In New York City, the trash workers union prevents dumpsters from being used, which would kill jobs.
Remember: trash is not a problem to deal with. It's a solution to unemployment.
But if what you are saying is true, that's what you get for not allowing multi-concern unions. Our union branch that take care of trash collection workers is also responsible for municipal cleaning workers, as well as dump workers: making the job worse for cleaning and dump workers is just not something the union would push for.
In any case, the US should destroy the unions by removing all legislation preventing work organization or giving them special rights, and let them reform as grassroot unions (your "old club that people can form") and let them grow from this point.
Well, people in any old club can "just stop working". But they are facing contractual penalties including getting fired. And I think that's fair.
> In any case, the US should destroy the unions by removing all legislation preventing work organization or giving them special rights, and let them reform as grassroot unions (your "old club that people can form") and let them grow from this point.
Yes. Though removing the special legal rights (and the few obligations) from unions would basically destroy them.
No, why?
The British monarchy also didn't spring out of nowhere, but that doesn't mean Britain couldn't turn into a republic, if they wanted to change their laws.
Here in Singapore we barely have any unions, or rather in practice unions barely have any influence.
Compare also https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/
NYC was, for large stretches, built without the alleys that lots of other cities would use to store such bins, and I don't think you can easily accommodate the volumes of trash that people want to turn over with just street storage without significant logistical problems with how much you disrupt the flow of people in the city.
Even if we eat the cost of parking around residential locations, businesses have gotten used to using the space in front of their restaurants as additional seating, so cannibalizing that for dumpsters will cause massive backlash on that front, to say nothing of the nasty effects on people's desire to eat when sitting next to a dumpster.
I agree that NYC is slow moving on a lot of things, but this is also a genuinely hard problem.
At this point, even massive dumpsters on the sidewalk would be an improvement.
Proper bins could pile the trash higher, so they would take up less floor space than the random distributed piles.
And as other commenters point out, you could sacrifice some parking spots.
I don't actually think you can get denser storage, at the moment, than the raw piles of garbage bags. In some places, they are absolutely willing to pile them higher than people stand, sometimes, and proper individual trashcans would sacrifice some space for their size, and actual dumpsters would be pretty disruptive to place since there's not much in the way of locations to land them on.
The trash bag piles also have the nominal benefit that they're transitory - that is, you don't have to permanently say "this space will only be used for trash storage", and with a place with space at such a premium sometimes, that really does matter.
(I'm not fond of the bags either, but short of the city dropping a truly astonishing amount of money on trying to buy up properties on each block to keep dumpsters in, as far as I can see, just getting the rolling bins out and about is the best reduction you can hope for.)
No, it's not. Just because a union opposes something doesn't mean it would cause unemployment.