"All Labor Has Dignity"

It is my tradition, on the day that we Americans celebrate the birth of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to take some time to read or listen to his speeches or writings. I am often drawn to Dr. King's final sermon, I've Been to the Mountaintop.

It is a beautiful speech, and listening to it will give you the chills, knowing that Dr. King would be assassinated within 24 hours of declaring that the journey to the promised land might have to proceed without him.

Today, however, I happened upon an NPR interview with Michael Honey a professor and author of All Labor Has Dignity, a collection of Dr. King's speeches that supported the labor movement. The interview included an audio excerpt from that speech:

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

Now the problem isn't only unemployment. Do you know that most of the poor people in our country are working everyday? They are making wages so low that they can not begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation. 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.

Let these words sink in: When there is vast unemployment and underemployment in the black community, they call it a social problem. When there is vast unemployment and underemployment in the white community they call it a depression.

So now it is clear to me how this will go. As we realize that "creating jobs" undermines capitalism, and the unfortunate by-product of progress is surplus labor, unemployment will become a persistent, permanent "social problem". And, as with solutions designed to help black people overcome "social problems". attempts to "create jobs" will be half-hearted, underfunded and eventually most leaders will come to the conclusion that the social "problem" rests with the very people that are suffering.

In other words, if you are unlucky enough to be poor, live in middle-America, lack a college degree or marketable skills, or dependent upon manual labor for income, it's kinda your fault that you don't have a good job.

Corporations will thrive, as will Wall Street. Silicon Valley will compete for software engineers by plying them awesome salaries and ridiculous perks.

And so, on this day of remembrance, I was reminded that the struggles of black people, are the struggles of this country. It can be argued that since the death of Dr. King, the problems of black people have less attribution to social and economic injustice and have been increasingly attributed to flaws of black people themselves. And so it will go with the unemployed. As time passes, and structural unemployment becomes the norm, unemployment will be associated not with the exploitative tactics of the finance industry and the predatory practices of corporate behemoths, but will be blamed on the unemployed, themselves.