"Memphis Negroes are almost entirely a working people. Our needs are identical with labor's needs -- decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor's demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth."
The next day, James Earl Ray assassinated King as he stood on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Hotel.
As Timemagazine noted at the time: "Ironically, it was the violence of Martin Luther King's death rather than the nonviolence of his methods that ultimately broke the city's resistance" and led to the strike settlement.
President Johnson ordered federal troops to Memphis and instructed Undersecretary of Labor James Reynolds to mediate the conflict and settle the strike. The following week, King's widow, Coretta Scott King, and dozens of national figures led a peaceful memorial march through downtown Memphis in tribute to King and in support of the strike. Local business leaders, tired of the boycott and the downtown demonstrations, urged Loeb to come to terms with the strikers.
On April 16, union leaders and city officials reached an agreement. The City Council passed a resolution recognizing the union. The 14-month contract included union dues check-off, a grievance procedure, and wage increases of 10 cents per hour May 1 and another five cents in September. Members of AFSCME Local 1733 approved the agreement unanimously and ended their strike.
The settlement wasn't only a victory for the sanitation workers. The strike had mobilized the African American community, which subsequently became increasingly involved in local politics and school and jobs issues, and which developed new allies in the white community.
Like the civil rights movement of the 1960s, there is a growing movement in the United States today protesting the nation's widening economic inequality and persistent poverty.
One of the most vibrant crusades is the ongoing battle to raise the minimum wage. In the past 40 years, the federal minimum wage -- stuck at $7.25 since 2009 because Republicans in Congress have refused to act -- has lost 30% of its value.
As a result, low-wage workers for fast-food chains and big box retailers, janitors, security guards, day laborers, and others have forged a grassroots movement to pressure their employers (like Walmart and McDonalds) to raise starting salaries and benefits. These workers and their allies have engaged in civil disobedience and strikes to galvanize public opinion.
Coalitions of unions, community organizations, faith-based and immigrant rights groups have also successfully pushed cities and states to adopt minimum wage laws that will pay families enough to meet basic needs. A growing number of cities -- including Seattle, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Pasadena, and many others -- have passed minimum wage laws that will gradually reach between $13 and $15 an hour, typically with an annual cost-of-living increase. Los Angeles County -- the nation's largest county -- adopted a law that will raise the minimum wage to $15 in unincorporated areas. Last year California and New York adopted state laws to bring the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Raise Up Massachusetts, a coalition of community groups, faith-based organizations, and unions, is sponsoring a ballot measure next year that would raise the state's minimum wage from $11 to $15 an hour by 2022 with a $1 increase each year starting in 2019. Twenty-nine percent of the Massachusetts workforce would see increased wages under the initiative, affecting roughly 947,000 workers.
A Pew Research Center survey last year found that 52% of American voters favored raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. An even larger number of Americans embrace increasing it to $12 an hour. Backed by nearly half of the Senate's Democrats, Senators Bernie Sanders and Patty Murray have introduced the Raise the Wage Act of 2017 which would gradually raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024.
In recent years, New York, California, Massachusetts, and Hawaii have adopted different versions of the Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights that provides new protections for nannies, babysitters, senior care aides, housekeepers and others -- primarily women and many of them immigrants -- who are excluded from federal labor protections.
Several states -- including California, Rhode Island, Washington, New Jersey, New York, and the District of Columbia -- have adopted paid family leave laws. A growing number of cities (including Philadelphia, Austin, Seattle, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Portland (Oregon), Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C), and counties (including Missoula County in Montana, Pima County in Arizona, and Kings County in Washington), have adopted laws providing government employees, and in some places all employees, with paid family leave.
These laws require employers to pay workers' salaries if they take time off from work to care for a new child following birth, adoption, or foster placement, to recover from a pregnancy or childbirth-related disability, and/or to take care of sick family members. This is a right that workers in most other countries already take for granted. As the number of cities and states with such laws continues to grow, Congress will be under increasing pressure to adopt similar policies at the federal level.
Of course, President Trump and the Republican Congress are trying to roll back worker protections against wage theft, health and safety dangers at the workplace, and threats to retirement security. Trump has appointed anti-union members to the National Labor Relations Board who will seek to weaken rules protecting workers.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," King wrote in his Letter From Birmingham Jail. "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
Just as King helped build bridges between the labor and civil rights movements, today's union activists are forging closer ties to the immigrant rights, women's rights, and environmental justice movements, as well as to struggles to reform Wall Street and to challenge the proliferation of guns and the mass incarceration of people of color.
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