by James Parks, Feb 24, 2008

With the issues of economic equality and immigration high on the agenda in this election, author Michael Honey reminds us that the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. carries some important lessons for today’s political leaders and activists.

Honey, humanities professor at the University of Washington-Tacoma, is author of Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last CampaignIn an article first published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, he says King’s life demonstrated that labor rights, human rights and civil rights are indivisible. He quotes King as saying, “We can get more organized together than we can apart.”

Honey says many of the democratic advances of the 20th century are in jeopardy today, none more so than the freedom to form unions,

without which working people cannot raise their incomes and improve their lives. We have a long way to go before people at their workplace are afforded the constitutional and human rights that the civil rights and labor movements struggled for, and that King died for.

Click here to read the entire article and here to read Honey’s Point of View column on the AFL-CIO website.

The need for the freedom to join unions is very clear, Honey says, on the issue of immigration. While some candidates are trying to demonize undocumented immigrant workers, he says the reality is that so-called “free trade” laws have helped U.S. agribusiness to undersell corn farmers in Mexico, sending them streaming north in search of work.

Those same laws make it easier for multinational corporations to export union jobs. As a result, he says:

Families on both sides of the border are hurt by the catastrophic destruction of the farming economy and well-paying working-class jobs. Workers in the United States and across our borders are not enemies. We have a common interest in enforcing the right of workers to organize, so that wages will rise, consumer spending will increase and our economies will move forward.

He points to the slave labor-like conditions endured by immigrant vegetable pickers in Immokalee, Fla., and the poverty wages and harassment faced by black, Hispanic and white meatpacking workers in Smithfield, N.C., as examples of how workers are hurt by weak labor rights.

It is just that kind of economic oppression King fought against, Honey says. King, who was in Memphis fighting for the right of sanitation workers to join a union when he was killed in 1968, told the workers:

All labor has dignity. You are … reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages. We know that it isn’t enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?

After passage of the civil rights and voting rights bills in 1964 and 1965, King said:

One era of our struggle came to a close and a new era came into being. Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality.

King often said a union is the best anti-poverty program available to poor people with jobs, and he supported unions all his life. He knew most of the major union leaders in the country and recognized that unions had paved the way for the civil rights movement.

Today, Honey says, we need to recall King’s warning that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Instead of denigrating immigrants, we need to renew King’s call to “planetize our movement for social justice” by helping workers in other countries organize to improve conditions so they don’t have to emigrate. At home, we need to regain the right to organize at the workplace. We need to strengthen laws to allow organizing, and reignite our own multiracial coalition. We need to return to King’s campaign to end war and poverty and support union rights.

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