Beyond the Mountaintop

from the Labor Center Berkeley

Here is a link to a report from the Labor Center Berkeley. It's entitled "Beyond the Mountaintop: King's Prescription for Poverty" Black Economists mark the 40th anniversary of King's Assassination. Below is a summary that comes from the California Progress Report

This is a day for reflection--the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination. “Beyond the Mountaintop: King’s Prescription for Poverty” does not disappoint as a way to spend part of today considering why King was in Memphis and what it means today.

In this 24 page document released today by the UC Berkeley Labor Center, Steven Pitts of UC Berkeley and William Spriggs of Howard University, two noted African American economists, analyze African Americans’ economic progress over the last 40 years and use Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of economic justice as the basis for policy recommendations to dramatically reduce poverty.

This is a renewal of the call on the nation to dramatically reduce poverty that focuses on three priority areas—stronger anti-discrimination laws and enforcement; elimination of barriers to unionization; and an effective minimum wage—advocated by Dr. King to extend black advancement beyond the scope of safety net programs.

The authors argue in this thoughtful document that Dr. King’s prescription for ending poverty and unemployment is as relevant and urgent now as it was in 1968. They document with graphs, charts, and economic facts how by aggressively employing the three elements of King’s prescription to reduce poverty between 1964 and 1969, the United States achieved the largest decline in poverty since the Second World War, reducing the number of black children in poor families by almost half. In the intervening years, this report concludes that these three key policy levers had been virtually decimated.

The authors urge an action agenda:

• A Full Employment Economy. The nation must put in place policies that will create a full-employment economy. Black workers fared best in the late 1960s and 1990s when the U.S. economy was operating at high capacity.

• Fight Discrimination. America must eliminate all forms of racial inequity including institutional discrimination that has the effect of denying workers of color access to employment and promotions.

• Protect the Right to Form Unions. For more than 70 years, workers rights to join unions and bargain collectively have won for them fair wages and decent working conditions. Wages and benefits would improve dramatically for low-wage service sector workers if they could unionize.

• Raise the Minimum Wage. Increasing the minimum wage to its 1969 value and indexing the wage so it keeps pace with productivity would not only lift up black workers trapped in poverty, it would elevate the wage floor for all workers.