Speech- "Labor Teach-in", 1997 February 27

1 Copyright 1997 by Julian Bond February 27, 1997

Labor Teach-in

In 1961, when Martin Luther King, Jr., adressed the Fourth Constitutional Convention of the AFL-CIO, he spoke of the "unity of purpose" between the labor movement and the movement for civil rights. He said:

Our needs ar eidentical with labor's needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor's demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.

The duality of interests of labor and Negoes [King say] makes any crisis which lacerates you a crisis from which we bleed. As we stand on the threshold of the second half of the twentieth century, a crisis confronts us both.1

Now, as we stand on the threshold of the birth of the twenty-first century, a crisis confronts us once again.

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It is a criss for the freedom movemet and a crisis for the movement of working women and men.

Despite impressive increases in the numbers of black people holding public office, despite our ability now to sit and eat and ride and vote and attend school in places that used to bar black faces, in some important ways nonwhite Americans face restrictions more difficult to attack than in the years that went before.

Labor unions' membership has plummeted -- from 35% of workers in the 1950's to about 15% of the work force today. In 1974 the average Amreican CEO made 34 times as much as the average American worker. By 1995, it was 179 times as much -- recalling the bitter words of Victor Hugo that there was always more misery in the lower classes than there was humanity in the upper classes.

Much of the groundwork for this sorry state of affairs was laid in the 1960's, 1970's and 1980's. For much of the latter decade, America was presided over by an amiable incompetent whose sole intent was removing government from every aspect of our lives. He brought to power a band of financial and ideological profiteers who descended on the nation's Capitol like a crazed swarm of right-wing locusts, bent on destroying the rules and laws that protected our people from poisoned air and water and from greed. But nowehre was their assault on the rule of law so great as in their attempt to subvert, ignore, defy and destroy the laws that require an America that is bias free.

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Conflict of interest became a precondition for employment in government. They unleashed a gang of corporate sociopaths to raid and ravage the national treasury.

Then, as now, they forced a form of triage economics upon us. Then it produced the firsst increase in infant mortality rates in twenty years and pushed thousands of poor and working poor Americans deeper into poverty.

By the mid-80's, the Census Bureau reported that the number of Americans living in poverty had increased over the previous four years by nine million, the biggest increase since these statistics were first collected over two decades ago. Even today the poorest of two-fifths of our population receives a smaller share of the national income and the richest two-fifths a larger share than at any time since 1947. The United States today is the most economically stratified of all industrial nations, the gap between rich and poor larger than in Britain, Italy, Canada, Germany, France, Finland -- greater and rising faster than anywhere else in the world.

In this period, income for the bottom fifth of America's population went down by 9%; for the top fifth, it went up by 32%, and for the one percent at they very top, after-tax income went up by 102%.

Those years then were what these years now promise to be -- a kind of festive party thrown for America's rich. Then the middle class had to get by on two paychecks, median family income was stagnant, and the percentage of young families who owned

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their own homes went down for the first time since the Depression. Savings and investment were down. More Americans were working longer hours at lower pay.

And for those Americans whose skins were black or brown, the poverty rate went up while median family income went down.

Poverty for black and Hispanic senior citizens went up, children who were poor got poorer, the numbers in poverty more than doubling.

In the late 1960's, three-quarters of all black men were working; by the 80's end, only 57% had a job.

In 1968, the Kerner Commission, appointed by President Johnson to investigate he causes and prescribe the cures for the riots of 1967, concluded that "white racism" was the single most important cause of continued racial inequality in income, housing, employment, education, and life chances between blacks and whites.

But then civil rights champion Lyndon Johnson was succeeded in 1968 by Richard Nixon. Nixon had been a civil rights advocate as Eisenhower's Vice-President; but, first as candidate and then as President, he pursued a 'Southern stategy' which used race to leach white voters away from the Democrats. Republicans have used race as a wedge ever since.

Within a few short years, the growing number of blacks and other minorities and women, pushing for entry into and power in the academy, the media, business, government, and other traditionally white male institutions, created a backlash in the

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discourse over race. The previously privileged majority exploded in angry resentment at having to share space with the formerly excluded.

Opinion leaders began to reformulate and redefine the terms of the discussion. No longer was the Kerner Commission's description of the problem acceptable.

Any indictment of white america could be abandoned, and a Ssuan Smith defense was adopted -- black people did it, did it to the country, did it to themselves. Black behavior -- not white racism -- became the reason why whites nad blacks lived in separate worlds. Racism retreated and apthology advanced. The burden of racial problem solving shifted from racism's creators to its victims. The fialure of the lesser breeds to enjoy society's fruits became their fault alone. In a kind of nonsensical tautology we heard again and again: these people are poor because they are pathological, they are pathological because they are poor.

Blacks and pushy women were blamed for America's demise, and further blamed for declining incomes, rising unemployment, and the loss of job advancement. Today the United Nations, Washington bureaucrats, and supporters of minority and women's rights have replaced the Soviety Union as the evil empire; the America's most privileged population, white men, suddenly became a victim class.

Just as economic security creates a climatei n which social justice prospers, economic stagnation breeds an environment of political scapegoating and social hostility.