How the Memphis Sanitation Strike Changed the Labor Movement

This article is from Headway, an initiative of The New York Times that examines the world’s challenges through the lens of progress. Headway looks for promising solutions, notable experiments and lessons learned from what has been tried.

Jack Walker is a trade unionist. He drives a garbage truck in Memphis, where his route can take him past shotgun-style homes along the Mississippi River and through the narrow alleys near the Lorraine Motel, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. He is always aware of how his union protection is tied to Dr.’s death. King and that of another man: his father.

Robert Walker, Mr. Walker’s father, was also a sanitation worker. On February 1, 1968, he was collecting trash when it started to rain. He and his colleague Echol Cole took shelter in the compactor of their truck. When a compression piston malfunctioned, the two men were crushed. The city had no intention of paying a death benefit and offered Robert Walker’s widow only $500 for funeral expenses. “if you need it,” as the official letter put it. She had five children, including Jack, and was pregnant with a sixth.

The tragedy was the culmination of slow-burning humiliations for black sanitation workers in Memphis. They earned low wages carrying heavy, open bins of trash to their trucks. Rotting waste seeped onto their skin and clothing. Their white colleagues, who were often drivers, showered at the depot at the end of their shift. But the black collectors were forced to ride the bus or walk home in their damp clothes, covered in dirt particles and maggots.

Fed up, they called a strike. About 1,300 sanitation workers began marching through the streets of Memphis. They carried signs that read “I am a man,” with the “Ben” underlined. The strike lasted for weeks. Even as trash began to pile up on the city streets, the mayor of Memphis would not give in to the strikers’ demands. Instead, he sent police officers with clubs and clubs to break up the marches.

The mission and courage of the strikers spoke to Dr. King, who had begun a new effort for economic justice: the Poor People’s Campaign. He came to Memphis in March and again in April, when he gave a passionate speech at a local church that would prove to be his last.

Two weeks after Dr. King was murdered on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, the Memphis City Council voted to recognize the sanitation workers’ union, promising higher wages for the largely black workforce.

“It was a first step in getting them on their feet financially,” said Lee Saunders, current president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. “It was a huge deal.”

The Memphis strike more than 50 years ago “sparked a wave of organizing and strikes similar to what we see today,” says William P. Jones, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota who has written about race and class.

The current resurgence in labor activism extends across a wide range of industries. There have been recent labor battles at railroad yards, schools, hospitals, hotels, Hollywood studios, and Starbucks stores, among others. And the issues on the negotiating table include traditional demands, such as higher wages and a better workforce, as well as protection from replacement by artificial intelligence. Unions have had notable successes in recent months, including securing a major pay increase for Las Vegas hospitality workers who only threatened to strike.

What the black sanitation workers in Memphis showed was that, by joining a union and leaving their labor behind, even people in the lowest-paying and most difficult jobs “could turn those jobs into reliable vehicles for economic mobility,” said Dr. Jones. And that, he added, led “to the rapid expansion of public sector unions in the 1970s and 1980s and the emergence of African Americans as the most unionized sector of the American workforce.”

‘Great strides have been made’

Today, black workers have the highest union membership rate of any racial or ethnic group. Yet black union workers earn less than their white counterparts — an average of $1,022 per week compared to $1,246 for white workers, according to the Labor Statistics Bureau.

Gary Hoover, an economics professor at Tulane University, said the gap likely stemmed from black workers having fewer opportunities for promotion. Still, said Dr. Hoover, black Americans are drawn to union jobs because they offer better protections than non-union jobs. “You’re looking for job security,” he said, “and some form of protection against discrimination.”

That protection is now more difficult to obtain. Union membership among U.S. workers reached 10.1 percent in 2022, a big drop from 20.1 percent in 1983, when the federal government first started collecting similar data. That decline was caused in part by the decline of manufacturing in this country and the spread of factories to states, largely in the South, that prohibited unions from forcing workers to pay dues. Tennessee voters passed an amendment last year to enshrine such a ban in the state’s constitution.

