Something Smells

Our local trash day is Monday. However, this week the trash has been sitting out since then, and has not been picked up. The girls have been hearing at school that the garbage men are on strike, so I steeled myself to go to one of the online local news sources, and found out that the garbage men are indeed on strike, but only in solidarity with garbage men in Youngstown, OH that are also on strike. Well. Youngstown isn't a place where the wealthy tend to congregate. My in-laws live there, my husband grew up there, and we go there often. It's not Detroit, but Youngstown has its share of abandoned buildings and run-down neighborhoods. Maybe the garbage men in Youngstown have a legitimate issue. Maybe you just can't get blood out of a stone. Mr. BTEG's previous job didn't offer enough money, or a good enough health care plan for our needs. His previous employer didn't particularly care. Apparently they felt they could afford to lose Mr. BTEG as an employee, when he was able to find a better job. The company made its decision; we made ours. An employee can't always get more money just by asking for it, no matter how unfair that may be in the mind of the employee.

In this economy, with unemployment high, and with lots of people who have gone through their 99 weeks of unemployment pay and basically given up looking for a job, I do wonder about the wisdom of striking. There might be a lot of people out there who would like work, even collecting garbage. I also wonder about the wisdom of striking when you are not even the group that has the grievance. It's over 80 degrees today, and we have garbage on the curb that has been there since Sunday night. We have raccoons locally, and I'm sure some people have had their garbage broken into. These things are not really making me think favorably about the garbage men. And what am I supposed to do, anyway? Call the Youngstown city offices and demand they pay their own garbage men more? All this strike is making me do is hope that the strikers here get fired.