Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail
Dear friends,
I hope you are off from work today in celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As many of you know, King died while campaigning for workers’ rights and human rights with the sanitation workers in Memphis. For all of the talk about essential workers, our society does not do enough to lift up, compensate, and protect the people who do the vital labor of caring for the sick and elderly and feeding the nation. Structural racism is to blame.
The Fight for $15, a campaign for a minimum wage that approaches a living wage for every worker, began with workers in fast-food restaurants and has expanded to include “home health aides, child care teachers, airport workers, adjunct professors, retail employees – and underpaid workers everywhere.”
Watch Fran Marion’s speech and Sign this petition to support the Fight for $15!
In 2019, New York passed a law to make overtime pay available to agricultural workers, but the law requires time-and-a-half only after working a 60-hour week. Typically, of course, overtime kicks in after 40 hours of work. The law took effect last January, and even after a panel gathered to reconsider the threshold for overtime pay in November, the 60-hour rule remains. Only a small number of states offer any overtime to agricultural workers. It is long past time to change federal law to rectify the exclusion of farmworkers from the protections of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which reflected the demands of Southerners who exploited the work of Black sharecroppers.
As a Senator, Kamala Harris introduced federal legislation (twice!) that would end a variety of minimum-wage and overtime exemptions for farmworkers so that they would be afforded the same protections as other workers.
Please call on your Congressional representative and Senators Schumer and Gillibrand to support the Fairness for Farm Workers Act.
King’s deep understanding of the insidious nature of racism and inequality was evident from the tremendous range of issues on which he spoke out during his lifetime. In 1966, in an address to doctors who were meeting to discuss human rights, King said
Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.
Covid-testing and vaccines are still inaccessible to many frontline food workers in factories and on farms; thousands of them have contracted the virus. Poorly coordinated vaccine distribution along with confusion about the costs of vaccination and about requirements for eligibility threaten the largely immigrant workforce of farmworkers.
Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, a national organization of farmworkers led by women, is working to educate and inform farmworkers about their eligibility to be vaccinated and about how the vaccines work. They are also countering the Administration’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and mistrust of vaccine safety.
Support Alianza Nacional de Campesinas.
In 1957, King gave a speech called “Give Us the Ballot,” which resonates today:
It is unfortunate that at this time the leadership of the white South stems from the close-minded reactionaries. These persons gain prominence and power by the dissemination of false ideas and by deliberately appealing to the deepest hate responses within the human mind. It is my firm belief that this close-minded, reactionary, recalcitrant group constitutes a numerical minority.
We don’t have to wonder what King would think of Republicans in the Georgia legislature who are working to limit absentee voting and to legislate stricter voter ID requirements.
Support Fair Fight in their continued struggle to stop voter suppression and promote fair elections.
Finally, I invite you to call back to all of us working from home for justice. One of the lessons we’ve learned from this pandemic and election year is that we need to build bridges to people who see the world differently. We need to move away from binary thinking toward more expansive and inclusive possibilities. This is also part of King’s legacy. In one of his many sermons, he said:
Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion gives man wisdom, which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary.
Your assignment, if you choose to accept it, is to find ways to advance a justice agenda that joins scientific and religious thinking in common cause. Recommend a group doing good work on an issue of importance — climate, health, etc. — and I will happily include it here another day.
If you want some ideas to celebrate today, check out the MLK2021 toolkit from The Frontline.
with love,
L