The jailed garbageman case is NOT racism [View all]

[Wella]

It's not about race: it's about punishing the wrong entity, and, possibly about a corporation that does what it pleases regardless of its customer's wishes.

Over the past few days, there have been a number of posts about this story from the Daily Mail:

Garbage man jailed for 30 days because he came to work too EARLY and annoyed residents of wealthy Atlanta suburb
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2984054/Garbage-man-thrown-jail-30-days-getting-work-early-annoying-residents-wealthy-Atlanta-suburb-houses-professional-athletes-rap-star.html#ixzz3TuFHJLuJ

The headline screams classicism, and it's very easy to take the emotional bait, especially since the garbage man is black, the city is in the South, and the central problem seems to be a noise ordinance. Those of us who live in big cities know that the trash people often wake us up before the alarm goes off, an there's a certain amount of jealousy of wealthy people who can sleep without the same annoyance.

However, this is actually a more complicated case and requires a little logic to understand.

PLEASE READ my argument below BEFORE you start commenting:

The garbageman, Kevin McGill, works for a company, Waste Management Inc, which accompanied him to the courthouse:

A representative for the company went to the courthouse with McGill, who expected to be ordered to pay up to a $1000 fine, Ms Bandoh said.

...Ms Prince added that Waste Management, which operates throughout the US and reported $14billion in revenue in 2014, would coordinate with its employee about his work schedule and jail time.

Waste Management is responsible for the employee's behavior and the company had ALREADY racked up a lot of fines with this city:

Sharon Kraun, a spokesman for Sandy Springs, told Daily Mail Online that McGill's citation stemmed from an incident where his truck had been photographed by a resident.

The city had seen a previous case where a garbage man was given jail time several years ago and that while no similar cases had happened since, the collectors had 'fair warning', Ms Kraun said.

She said that Waste Management, which had amassed thousands of dollars in fines with the municipality in the last year, suspended McGill for violating its policies before he went to court.

Waste Management could not answer questions about McGill's employment history with the company as of Saturday morning and said it was 'currently still investigating all the facts in the case'.

So what is the real story?

You have an employee who either (a) ignored his employer's order to start work at 8:00am (the time the city desired garbage pick-up) or (b) was following his employer's order to start at 5:00 am (a time the city did NOT want their garbage picked up.)

These are the only two logical choices. Either McGill started at 5:00am against his employer's instructions or he started at 5:00 am with their approval.

In the first case, an employee going against his employer's instructions should have been fired or moved to another job (he was not). In the second case, the company was deliberately ignoring the city's noise ordinances. In either case, the company is taking the city's money but not giving them the service they want. The city should break their contract with Waste Management, Inc and find another company.

Now to the court case:

We don't know if McGill was acting against his employer's instructions or on their orders when he broke the city's noise ordinances. However, the fact that MANY noise violations were piling up and Waste Management, Inc, was prepared to pay yet another such violation at $1000 tells me that McGill had some kind of approval from the company to keep doing what he did. In other words, it's not the employee who is breaking the noise ordinance but the COMPANY, Waste Management, Inc.

So why did the garbage man get prison time?

Probably because you can't jail a company.

The garbage man's (ludicrous) punishment seems to be the result of a "privatized" local court system that was insufficient to handle a large recalcitrant corporation. We know from the article that the company was fined again and again by this city, to no avail. The fines had ZERO effect. The corporation seemed to just accept them as the price of doing business.

In other words, the corporation had no intention of changing its pickup time and considered itself above the city government and its laws.

Against this backdrop, the privatized court--lacking any means to get this company to change its ways--lashes out at the employee, the only person who could be jailed. The corporate "person" could not.

It was flagrantly wrong for the court to put the employee in jail for his employer's contempt of their laws and continued violation of them.

However, this case highlights just how difficult it is to hold a private corporation to account. A municipal waste company--under taxpayer control--has to follow the city laws or its employees don't get paid. There is no such leverage with a privatized service.

Remember, THIS Is the goal of the Scott Walkers, the GOP, the Third Way Dems: to privatize everything. This Daily Mail article is a perfect example of why privatizing public services is a BAD idea.

For more information on this town that "privatized everything", see this video: