Saturday, December 15, 2012
Post 3900 - Right To Work
There's a quote by MLK circulating, putting forward the idea that he thought "right to work" laws were a fraud and a hindrance to civil rights. It just says "1961" for attribution, and I can't find it anywhere until it shows up a few days ago. I suspect it is made up, or is at minimum a misquote. It is altogether too neat and too perfect. But I have been wrong in such guesses before. Does anyone know if the quote is sourced?
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8 comments:
Here it is from 2006:
http://www.nathannewman.org/laborblog/archive/003608.shtml
MLK was very, very active in the union movement and constantly appeared at strikes:
http://www.afscme.org/union/history/mlk/dr-martin-luther-king-jr-on-labor
I don't think it is fake. In 1961 he was at several labor conventions.
AFT has had this quote featured for years and years on its website:
http://www.aft.org/yourwork/tools4teachers/bhm/mlktalks.cfm
The world has changed. This quote has been overcome by events.
MOM - Thanks
Here is the source of the quotation:
http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/vote-no-state-question-409-oklahoma-naacp#
I always distrust ellipses in quotations of this sort. It was a relief to find that in the orignal there just a "." where these many copies all have "..."
The pamphlet (not speech) that this came from was published in 1964 (not 1961) in the effort against a "right to work" constitutional amendment in OK. The amendment lost 352,26 to 376,555
I see the claim, but no citation. There's another very similar quote making the rounds, equally suspicious, attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt. In both cases the quotes are artless and have none of the flavor of either person.
Right to work means right to hire: the right of an employer to hire additional workers who do not belong to the union. Were it not for the millions of illegal immigrants in the land this might make a certain amount of sense -- otherwise a union is tantamount to a local monopoly on labor, which is open to the same objections as any other monopoly. But in the actual world we live in right now it means an invitation to work and ever-lower wages for years, if not decades, to come. I am from an old union family by the way, my father was an organizer and I was myself a member of the International Brotherhood of Carpenters for many years, even after I became a landscape gardener instead, and then a small employer myself.
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