Private Garbage Services: Saviours or Opportunists?
We're nearing the end of Day 12 of the unionized city workers strike, and Toronto is neither in a state of total mayhem nor is it clearly on its way to becoming a diseased-filled cesspool. But things are definitely getting messy and stinky in some parts. Garbage is piling up at residents' homes and it's overflowing at some of the temporary dump sites in parks.
Not everyone has the ability to store their own waste. Not everyone has the time or the courage to cross picket lines, or the physical ability to take their garbage to one of the city's temporary garbage dump sites or the few larger, permanent transfer stations. This is where established private companies, and other, less established (some cash hungry opportunists, no doubt) come in.
Private garbage collection services are seemingly popping up in this city faster than poutine restaurants and construction pylons.
With today's announcement by the city that the Christie Pits temporary dump will be closing (news surely to bring about cheers from those opposed to the use of parks as dumps), those in the downtown core now have even further to go.
Private pickup services like 1-800-GOT-JUNK have no doubt been busier than usual, and do legitimate service (i.e. take your junk to proper dumps and recycling facilities) but it's the upsurge of everyday Joes that are hawking trash collection services via Kijiji and Craigslist that have me wondering and a little worried.
Are "Stanky Boys" issuing receipts or is this an attempt to make income tax-free? How can we be certain that the "Trash Guys" aren't simply taking our garbage to the temporary stations like private residents are doing themselves?
The going rate for these services varies greatly. While some are offering pickups of large black garbage bags for as little as $4 a pop, others are claiming that if you act now you can save $10 and get a full standard garbage/recycling/green bin pickup for the low price of $39.99 (prepaid via Paypal) - a fee that makes our annual fees to the city seem like a steal of a deal.
Sending money and putting trust in people using Hotmail addresses seems like a risky prospect to me. But I'm willing to bet that enough people are quite ready to pay the price and not really care where their stinky garbage goes, so long as it's no longer leaking in the garage.
Lead photo of Christie Pits garbage heap photo by jordan.marklund. Residential heap and mattress photos by seastarerrin. Truck (cellphone snap) photo by the authour.
Comments (47)
You say opportunist like it is a bad word. We do live in a free market society, and at the moment there is a high demand for trash removal.
The temporary sites will only allow a drop off of 3 bags max, pulling up to a transfer station with a truck full of garbage and hot picketers is a bad combination. There are other options though.
I don't see anything wrong with being opportunistic in this situation. As you mentioned, many people can't haul their garbage themselves, so if they're willing to fork over the cash to have someone do it for them, all the better. Some are also hauling trash and donating all of the funds to charity. As long as the garbage is taken to appropriate facilities, I welcome these trash disposal entrepreneurs! My street is getting a pickup once/week at $10/bin.
Complete agreement with Carrie and "That Guy"
So long as it's still legal to pick up trash off the streets and haul it away to a legal dump, there's absolutely no reason why people shouldn't be allowed to benefit from it.
It's not like people are running around pretending to be paramedics or something. Hey look, people are pitching in to keep trash off the streets. I'd pay for that service in a situation like this too.
Good thing you blocked the plate of that truck, given that this hauling by instant entrepreneurs is most likely illegal: http://www.ene.gov.on.ca/en/business/cofa/wastedisposal.php
"Operations that require a Certificate of Approval for a Waste Management System include, [...] waste haulers."
Evil. They take your money and bring your waste to residential park sites (closer and less waiting than at the transfer stations), where the resulting raw sewage seeps out into parkland, ending up in the groundwater and the lake - your drinking water!
Just because you don't see it anymore doesn't mean your garbage has disappeared.
Do you have proof that every single one of these "entrepreneurs" is dumping the trash in parks? No, of course you don't.
If anything this just shows how many people out there are willing to do this work. I hear from friends of mine "Garbage picking is such a crappy job, they deserve the perks". And I say "You're an idiot." 1.5 million Canadians are unemployed, there's a HELL of a lot of people in the coutry that want a job picking up garbage, and it will do it for FAIR PAY and not some insane sick day banking compensation package that barely anyone else in reality could ever hope to receive.
