Blumner: Do these dark times mean a renaissance for labor?

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_12067978

By Robyn Blumner

The St. Petersburg Times
Posted: 04/04/2009 06:00:00 PM MDT

"I Am a Man" was the slogan of 1,300 striking black sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968. Their grievances were many, but chief among them was that their wages were so meager they lived below the poverty line.

On April 4, 41 years ago last evening, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. He was in town to help the strikers gain recognition of their union, and his epic "I've been to the mountaintop" speech was a labor rally.

Dr. King is remembered as America's greatest civil rights leader, but the man was a towering labor leader as well. He clearly connected the dots between the immorality of racial inequality and the economic injustices inflicted on working men and women of all colors. It was the same struggle: to demand through collective action one's individual worth and dignity.

One of the great labor speeches in American history is King's 1961 address to the AFL-CIO. In it, King reflected on the grand work of the labor movement. He said that in response to the "organized misery" of sweatshops and the notion that capital may "act without restraints and without conscience," the worker unionized and by doing so had "constructed the means by which a fairer sharing of the fruits of his toil had to be given to him."

How sad that in the intervening years King's message to workers has been lost. Worker solidarity has given way to an every-man-for-himself ethic that has helped to strip labor of the influence it once had.
No surprise then that America's prosperity over the past 30 years has not been shared by the workers who created it, with essentially all of its rewards flowing to those at the top. Workers are no longer at the table when the pie gets divided, so they get the crumbs.

It seems the American worker has just been waiting around for, as King put it, "charitable impulses to grow in his employer."

Well, they haven't.

FULL story at link.