I moved back to the south after living out west for 20 years and it is insane the amount of trash dropped by trash workers while they are dumping bins. Part of it is cultural in that trash is literally piled at the street in bins of varying condition vs out west where you know if it doesn't fit in your 90 gal bin it ain't getting picked up by the robot arm.

The transition from "pile everything in a heap" to "if it's not in your wheelie bin it's not getting picked up" happens pretty quickly. Just need the garbage company to specify that in their contract with the municipality. I honestly miss being able to pile up oddly shaped pieces of trash though. Now if you have something weird, it's just not going to get picked up and you have to figure out how to get it to the dump.

I don't see much of that in North Carolina.

I've heard that it was that it was because it would remove parking space.

But if what you are saying is true, that's what you get for not allowing multi-concern unions. Our union branch that take care of trash collection workers is also responsible for municipal cleaning workers, as well as dump workers: making the job worse for cleaning and dump workers is just not something the union would push for.

Unions have obligations in the US. You can't organize a protest or strike for other professionals. You _have_ to follow some rule before and after a strike. You cannot "just stop working" (because some industrial processes, when let down, can destroy the whole factory). The right the unions got are written in blood, and honestly in the US, it seems to me they control workers a lot more than they protect their rights, at least since the 70s.

In any case, the US should destroy the unions by removing all legislation preventing work organization or giving them special rights, and let them reform as grassroot unions (your "old club that people can form") and let them grow from this point.

> You cannot "just stop working" (because some industrial processes, when let down, can destroy the whole factory).

Well, people in any old club can "just stop working". But they are facing contractual penalties including getting fired. And I think that's fair.

> In any case, the US should destroy the unions by removing all legislation preventing work organization or giving them special rights, and let them reform as grassroot unions (your "old club that people can form") and let them grow from this point.

Yes. Though removing the special legal rights (and the few obligations) from unions would basically destroy them.

You seems to believe unions appeared out of nowhere. Just remember that the NRA was initially created to limit firearms access for workers. When unions as they exist in the US are destroyed, something else might take their place. Hopefully it won't be new Luigi's but a better work organisation.

> You seems to believe unions appeared out of nowhere.

No, why?

The British monarchy also didn't spring out of nowhere, but that doesn't mean Britain couldn't turn into a republic, if they wanted to change their laws.

Here in Singapore we barely have any unions, or rather in practice unions barely have any influence.

Compare also https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/

Where would the dumpsters go? Serious question, the impression I get is that there is no room in many places in the city.

Dumpsters would go where trash goes now. Instead of trash sitting on the street, the same trash will sit inside dumpsters.

Parking spots that currently house individuals’s cars could be used for dumpsters instead.

Ignoring the political backlash around taking people's parking, I would instead point out the likely rate of hitting dumpsters in the street with how tightly packed people would park around them.

NYC was, for large stretches, built without the alleys that lots of other cities would use to store such bins, and I don't think you can easily accommodate the volumes of trash that people want to turn over with just street storage without significant logistical problems with how much you disrupt the flow of people in the city.

Even if we eat the cost of parking around residential locations, businesses have gotten used to using the space in front of their restaurants as additional seating, so cannibalizing that for dumpsters will cause massive backlash on that front, to say nothing of the nasty effects on people's desire to eat when sitting next to a dumpster.

I agree that NYC is slow moving on a lot of things, but this is also a genuinely hard problem.

What if all cars were required to haul trash?

They had plenty of room for on street restaurant expansions in many parts of the city.

That is at odds with the fact the article says they are using bins and picking them up 6 days a week, I don't see any union complaint here?

I thought the problem with it was the lack of space.

Well, the trash on the pavement is taking up space, too.

Proper bins could pile the trash higher, so they would take up less floor space than the random distributed piles.

And as other commenters point out, you could sacrifice some parking spots.

> could pile the trash higher

I don't actually think you can get denser storage, at the moment, than the raw piles of garbage bags. In some places, they are absolutely willing to pile them higher than people stand, sometimes, and proper individual trashcans would sacrifice some space for their size, and actual dumpsters would be pretty disruptive to place since there's not much in the way of locations to land them on.

The trash bag piles also have the nominal benefit that they're transitory - that is, you don't have to permanently say "this space will only be used for trash storage", and with a place with space at such a premium sometimes, that really does matter.

(I'm not fond of the bags either, but short of the city dropping a truly astonishing amount of money on trying to buy up properties on each block to keep dumpsters in, as far as I can see, just getting the rolling bins out and about is the best reduction you can hope for.)

There is plenty of space, but most of it is taken up by individuals’ cars.

> It's a solution to unemployment.

No, it's not. Just because a union opposes something doesn't mean it would cause unemployment.

It absolutely is a problem to be dealt with. I understand what you are implying but it actually is a problem

Is there a source on this? This is the second of two conspiracy theories I've heard, the other being that Reagan is somehow responsible for getting rid of the communal dumpsters that are claimed to have once existed.

That's a sign the city has useless excess population.