Safety of Workers in New York City Commercial Waste Operations Questioned

When the brakes failed on the garbage truck Carl Orlando was driving in Brooklyn, New York, it was around 2 a.m. on a February morning and he was headed to the dump.

“I had to crash the truck into a tree.” Orlando said as he described the incident by phone on Tuesday.

He believes that basic maintenance by the company that owned the rig would have kept the brakes working and prevented the wreck. During the last nine years, Orlando has been employed with seven different private sanitation companies in the New York City region.

From his perspective, bigger firms collecting and processing waste in the city take worker safety seriously and follow the rules. But some smaller outfits do not.

“I've seen owners, I’ve seen workers, remove an inspection sticker from one truck and put it on another because that other truck ain’t gonna pass,” he said. Orlando noted that he’s quit every waste management company he's worked for and that these days he’s looking to go into business for himself.

Asked why he left the jobs, he replied: “The trucks are outdated. The safety equipment that should be on the trucks is not on the trucks. The men are working well past a 12-hour shift. And there’s no safety training, there’s no meetings, there’s no orientation, there’s no training video. It’s just get on the truck and go.”

‘Worst-of-the-Worst’

Household waste in New York City is collected by the city’s Department of Sanitation, which has a unionized, public workforce. But commercial waste is transported by dozens of city-licensed private firms, which vary widely in size and sophistication. Some are unionized, others are not.

On Tuesday, a labor advocacy group with ties to unions, the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, released a report highlighting a range of safety concerns within the private waste collection, treatment and disposal sector in New York City.

In it are grisly case studies that describe incidents where workers were killed and maimed. For instance, a man was fatally crushed by a dumpster that fell off of a truck, and another was hit, run over and killed by a front end loader at a recycling facility.

The report contends that these types of incidents are not anomalies, that some—not all—commercial waste operators in the city routinely flout safety and health standards, as well as wage regulations.

“Through their ongoing inaction and noncompliance, these employers directly cause unnecessary and avoidable employee injury, illness, and death,” it states.

David Newman is an industrial hygienist with NYCOSH and the author of the report.

“What struck me over the six or so months that I was pursuing it,” he said as he discussed the report during an interview Tuesday, “is just the pervasive disregard for legal protections for workers in a distinct segment of the industry. Sort of the bottom feeders, the worst-of-the-worst.” Echoing Orlando’s view, he said the bad actors seem to be smaller companies, with nonunion workforces, that are flying under the regulatory radar to some degree.

“They tar the whole industry with their practices.” Newman said. Later he added: “These small companies get citations and violations and yet they get their licenses renewed. So that aspect of it is something that cries out for a change in the oversight and enforcement process.”

Councilmember Antonio Reynoso chairs the New York City Council’s Committee on Sanitation and Solid Waste Management. He said in an interview Tuesday that the report lent credence to concerns he and other councilmembers have previously expressed about the city’s private sanitation industry, and backs up claims that the sector is a “wild, wild west” of sorts.

“What we see is an under-regulated industry,” he said.

Reynoso outlined plans for a hearing in early fall, after the Council completes its budget-making work for the year, to discuss ways New York City might enact new measures, or crank up enforcement of existing regulations, to provide greater protections for private sector sanitation workers.

“This is not something where it's just overzealous unions looking to impose on private sanitation,” he said. “We have people that are losing limbs, losing fingers, dying and having to fight for workers compensation. No safety equipment, limited safety equipment, no training.”

‘Only So Much You Can Do’

Thomas Toscano’s family owns and operates Mr. T Carting Corp., a private waste management, recycling and garbage removal business based in Glendale, New York. He also chairs the New York City chapter of the National Waste and Recycling Association, an industry group.

Safety, Toscano stressed on Tuesday, is already a top priority for the waste industry.

“The report seems to imply that the safety problems are systemic and widespread, I don’t agree with that,” he said. “Are there a small percentage of bad actors out there that may not be doing everything the way they’re supposed to? Yeah, I’ll agree with that.”

“But,” he added, “you’ll probably find them in every industry.”

It’s no secret that collecting, hauling and processing trash and other waste is dangerous work.

“The waste collection industry has the fifth-highest fatality rate in the United States,” said David Biderman, executive director of the Solid Waste Association of North America, a professional group for people who work in the solid waste sector. “We’re devoting a substantial amount of our bandwidth to getting the industry off the top-ten list.”

“Nothing we do,” Biderman added, “is more important than improving safety.”

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data for 2014, which are the most recent figures available, show 71 fatal injuries in the waste management and remediation services industry nationwide.

There were also at least 8,650 nonfatal, occupational injuries and illnesses in the industry that year that resulted in days away from work, according to the data. Within the sector, injury and illness rates were highest for collectors and workers at materials recovery facilities.

For every 10,000 full-time solid waste collection workers, 302 were injured or fell ill due to incidents on the job. For workers at recovery facilities, the statistic is 326. That puts those occupations on par with underground coal mining, which has a nonfatal injury and illness rate of 315 injuries per 10,000 workers, and in excess of logging, where the rate checks in at 212.

As for New York City-specific death and injury figures for the commercial waste industry, Newman said by email that in the course of his research: “We could not find any such data.”

According to Toscano, private waste companies in the city would be willing to discuss new options for safety rules with authorities. But he also stressed the importance of enforcing regulations that already exist first, and that some risks fall outside the control of employers.

“We do, right now, everything we know that we possibly can to try to minimize risk and injuries. Whether it be safety equipment, safety vests, boots,” he said. “But there’s only so much you can do to protect somebody who’s out working on the street in the middle of the night.”

