A friend of mine worked on a garbage truck (1970’s). His team (driver and two can tossers) had a route. If they busted their butts and finished in 3 hours, they went home early. But, were paid for 8 hours.
No holidays, vacations or health insurance.
But Christmas was very good. Home owners would tape money under the lid of the garbage can.
Obviously the profession has changed. And that is a good thing.
Here they work the public holidays as if they were regular days. I think they get paid double for holiday days.
I’m not a sanitation worker but I am a government employee and I work under the basic agreements as the municipal sanitation workers around here. They get time and a half pay with the choice of comp time [paid time off] and a “floating” or “flex” holiday to be taken at different time.
I don’t celebrate Christmas so I’m pleased as punch to work it. I get 1.5 pay plus 8 hours holiday that I can take as pay or 8 hours off paid at a different time. I always take the paid time off over the OT pay. So between Xmas, Xmas eve, NYE and NYD holiday acquirement and taking comp time over pay I end up with 10 extra days paid off to pad my vacation. On top of that there are other holidays like MLK day to add to the OT pay or comp time off.
Don’t you worry about muni garbage men. They’re taken care of.
The private company guys, that I don’t know.
A friend of mine is a garbage truck driver in the US. He gets holidays, but the garbage must be picked up, so he ends up working longer days the rest of the week. So yes, he gets a holiday, but he’s not really reducing his hours worked.
Vancouver (and the suburbs, IIRC) had the same system. They’d send out a calendar every year with your pickup days highlighted. If you’re confused, just look on the front of your refrigerator!
I don’t begrudge the sanitation workers a penny of what they earn. Having to pick up plastic bags that some idiot might have stuffed full of broken glass and toss them, by hand, into the maw of a filthy machine specifically designed to crush organic material? It’s a far more dangerous job than police officer or firefighter, and a lot harder than both, yet they get no respect.
The private company guys usually have to both drive and pick up. It’s insane.
In Florida, trash pickup is invariably outsourced. Waste Management, Republic Services and the other big garbage collector companies just fill out their staff with day laborers for holidays. Their own employees will always be driving the trucks, but the pickers are usually from a labor pool (even on regular business days).
Actually, the workers hardly ever touch the bags of garbage anymore.
Those go in wheeled carts. The worker wheels them over to the back of the truck, and connects them to a hydraulic arm that lifts them up, dumps them, and puts them back down again. Only if there’s extra bags that won’t fit in the cart, or something special like that, does the worker actually handle a bag. And if those are nasty or filthy you’ll get a nasty note, and a bad mark in your file (really!).
The reason for this change was economic – it’s cheaper to collect garbage this semi-automated way. My city was able to provide the wheeled carts to every homeowner free, paid for by decreased staff costs – they now have only 1 worker per truck (besides the driver) instead of 2 but get more done, and the decreased cost in workers comp claims (from workers going to lift a garbage bag that suddenly weight 150 pounds).
Ours do. They usually pick up on Friday morning; but this week it was postponed to this morning. Everyone was pushed forward due to the Monday Holiday.
In my area in the UK the normal work days are Monday - Friday so when there are bank holidays they work Saturdays (hopefully getting paid overtime) to catch up. It gets quite backed up this year with Christmas day, Boxing day, and New Year’s day all falling on weekdays. My normal pickup day is on a Friday. This year the 29/12 pickup is shifted to 02/01, 05/01 shifted to 08/01, and 12/01 shifted to 13/01.
Kansas City is still using bags, but Chicago is using carts, so I have experience with both.
Our garbos work Christmas Day. I don’t think they always have, but it goes back at least 20 years. One Christmas a child up the street from my parents rode his new bike down his driveway and straight under the wheels of the garbage truck. I recall people discussing the tragedy commenting with surprise on the fact that garbage collection was happening that day at all, which makes me think it might have been newly introduced.