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Three Challenges to Labor   Jackson

strain on the nation's resources created by a military budget which is moving in the direction of being 100 billion dollars a year, with among other things, all the inflationary consequences of that strain on the economy. This is going to require national planning. What we have had so far are such things as the "Philadelphia Plan" or the "Los Angeles Plan" or the "Baltimore Plan" and some fifty other plans. This kind of fragmentation merely indicates that there is no serious attempt to solve the problems which these plans are supposed to be dealing with. Such planning is designed to fail because it is narrowly conceived and is not part of any comprehensive national plan for dealing with national problems. The kind of planning I am speaking of is exemplified by the Operation PUSH Economic Bill of Rights published earlier this year by a team of social scientists.
It is axiomatic that in a complex society like the United States any serious attempt to deal with problems which are national in scope requires national planning, at least in the areas of enforcement power to achieve certain desired objectives.
The United States does not leave income tax collections to some local plan. This is enforced by the national government. There is no "Chicago Plan" to carry out the draft or highway construction. These are matters of National design. So we insist that such life and death matters as jobs, education, and prison reform require National attention and planning of the kind given to other matters which are considered "important" to this society.
Some of you in the Trade Union Movement may have forgotten it, but power is in the people. Presidents talk to you, because power is in the people. Presidential nominees come to talk to you also because they know power is in the people.
Your power is not based upon who is in the White House, but rather upon how alert your shop leader is. Democrats and Republicans alike want their meat cut. It does not matter who is in the White House, when you walk out of those chain stores, any administration will respect you because that is your power. If you give up the right to strike, you've lost your power. Even worse, when you lose the will to strike the universe will not support you. We need you to do some good things with us.
All civil rights groups need money; all civil rights groups need nice resolutions; all of them need you on the days of big marches, to be in the front line, and to hold your labor banner high. That is one of the level of contribution. There is a more valid contribution to be made. Wherever there is a store that discriminates against us

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