To the Editor:
Call me cynical, but I find it strange that the RPI campus is now adorned with banners and posters promulgating Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and urging us to celebrate his legacy. As I understand the life and work of Dr. King, his main issues were peace and social justice. At RPI we find little of either: The Institute benefits handsomely—directly and indirectly—from military/war research, thus enabling the oligarchy to wage its imperial wars against whomever it pleases, whenever it pleases—preferably countries with oil and little or no defensive capability. The environmental services workers, who are trying to get a little piece of Dr. King’s social justice by forming a union, have been lied to, misled, and intimidated by the RPI Administration to prevent them from exercising their legal rights (see Sections 7 and 8 of The National Labor Relations Act) and their human rights (see Articles 23, 25, and 28 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights). To this end, the RPI Administration retained the services of an expensive union-busting law firm to do everything it could to prevent a vote in favor of the union. Should anyone care to find out the kind of dishonest and despicable tactics these highly paid lawyers use against workers read Confessions of a Union Buster by Martin Jay Levitt.
Surely President Jackson understands the efforts of the environmental services workers. After all, while a graduate student at MIT she founded a black students’ union to counter a lack of representation at that school for African-Americans and to redress wrongs. Or is she now only interested in the rights of people with incomes comparable to her $375,000 per annum?
Social justice starts at home. Ignoring injustice makes us all guilty.
Mark Lunt
Senior Library Clerk
Folsom Library
