Two times every day a line of at least a dozen garbage trucks leaves the City of Lafayette's Sanitation Department garage.  They barrel up Dorset Street away from the Vermillion River, past stinking Trappey's, and spread out across the city.  Working day and night along 25 well-coordinated routes, the hungry hydraulic jaws of these trucks will pack in several hundred tons of Lafayette's leftovers each day.

Feeding and burping the machines are the most hardworking men in town. Teaming up three to a truck, the driver and two collectors empty about 1,400 cans per day.  All things considered, they are also the most underpaid and abused.

Not since the Middle Ages when corpse carriers carted off victims of the Black Plague has any work been so widely regarded as unhealthy and undesirable.

It is in fact true, as the sanitation workers will admit, that the job they do is unhealthy and undesirable.  But an important distinction should be drawn between work and worker.

There is a popular assumption in our overly-competitive society, that a man's quality is to be ranked according to his work.  So, naturally enough, the common term "garbageman" seems to reflect the value people place on men who toil with trash. In the back of their heads some people say, 'as a man you are garbage.'

On their rounds they can expect to be frequently treated like garbage.  Little girls throw things at them ("Clarence was knocked out with a peach"), folks call them "nigger" (all the collectors are Black), and ever since the $2.25 monthly residential charge began last year people have been more demanding ("sweep the rest up off the street").

DANGERS

The possible health hazards of this line of work are many.  For instance, it is easy to twist an ankle jumping onto and off the truck all day.  Vigilant dogs do not distinguish between postmen and collectors.  In addition, these guys are expected to work in all kinds of weather-- lightning, downpour, everyting.  The morning crew even worked through Hurricane Edith.  The truck drivers are known to back up on the collectors occasionally.  As recently as a couple years ago a collector had a hand drawn into the loader and sliced off.  The garbage itself presents obvious dangers.  Sharp objects offer painful surprises.  Diseases and cockroaches thrive in putrid piles of muck.  And the continual turmoil in their stomachs caused by the repulsive stink of rotting food produces ulcers in almost all of the long-time garbage collectors.  The monthly safety meetings held in City Hall are dedicated primarily to cost-cutting schemes and efficiency pep talks.

It is a myth that these men get accustomed to the dirty work.  "Some things nobody can get used to.  We still throw up now and again," says one.  "They got us picking up rotten-ass motherfucking dead dogs when they're supposed to have a dog warden."

Another suggests sarcastically, "Well, you can't expect whites to do shit work!"

Indeed, the administrators seem to agree.

RACISM

As mentioned before, all collectors are Black.  They hold the positions at the bottom rung in the Departmental ladder.  Once, for a short while, a white man collected trash.  He was put into a different position because the Department received complaints from whites who thought it inappropriate.