They worked hard in a demanding, physical job — and they’re angry that they didn’t get paid by a Bronx carting company that shut down in November after its trucks killed two people.
“We should be entitled to what we’re owed,” said Troy Williams, 33, who claims Sanitation Salvage shorted him more than $100,000 in pay and benefits over the 13 years he was one of its trash haulers.
Williams and other ex-Sanitation Salvage workers plan a protest Monday on Martin Luther King Day. The workers remember that the day before his assassination in 1968, King delivered a speech in solidarity with striking sanitation workers in Memphis.
“The same things that Martin Luther King, Jr. was protesting years ago with trash workers are still happening today,” said Teamsters Local 813 organizer Allan Henry, who has been working with the trash haulers.
Many Sanitation Salvage workers worked off the books for years, their pay fixed at $80 per shift, no matter how many hours they worked.
Williams earned the $80-per-shift off-the-books wage when he started at the company. Sometimes, he worked more than 12 hours on a shift, he said.
Williams moved up the ranks and eventually became an on-the-books hourly employee. When the company shut down in November, Williams said, he was owed years’ worth of overtime and at least a week’s worth of vacation time.
“They wore me out,” Williams said. At least, he said, he learned something over the years about his rights as a worker. “I went to that company as a mouse, and I left as a man,” he said.
Talli Kebbeh, 23, started working for the hauler in 2015, and says he’d sometimes work 18-hour shifts. He never made more than $80 per shift.
Kenneth Hernandez, 27, started working for the company in 2011, and was formally put on the books in 2012.
In 2017, he broke his finger on the job, and was offered only $300 per month in worker’s compensation.
After missing four shifts, Hernandez decided to go back to work with a cast. Those days were taken out of his sick day total, he says, despite the fact that he didn’t give the company approval to do so.
Hernandez and Williams both have found new jobs at other trash haulers since Sanitation Salvage’s closure. Kebbeh says that he’s now in school.
Alex Moore, a Teamsters communication director, estimates that despite the bone-chilling weather forecast, 30 to 50 former Sanitation Salvage employees will show up at the protest Monday at Sanitation Salvage’s headquarters on Manida St. in Hunts Point.
The protest comes as the city’s Department of Sanitation is working to roll out a new policy surrounding commercial waste zones that would require private trash haulers to bid on the right to operate within fixed areas of the city.
If implemented, it would help curb the kinds of shoddy practices that companies like Sanitation Salvage have leveraged for years, Moore says.
Two people died after being hit by Sanitation Salvage trucks — one in November 2016, and the other in April 2018. The same driver was behind the wheel in both crashes.
The city Business Integrity Commission suspended the company’s license for a month last year over a “pattern of unsafe business operations that creates an imminent danger to life and property.”
The suspension was a blow from which Sanitation Salvage could not recover. Unable to find a buyer, the company’s owners decided to close up in November.
