bluegrass State and elsewhere, the movement aims to rekindle the spirit of the 50-year-old Poor People's Campaign, which was started by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1968, weeks before he was murdered in Memphis.
King sought to combat the pervasive racism, poverty and militarism of his day, the latter exemplified by the Vietnam War, which he criticized as being largely fought by poor whites and people of color who were drafted into the military.
Poor people, “both white and Negro, live in a cruelly unjust society,” King said. “If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.”
The interrelated problems King cited are "by many measures...worse today than they were in 1968," said a flyer given to journalists at the rally. "And if you add in climate change and ecological devastation, the urgency is even greater."
According to the national group's website, the campaign "is uniting tens of thousands of people across the country to challenge the evils of systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation and the nation’s distorted morality."
The Bluegrass State Poor People's Campaign says Republican Gov. Matt Bevin's policies harm many Kentuckians, including poor people, the elderly, union members, teachers, students, other government employees and the environment.
Londrigan reminded the June 11 crowd, which included union members, that King saw the civil rights movement and organized labor as natural allies. King went to Memphis to stand in solidarity with striking sanitation workers, who had organized an American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union local.
Londrigan referred to a 1965 speech in which King said, “The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress" for all workers.
King added that out of organized labor's "bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old age pensions, government relief for the destitute, and above all new wage levels that meant not mere survival, but a tolerable life. The captains of industry did not lead this transformation; they resisted it until they were overcome. When in the thirties the wave of union organization crested over our nation, it carried to secure shores not only itself but the whole society.”
Londrigan praised the diversity in the crowd, which also chanted and sang spirituals and protest songs. He described the gathering as “young, old, black, brown, white, grandparents, kids, students.” He said unions reflect the same diversity.
The veteran labor leader held a microphone in his right hand and hung onto a red and white cardboard sign with the other. “Stop The War On Working Families!” the sign demanded.
Londrigan said the war or working people started about 40 years ago, when Republican Ronald Reagan was president. Reagan crushed the Professional Air Traffic Controllers union; unions judged Reagan the most anti-labor president since Herbert Hoover, also a Republican.
Encouraged by the conservative Reagan, “the big business community started organizing itself to take back the rights of workers to have collective bargaining, health care, fair wages, pensions and education,” Londrigan said.
He recalled that last year, the GOP-majority Kentucky General Assembly, cheered on by Bevin, passed a “right to work” law and repealed the prevailing wage.
This year, the legislature cut pension benefits for teachers and other state public employees, slashed the workers’ compensation program and approved a tax bill that lavishes most tax breaks on wealthier citizens and makes up the budget shortfall by taxing a wide range of personal services such as mechanical work on vehicles.
“They have attacked us on every opportunity,” Londrigan said. “This attack will continue unless we stand together as organizations, groups and individuals and create a united front.”
Concluded Londrigan: “This is not just about economics. It’s not about Democrat and Republican. It’s about right and wrong, and if we stand together for what is right, we will win in the end.”
A spring shower ended just before Londrigan and the others spoke. "It just rained long enough to wash out the ugliness inside," mused Jeff Wiggins, state AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer.
Wiggins pointed to some flowering trees flanking the steps leading to the 1909-vintage, high-domed Capitol. "It's the beauty on the outside that covers up the ugliness on the inside."
The state AFL-CIO includes Louisville-based United Food and Commercial Workers Local 227, which was represented at the rally by Paul Whitely and others.
"We are in support of working people," he said. "We represent folks in the food industry, but we believe it is important to fight for all workers, not just our union members. Like the old labor slogan goes, 'An injury to one is an injury to all.'"
As they had at a June 4, rally, estimated at 400 strong and led by the Rev. William J. Barber II, national Poor People's Campaign co-chair, state police kept the crowd out of the Capitol, which is open to the public.
After the speaking ended with Londrigan's remarks, Tayna Fogle and Pam McMichael of the Kentucky Poor People's Campaign took officers up on a new state police rule that permitted two people to come inside. They wanted to deliver a long list of grievances to Bevin, but a police officer stopped them at a velvet rope barrier in the governor's office and threatened to arrest them if they crossed it.
They left the list, in scroll form, with an office employee.
On June 13, Barber, who started the Moral Monday movement in North Carolina, returned to the Capitol steps for a press conference, where a smaller group of protestors also gathered. Again, police halted the crowd inside the doors at the metal detectors.
The Kentucky Poor People's campaign, which is considering filing a lawsuit challenging the ban, tried to deliver a bible to the governor. When officers stopped them, the group left the bible with the police.
Londrigan had hoped to be at Barber's press conference, but he had to preside over the quarterly meeting of the state AFL-CIO Executive Board.
"We are all in this together--plain and simple, short and sweet, and that's really the bottom line," he said before opening the E-board meeting. "It's us against them.
"We know who 'them' is. It is a very small number, and the rest is us, and unless we all work together and push back against the right-wing agenda and the corporate plutocrats, then everybody is going to suffer even worse."