28 January 2015

Workers' Rights=LGBT Rights

Some would argue--and I would be inclined to agree--that the most important speech Martin Luther King Jr. gave was "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam".  Delivered one year, to the day, before he was murdered, it expresses something that had become more apparent to him throughout his life:  All struggles for justice are related. As he said, you can't oppose racial prejudice in the United States (or anywhere else) and support killing people of a different race in another country.  Likewise, if you believe people deserve to be treated fairly and equally, whatever their race or gender or religion or sexual orientation, you also must believe  that people deserve to be paid a fair living wage for doing a day's work.

That is why something I came across would have made perfect sense to him:  Workers' rights are tied to LGBT rights, and vice-versa.  I am not simply repeating a nice ideal:  There are statistics to prove it.  Those numbers indicate that union workers are three times as likely as non-union workers to have domestic partner health care coverage and twice as likely to have survivor benefits for their domestic partners.

From National LGBT Taskforce blog