“Less than a century ago the laborer had no rights, little or no respect, and led a life which was socially submerged and barren…. American industry organized misery into sweatshops and proclaimed the right of capital to act without restraints and without conscience. The inspiring answer to this intolerable and dehumanizing existence was economic organization through trade unions. The worker became determined not to wait for charitable impulses to grow in his employer. He constructed the means by which fairer sharing of the fruits of his toil had to be given to him or the wheels of industry, which he alone turned, would halt and wealth for no one would be available…”

—  Martin Luther King, Jr.

1960s, Address to AFL–CIO (1961)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Less than a century ago the laborer had no rights, little or no respect, and led a life which was socially submerged an…" by Martin Luther King, Jr.?
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Martin Luther King, Jr.658
American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Ci… 1929–1968

Related quotes

Louis Brandeis photo

“Strong, responsible unions are essential to industrial fair play. Without them the labor bargain is wholly one-sided. The parties to the labor contract must be nearly equal in strength if justice is to be worked out, and this means that the workers must be organized and that their organizations must be recognized by employers as a condition precedent to industrial peace.”

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) American Supreme Court Justice

Reported in Osmond Kessler Fraenkel, Clarence Martin Lewis, The Curse of Bigness: Miscellaneous Papers of Louis D. Brandeis (1965), p. 43.
Extra-judicial writings

Samuel Gompers photo

“The trade union movement represents the organized economic power of the workers… It is in reality the most potent and the most direct social insurance the workers can establish.”

Samuel Gompers (1850–1924) American Labor Leader[AFL]

Samuel Gompers, " Not Even Compulsory Benevolence Will Do http://books.google.com/books?id=3LVLAAAAYAAJ&dq=in%20reality%20the%20most%20potent%20and%20the%20most%20direct%20social%20insurance&pg=PA47#v=onepage&q=in%20reality%20the%20most%20potent%20and%20the%20most%20direct%20social%20insurance&f=false." The American Federationist. January 1917, p. 47.

Ronald Reagan photo

“By outlawing Solidarity, a free trade organization to which an overwhelming majority of Polish workers and farmers belong, they have made it clear that they never had any intention of restoring one of the most elemental human rights—the right to belong to a free trade union.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Radio Address to the Nation on Solidarity and United States Relations With Poland http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=43110#axzz1Go825Y2t (1982-10-09). Compare with an earlier Reagan speech: &quot;... where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost. They remind us that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.&quot; Labor Day Speech at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, New Jersey, September 1, 1980 http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/9.1.80.html <br class="br">1980s, First term of office (1981–1985)

Robert Hunter (author) photo

“Tolstoy, while sympathizing with the industrial workers, believed that they ought not to organize in trade unions and he opposed strenuously nearly every form of action advocated by working-class organizations.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 72

Ernest Mandel photo

“In fact, it would be very easy to ‘prove’ Marx’s analysis to have been wrong, if experience had shown, for example, that the more capitalist industry develops, the smaller and smaller the average factory becomes, the less it depends upon new technology, the more its capital is supplied by the workers themselves, the more workers become owners of their factories, the less the part of wages taken by consumer goods becomes (and the greater becomes the part of wages used for buying the workers’ own means of production). If, in addition, there had been decades without economic fluctuations and a full-scale disappearance of trade unions and employers’ associations (all flowing from the disappearance of contradictions between Capital and Labour, inasmuch as workers increasingly become the controllers of their own means and conditions of production), then one could indeed say that Capital was so much rubbish and had dismally failed to predict what would happen in the real capitalist world a century after its publication.”

Ernest Mandel (1923–1995) Belgian economist and Marxist philosopher

Introduction to Capital. Introduction to volume 1 (1976)

James Russell Lowell photo

“Both of them mean that Labor has no rights which Capital is bound to respect,—that there is no higher law than human interest and cupidity.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Referring to John C. Breckenridge and Stephen A. Douglas (Abraham Lincoln's opponents)
The Election in November 1860 (1860)

Michael Parenti photo

“Union busting has become a major industry with more than a thousand consulting firms teaching companies how to prevent workers from organizing and how to get rid of existing unions.”

Michael Parenti (1933) American academic

2 MEDIA AND CULTURE, Giving Labor The Business, p. 122
Dirty truths (1996), first edition

Robert Ley photo

“The trade unions that were swayed by Marxist teaching did not want social peace. They calculated that their chances of acquiring political power would improve with the growing dissatisfaction of the workers. One of the first necessities with which the Hitler Government found itself faced was that of dissolving the organizations that kept alive the antagonism between employers and employees. They were replaced by the Labour Front.”

Robert Ley (1890–1945) Nazi politician

Quoted in Social Policy in the New Germany by Bruno Rauecker - 1936

Antonio Negri photo

“The old form of trade union, which was born in the nineteenth century and aimed primarily at negotiating wages for a specific trase is no longer sufficient. First of all, as we have been argueing, the old trade unions are not able to represent the unemployed, the poor, or even the mobile and flexible post-Fordist workers with short term contracts, all of whom participate actively in social production and increase social wealth. Second, the old unions are divided according to the various products and tasks defined in the heyday of industrial production - a miners' union, a pipefitters' union, a machinists' union and so forth. Today, insofar as the conditions and the relations of labor are becoming common, these traditional divisions (or even newly defined divisions) no longer make sense and serve only as an obstacle. Finally the old unions have become purely economic, not political, organization.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

136
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Hermann Rauschning photo

“Gregor Strasser, Hitler's dangerous rival in the party, was out to gain control of the whole of the party formations, the organs of public administration, and those of social and economic life, particularly the trade unions, which he proposed to form into a great and comprehensive force of Workers' Guards of the revolution. This brought him into conflict with Roehm's similar ambitions for the S. A.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: Men in Chaos (1942), p. 17

Related topics