Written by By Nick Jain
This article is an excerpt of the full analysis published on Nick’s Blog, Looking Closer.
Philadelphia’s trash men/women are the 4th lowest paid amongst top 20 American cities.
When Philadelphians think about city government, we often focus on what isn’t working. Trash collection is one thing the city generally gets right.
Week after week, in freezing winters and sweltering summers, the trash men and women show up and collect our garbage. It’s consistent – and critical to our quality of life. Yet they’re among the lowest-paid employees in city government.
The average Philadelphia sanitation worker earns $46,459 in base salary. Among the 20 largest metropolitan areas in the United States, only Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth pay less.
According to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, a single adult with no kids in Philly needs $52,790 per year to achieve a pretty basic standard of living. The average sanitation worker earns $6,331 less than that.
Sanitation is not the lowest-skilled job in city government, and it may be the toughest. Few city employees spend every workday outside, regardless of weather.
Clerks, librarians, and 311 operators work in comfortable AC indoors. Police and firefighters also work outside, but they are compensated for the risks and demands of their jobs.
Moreover, looking just at salaries understates the problem, since cost of living differs by city. When you adjust for this, Philly drops from 4th worst to 2nd worst, ahead of only Washington, DC.
Last year’s strike produced modest gains: 3% annual raises for three years plus a one-time $1,500 bonus. After the first raise, the average worker will earn roughly $47,853 — still nearly $5,000 below the local living wage.
When trash isn’t collected, everyone notices immediately. When it is collected, we hardly notice at all.
We all depend on sanitation workers every single week. We ask them to do physically demanding work in every kind of weather, and they deliver one of the city’s most reliable public services.
We should pay them properly for it.
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