The city should take back control of public services!
18th October 2021 · 0 Comments
Before Hurricane Ida, many New Orleans residents complained about inconsistent garbage collection, utility outages, and poverty wages paid by city contractors.
While Mayor LaToya Cantrell and the City Council explore options to private contractors’ failures to deliver good public services, the question must be asked: Should the City of New Orleans take back control of its own public assets and services?
Garbage contractors like Metro Disposal are struggling to meet workers’ demands for higher pay and benefits. Although Entergy reportedly pays an average salary of $31,000, that is still not a living wage.
Entergy’s failure to adjust service delivery to meet climate change demands or employing 21st-century technology is problematic. Every time there is a hard rain or a hurricane, residents experience outages.
Entergy’s and other services providers’ continual use of 1816 technology; telegraph and telephone poles, to deliver essential utilities is unacceptable. Especially when New Orleanians are being charged exorbitant prices for Entergy’s services, compared with other utility providers’ charges in other parts of the state.
Hurricane Ida only exacerbated a garbage collection problem that had been ongoing for months. In 2020, sanitation hoppers went on strike at Metro Disposal for better pay and benefits.
While Metro Disposal deserves credit for offering pay increases and incentives to workers, the company, like others across the U.S., is experiencing the after-effect of the bursting of the cheap labor bubble. Workers across the U.S. and here are done with poverty wages. Last August, 4.3 million people quit their jobs.
Mayor Cantrell’s swift action in addressing the garbage collection problem is genuinely appreciated. She greenlit a $20 million emergency garbage collection plan which included hiring additional contractors the day before residents marched on City Hall in a “Trash Parade.”
And the City Council is to be commended for passing an ordinance waiving the $24 monthly sanitation charge for November 2021, to which Cantrell agreed.
Still, the garbage problem exists. Garbage is now collected once weekly instead of twice a week. And we know that every time we experience an Entergy outage, residents are at risk for food spoilage and electronic failures – cell phones, computers, and electricity and gas were unobtainable – which cut off contact with the outside world.
Conventional wisdom is that government can’t provide services as well as the private sector. Government benefits from privatization by passing on the responsibility for providing services to residents and not being held totally accountable for private companies’ failure to deliver high-quality services.
However, consumers bear the brunt of higher costs and declines in service quality and pay through the nose – taxes and monthly fees—for less than adequate essential services. Residents must pay whatever service providers like Entergy charge because our city allows monopolies to abuse us.
While we applaud the efforts of our city leaders, price-gouging of residents must stop, poverty wages being paid to workers, whether in government or the private sector, must end, and monopolies must end.
It’s no surprise that Louisiana had the second-highest poverty rate in the nation, 19.0 percent, second only to Mississippi’s 19.6 percent in poverty, according to U.S. Census Data (2019). The data shows that the states with the highest poverty rates are in the south. Truth be told, these data can be attributed to the plantation mindset of government officials who devalue the work and worth of its citizenry, especially Black citizens.
The poverty rate in New Orleans surpasses both states, with 23.7 percent of city residents in poverty. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. We’re better than that. This city is by far more sophisticated, more cosmopolitan, more popular than other Louisiana parishes. Tens of millions of tourists come to enjoy the city. Everyone who employs workers here should pay a livable wage.
For its part in combating poverty, New Orleans’ government needs a paradigm shift in regulating utilities and private contracts. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is insanity. And we don’t want to hear about costs incurred by the service providers. They’ll pass them on to us anyway.
The city of New Orleans needs to take back complete control of its utilities. That will create more jobs, with livable wages and benefits for essential workers. The city must take care of its own. Waiting for the state to mandate a minimum living wage is a fool’s errand.
Privatization of public services isn’t working, and the costs to consumers are adding to the poverty level here.
Until the city decides on public service contracts, residents should only pay $12 monthly for garbage pick-up since collection days are reduced. Citizens should also be reimbursed or receive credits for all the months of inadequate garbage collection.
As for Entergy’s and Sewerage and Water Board’s overcharges, the city should put a cap on what both can charge.
This article originally published in the October 18, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