Privatize it now, and get rid of these damn headaches.
Privatize now! We should not be paying unionized workers to save up 4 weeks of paid vacation every year and cash it in at early retirement. Who on earth has such a privilege these days?
Job security is a myth, there is no such thing and they shouldn't be demanding it. We do not deserve to have our good money wasted by these greedy unions. They are taking advantage of us all and I'm sick of it.
Privatize garbage collection now!
Well said. Fire the bums, like Ronald Reagan did with the air traffic controllers in the '80's. There are tens of thousands of Torontonians out of work who would be very happy with a lesser benefits package to have a steady, well-paying job.
I'm a little surprised the Medical Health Officer hasn't stepped in yet. Maybe everyone is waiting til the 2 week mark. Dodging the Norwegian rats in Kensington is becoming great sport on a bike.
Agreed!
Where is this garbage supposed to go?
This NIMBY attitude (not in my backyard) is starting to really bother me. It's temporary people. it's a means to an end. RELAX. the garbage has to go somewhere...for now.
And i couldn't agree more, privatize and lets get on with it.
It's insulting to hear these union demands in the face of mass unemployment, Wage freezes where they are across the board etc.
PRIVATIZE IT AND LETS MOVE ON
Goddamnright they're saviours.
As if we're all supposed to keep our garbage under our pillow until this moronic strike is over.
Can't wait for the rat population to explode in 4 weeks.
If some of these services aren't deemed essential after this fu*king thing is over, I'm going to go ballistic.
They should have made the temporary dumps in the parking lots of the services closed by the strike.
Privatize now?
From the sounds of it we already have privatized garbage pickup. Tell the city you don't want a bin and get one of these companies to haul it for you. I'll continue to pay people a living wage, sort of like fair trade coffee, and not participate in the race to minimum wage.
Read some history on Unions and collective bargaining and some of the contributors to this blog might see things differently concerning the local 416 and 79 strike action. The city actually wants to strip away senority rights,sick days,and force anyone to reapply for thier own job. The issues the unions are fighting about go to the very core of unionism. It is a fact that the existance of unions has improved the work conditions and compensation of all workers by setting standards that never existed before they fought for them.This is not a garbage strike, there are 24,000 city workers on strike and most of them work in finance,engineering,IT,water production, and the list goes on. These professionals are what keep the city functioning in spite of how everyone loves to put them down. Bug the Mayor and councillors to get on with reasonable negotiations, and not attempts at weakoning unions so that services can be privatised. Read about the absolute mess in Hamilton when they privatized their sewage and water production years back, then the city went back to running it. Read about how the LCBO uses so many casual workers, who get no benefits at all, can get called in to work 2 hours,will never get hired as a real employee and the province pockets the profits. Who's side are we on anyway??
Those poor union workers tirelessly working to keep city running. Society owes them so much, the least we could do is to stick our heads up our own asses while they fleece us.
The only workers I have any sympathy for are ambulance and 1st responders. The rest should just be fired and replaced.
Stephen123 -
Play your little violin of sadness somewhere else.
In the current reality, the reasons for the strike are unacceptable.
Please tell us why these 24000 people shouldn't be tightening their belts like everybody else.
So many of these fu*kin' jobs are ESSENTIAL SERVICES and should not be allowed to strike.
Don't like it? Find another job. There are plenty of people willing to do it in your place who have no intention of fu*king over the people who pay their salaries.
Mark Dowling on July 3, 2009 at 11:18 PM
I have a question - where are the "Friends of Christie Pits" bringing their garbage?
---------
Ha ha - good question. The Christie Pits crybabies are just driving over to some other park. Hypocritical NIMBYism at its finest.
"The Christie Pits crybabies are just driving over to some other park. Hypocritical NIMBYism at its finest."
Do you have proof to back up such a claim?
Oh for fu*k's sake.
Yeah, everybody within 2 blocks of the park is stockpiling their trash at their homes. None of them are taking their trash anywhere. Righttttttttt.
