The African American Cultural Center at NC State has become home to the award-winning “I Am a Man” virtual exhibit. The exhibit portrays the perspective of black sanitation workers at the time of the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis and the ongoing civil rights movement.
The title of the exhibit originates from the signs held by the sanitation workers after they had encountered brutality at the hands of Memphis police. Sanitation workers in Memphis had gone on strike to protest immensely hazardous working conditions and inadequate pay.
The process of obtaining better working conditions and pay for these sanitation workers would not have been possible without the creation of their union. After two months of being on strike, the Memphis City Council was pressured into recognizing the sanitation union, thus guaranteeing them better wages. This is a concept that is not afforded to workers in North Carolina.
North Carolina has been a “right-to-work” state since 1947, meaning that mandatory union dues have been banned. Because of this rule, unions are effectively stripped of their collective bargaining ability. For the longest time, our state boasted the accolade of having the fewest unionized workers at 3 percent; our southern neighbor, South Carolina, now has the least.
While conditions for workers aren’t nearly as abhorrent as they were during the time of the sanitation strike, North Carolina still has a long, long way to go until conditions could be considered ideal.
As wages in North Carolina continue to remain stagnant, the prices of goods continue to rise due to inflation. Over a stretch of eight years, from 2007-2015, the cost of food and shelter outpaced the rise of wages, rising 20 percent and 14.5 percent, respectively. Wages, on the other hand, only increased by about 12 percent.
The working class often feels particularly squeezed by inflation because of the relative proportion of its income that goes toward inflated goods. Households at the lower end of income distribution spend over 40 percent of their budget on housing, while the top portion spends only about 30 percent of its income on it.
All this comes at a time where North Carolina currently still has a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, which is far below the recommended living wage. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed that the living wage in our state for a one-adult household is $11.79 per hour. A household with one adult and a child would need an income of $23.89 per hour to be considered a living wage. This is three times our current minimum wage and almost 50 percent more than the median wage of $16.71 per hour.
Recent legislation passed by the North Carolina House of Representatives attempted to do even more damage to the presence of unions. Instead of just having the right to work in our statutes, the legislation would amend the state constitution to add right-to-work legislation, making any efforts to reverse the policy even more difficult.
Even though the bill was never voted on in the state Senate, the push was still reaffirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court case Janus vs. AFSCME, which declared the power of labor unions to collect fees from workers unconstitutional.
The “I Am a Man” exhibit serves us as both a reminder of our dark past and a warning of what could lie in store for us in the future. It is up to us to decide whether we heed the advice of the past or continue into a precarious future of unprotected labor.
