Memo: Clarence Darrow to Gov. Walker: Labor Rights ARE Civil Rights

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/speakout/andrew_e_kersten.cfm

By Andrew E. Kersten


The year 2011 has already been a great and terrible year for the labor movement. In my home state, Wisconsin—as well as around the nation and in fact the world—workers and unions have been taking it on the chin. Their extraordinary resistance to the machinations of the corporate elite and their politicians has been valiant and inspiring, but there’s no denying the setbacks.

Reactionaries in Wisconsin have just scored a major victory with the passage of a new anti-union state law that severely limits collective bargaining, makes it more difficult to keep a union and takes huge concessions from state employees. A few days ago, Gov. Scott Walker boasted to newspaper reporters about his victory over state unions, dismissing collective bargaining rights as “an expensive entitlement” program.

After hearing Walker’s malicious comments, I began to wonder what my hero, Clarence Darrow, would have thought about Walker and the Republicans around the country who are waging a class war from above. Darrow would have scoffed at and shamed Walker. In terms of the law, the idea that workers have rights to organize and collectively bargain is as old as the nation itself.

Over the 19th and 20th centuries, through state laws, federal laws and U.S. constitutional amendments, the rights of workers and unionists were recognized and codified. This was not done out of the goodness of anyone. Rather, workers demanded progress and achieved advances through various political fights, legal battles and even wars. Darrow would remind us that the U.S. Civil War was about workers’ rights. He also would lead us through the histories of the 1894 Pullman strike and the 1898 Oshkosh (Wis.) Woodworker strike, for which he provided spirited defenses of unions and their rights to exist and bargain collectively.

To Darrow, without those rights, civilization itself was (and still is) at great risk.

FULL story at link.

[iwishiwas]

1. Thanks. good reminder.

[midnight]

2. K&R

[iwishiwas]

3. Walker set up a we vs them and many folks bit the bait.