‘Not an Easy Job’

Joe Tesi has been around the waste business a long time. “I drove a garbage truck for 20 years, I’m 62-years-old,” he said, when reached by phone Tuesday. Tesi added that his family’s involvement in the industry dates back to 1902.

These days he’s the vice president of operations at City Waste Services of New York Inc., a unionized, city-licensed waste hauler with between 40 and 50 employees, located in Jamaica, Queens.

“We’re a good sized company, and we have training and experienced people. Not everybody works like us,” he said. “A lot of these companies that these assemblymen and these Council guys are talking about, they’re nonunion companies, with inadequate equipment, inadequate workers, and inadequate insurance.”

As of last October, there were 247 commercial waste hauling companies licensed in New York City, according to the NYCOSH report. Nearly half the city’s roughly 138,000 commercial waste customers were served by the 10 largest operators. Biderman, of the Solid Waste Association of North America, said most of the hauling companies in New York have 10 trucks or less.

“The guy who owns that company, he’s probably out there on the truck,” he said. “These are often small mom-and-pop companies, that often are handed down from one generation to another.”

Tesi is not against the idea of the city putting new regulations on the books to keep workers from getting hurt.

“I’m probably doing it already,” he said, of any new rules the city might impose. “I tell all my workers: ‘Be safe, don’t rush, take your time, take care of yourself,’” he added.

But even those warnings, combined with training, are not always enough. “One of my men got run over in the street about two months ago,” Tesi said. “He broke his spine in three places.”

And even without having a serious incident there are risks. Tesi detailed the toll working in the business had taken on him: “I got arthritis on my spine, I got arthritis on my wrist, I had a torn meniscus surgery. I had carpal tunnel syndrome in two hands.”

“It’s not an easy job,” he added. “Believe me.”

‘Keep It Moving’

Getting struck by trucks moving in reverse, or cars traveling in the street, are two of the leading ways workers in the waste hauling business get killed, according to Biderman. Training backed by the Solid Waste Association of North America, he said, highlights the importance of drivers backing up slowly, and checking their mirrors often, as well as helpers not lingering behind rigs.

“It’s about changing employee behavior,” Biderman said. “You’ve got to repeat the messages over and over.” The association plans to hold a safety event in New York City in June.

For Orlando, the truck losing its brakes wasn’t his only close call on the job.

“I had my hand in a place where it shouldn't have been and it got crushed a little bit,” he said. “I'm not deformed or anything from it,” he added. “But if I had an hour of training from somebody who was in the industry, that probably wouldn’t have happened to me.”

He knows other workers that have been less fortunate.

In two separate incidents that happened about two years apart, the members of one team, he said, both had the same finger, on each of their same hands, cut off by dumpsters that slipped on the back of the same truck.

Injuries don’t always garner a lot of attention.

“Usually,” he said, “when someone gets hurt, it’s: ‘Hey, it’s part of the business’ and keep it moving.”

‘These Guys Live in Fear’

Organized crime—the mob—reigned over much of the trash business in New York City for around four decades, through the late 1990s, Newman, the author of the report explained.

“For 40 or so years it was a really tainted industry,” he said.

In addition to organized crime’s control receding in the city’s private waste management sector, there’s another aspect of the business that has changed in more recent years as well.

“It was sort of a path to the middle class, or the lower middle class,” Newman said. “It’s evolved over time to an immigrant workforce and also, to a certain extent, an ex-offender workforce.”

For workers who may not be in the country legally, or who have criminal records, reporting safety violations, or wage theft, can be a dicey proposition. Newman puts it this way: “These guys live in fear, they live in fear of losing their jobs. They live in fear of retaliation. They live in fear of harassment. Some of them are macho guys and have more bravado than others, but they live in fear.”

Orlando said that at one point he worked for a company that was withholding overtime pay. Once he started to complain about the money he believed he was owed, he said his hours started to get cut back and “before you know it you’re not working anymore.”

“Most workers are living paycheck to paycheck," Orlando added. "They can’t afford to be without work, so they keep their mouth shut.”

‘A Standard for Everyone’

The NYCOSH report includes policy recommendations that are broad in scope.

For instance, one calls for the criminal prosecution of waste operators where evidence indicates that one or more deaths was caused by intentional disregard for laws or safety. Another advises that riding on the steps mounted on the back of garbage and recycling trucks should be prohibited. And there’s one that says employers should have to provide flush toilets, shower facilities, and locker rooms at the places where workers begin and end their shifts.

An interagency working group to coordinate the enforcement of regulations is also on the recommendations list. Overseeing different aspects of the city’s private waste sector falls across a number of agencies, such as the city’s Business Integrity Commission, which handles licensing, the Department of Sanitation, and the New York State Department of Labor.

Newman believes it will take labor union representation to fix some of the safety issues he described in the report.

“Given the rogue nature of a lot of this industry, and I’m not just talking about the smaller employers now,” he said. “I think unions are in this particular industry, in this particular location, I think unions are absolutely essential to any significant change for the better.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office responded to a request for comment about the report with an email pointing out that the Sanitation Department and the Business Integrity Commission are conducting a study of the city’s private waste hauling sector that will look at, among other things, worker safety. The mayor’s office also said the city is collaborating with industry groups on safety efforts.

The City Council’s sanitation committee chairman, Reynoso, said that “for the last two years, worker safety has been a huge issue for me, when it comes to the private sanitation industry,” but that it has been difficult to get de Blasio’s administration to focus on the topic.

“This hasn't been an issue that they've taken on,” he said.

Reynoso said he’d like to see future conversations about city policies for the private waste sector zero in on areas like mandating that employers provide certain safety gear, limiting hours that employees can work, and cementing training protocols.

“What we want to do is set a standard for everyone,” he said. “Whether you’re in a union or not, you should be safe.”