Duh.
I can emphasize with you. However, I believe we need to take care of each other -- and that means taking care of the majority. There are a lot of city employees. If we start screwing the sanitation workers... the rest are next to follow. Do you really want to live in a city with low paid maintenance/social/safety workers? I don't. Its a catch-22. If we vote to strike, we end up with a stinky city. If we vote to screw the garbage workers, we will eventually kick ourselves in the rear.
However, if we can take care of ourselves while the union fights and our unpaid sanitary friends can manage to pay the bills... we may have a shot. We need to work as a team! I came across garbagehelp.com earlier. I think they have the right idea.
Yeah, you're right, there are so many other people on strike besides the garbage guys. There's the city-run daycares, who are now forcing families to leave their own jobs to take care of their children. They're certainly affected, but that doesn't matter to the unions. There's also the Toronto Island Ferry, which doesn't run anymore. Anyone who lives there is stranded now. There's also the parks people, who would normally run our Canada Day celebrations. Canada Day seemed to not happen this year. Anyone else I'm missing?
Name me one unionized industry that is prosperous and profitable.
"Opportunistic"? Sounds like blogto writers have been sipping too many soy milk lattes and reading one too many books at the one of (if you only went to blogto for advice) millions of gourmet little coffeeshops that seem to pop up every week. Put down the books and please stop gushing of basil paninis. Wonder why these places keep popping up? Because they keep going under. Food/beverage business strategies may as well be written in mandarin chinese for some of these people.
What completely blows my mind is: how we as citizens are somehow alright with strikes every 3 years across a whole range of public sectors.
What seriously needs to happen is the city and unions need to figure out what is the best for THE CITY. Workers want proper health care and wages indexed to inflation. If everyone can say YES to this, all contracts can be written for 5 years.
Let's stop sounding like cocknoses with issues and ask all our representatives to lock shit in, in a reasonable way.
You're clearly misinformed. "The Friends of Christie Pits" is a community group and NOT just anyone who lives in the vicinity of the park. After having spoken to a number of members of this group for the purpose of a post on this site, I find it difficult to believe that many of them are dumping at another park.
They are opportunists and I see absolutely nothing wrong with that. If the sheep that that retard Sid Ryan leads can't do what they're paid for and we can't afford to put up with the shit in the picket lines that envelop the dump site, then someone has to be reimbursed for their effort.
Screw the union, just like they are screwing the citizens of Toronto. Unions have long ago outlived their usefulness and nowadays exist only to prop up an unaffordable status quo and inflame the public with wildly outrageous demands. Get with the current economic reality. And who said anything about paying them a low wage?? They make well above minimum wage, and for zero educational requirements. Maybe they should all flip burgers for the guy in the clown suit for awhile to appreciate what they have.
Unions are just part of an ongoing conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity. They support Holocaust 2.0 (this time it's personal), supported holocaust 1.0, aided and abetted the murder of 100 million people by their socialist brothers...
Not to mention their racist origins and continued practices. FIRE THEM ALL.
"faster than poutine restaurants"??? Thats not very fast at all.
There's not that many poutine restaurants, maybe you meant faster than gourmet burger restaurants OR faster than burrito restaurants
Great. Now that we are convinced that the unions are the font of all our problems, who will we blame once the negotiations are complete and a contract is signed?
I'm sure we will find other groups to scapegoat. Any suggestions?
I have not disposed of any garbage since the strike began.
I have taken steps to reduce waste (don't buy things with excessive packaging, use a travel mug, etc.). I am storing my recyclables and dry waste in bins on my front porch (recycling bin is overflowing at this point, while the small garbage bin is still practically empty.
Green bin waste is more of an issue, especially since I have pets. I've started separating out all vegetable matter and taking it, along with newspapers and such, down to the community garden to add to their compost heap. For the wet stuff that's not appropriate for compost, I've picked up some sawdust for absorption of moisture and odour, lined a large sealable bin with it, and am keeping this waste at home until service resumes.
