“All Labor Has Dignity” — The Case for Wage Equity for Essential Health Care Workers

Abstract

In the early months of 1968, the city of Memphis, Tennessee, witnessed a growing public outcry and a series of strikes organized by more than 1000 sanitation workers, the majority of whom were Black.¹ Earlier that year, two employees — 36-year-old Echol Cole and 30-year-old Robert Walker — had been crushed to death in a garbage-truck compactor as they sought shelter from inclement weather, a practice that had become common after a citywide order prohibiting rest stations for sanitation workers in local neighborhoods. Long subjected to low wages and negligible employee protections, Memphis sanitation workers — and indeed, all essential but low-paid Black workers — soon gained international attention and became a focal point in the civil rights movement. Images of sanitation employees holding signs proclaiming “I Am a Man,” which laid bare the rampant discrimination that had denied workers their personhood and agency, would soon come to define the protests. To an audience of 25,000 people in a local Memphis church on March 18, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., offered both consolation and strength. “All labor has dignity,” he declared — an iconic line that has since bound conceptions of racial equity with those of economic and social justice.