Monday, September 9, 2013

A. Philip Randolph, Labor Day Message September 5, 1966





A. Philip Randolph addressing
the 1961 AFL-CIO Convention.
Eighty-four years ago, in 1882, the Knights of Labor celebrated the first Labor Day in our nation's history. In the wake of the great Civil War, the Knights organized integrated union locals in the South and ran Negroes for Public office. Southern oligarchs finally used racism as a weapon to destroy those early southern trade unions.

It is only fitting that we pause today to recall the dream of the early movement. For that dream of a Negro-Labor Alliance is even more relevant today than it was eighty-four years ago.

We must pause to remember that the modern civil rights gains were based largely on the economic progress the Negro registered with labor's help in the 1940's and 1950's. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and  1965 could not have been passed if the labor movement had not worked around the clock - concentrating its expert lobbying on congressmen whose constituencies were not substantially negro. The Negro nonviolent movement owes a great deal to Gandhi and Thoreau, but it is also indebted to the American labor movement for much of its techniques - for example, the boycott, mass picketing and, most important, the sit-down strike.

Today, thanks to the monumental sacrifices of civil rights workers, the support of labor and religious groups, the Negro has at long last won his juridical rights. But in many areas of the South he is still too unorganized and too intimidated to use his vote effectively. He is also too poor to use integrated facilities, and too poor to buy homes in the newly integrated suburbs. In fact, twelve years after the historic Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated schools, more Negro children attend all-black schools than in 1954. Moreover, the slums are more dilapidated and joblessness among Negro teenagers is increasing.

The only institution in this society whose economic programs coincides with the needs of the civil rights movement is the labor movement. Full and fair employment, a higher minimum wage, housing subsidies and democratic economic planning are the answers to Negro impoverishment and, let me add, to white impoverishment as well. They are the basic plans of the AFL-CIO economic program.

The American Federation of Teachers is vigorously organizing Negroes, The AFL-CIO has guaranteed the funds needed to organize the migrant laborer, and the Industrial Union Department has opened community grievance office in Chicago to help Dr. Martin Luther King organize. Labor's fight for the repeal of Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act will help the Negro. In the "right-to-work" states, not only do Negroes earn less than white workers, but they are falling further and further behind.
In the area of political action the goals of the labor movement and the civil rights movement are one and the same. When both movements joined hands Dixiecrats were defeated in Tennessee and Virginia. When they were divided and did not coordinate efforts in Alabama, racist-reactionaries won.

And thus we see that social justice (the objective of the civil rights movement) and economic reform (the objective of the labor movement) have become inextricably intertwined in our lifetime. A separation between organized labor and the Negro struggle can only encourage the growth of reactionary currents in American political and cultural life. Alone, the civil rights movement cannot win jobs, better housing and decent schools. Alone, the labor movement does not have the power to defeat anti-labor legislation and to protect workers rights. 

The Negro-Labor alliance is our strongest weapon against the coalition of reactionary Republicans and Dixiecrats who deprive the Negro of his civil rights, who would repeal social progress. The political power of this reactionary coalition must be shattered. It must be shattered in Congress where the seniority system and he lingering disenfranchisement of Negroes enables it to exercise a strangle hold over Congressional committees. When Representative Howard Smith of Virginia was defeated, he was immediately replaced as Chairman of the House Rules Committee by an ardent Mississippi segregationist.

It must be shattered on the local level where right-wing groups are launching a reactionary counterrevolution against the civil rights revolution. It must be shattered in the right-to-work states where it perpetuates a permanent depression economy. The reactionary coalition which denies us a substantial minimum wage, which denies us rent subsidies and which diminishes and demeans the war on poverty, can only be smashed by a strong Negro-Labor alliance. For when the masses of white workers join black workers in the streets and at the polls we will be well on the way to the democratic political revolution which will free all Americans from minority rule.

We must not only proclaim the need for an alliance, we must prove to the advocates of black power, to the worker who fears his job and his home, to the depressed and alienated white poor, that progressive social change is possible. We must join in the fight for an end to poverty. 

Let me say here that too many Americans are ignorant of labor’s role in the fight against poverty, which is the fight for economic democracy. Between 1960 and 1965, after-tax corporate profits rose 67 percent, as compared with the rise of only 33 percent in wages, salaries and fringe benefits. Let these facts be borne in mind by those who were outraged by the airline strike and by the final settlement of 6 percent. I contend that the machinists' strike, which sought to divert enormous corporate profits into workers' wages and fringe benefits, struck a blow on behalf of the war on poverty. 

