Overflowing trash cans sitting curbside in the midst of a busy holiday season offer perhaps the most tangible proof of an Atlanta economy on the mend.
Economists, after all, equate garbage to consumption and posit that Georgians are spending more and feeling better about their economic futures. And cash to burn usually means the consumer has a job — maybe even as a garbage man.
The waste-hauling business in Georgia is prospering, a tribute perhaps to a rebounding economy. Further proof of Atlanta’s still-slow recovery from the recession came with the announcement Thursday that the region’s unemployment rate dipped to 8 percent in November.
A year earlier, the rate stood at 8.9 percent, according to the Georgia Department of Labor.
Shaquita Fitzpatrick, jobless for 18 months, awaited the economic revival Thursday at the state labor office in Norcross where she sought a job as a garbage man, er, woman. Her Lawrenceville neighbors, though, have apparently discarded their recessionary fears along with the Christmas garbage.
“Their trash was over-pouring. It was insane,” said Fitzpatrick, 32. “People all around me are looking like they’re doing better, spending money on new TVs and buying new cars. Am I the only one not working?”
No. But she’s part of a dwindling, yet still-large cadre of unemployed Atlantans. The 28-county Atlanta region has added 12,300 jobs since October when the unemployment rate stood at 8.2 percent. Wholesalers, store clerks, truck drivers, warehousemen, nurses and computer designers are in demand. Construction workers, Realtors, hotel and government workers are not.
In 2007, before the recession hit with full force, 1,762 Georgians collected solid waste for private companies, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A year later, the number of trash jobs plunged 11 percent. In 2011, 1,992 Georgians did the dirty work, a 13 percent increase over the previous year.
More than 125,000 people hauled garbage for private companies nationwide last year, a 5 percent uptick over 2010.
Advanced Disposal sought three trash men (or women) Thursday to pick up garbage and recyclables across central and northwestern Gwinnett County. Garbage haulers, with three years driving experience and a willingness to occasionally wrestle trash bins into the smelly maw of a garbage truck, can expect to make a minimum of $135 daily.
Advanced, the nation’s fourth largest waste hauler, expects to hire more garbage workers in the future as business, and the economy, improves.
“People always have garbage, recycling and yard waste to be collected, but it’s certainly not a recession-proof industry,” said Mary O’Brien, chief marketing officer for Advanced. “While we’re cautiously optimistic about an improving economy, we’re still hesitant to say the economy has turned around.”
Creative economists look beyond GDP growth and corporate earnings to divine the economy’s health and direction. “Trash analysis,” like skirt lengths, is now part of an economist’s analytical quiver.
Alexi Savov, a professor of finance at New York University, correlates waste disposal to personal wealth. The more money you make, he deduces, the more you spend and the more you discard food, retail items and the packaging they come in.
“In 2008, we saw a dramatic fall in garbage generation on the order of 3-4 percent,” Savov said. “In 2010, it leveled off. Now it’s up a couple of percent — nothing dramatic, but the economy is moving in the right direction.”
Advanced’s O’Brien says disposal of construction debris is a better barometer of the impact of trash on the economy. While housing starts have picked up lately, and apartment construction purrs along, Advanced hasn’t seen a surge in construction tonnage.
Yet they’re hiring. Joe Evans, 55 and without full-time work since 2009, applied in near-desperation Thursday for an Advanced job. He’d hauled trash before and remembered without rancor the stench, the rain, the darting school kids and the irate customers.
“Sometimes it can be stressful, but they’re good jobs and they pay the bills,” said Evans, who recently sold a flat screen TV for cash to buy gas to make a job interview in McDonough. “I’m willing to work 24 hours a day just to get on my feet again. I’m just sinking into deep waters.”
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