Trashed in New York: Ex-Sanitation Salvage Workers Protest... 'All We Want Is for Them to Pay Us What They Owe Us'

 

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. 

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Source: ProPublica