As Billionaires Consolidate Power, We Need to Recommit to MLK’s Radical Vision

Less than a month before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. addressed a crowd of 10,000 striking sanitation workers and their supporters in Memphis, Tennessee. “One day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive,” he said, “for the person who picks up our garbage … is as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity.”

King delivered this message at Mason Temple on March 18, 1968, as Black sanitation workers in the city were waging a historic strike for safer working conditions. His speech also focused on one of the central themes that consumed his political work in the last two years of his life: the moral and political need for the United States to divest itself from fighting wars and reinvest in ending poverty, or the U.S. would surely, he declared, go “to hell.”

When King delivered this speech advocating for workers to overturn segregation and build power to pursue economic justice, the U.S. was on the cusp of a strike wave. In less than a month, King would be struck down by an assassin’s bullet while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were more than 26,000 strikes involving more than 10 million workers between 1969 and 1973. These strikes gave birth to new radical labor organizations like the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Black Workers Congress that articulated transformative visions aimed at disrupting what King called the “giant triplets” — racism, militarism and materialism, or capitalism.

However, this new wave of strikes and labor actions took place at a time of growing counterrevolution. Richard Nixon won the 1968 election on an anti-civil rights “law and order” campaign. Law enforcement throughout the U.S. engaged in violent repression of the Black liberation movement and the New Left. These efforts featured COINTELPRO’s attempts to extinguish the Black Panther Party, which arrived in the form of raids, shootouts, jailings and assassinations of activists like Fred Hampton. By the end of the 1970s, state repression; economic turbulence, in the form of stagflation, energy shocks, recession and deindustrialization; and organized labor’s failure to win labor law reform had frozen workers’ aspirations to achieve power. As Gil Scott Heron said, “It was winter in America.”

We are living in a similar moment. Five years after the largest racial justice uprising in the U.S., we live in a counterrevolutionary moment. Most Democrats and Republicans are in agreement about lavishly funding the police; celebrations of “essential” workers during the pandemic did not translate into material gains; white nationalists have launched ideological and political attacks on critical race theory, diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and on the teaching of Black history; and politicians are targeting trans people and immigrants in their bid to secure and maintain power. Colleges and universities have led the crackdown effort on Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and anyone else protesting apartheid and genocide in Gaza. Billionaire authoritarians and media organizations appease the incoming Trump administration in advance. Corporations seek to foist generative AI onto everyone, which threatens to displace workers. The Trump administration seeks to enact policies such as broad tariffs and cutting welfare benefits like SNAP that will disproportionately hurt working-class people. Lastly, the new administration’s promises to enact mass deportations of Global South migrants are reminiscent of the anti-immigrant programs of the 1930s and the 1950s.

Despite these major setbacks, one progressive political force is poised to lead us through this winter season — workers and labor unions. Of course, union density is at its lowest since the 1970s. Nor has organized labor organized a strike wave on the level of the 1970s. But labor unions have experienced a sort of upsurge in the last ten years. Fast food, restaurant, hotel and coffeehouse workers launched the “Fight for 15” movement with the demand of a $15/hour wage and union recognition. The Fight for 15 movement represents one of the contemporary labor movement’s most notable successes, as it has won wage increases in hundreds of U.S. cities and changed public discourse.

Thousands of educators have engaged in labor actions as well. More than 100,000 teachers participated in the “Red for Ed” strike wave in 2018-2019. These actions took root in mostly “red” states like Oklahoma, Arizona and West Virginia. Facing increased precarity, stagnant wages and benefits, and losing control over shared governance, tens of thousands of college and university faculty, graduate assistants and staff have responded by unionizing and striking. According to a report in Inside Higher Ed, nearly 36,000 graduate students won union representation in 2022 and 2023. Three faculty unions at Rutgers University struck for the first time over salaries, graduate student funding and job security for adjuncts and won. Members of University of Michigan’s Graduate Employees Organization responded to the 2020 uprisings for Black lives with an “abolitionist strike” to transform the way the university approached public safety. Members have also struck for improved trans health care.

