In the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump all recognized that workers and communities have lost trust in the North American Free Trade Agreement’s approach to globalization. They all said we should manage globalization differently.

By recognizing social and economic justice as one and the same, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. understood the immense power working people have when they come together. He saw union representation as the clearest path out of poverty and into the middle class, and fought for the rights of all people to have good jobs and a voice at work.

At the 1961 AFL-CIO Convention, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature. He spews racism from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other.

Fifty years ago this week, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his final speech in Memphis, Tennessee. In the decades since his assassination, much of the focus on King’s life has centered on his civil rights legacy. But his final days in Memphis are a reminder that he was also a relentless champion for the dignity of work.

On April 9, 2007, Santiago Rafael Cruz was assassinated in the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) office in Mexico. The organizer gave his life in service of trying to improve the lives and workplaces of farm laborers. In his honor, FLOC will picket nationally outside 7-Eleven, Circle K, Kangaroo Express and Wawa convenience stores, calling on the corporations that run these stores to stop selling VUSE e-cigarettes.