Labor & Employment Law

King?s Legacy: Fighting for Economic Justice

By admin

In his latest book, All Labor Has Dignity, historian Michael Honey brings together 16 of Martin Luther King Jr.?s speeches on economic justice, many of them unpublished until now. Honey, a professor at the University of Washington Tacoma, edited the speeches and wrote an introduction for the book. AFL-CIO Now senior writer James Parks interviewed Honey about King and his legacy of economic justice.

Q: In All Labor Has Dignity, you say King’s dream called for ?economic equality.? What does that mean and how do we achieve it?

Honey: At various times he says he is not opposed to people having wealth, he?s opposed to people having wealth at the expense of other people not having wealth…and ignoring the poor. His ?Poor People?s Campaign? was really about economic restructuring. His plan was to put pressure on Congress to shift its priorities from war and military spending to housing, health care, jobs and education, focusing especially on the people who were losing jobs because of automation of industry and outsourcing.

It was a two-pronged approach?one was that there were these people who were being thrown out of the economy to starve and something had to be done about that. But secondly, the priorities of the country are all wrong.

Q: What do you think King would say about the current economic crisis, its effects on working people and the attack on public employee unions?

Honey: In his speech to the AFL-CIO in 1961, King talked about the developing right-wing coalition that would threaten the labor movement and the civil rights movement. The quote is ?the alliance between big military and big business or the coalition of Dixiecrats and militant reactionaries?whatever the form?these menaces now threaten everything decent and fair in American life. Labor today faces the greatest crisis. In the next 10 to 20 years, automation will grind jobs into dust. This period is made to order for those who would drive labor into impotency by viciously attacking it at every point of weakness.?

His idea [to fight this developing right-wing coalition] is to develop a mass coalition of labor, civil rights churches, anti-war, students?anybody who’s moving in the same direction.

Q: What is King?s legacy today and how can we best honor it?

Honey: King was a holistic thinker and he said the problem is not just individuals, the problem is the system. The real evil is systematic. The three great evils are racism, militarism and materialism. Our country is under the control of those three evils and we have to change the whole setup of the country to change that. If you look at him in that way, he?s timely and timeless.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on January 17, 2011 (boomark / email).