To pay the bills, Luis Nieves, an eight-year sanitation worker in Montclair’s Department of Community Services, holds a second job. The Bloomfield resident works on the side as the superintendent of a 35-unit apartment building on Bloomfield Avenue in his hometown.
Since his wife has a medical condition and is on disability, his family, including his 7- and 9-year-old sons and 16-year-old daughter, relies heavily on his earnings to stay afloat.
As if that weren’t enough to keep him preoccupied, Nieves has another concern: whether his Community Services job will still exist in the near future.
"With everything that’s going on in a person’s life," having this constant threat of Montclair’s garbage collection, a service he and 17 other township employees presently perform, being handed over to a private-sector company "is a burden that should not have to be," said Nieves.
He was among approximately 30 workers from the Department of Community Services who protested for the second time in as many weeks outside the Municipal Building this past Tuesday, as they continued decrying the potential privatization of the township’s trash removal.
As they did on Aug. 5, workers devoted their half-hour lunch breaks to marching back and forth outside 205 Claremont Ave. while holding anti-privatization posters. As they walked, one member repeatedly asked, "Say what?" and was answered by a chorus of his colleagues saying, "Save our jobs!"
Ernie Branca, president of the union local that organized the protest, said employees staged a second march since the first did not induce supervisors to reach out to the union and hear workers’ concerns.
"We’ll see if management contacts us this time," Branca told applauding employees after the march concluded.
Before the previous members of the Township Council left office, they approved a budget calling for a $75,000-reduction in the amount of funding allocated for refuse collection. Outgoing council members told Township Manager Joseph Hartnett to restructure the municipal trash collection service, or to consider contracting with an outside company to pick up Montclair’s garbage.
Municipal officials are in the process of determining how much taxpayer money the latter move might save. They have received copies of the garbage-collection contracts of six other Essex County towns believed to have demographic and other similarities with Montclair.
Officials of the union representing Montclair’s sanitation workers have said making the switch to a private company would not save the municipality money.
Contractors commonly offer low bids to convince towns that they are the better option, they said, but the low rates are fleeting. When it comes time to renew the contract, those bargain rates are nowhere to be found, and many times towns have already sold their garbage trucks and other equipment and can’t go back to doing the work themselves, union representatives claim.
Hartnett said Montclair would not fall prey to such a bait-and-switch. By researching the mature contracts of other towns, Montclair officials are getting a glimpse of what long-term rates would look like, the township manager said.
But beyond financial concerns, Nieves said that if a private company was brought in, then the quality of the service would suffer.
"We feel we’re your neighbors, we’re your friends," he said, referring to the relationship between the public sanitation workers and residents.
That rapport and respect for people’s property and convenience would be gone if a private company were hired, he said. Contracted workers will not wait around while residents who, at the last minute, remembered it was trash-collection day and drag their trashcans out front. They will not provide the friendly and personable service now being offered, he maintained.
"We’re part of this community," said Nieves. "But we’re being treated as if though we’re expendable.
"We feel we’re not."
Hartnett has told The Times that, if the municipality were to sign a contract with a private entity, officials would then include a clause in the agreement requiring that the company offer employment to municipal workers whose jobs were outsourced.
But during Tuesday’s protest, Richard Gollin, executive director of Council 52 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), said that even if a private company hired ex-municipal employees, their compensation would be reduced.
"To tell someone they’ll have a job that pays McDonald’s wages, that’s not the same job they have now," Gollin said, adding that for any contractual provision to be meaningful, it would need to protect not just employees’ positions, but their pay, pension, benefits and union representation.
