Fast food and other organizations strike action for a living wage in Union Square, New York City on August 29. (Photo: The Eyes Of New York )
On September 2, 2013, Peter Dreier of Truthout writes:
On Thursday, in anticipation of Labor Day weekend, thousands of workers at 1,000 fast food restaurants in 60 cities walked out on strike to protest their low wages, erratic schedules, lack of job security, miserable working conditions, and lack of benefits. The movement began last November in one city – New York. The idea has since spread. The protest is the largest mass action of fast food employees in history. If they reflect the nation’s McWorkforce, many of them were Black and Latino. Their average age will be roughly 28. Many have children to house, clothes and feed, which is impossible on the minimum wages they are paid. They are demanding a living wage of $15 an hour and the right to unionize without employer resistance or retaliation.
The Service Employees International Union, which has provided support for the fast food workers’ campaign, thinks America may be ready for an upsurge of activism not only among low-wage workers but also among middle-class employees who are sinking quickly, many with the additional burden of underwater homes.
What radicals once called the “objective conditions” seem ripe for such a mass protest movement. In a new report, A Decade of Flat Wages, economists Lawrence Mishel and Heidi Shierholz observe that “the vast majority of U.S. workers — including white-collar and blue-collar workers and those with and without a college degree — have endured more than a decade of wage stagnation.”
Union activists know that American workers are filled with discontent. But sustained protest requires not only that people think that things should be different but also that they can be different. And that requires hope. If the fast food workers’ campaign captures the public’s imagination – and more importantly, wins some stepping-stone improvements at work — it could help restore that missing ingredient, and perhaps contribute to launching a new wave of workplace activism.
Rev. Martin Luther King understood the importance of combining discontent and hope. It was the theme of his “I Have a Dream” speech. If he were still alive, King would certainly join those workers in their struggle against McDonalds, Taco Bell, Burger King, Dunkin’ Donuts, KFC, and the other large and profitable chains that pay their employees poverty-level wages. It is exactly the kind of poor people’s campaign he was planning in 1968 when he was assassinated in Memphis, where he’d gone to support striking garbage workers’ demands for safer conditions and better pay.
Comment by my colleague Norman Kurland of the Center for Economic and Social Justice (www.cesj.org):
I don’t think the strikes for higher wage system incomes mentioned in this article represent Martin Luther King’s Dream. His Dream was to advance Justice for all humans, from the bottom-up. His colleague and friend Rev. Dr. Virgil A. Wood told me that Dr. King was becoming a supporter of Capital Homesteading and the Just Third Way before his assassination.
The labor movement doesn’t understand that the wage system is the cancer that not only perpetuates mass powerlessness and poverty. It is in the process of committing suicide, not because of bad intentions but because it is blind to a genuine populist cure for the injustices of monopoly capitalism.
Below are quotes from Walter Reuther and Martin Luther King, Jr. that demonstrated a better and deeper feel for Economic Justice and populist change than all of today’s labor leaders.
First, Here’s a statement made by Walter Reuther in 1967 consistent with binary economist Louis Kelso’s cure to the cancer that was then becoming manifested by emergence of the “Rust Belt” threatening millions of unionized jobs, before Reuther was killed in 1970 in a plane crash:
Walter P. Reuther (President, United Auto Workers) [Testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress on the President’s Economic Report, February 20, 1967.]:
Profit sharing in the form of stock distributions to workers would help to democratize the ownership of America’s vast corporate wealth which is today appallingly undemocratic and unhealthy.
The Federal Reserve Board recently published data from which it is possible to estimate the degree of concentration in the ownership of publicly traded stock held by individuals and families as of December 1962. Preliminary analysis of these data indicates that, despite all the talk of a “people’s capitalism” in the United States, little more than one percent of all consumer units owned approximately 70 percent of all such stock. Fewer than 8 percent of all consumer units owned approximately 97 percent—which means, conversely, that the total direct ownership interest of more than 92 percent of America’s consumer units in the corporation-operated productive wealth of this country was approximately 3 percent.
Profit sharing in a form that would help to correct this shocking maldistribution would be highly desirable for that reason alone.… If workers had definite assurance of equitable shares in the profits of the corporations that employ them, they would see less need to seek an equitable balance between their gains and soaring profits through augmented increases in basic wage rates.
This would be a desirable result from the standpoint of stabilization policy because profit sharing does not increase costs. Since profits are a residual, after all costs have been met, and since their size is not determinable until after customers have paid the prices charged for the firm’s products, profit sharing as such cannot be said to have any inflationary impact upon costs and prices.
And here are statements by Dr. King, whose sense of Economic Justice was consistent with the three fundamental principles of Economic Justice promoted by CESJ:
Martin Luther King Jr.:
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice. […] Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. [Letter from a Birmingham Jail, 1963]
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.This note was a promise that all men, yes black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. [I Have A Dream” Speech, 1963]
[O]ne day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, “Who owns the oil?” You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?” [“Where Do We Go From Here? Address to SCLC, 1967]. . .
[C]ommunism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. . . . [Ibid.]
A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them and make them things. And therefore, they will exploit them and poor people generally economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and it will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I’m saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, “America, you must be born again! . . .[Ibid.]
What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. . . . [Ibid.]
When people get caught up with that which is right and they are willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping point short of victory. [Memphis Speech, 1968]
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. [Ibid.]
“Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.” (Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Road to Socialism by Maurice Isserman in Civil Rights to Human Rights; Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice by Thomas F. Jackson, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006; in King’s own words, from a 1965 speech to the Negro American Labor Council quoted in Jackson’s book.
King’s ownership-based vision of Justice needs more open-minded labor leaders who are open to transforming labor unions into ownership unions, expanding their membership outreach to all citizens, 90 percent of whom own less labor-displacing income-producing capital assets than the top 1 percent. The proposed Capital Homestead Act would do much more for WalMart and fast food workers than increasing the minimum wage. Their wage system solutions will destroy jobs and increase prices for the poor. Capital Homesteading will increase jobs, reduce costs of government, provide a better way to cover retirement incomes of academics, teachers, the military and government workers, and raise incomes and ownership opportunities for every man, woman and child, etc., etc.
The revival of organized labor is being handed to them on a single platter. All workers need are leaders who can think and be moved by Justice, like Reuther and King.
