As I recall from high school Latin, “scrute” is trash, and the word scrutinize, from which it is derived, means to pick through the trash. Using data from the Governments Division of the Census Bureau, and the New York State and U.S. Departments of Labor, this essay will pick through the trash at the NYC Department of Sanitation to find out what kind of deal we are getting. That isn’t as easy as for, say, schools and policing, which are provided in every locality, because not everyone has public trash collection. But I did the best I can, and from what I can see, our deal stinks.
If you downloaded the data I attached to this post http://www.r8ny.com/blog/larry_littlefield/where_the_excess_and_below_average_government_jobs_and_pay_are.html,
you know that in March 2005 New York City employed 122 full time equivalent workers in the Solid Waste Management category for every 100,000 residents. The national average was 37, the average for the rest of New York State 41, and the average for New Jersey 50. But in many areas local governments contract with private carters to pick up the trash, and in others residents are required to make those arrangements themselves (like New York’s commercial businesses).
Private carter employment doesn’t show up in public employment statistics. But it does show up in ES202 (covered employment and wages) data. And as that same table shows, thanks to that commercial trash, in the second quarter of 2005 New York City had 27 private solid waste collection workers per 100,000 residents. That’s just seven less than the national average of 35, and just 24 less than the rest of New York State at 51. Adding the two together, it takes 149 solid waste workers per 100,000 residents to pick up New York City’s trash, compared with a national average of just 72, and an average of 92 in the rest of New York State.
That’s a lot of employees, but I’m not an expert in solid waste collection, and it is possible that it takes more manpower here. Although since the buildings are closer together, and you don’t need to travel as far to pick up trash from the next household, I would have guessed the opposite was true. It is also possible that some of the solid waste collectors elsewhere are “off the books.” ES202 data is based on unemployment insurance records.
The average pay of public solid waste workers in New York City compared with the rest of the country, however, is more of a direct comparison. In the second quarter of 2005, the average private sector worker in New York City, excluding the high-paid finance and insurance industries, earned 27.5% more than the national average. That is what the rest of us earn, and a factor it the cost of living all of us face. On an annual average basis (fourth quarters are better), that ratio is usually 33% more than average. Meanwhile, New York City’s solid waste public employees earned 90% more than the national average. That is also consistent with what I find year after year. In no other category of public service do New York City’s public employees earn so much more than average. In New Jersey, on the other hand, where private sector workers earned 19.9% more than the national average, solid waste public employees earned almost exactly the same as the national average, and were thus much worse off than average in that high cost of living state.
I used to be of two minds about this.
On the one hand, sanitation is a dirty, dangerous, physically taxing, low prestige job that requires heavy lifting in all weather. You have to be strong and tough to do this work. As a matter of fairness, I would want my neighbors who did such work on my behalf to be well paid. Having lived elsewhere for a few years, I can tell you that whereas other parts of the country may be less tolerant on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation etc., the New York area has a class problem. I wouldn’t want to stand with those who act as though those who work with their hands are lesser human beings.
On the other hand, while there are many reasons picking up garbage is a job many people would not choose to do, it is also a job many people are qualified to do. Machines have made brawn less valuable, relative to brains and manual skill, yet there are plenty of men who have more of the former and less of the latter. Heavy lifting by tens of thousands of stevedores has been replaced by skillful crane operation by far fewer, for example. Sanitation is one of the few pure brawn jobs out there. Lots of people would be willing to take that job for less than what we pay here, and there is if anything a surplus of tough, strong men available. So they can be had for less. Nationally, fees cover two-thirds of all public trash collection by public employees. It is a fee supported service, just like water and sewer in New York. But in New York, fees cover virtually none of the solid waste bill, which is paid for by taxes mixed in with everything else. If New Yorkers were charged for solid waste collection, and compared those charges with what their friends and relatives elsewhere had to pay for the same public service, they would not be amused.
Recent events have made one of these offsetting arguments more important than the other. Unionized solid water collectors are not going to be my neighbors anymore. Over the objections of the City of NewYork (this was before Bloomberg cut a similar deal with DC 37), the New York State Legislature passed, and Governor Pataki signed, a bill to allow residents of the suburbs to take these highly-paid jobs funded by my tax dollars.
A crusty old demographer at City Planning once told me something he had heard from a crusty old pol knowledgeable about sanitation. Why does New York City require a high school diploma to pick up the trash? Because among Hispanics and Black Non-Hispanics, only those going on to college bother to get high school diplomas, whereas among non-Hispanic whites, everyone knows that the diploma is the ticket to a decent job. So, according to the EEO file from the 2000 census, nearly half of all those employed as refuse and recycling collectors in New York were non-Hispanic whites – and many of those presumably work for private carters. While the national average for this occupation is 55% white non-Hispanic, people and in general are more likely to be white non-Hispanic nationally. Among high school dropouts in this occupation nationally, only 17.4% were white non-Hispanic.
If the high school diploma requirement had been repealed by the state legislature, instead of the residency requirement, it’s likely that in the future many poor New York City Black and Latino men would have gotten a decent job picking up the trash. But not now. In 1960, New York City residents were more likely to be in the labor force, working or looking for work, than the national average, but NYC labor force participation has been far below average since then, and the low employment rate of Black men is a big reason. Now that the jobs will be going to residents of white, middle class suburban towns, rather than struggling New York City neighborhoods, does it make sense to continue the longstanding principle of “parity,” under which sanitation workers earn 90% of policemen and firemen (which at one time meant Italians were worth 90% of Irish)? Can you really use that yardstick, now that all the Irish and Italians have married each other? How about this as a measure of parity? Nationally, in March 2005 the average police officer in the United States earned $4,754; the average sanitation employee (including managers) earned $3,380, or 71% as much.
Or, how about this compromise. The city objected to sanitation workers living far away, because their assistance is required to plow non-arterial streets during snowstorms, and the city was afraid that if the roads were blocked, the sanitation worker might not show up. How about hiring teens to shovel those streets by hand? Perhaps it would cost less. Perhaps it would cost more. But either way, you wouldn’t have to pay more for pensions due to overtime, and you wouldn’t have to wait three days for the trash to be picked up while the trash collectors recovered from 24 hour of plowing. Black and Latino teens just don’t get jobs in NYC compared with elsewhere, except through those bogus youth employment schemes financed by “riot money.” How about real pay for real work that is of real value to their neighbors?
And how about contracting out mixed-use trash recycling collection? It isn’t that heavy, it doesn’t smell bad, and those willing to hustle could probably set up small businesses picking it up in vans. Make a decent living too, if they hustled, while charging less than it costs the city today. And in the next fiscal crisis, perhaps we wouldn’t have to hold our recyclables for two weeks (four weeks if there is a holiday) because the city can’t afford to send its high-priced sanitation workers out on overtime to fill one-third of a truck in their contract-specified collection routes.. All Black and Latino workers, I’d bet, many the sort of ex-offenders coming home to find out crime is the only available job, even now.
The existing union could continue to pick up non-recyclable trash and paper, at least for now. And enjoy life out in Suffolk County. But just remember folks, some of use are looking at your pay with a much colder eye. I’ve been looking at these numbers for a long time. I’m blogging about it now.