Groping the Trash

November 11, 2006

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As a garbage sorter, I imagine, you know you have signed up for filthy, oppressive, and unhealthy work well before you show up for your first day on the job. And you are presumably well aware of the fact that you’re doing it for a pittance you can't properly feed your family on. It's a fact you must somehow have reconciled yourself to, at least temporarily. But consider for a moment what it would do to your worldview.

For about seven years, the company that runs the Sunnyvale SMaRT station, Green Team/Zanker, added insult to injury, holding up a payraise for the duration of a skirmish with the city of Sunnyvale over what is the sorters' due. They paid about $8 per hour (and wanted it counted as just about $10 because they threw in not quite $2 for benefits on top of the regular wage). The total amounts to just about half what sorters get in San Jose.

The Department of Industrial Relations did a survey setting the prevailing wage at $20.80 an hour in 2004. Green Team Zanker protested. The state revised its estimate to $14.93 an hour early in 2006. Again Green Team/Zanker protested. Finally the Teamsters settled with the company for $11.53 an hour in October 2006, together with some back pay that comes to a little over $90 for every month a sorter has worked between April 2002 and June 2006. Another version of pittance.

Someone who's been at the SMaRT station all along will get some $3,500 in back pay. However, if this person had made $11.53 all along, she would have received $12,000 more than she got. And if she had been paid at what the state considers the prevailing wage, she would have received some $40,000 more than she got.

This kind of thing raises some gnarly questions. What is the value of the work these people do? What is the cost to them of grubbing around in filth and smut to reduce the amount of trash we put in our scarce landfill space? Should we pay them as little as we can get away with or do we think we should compensate them fairly? And how much profit is enough profit? How high a fee is too high a fee for garbage collection? Do we shoulder the burdens of our affluence or do we let someone else pay the price?

There's no doubt in my mind that $11.53 an hour is insufficient compensation for the hardship of working the garbage sorting line. Fortunately, the city of Sunnyvale is making an hourly wage of $18.52 for sorters a condition for a new contract, which is to start next year. Whether this is going to mean that collection fees will go up by a few bucks a month I don't know, but if you had seen what it is like, I can't imagine you would complain.

Marijke Rijsberman

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