Labor Day: Honoring Labor in the South (blasts Glenn Beck)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.southernstudies.org/2010/09/honoring-labor-in-the-south.html

When Glenn Beck decided to hold his "Restoring Honor" rally last week at the very site in Washington, D.C. where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, the Fox commentator's dubious attempt to draw parallels between his right-wing agenda and King's quite different vision was blasted by civil rights veterans.

But Beck seems to have missed another flaw in the comparison: The 1963 "March for Jobs and Freedom" that Dr. King addressed was sparked by the labor movement -- specifically A. Phillip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who formed a crucial backbone to the civil rights struggle in the South.

Randolph and Brotherhood leaders like Alabama's E.D. Nixon, who was instrumental in launching the Montgomery Bus Boycott that propelled King onto the national stage, would find little to agree with in Beck's anti-labor agenda. When the Employee Free Choice Act was up for debate last year, Beck's show equated it with (surprise) tyranny and socialism; Beck even mused that if he turned up dead, "check the unions."

But Beck's bungling attempts to white-out civil rights and labor history reveal a deeper truth: That King's and the Brotherhood's agenda of protecting workers' rights and promoting a fair economy is under attack.

This week, the human rights group Freedom House released The Global State of Workers' Rights, a report sizing up labor rights world-wide. The conclusion: "One-third of the global population lives in societies in which workers' rights suffer a significant degree of repression."

But another finding was even more striking: The United States, far from being a human rights leader, lags behind 30 other nations in its labor protections. In the Americas alone, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Chile and Uruguay all rank higher.

FULL story at link.