by James Parks, Mar 26, 2008

Martin Luther King Jr. was killed 40 years ago while trying to help striking sanitation workers in Memphis gain dignity and respect on the job. On March 31, historian Michael Honey, whose book Going Down Jericho Road chronicles King’s last campaign, will share stories from the workers and discuss the strike’s impact on the civil rights movement during a presentation at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C.

Those in the Washington area who can attend the event also can take a look at an exhibit of photos and quotes in our lobby that commemorate the sanitation strike and King’s commitment to working people. The AFL-CIO exhibit runs through June 30.

 In a Point of View guest column on the AFL-CIO website, Honey says we should remember King not only for his “I Have a Dream” speech and his leadership of the civil rights revolution, but also for his quest for economic equality. 

Honey, a professor at the University of Washington-Tacoma, 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.”

In an article first published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Honey 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. 

The plight of immigrant workers clearly shows the need for the freedom to join unions, Honey says. So-called “free trade” laws have helped U.S. agribusiness to undersell corn farmers in Mexico, sending them streaming north in search of work. he says. Those same laws make it easier for multinational corporations to export union jobs.

Honey also 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 laws.

It is just that kind of economic oppression King fought against, Honey says. In one of his last speeches, King told the Memphis sanitation workers who were trying to join a union when he was killed April 4, 1968:

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?

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