Labor activists across the country are trying to prevent further decline and form unions in new industries. During the first ten months of this year, 492,300 workers went on strike – more than three times as many as in the same period last year, according to a tracker of labor actions from Cornell University. There are picket lines on the nightly news, including one in September in the Detroit area, where President Biden joined members of the United Automobile Workers union.

Important victories have been achieved in recent months. Nearly 75,000 Kaiser Permanente health care workers went on strike nationwide, securing major wage increases, including a $25 hourly minimum wage in California. In September, after a months-long strike, the Writers Guild of America agreed to a 12.5 percent pay increase over a three-year contract, and two months later SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, received a 7 percent raise in the first year. of his contract. Perhaps most notably, the UAW staged an innovative strike against the three major automakers that led to a 25 percent wage increase over the next four and a half years.

“Great progress has been made,” said Martin Luther King III, Dr.’s eldest son. King. Mr King, 66, who often demonstrates in solidarity with union members, said the labor movement felt more energized in the past year than at any other time in his life.

Dr. Jones noted that “most of the big gains have been in industries where unions are well established and have the legal protections to strike and win concessions,” such as the auto industry and Hollywood. Initial successes in unionizing Amazon workers have stalled. And workers in industries like the car-sharing industry or food service have had a harder time gaining union recognition. “In that regard,” he said, “workers at Starbucks or Uber are fighting for the same rights to decent wages, working conditions and union representation that the Memphis sanitation workers demanded in 1968.”

On a recent morning, dozens of garbage trucks rumbled along a road past the iron gates of a sanitation building on Memphis’ south side. The air was thick and rancid. Most trucks were driven by a driver and a collector, who jumped out of the truck at each stop and hoisted the debris from the cans into the compactor. Their shifts start at 7 a.m. and sometimes last up to twelve hours.

Memphis has embraced its place in civil rights and labor history. Images of black sanitation workers holding the iconic “I Am a Man” sign are plastered on plaques and murals throughout the city. In 2017, city officials gave $70,000 grants to more than a dozen workers who joined the union in 1968. The mayor praised their “courage and determination.”

Much has improved, Mr. Walker said, since his father’s time. At the time, most black men in the department could only work as garbage collectors, not drivers; Today, Mr. Walker is a driver. But the sanitation work in Memphis is still dangerous. In interviews, some city sanitation workers described persistent safety problems, such as coming into contact with the carcasses of rabid dogs and acid splashes from batteries. Patricia Moore, 52, who worked at a private plumbing company, Republic Services, was killed in March when she was crushed under a truck at a Memphis landfill. She had worked for the company for thirty years.

After the accident, employees of Teamsters Local 667, which represents Republic workers, walked off their jobs and launched a nine-day strike, ultimately receiving a new five-year contract with wage increases of up to 28 percent per hour during the period of the accident. agreement. It also included additional funding for safety equipment and equipment.

Pay remains a problem for city sanitation workers. Marquize Cast, 40, joined the sanitation department in 2009 as a driver. He grew up hearing stories about the 1968 strike from his grandmother, and working as a sanitation worker gives him a sense of pride, he said.

“Those brothers have been through a lot,” he remembered thinking.

But with two children and mounting bills, his pay (he started at about $14 an hour and now makes about $21) wasn’t enough. A few years after he started in the sanitation department, he got a second job as a night janitor at an elementary school.

Mr. Cast spoke of the brotherhood he felt with fellow sanitation workers – sharing laughter and meals, taking shifts to help each other. But he has seen colleagues leave for non-union jobs with better pay at FedEx, which is headquartered in the city, and at large warehouses full of cargo at Memphis International Airport.

“Mentally and physically the job can destroy you,” he said of working in sanitation.

The same goes for Mr. Walker. The repetitive motion of getting in and out of bed for 40 years has damaged his joints. Sometimes he wonders if the city really appreciates the work of people like him.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Walker sat outside the headquarters of Local 1733. Nearby, a plaque on a lamppost read “1968 Strikers Lane” — a small reminder, like so many others in this city, of the father taken from him when he was still a boy.

Mr. Walker looked toward the plaque. He thought of his father, “a strong, healthy man,” he said, “who just wanted to provide for his family.”

The Headway initiative is funded by grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editorial process and do not review stories prior to publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.