The last garbage men
By Ethan Smith
Published in News on January 29, 2015 2:05 PM
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News-Argus/MELISSA KEY
Charles Morgan Jr. jokes around with another worker while riding on the back of a garbage truck on Tuesday morning on his normal route.
First thing--the job is smelly.
It is also exhausting, usually hot and difficult, even worse in the summer when the air is thick and breezes are non-existent. The dust that flies into your mouth out of the back of the truck makes it nearly impossible to breathe.
But for decades, many have stepped up to do the essential job -- collecting garbage left at the curb by city residents.
But now, as Goldsboro updates its trash collection operations, the jobs of nine garbage men will be no more. Instead, fully automatic "one-armed bandits" will be operated by a single driver to do a job that once required three men and 10-hour work days.
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Charles Morgan Jr. wakes up at 5 a.m. every day, and has for the past 14 years. Some days, he goes to the gym before work. Other days, he goes straight to collecting garbage before the sun rises.
"If I miss the gym in the mornings, I don't really worry about it because this is such a good workout," he said as he tossed garbage bags into the back of the truck.
Stepping back on to the truck to ride to the next garbage pickup, he admits he is going to miss the job when he moves to a new department and no longer spends his days hopping on trucks and making garbage disappear.
"I'm going to miss the workout it gives you, definitely," Morgan said. "I'm going to miss the people a lot, too. A lot of the people we pick up for know us and speak to us, and some of them leave goodies out for us for picking up their garbage."
Just as he said that, he picked up a can that had a bag full of sodas and nabs beside it for the garbage men to munch on later.
But being a garbage man comes with long hours and putting yourself in harm's way.
"People don't respect the truck," said Kirk McLaurin, who drives the trucks. "They'll whip out in front of you and they don't understand these trucks can't just stop on a dime."
Over the years, several men have been hit by cars while on the job, Morgan said.
Truck automation will remove that danger.
Working on the back of the truck gets hot in the summer, and that's an understatement.
"Oh man, sometimes you're back here begging for a breeze to cool you off," Morgan said. "You can't drink enough water."
And don't even get started about the smell.
"In the summer it comes up here to the front of the truck and just gets trapped and you sit here and just breathe it in," McLaurin said.
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Two of the three automated garbage trucks purchased by Goldsboro's public works department are set to arrive by the end of the week, public works director Jose Martinez said.
While the job of garbage man will now be automated, none of the nine men will be losing their jobs.
"While we've been going through this all the guys have been scared they're going to lose their job. It's something I've been hearing consistently," Martinez said. "But that's not going to happen and they're beginning to see that. We've had a bunch of people retire recently. Seven of the nine positions that will be absent after the new trucks arrive, those guys have already moved to different departments or retired, and we've hired part-time employees to temporarily fill the vacant positions left by retirees. The remaining two guys will be transferred to another department."
But the changeover will not happen immediately. The one-armed bandits will not be fully phased in until April. Until then, Martinez said, public works will be focusing on training employees on how to operate the new trucks and spreading the word about new regulations being phased in with the new trucks.
None of the new regulations will affect handicapped persons, Martinez said. For them, garbage men will continue to go to the garbage bin to collect trash and it will be business as usual.
Garbage bin overflow will no longer be allowed as the new trucks are brought into operation, as there will no longer be men on the back of the truck to collect bags lying around the can.
If a garbage truck driver has to stop at each overflowing bin and manually collect the trash, it slows the operation down by an average of 45 seconds per stop. If this happens at one in every 10 stops, each automated route would see an extra one and a half hours added to its total collection time, Martinez said.
If residents feel they have too much trash to fit into one bin per week, Martinez said extra bins will be available upon request at the cost of $2 to $4 per month.
Public works is no longer considering charging residents a special pickup fee if garbage trucks must return to a location and perform a second pickup because of overflow, Martinez said. Goldsboro's City Council was not a fan of the proposed fee, so Public Works is in the process of restructuring that regulation.
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While it may seem easy to think overflow is no big deal, it not only slows down employees, stretching out their work days, but it is also exhausting. With 10-hour days filled by lifting bulky items and bins that weigh anywhere from 5 pounds to 50 pounds, stopping to pick up the excess is not something anyone wants to do.
Taking care of garbage men has its perks, too.
"You see this lady left some stuff out for us," Morgan said, tossing a bag of goodies up in the truck to McLaurin. "We like that, so we go ahead and push hers back for her because she takes care of us."