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.

Whopping 62% of jobs don't support middle-class life after accounting for cost of living

Third Way study from 2018--

30% of jobs are "hardship jobs," not allowing a single adult to make ends meet, 

32% are "living wage jobs," making enough to get by but not enough to take vacations, save for retirement, or own a home, 

23% are "middle class jobs," allowing for some dining out, taking vacations, sending your kids to college, and saving for retirement,

15% are "professional jobs," paving the way for more eating out, bigger vacations, and a more expensive home (or homes). 

The ratio of CEO to average worker pay, in double digits as recently as the 1980s, is over 300 to 1 last I heard. In the European Union they have the ratio capped at 20 to 1 or something like that by law. 

Why not forbidding even 2 to 1 before every employee is paid at least a living wage? A millionaire or billionaire CEO paying less than a living wage is a grotesque example of predatory capitalist excess. 

But then what if "living wages" don't cover health care or education, etc? The gov will have to tax wealth enough to pay for the public infrastructure the rich depend on in building their personal fortunes but are always trying to get out of paying for, because you know they earned every penny on their own and don't need the gov or anybody else. (Or until they need to be bailed out of financial trouble, anyhow.)

Captains of Industry! Too Big to Fail!

And then if you want more middle class jobs the gov has to encourage or even require labor union representation in all medium to large scale industry. We know this: more union jobs = more middle class jobs.  

But Big Biz will have none of it and will do anything they can to defeat any such reforms. And, besides, it's less likely any of their economic tyranny catches up with them before their environmental destruction takes us all down. 

The Dems get at least some of this; some Dems anyway, Biden better than any potus since maybe LBJ. But the MAGA Repugs would like to take us back to the old plantation economy and whipped labor. Sure I'm exaggerating but not by much. 

Paul Davidson, USA TODAY