[ Young people are with this movement because they understand it
is not about left and right and the normal politics — it’s about
right versus wrong.]
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POOR PEOPLE’S MARCH ON WASHINGTON CALLS FOR ‘MORAL FUSION OF
EVERYBODY’ TO BUILD UNIONS AND CHANGE CORRUPT ‘POLICIES OF
GREED’  
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Bob Hennelly
June 20, 2022
LaborPress
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_ Young people are with this movement because they understand it is
not about left and right and the normal politics — it’s about
right versus wrong. _

1199SEIU members from New York arrived in Washington, D.C. aboard 70
buses., Photo by Bob Hennelly/LaborPress

 

This past Saturday union activists, their families and their
supporters came by the thousands to the nation’s Capitol to answer
the  Poor People’s Campaign’s call for a moral march on
Washington. The racially diverse crowd extended for several long
blocks. 

The organizers of the Poor People’s and Low Wage Workers’ Assembly
and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls,  estimate there are
140 million low-wage and low-wealth Americans that made up 35 percent
of the nation’s electorate in 2020.  

According to the Rev. Dr. William Barber, co-chair of the Poor
People’s Campaign, this makes this cohort of under-appreciated
voters a “a sleeping giant” whose ballot choices could decide the
outcome of dozens of swing district races that will determine who
controls Congress. 

A significant portion of the march’s attendees had not been born yet
when Dr. Martin Luther King issued his call for the original Poor
People’s Campaign more than a half-century ago, that he did not live
to see. Throughout the five-hour program, which featured dozens of
union, social justice, anti-militarist, climate change and human
rights speakers, it became evident that the activist torch had been
passed from the 20th Century into the 21st. 

“Young people are with this movement because they understand it is
not about left and right and the normal politics — it’s about
right versus wrong,” Rev. Dr. William Barber, the co-chair of the
Poor People’s Campaign, told LaborPress just before the program
started. He cited  union organizing drives at Amazon
[[link removed]], Starbucks
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General 
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well as campaigns for peace, reproductive rights, gun control,
universal healthcare, and social justice as converging in a “moral
fusion of everybody” sufficient to “change this country.”

“54 years ago, my father launched the Poor People’s Campaign to
revolutionize the economic landscape of our nation,” Rev. Bernice
King, Dr. KIng’s youngest daughter, told the large crowd.
“Unfortunately, Dr. Martin Luther King did not live long enough to
see it come to fruition. However, on June 19, 1968 my mother Coretta
Scott King was here in our nation’s Capitol during the initial Poor
People’s Campaign…and she made the appeal that poverty is not a
longstanding evil of the nation, but an actual act of violence against
the dignity, livelihood, and the humanity of its citizens.”  

Rev. King, who is also an attorney, continued, “Fifty-four years
later poverty still has a grasp on the soul of our nation. So, today
as the bearer of my parents legacy,  as the CEO of the King Center, I
join in solidarity with the chorus of voices that say we won’t be
silent anymore.”

 

Rev. Bernice King: “Poverty still has a grasp on the soul of our
nation.” (Photo by Bob Hennelly/LaborPress)
“This level of poverty and greed in this, the richest nation in the
history of the world, constitutes a moral crisis and a fundamental
failure of the policies of greed,” proclaimed Rev. Barber, as he
convened the marathon program. “The regressive policies which
produce 140 million poor and low-wealth people are not benign. They
are forms of ‘policy murder’.”

The latest iteration of the Poor People’s Campaign comes as
nationally labor union membership, something King championed, is down
to  10.3-percent overall, down by half since the early 1980s. Close
to a third of the public sector is represented by a union.

Over the last several months, in the midst of the COVID pandemic,
there’s been a 57-percent increase in petitions being filed by
workers seeking a union with the National Labor Relations Board, in
the first half of Fiscal Year 2022 to 1,174.

“No contract-no coffee,” shouted Nikki Taylor, with Starbucks
Workers United when it was her turn to address the crowd. “With
Starbucks’ billions, Starbucks workers should not be poor
people…Most of us are making under $15 an hour.” Taylor is one of
the ‘Memphis Seven’ who was fired for their organizing efforts,
which so far has resulted in 160 locations voting to unionize. “Six
months ago, there was zero,” Taylor added.

