Complaints about uncollected trash have more than quadrupled in the last week, since New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced an all-encompassing COVID-19 vaccine mandate for municipal workers.
The complaints spiked the most in south Brooklyn, parts of Staten Island and the northwest Bronx, according to publicly available 311 data.
“I'm assuming it is related to people expressing their views on this new mandate,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said of the missed pickups at a press conference on Thursday.
City workers must have at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine by 5 p.m. on Friday afternoon. Enforcement of the requirement begins three days later, on November 1st, when those without shots will be sent home without pay. As of Wednesday, about 3,300 sanitation workers — or around one-third of the department's staff — are unvaccinated, according to the latest city data.
Complaints of uncollected trash and recycling topped out at more than 12,200 in a single day on October 24th. At the start of the week prior, the city averaged just 140 missed collection service requests per day.
Weekly complaints, too, are more than quadruple what they were this time in late September. New Yorkers made 5,249 missed pickup reports between October 20th and October 26th, compared with just 1,109 a month earlier.
Residents of Canarsie in Brooklyn, told WNYC/Gothamist that trash is usually collected on time—perhaps barring a snowstorm—but they recently started noticing missed pickups.
“For the last week there’s been a lot of trash left behind by the sanitation department, and it’s unfair,” said Garvin, a Canarsie resident who declined to give his last name. “We have a lot of rodents in this area. We have raccoons. We have possums. It’s not really healthy to have all this trash laying around.”
Garvin said it seems like the sanitation workers are on a “go slow” because they pick up some people’s trash and not others. “You have garbage trucks driving by and not picking up any garbage,” he said.
The trash wasn’t strewn around equally. Missed pickup complaints from parts of Staten Island rose 50-fold this week compared with a month ago. Marine Park, Bergen Beach, Canarsie and the surrounding neighborhoods saw 20 to 30 times the usual number of trash-related 311 submissions. And reports more than tripled and quadrupled in Throgs Neck, Pelham Bay, much of south Brooklyn and other neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs. And that’s not even counting missed pickups that weren’t reported.
Sanitation Commissioner Edward Grayson conceded in an interview with NY1 on Tuesday that they’d seen a slowdown in trash pickups. The Department of Sanitation didn’t immediately return a request for further comment.
Harry Nespoli, president of Local 831, the union representing sanitation workers, denied there was some kind of trash pickup slowdown.
“How is it a slowdown when the Department [of Sanitation] made a move to get the guys out to do all of the catch basins, 5,000 catch basins before the rain,” Nespoli said, though the spike in complaints for uncollected trash began days before storms hit the city on Tuesday. “We saved the city again from floating away. That’s not a slowdown.”
Though Nespoli wouldn’t admit his members were intentionally not collecting trash, he said unvaccinated members were angry and demoralized about the mandate.
“The city workers should not be treated like this,” he said. “What they’re doing is, they’re not turning around. They feel as if, how can I go out there and perform if I don’t know tomorrow I have a job. But they are out there picking up the garbage. That's what they’re doing.”
De Blasio on Thursday urged sanitation workers to resume trash pickups, warning that others could take their jobs if they didn’t want them.
“You want to protest, go protest. But when you're on the clock, you have to do your job,” he said. “Your fellow New Yorkers really are depending on you.”
