Not even automating your workforce will protect you from this trope!
846. Just because you earn a decent wage, don't look down on those who don't. To put things in perspective, consider what would happen to the public good if you didn't do your job for 30 days. Then, consider the consequences if sanitation workers didn't do their jobs for 30 days. Now, whose job is more important?
— Life's Little Instruction Book, Volume II
Something's happened in this setting. Trash cans are overflowing and their contents are spilling onto the streets. Why is this?
Answer: something has caused trash collection in the area to grind to a halt. Maybe the local sanitation workers are on strike. Maybe there's some kind of logistical issue with trash pickup. Maybe something has physically cut the area off from trash collection. Whatever the reason, trash isn't getting picked up, causing a neighbourhood or even an entire city to become an unwilling example of Trash of the Titans, with garbage accumulating everywhere.
Expect residents to be none too happy about it. In fact, some writers may use it to give people in the setting a reason to be irritable, much like they would be during a Heat Wave (there may even be overlap, since a heat wave would likely make the garbage smell even worse).
May also provide An Aesop on the importance of sanitation workers or taking out the garbage. If the accumulated trash is symptomatic of broader societal problems, then it may also be considered a setting-wide example of Mess of Woe.
A Sub-Trope of Trash of the Titans. Often doubles as a Strike Episode when more serious causes are too heavy for the tone of the work. Can be considered the artificial equivalent or even Sub-Trope of Decay Is Necessary.
Compare and contrast:
- Milkman Conspiracy, when a seemingly lowly job is powerful behind the scenes.
- The Real Heroes, when superheroes and other "elites" spotlight the all-important contribution of "ordinary" police, firefighters, and paramedics.
Not to be confused with Almighty Janitor, which is a character with outsized influence despite their menial position. Also compare Nature Clean-Up.
Examples:
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Films — Live-Action
- The Fifth Element: The airport has a mountain ridge of trash running through it due to the alien janitorial staff being on strike.
- Ghostbusters II: When the prosecutor sarcastically asks Peter Venkman if he thinks the Ghostbusters paranormal expertise makes them special, he replies that "sometimes, shit happens, someone has to deal with it, and who you gonna call?" Since this is New York, this sentiment draws rousing applause from the audience.
- Gotham City is under a garbage strike during the events of Joker (2019), a sign of the social unrest within the city that eventually leads to the rise of the Clown Prince of Crime.
- Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris: Downplayed. Mrs. Harris visits Paris in 1957, in the midst of a garbage workers' strike, meaning that while the sights are beautiful, the streets are filled with trash. While Mrs. Harris is still able to enjoy the city in spite of this, this background struggle for fair work compensation parallels those of Mrs. Harris, who is often taken advantage of in her day job as a widowed house cleaner, and the Dior workers she gets to know on the quest to get her dress, whose jobs are at risk as the company struggles to modernize, all of whom must learn to fight for their own fair compensation. It also foreshadows that the Rich Bitch who claimed the dress Mrs. Harris first fell in love with out of spite is the wife of the unfair sanitation plant owner behind the strike. When the couple is arrested for corruption and graft near the film's end, Mrs. Harris is able to get her dream dress after all.
- The Out-of-Towners takes place amidst a garbage strike, with the piles of trash adding to the film's Big Rotten Apple atmosphere.
Literature
- Barney Bin Down In The Dumps: In the house where all the objects are alive (Kitty Kettle, Sam Spade, PC Pot and so on), they are mean to Barney Bin because he keeps accidentally dropping rubbish everywhere. When Sam Spade tells him to Get Out!, he leaves the house, never to return, and beds down for the night in a dump. The other characters are then sorry he has gone, because they need him to take away their rubbish. They find him by following the trail of rubbish he has left behind, and persuade him to come back.
- Mr. Monk is Miserable: After Natalie ropes him into stopping over in Paris for a few days before flying back to America, Adrian Monk surprises her by saying he wants to see the Sewer Museum, since the Paris sewers were the first modern sewers in Europe and helped pave the way (literally) for modern sanitation in the rest of Europe. When Natalie objects that Paris is famous for much more exciting things - art, literature, architecture, and cuisine - he asks her if any of those things would have been possible if the streets were awash with human waste and all of Paris's artists, writers, architects, and chefs were too busy dying of cholera. She admits he has a point. Trekking through the museum, she admits that it is pretty interesting, and Monk is tickled when she translates one of the placards revealing that, before the dedicated department of sanitation was created, the Paris Police were responsible for enforcing cleanliness statutes: "It was a perfect world."
