Recorder Staff
GREENFIELD -- Inspired by the recent rights protests in Wisconsin, North Africa and the Middle East, Greenfield Community College student Samuel King wanted to raise awareness, so he organized a teach-in at the college.
"Despite being a fairly pro-union state, I wanted to show that we support these popular movements," in particular, the Wisconsin public employee labor troubles, said 23-year-old King. "I have always been in favor of groups getting together to further rights."
GCC's teach-in fell on the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., where 43 years ago he stood with sanitation workers demanding their rights. Monday's event featured several speakers, who argued that collective bargaining is a constitutional right and that these "attacks" on collective bargaining rights aren't just happening in Wisconsin, but all over the country and in Massachusetts.
"The issue that brings us together here isn't just an issue of contract rights," said Buz Eisenberg, GCC professor and local human rights lawyer, to a group of about 15 that had gathered in the college lecture hall. "It is an issue of constitutional importance, which like all constitutional issues, involves interpreting key provisions of the U.S. Constitution to decide where our values lie as Americans."
Eisenberg cited some previous times in history "when workers' rights were contested and the Constitution was invoked." By 1933, he said, West Coast dock workers felt a growing desperation with the harshness of the Great Depression and a rising anger at the danger and indignity of working conditions. "With the National Industrial Recovery Act, for the first time Congress recognized and codified the right to organize and bargain collectively. "But, on the West Coast, budding union activity led to great resistance from the owners and from the police who protected their interests."
"Pitched battles over the right to collectively bargain resulted in injuries and deaths up and down the West Coast these battles eventually culminated in the largest general strike in America history and resulted in 1934 in a victory for the strikers."
"Those dock workers won control of their hiring halls in 1934," he said. "They fought to create a union open to all races, religions and political leanings."
They argued for safe working conditions and eventually secured healthcare benefits and established pensions. They negotiated the need for paid holidays, vacations and took public stands on a wide range of issues that impact American workers and workers throughout the world, he said.
"While many spoke of it as a victory for the National Industrial Recovery Act, many others recognized it is as a victory for the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution the right to freely assemble with whomever you choose."
"The right to join others and collectively bargain should not be a right afforded only to certain people," he said. "It is an American right, to be enjoyed by each and every individual in our society." "Those Wisconsin workers demand it, our Constitution demands it and we should demand it."
The speakers all discussed their views on unions rights, in light of the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Legislature's and its governor's rollback of the state public employees' right to collective bargaining.
Not just Wisconsin
"What is happening in Wisconsin is not just happening in Wisconsin," said economics professor Tully Fitzsimmons.
Across the country, there are battles over the rights of unionized labor playing out in state legislatures, Fitzsimmons said. He applied economic principles to the labor markets. He said individual workers sell their labor to their employers, which could be private or public. Those employers then sell the final products, whether goods or services, to consumers.
He said there are fewer solutions available to public employees to even the playing field. Anti-trust laws can not be applied to government structures, and government can not be broken up. "The only solution, then, to create equivalent market power, is to permit those at the bottom of the chain, the laborers, to organize and speak with a single voice," he said, on his blog. "And that is what unionism is all about."
Rosemarie Freeland, coordinator of GCC's Women's Resource Center, is a member of the Greenfield Community College Professional Association, a union affiliated with the Massachusetts Community College Council and the Massachusetts Teachers Association.
In 1993, Freeland came to GCC as a single mother with three children on welfare. "I was told then that welfare reform was necessary to balance the budget and now public workers are being told it is necessary to strip your right to collective bargaining to balance the budget."
"What I really want to get across is that we as a faculty and professional staff union are very aware of budget constraints and we work with the governor and with our employer all the time to come to terms with the difficulty of funding contracts," she said, after the event.
The Wisconsin move, billed as a necessary cost-savings measure, has been criticized by unions and others as a power play to emasculate the labor movement. But, the law is on hold, as a judge declared that the law hadn't properly been published and wasn't in effect as they claimed. The law would force public employees to pay more for their health care and pension benefits, which amounts to an 8 percent pay cut. It also would eliminate their ability to collectively bargain anything except wage increases no higher than inflation. The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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