The NYC Department of Sanitation (DSNY) just released its "Private Carting Study 2016".  The report, jointly compiled with the Business Integrity Commission (BIC), endorses the city moving forward on a "franchising" model for commercial waste collection. This will mean discontinuing the current private market in favor of a system in which the city issues long-term contracts to companies to provide exclusive pick-up service in specified urban zones. The report anticipates a six-year path to the government-run model, involving two years of study, a two-year RFP process and two years to prepare for implementation.

While in theory franchising sounds attractive, there is a reason that the largest U.S. municipality the report can point to as having successfully adopted it is San Jose, CA. Implementing a zoned system is really complicated. If done wrong, it can leave businesses locked into service with a carter they did not select, at prices they cannot control, with no way of getting out — because it is the city that holds the contracts which are typically 10 to 15 years long. In other words, franchising can go very wrong, so there needs to be significant tangible benefits from it.

But despite the report’s dramatic predictions of environmental gains, a closer look reveals shocking oversights. For example, its sole metric for environmental success is Vehicle Truck Miles (VMT). But garbage trucks emit a lot of carbon when they take hours to service multiple stops on narrow city streets; in fact, pretty much the same amount as when they travel fast (and far) on the West Side Highway. Shockingly, the report makes no allowance for the inevitable slower pace of trucks under a franchised system. A better measure of environmental impact might have been the total number of routes required to service the city, which the report quietly (and unimpressively) predicts would drop by 13%.

The only other issue the report addresses is safety, which it rightly credits as a major problem, primarily outside of the few large companies. This actually endorses what Laborers’ Local 108 has long been saying — that safety culture is happening at the big (Local-108 represented) contractors. So apparently advances in safety can happen without franchising; in fact, how franchising even relates to safety remains unspecified. Regrettably, the report gives no indication that the involved-agencies have any intention of learning from the positive safety advances of companies like Action, IESI and Filco. They apparently prefer to have imperiled workers wait six years for franchising. 

These same companies also presently provide their workers fair wages and benefits, making them rare outposts of good blue-collar jobs in the increasingly service-focused NYC economy.  Those terms were not won by government enforced mandates, but by Local 108 organizing and reaching fair deals with companies over the course of two decades, to the great benefit of its approximately 1,000 NYC-area waste industry members. The wins came despite downward market pressures exerted by Teamsters Local 813 with its history of organizing failures and rate-cutting contracts. Franchising, with its plan of chaotically re-shuffling the deck, is just the latest obstacle the Teamsters are trying to throw in the way of meaningful industry progress.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. The BIC and DSNY should promptly be empowered to codify and expand the safety and labor standards developed in the high-end part of this market. The just-noted companies have somehow managed to survive the BIC’s continuing focus on market-competition (a legacy of its initial assignment of breaking up the Mob-based cartel). Letting the companies operate in a revamped regulatory system with a new focus on labor standards and route efficiency is the logical next step; not franchising.

In fact, if the BIC and DSNY were tasked to set high labor standards for this industry on the penalty of license-revocation, they would not only address the immediate safety needs of workers, they would shrink the number of contractors, thus reducing routes, probably at least on par with the 13% the report anticipates. For that matter, the BIC should immediately stop issuing new carting licenses. It is actually rather insane that the agency is recommending that in six years only one carter should be allowed to operate in each of eleven suggested city zones, while in the meantime it is allowing 113 companies (and counting) to operate throughout the city.

A report that compared franchising with a system of robust worker-oriented and environmentally conscientious regulation would reach very different conclusions than the one we got this week. The current report, with its faulty environmental analysis and utter absence of imagination in thinking about alternatives, is at best a model in bad policymaking.  At worst, it is a cynical effort to kick a political issue six years down the road, claiming victory now based on empty words, without ever having seriously even tried to address the felt concerns of the people who work hard in this dangerous business everyday.