"The Hydraulic Squeeze: Worker Safety, Automation, and the Compacting Refuse Truck in Memphis and New York’s 1968 Sanitation Strikes"

In 1968 there were a raft of sanitation worker strikes in cities across the United States. Of these strikes, two stand out for their far reaching political and cultural consequences. The first was the strike in New York City that caused garbage to rapidly piled up in the city’s streets, led to a bitter political standoff between Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Mayor John Lindsey, and ended with a dramatic victory for the sanitation workers’ union. The second was the strike in Memphis that began after a sanitation worker was killed by a compactor truck. That strike has a different legacy — it was resisted harshly by the city government and became a symbol of the national struggle for Civil Rights when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while in Memphis supporting the strike.
The divergent outcomes and implications of these two strikes sometimes lead historians to look at them separately, in their own specific geographic and political contexts. When considered against the broader history of waste labor in the US, however, this seems like an oversight. These strikes were connected on an organizational level and on a motivational level. They were about pay and pensions, of course, but they were also about worker safety, social standing, and the threat of automation.
In this paper, I want to focus how waste disposal technologies became a flashpoint issue in these labor disputes. The employment and maintenance of technologies like compactor trucks and incinerators were highly contentious issues in sanitation departments, as workers reckoned with the dangers of working with them and the effects of the technology on their jobs and their status. Waste disposal technologies often solved problems of labor efficiency and environmental effects in waste management, but they also often had unintended impacts on the very workers who operated them.