- In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, it's revealed that the planet the human species originated was wiped out by a virus contracted from a telephone after they determined only great thinkers and doers were important to society and sent everyone else in society off to another planet (Earth) to be forgotten about — including the telephone sanitizers.
- Sharpes Enemy: The Duke of Wellington muses aloud to Sharpe that being Britain's most successful general since Marlborough sounds glamorous, but to him war is a dirty job that somebody has to do, "like being a street sweeper."
- "Strikebreaker" is about a colony in danger of being wiped out because the man in charge of processing human waste is on a strike.
- Where the Sidewalk Ends: "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out" is a humorous poem about a girl who absolutely refuses to take the garbage out, no matter how much her father nags her. It piles up so high that it fills the entire house and reaches up to the sky, and only then does she decide to take it out.
But then, of course, it was too late...
The garbage reached across the state,
From New York to the Golden Gate.
And there, in the garbage she did hate,
Poor Sarah met an awful fate,
That I cannot now relate
Because the hour is much too late.
But children, remember Sarah Stout
And always take the garbage out!
Live-Action TV
- Fraggle Rock: In Outer Space, it's the start of the first holiday weekend at the Captain's Inn, where Doc is part-time manager. Unfortunately, the sanitation workers go on strike that day, and Doc is forced to keep all the garbage from the Captain's Inn inside his workshop so the people at the inn won't smell it.
- It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: "The Gang Recycles Their Trash" centers around the gang becoming freelance garbage collectors after trash starts piling up around town due to a garbage strike.
- Monk: "Mr. Monk and the Garbage Strike" takes place amidst a garbagemen's strike, with the Body of the Week being the union boss who was leading the strike. The complicated politics makes it a very tricky situation, with suspicion even falling briefly on the Mayor of San Francisco himself. The growing piles of garbage are also a nightmare for Adrian Monk due to his OCPD, to the point that he has a Heroic BSoD preventing him from thinking clearly about the case until Stottlemeyer takes him to an extremely sanitized lab room. It is ultimately revealed that the murder wasn't related to the strike itself, but rather was committed by a corrupt union official who had been embezzling funds. He knew that once the strike was over, no matter how it ended, his embezzlement would be discovered and he planed to frame his victim for the theft.
- Even Sesame Street had an episode where the local sanitation union is on strike and refuse hasn't been collected in some time. Gordon and Susan help explain the basics of what a strike is to viewers and that the two sides need to reach an agreement before the refuse collectors agree to go back to work. The two then discuss a plan with their neighbors to help solve the issue of what to do with the refuse in the meantime.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: In the fifth season, Quark's brother Rom quits working for Quark's bar and gets a job as a station technician, working in the station's waste extraction system, with this exchange in "The Assignment":
Quark: I don't understand. You gave up a perfectly good job with me to work on the station's waste extraction system?
Rom: A good waste extraction system is important. Imagine where we'd be without one.
Video Games
- Cyberpunk 2077: The mega-corporations have intentionally flubbed up the garbage disposal in Night City, using the cheapest methods that ensure health risks for the poor. Trash bags are found piled up on the streets, stuffed in the corners between highways, and thrown out in the open onto mountains of garbage just outside the city limits.
- Ready or Not: Many streets, alleyways, and dumpsters throughout Los Sueños are overflowing with trash bags due to a prolonged strike by the Los Sueños Sanitation Department, being yet another one of the systemic and cultural problems overflowing the city.
Western Animation
- Garfield and Friends: The short "Day of Doom" revolves around the Aesop that Mondays, no matter how miserable they may make people, are a necessary evil. One of the many negative side-effects of Garfield wishing that there were no more Mondays is that the trash never gets picked up (since Monday is when that happens in his neighborhood), leaving the sidewalks clogged with full trash cans.
- Harry and His Bucket Full of Dinosaurs: In "What Mess?", Harry is sick of being told to clean his room, so he goes to Dino World and enforces a "no cleaning up" rule. However, trash piles up to the point where it eclipses the sun, so he decides he and the others have to clean up after all.
