Official Statement Of Teamsters General President Jim Hoffa
(The International Brotherhood of Teamsters issued the following on January 13.)
The Teamsters pay tribute to the life and the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and seek to honor his memory on this holiday, and every day, by fighting for the principles he gave his life to promote.
King championed a vision of civil rights that was synonymous with labor rights. He believed that the racist and the labor-hater were born of the same ignorance, “spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.” His “Poor People’s Campaign” in 1967 was intended to be the second phase of the civil rights movement, a heroic call to bring family-supporting wages to poor people of all races.
My father also saw the connections between civil rights and labor rights. He believed all workers deserved respect, no matter what color they were, and he did more than any other labor leader of his time to unite the struggles of blacks and poor workers.
At King’s request, the Teamsters gave $25,000 to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and donated money and supplies to the tent cities cropping up around Montgomery and Selma, Ala., to protest segregation. Viola Liuzzo, the wife of a Teamster business agent from Detroit Local 247, was shot and killed while participating in civil rights actions in Montgomery and Selma in 1965.
King was supporting the rights of sanitation workers when he was gunned down in Memphis, Tenn., in 1968. I think he would be heartened to know that his spirit lives on as Teamster waste workers in Alabama, Georgia and Florida recently secured their first contract, securing a better future for their families and greater respect on the job.
Today, King’s fight continues as American workers see hard-won labor rights of the past crumble around them. The share of Americans living in poverty has increased four years in a row, while tax cuts funnel more and more money to the super-rich. Corporations are shipping good jobs overseas and offering wages so low at home that many people work multiple jobs just to cover basic necessities. Forty-five million Americans are without health insurance, and skyrocketing health care costs eat away at already stretched paychecks.
We can do better. King would dream of nothing less.