Inside America’s garbage labour dispute

Garbage bags overflowing in dumpsters. Flies buzzing in the air. Malodorous fumes wafting in the summer sun – an unsightly mess is plaguing American cities from coast to coast this summer.

Some employees of Republic Services – a Fortune 500 private waste-management company with municipal contracts across America – have been refusing to take out the trash since going on strike over three weeks ago.

The Teamsters union, which represents the company’s workers, say they are being paid far below other sanitation workers and receive worse benefits. But the company says the union isn’t willing to compromise, and while relations rot, so does the garbage.

The strike began on 1 July with Local 25, which serves 14 communities in the Greater Boston area, and spread to several other cities in the US: Manteca, California; Ottawa, Illinois; Cumming, Georgia; and Lacey, Washington. More employees stopped work in solidarity.

“The cost of living is high – what they’re offering, I wouldn’t be able to live on that in a month,” said Mike Ortiz, a truck driver from Malden, Massachusetts who’s worked in the industry for 17 years.

At peak, effectively over 2,000 garbage collectors across the country weren’t on the job, impacting millions of Americans. While Republic and the union have resolved some local disputes, there’s plenty of workers still holding out.

In the ocean-side city of Gloucester, about an hour north of Boston, the sharp smell of salt air has been undercut by the lingering funk of rotting garbage, and squawking seagulls circle overhead.

“I mean, if this were going on in, you know, November, December, it wouldn’t be as noticeable, the smell of it,” Greg Vargas, the city’s mayor, told the BBC.

It’s become a major nuisance for the mayor, who has joined forces with five other towns to sue Republic over breach of contract.

“When they were talking to us before the strike, they said, don’t worry about it, we’re a national company. We’ll have people in place and take care of everything,” he recalled. “That has not been delivered on since day one.”

Meanwhile, Republic Services has sued the Teamsters, accusing it of engaging in illegal behaviour.

“The Teamsters’ pattern of criminal behaviour -including truck theft, tire slashing, spraying chemicals on drivers and hate speech – demonstrates the union’s preference for chaos over compromise,” the company said in a statement.

The union denies the accusations.

Garbage collectors in major cities like New York and Philadelphia are public employees, but smaller metropolises have long outsourced to private companies, like Republic. Founded over 40 years ago, the company took in $16bn in revenue in 2024, and frequently appears on the Fortune 500 list.

At the heart of its success story has been a promise to customers: we’ll whisk your trash out of sight, and you won’t have to think about it.

But when the trash piles up, things can get ugly.

“We have these negative associations with waste, particularly smellier waste, that is associated with poverty and disease – other things we don’t like to see or think about,” said Sarah A Moore, a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

That can give striking workers leverage, she said.

In Philadelphia, where a separate garbage strike made headlines this summer, it took just eight days for the city to reach a deal with public workers, after trash overflowed into the streets and residents complained of rats running amok.

In Lacey, Washington, which is outside the capital city of Olympia, the union representing the workers there reached an agreement with Republic Services after about a week, ending the strike. It has also reached a deal with the union in Manteca, California, near Stockton.

But bedraggled residents who spoke to the BBC near Lacey last week said they felt the workers’ absence during the strike. They described dirty diapers piling up at home, and striking sanitation workers described working under dangerous and filthy conditions.

Workers on the picket line complained that Republic has not maintained equipment since taking over the Thurston County dump around two years ago.

“Things are constantly breaking down,” says Eric Fiel, a veteran sanitation worker whose team moves 1.5 million lbs of rubbish every day.

“We have a pump system that keeps breaking. Basically it just pools up. You’re wading through this water. It’s full of faeces, diapers, animal faeces, whatever comes through.”

Will Zekas, in Lacey, told the BBC he appreciated the national effort that happened around the US, and attributed it to his union’s ability to negotiate a better contract.

“Power lies in the solidarity,” he said.

In the parts of Massachusetts affected by the Teamsters Local 25 strike, there appears to be no sign of a quick resolution. Mr Ortiz said the union and the company were farther away then ever on pay and health-care benefits.

Each accuses the other of misrepresenting the conflict.

“Republic Services is focused on facts and reaching an agreement that provides our employees with market-leading pay and benefits, while Teamsters leadership is focused on disinformation and disruption,” the company said in a statement.

Meanwhile, towns and cities are having to get creative – and dig into their own pockets – to keep the trash under control.

Several towns have created dump sites where residents can bring their own refuse. Gloucester has diverted some municipal workers to pickup duty, while other cities have had to outsource to different private contractors. The additional cost has been cited in the lawsuit against Republic.

But even cities that don’t work with Republic are struggling to deal with the stalemate.

In Boston, where many local businesses rely on the company for private collection, Mayor Michelle Wu said she would start fining Republic for failure to clear trash: “Your inability to collect trash from your customers due to the ongoing labor dispute at Republic Services is taking an unacceptable toll on Boston’s residents, businesses, and neighborhoods.”

At a coffee shop in Malden, a few miles north of Boston, a garbage dumpster was overflowing on Wednesday, attracting a cloud of buzzing insects.

“It’s been horrible, terrible, really. I don’t know how to explain how frustrating it is,” said business-owner Glaicy Santos. “We need the trash to be picked up every week because we have a lot of trash. When that doesn’t happen, then that creates a big problem for us. And then it also becomes mosquitoes out there, or other rodents could be out there.”

She’s not sure how much more she can take, but she may have a while to wait. Negotiations broke off last Friday, and the two parties have no date scheduled to head back to the bargaining table.