The Striking Sanitation Workers’ Struggle in Chula Vista Is a Fight Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Would Readily Join

There Is No Real Justice without Economic Justice

In the lead up to this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, Chula Vista leaders made a nod toward his legacy by pledging support for the union workers striking for a living wage and dignified working conditions from their employer, Republic Services.  

As the San Diego Union-Tribune reported, Chula Vista’s mayor and council members said they would work to protect the jobs of unionized workers if Republic Services refused to negotiate after being moved, in part, by the testimony of some of the striking workers 

Oscar Salas, a driver who has been working with Republic Services for 30 years . . .  spoke Tuesday before the council about his experience with the company

• “I can speak for my workers, we always give our 100 percent,” he said in Spanish with the help of a translator. “My clients are 6,300 per week. When they come out in the mornings and they say, ‘hi,’ with a big smile on their face, it just really motivates me to do my job better.”

• “I’m an ambassador for the company and I’m proud, but I also want them to be proud of us,” he added. “The thing that hurts me the most, and that’s why I’m here speaking before you, is that they compared me with the market. I’m not a market, I am a man.”

The sanitation workers, members of the Teamsters, Local 542, have been on strike since December 17th, and have recently extended their picket line to four Republic facilities in Seattle to put pressure on the $10 billion corporation to come through with a living wage and address workers’ complaints about excessive overtime and harassment by managers.  Thus far, the company has been playing hardball.  

As sanitation worker Rafael Mejia stated last week, 

• “We put our lives on the line every day to protect the public health, doing the sixth-deadliest job in America. When we went on strike as a wake-up call to Republic, the company brought in strike breakers at higher pay than it’s offering to pay us. And it was a slap in the face to learn that Republic gave its board members hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and stock this week.”  

The Teamsters point out that the disrespect Republic Services is showing their workers is underlined by the fact that while they are simply asking for a comparable contract to sanitation workers in Orange County, Republic Services is taking home immense profits and their shareholders are some of the richest people in the country: 

• Republic Services is the second-largest trash collection and landfill corporation in America. In 2020, Republic Services earned over $10 billion, with $1.2 billion in net profit, while its CEO’s total compensation totaled over $12 million. Republic has spent more than $736 million buying back its stock in recent years. Republic’s largest shareholder is Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and Gates’ investment advisor sits on Republic’s board of directors.

But our local sanitation workers’ strike is about more than money; it is about human dignity.  When workers like Oscar Salas must declare “I’m not a market, I’m a man,” it recalls the struggle that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his life for in Memphis, Tennessee during another such strike in the 1960s.  As Dr. King put it then in a speech in support of the strike: 

• But let me say to you tonight, that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity, and it has worth. One day our society must come to see this. One day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive, for the person who picks up our garbage, in the final analysis, is as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity.

• But you are doing another thing. You are reminding, not only Memphis, but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages. … Do you know that most of the poor people in our country are working every day? And they are making wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation. These are facts which must be seen, and it is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis and a full-time job getting part-time income. You are here tonight to demand that Memphis will do something about the conditions that our brothers face as they work day in and day out for the well-being of the total community. You are here to demand that Memphis will see the poor. 

Thus, the bottom line this Martin Luther King Jr. Day is that it’s simply not enough to say a few nice words about “essential workers” during a pandemic without rewarding their labor with living wages and dignity in the workplace.  Dr. King came to see that his struggle for civil rights and a just society was fundamentally interrelated with achieving economic justice for all.  

Our present historic level of economic inequality is an affront to Dr. King’s legacy, and one of the best ways we can concretely honor him is to honor all workers by supporting their struggles in every workplace in America.