Protest demonstrations were organized by UE Local 150 and the Southern Workers Assembly for Friday, November 1 in three North Carolina cities, as well as three other Southern cities. The demand of these rallies: “Stop the criminalization of the constitutional and international human right to protest! Drop charges against Saladin Muhammad and all Moral Mondays arrestees!”
The protests were scheduled for Raleigh, Charlotte, and Goldsboro, NC; Charleston and Columbia, SC; and San Antonio, TX. The Southern Workers Assembly is a multistate workers’ rights coalition formed at a Labor Day 2012 gathering in Charlotte, in conjunction with protests at the Democratic National Convention.
Moral Mondays are a series of weekly protests at the North Carolina Legislative Building, beginning in April 2013, against the extremist anti-worker and anti-democratic agenda being pushed by the right-wing Republican majority in the legislature. The legislature has rolled back voting rights, drastically cut public education including the state university system, denied healthcare to hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians. In a state that already bans public employee collective bargaining and has an anti-union “right-to-work” law, the Republican majority is pursuing further anti-worker measures, such as banning dues checkoff and putting “right-to-work” and the bargaining ban into the state constitution.
Thousands participated in the Moral Mondays protests in Raleigh while the legislature was in session, and 940 were arrested, including eight UE Local 150 members. The first protester to go on trial was Saladin Muhammad, retired UE international representative, and on October 4 he was found guilty. Rev. William Barber, president of the state NAACP, organizer of Moral Mondays, and key speaker at UE’s national convention this year, went on trial along with 16 other clergy members on October 25. That trial has been continued to December 3 and 4.
The trial of UE Local 150 President Angaza Laughinghouse and Vice President Larsene Taylor was also supposed to be held on October 25 but has been postponed by the prosecution. Laughinghouse believes it is a deliberate tactic of the prosecutors to force people to travel from around the state and take time off from work for their scheduled trials, then postpone the trial and force them to do it again.
Angaza Laughinghouse commented on the importance of the current struggle in North Carolina for UE and other unions. “This is critically important – the right to protest, the internationally-recognized right to form unions. This is something all unions can understand, since it’s the right to protest that won us the Voting Rights Act and helped win workers rights during the 1930s and ‘40s, it helped up win affirmative action and women’s rights. It’s so important, this particular struggle that’s going on as a result of the Moral Mondays protest and the legislative leaders pushing the Raleigh chief of police to arrest us for exercising our democratic right to protest.”
Laughinghouse points out that, a few years ago, Tea Party members held a protest inside the legislative chamber in which “they threw tea bags from the balcony down onto the floor, hitting some of the legislators. None of them were ever arrested. The worst that happened to them was the sergeant-at-arms went up into the balcony and escorted one of them out.”
He added, “In our protest, there was nothing violent done, nothing disorderly done. We were singing, praying, chanting, in the lobby outside the chamber.” The Moral Mondays protests did not hinder legislators from getting in and out of the chamber, which has five other entrances.
Besides pursuing an incredibly anti-worker agenda, the Republican state leadership in North Carolina has shut down normal channels for workers and citizens to express their concern, said Laughinghouse. “UE 150 has always visited the legislature. We’ve always had meetings with Republicans and Democrats, the Speaker of the House, the pro-tem leader in the Senate, the governor’s office, Governor Easley, Governor Perdue. We’ve had robust discussion with them on policy issues. In fact our union has introduced bills.”
This year, Local 150 was promised by the speaker of the house and the leader of the senate that they would again meet with the union. “We followed up with emails, visits, sending the material we wanted to discuss with them,” said the UE local president. But the meetings never happened. “The same thing happened with Governor McCrory,” who promised meetings that never occurred.
“We had no choice but to go to the General Assembly, bring labor’s agenda, and let them know that we needed some accountability from these legislators,” Laughinghouse continued. “They’re trying to silence us, they’re trying to block us out, they’re trying to make sure we don’t have a voice.”
“I’m very proud of the role UE 150 has played, along with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee and some other unions that are part of the Southern Workers Assembly," Laughinghouse concluded.