Please don't make the assumption that the residents who oppose these dump sites do not live by their principles.
One other thing - for those who don't believe that many of us living nearby are actually keeping our waste at home, please just drop by the dump and ask the non-union workers. They know us very well by now.
we all pay taxes to the Government (OK, almost everyone), and in return, the Government use this fund to run the system. In my opinion, this system is no different than any other private enterprise, if the goods or services are not delivered, there should be a refund (yes, I mean taxes) or get rid of those trouble makers as they should have a real taste of the real world that no job is 100% secured (just look at GM?) if they do not do what they suppose to do, in this case, "remove my trash". I welcome the private individuals (as long as they do a good job :-) as those greedy government worker should take a pay cut, just like the rest of us. Sound fair?
@james
You are missing the point completely here my friend.
yes, a resolution will no doubt happen, contracts will be signed, and we will all move on with life.
But why are we even in the middle of this strike in the first place??
Moreover, why are we in the middle of a second garbage strike in less than 5 years?
Why should the unions be allowed to pull the 'strike' trigger whenever they see fit?
Oh right. it's a union.
a dated system that does NOT act in the best interest of TORONTO CITIZENS! So yes, even once the ink has dried on the new contracts, i will be pointing my finger directly at the union as the root of the problem
open your eyes man the UNION IS THE PROBLEM HERE.
Your argument that they will help resolve the very problem they've created holds NO water my friend.
The unreasonable demands of this union are affecting Toronto citizens across the board, in more ways than garbage pickup and that's not right.
forget about garbage for a minute.
How about parents who rely on daycare?
How about single poor mothers who rely on Toronto Public Health Workers to visit them, to help with feeding, and the well being of their children.
YES. I blame the union.
And I will continue to blame them long after this shit is over.
Wow, that's easy to say when you're not trying to pay for a university education with a summer job!
Douche.
"Do you really want to live in a city with low paid maintenance/social/safety workers?"
I don't think their workers are low paid, but apparently 600,000+ people choose to live in union- and strike-free Mississauga quite happily.
It seems that many of the people advocating paying high, so-called "living wages" to these workers seem to think that privatization equals minimum wage however they have no proof of this. Many non-unionized companies pay "fair" wages.
Also, you seem to forget that the city has many non-union workers who aren't paid minimum wage, who are working 12 hour days to keep the city running during the strike-not seeing their family, and who were handed a wage and bonus freeze. These workers are still working, making more than minimum wage, not on social assistance and, more importantly, not loudly BITCHING about it. Are you listening unions?
Those non-union employees who are running things while the unions are on strike are recieving their regular salaries and in addition are being paid every hour for filling in. The water treatment plants which produce the citys drinking water is being manned by managers and supervisors 24hours a day 7 days a week and are roughly grossing 15,000 dollars every two weeks per person on top of their regular salaries,have all thier food delievered to them and get a food allowance.Truth be known get a non-union city job and with salary, performance bonuses, incentives, the best benefits that anyone will ever recieve, then we'll see who's really milking the city budget. Of course if you believe the Mayor,the politicians and you hate all unions then none of this will bother you.
"the best benefits that anyone will ever recieve"
That would be something. What are these benefits again?
They're keeping the city running 24/7 like you stated, when a bunch of selfish picketers decide they'll use the citizens as hostages, and being compensated.
Yeah, ok. The non-union workers being forced to man the fort while the union disrupts the city are milking the budget, right. Why should they have food delivered to them? They are only forced to man a post 24/7, fat-cat slobs! And job performance incentives! Man, talk about perks! They should be forced to deal with the paltry, guaranteed yearly increases the poor union has to deal with which aren't tied to performance or attitude. And they non-union workers should also be forced to accept the shitty benefits the poor union gets, like 100% dental coverage. And why should they get so much money for merely giving up their personal lives?
In case you can't recognize sarcasm or sense my sardonic tone, I completely disagree with your point.
By the way, could you post some source for your claim they are getting $15,000 bi-weekly on top of their regular salary?
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