Back in April, organizers of the independent Amazon Labor Union, led
by Chris Smalls, won a landmark organizing vote
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Amazon’s Staten Island location where 2,654 workers voted YES for a
union, besting the NO vote that garnered 2,131. Amazon is contesting
that victory. ALU lost a subsequent vote
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an adjacent much smaller facility that relies on part-timers.
 

Nikki Taylor, one of the “Memphis Seven” fired from Starbucks
after attempting to organize, addresses this weekend’s Moral March
on Washington, D.C. (Photo by Bob Hennelly/LaborPress)
“I was inspired by Chris Smalls with his efforts with Amazon and
what it brought about,” Rev. King told LaborPress offstage at the
march. “We are in a season of great sacrifice, and we have been in
this kind of period of time when people have not understood that Daddy
and them had to put a lot on the line, and that’s where we are now.
And so, wherever these young people are when they organize, they
mobilize, they strategize — they can plan and change comes that way.
It’s not instant, oftentimes, but it can come and it can be inspired
by efforts like Chris Smalls.”

“We all know that we should not have to be here,” said Fred
Redmond, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, which represents 12.5
million workers in 57 unions. “We should not have to join in the
streets and march and lift our voices to put an end to poverty because
poverty is a failure — it’s a failure of the system not of the
people…being poor is not a crime. The crime is accepting a system
that allows for poverty. Poverty exists because we allow it to
exist.”

Although the date of the march did coincide with the actual
anniversary of the first Poor People’s Campaign and the Juneteenth
holiday, planners were aiming to inspire early engagement in the
pivotal 2022 Congressional elections. While historically, voter
turnout drops considerably in non-presidential years, 2018 saw a 49.4
percent turnout, the highest percentage since 1914.

“Working people understand we have to raise the stakes [this
election] because the stakes are getting raised on us by denying
voting rights, by denying abortion rights and healthcare and denying
us the ability to join together in unions,” Mary Kay Henry,
president of SEIU, told LaborPress after she spoke at the march.
“So, we have to turn out in record numbers in 2022.”

The night before the march, organizers and activists held an intimate
sunset memorial service at the base of the Lincoln Memorial to mourn
the victims of the COVID pandemic. Over one million Americans died
during the pandemic and there’s no registry of the many thousands in
public-facing jobs who died and worked in government, healthcare,
transit, utilities, emergency services, retail, agriculture or food
service.

Back in April, the Poor People’s Campaign released the first of its
kind comprehensive study of COVID deaths 
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over 3,000 U.S. counties that plugged in the intersectionality of
poverty, income, race and geography. What the data revealed was that
the residents of poorer neighborhoods were anywhere between twice to
five-times more likely to die than people living in wealthier
counties. Public health experts have linked pre-existing chronic
illnesses, along with limited access to health care, as contributing
factors to the disparity in how communities fared during the
pandemic.  

“Remember, this unnecessary death happened while we gave
corporations $2 trillion to keep them alive and the richest
Americans  saw their wealth soar,” Rev. Barber told reporters when
the report was released. “It’s a gross example of what Naomi Klein
has called the ‘shock doctrine’, when the wealthy exploit tragedy
to increase their own profits while poor people suffer.”

[_ROBERT "BOB" HENNELLY is an award-winning print and broadcast
journalist. He is currently the City Hall reporter for LaborPress, a
New-York-City-based news source on regional and national labor issues.
He hosts a morning drive time program on WBAI (Pacifica in New York)
99.5 FM every Monday at 7 a.m. EST on labor issues. He is also a
regular contributor to Salon, Insider NJ, and WBGO-Newark Public
Radio. Prior to joining LaborPress he covered the global economy for
CBS MoneyWatch. From 2003 until 2013, he was a senior reporter for
WNYC-New York Public Radio, where he also was a National Public Radio
contributor. Prior to WNYC, he served as a national correspondent for
Pacifica Network News. Prior to Pacifica, he was on staff at The
Village Voice. He has been a freelance reporter for CBS’s “60
Minutes” and in New Jersey for The New York Times. His writing has
also been published by The Detroit Free Press, The Miami Herald, The
Christian Science Monitor, The Bergen Record, the Star Ledger and The
Guardian. His work has also been featured on Alternet, Raw Story,
xxxxxx and Real Clear Politics._]

Thanks to the author for sending this to xxxxxx.

* Poor People's March
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* Rev. Dr. William Barber II
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* Poor People's Campaign
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* Moral Mondays
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* Moral March
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* poverty
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* 1199SEIU
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* Juneteenth
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* Labor Organizing
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