Illegal food waste dumping. Business owners cautiously watching security feeds of their dumpsters. Bystanders snapping photos of piled trash bags.
Across the Northeast, a pair of sanitation strikes is headed towards their second weeks on Monday, with unions representing workers in Philadelphia and the wider Boston area continuing work stoppages as they demand higher pay.
In Philadelphia, where the AFSCME District Council 33 is leading the largest city worker’s strike in four decades, city officials and residents alike complained about residents failing to follow adjusted waste rules and illegally dumping, including businesses using temporary sites set up to help collect residential trash.
“In Logan this weekend, we’ve had a business take rotten chicken and unused oil and place it at our location. Needless to say, this person will be held accountable,” Carlton Williams, heads of the city’s Office of Clean and Green Initiatives, said at a press briefing. “They were arrested and they will be held to the fullest extent of our new process with our law department.”
News video captured row after row of trash bags lining certain streets, including Calera and Red Lion Road in the city’s northeast.
Residents of Morrell Park told CBS News Philadelphia the neighborhood has never looked worse and is filled with the overwhelming stench of trash.
“It’s not right. I feel like people are really taking advantage of this,” a Philadelphia resident told the station. “Normally, our sanitation workers – they don’t pick up furniture. They don’t pick up sofas, sinks, counters, they don’t pick up these items. So people are really taking advantage, and they’re using this opportunity to dump everything out of their household.”
The union, which represents about 9,000 municipal workers across fields including waste management, 911 dispatch, and the water department, met with the city on Saturday and is planning another round of negotiations on Tuesday.
The union is requesting 5 percent wage increases over the next three years, while the city is reportedly countering with an offer just below 9 percent growth over that period.
District Council 33 president Greg Boulware told NBC Philadelphia the union was potentially willing to scale back its ask.
“We’re here,” he said on Monday. “We’re ready to negotiate. We’re ready to sit down and we’ll stay around the clock.”
Further north in Massachusetts, over 400 Teamsters workers employed at Republic Services are also nearing a week on strike, impacting 14 cities and towns around the Boston area containing some 400,000 people.
One business owner told NBC Boston he was now surveilling his own dumpster, to make sure people weren’t illegally dumping into it, lest he get fined as bags pile up.
“I usually keep this dumpster on the other side of the building, but now I have to keep it under my cameras because you come here every day and you find people’s trash,” Armando Giannasca, the owner of All-Pro Detailing in Peabody, said.
