That famous letter by Martin Luther Kind cited here raises a profound point about the tension between the rule of law and civil disobedience in the pursuit of justice. There are no simple answers, but the historical perspective has generally been that civil disobedience is morally supportable only when the injustices it opposes are truly egregious; for example, fighting massive and systemic racial discrimination, as opposed to garbage workers wanting more paid sick days – and engaging in illegal actions to gain their objectives. Conflating actions calling for large-scale social transformations with actions motivated by petty union grievances is a classic example of argument by false equivalence.
That’s my argument. If you have a problem with it, that’s the argument you need to address. What follows is just an interesting additional anecdote.
An interesting sidebar here, since you brought up MLK, is that he was bailed out of the Birmingham jail by the United Auto Workers, then under the leadership of Walter Reuther. Anyone wondering what interests the UAW could possibly have in MLK might be interested to know that Reuther also made the union a major force behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and both Medicare and Medicaid. As many of these initiatives could be seen as directly beneficial to its members and were just causes that most of us would strongly support, they may seem difficult to criticize.
But this union overreach also resulted in Reuther aggressively pushing his union-centric concepts of socialization to the entire auto industry and beyond. He forced automakers into contracts providing for ever-higher worker pay and hostile to plant automation, which is a major factor in consistent manufacturing quality. This doomed them to being less competitive with foreign automakers, particularly the Japanese, and ultimately led to the collapse of Detroit as the world’s premier center of automobile production.