- The Loud House: The episode "Chore and Peace" has a localized example. Lincoln figures that he's got a raw deal when his chore is taking out the trash all by himself, which is a herculean task when living with ten sisters (one of them a baby) as well as a dog, a cat, a bird, and a toilet-trained hamster. He goes on strike until he can swap chores with one of his sisters, and the trash accumulates. Things get messier when his sisters go on strike in response. It gets to the point the garbage in Lisa's room becomes sentient. The episode ends with the garbage being taken out and the strikes ending, but Lincoln finds out the garbage workers are on strike for more money, and now he and his sisters are striking to get pay for their chores.
- In one episode of Mona the Vampire, garbage piles up all over the neighbourhood due to a garbagemen's strike.
- Rocko's Modern Life: In "Popcorn Pandemonium", Rocko and Heffer see a trailer for a movie called Garbage Strike: The Musical. In this trailer, the Rat Garbagemen sing about how they won't pick up any garbage that's polluting O-Town, and why is that? 'Cause they're on strike!
Heffer: The book was better.
- The Simpsons: The plot of "Trash of the Titans" kicks off when Homer insults his garbage men, so they cut off service to the Simpsons house, leaving piles of garbage to pile up around their house. Later in the episode, when Homer becomes Sanitation Commissioner and spends his entire annual budget in a month (leaving nothing left to pay wages), the sanitation workers threaten to strike, prompting Homer to come up with the solution of getting other cities to pay him to store their excess garbage in an abandoned mineshaft (which leads to even bigger problems). Fittingly, he tries to promote his campaign by interrupting a U2 show as they were performing "Pride (In the Name of Love)", which was written about Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated after addressing striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968.
Bono: Hold on, people! The man's talking about waste management. That affects the whole damn planet!
The Edge: Aw, here we go... - In the Sonic Boom episode "Mayor Knuckles", Knuckles approves a vacation for the town's only sanitation worker, causing Eggman's trash to pile up.
- South Park has a variation in "The Last of the Meheecans". Butters inadvertently inspires all individuals of Mexican heritage in the U.S. to return to Mexico, meaning that several households and businesses have lost a lot of their workforce, including cleaners. Randy is one of the few who have no qualms about it until he discovers that there now isn't anyone to clean up the massive piles of leaves scattered throughout the neighbourhood.
- A variant in Theodore Tugboat; Guysborough is an ill-tempered garbage barge who is rude to everyone he meets, but is responsible for keeping the Big Harbor clean and free of garbage. In "Guysborough's Garbage", when the tugboats tell Canso, a visiting ship, that they're lucky to have a clean harbor, Guysborough overhears and points out to Jasper the Junk Dock that without him, the garbage will pile up. Just to prove his point, he refuses to clean up the garbage when he feels unappreciated by Theodore and his friends.
- Transformers: Animated provides a non-strike example in "Garbage In, Garbage Out", which takes place during a contract dispute between Sumdac Systems (which builds and maintains the city's trash collection robots) and the city of Detroit, resulting in the robots malfunctioning and garbage piling up all over town. Ratchet winds up having to yell at Porter C. Powell and Mayor Edsel to meet each other halfway — lest he chuck them both in the water — to resolve the crisis.
"In the meantime, garbage is piling up and tempers are flaring up all over Detroit."
Real Life
- Politically, a major strike by waste disposal workers in the winter of 1978-79 was one of the triggers that saw the UK's election of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher later in the year. Aided by right-wing newspapers publishing graphic photos of uncollected waste piling up in the streets and attracting rats — which became iconic images — Thatcher would be elected PM on an anti-union ticket.
- Another noteworthy example is the Memphis Sanitation Strike
of 1968, in which the city's sanitation workers — many of whom were black — went on strike after two black garbagemen were killed in their truck's trash compactor.note Memphis's mayor, Henry Loeb, was a racist who opposed the then-ongoing Civil Rights Movement and refused to recognize the union or make any concessions and had the police brutally suppress a pro-strike demonstration, resulting in a teenage boy being killed by police. Infamously, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis while supporting the strike.
- In Lebanon, especially Beirut, trash collection has been a chronic problem owing to a decades-old system that has gone unreformed due to abysmal corruption and vested political interests. The problem worsened significantly in the 2010s, leading to many protests that, unfortunately, failed to change things for the better. In hindsight, the garbage crisis was one of the heralds of the country's economic collapse which took off in earnest in the late-2010s. The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent Beirut port explosion - which knocked out two garbage processing facilities - only served to exarcebate the crisis. As of the 2020s, Lebanon's garbage crisis shows no signs of abating. But then, neither do the country's many other crises.