CityReads│The Unknown Lives of Sanitation Workers in New York

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The Unknown Lives of Sanitation Workers in New York

Anthropologist Robin Nagle on the vital, hidden, and arcane sanitation system that enables cities to function.

Robin Nagle. 2013. Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

All of us create trash in great quantities, but its a troubling category of stuff we mostly ignore. We particularly ignore how much care and attention it requires from a large, well-organized workforce. What would life be like if the people responsible for managing the waste of contemporary society were not on the streets every day? What do their jobs entail? What is the status of a sanitation worker? Who takes the job? What is the work like, on the street or at the dump? Why don’t they get the kudos they deserve?

Anthropologist Robin Nagle at New York University not only raised these questions but also spent a decade in researching and working as a sanitation worker. Her works have been published, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City, which lets the uninitiated in on the vital, hidden, and arcane system that enables cities to function--from the logistics to the slang and jokes to the places most of us never see. 

Robin Nagle

Nagle has an indissoluble bond with garbage. Since childhood, she has been questioning a series of phenomena about garbage, and this strong curiosity has also laid the foundation for her future academic interest. With an interdisciplinary background in anthropology and environmental studies, she works on urban waste research at New York University and New York City’s Department of Sanitation (DSNY) to discuss contemporary urban politics, environment, human and historical issues behind the trash. Her recent ethnographic book, "picking up" takes the "Garbage man" that we habitually ignore from the margins to the center. 

Mierle Laderman Ukeles in her “Touch Sanitation Performance,” from 1979-80.Credit: Robin Holland/Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts

Picking Up blends statistics, history and personal stories to tell a rich and detailed story of the Department of Sanitation New York. Nagle had to work hard to gain the trust of the DSNY and its employees, first getting access to their archives, then being allowed to observe garages and collection trucks on their rounds, then, finally, getting a job as a sanitation worker herself. Nagle uses her own transition from curious outsider to tolerated observer and finally valued colleague to structure the book. As she learns how to lift properly, how to navigate bureaucratic politics, and how to operate the complex and dangerous machinery.

Trash and the city

20 percent of today’s metropolitan region, and fully 33 percent of lower Manhattan, is built on fill, much of which was created from rubbish. Like many cities around the world, contemporary New York rests on top of its own buried history.

The Department of Sanitation of New York cleans up after us, to the tune of 11,000 tons of garbage and 2,000 tons of recyclables every day. Despite unprecedented technological sophistication, the labors of waste literally rest on the bodies of men and women whom we routinely stigmatize. New York’s 8.2 million residents are served by fewer than 10,000 Sanitation employees (9,216, to be precise: 7,383 uniformed personnel and 1,833 civilians). Roughly a quarter of them are African American, slightly fewer than a fifth are Latino, and a little more than half are white, though within that category are many who make a sharp distinction between Irish and Italian. 

Ceremonial Arch Honoring Service Workers IV” at the retrospective.CreditAndrea Mohin/The New York Times

Why sanitation workers are important ?

Sanitation workers are the most important labor force on the streets of the city, for three reasons. They are the first guardians of public health. If they're not taking away trash efficiently and effectively every day, it starts to spill out of its containments, and the dangers inherent to it threaten us in very real ways. Diseases we've had in check for decades and centuries burst forth again and start to harm us. The economy needs them. If we can't throw out the old stuff, we have no room for the new stuff, so then the engines of the economy start to sputter when consumption is compromised. I'm not advocating capitalism, I'm just pointing out their relationship. And then there's what I call our average, necessary quotidian velocity. By that I simply mean how fast we're used to moving in the contemporary day and age. We usually don't care for, repair, clean, carry around our coffee cup, our shopping bag, our bottle of water. We use them, we throw them out, we forget about them, because we know there's a workforce on the other side that's going to take it all away.

The job of sanitation workers

According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, sanitation work is one of the most dangerous jobs in the nation, with significantly higher injury and fatality rates per labor hour than policing or firefighting. Sanitation worker is quite likely to get beaned in the head, or punched in the gut, or scored on the legs with a random assortment of blunt or sharp or jagged objects. Various toxic substances inside the trash he’s handling can cripple or even kill him. And while he’s working in the street, his chances of getting clipped, crushed, or run down by traffic are alarmingly high. Sanitation workers, it turns out, have twice the fatality rates of police offers, and nearly seven times the fatality rates of firefighters.

