by Tom Price

Warehouse Local 6 has been organizing the waste disposal sites all over the San Francisco Bay Area, raising wages, establishing employer-paid health care and giving workers a voice on the job. This drive has gained momentum in the last three years, and when the City of Fremont signed a deal with BLT to build a new recycling facility, Local 6 was ready.

“Fremont’s landfill is nearly full, within a year or two the only work left will be to cover it and maintain the pumps drawing out methane gas,” Local 6 Secretary-Treasurer Fred Pecker said. “The City will not build another landfill. Instead they decided their garbage service would be provided by a combined transfer station and recycling center.”

For Local 6, the challenge was  getting a union contract for the recyclers and getting the un-recyclable garbage to the union dump in Livermore.

So Local 6, represented by its President, Efren Alarcon, and Pecker, sat down to bargain with BLT. The talks were a bit drawn out, but the company saw the power local labor had with the city, and Local 6 had the support of the Teamsters and the Alameda County Central Labor Council, Pecker said. The company agreed to a neutrality agreement, letting the workers choose whether to have Local 6 represent them without employer interference. Then the negotiations went smoothly to a conclusion.

The new facility had been in operation for only about three weeks when, on June 27, the 35 workers voted up their first Local 6 contract, setting the bar higher for those who perform this vital work.

“It’s a victory in being able to establish a good relationship with a company where we didn’t previously have one,” Pecker said.

The workers got a six-year deal that starts recyclers at $11.50 an hour with cost of living raises. They will also have full, company-paid family medical coverage and a 50-cent an hour contribution to pensions. Besides those who sort the recyclables from garbage, the site also has cat drivers, who operate power shovels, weigh scale workers, forklift drivers and traffic directors.

The City of Fremont put out a request for bids for the new recycling center more than two years ago, and BLT won. The City required BLT to pay “prevailing wages.”
“The idea of an ‘area standard,’ for a ‘prevailing wage’ in recycling is a rotten issue because private-company recycling pays so poorly,” Pecker said.

Local 6 has a reputation for raising labor standards. In warehouse, the local negotiates an area agreement in partnership with the Teamsters that covers hundreds of workers and raises their pay, benefits and working conditions. Now the refuse and recycling industry needs union help. But because of the smaller bargaining units and low pay, this has been a difficult industry.

Local 6 has responded by organizing workers at landfill sites and at recycling stations all over the Bay Area. It has joined other unions in supporting laws requiring contractors to pay the “prevailing wage” in city and county contracts. If enough of the industry is organized, this can mean the union wage becomes the standard. But the recycling industry has a long way to go.

“Non-union workers in the industry now make minimum wage or worse,” Pecker said. “At one place the ILWU was organizing, workers lived in the scrap yard in plywood shacks covered with plastic sheeting—and their boss charged rent on the shacks.”
 
“I wish every organizing drive was this successful and simple as this one,” Alarcon said. “It makes a big difference when you’re dealing with a company that feels political pressure. We would run across more of these should we stay and remain political.”

While this is a big step up for one group of workers, others still need a union, Pecker said.

“Public policy mandates recycling, but non-union workers in the industry get treated like the garbage they sort,” Pecker said.