Mark Dudzic
National Organizer for the Labor Party
Remarks at the Workers Rights are Human Rights Forum
Charleston, South Carolina
November 29th, 2002

Thank you brother Reilly and the Charleston Longshoreman for hosting us. Its not easy to carry the message of organized labor in South Carolina.

I’ve just become the National Organizier of the Labor Party. I’m taking over from a dear brother of mine, Tony Mazzochi, who has been very inspired by the vigorous movement in South Carolina, and the unity that has developed around the issues.

I think we can learn from South Carolina, where the struggle is much more open, where there is much less attempts by reformist politicians to mask things. These issues of workers rights are at the core of what is happening in this country.

When you have to work for a living, you abandon all of your rights. You give up your constitutional rights to speak, to assemble, and to act collectively. If you have a union, you get some of those rights back. You have the right to act collectively, and to due process. Unions make things better.

Over 50% of workers in this country have said they want to be in a union. Yet only less than 15% are members of a union. And in South Carolina there’s even less than that. Over half of working people would join a union if they could. So why don’t they have union representation? Because the workplace is a totalitarian society.

Imagine I came to South Carolina and wanted to run for mayor. Imagine what would happen if I tried to run a campaign without setting foot in the city, just trying to shout in from the outside. How many people would support me if 1 out of 20 will get fired and lose their livelihood if they support me? How successful would I be against those odds? Imagine if I won, and for the next 3 years the vote was challenged in court. Then, at the end of 3 years, the court says that we ought to have a new election. Do you think I’d win? That’s what its like. Those are the odds in trying to organize a union in this country. It is a hidden rein of terror.

Even when you win, you can’t fight. Its impossible in our current state of labor law to come out in solidarity with each other. The entire power of state is brought out against you in those situations. We can’t stop work or act collectively, to act in solidarity. There is no ability to organize a solidarity strike or an effective boycott under the current legal system.

We in the Labor Party say the time has come to reframe the issue. Workers rights are human rights. The Constitution guarantees the right to free speech, to negotiate collectively, and against involuntary servitude. But we don’t have those rights when we step into the workplace. We need a broad critique against the labor laws in society that control us and prevent us from acting collectively. We can’t make the advances we need to make until we do.

How do we do that? Power has to come from the streets and from the people. We need to defy types of laws that prevent us from exercising our constitutional rights. We need to build a powerful movement from below to enforce laws that say that constitutional rights extend into the workplace. The courts for nearly 100 years upheld segregation. Does anyone here believe that without a powerful movement to end segregation in this country that the courts would have reversed it? The court upheld discrimination against women for years, and it wasn’t until the women’s rights movement that they changed them. Not until the workers organized in the 30's did the courts recognize that workers had basic rights.

Our job is to organize that kind of movement, to take a stand to support workers, and to support one another. If we do our job, the the courts will follow.

We will win our right to assemble, our right to organize and to defend our economic interests.