Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America And Rob Taxpayers Blind - Plot & Excerpts
By then, the famous Dempster Dumpster technology—that’s that sound that wakes you up at 5 a.m., when wheeled waste containers are mechanically tipped into a garbage truck—had already been available for three decades. But not in Memphis. There, sanitation men still had to pick up and carry metal garbage cans and dump them into heavy leather tubs. Then, they had to sling the tubs over their shoulders and carry them through people’s yards. Many of the tubs leaked, “and during the course of the day the caustic flow from the garbage caused huge welts on the men’s shoulders, arms, and torsos.”31 There were still more indignities: white crew chiefs typically addressed black sanitation collectors as “boy,” and black men were not promoted to the job of supervisor.32 Also, the sanitation men were paid to cover a certain number of city blocks per day, no matter how long it took—with no overtime. And in 1968, their average weekly pay was a bit over $70 a week.33 In a sense, the situation in Memphis was one of those situations where workers were actually being exploited and mistreated, and where organizing the workers could perhaps produce improvements in pay and working conditions as it had in the earlier part of the twentieth century for garment workers and others.
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