We can start with King’s declaration that “all labor has dignity” and then move toward his argument for a “revolution in values” that centers human rights and the environment.

Flight attendants, led by AFA-CWA international president Sara Nelson, have positioned themselves at the fore of fighting for improved working conditions for themselves and all workers, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic. American Airlines flight attendants won pay increases after threatening to strike last year. Hundreds of Starbucks and Amazon workers have recently engaged in inspirational unionization drives. The Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) went on strike to protect their labor from AI and win revenues from streaming. The Teamsters union, representing UPS workers, won wage gains for all of the company’s workers in 2023. The United Auto Workers (UAW) won an extraordinary contract that included increases in wages, retirement benefits and other benefits for all of its workers, in its strike against the Big Three automakers in 2023. Rather than all workers going on strike simultaneously, the UAW utilized a different tactic, a “stand up strike,” where the union would decide which plants to idle, hoping employers could not recalibrate production to blunt the stoppages. Last year, the labor movement scored a major victory. The UAW successfully unionized Ultium Cell workers and a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee, establishing a potential organizing beachhead in the South. This effort took place in a year where tens of thousands of workers at Boeing, Starbucks, Amazon and U.S. ports engaged in labor actions.

Organized labor has also advocated against another one of King’s “giant triplets” — militarism. The UAW used its power to weigh in on the genocide that Israel is inflicting on Gaza when Shawn Fain called for a ceasefire. Rank-and-file members of the UAW also demanded that Fain and the leadership divest from Israel. Members from several unions including the Association of Flight Attendants, Service Employees International Union and the United Electrical Workers also called for the end of the genocide and the defunding of U.S. military aid to Israel. It would be powerful if workers in shipping and the defense industry joined to support Palestinian liberation in the wake of the recently announced ceasefire agreement.

Lastly, more Americans recognize the importance of labor unions in fighting for their rights as workers. According to a September 2024 Gallup poll, labor unions are polling their highest approval rating since 1965. And as winter in America comes and more Americans grow skeptical of political institutions, tech companies, health insurance firms, and other corporations, organized labor is the best force to lead this struggle.

Workers and organized labor can provide a more expansive vision of democracy that does not just emphasize voting. What would it mean for workers to provide a real countervailing force against authoritarians and capitalists? And what would it mean for them to determine their fates in their workplaces at a time when costs and expenses remain high, when employers continue to steal wages, and at a time when generative AI threatens to degrade human labor?

But, to confront billionaire authoritarians, economic inequality and fascism, we need to build power. King articulated a similar point in his March 18, 1968, speech, saying:

We can all get more together than we can apart; we can get more organized together than we can apart. And this is the way we gain power. Power is the ability to achieve purpose, power is the ability to affect change, and we need power. What is power? Walter Reuther said once that ‘power is the ability of a labor union like UAW to make the most powerful corporation in the world—General Motors—say yes when it wants to say no.’ That’s power.

Racial justice protesters, educators, workers for Starbucks and Amazon, port workers, and other laborers have demonstrated the necessity of utilizing the disruptive power of collective action. The UAW’s use of stand up strikes is another example of using disruption strategically.

Unions and worker organizations are needed the most at this moment as economic inequality is increasing and as billionaire authoritarians continue their quest to consolidate power over the private and public sectors. We need a radical independent labor movement to bring in those disaffected with capitalism, the legal system and electoral politics. Of course, not all labor unions fit within this category, but workers and unions in the U.S. boast a tradition of advocating for various issues important to a broad swath of workers including workplace democracy, socialized health care, racial justice, immigrant rights and disinvestment from militarism. This tradition of solidarity is a good place to deepen contemporary workers’ political consciousness. Unions and workers’ organizations can be the institutions that welcome all of us into radical politics without fear of making mistakes. We can start with King’s declaration that “all labor has dignity” and then move toward his argument for a “revolution in values” that centers human rights and the environment.