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To build a better future for workers, we must recognize the racist and blood-stained history of U.S. labor and the shortcomings of the labor movement’s past.
From this place of understanding and healing, we can better push our movements for racial justice and workers’ rights foward. Labor movements are inextricably linked to climate justice, abolition, reproductive rights, immigration, housing and health care, and our political future in which all people have their basic needs met. The March Continues because it must, and we’re here to report on it.
The March Continues is a Prism project highlighting the legacy of the March on Washington and the inextricable relationship between labor and racial justice in the U.S. Prism looks at everything from prison labor, to Black women and their labor organizing in the South, to chattel slavery and its pervasive legacy and replacements.
Created by labor unionist A. Philip Randolph and activist Bayard Rustin, the March on Washington mobilized 250,000 people for Black Americans’ economic and civil rights. Black labor advocates, unions like the United Automobile Workers (UAW), organizers, civil rights groups like the NAACP and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Black activists, and workers understood that their call to action, their fight, and their efforts were stronger together as a united front, even if there were differences in politics and strategy on a more granular level.
Hear from labor organizers about the continued legacy of the march and how we keep moving forward.
Incarcerated laborers are often left out of workers’ rights efforts, but they are vastly underpaid, underprotected, and unable to save for a life beyond bars
Many workers don’t have any paid leave. Illinois has become the third state to require employers to provide paid leave that workers can use for any reason, not just sickness
The legislation has strayed far from its initial model of labor-minded price floors and supply management to creep into the corners of federal institutions where structural racism thrives
There is an unbroken line from the economic conditions developed to protect chattel slavery to the legal structures that allow for the abuse and exploitation of migrant farmworkers today