People produce dross, garbage, and discards all the time in their daily lives which become a part of life. However, modern society uses the inventions such as garbage truck, waste disposal transfer station, and organizations to drive garbage out of their lives. Nagle is puzzled over people’s negative attitudes toward everything associated with garbage, such as disgust and intentional alienation. So the core issues in this book to be solved are how the inherent impression of garbage forms and through what power or structure organization, we transfer responsibility for dealing with garbage to others, thus making themselves withdraw from “dirty, waste”. And the most important question is why sanitation workers who make the city stay healthy are stigmatized deliberately forgotten by the city. The tale in this book is in New York, but Nagle believes that these issues are common all over the world. In her book, she shows every aspect of the daily work of New York City sanitation workers. Although there is a obvious preference, its real intention is not to overemphasize the prominent status of sanitation workers.  It is more important to normalize and de-enchant the workers of the unknown.

Garbage is useless and is no longer needed. Once discarded, no one cares about it. Neat homes and streets are taken for granted. Accordingly, workers in charge of disposing of trash disappear along with it. As long as trucks make ceaseless noise, or trash sends out foul odors, which interferes with the their life, garbage, together with the workers becomes the source of evil. Workers who have been working with garbage all day are stereotyped as useless, scum and low-quality. They hold the view that the job of picking up rubbish and cleaning usually has no requirement, only those who can't find a good job would do this. 

But when the book presents DSNY’s daily work to the public, it would dissolve the original imagination and reassign the professional image that the cleaning industry should have. On the one hand, sanitation workers are essential to public health and even the survival of cities. In addition, in the era of rapid consumerism, they are also an indispensable part of the capitalist economic chain. On the other hand, back to the industry itself, its professionalism and complexity make it hard to be ignored. The operation of the entire industry requires sophisticated organization and system coordination. Around the three tasks of “collecting garbage, dealing with garbage, and sweeping snow”, especially the third one, the cleaning team members need to spend considerable energy. 

The daily routines and lives of sanitation workers

Dirty, difficult, dangerous, extreme weather, dumping trucks day after day, enduring the humiliation of the public, occasionally serving as a punching bag for senior bureaucrats and the most annoying part getting up early……All of these constitute a daily routine for san workers. Compared with ordinary cleaners, the supervisor may take more stress because of the role of reconciling the superior and the subordinate.

Hard work, of course, is only one thing, it also has its own tricks of trade as any other industry. There are many unwritten rules, the default ways of communication among colleagues, prominent gender culture and the jargon that only san men can understand. Outsiders may be surprised to learn about these, but Nagle thinks such surprise is precisely abnormal.

Sanitation workers' dilemmas and self-help

How do the santation workers see their work? How do they position themselves? How do they react when encountering trouble at work and facing negative evaluation from the outside world?

In Nagle's view, confusion and resistance coexist.

It's tempting to be a uniformed san man. The pay and benefits aren't so high, but they're good enough for a lot of people. Lyons works hard and has a good career prospects. But comments such as the Garbage Department lead him seriously to deny self-worth and affect his normal social interactions. So far, for example, he still hasn’t told the neighbors what he does for a living.  

On the other hand, however, we can see that they are actively constructing their own meaningful world, and even inventing a variety of "protest movements", such as“To mongo”,  acting diplomatically with the supervisor when making a mistake and carrying out one's struggle through daily work under the premise of conformity with the norms.

When taken for granted by the larger, workers also selectively ignores the public's perception. They reach a consensus within the Department and develop a system of mutual evaluation. Comments among colleagues matters much. Sanitation’s tradition benevolent societies is a key place for them to socialize, get rid of invisibility and build confidence.

Nagle does not mention or intentionally construct various theoretical terms in this book. The whole book is like a series of nonfiction tales. The author organizes the book according to her own experience and perspective, and this way of writing aptly expresses her purpose, which is letting the public understand the real work and life of those people and removing the stigma imagination. 

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