In this report:
Executive Summary
Just over 40 years ago, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, closing a chapter on a grave national crisis and a deep national shame, the systematic denial of the franchise to African Americans and people of color. Although the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution had extended voting rights to all male citizens without regard to "race, color or previous condition of servitude," in practice, voting was more often like a game of Russian roulette for people of color, particularly African Americans, than the free exercise of a fundamental right. Facially neutral state practices, such as poll taxes, literacy tests and restrictive voter registration requirements, had the intended effect of keeping minority voters from the polls. And when these policies were not enough, private vigilantes and public officials initiated campaigns of intimidation and coercion in a concerted and often successful effort to chill the exercise of a fundamental right.
In response to this national crisis, historic allies in the fight for equal rights—civil rights advocates and labor activists—stood shoulder to shoulder to win passage of the Voting Rights Act, widely regarded as one of the most important civil rights measures in our nation's history.
This was neither the first nor the last time the civil rights and labor movements joined together to right a grave wrong. Instead, determined to move beyond a history of bias and segregation that too often pitted them against each other, in 1950, the Leadership Conference on Civil rights (LCCR) was formed, largely of civil rights and labor organizations, under the able and visionary leadership of labor and civil rights giant, A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; Roy Wilkins of the NAACP; and Arnold Aronson, a leader of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council. In the more than 50 years since its founding, LCCR, working closely with its members and partners in the labor movement, has led the fight for equal opportunity and social justice. Together, we passed civil rights laws banning discrimination in employment, education, public accommodations, voting and housing; outlawed job-based age discrimination; won employment and other rights for people with disabilities; and extended family and medical leave protections to millions of American workers. Together, we continue to fight to end employment discrimination against LGBT Americans and to expand protections against hate crimes, preserve affirmative action, raise the minimum wage, and provide paid leave for America's workers.
Workers' rights are civil rights; and when Dr. Martin Luther King spoke to the AFL-CIO in 1961 about the shared vision between the fights for racial equality and for workers' rights, he said it best: "Our needs are identical 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." Because of this "duality of interests," King continued, "any crisis which lacerates you is a crisis from which we bleed."
Today, the labor and civil rights movements confront another shared crisis — the systematic, often brutal denial of the right of American workers "to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively…and to engage in other concerted activities…." As the following discussion details, this attack on organizing rights is one piece of an overall roll-back of civil and workers' rights over the past quarter century, as federal policymakers and judges have etched away at rights and protections for all workers. The damage resulting from these public acts is greatly exacerbated when it comes to workers' organizing and bargaining rights by the aggressive, virulent and often unchecked anti-union campaigns that private actors—employers and their consultants—mount when workers try to form unions. So ruthless are these campaigns and so predictable their consequences that the right to form unions and bargain collectively has been all but eliminated in America's workplaces.
Denial of any fundamental right concerns LCCR. However, the denial of organizing and bargaining rights raises special concerns for several reasons. First, the communities of workers our earliest civil rights laws were designed to protect, women and minorities, are also those who stand to gain the most from union representation, and hence, have the most to lose when the right to form unions is denied. Second, our statutory scheme of workplace protections is fragmented and incomplete; union representation provides disadvantaged workers—disproportionately, women, minorities, and people with disabilities—an arsenal of workplace tools that better enable them to achieve the promises of equal opportunity and economic security. Finally, the assault on the right of workers to form unions and the corresponding decline of the labor movement diminishes the power of working people overall, making it harder to secure public policies and programs that broadly benefit working families and easier to enshrine legal and regulatory practices that prioritize narrow corporate interests. This is of grave concern to the civil rights movement. Our history makes clear that a strong labor movement, born of the free and robust exercise of the right to organize, is an essential partner in the ongoing struggle for civil rights for all Americans.
For all these reasons, reinvigorating the right to organize is a matter of basic civil rights, a priority for our nation, and an imperative for our movement.
Next Section: Restoring the Right to Form Unions
