Even in Montgomery, Alabama, Some People Still Believe in Workers’ Rights

A YouTube video snapshot of the first rally for unions in the South

Glynn Wilson

by Glynn Wilson

Almost 100 people from all over Alabama showed up on the old Capitol steps in Montgomery on Saturday for a “Save the American Dream” rally in support of organized labor and the protesting public workers in Madison, Wisconsin, who seem to have been inspired by the people of Egypt — and spawned a movement that appears to be spreading across the country.

“I’m for the unions,” said Jim Allen, 75, one of the speakers at the rally.

“I’m a slow learner,” Allen joked. “But here’s something I think I’ve gotten. We hear a lot of talk about defending our American freedoms, our liberty, especially in connection with wars that aren’t going to have anything to do with that. But what I’ve observed is that comes most often and most from people with the biggest megaphones, the people with the money.”

What he has figured out is that those people want us to think only about our “individual liberty,” he said. “They don’t want us getting together. Remember, the people united can never be defeated.”

Johnny Phillips, President of the United Steelworkers Local Union in Courtland, Alabama, said anybody who thinks this protest and situation is only about Wisconsin and the public workers “needs to think again.”

He said the Republicans in Congress tried to pass an alleged budget cutting bill recently to defund the National Labor Relations Board, but even though that effort failed, “What’s going on in Wisconsin is scary,” he said. “We sat here in January, lackadaisical because we are a right to work state, and let this legislature pass an ethics bill that had about as much to do with ethics as the one in Wisconsin has to do with the budget.”

He said the real purpose is to get rid of the middle class and unions.

The Rev. Jack Zylman of Birmingham, who has been involved in the Civil Rights movement since the 1950s and gone to jail 18 times over the years, said he feels the “jail house itch” coming on again because of the assault on workers’ right by Republicans all over the country.

He studied under Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, the school most credited with the current version of so-called “free-market economics,” what some call “Reaganomics,” he said.

“What is happening now is more drastic than anybody’s telling us,” he said. “It’s neo-liberalism, the economics of Fascism.”

“They are just trying to destroy the unions … the working classes,” he said. “That’s what Hitler did. We’ve got to fight it, or you are going to die out any representation.”

Barbara Evans of Montgomery, who led the rally organized by Moveon.org, said what needs to happen is to make the average people in the U.S., the South and Alabama understand that everybody should have the right to a contract for their labor.

“It’s not about money,” she said. “It’s about rights.”

Tags: Save the American Dream Rally Held on Capitol Steps

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 27th, 2011 at 12:05 am and is filed under Labor News, Organized Labor, Politics and Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.