“All Labor Has Dignity” — Martin Luther King, Jr. And The Grocery Industry.
"All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”-MLK
Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr (MLK) represents how to live a life of tolerance, compassion, commitment and most of all, solidarity. His most famous speech, the “I Have A Dream” address, was given at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and so eloquently demanded voting rights and an end to segregation, but also fair wages, good jobs and better standards of living, prioritizing economic liberties as well as civil rights.
While MLK is canonized for his civil rights leadership and non-violent philosophy, incorrectly held up as a counterpoint to his rival and ally Malcolm X’s militant Black nationalism, MLK was also deeply critical of the economic injustice, inequality and exploitation of his era, crises that are still so prevalent today. This latter part of MLK’s philosophy tends to get whitewashed and sanitized.
MLK was not a pushover, a passive accommodationist who compromised with the powers that were. He was a total badass and we should reconsider his legacy for the grocery industry.
“No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”-MLK
MLK’s civil rights activism grew out of the Christian church’s philosophy of solidarity and social justice and his embrace of Gandhian strategic nonviolence. He was deeply rooted and trained in the labor and community activism of his predecessors, such as Ralph Abernathy and A. Phillip Randolph. He was also an ally of progressive Rabbi Abraham Heschel, uniting Blacks and Jews in common cause against prejudice and white supremacy, recognizing Jewish trauma while also supporting Palestinian statehood. He was a disruptor of the status quo and a rabble rouser. It made him very unpopular at the time.
“It is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he should lift himself up by his own bootstraps. It is even worse to tell a man to lift himself up by his own bootstraps when somebody is standing on the boot.”-MLK
MLK recognized that the “bootstraps” nonsense was based in satire and sarcasm, not material reality. He had an 80% disapproval rating with our grandparent’s generation. He was despised by the media, big business, cultural tastemakers, southern segregationists and, or course, the federal government, including FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who surveilled, threatened and terrorized MLK, his family and his close associates.
When MLK was assassinated in 1968, he was on the ground supporting sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, after a three year sojourn organizing in the deeply segregated Chicago suburbs, where he experience racism and violence beyond anything he saw in the Deep South. And yet, despite all of mainstream society bearing down on him and his quest for economic justice, there was MLK in Memphis, still marching and organizing with essential workers until the very end, when his life was cut short by an assassin’s bullet.
“All mankind is tied together; all life is interrelated, and we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” -MLK
MLK saw that economic justice and mutuality were key to the changes he had preached, marched for and written about. He was critical of consumer society and big business. He foresaw how deindustrialization and offshoring would shatter his vision of the promised land, how the quest for freedom would get kneecapped by losses of well-paying jobs. Against the advice of close associates, he questioned and challenged the war machine and why society was spending money on space exploration while millions languished in poverty. MLK had an unflinching analysis of capitalism, but also how essential workers could organize within the framework of American democracy to win better livelihoods for themselves, their communities and their descendants.
Why does this matter now? MLK’s economic philosophy is even more relevant today, especially where up to 75% of grocery employees have been food insecure and over 10% have been homeless in recent years, where seven of the ten lowest paying jobs are in the food industry, where farmworkers are still mostly excluded from basic labor protections, where Amazon employs 36% of warehouse personnel but accounts for over 53% of warehouse injuries, where multiple studies document how Walmart drives down wages and living standards in heartland communities, where migrant and undocumented workers perform some of the most daunting, dangerous jobs in meat processing and food manufacturing, under threats of deportation and harassment by law enforcement, enduring sexual violence and worse.
So while there are opportunities in the grocery industry for some of us to make a good living, start a business, move up the corporate ladder and graduate into the middle class, that is not the case for many, many people who we depend on for our livelihoods, who make sure these supply chains keep running no matter what, the folks working in the fields during hurricanes and wildfires, the truck drivers waiting ten deep at 3 AM to drop their loads at fulfillment centers, the migrant kids scrubbing grease off packing machinery after the shift workers go home, the women cooking meals and taking care of the kids after 14 hours of bent, stooped work in the fields picking berries, celery, tomatoes, the grandparents working as cashiers and people greeters instead of enjoying a well-earned retirement, the food processing workers who were laid off after years of corporate profiteering drove up prices, cratered consumption volumes and shuttered processing facilities, the retail clerks and cashiers working second and third jobs as their hours get cut while their hourly wages fall further and further behind spiraling costs of living, the 99% of wage earners who have lost $80 trillion in income since 1975 as the gains of productivity were shared by an elite few that now account for over 50% of consumer spending, the economy gone K-shaped.
“Oh America, how often have you taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.”-MLK.
This pursuit of justice is the legacy of MLK. It is carried on today by Amazon workers demanding safer jobs and better pay, by Florida farmworkers holding growers accountable through legal binding purchase agreements with grocers, by Whole Foods clerks in Philadelphia demanding that the company return to its roots of providing best in class wages and benefits, by the food processing workers at Kellogg’s, Mondelez and Frito Lay who walked off their jobs during Covid-19 to demand better pay, commensurate with their skills and productivity, by the beef and poultry processing workers pushing for safer line speeds and better staffing levels, by the immigrant dairy workers risking deportation while marching for fair wages, better housing and decent medical care, by high road business owners and purchasing managers making sure their brands, stores and facilities sell the highest quality, most ethically sourced products that take into account worker treatment, agrochemical usage and fair wages. MLK’s economic ideas are more relevant than ever, especially to the grocery industry.
“The fact is that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed — that’s the long, sometimes tragic and turbulent story of history.”-MLK.
MLK’s ideas are not stagnant, ancient history, not museum set pieces or folk tales. They are living, fire-breathing ideals that can inspire, energize and emancipate, just as MLK was inspired, energized and emancipated by the gospel or his friend Rabbi Heschel by the Talmud and Pirke Avot. They are a road map to justice, to a better food industry, to a better humanity, not only on MLK Day, but every day, and only if we take the steps now, to build that road as we travel forward.
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter”- MLK.
This story comes to us from Errol Schweizer’s newsletter The Checkout, the essential take on the $1 trillion U.S. grocery industry. We encourage you to, if you will, check it out.
The Bittman Project
