If I rolled around in trash, I don’t think I’d be terribly grateful to sanitation workers for taking my trash away, now would I?
Sanitation workers save countless lives, die in the line of duty much more frequently than cops, and have never to my knowledge been used to terrorize and oppress poor people and people of color.
Do you know how many people would die of typhus, cholera, and other horrible and preventable diseases without sanitation workers? Without sanitation workers we could easily have a resurgence of the bubonic plague because rats would run rampant through our trash filled hell scape cities. We’d have mass infestation of disease carrying fleas brought in by the rats.
We would have epidemics of disease of nigh apocalyptic proportions. Do you know what the world was like pre-sanitation worker? The streets were filled with shit, corpses, food waste, rotting offal of all kinds.
Do you not realize how MIRACULOUS how clean and trash free modern American cities are?
I have complained to the police on multiple occasions, and they did nothing, nothing to catch the burglar who stole all the plumbing from my basement for scrap copper, nothing to catch the flasher who accosted me on a walk (instead they spent 15 minutes laughing and not believing me) and nothing until I identified the culprit (I’d seen his pickup truck) when a large amount of farming equipment was stolen from my parents barn. However they’re perfectly happy to pour a homeless veteran’s PTSD meds down a storm drain and beat the shit out of him.
I have never seen one do a lick of useful work in all my days.
Fuck cops.
Sanitation workers: Literally stopping our streets from being covered in trash. Transporting tons of trash and recycling to appropriate places, allowing us to live the material-focused lives that we all do. (like do y’all want to take everything to the dump and recycling plants yourself?) Known to advocate for labor rights and waste-related environmentalism.
Cops: Instead of checking that our restaurant wasn’t being robbed when the alarm was accidentally tripped yesterday, they harassed our employees and wrecked some shit. My GM recognised one of the cops. He once assaulted a homeless man who was taking too long to get into the car.
Cops are trash and sanitation workers should take them out.
“ die in the line of duty much more frequently than cops” Does anyone have a source for that claim? I’m not accusing you of lying I’d just like to see the source.
Here are two sources on the death rate. From The Atlantic article linked: “Sanitation workers have twice the fatality rates of police officers, and nearly seven times the fatality rates of firefighters.”
I do however need to interject that historically sanitation departments have acted in horribly discriminatory manners. There is a reason why the first action taken by the Young Lords was burning trash in East Harlem. Sanitation Workers were not coming to that neighborhood (For those unfamiliar with NYC, this is a poor Latin@ neighborhood) to collect the trash, letting garbage pile up to make streets unhealthy and unsafe. I would be in shock if that was an isolated story of biased garbage collection. I mean to this day you can tell that some neighborhoods have their trash collected more often than others.
But in comparison to cops? Oh wow are Sanitation works a billion times better.
@queenshulamit
Thank you for this excellent point, @glompcat!Though also sanitation departments are heavily staffed by black people in the states, and examples of excessively dangerous working conditions created by racism show up frequently like this one http://crdl.usg.edu/events/memphis_sanitation_strike/
From the wiki article:
Echol Cole and Robert Walker had been crushed in a mechanical malfunction on February 1; city rules forbade black employees to seek shelter from rain anywhere but in the back of their compressor trucks, with the garbage.
Also a good point, which highlights the power imbalance between sanitation departments and their workers! I live in London and many of the sanitation workers I see out and about are black people, including African immigrants. And we’ve had many many rubbish strikes over the last few years, as rubbish collectors protest their poor pay and working conditions.
Exactly, I mean sanitation workers do a hard, dangerous job picking up garbage, and may go home to a neighborhood where their trash isn’t even properly collected because of the way the department bureaucracy works
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 