Martin Luther King jr. on the Dignity of all Labor and the Crime of Economic Maximizing the Minimum and Minimizing the Maximum

Excerpts from a speech MLK gave in Memphis during a sanitation worker strike on March 18, 1968: 

But let me say to you tonight, that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity, and it has worth. (Applause) One day our society must come to see this. One day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive, for the person who picks up our garbage, in the final analysis, is as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. (Applause) All labor has dignity. (Yes!)

But you are doing another thing. You are reminding, not only Memphis, but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages. (Applause) And I need not remind you that this is our plight as a people all over America. The vast majority of Negroes in our country are still perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. (Applause) My friends, we are living as a people in a literal depression.

Now you know when there is mass unemployment and underemployment in the black community they call it a social problem. When there is mass unemployment and underemployment in the white community they call it a depression. (Applause) But we find ourselves living in a literal depression, all over this country as a people.

Now the problem is not only unemployment. Do you know that most of the poor people in our country are working every day? (Applause) And they are making wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation. (That’s right) These are facts which must be seen, and it is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis and a full-time job getting part-time income. (Applause) 

If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she, too, will go to hell.

Now you are doing something else here. You are highlighting the economic issue. You are going beyond purely civil rights to questions of human rights. That is a distinction.

Never forget that freedom is not something that is voluntarily given by the oppressor. It is something that must be demanded by the oppressed.