by Kiera Feldman
The temperature was barely
above zero in the Bronx on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but more than a
dozen former garbage workers showed up outside the offices of Sanitation
Salvage, once one of the major private trash haulers in the city. They
carried signs and demanded wages they say they are owed by the company,
which surrendered its license in November after a series of revelations about its troubled operations.
Andres Hernandez said
he’d worked as a Sanitation Salvage driver for seven years. Manuel
Matias said he’d started working at Sanitation Salvage at age 17 and was
paid off the books for years. Alex Amante said the cold was all too
familiar — he’d regularly worked the city’s streets at night in such
temperatures, doing shifts that he and other workers said could be 18 or
even 21 hours long.
The former Sanitation
Salvage workers picked the day to protest intentionally. When King was
assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968, he’d come to the city in
support of its sanitation workers, who were on strike over low pay and
dangerous conditions following the deaths of two workers.
“All we want is for them to pay us what they owe us,” Hernandez said.
Click here for the full article.
Source: ProPublica
No comments:
Post a Comment