Fifty Years Later, The Struggle Continues

At each stop sanitation workers make, they’ll drag garbage cans weighing more than 200 pounds each from the curb to a mechanical lift attached to their truck. As the lift dumps the contents into the belly of the truck, the workers must turn away to avoid the dangerous – and sometimes poisonous – backsplash of liquids that ricochet off the sides of the truck.

In one day, says Spivey, a sanitation worker might haul as many 300 cans.

The insides of the garbage cans are only part of the daily ordeal. There are the alley weeds that grow several feet high, clawing at crew members as they navigate narrow, cluttered alleys. There are the spiders, too, which Spivey says grow as “big as your hand.”

And then there’s the heat. In summer, Memphis temperatures can reach 100 degrees or more, and for many crew members, who work on trucks without air-conditioning, the heat, combined with the temperature from the engine’s motor, becomes unbearable.

Another longtime Memphis sanitation worker, Adrian Rogers, says casually, “I can expect to end up in the E.R. at least once a summer.”

Still, Spivey and Rogers acknowledge that by banding together, sanitation workers in Memphis have been able to make life better on the job and for their families.

As full-time city workers and AFSCME members, they enjoy health benefits, job security and most importantly, a seat at the table to negotiate improvements for their families and communities. At the top of their list right now: getting working air-conditioning in their trucks (most have none) and securing hazard pay.

In fact, what might be surprising is not how far the AFSCME sanitation workers in Memphis have come since 1968, but the fact that for others, far too little has changed.

In addition to full-time, AFSCME-represented sanitation workers like Maurice Spivey and Adrian Rogers, Memphis, like many other cities, also employs a workforce of so-called “contingent,” or part-time, sanitation workers whose jobs are just as taxing as Spivey and Rogers’ but far more precarious.

One of them was 36-year-old Darryl Seay.

“He had dreamed of being made full time,” recalls Kristy Clark, a crew chief driver who worked alongside Darryl.

This past July, Seay, Clark and a third member of their crew were out on their day’s route. When that third crew member succumbed to heat exhaustion and needed to be rushed to the hospital, Seay and Clark had no choice but to complete their route down a crew member. And as was typical, they were in driving in a truck with no air-conditioning.

Returning to their headquarters, they were sent out a second time. It was on that second loop that Darry Seay died.

Seay, a father of five boys, had been a part-time worker for eight years.

 “He was a good worker,” recalled Kristy Clark. “If he was made permanent, he was going to buy a big house, move his whole family in with him.”

Contingent workers like Darryl Seay, and like Kristy and Adrian Rogers, who themselves toiled for years as part-time workers, are only permitted to work 56 hours every pay period, or about 28 hours per week. It’s not nearly enough to make ends meet. Part-timers generally hold second jobs.

“A part-time worker is in a twilight zone,” Spivey says.

In the hopes of being converted to a coveted full-time position, these part-time workers will remain on with the sanitation department as long as they can, aspiring to the same benefits, salary and security as their full-time counterparts. Just as importantly, there’s the hope of having a voice on the job by joining together in a union.

Right now, contingent workers like Darryl Seay work in fear. If a contingent worker gets injured, for instance, they can’t afford to tell a supervisor and they can’t request time off to see a doctor, whose services they likely wouldn’t be able to afford in any event.