The thinking is somewhat convoluted,
but the governor of Oklahoma has just signed into law a bill that
gives immunity to anyone who drives through protesters and injures or
kills someone if the driver feels he or she is "fleeing from a
riot" and the injuries or deaths are "unintentional."
Similar legal
efforts have also been created in Florida and Iowa.
Talk about an open season on human
beings. We have reached that stage of deterioration of civil rights
and human rights in the U.S. Oklahoma is not the only state to adopt
such a law. There are others and, like the right-to-work-for-less
laws, they're catching on, mostly in red states, but also in states
that had been liberal and friendly to trade unions and their
picketing and rallying over union issues.
Over the past two or three decades,
the decline of unions has seen a decline of strikes and picketing
over traditional union issues. As most of us know, in the past
several years, however, there has been an increase in rallies and
picketing over the issues of police brutality and the killing by
police of unarmed black citizens, men, boys, and women. The new
surge of demonstrations has been led principally by Black Lives
Matter, an organization that the right has tried to paint as violent,
even to the point at which some right-wing politicians have called
BLM a terrorist organization. Overwhelmingly, the BLM protests have
been peaceful and, as is usually the case, the press covers them more
closely when there are disturbances that have turned violent and
there has been some property damage.
Oklahoma is simply following the
lead of a few other states, but many states have begun to pass laws
that will make it harder to exercise First Amendment rights, by
assembling, speaking, picketing, marching, or joining with fellow
citizens to petition the government and other authorities with their
grievances. Slowly, but surely, individual rights are being squeezed
out of public life, bill by bill, law by law, and attitude by
attitude. It's being done by a consortium of powers that should be
protecting the rights of citizens, through Congress, state
legislatures, the courts, and the press. Generally, these entities
are protecting those who already hold most of the power.
For trade unionists, this is an old
story. In mid-20th
Century, often contracts did not have grievance procedures and
grievances were solved by mass picketing at the gates by the workers
until the grievance was solved. Then, they entered the factory and
went to work. Grievances were mostly solved post haste or the work
of the day didn't get done. Mass picketing also was used in
organizing, getting to a first contract, and settling contracts
during negotiations. In other words, very effective.
That was too much worker power for
Corporate America and its minions in Congress and the various state
legislatures. Something had to be done to curb that power, so laws
began to be passed to do that. A decade-long campaign resulted in
curbing worker power and, by the late 1940s, mass picketing was
pretty much outlawed.
Ahmed A. White of the University of
Colorado Law School, writing in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil
Liberties Law Review in 2014: "Thereafter, it ceased to serve
as an effective means of labor protest. Although overlooked by labor
scholars and legal historians, this successful crusade against mass
picketing was a crucial event in American legal and social history.
For it not only anchored a broad-ranging attack on labor rights that
culminated in the 1947 enactment of the Taft-Hartley Act; it also
disarmed the labor movement, leaving unions and workers unable to
consolidate the rights they seized in the 1930s and 1940s and
impotent against renewed attacks on labor rights that began to unfold
in the 1970s and that have left the labor movement shattered."
President Harry Truman rightly
called the Taft-Hartley Act the “slave-labor bill,”
because it took so many rights away from workers and their unions.
He vetoed it, but Congress overrode his veto and it became law.
Effectively, it destroyed any semblance of solidarity among workers
across the country, by making so many features of worker solidarity
illegal. That slave-labor act stands today and has served as the
foundation of a series of laws and precedents that eliminate the
basic rights of workers to rebuild the union movement and uplift the
working class. Corporate America and the rich have achieved their
goal of neutering the working class as an integral part of a
democratic nation. Although there are signs of a renewed interest in
the idea of “union” or solidarity, and workers are rising
up in various parts of the economy, they are forced to make their
economic and social gains piecemeal. The piece that is missing is
the vision of worker solidarity that encompasses all workers in all
industries, which comes from a strong and progressive union movement.
The oppression of workers and their
unions that has been accomplished over the past century is what is
happening now to the basic civil rights of Americans everywhere. The
charge that Black Lives Matter is a "terrorist"
organization is just a part of the effort to demonize those fighting
for equity and justice in what is essentially an unjust polity. It
is driven by racism, xenophobia, and lust to maintain power over much
of the national life. We are seeing the beginning of sets of laws
that will restrict public demonstrations, rallies, picketing, and all
of the ways that aggrieved people can make their grievances known to
their government and others in power. An attempt is being made to
reduce the rights under the First Amendment to a simple concept:
"Out of sight, out of mind."
There is a vast array of efforts to
muffle First Amendment rights, along with some other rights that are
supposedly enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Not only are the laws
such as Oklahoma's meant to make potential demonstrators fearful of
expression in large numbers, but there are efforts underway on
university campuses to curb free speech by making it a serious
offense to criticize Israel's treatment of Palestinians or support
the BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) movement to stop the oppression
of Palestinians. The latter is but one way that civil and First
Amendment rights are being dismantled.
The danger of Oklahoma's new law is
that the crux of the law rests in the “intent” or “fear”
of the driver of the vehicle that injures or kills demonstrators, and
that is one of those indecipherables that a jury would have to
decipher. As in the case of the murder of George Floyd, even an
attorney general of color admitted that it was not possible to charge
the cop with a hate crime. Historically, in cases like these, the
side with the power wins. How the Floyd case ended is an anomaly.
Those struggling for human and civil rights are hoping that the case
will be a turning point...toward justice.
Many of the laws suppressing civil
and human rights should eventually end up in court, but proving their
unconstitutionality lies with the side which has little power and
even less money to pursue legal remedies. Some of the cases will
take years to resolve and during that time, the lives and safety of
legal and constitutional demonstrators will be at risk. There will
always be the question of what constitutes a public street and
whether citizens have a right to be on them at all, at any time.
The lessons of the union movement
need to be studied in this time because this modern civil rights and
human rights movement is at a similar stage that unions were at in
the late 1940s when the authorities were on a legal rampage to stamp
out the rights of workers to act in solidarity with one another. In
that, they have been successful and the struggle of workers to
unionize freely continues. That need not, and should not, happen to
those struggling for rights of black, brown, and other people of
color, who will keep protesting, organizing, and fighting bad laws
wherever they appear.
BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John
Funiciello, is a former newspaper reporter and labor organizer, who
lives in the Mohawk Valley of New York State. In addition to labor
work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the
land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land
developers. Contact
Mr. Funiciello and BC.
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