What did MLK say about labor unions?

The relationship between the Negro freedom struggle and organized labor was, to my mind, one of the most vital alliances in American life — and I spoke to it directly and at length. Speaking before the AFL-CIO Convention in December 1961, I drew the parallel between labor's historic struggle and our own: as I said in that address, “We are confronted by powerful forces telling us to rely on the good will and understanding of those who profit by exploiting us”. Labor had faced those same forces and refused to be pacified by them. We had to do the same. The economic bond between Negro Americans and the labor movement was not incidental — it was structural. As I wrote in Stride Toward Freedom, “The Negro then has the right to expect the resources of the American trade union movement to be used in assuring him—like all the rest of its members—of a proper place in American society”. Yet I was not blind to labor's failures. Discrimination existed inside union halls just as it existed elsewhere, and I said so plainly. I called on labor to root it out — not merely as a moral obligation, but as a matter of self-interest. As I argued at that same AFL-CIO convention, “The political strength you are going to need to prevent automation from becoming a Moloch, consuming jobs and contract gains, can be multiplied if you tap the vast reservoir of Negro political power”. The Negro and the laboring man shared the same enemies and the same aspirations. That unity was not sentiment — it was strategy.