Trashed: Inside The Deadly World Of Private Garbage Collection
Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.
Shortly before 5 a.m. on a recent November night, a garbage truck with a New York Yankees decal on the side sped through a red light on an empty street in the Bronx. The two workers aboard were running late. Before long, they would start getting calls from their boss. “Where are you on the route? Hurry up, it shouldn’t take this long.” Theirs was one of 133 garbage trucks owned by Action Carting, the largest waste company in New York City, which picks up the garbage and recycling from 16,700 businesses.
Going 20 miles per hour above the city’s 25 mph limit, the Action truck ran another red light with a worker, called a “helper,” hanging off the back. Just a few miles away the week before, another man had died in the middle of the night beneath the wheels of another company’s garbage truck. The Action truck began driving on the wrong side of the road in preparation for the next stop. The workers were racing to pick up as much garbage as possible before dawn arrived and the streets filled with slow traffic. “This route should take you twelve hours,” the boss often told them. “It shouldn’t take you fourteen hours.”
“In the history of the company I am sure there have been times where supervisors have inappropriately rushed people,” said Action Carting CEO Ron Bergamini. “They shouldn’t be, and they’d be fired if they ever told people to run red lights or speed. But you have to find the balance between efficiency and safety, and that’s a struggle we work on every day. But you cannot turn around and say, ‘Hey just take your time, go as long as you want.’” He pointed out that workers can anonymously report concerns to a safety hotline. As to the questions of overwork and driver fatigue, Bergamini responded, “That’s a struggle that the whole industry has — of getting people to work less.”
In the universe of New York’s garbage industry, Action is considered a company that takes the high road. A union shop, it offers starting pay of about $16 per hour for helpers and $23 for drivers, far more than many other companies. And unlike some other companies, Action provides high-visibility gear and conducts safety meetings. But since 2008, the company’s trucks have killed five pedestrians or cyclists.
In New York City overall, private sanitation trucks killed seven people in 2017. By contrast, city municipal sanitation trucks haven’t caused a fatality since 2014.
Pedestrians aren’t the only casualties, and Action isn’t the only company involved in fatalities. Waste and recycling work is the fifth most fatal job in America — far more deadly than serving as a police officer or a firefighter. Loggers have the highest fatality rate, followed by fishing workers, aircraft pilots and roofers. From the collection out on garbage trucks, to the processing at transfer stations and recycling centers, to the dumping at landfills, the waste industry averages about one worker fatality a week. Nationally, in 2016, 82 percent of waste-worker deaths occurred in the private sector.
There are two vastly different worlds of garbage in New York City: day and night. By day, 7,200 uniformed municipal workers from the city’s Department of Sanitation go door-to-door, collecting the residential trash. Like postal workers, they tend to follow compact routes. They work eight-hour days with time-and-a-half for overtime and snow removal and double-time for Sundays. With a median base pay of $69,000 plus health care, a pension, almost four weeks of paid vacation and unlimited sick days, the Department of Sanitation workforce is overwhelmingly full time and unionized. It’s also 55 percent white, and 91 percent male.
But come nightfall, an army of private garbage trucks from more than 250 sanitation companies zigzag across town in ad hoc fashion, carting away the trash and recycling from every business — every bodega, restaurant and office building in the five boroughs. Those private carters remove more than half of the city’s total waste.
Since each business chooses its own carter, a dozen garbage trucks might converge on a single block over the course of a night. In one five-block stretch near Rockefeller Center, for example, 27 garbage companies stop at 86 businesses, according to an analysis of city data by ProPublica and the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute. Plenty of other U.S. cities split trash collection along the same lines — residential waste on the municipal side, commercial waste on the private side — but New York is singular in the scale of private collection operations.
Many waste companies pay workers a flat fee, some as little as $80 a shift, no matter the hours, with no health benefits, overtime pay or retirement plans. The practice of employing helpers off the books is widespread, according to a 2016 report by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration. The workforce is more than 60 percent minority, and more than half of Latino workers and about a third of black workers earn less than $35,000 annually. Many of these jobs are non-union, and while the drivers tend to be full-time employees, the helpers are often contract workers with unstable hours — some scrambling to work enough to feed their families, others clocking 18-hour or longer days. A May 2016 study by the nonprofit New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health found that the underpayment or nonpayment of wages is “rampant in the commercial waste industry.”
Five Star Carting, the third biggest garbage company in New York City, with 10,400 customers, has received numerous citations from the New York State Department of Labor for underpayment or nonpayment of wages. In 2015, after two Five Star workers testified at a City Council hearing about their long hours, low pay and unsafe work conditions, they were fired. (They were later reinstated but only after labor advocates and City Council members organized a rally outside of Five Star’s headquarters.) Five Star declined to respond to detailed questions.
Private garbage trucks are ubiquitous on New York’s streets after dark, yet the human effort involved remains largely invisible to most people. To travel deep into the world of New York’s midnight trash collection is to enter a realm where people often toil in grave danger for low pay. Those perils are easy to miss in the roar of a diesel engine, the rush of a giant truck and a waft of scent from a bag we’re all happy to see somebody else remove.
