Susana Bates for New York Daily News
Sanitation Department canned a guy whose only offense was to take a $ 20 tip.
What a load of garbage.
The city just forced a sanitationman named Lenworth Dixon, 56, into retirement and fined him $ 1,500 because he accepted a $ 20 tip for hauling off a homeowner’s large load of refuse.
Talk about trashing a workingman’s life.
This is plain ridiculous. Here we have a hardworking guy who picks up our garbage in the blistering summer and freezing winter, dealing with roaches, rats and maggots known as “disco rice.” He risks exposure to toxic and incendiary chemicals, crazed horn-honking motorists and nitpicking homeowners. He plows and salts our snowy roads. Here is a man whose toil we can plainly see as well-spent tax dollars. And yet he gets canned because he takes a $ 20 tip?
C’mon.
How about a fine? Maybe an unpaid suspension? A loss of vacation days?
Listen, I understand that it’s illegal for city workers to take gratuities. We don’t want our cops selling their badges to drug dealers. We don’t want fire inspectors overlooking a dangerous warren for a bribe. We don’t want Buildings Department staffers giving slumlords a pass for a green portrait of Benjamin Franklin. We don’t want Health Department inspectors giving an “A” rating to a dive. We don’t want our politicians and judges in anyone’s pockets.
But we’re talking about load of garbage here, OK?
A Department of Sanitation worker who took an extra twenny to haul off more than the allotted six pieces of garbage from a home. This is not going to lead to a four-alarm blaze or a drug dealer operating with impunity or a politician giving a mobster a city contract for a kickback.
Some perspective is in order.
It’s a sanitationman, a guy who heaves bags of our daily dregs into a truck until his lower lumbar discs herniate, taking lunch money. For as long as I can remember in this city, you tipped sanitation workers when they took away a big pile of junk.
Or at Christmastime.
Early in his first term, I had dinner with Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He asked me what people thought of him in the outer boroughs. I told him his nickname was Mayor Taxberg because of the way he blanketed citizens with sanitation summonses. I told him I caught a sanitation inspector literally tearing open my plastic trash bags to discover an unrecycled newspaper, for which he wrote me a $ 25 ticket.
Bloomberg laughed and said, “You must not be tipping your garbagemen at Christmas.”
I assured him I did.
True, I don’t tip cops, firefighters, toll collectors or tree pruners. But I don’t have a personal daily relationship with those workers. A sanit worker is like a regular fixture in a homeowner’s life, like the mailman and the lawn guy.
Harry Nespoli, the president of the sanitation workers union, comes from my old neighborhood in Brooklyn. “It is a harsh punishment, but they don’t tolerate taking money from the public,” he told the Daily News after Dixon’s termination. “We’re not allowed to take any money from the public, even at Christmastime. We don’t work for the post office.”
Growing up in Brooklyn, I lived in a tenement between 11th and 12th Sts., and the Nespolis lived in a lovely home on 13th St. with a gorgeous front garden tended by his green-thumbed dad.
Look, I realize there is a long list of people waiting to get a job with great benefits at the Sanitation Department in these tough economic times. I get it that when you work for the city you’re supposed to play by the rules.
But we’re talking $ 20 to haul a little extra house garbage here. Not thousands to dispose of asbestos.
Does a guy from Queens with three kids who has worked 24 years picking up our trash in scorching summers and freezing winters deserve to be dumped like garbage for taking a measly $ 20 tip?
Hell, no. What a waste.
dhamill@nydailynews.com
Yahoo Local News – New York Daily News
http://ift.tt/1g9iuo6
via Great Local News: New York http://ift.tt/1iZiLP1
No comments:
Post a Comment