[This Martin Luther King Day comes just weeks after a year
that’s been dubbed ‘the year of the strike’ because in 2023
there were well over 300 such work stoppages involving 450,000 union
workers willing to take the risk of walking out . . .]
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KING DREAM ROOTED IN LABOR’S RISING  
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Bob Hennelly
January 13, 2024
InsiderNJ
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_ This Martin Luther King Day comes just weeks after a year that’s
been dubbed ‘the year of the strike’ because in 2023 there were
well over 300 such work stoppages involving 450,000 union workers
willing to take the risk of walking out . . . _

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This Martin Luther King Day comes just weeks after a year that’s
been dubbed ‘the year of the strike’ because in 2023 there were
well over 300 such work stoppages involving 450,000 union workers
willing to take the risk of walking out on their employer, a 900
percent increase from just a few years earlier.

Automakers, actors, writers, nurses, and a long list of other
occupations were fed up enough that they walked off their job by the
tens of thousands. Meanwhile, the National Labor Relations Board
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in 2022 receiving over 2,500 applications for workplace union
representation, a 53 percent increase over the previous year.

King’s last address in April of 1968 was to striking sanitation
workers in Memphis who went out in part because two of their
co-workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker had been crushed to death by
the errant trash compactor of their sanitation truck. Throughout
King’s career, it was unions like the United Autoworkers, the
Transport Workers Union, SEIU 1199, AFSCME and others that he saw as
essential allies in his campaign for mass collective nonviolent
action.

For King, the civil rights  and labor movements were intertwined
because they both required disciplined non-violent collective action
to succeed. In his “American Dream” speech, a version of which he
gave at St. Peter’s College
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September of 1965, he spoke of the “inescapable network of
mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

King continued. “And whatever it affects one directly it affects all
indirectly. And as long as there is extreme poverty in this world no
one can be totally rich, even if he has a billion dollars. As long as
diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more
than 28 or 30 years, no one can be totally healthy even if he just got
a checkup in the finest clinic of the nation. Strangely enough, I can
never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And
you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.
This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

In a 1962 speech in front of the National Maritime Union
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MLK gave a speech that more than a half century speaks eerily to our
national  circumstance 24 years into the 21st century. In that
address he presciently frames out the contours of the opposition to
the social justice agenda he shared with so much of the labor movement
that appears even more lethal today.

“Our nation is facing severe trials in these turbulent days because
one region of our country still holds itself above law, as if it were
cut adrift from constitutional obligations, and insurrection and
mutiny against the government is still possible,” King said. “They
not only abuse persons, but they debase the democratic traditions of
the nation in their defiant resort to anarchy and stormtrooper
rule.”

King continued. “Emulating the labor movement
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we in the South have embraced mass actions — boycotts, sit-ins and,
more recently, a widespread utilization of the ballot…The secret
ballot is our secret weapon.”

John Samuelsen is the international president of the TWU which
represents 155,000 workers across the country and here in New Jersey
in the airline, railroad, transit, university, utility, as well as
service sectors. It was one of the TWU’s founders, Michael J. Quill
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of the earliest and most ardent labor leaders to support King’s
work.

“The very essence of Dr King is fulfilled when workers organize
together across lines  ethnic and racial against their real common
enemy , the bosses,” Samuelsen texted InsiderNJ. “Workers have far
more in common with each other , regardless of skin color or religious
/ ethnic identity , than they have in common with the CEOs.”

In New York City alone, TWU lost over 100 members as a consequence of
their occupational exposure running the city’s bus and subway.

It wasn’t just COVID that sparked this great reawakening. Ever since
President Reagan, a former union leader,  kneecapped the nation’s
striking air traffic controllers by firing them, the union movement
went into a tailspin with union density plummeting. And with the power
of collective action by workers on the wane, corporations remade our
society into a wealth pyramid with a tax and trade policy regime which
accelerated wealth concentration to levels not seen since the Gilded
Age.

According to a RAND Corporation
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during that decline the nation’s top one percent was able to extract
$50 trillion in wealth from the bottom 90 percent of the nation’s
households. Today, Fortune
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the average CEO with a publicly traded corporation makes 272 times the
median salary of their employees, meaning it would take five lifetimes
to make what the boss makes in a single year.

It’s no accident that this unprecedented  21st century  surge in
labor militancy came after the COVID pandemic that killed 1.1 million
Americans and an untold  number of  transit  workers, first
responders and other essential workers including 3,600 nurses  in
that first wave of the mass death event. 700 of those nurses were from
New Jersey and New York which was Ground Zero for COVID. Two-thirds of
them were people of color.

Across the country,  healthcare worker unions were the only entities
daring to hold the multi-billion dollar hospital industrial complex
accountable for putting profits ahead of people by paying out Wall
Street salaries for CEOs during a mass death event.

Tens of thousands of union healthcare workers who work for Kaiser
Permanente in several states won a 21 percent pay increase over four
years following a three-day strike  in October, the largest such
action in U.S. history.  The tentative deal includes restrictions on
outsourcing and measures to promote staff retention, a key concern of
the coalition of unions led by SEIU.

