Good morning brothers and sisters. Thank you for spending your holiday weekend with us.
And I want to echo Liz and thank Danielle and Clay and our Civil and Human Rights department, and our meetings and travel department, and everybody whose hard work is making this weekend happen.
And that includes President Liz Shuler. Under her leadership, the AFL-CIO has committed to stand together with our friends and allies in the civil rights and social justice movements.
Because we’re stronger together, and because it’s going to take all of us to fully realize a world where all people are treated fairly and without discrimination, the right to vote and to participate fully in civic life, and the opportunity to live and work with dignity.
When we’re working together—all of us—we can be that mighty force for change that Dr. King spoke about.
That’s the legacy of Dr. King. That’s why we’re here. To be that mighty force for change.
I’m excited for this weekend.
I’m excited to be here in Montgomery…in Alabama where the seeds of the civil rights movement were sowed and first took root.
Where the March from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 brought attention to the need for voting rights…
Where Dr. King wrote a letter on civil disobedience, explaining why an “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” while in a Birmingham jail in 1963, before the United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther posted his, and the other jailed protesters, bail.
And where Dr. King was jailed for the first time in 1956 during the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Alabama became the birthplace of the civil rights movement not by choice, but by necessity.
It was where the currents of racism and segregation and discrimination ran deepest.
Where the right to vote wasn’t a right for all of us.
And where the justice system was most unjust.
Alabama has had an abundance of injustices. Racial…economic…social…
And it has an egregious injustice today.
I can’t speak to the state of the prisons that held Dr. King and other civil rights activists…
But the Alabama prison system today is not a just one… It’s a corrupt one.
Alabama prisons are some of the most violent and dangerous places in the world.
They’re overcrowded and understaffed.
And they’re profiteering off of forced labor.
People are forced to work or risk being put into solitary confinement.
People who have paid their debt to society are being denied parole so that the state can maintain its pool of workers and lease them to big corporations… in a scheme that generates nearly a half a BILLION in annual benefit for the state of Alabama.
A scheme that harkens back to the decades following the Civil War when convict leasing powered Alabama’s economy…and by 1898, it accounted for nearly three-quarters of the state’s budget.
It’s a modern-day form of slavery.
It’s an injustice that threatens justice everywhere.
So last month, labor unions and civil rights groups, along with Alabama’s current and formerly incarcerated, filed a federal class action lawsuit. And I want to recognize RWDSU and their president Stuart Appelbaum for advancing this issue and their efforts filing this suit.
We’re demanding an immediate end to this racist forced labor system, and the release of the workers who have been denied parole and trapped in this unlawful and racist forced labor scheme.
The workers should be compensated.
And those companies that benefited from this forced labor should be disgorged of their illegal profits.
We need to right the wrongs here, and we will.
We’re going to root out the human trafficking of workers anywhere it exists, and that’s a commitment and priority for the labor movement.
Everyone should have dignity on the job and access to decent and fair wages in exchange for their work.
Just as everyone should have the right to form a union.
And we are committed to organizing workers no matter where they live or work.
We are committed to the advancement of civil and human rights. To the advancement of social and economic justice.
And to remedy injustices everywhere.
That’s the legacy of Dr. King. That’s why we’re here this weekend.
And it is our job to contribute to that legacy.
Let’s answer his call. And let’s build a society that is fair and just for all.