My first night following a garbage truck was on a sweltering Thursday in July 2016. After many rejections, I had persuaded a driver to let me follow him for a shift. He was taking a big chance: Workers can get fired in an instant, but he was willing to risk his job to take me into his world. What I saw opened the door to a far more complex investigation than I’d anticipated, one that involved dozens of interviews over 18 months with drivers, helpers, regulators, owners and experts; combing through thousands of pages of civil and criminal records; reviewing hundreds of documents obtained through public-records requests; and building a database of federal truck inspection records.
That night in 2016, Alex Caban prepared for his shift as a garbage truck driver at #1 Waste and Recycler. New York was then in the middle of the city’s longest heat wave in 14 years. In his apartment above a deli in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Caban dressed quickly in a black T-shirt, black Dickies and black leather work boots. Hot trash and its many leaky juices will soil anything lighter. Caban, a garbage man of three years, does not like to look dirty.
Caban snacked on banana chips while he drove his minivan to the company yard, a gravel lot on an industrial stretch of Pacific Street in Brooklyn where freight trucks, buses and pit bulls are kept behind chain link fences. He prefers to drive to and from work so that when he heads home at the end of his shift soaked in what workers call “garbage juice,” he is not the person in the subway car that other riders move away from. “They think you’re a bum,” Caban explained, wrinkling his face for effect. An animated 45-year-old, Caban spoke in a Puerto Rican staccato, one thought tumbling excitedly into the next. He looked a decade younger with his wire-rimmed glasses, shaved head, and — when he wasn’t working — a button-down shirt and a brimmed hat.
Caban arrived at the yard. Awaiting him was Bilal, 18, an immigrant from Yemen (he asked to be identified only by his first name). A “helper,” Bilal would spend much of the night riding the back “stepper” of Caban’s aging green garbage truck. Several lights were smashed in the rear, and the driver’s side door hung crookedly behind the cab, offering a view inside of ripped seats. Faded lettering on the side recorded the truck’s past lives. (“UNDER CONTRACT TOWN OF ISLIP”) showed it had once hauled trash in a Long Island town. (“PUT YOUR CANS IN OUR HANDS”) pointed to time in the recycling business.
Caban hoped for the same things that every garbage worker hopes for at the start of each shift. No crashes. No injuries. No fires in the hopper. No truck breakdowns. In Caban’s five weeks of driving for #1 Waste, something was always breaking down. One night it was the transmission, he said, another the radiator, another the compactor. Twice the brakes failed, he said — this on a 10-wheeled vehicle that weighs about 40,000 pounds without a load of garbage and more than 80,000 pounds with. Making it home alive each night was a small victory. (#1 Waste and Recycler did not respond to a detailed list of questions.)
It was shortly after 6 p.m. on a night that could last past eight in the morning. Caban stepped up through the opening where the driver’s side door should have been. His helper, Bilal, rode shotgun. The engine growled, the throttle shaking the truck’s body, and with a blast of black exhaust, Caban pulled out and took a right on Classon Avenue, the broken driver’s side door flopping in the breeze.
Rushing makes the job more dangerous, and most everyone has to rush in order to finish hundreds of stops — sometimes more than 1,000 — in a night, covering a route that could easily be 85 miles. As most any private sanitation worker in New York City will tell you, the routes are often too long to finish within the 11-hour driving limit set by federal Department of Transportation regulations. As a result, many garbage truck drivers routinely drive far more than the 11-hour limit, hardly getting any time to rest before they must return to the wheel.
After working a double shift in August 2016 that lasted nearly 23 hours, Queens County Carting driver William Bonds was fired after refusing to work another double shift less than two days later. On the first shift, Bonds had fallen asleep at the wheel. He was worried he might kill someone. (Queens County Carting owner Michael Bilik acknowledged in an unemployment hearing that Bonds routinely worked 60 to 80 hours a week, and his dispatcher explained that daytime drivers sometimes worked doubles when the company was short nighttime drivers. An administrative law judge found that Bonds “had good reason for refusing overtime that day … feeling exhausted and incapable of driving the truck.” Bonds is now a plaintiff in a negligence lawsuit against the company.)
It doesn’t help that many rigs are in terrible condition. Garbage trucks from New York City’s 50 biggest companies are pulled off the road and declared unsafe to drive after 53 percent of government inspections, according to an analysis of data from the city and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Fourteen of those 50 companies hadn’t been inspected even once in the past two years. Nationally, commercial trucks are pulled off the road after 21 percent of inspections.
The industry doesn’t display a lot of urgency on safety issues. In October, garbage company owners, lobbyists and city officials held an event billed as a Safety Symposium, where industry participants seemed more eager to blame cyclists than take responsibility. “We’ve been talking about as an industry what we’ve been doing,” said Bill Falletta, safety manager of Action Carting, whose truck killed 27-year-old cyclist Neftaly Ramirez in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn on July 22. “Is there anything being done to educate the bicyclists on safety? They should be following the same traffic rules that we do. I very rarely see that.” Later, when a city official explained that — although it was perhaps counterintuitive — narrower streets are actually safer because they slow the flow of traffic, David Biderman, an industry lobbyist, raised his hand and asked if narrower bike lanes could be used to slow down bicyclists. The consensus seemed to be that two-wheeled transportation was the real menace on the road.
Said City Council member Antonio Reynoso at a Nov. 27 hearing on safety in the industry: “I thought by now that we would have seen more change, and we haven’t.”