"A Hard Pill to Swallow"

I suppose that in itself, it's not a particularly good or useful idea to harp on the "sanitation" issue any more.  "What's done is done," one of our neighbors said to me at the time, although that appears not to have been the case, even for the person who said it.  "Moving forward...," as others say.

One opportunity, at least for me, is to ignore the continued sputterings, and to assume they will die out in time.  Which perhaps they will.  But ignoring significant psychological and emotional dynamics is not what I do, especially when they have practical and functional consequences.

In the aftermath of the goodbye-lunch-for-the-departing-employees stunt, one reader wrote several comments to me, and she began by noting what I have used as the title for this post.

Here's the pill that's hard to swallow:

This whole sanitation crusade was structured as a complaint about lack of appreciation for Village employees who are portrayed as valued.  They were further portrayed as having been summarily and heartlessly dismissed, with no acknowledgement or recognition of the important role they filled in the Village.  It was said that in our transitioning to WastePro, we pulled the rug out from under these people, depriving them of their careers and their livelihoods, and we were uniquely cruel to have treated them this way.  That's the assertion.  That's the portrayal.  That's the image and the mascot.

These are the competing realities.  Although no one deprived these Village employees of anything, we have, in fact, done exactly that to other Village employees.  There was a woman who provided janitorial service for Village Hall and the recreation center.  We dismissed her.  One day she had a job, and the next day, she didn't.  We decided to reassign the tasks and save the money.  There was a PW worker named Charles.  We decided his job description, or the way he fulfilled it, was not worth the money, and we ended his employment here.  We did not replace him.  We "retired" a PW worker named Roscoe.  We also "retired" Bernard Pratt.  It was the same deal for these three men as it was for the woman who used to clean the log cabin and the rec center: a job one day, no job the next day.  If you want to know how many Village residents rose up to complain about our treatment of these valued employees, abruptly deprived of livelihoods, the answer is none.  There has also never been a general outcry in opposition to the low wages we have always paid these people.

And the fact is, we didn't deprive our sanitation workers.  We carefully chose an outsource contractor who agreed to hire all of our employees, and pay them better than we did.  And this was to do exactly the same work they were already doing, and in part, in exactly the same place, with better equipment to use.  We provided for these Village employees extremely well, especially compared to how we dealt, without criticism, with other similar Village employees.

Bernard Pratt, by the way, moved back to Georgia to be with other parts of his family.  When his mother died a few years ago, several of us, but not most of the current complainers, went to the funeral.  (It seems Bernard didn't feel like "family," or a "close friend," to those of us who couldn't be bothered to attend his mother's funeral.)  Charles is still around.  He does lawn maintenance, and a number of his customers are Village residents.  I don't know what the cleaning woman and Roscoe are doing. These are Village employees to whom the dreaded eventuality actually happened, and no one made a peep about it.  What happened to the appreciation of, and concern for, our valued PW employees? 

And what about some of our other valued Village employees?   We have improved services by hiring new people.  One is a replacement, of sorts, for Candido Sosa-Cruz, and the others are recreation employees.  They have been routinely slighted by those here who complain of the disrespectful treatment of Village employees.  Their legitimacy, and the legitimacy of their positions, have been questioned, often to their faces.  The disrespect has not been lost on them.  It is they who have been having a bit of trouble swallowing the pill.

Here they are, having applied for and accepted an opportunity to fulfill a position, ready to do and give their best, and bringing a great attitude every day.  In return, they are treated as unwelcome intruders by BP residents.  And these are the very same residents who then bemoan what they portray as the disrespectful treatment of Village employees.  If you had just taken a job in BP, would that be a hard pill for you to swallow? 

What's done is in fact done, and there's no reason at all not to assume it is an improvement.  We should without question be moving forward.  And we can have every confidence the sanitation workers who didn't want to work for WastePro will be moving forward.  If they didn't have a better deal, they would have accepted the generous offer to work for WastePro.