Sebastian Feculak lives in an unincorporated Durham community. The 30-year-old staffer with the Ironworkers Union Local 844 had last Monday, Marin Luther King Jr. Day, off of work. He expected to sleep in that morning until he was awakened by a clatter of trash bins outside of his home.
It was between 6:30 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. The county trash collectors were hard at work.
“You gotta be kidding me,” was Feculak’s first thought. “I got the day off. My mindset was from the perspective of the workers. Either they’re being paid double time, or they didn’t get the day off.”
A great many Americans and people around the globe paused to reflect last week on the life of a man who spent his life teaching the values of peace only to be violently cut down by an assassin’s bullet on April 4, 1968.
Exactly one year to the day he died, King had delivered a sermon decrying the war in Vietnam. His life was cut short in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was lending his support for a sanitation workers’ strike.
Given that history, one would think sanitation workers all over the country would have off work for the man’s holiday, especially here in Durham. King visited the city five times between 1956 and 1964, according to the Durham Civil Rights Heritage Project (DCRHP).
Fatefully, America’s greatest civil rights hero was scheduled to visit the Bull City a sixth time.
“King was to have been in Durham on April 4, 1968; instead, that day, he was murdered on a motel balcony in Memphis,” according to the DCRHP.
Feculak sent a letter to members of Durham’s board of county commissioners the next day, asking why in the world the sanitation workers were hauling and lifting garbage bins on King’s holiday.
“I was surprised to see GFL Environmental workers picking up recycling … when most other departments and institutions were closed,” Feculak said. “Not only that, but of all the federal holidays, it felt like an insult that workers were working on a day for Martin Luther King Jr., who died when attending solidarity actions for the Sanitation Workers strike.”
GFL Environmental is headquartered in Ontario, Canada and is one of the largest of its kind in North America, according to its website.
With services that include solid and liquid waste management, GFL Environmental’s corporate footprint stretches across Canada and more than half of the United States, with more than 19,500 employees and projected revenues this year of more than $7.4 billion, according to the website.
GFL Environmental officials did not respond to an INDY email seeking comment about requiring trash collectors to work on MLK Day.
In his letter, Feculak told the commissioners he called the county’s waste management department and was told that Durham County has a five-year contract with GFL Environmental that does not include MLK Day as a paid holiday, nor Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day.
Nor do sanitation workers with GFL receive holiday pay and a day off for July 4, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Juneteenth, or any other observed holidays, Feculak wrote.
“And I imagine, they may not receive holiday pay for anyone of different faiths,” he concluded. “I hope the county can resolve this.”
Support for a national holiday to honor King’s legacy began soon after he was assassinated. President Ronald Reagan in 1983 signed a bill into law for a King holiday that was not officially observed until 1986.
Support for the holiday was not without opposition, particularly from the former U.S. senators Jesse Helms and John East, to the state’s everlasting shame.
Today, many people observe the MLK Day of Service by volunteering in their communities. Indeed, in 2010, former president Barack Obama celebrated the day by volunteering at a Washington, D.C. soup kitchen.
Given his public comments about the value of work, Dr. King probably would have applauded the sanitation employees working on his day. The civil rights icon said “all labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”
King may have had sanitation workers in mind when he famously said:
“If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music; sweep streets so well that all the host of Heaven and earth will have to pause and say, “Here lived a great street sweeper, who swept his job well.”
King’s emphasis on the value of a work notwithstanding, Durham County should not get a pass for requiring sanitation workers no less, to work on a day honoring a man who gave his life for many of the values Bull City leaders claim to hold near and dear.
Meanwhile, the city’s sanitation workers were given the day off.
Durham city spokeswoman Beverly Thompson told the INDY that King’s legacy is important to the city and that most of the city’s employees have the holiday off, unless there are unusual circumstances requiring them to work — water main breaks, [or] severe weather.”
Thompson noted that the collectors who do work on paid holidays are paid overtime, and that some “often do volunteer to work for the few hours they are needed on that day.”
In the meantime, Feculak, who works as a political coordinator lobbying on behalf of workers across the Carolinas, says it’s about respecting King’s legacy, and county workers.
“Out of all the places in North Carolina, this is the one spot where the King holiday should be respected,” Feculak says.
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