On January 16th,
the United States, and the world, observed Martin Luther King Jr. Day,
highlighting the enduring legacy Dr. King brought to the world.
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| Dr. King at a press conference in 1964 |
Best known for his battles
against racial justice, Dr. King was also a tireless fighter for social and
economic equality. He advocated for workers’ rights, commonly aligning himself with
labour unions across U.S. King’s movement was a civil rights movement, after
all, and that means it was a movement concerned with human rights and all
manner of injustice, including labour rights.
Indeed, economic
injustice was an issue to which Dr. King devoted his energies, lending to it
the eloquence and verve that has come to characterize his oratory. Take, for
example, a speech made in 1968, the year of his death, where Dr. King suggests
that racial equality is not enough without jobs and a living wage, stating:
Now our
struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. For 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?
Or consider when Dr.
King criticized the nation for its inadequate response to unemployment,
commenting on the damage joblessness can do to a person, up to and including
the denial of a person’s humanity:
In our society, it is psychological murder to deprive a
man of a job...you are in substance saying to that man 'You have no right to
exist.’
In his speech, “All Labor
Has Dignity," which he gave to sanitation workers in Memphis, Dr. King stressed
the importance of opposing
income inequality. Unlike some of
his more famous speeches, this speech was not scripted. It was Dr. King speaking straight, with no interlocutor
between his voice and his heart. In the speech, he says that there are two
Americas – one for the rich and one for the poor. This was a problem of
inequality that Dr. King found deeply troubling.
With the pay and
bonuses of CEO’s hitting stratospheric levels, and the jobs of workers growing
increasingly precarious, it’s not hard to see the crisis he laments persists to
this day, and have perhaps grown more troubling. Workers continue to struggle,
no matter whether from a developed or developing nation.
In North America, for
instance, outsourcing and offshoring continue as companies move production to
low-wage countries, allowing corporations to increase profitability, but doing
harm to domestic manufacturing industries and depriving workers of jobs. On the
opposite end, lax labour regulations in low-wage countries lead to the
exploitation of workers in developing nations, all but ensuring the “working
poor” are a growing global demographic. Dr. King fought for the working poor,
who he so memorably described as people who work: “full time jobs at part-time
wages.”
It’s perhaps no
surprise then that Dr. King was both supported by, and a supporter of, labour
unions. His support for workers’ rights and organised labour, while certainly
no secret, has not received the historic attention it deserves. It wasn’t until
1992, some 24 years after his untimely death, that Dr. King’s speeches to
labour unions and workers’ rights groups were discovered. Found in a folder
titled simply, “King’s Labor Speeches”, most of these speeches had never been
published.
In the early ‘60’s, King claimed there were three social evils in the
world, being: war, economic injustice, and racial injustice. He went on to
assert that these three evils were not distinct from one another, but were the
interlinked products of a system that had lost its moral bearings. In his 1967 speech, “The Three Evils of Society,”
Dr. King zeroed in on capitalism as being a source of immoral
exploitation, an immorality that was seemingly colour-blind:
Again we have deluded
ourselves into believing the myth that Capitalism grew and prospered out of the
Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was
built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive
on the exploitation of the poor – both black and white, both here and abroad.
With a new Trump Administration in the U.S., wars raging, global income inequality on the rise, and government and corporate interests uniting to call for privatisation (seemingly heedless of the impact it may
have on unions and workers’ rights), Dr. King’s words are fitting to today's political
and economic climate. Increasingly, there is a sense of urgency, a fear
that if the tide is not soon stemmed, the hope of a brighter future will be
lost to the very concerns Dr. King fought against.
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| President Lyndon Johnson meeting with civil rights leaders in 1964 |
But, many wonder,
what can be done? What can one person do to combat rising social and the economic
injustice thriving all around them? While there is, of course, no simple
answer, if indeed there is an answer, I suspect we’d all do well to remember
Dr. King’s advice. He maintained that an individual can make a positive impact
on the world. In a 1959 Youth March for Integrated Schools, Dr. King argued that an individual can make a positive
impact through their choices. For many of us, the choices are within our grasp:
Whatever career you may choose for yourself - doctor,
lawyer, teacher - let me propose an avocation to be pursued along with it.
Become a dedicated fighter for civil rights. Make it a central part of your
life. It will make you a better doctor, a better lawyer, a better teacher. It
will enrich your spirit as nothing else possibly can. It will give you that
rare sense of nobility that can only spring from love and selflessly helping
your fellow man. Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the noble
struggle for human rights. You will make a greater person of yourself, a
greater nation of your country and a finer world to live in.
Whatever the solution
to our troubles as a society, solidarity is certain to be a key component.
Doctor King, after all, brought untold numbers of people together and became a
symbol of solidarity. When he marched in the March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom to deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” address, he did so in solidarity with some 250,000
people, and the support of many more all over the world. That day in August of
1963 now lives on, indelibly printed on the hearts of the generations that
followed. Dr. King proved that solidarity is important. Not only did he prove
that it’s important, he proved that it works.
Not just on Martin
Luther King Jr. Day, but every day, we can try to remember the spirit of Dr.
King’s struggles in our choices, in the problems we face, and in the lives we
live.
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