For when wages and salaries lag behind profits, income is distributed upward; consumer purchasing power falls behind productivity and the end result is rising unemployment and poverty. In the face of fantastic corporate profits, guidelines which would restrict wage increase to 3.2 percent endanger the whole economy and create special hardships for workers at the bottom of the ladder.

This is only one example of how our economic policies contradict the war on poverty. Training and community action alone will avail us little if the wage-profit gap continues to spread. Yet, the 1964 tax cut had an effect of increasing corporate after-tax profits by $3 billion -- more than the cost of the entire federal war on poverty. And still there are those who would tell us that we lack the resources for a war on poverty, that domestic social spending must be slashed because of the war in Vietnam. They would have this war borne upon the bent shoulders of the poor.

I am proud that these voices of reaction are most sternly resisted by the American labor movement - at the collective bargaining table and, when there is no other recourse, in strikes and picket lines.

At the planning meeting for the White House Conference "To Fulfill These Rights" I proposed a $100 billion Freedom Budget, a massive investment to destroy the slums and eliminate poverty.

The Budget attacks all of the major causes of poverty - unemployment and underemployment, substandard pay, inadequate social insurance and welfare payments to those who cannot or should not be employed, bad housing, deficiencies in health services, education and training, and fiscal monetary policies which tend to redistribute income regressively rather than progressively. The Freedom Budget leaves no room for discrimination in any form because its programs are addressed to all who need more opportunity and improved incomes and living standards, not to just some of them.

Let me interject a word here to those who say that Negroes are asking just for another handout and are refusing to help themselves. From the end of the nineteenth century up to the last generation, the United States absorbed and provided economic opportunity for millions and tens of millions of immigrants, these people were usually uneducated and a good many could not speak English. Yet the economy could profitably employ them. They had nothing but their hard work to offer, and they labored long hours, often in miserable sweatshops and unsafe mines. But the industrial revolution had need of muscle and immigrants could learn gradually and move up the ladder to greater skills. There were thus economic trends which helped people escape poverty. And then, perhaps the most decisive act of self-help on the part of the older generation was to organize the trade union movement. Unions not only struggled and won collective bargaining rights in the shop, they joined with the middle class reformists and the religious men of conscience and all partisans of social change.

Today, it is absolutely necessary that we go beyond the games of the past and guarantee a real right to work. For the American economy has become much more sophisticated than it was a generation ago; it needs scientists and engineers much more than muscle power.

Negroes, who have been driven off the farm into a city life for which they are not prepared, cannot be compared to the immigrants of old. The tenements which were jammed by newcomers were way stations of hope. The ghettos of today have become dead ends of despair. We must guarantee full and fair employment - it can no longer be a question of pious statements of public intent which lead only to deeper frustration. Twenty-two years late we must return to the idea of a legal obligatory guarantee of work. There have been too many vague promises.

The President's Commission on Automation reported that there are 5,300,000 public service jobs unfilled right now in health education, beautification, and the like. One of our top priorities should be training to fill them.

We have just had a debate over extending minimum wage coverage to the poorest of the poor. Opponents of that wage have said that if employers of stoop labor in the fields were required to pay a decent living wage, or if the salaries of hospital employees were raised, thee occupations would be destroyed because the employer would be motivated to mechanize. I see no reason why these occupations should be preserved so long as useful and humane work can be found for those displaced. Let us not treat the unemployed and underemployed as a burden, but as a reservoir of talent who, if only given a chance, could make this society a better place to live in for all.

I can anticipate arguments which say that this program of massive spending discriminates in the favor of the black man, or the poor generally. That is not true, It is only the first installment in giving those least able to pay at least the public assistance in housing that we have lavished on the rich.

After World War II, the GI Bill of Rights was instituted to help veterans for to school. It would be a wise social investment to pay the veterans of the ghetto to go to school today. And let us invest so that after we have torn down the slums and built new housing, schools and hospital aids, artist and actors and their apprentices. We can build new towns, but not as hideouts for the white middle class where social problems and responsibilities are ignored. We can plan new towns from the ground up as integrated, productive, productive communities.

We have before us the fantastic potential to celebrate the second century of America's existence by the abolition of ghettos and slums. 

And I submit that this glorious dream is possible only if the civil rights and trade union movement work together hand in hand.

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