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This is a Human Right.
Author: Raine    Date: 04/04/2011 12:52:49

On Feb. 1, 1968, two sanitation workers in Memphis, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, rode out a driving rainstorm by climbing inside one of the Sanitation Division’s old “wiener barrel” trucks. The walls inside the packer were caked with putrefying garbage of all sorts—yard waste, dead chickens, moldy food.

Cole and Walker’s soiled, worn-out clothes smelled of garbage. The city did not provide them with gloves, uniforms or a place to shower. They did hard, heavy work, lifting garbage tubs and carrying them on their shoulders or heads or pushcarts to dump their contents into outmoded trucks.

As crew chief, Willie Crain drove the loaded garbage packer along Colonial Street, he heard the hydraulic ram go into action, apparently set off by an electrical malfunction. He pulled the truck over to the curb immediately but the ram was already jamming Cole and Walker back into the compactor.

The men were crushed like so much garbage.
Excerted from By Michael Honey, History Professor at the University of Washington, Tacoma, posted at the AFL-CIO website.

The names of these two men are often forgotten when we speak of the Reverend Martin Luther King, and the cause that brought him to Memphis for what would ultimately be his final march. Many speak of the "I've Been to the Mountaintop" as foreshadowing his death, but few talk about what he was championing. The sanitation workers were seeking to join the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 1733. On workers rights in his speech, King said:
The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers. Now, we've got to keep attention on that. That's always the problem with a little violence. You know what happened the other day, and the press dealt only with the window-breaking. I read the articles. They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that one thousand, three hundred sanitation workers are on strike, and that Memphis is not being fair to them... They didn't get around to that. Now we're going to march again, and we've got to march again, in order to put the issue where it is supposed to be -- and force everybody to see that there are thirteen hundred of God's children here suffering, sometimes going hungry, going through dark and dreary nights wondering how this thing is going to come out. That's the issue. And we've got to say to the nation: We know how it's coming out. For 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.
The next day, he was sacrificed - and still the struggle still goes on, perhaps today even more virulent than ever. With workers rights to collectively bargain being stripped in many states, with workers wages constantly being reduced, with work safety taking a back seat to corporate profits, labor rights are being assaulted. It's not just labor, it is civil and human rights that are being attacked by an impeding corporatocricy in this nation.

As Professor Honey wrote in 2008:
Five years after King’s death, an African American TV news reporter asked an unnamed sanitation worker for his reflections on what had happened. “I don’t think we can show enough appreciation for what Dr. King give,” he said. "See, when he was here in the strike, every man wanted to stand up and be a man. And that was the whole story. We wasn’t counted as men before then. Every man be counted as a man now. It’s no more ‘boy.'... It’s no more of that Uncle Tom now....You be treated like a man.”

This was the message of the 1968 strike: dignity and respect for the individual, the demand for a living wage and the right to belong to a union. So it is that 40 years after Echol Cole and Robert Walker were crushed in the back of a garbage truck and Martin Luther King was assassinated, sanitation workers keep their own memory of King and the Movement alive by bringing out the old picket signs reading, “Honor King: End Racism,” and “I Am A Man.”

It is a history that should never be forgotten, and never will be.
Today we should honer Dr. King, who gave his life so that others would have better. But we should also honor those anonymous people who gave Dr. King a reason to change the world. People like Echol Cole and Robert Walker. We should remember those that died at the Triangle Fire. These people simply wanted to be treated as human beings, instead of dying like garbage or being forced to jump out of a window like an animal. We should remember Cesar Chavez who co-founded the Farm Workers Union, so that migrant workers would not die in the fields. This is why Wisconsin is so important.

Yes, today in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr was taken, but the struggle and the work goes on. These are our rights as human beings. Labor rights are Human rights. Today, let us honor a man who gave his life for what is just and noble



&
Raine
 

52 comments (Latest Comment: 04/05/2011 02:08:36 by livingonli)
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