Trash Management Gets Hands Dirty

Juan Cortes hopped aboard a 40-ton truck in the early morning darkness Tuesday, eased through a raucous picket line of his buddies, then got chased down a highway by an SUV full of angry strikers hoping to slow him down.

“We lost them at a red light,” said Cortes, a Waste Management operations manager-turned-driver.

One colleague wasn’t so lucky. When that driver emptied the bin at a Del Taco restaurant in Santa Ana, pickets blocked the exit and wouldn’t let him out. They didn’t leave until the police were called.

And that’s just the problems of getting around. Then, guys like Cortes, who are filling in for striking drivers throughout the country, have to figure out how to get trash into trucks they’ve never operated before.

By the middle of his workday Tuesday--10:30 a.m.--Cortes was just finishing the route he had been unable to finish Monday. But he was confident that he would have the hang of the job by week’s end.

“These trucks are fairly easy to operate,” Cortes said while waiting in the parking lot of the Alder Court apartment complex in Santa Ana. Waiting, because the huge trash bins weren’t out. “When we didn’t show up yesterday, they put them back inside.”

Once the trash was wheeled out, Cortes, who used to drive a more primitive breed of trash truck, started pulling gears and pushing buttons. Two big metal arms came down and slid onto the bin. As it was lifted, the bin seesawed and crashed into the front of the truck before Cortes was able to hoist it into the receptacle. He looked resigned about such miscues.

Cortes is not pleased to be back in the driver’s seat. “Those guys out there are like family,” the 10-year Waste Management veteran said of the pickets. As he spoke, wrappers and tissues that didn’t make it into the truck rained down on the cab.

Anthony Yetkofsky, another supervisor, rode with Cortes as a safety precaution. Their friends on the picket lines haven’t hassled them much--yet.

“When more guys start coming in from out of state to take over these routes, it is going to get ugly,” Yetkofsky said.

Waste Management is already bringing in out-of-state, nonunion drivers, offering bonuses of about $100 for every day they fill in.

“My father was a Teamster for 30 years,” Yetkofsky said. His father’s advice? “Be careful.”

The strikers aren’t the only ones he needed to look out for: There’s also the residents. Yetkofsky was helping a driver pick up commercial trash in Costa Mesa on Monday when a homeowner begged them to take hers too. They did. Then another resident came outside, and another and another. “We finally had to say, ‘No more.’ ”

As the days wear on and the trash piles up, he expects the pressure from the strikers and the customers to get much worse.

Cortes jumped from the truck with a long stick, which he used to push trash strewn over the top of the truck back inside. A pile of rotten produce, Styrofoam containers, and what looked like moldy scrambled eggs fell to the ground.

“You guys eat breakfast yet?” Cortes joked.

Then it was off to the transfer station in Irvine.

The men braced themselves. Pickets had hit the facility hard. Word was out that dozens of workers based at that location who were not on strike had staged a sickout Monday. And strikers picketing there had just been informed that their heath benefits had been cut off.

Cortes and Yetkofsky arrived to find a handful of strikers at each of the two entrances. But even those few were managing to slow the operation. They barred the entrance for two minutes every time a truck tried to get in, the amount of time police are allowing strikers block traffic. That caused a backup of half a dozen trucks.

Project Manager Carlos Muniz explained: “Two minutes might not seem like much, but if these guys can block 20 trucks for two minutes each, it adds up and causes problems.”

Yetkofsky sees a picket he knows and waves. “That guy has been with the company 32 years,” he said. “He only had 22 months till his retirement.”