The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century

Jerry Wurf (1919–1981)

CREDIT: Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University

IN APRIL 1968 Jerry Wurf, president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) flew to Memphis to support African American garbage workers who had gone on strike not only to protest unsafe conditions, abusive white supervisors, and low wages, but also to gain recognition for their union. With the help of key AFSCME staffers, and in coalition with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and local black ministers (led by Rev. James Lawson), Wurf helped draw attention to the sanitation workers’ struggle.

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. also flew to Memphis to support the strikers. He addressed 15,000 people—black workers, preachers, students, and a broad spectrum of the black community, joined by white unionists and liberals—at the Mason Temple. King told them, “You are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages.” Wurf, a longtime civil rights activist, was one of the other speakers on the podium. In his deep, foghorn voice, he talked about the injustices shared by blacks and workers, then turned to King and said, “We know, brother, we’ve been the same places.” When a local black minister rose to speak, he pointed to Wurf and said, “This man’s skin is white. But he is a brother.”

Wurf believed that garbage workers, secretaries, hospital orderlies, emergency medical technicians, childcare providers, highway laborers, office clerks, janitors, social workers, mental health workers, and food service workers deserved decent pay, health care benefits, and pensions. They should not have to give up their hopes, or their rights, just because they worked for government.

As AFSCME’s president, Wurf was the labor movement’s most important leader in organizing public employees. Through aggressive organizing and skillful bargaining, AFSCME grew from 220,000 members in 1964, when Wurf was elected its president, to over 1 million members at the time of his death in 1981. Other unions organized teachers, prison guards, and other public employees. Wurf’s union focused on raising the standard of living for low-paid workers, who were disproportionately blacks and Latinos.

This dramatic growth occurred at a time when overall union membership was falling. The peak unionization rate was 35 percent during the mid-1950s. By 2010, it had plummeted to 12 percent. Today, government employees make up over half of the 15 million union members in the United States. As historian Joseph McCartin observed in Dissent magazine in spring 2011, “By default, public sector unions have become the single most effective social force capable of speaking out for a justice economy.” Wurf’s pathbreaking success in organizing government workers in the 1960s and 1970s is what has kept the labor movement alive today.

Wurf was born to Jewish émigrés from Austria-Hungary. His father was a tailor and textile worker. At the age of four, Wurf developed polio and spent much of his youth in a wheelchair. For the rest of his life, he walked with a limp, which did not stop him from joining picket lines or protest marches. As a Depression-era teenager in New York, he joined the Young People’s Socialist League and honed his skills at soapbox oratory, passing out leaflets and debating the fine points of political theory. Wurf briefly attended New York University but dropped out to change the world. He wound up making change as a cashier at a local cafeteria, hoping to organize his fellow workers into the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union. In the early 1940s Wurf was such a persistent and militant organizer that the Yiddish-speaking cafeteria owners he was opposing called him Mal’ach Hamaves, or “angel of death.”

In 1947 Wurf joined the staff of District Council 37, AFSCME’s New York City affiliate, and soon became its director. He inherited a corrupt, do-nothing union with fewer than 1,000 members and transformed it into a potent organizing force. By the time he left to become AFSCME’s national president, District 37 had 38,000 members. Wurf’s biggest breakthrough came in 1958, when he mounted a successful campaign to persuade New York mayor Robert Wagner Jr. to issue Executive Order 49, which gave unions the right to organize the city’s employees. (The mayor was the son of Senator Robert F. Wagner Sr., sponsor of the prolabor National Labor Relations Act, often called the Wagner Act.)

The plight of Memphis’s African American sanitation workers posed a major challenge to AFSCME, which had not yet made major progress organizing public employees in the South. On January 31, 1968, twenty-two black workers were sent home when it began raining. White employees were not sent home. When the rain stopped after an hour or so, the white workers continued to work and were paid for the full day, while the black workers lost a day’s pay. The next day, two sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning city garbage truck.

These two incidents epitomized the workers’ long-standing grievances. The Memphis sanitation workers earned an average of about $1.70 per hour. Forty percent of them qualified for welfare to supplement their poverty-level salaries. They had almost no health care benefits, pensions, or vacations. White supervisors called black workers “boy” and would arbitrarily send them home without pay for minor infractions that would be overlooked if done by white workers. The workers asked Memphis’s mayor, Henry Loeb, and the city council to improve their working conditions, but they refused to do so.

On February 12, 1,300 black sanitation workers went on strike. They demanded a pay raise, overtime pay, merit promotions without regard to race, and recognition by the city of AFSCME as their bargaining agent. For the next several months, city officials refused to negotiate with the union. In private, Mayor Loeb reportedly told associates, “I’ll never be known as the mayor who signed a contract with a Negro union.”

With the help of key AFSCME staffers and in coalition with black community leaders, Wurf helped organize marches and rallies to publicize the strike. In the midst of this frenzy of activity, a local judge found Wurf guilty of violating an injunction prohibiting the city garbage workers from striking. Wurf ignored the order and kept the strike going, raising money to help the strikers pay for food and rent.

Wurf was contemptuous of Mayor Loeb’s racism and antiunion hostility, and he figured the movement’s best strategy was to outmaneuver him by getting the city council to support the workers. On February 22, more than 700 workers packed a city council hearing to demand a settlement. The next day, Wurf helped orchestrate a mass march from city hall to Mason Temple. The Memphis police attacked the union members, ministers, and AFSCME leaders indiscriminately, using clubs and mace. Police harassed them and even arrested strike leaders for jaywalking. On March 5, 117 strikers and supporters were arrested for sitting in at city hall. Six days later, hundreds of students skipped high school to participate in a march led by black ministers. The attacks cemented the alliance between the union and the black religious and community leaders.

Memphis Negroes are almost entirely a working people. Our needs are identical with labor’s needs. That is why Negroes support labor’s demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.

The next day, James Earl Ray assassinated King. As Time magazine noted at the time, “Ironically, it was the violence of Martin Luther King’s death rather than the nonviolence of his methods that ultimately broke the city’s resistance” and led to the strike settlement. After President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered federal troops to Memphis and instructed Undersecretary of Labor James Reynolds to mediate the conflict and settle the strike, Wurf led the negotiations with city officials to reach an agreement. The city council passed a resolution recognizing the union. The fourteen-month contract included union dues check-off, a grievance procedure, and wage increases of fifteen cents per hour.

“Let us never forget,” Wurf said at the meeting where union members ratified their new contract, “that Martin Luther King, on a mission for us, was killed in this city. He helped bring us this victory.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, Wurf’s views on organizing unorganized workers and on civil rights and his opposition to the Vietnam War put him at odds with AFL-CIO president George Meany and the leaders of other unions. As a member of the AFL-CIO’s executive council and one of its vice presidents, he was often a dissenting voice on key issues confronting the labor movement. In 1973, one member told Time magazine that the votes of the executive council “usually range from 25 to 1 to 34 to 1, depending on how many other union chiefs are present to vote down Jerry Wurf.”

In October 14, 1973, on the opening day of the annual AFL-CIO convention, Wurf authored a blistering column in the Washington Post entitled “Labor’s Battle with Itself,” attacking his fellow union leaders for “fighting each other for the right to represent workers rather than working together to organize the unorganized.” He proposed that the labor movement, which had 113 affiliated unions, reorganize itself into twenty or thirty large unions that could focus on organizing a particular industry or sector. The AFL-CIO leaders rejected Wurf’s proposal without much discussion, but the same ideas resurfaced three decades later, this time proposed by Andy Stern, the president of the Service Employees International Union.