King’s Legacy: Living Wage and Freedom to Join a Union

by James Parks, Jan 26, 2008

Forty years after his death, we should remember Martin Luther King Jr. not only for his “I Have a Dream” speech and his leadership of the civil rights revolution, but for his quest for economic equality.

In a Point of View column on the AFL-CIO website, historian Michael Honey says what’s missing from the discussions of King’s life is the fact that he always stressed economic equality and workers’ rights up until his last day on earth. Click here to read “Forty Years Since King: Labor Rights Are Human Rights.”

What the nation mostly remembers about Memphis in 1968 is King’s death there, but few seem to know that he died in the midst of a struggle for the right to belong to a union, which the mayor and the City Council resisted at all costs. Unionization, they feared, would open up the floodgates of demands by African Americans, who constituted nearly 40 percent of the local population of 500,000 in the mid-1960s.

Black workers in Memphis were in constant danger of being fired, which forced them to take what the white man dished out, says Honey, a professor at the University of Washington, Tacoma, and author of Going Down Jericho Road (available here). Segregation denied them adequate education, training and promotion ladders. They routinely endured police brutality and unjust incarceration. So,

the strike of black sanitation workers in 1968 thus embodied a larger struggle for the human rights of all black workers in their community.

Honey, who spoke at the annual AFL-CIO King Day celebration, quotes from a speech King gave in Memphis less than a month before he died in which he said:

“… you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages. And I need not remind you that this is our plight as a people all over America.”  The best anti-poverty program for a worker, King often said, is a union.

Honey points out that King called for the United States to “be true” to itself by upholding civil liberties and rights, including the freedom to form a union. (For those of you in Washington, D.C., Honey will speak and sign copies of his book March 31 at the AFL-CIO.)

That challenge is still with us. Every day, America’s workers routinely are denied that basic right. Most who seek to form unions risk being fired or blacklisted or face economic intimidation. The union movement and our allies are calling for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act to restore the right to form a union we had won in the 1935 Wagner Act during the New Deal.

This was the message of the 1968 strike: dignity and respect for the individual, the demand for a living wage and the right to belong to a union. It is a history that should never be forgotten, and never will be.

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