UNIONISTS DEDICATE KING COMMEMORATION TO ELECTION ACTION

One thousand union leaders, gathered in Memphis for the AFL-CIO’s commemoration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday, launched a drive Jan. 18 to “take back the country” in the 2008 elections.

That means fed will focus on--so far--races from Senate seats to referendums in 17 states, including three governorships, and 528 races overall, AFL-CIO Political Director Karen Ackerman told the crowd. And it wants to increase unionists’ and union supporters’ turnout by 4 million votes. Those groups made up one-quarter of the electorate in 2006.

The 4-day event came to Memphis as the 40th anniversary nears of King’s assassination there. The event both honored the civil rights leader and reminded people that his last campaign--the one where he was gunned down--was in support of striking sanitation workers, now represented by AFSCME. Other speakers included the union’s present Secretary-Treasurer, William Lucy, one of those sanitation workers.

Heeding King’s 1961 declaration that “the vote is our most powerful weapon,” labor and civil rights leaders mapped plans and held training sessions to arm trade unionists with tools they hope will elect a pro-worker president, larger pro-labor majorities in the Senate and the House, pro-labor governors and hundreds of progressives in state legislative bodies. Observers called it the most ambitious election effort ever by labor and its allies.

“In 2008, the elections are the key vehicle for civil and workers’ rights,” University of Maryland professor Ron Walters told the crowd in a keynote address.

“Dr. King would indeed be proud if he could see the field of the main Democratic contenders for the presidency: A woman, an African-American, and a white male who opened his campaign for the job in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans,” Walters declared as delegates rose to their feet and cheered.

“As always, we must keep the issues on the front burner, but I think we can live with any of these three candidates and when could we ever say that before about all the possible nominees of one of the big parties?” Walters asked. The hopefuls are Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and ex-Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.).

The federation told the King commemoration delegates on Jan. 18 that besides electing a pro-worker president, it will target 17 states where it believes progressives can be elected: Minnesota, Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Alaska. That’s in addition to targeting 68 U.S. House seats to add to the Democratic majority there, Ackerman said.

Vulnerable GOP senators are up in Maine, New Hampshire, Missouri, Minnesota and Oregon. And there are open-seat U.S. Senate races for GOP-held seats in New Mexico, Virginia and Colorado among others. Labor will add list three states, Alabama, Nebraska, and South Dakota, where it believes it can elect pro-worker governors.

The crowd was also determined to act politically by the dismal record of the Bush government, emphasized by speaker after speaker at the King commemoration. Speakers, both at the main commemoration and subsidiary events, included Lucy, AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney and AFSCME President Gerald McEntee.

Included on the list of “Bush disasters” were 4,000 dead U.S. soldiers in Iraq, Bush’s initial lack of response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, followed by an enormously wrong response there, the obscene and growing income gap between rich and poor, and Bush appointees’ use of the National Labor Relations Board, which was intended to protect union organizers to instead destroy organizing rights. Also included were Bush attacks on voting rights, his budget deficits, 47 million people without health insurance and the sub-prime mortgage debacle.

Many speakers noted corruption in Washington with delegates laughing when AFL-CIO Political Director Karen Ackerman said that “because of Bush, Nixon is starting to look great.” McEntee has previously said Bush makes Ronald Reagan look good.

The political focus was important, not just because of Dr. King’s exhortation but because labor provided the votes for the near-miss that Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) gave Bush in 2004 and the Democratic takeover--numerically if not in real control of events--of Congress in fall 2006. AFL-CIO figures discussed at the commemoration show that in 2004 Kerry lost to Bush by just 135,000 votes. If the trade union vote were subtracted from the 2004 totals, Kerry would have carried only Washington, Maine, Vermont and Connecticut.

Dr. King’s commitment to labor rights began long before the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike. His Dec. 11, 1961, declaration that “Our needs are identical with labor’s needs” was invoked by several speakers who called for continuation of the “historical unity” of the labor and civil rights movements. That unity, they stressed, will make the 2008 election plan realizable. “The issues they will be mobilized on,” Ackerman said, “will be an economy that works for all, universal health care, support for the Employee Free Choice Act, so everyone can exercise their right to form a union, and an end to the war in Iraq so that money will be available to rebuild this country.”