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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.
