(Library of Congress)

Accepting her Golden Globe for best supporting actress last night, Octavia Spencer said, "With regard to domestics in this country, now and then, I think Dr. King said it best: 'All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance.'" Martin Luther King, Jr. was certainly outspoken on the dignity of labor, which is an important and powerful theme. It's also, unfortunately, a theme too often appropriated by conservatives as a way to argue that because domestic or custodial work has dignity, it doesn't also need a decent paycheck.

But King was also outspoken about the importance of workers organizing and fighting for rights and a voice in the workplace, and he was an ally of unions in that fight. In fact, the line Spencer quoted is taken from his speech during the Memphis sanitation strike, the night before he was killed, just one of many times he spoke to or joined with unions. AFSCME, the union of the Memphis sanitation strike, has a collection of quotes demonstrating exactly this. "As I have said many times, and believe with all my heart," King wrote to the Amalgamated Laundry Workers in 1962, "the coalition that can have the greatest impact in the struggle for human dignity here in America is that of the Negro and the forces of labor, because their fortunes are so closely intertwined."

He was clear about the history of and continuing need for labor struggle, that workers rights aren't won without a fight, saying to the Illinois AFL-CIO convention in 1965:

The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress. Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old age pensions, government relief for the destitute, and above all new wage levels that meant not mere survival, but a tolerable life. The captains of industry did not lead this transformation; they resisted it until they were overcome. When in the thirties the wave of union organization crested over our nation, it carried to secure shores not only itself but the whole society.

He warned repeatedly that as many jobs were automated, workers would suffer unless they organized for political power and power in the workplace, organizing service workers into unions, pushing elected leaders to provide jobs and retirement security and workplace protections, pushing to make it our reality that "The society that performs miracles with machinery has the capacity to make some miracles for men—if it values men as highly as it values machines."

As Republicans try to claim Martin Luther King, Jr.'s legacy, let's remember the vast swaths of it they're simultaneously trying to write out of history.