Dallas Garbage Workers Protest Being Paid Minimum Wage

You get up early in the morning. You brush your teeth, you shave, and you travel to work. Then, you hang off the back of a truck. Whether it's raining, or it's a day filled with blistering heat, you travel along exposed to the weather. Only inches in front of your face for the full length of your shift is a bin filled with contaminants that give off a sharp odor. Every few yards, the truck comes to a stop, and this is when you need to spring into action. You look for trash bags, and you lift them -- whether they are heavy or not; whether they are falling apart or not -- into the bin at the back of the truck.

And you only get paid $5.15 an hour.

Yes, that's right. $5.15 an hour.

Welcome to the city of Dallas. Sanitation workers are feeling unappreciated, and are considering walking out on strike, according to a WFAA news report.

I don't blame them. After paying their rent, they hardly have enough of a wage to buy a bag of burgers with. Workers say they need to work overtime just to make up the difference.

Whether these workers are protected by safeguards of a Union, I'm not sure, but if they were, this says little for the ability of a union to bargain with the city of Dallas. Perhaps they're receiving excellent medical coverage, but I think they will be in dire need of it if they're handling trash and riding behind a bin of contaminated waste all day long.

Job security is also an issue in such a line of work as this. Waste pickup in two other nearby cities, Southlake and Keller, was halted on December 18^th, 2006, when workers were dissatisfied with job conditions with their company, Allied Waste Services. Quoted in the Dallas Morning News, the vice president of Local 767, John Shorts said, ""The sticking point is job security. They want to take away the workers' right to job protection."

Often, sanitation work such as this is contracted out to independent contractors, whose affiliation with the city is loose. When their contract is ready to expire, they are vulnerable to fluctuations of the marketplace. Their company can easily be outbid by another. Plus, from the perspective of the workers, nothing is very certain. In addition to the low wages the city might choose to offer to the independent contractor, these independent contractors themselves can choose to pay the workers pennies as well.

If we expect these people to put up with all of our garbage, the least our cities can do shell out enough of a paycheck for them feel like they still have their integrity.