By David Cruz
Correspondent
In his final days Dr. Martin Luther King was helping to organize sanitation worker in Memphis, the low-wage, invisible workforce doing the unglamorous jobs for the comfort of others. His message then echoed throughout a demonstration by workers at Newark Airport — cabin cleaners, porters and others — fighting for wage and benefit increases.
“It is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages,” he told an audience in a speech the day before he was assassinated.
“We know if Dr. King were here and alive today, he would be marching someplace and maybe even be with us today, saying that we want a livable wage,” said Ronald Tuff, Pastor at First Bethel Baptist Church in Irvington. “We want to be able to feed our families and to call for the end of poverty.”
Maintenance Worker Deandre King said “Airport employees work their fingers to the bone but most of us don’t have health benefits. It’s not right that skycaps, baggage handlers and wheelchair attendants work in unsafe conditions, face intimidation and harassment.”
Workers at the airport say the average $10 an hour salary, a rate imposed by the Port Authority in 2014, amounts to little more than poverty wages. They challenged their bosses to survive and feed their families on $400 a week. Today they had support from a number of elected officials and civil rights leaders.
“Fifty years later after Martin Luther King marched with folks in Selma and marched with sanitation workers in Memphis. Still today we don’t have fair wages for people,” said Assemblyman Jamel Holley.
Many of the airport workers are not unionized. Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union have been trying to organize workers here with just limited success. The fight for a $15 an hour salary has been a rallying point and today they hoped to up the ante with civil disobedience in the tradition of King and the civil rights movement, marching from Terminal B to Terminal C, under the watchful eye of almost two dozen Port Authority police, hoping to be arrested.
“Your actions are causing a harmful and dangerous condition, thereby unlawful,” snapped a Port Authority cop. “If you don’t disperse the area immediately, you will be subject to arrest.”
With that about 10 demonstrators were cuffed and taken into custody.
“We are not going to stop today,” said 32BJ District Director Patricia Arcila-Cabrera. “We’re going to continue fighting for the dream — the American Dream that everyone deserves to have a fair life in justice and dignity.”
Their co-workers applauded them as they were taken into custody.
“I’m really proud of them because they’re fighting for their rights,” said Armando Trujillo, of Trenton.
“I think they did the right thing because that’s the way to be supportive of the workers here at Newark Airport,” added Marco Jurado, of Hillside. “I mean that’s the only way.”
The union says that those who left in handcuffs today are continuing the tradition of MLK and they say they’ll be back here again very soon.