‘I Am A Man’: New Orleans Sanitation Workers Strike for Dignity

In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. rallied sanitation workers to protest for the respect they deserved—now that legacy is being revived in New Orleans.

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On March 18, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Memphis, Tennessee, to show solidarity with striking sanitation workers. “Our society must come to respect the sanitation worker,” King told the workers. “He is as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, disease is rampant.”

These words reverberate today with sanitation workers, or “hoppers,” in New Orleans, Louisiana who have been on strike since May 6 to demand higher wages, weekly hazard pay, and personal protective equipment. Metro Service Group, a private disposal firm, subcontracts hoppers to People Ready, a temp agency, that only pays $10.25 per hour.

After walking off the job in May, the hoppers were fired and replaced by inmates from the Livingston Detention Facility, a nearby correctional facility. By state law, these incarcerated laborers are only paid 13 percent of the hoppers’ hourly rate, or $1.33. So far, both Metro Service Group and People Ready have refused to meet with the hoppers or the City Waste Union, a union the workers recently formed.

Hoppers, whose job is to jump on and off of garbage trucks, play a pivotal role in maintaining public health; without them, the streets of New Orleans would quickly fill with festering waste.

This portrait series is a tribute to the hoppers standing up to reclaim their voices. The words “I AM A MAN,” a slogan of the striking sanitation workers in 1968, ring as true today in New Orleans as they did fifty-two years ago in Memphis.