At this historical moment of labor struggle by Memphis sanitation workers, national leaders in AFSCME viewed their actions as troublesome. When initially informed of the walkout, AFSCME’s field service director P.J. Ciampa privately stated, “I need a strike in Memphis like I need a hole in the head.” He also chewed out T.O. Jones for helping start an illegal strike, though eventually promised support from the national office.[4] This was yet another example in American labor history where the autonomous creative capacities of working folks reached far beyond the capacities of union bureaucrats to envision struggle towards fundamental change in workplace social relations. Support remained strong in the Memphis community with national attention and aid from the civil rights establishment arriving later. This proved both a blessing and a curse, especially when Martin Luther King Jr. publicly took up the cause of sanitation workers by late March. His notoriety brought great national attention and resources from the progressive establishment and media, while simultaneously boxing out more radical sanitation workers and Black Power community groups that fell outside the civil rights establishment’s reformist vision.

This showed prominently in a community march that King participated in. Police violently attacked some marchers and they fought back, smashing up property in downtown Memphis in the ensuing clash. King was appalled that these marchers did not follow his strict philosophy of nonviolence. However, some strikers and community members felt his intervention was opportunist and aloof from strategies and goals agreed among folks in Memphis. King’s actions and attitudes were a telltale sign of how relations between the civil rights establishment, supported by many labor bureaucrats in 1968, and rank-and-file workers as well as community groups would operate in future labor struggles. When King returned a few weeks later to lead another strike and was assassinated before he could do so, nearly all of liberal official society nationwide stood with the Memphis sanitation workers. Mayor Loeb and city officials conceded to striker demands. It appeared King’s martyrdom in service of the black working folks of Memphis would be unquestioned for generations to come.

However this would not be the case. Some of the same black leaders in the civil rights establishment who had sought to aid sanitation workers against racist Memphis city officials, would just nine years later be in the same position as Henry Loeb. By then they were willing to use the same strikebreaking tactics he had employed in his attempt to crush the 1968 strike. This complex relationship of class and race at the dawn of the era of black mayors and city officials, in their fight to contain the aspirations of community and workers’ self-management, comes into focus when we examine the 1977 Atlanta strike.

Atlanta Strike of 1977

The sanitation workers’ strike of 1977 was a culmination of frustrating and contradictory relations with a new generation of ruling elites. Pivotal was the relationship between city workers, represented by AFSCME Local 1644, and Mayor Maynard Jackson. This relationship began in 1970 when sanitation workers struck for union recognition, higher wages, and change in the unequal social relations between city management and rank-and-file employees. Their demands mirrored those of striking sanitation workers in Memphis just two years earlier. Atlanta’s white mayor, Sam Massell, battled back by firing workers and using prisoners from city jails for garbage removal.[5] Jackson, then vice-mayor and a former lawyer with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), publicly chastised Massell’s hard line tactics, supporting those on strike and calling their wages “a disgrace before God.”[6] This endeared Jackson to city workers, progressive whites, and many folks in the black community who helped elect him mayor in 1973. However, it was Jackson who, by March 1977, became a “disgrace before God” in the eyes of those same city sanitation workers he supported in 1970, and who had gotten out the vote for him two years later.

This contradiction showed Jackson’s success in preempting popular black support for the 1977 strike by municipal sanitation workers, nearly all of whom were black and who were easily the lowest-paid workers on the city government’s payroll. Jackson short-circuited union and worker attempts to build community support for the strike by portraying it as a racial attack by a white-led AFSCME on his administration. This, even though most of its local union leaders were black and had struck against the initial wishes of many whites in the union’s national leadership.[7] This relationship helped form the foundations of social relations between largely black-run city government and everyday black folks they governed. This was the logical outcome of civil rights and Black Power struggles for self-government, for these movements at their philosophical core sought a seat at the table of representative democracy, rather than turning that table over in favor of a democracy from below. For many everyday black folks Maynard Jackson represented Black Power, and they believed his rise to power meant the city’s social and economic patronage circles would trickle down to them.

In the minds of the new black officials and perhaps the majority of working folks in the black community, the actions of striking sanitation workers threatened what they believed was Black Power finally achieved. The perceived gains for the black community would not be uprooted by class struggle under the watch of black officials and their supporters. This relationship continues today in Atlanta, where black officials receive wide support among folks of various class and ethnic backgrounds throughout the city.

The 1977 strike occurred in two separate waves. The first played out during four weeks in January and February. It began with sanitation men wildcatting when they were told to report to work in cold weather conditions. The city and union had agreed employees did not have to work if the temperature was below 25 degrees, which it was on the 18th and 19th of January. City bosses ignored this agreement and docked employee pay. Already upset their demands for higher wages were falling on deaf ears, many sanitation workers walked off the job for a week in February when city officials refused to reinstate pay.[8] Jackson and city officials refused to give in, demanding employees return to work or face termination. The move caused the ranks to waiver, with the majority of AFSCME Local 1644 staying on the job. A solidarity strike among waterworks employees also failed to materialize. The city agreed to pay only half the wages docked. AFSCME local organizer Leamon Hood said the strike was not so much about the pay as “the principle of someone sitting in a warm office and telling you to go out in cold weather when you couldn’t even get the ice off the cans.”[9] It was the idea that sanitation workers should manage their workplace of their own accord, free of bosses sitting in the warm offices of city hall.

Another theme evident was that bosses failed to follow agreed upon work stipulations, and held it against workers when they dare follow the rules. This demonstrated the contempt city bosses had towards any terms of the contract or any other agreements favorable to working folks, showing how tenuous labor-management contracts really are. Won through the struggle and self-activity of workers, not dreamt from the minds of labor bureaucrats, contracts that supposedly govern workplace social conditions are never set in stone. Their gains must constantly be guarded by working folks against bosses who would assume they never existed in the first place. The strikes of January and February would serve as a prelude to events occurring some weeks later.

Bitter and emboldened by their experience in January and February, sanitation workers and AFSCME Local 1644 continued pressing the Jackson administration for fifty-cent-per-hour wage increases to a salary averaging $7,000 annually. This amount was below the national poverty line. Jackson refused, claiming raises would put the city budget into deficit. With Jackson up for reelection and seeking to shore up support among white business elites and middle classes, he did not want to be the first mayor since 1937 to take the city to the bank.[10] Jackson claimed he felt sanitation workers deserved wage increases, but the city’s economic bottom line was obviously more important. AFSCME countered with full-page ads in the New York Times and Atlanta Constitution lambasting Jackson, claiming city budgets showed multi-million dollar surpluses that easily could cover wage increases for sanitation workers.[11] The line in the sand was drawn, as it was clear Jackson, though claiming he “felt their pain,” would not acquiesce to sanitation worker demands.

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