New Orleans In New Orleans, Local 100 has represented “hoppers” – the garbage laborers on the back of the truck or hopper as it’s called – for more than 30 years. These are temporary workers who do an essential, but tough, dirty, and often disrespected job for the city. The job has changed over the years with some mechanization on the trucks to lift the cans into the hopper, but it’s still two, usually, men lifting and wrangling cans weighting 50-60 or more pounds into the garbage bins.
Add to the degree of difficulty, the fact that garbage pickup in this city, like so many, has been subcontracted for something close to 40 years. Political juice flows faster than the liquid oozing out of many of the cans. For a long time, that meant the giant and well-connected Waste Management company. When garbage was a city job, drivers and laborers enjoyed full-time work. Once privatized, Waste Management hired a variety of temporary employment companies to recruit hoppers to work the trucks. At the time we organized them all originally, it was minimum wage, no holidays, no vacations, no nothing. In our contracts, we got workers up to almost $20 an hour with a day rate and something complicated called Chinese overtime.
Then came Katrina in 2005 and FEMA picked up the garbage for almost a year and all the companies were scuttled. Once FEMA left the city, garbage contracts were go-to for minority business contracts. We kept hoppers under contract, but it meant pushing up from the bottom again. The new employer was a small outfit called Barry. They had trouble doing right by the union contract, we filed charges, and, to make a long story short, it’s more than a decade later, and they are still paying nickels and dimes every year to settle with our union and the workers.
They were replaced with Richards Disposal and a subcontractor called Creative Visions, which claimed to be arm’s length, but was run by the son of the owner of the garbage company. Once again, we had a pay dispute where they underpaid the workers, forcing us to file unfair bargaining charges with the NLRB. We won, they appealed within the board, months turn into years, and a couple of weeks ago I get a call from the NLRB’s compliance officer telling me the final letter is coming out.
The numbers were huge. Actual backpay for 600 workers was about $1.25 million. Adding interest and penalties for the three or four years it wound through the NLRB, and the numbers soared up to $2.5 million – a record settlement for Local 100. The fact that the list includes so many workers is a good snapshot of how temporary the workers often were on the back of the trucks. Looking past that, what are the real chances that many of the hoppers will see all or much of that money any time in the near future or their lifetimes? I hate to be jaded, but the answer is probably, slim and none.
At one level it’s a great union and workers’ victory, but the current NLRB process, packed with lawyers and delays, changing partisan board members, and still more chances at legal review, is a classic example of “justice delayed is justice denied.” A million dollar payout, much less two million would bankrupt the company. They’ll try to get a payout schedule, like Barry, and the workers who can still be found will be lucky to get a bit here and there.
How can we pretend this is the way worker protection under the US labor laws is really supposed to work, even as the NLRB can pat themselves on the back for keeping at it, the union can claim a big victory, and the workers’ still get diddle?