Lessons of the Civil Rights Movement for Workers' Rights/Union Organizing (original) (raw)

In 1955, African Americans in the South faced seemingly impossible conditions, but a decade later, a mass movement had won impressive victories. If workers and unions hope to achieve fundamental changes, not just incremental advances, they should learn from the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement indicates that workers' rights can be won only if workers launch a mass movement, take risks, engage in direct action, demonstrate an ability to disrupt the normal functioning of society, and maintain that disruption until concessions are won. Political change, legal victories, cultural shifts, and media coverage followed from, and depended on, the success of mass action. Learning from the Civil Rights Movement Imagine a rational analyst in mid-1955 evaluating the situation for African Americans in the South. The "logical" conclusion would be that there was very little Black people themselves could do to change their oppressive conditions. Black people were relegated to the bottom of the economic order, and most were disenfranchised. White people dominated politics, the courts, and media. Segregation-in schools, bathrooms, waiting areas, water fountains-and other practices, created daily humiliations, flooding Black people with messages of inferiority. Even minor "transgressions" of the segregated order might be punished immediately and severely, leaving little space for resistance. Most Black people were unwilling to fight the system openly, and many de facto accepted the label of "inferior." And yet, just a decade later, a mass movement had transformed America, both Black and White consciousness were forever altered, and landmark legal changes had passed Congress. Some fifty years later, workers' rights are widely violated; workers face enormous difficulties if they attempt to organize unions and act collectively. The objective conditions are not nearly as grim as those faced by Black people in the South in 1955, but are daunting nonetheless. Labor laws permit practices, such as captive audience and one-on-one meetings (Bronfenbrenner and Juravich, 1994) that some day may be viewed as people today view the poll tax and Jim Crow ordinances. When those provisions of our labor law that are supposed