An Increasingly Interesting Dance

Rewritten, under editorial advice to reduce the run-ons.  I intended to use them strategically to illustrate and provide experience of a convoluted and dizzying dance that deposits us in precisely the place we were trying so hard to avoid.



At this point, there have been approximately 550 views of this blog in just over 24 hours.  At this pace, I expect the highest two-day total of views ever.  Clearly, the topic has been of great and urgent interest to us.  There are two relevant posts on this topic in the past day, and one of them is authored by someone who never before contributed to this blog.  There have been very many comments, and they have been thoughtful and extensive.  And I'm not even counting the related posts from days or so before yesterday, which included yet other authors and even more comments.

The topic, of course, is our sanitation function, and the idea of outsourcing it to a private contractor.  Whether or not there is clear reason for us to consider outsourcing, the response has included impassioned opposition to the idea.  This opposition has been coupled with alternative proposals that would allow us to keep the function under Village Hall's jurisdiction, and functioning efficiently and well.  There appears to be universal agreement that even if we like our sanitation function, and the employees who execute it, no one thinks we have been efficient about it.

Anti-outsourcing suggestions include increasing the amount we pay for our service-- most definitely increasing what we pay-- as well as buying new trucks and related equipment.  But we all also agree we should increase the efficiency of our crew.  To do that effectively, we have to change the (union) contract we have with our PW employees, and the opportunity to do that is right now.  Their union contract ended last September, and we have simply adhered to it on a continuing basis since September.  But we need a new contract with them, and it needs not to leave us at the disadvantages under which we have been laboring.  Results of a new union contract will include greater efficiency and accountability on their parts.  There will be, for example, fewer allowed absentee days.  We may need more prerogative about when to ask them, and require them, to provide extended hours, at overtime pay, of course, to get needed work done.

Drew Dillworth reminds us of another possible change we may have to consider.  In the almost nine years I have lived in BP, I, too, remember mention of this idea.  The idea is to decrease the collection days, so that garbage is collected one day a week, instead of two.  When this idea has been floated in the past, it has been for exactly the same reason as it may be considered now: to decrease the cost of the program.  When the cost of the sanitation program has been addressed before, there have even been neighbors who themselves have suggested decreasing the number of days, which some consider an unnecessary luxury, to lower the cost.

There may be casualties of our making changes.  For example, we should "tighten" the union contract, and extract more exertion and more efficiency from our employees. This may lead some of them to conclude BP is not the friendly, comparatively accommodating, place to work to which they had accustomed themselves.  It could be imaginable that some might choose not to continue employment with us.  We have already seen that offering to compensate them by paying them more is not experienced by them as inducement enough.

Further, some of us might complain if we decrease garbage pick-up from two days a week to one, even though that may be prudent or even fiscally necessary.  Some may like the more frequent relief.  But when we get new trucks, which are planned to be larger and more reliable than the old trucks, and we have our crew operating more efficiently, there is little need or even excuse for such frequent pick-up.

So here's the curiosity.  What we might "succeed" in doing is winding up with new equipment, busier and possibly less happy, though better paid, employees, and less frequent garbage pick-up.  All of this very closely approximates what some of us are trying to avoid by resisting outsourcing.  And "accomplishing" all of this unwanted (by some) effect will be at much greater cost than having a contractor do it.  I'm not sure this qualifies as a pyrrhic victory, but it sure is close.