“Millions of Americans are safer today because tens of thousands of
dedicated healthcare workers fought for and won the critical resources
they need and that patients need,” Caroline Lucas, executive
director of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, said in a
statement. “This historic agreement will set a higher standard for
the healthcare industry nationwide.”

The Oct. 4 to Oct. 7 strike by the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente
Unions was organized by eight unions including members of SEIU and
OPIEU in California, Colorado, Maryland, Oregon, Virginia, Washington,
and Washington D.C. Staffing, and higher wages were key demands.

Here in New Jersey, USW Nurses Local 4-200 won their strike at Robert
Wood Johnson University Hospital for better wages, improved working
conditions and more robust staffing which has been documented to
improve patient outcomes, promote infection control as well as
encourage nurse retention, something that’s essential in a country
where over one million nurses have opted to not be at the bedside.

Judy Danella, RN, is the president of USW Nurses Local 4-200.

“The five months’ strike was definitely an action aimed at the
betterment of the patient, of the society, and of our nurses,”
Danella told InsiderNJ. “It’s a hard road to walk but we were
willing to put our employment at risk to improve the future of
nursing.”

A broad coalition of nurses unions and the New Jersey State AFL-CIO
continue to push for state legislation to codify safer staffing in New
Jersey’s hospitals.

“Healthcare workers suffer moral injury every day working short
staffed. They know they won’t be able do the job they were trained
to do and therefore, patients will suffer,” wrote Debbie White, RN,
and president of HPAE, New Jersey’s largest healthcare union.
“This year, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, we are
fighting to get elected leaders to pass a safe staffing law that would
enable healthcare workers to give patients the best possible care- the
care they deserve.”

The long simmering rebirth of the American labor movement is producing
results for workers and their families in a way that will have
generational consequences.

The United Auto Workers’ strike
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in a 25 percent wage hike and the end of an exploitative tiered
workforce which depressed younger workers’ earnings for a
generation.

The Teamsters, who drilled hard for a strike, emerged with a landmark
deal giving all full- and part-time UPS Teamsters $2.75 more per hour
in 2023 and over the length of the contract a total $7.50 per hour
increase. Wage gains for part-time workers were double the amount
achieved in previous UPS deals with current part-time workers who will
receive a 48 percent average total wage increase over the next five
years.

Kevin Brown is the New Jersey state director of 32 BJ SEIU which is
the nation’s largest building service worker union with 175,000
member in 12 states and Washington D.C. His union won a 4.5 percent
annual wage increase and expanded pension benefits to an additional
5,000 union members in New Jersey.

“Collective action is the key to everything,” Brown told
InsiderNJ. “If you have a voice on the job and you are able to sit
down with your employer you improve tremendously your conditions at
work and for your life as well as your family’s life. That’s how
we make people’s lives better and that’s the same struggle Dr.
King’s life was committed to.”

Brown continued. “The history of 2023 was that of the year of the
strike. We had not only the UAW but we had Kaiser—we had
SAG-AFTRA—the Writers Guild and in New Jersey we had USW Nurses
Local 4-200. Basically, everybody won and so that certainly helped
when we were bargaining for 70,000 workers up and down the East Coast.
In 2023, workers have been making real gains at the bargaining table
and that changes peoples’ lives and that can only be done through
collective action and that’s what Dr. King’s mission was all
about.”

“Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King  Jr. recognized the common purpose of
the civil rights movement and the labor movement to improving the
lives of all working class people, including those of color,” texted
Fran Ehret, New Jersey state director of the CWA, which represents
70,000 workers in the private and public sectors. “He understood
that by joining these movements together it would build power and a
greater voice for their common cause.”

Most of the labor activists that are reviving the American union
movement were not on the planet when King walked the earth. But the
torch has been passed and the “dream” endures.

_BOB HENNELLY has written and reported for the Village Voice, Pacifica
Radio, WNYC, CBS MoneyWatch and other outlets. His book, "Stuck
Nation: Can the United States Change Course on Our History of Choosing
Profits Over People?"
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2021 by Democracy@Work. He is now a reporter for the Chief-Leader,
covering public unions and the civil service in New York City. Follow
him on Twitter: @stucknation [[link removed]]_

_INSIDERNJ is a nonpartisan website dedicated to political news in
the state of New Jersey. Veteran award-winning reporter and editor Max
Pizarro is contractually in charge of all news content and
professionally focused daily on making INSIDERNJ the Garden
State’s number one trusted source for political news. An editorial
board regularly offers opinion on statewide political subjects._

_INSIDERNJ is committed to giving serious political players a fair
hearing and an interactive and dynamic forum for ideas, discussion and
political intelligence. We will be out here on the streets of our
cities, under the Gold Dome, and in the suburban town halls, fair
grounds, marketplaces, county conventions and diner booths of
political inquiry and intrigue. We will find our way into the
conversation._

* Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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* Labor
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* Strikes
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* unions
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* Civil Rights
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* mass action
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* Martin Luther King Holiday
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