Kahlenberg and Marvit: Workers’ Rights Are Civil Rights

by Joye Barksdale  |  March 06, 2012

AFSCME’s members have for many years understood that civil rights and workers’ rights go hand in hand. In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. epitomized this connection by joining with the sanitation workers of AFSCME Local 1733 in Memphis, as they went on strike to force the city to recognize their union.

Now, a scholar and a lawyer are suggesting that the connection is so fundamental that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 should be amended to include the right to organize a labor union. Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, and Moshe Z. Marvit, a labor lawyer, are authors of the forthcoming book Why Labor Organizing Should be a Civil Right: Rebuilding a Middle-Class Democracy by Enhancing Labor Voices.

They say the right to organize should be enshrined in the Civil Rights Act because employers who discriminate against workers for trying to start a union face extremely weak penalties that don’t discourage union-busting. The First Amendment protects freedom of association and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 recognizes the right to form or join labor unions, but “the opportunity to organize is a right without a remedy,” they wrote this past week in The New York Times.

In a similar piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Kahlenberg answered right-wing pundit Ann Coulter, who argued that “civil rights is for blacks,” not for union organizers. “Coulter’s argument involves a classic divide and conquer strategy,” he wrote. “Conservatives are terrified of the idea of a revived labor movement, which, in its heyday, brought America a host of progressive social legislation, from the Civil Rights Act to Medicare.”

Kahlenberg cited the example of Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., ranked among the top five liberal-arts colleges nationally. For two years, dining-hall workers, many of them Latino immigrants, have been trying to organize a labor union at Pomona, which also happens to be among the country’s wealthiest campuses. The administration has responded by firing workers and barring dining-hall workers from talking to students. “If this could happen at a liberal college like Pomona,” Kahlenberg wrote, “how much worse is it for average workers trying to organize amoral corporations which have powerful incentives to do everything necessary to keep unions out?”