We turn up our noses at them just as we do at the waste they collect. They pass through your street in a flash, at full speed, and as if by magic, it is cleared of its rubbish. One of the long-time players in the world of garbage collectors describes their reality in a most surprising book that has just arrived in bookstores.
“I went to school, I don’t need to do that. You just have to go to school!” This scathing sentence was thrown at Simon Paré-Poupart by a Montreal resident complaining about his work, carried out in winter in trying conditions. The garbage collector had then offered to replace him for a day. This was his response. The problem is that Mr. Paré-Poupart spent a lot of time on the student benches; devouring psychology, literature and management, with a master’s degree to boot. But for him, running, collecting, cleaning, feeding the insatiable dump trucks remains a vocation, and he presents the reasons for this in his very first book, Garbage !.
And it is almost a parallel world that is depicted there, on the fringes of a society that prefers not to dwell too much on this soiled microcosm and its disdained workers – they who nevertheless provide an increasingly essential service in an over-consumerist universe. To decode it and make it intelligible to the general public, the author’s academic assets combined with 20 years of field experience form an improbable and enlightening bridge. A documentation task that did not come naturally to Mr. Paré-Poupart, but which appeared necessary over the course of his studies, particularly under the impetus of the philosopher Alain Deneault.
I didn’t feel like the drainers were experiencing anything atypical. But when I started talking about it to people who weren’t in the field, especially during my master’s degree, I could see their reactions and read their surprise.
Simon Pare-Poupart
“Alain Deneault had his eyes wide open. In sociology, it is the position of the foreigner that makes us realize that we are touching on something unusual,” the author continues.
Incongruous Hercules
Beyond his personal experience, beginning with infernal paces and trying conditions, under the injunctions of his father chanting to him “Make a man of yourself!”, he reveals the unsuspected workings of this changing sector (recycling, compost and the incursion of foreign companies have come to reshuffle the cards), its codes and its ways of doing things – not always clean, some taking advantage of their employees’ propensity for debt – but above all, its colorful protagonists, oscillating between the heroic wrestler with the tasty nickname (“Spandex”, “The Legend”, “Beaujeunehomme”) and the worker with the broken face, crushed by the social machine.
Simon Paré-Poupart, inheriting the nickname “The Psychologist” (he is also a psychosocial worker), was able to take advantage of the bond created with his garbage collector counterparts.
PHOTO JOSIE DESMARAIS, THE PRESS
Simon Pare-Poupart
It’s true that I have an atypical profile, but we find others who are a bit strange, nice, who have broken lives and have ended up there. I’m thinking of a friend who has a baccalaureate in music, became a teacher, then said to himself that he would rather pick up trash than suffer the way the National Education system treats him.
Simon Pare-Poupart
One of the attractions ofGarbage ! remains the sociological decryption and the critical look at the environment, calling upon anthropologists who have studied the question of waste management, such as Zygmunt Bauman or Mikaëla Le Meur. The world of the drainers is not simply described: it is examined in detail, perceived as one of the last working conditions of the 21st centurye century.
Furthermore, the author sees it as a lever for social reintegration for workers with chaotic backgrounds.
I have many colleagues who have been through five or six foster families, and they tell me stories of incredible sadness. I don’t judge them, on the contrary, I find that the environment is a form of social reintegration, because it has a lot of acceptance for this difference that we wouldn’t see elsewhere.
Simon Pare-Poupart
Waste, freedom, solidarity
Another little-known aspect remains the advantages provided by the profession, in particular a form of freedom and a relative margin of maneuver, resulting from a system of contracts. “We are a bit like mercenaries,” says Mr. Paré-Poupart. “You claim your rights yourself and you are able, through your hard work, to say to a boss: ‘I don’t give a damn and I’m going to see the next one.'”
PHOTO JOSIE DESMARAIS, THE PRESS
Simon Pare-Poupart
This is not a myth: garbage collectors can earn a comfortable living if they manage their flutes well. The author did not want to give figures, as the annual salary range fluctuates greatly, but mentions salaries “comparable to those in construction, or even a little more.”
The book also addresses the changing profiles in the profession over time, with the integration of more and more cultural minorities, highlighting a Quebec specificity. “In Quebec, about twenty years ago, it was all French-speaking whites. I felt that it was a closed environment. When I started, there were no immigrants, no diversity. However, it is completely the opposite, sometimes in North America, or in France, where newcomers are allowed to do this work because the locals don’t want to get dirty,” notes the man who estimates that a quarter of the garbage collectors today are occupied by immigrants in Montreal. “Even if there are language barriers, there is a great class solidarity in the world of garbage collection when it comes to the task.”
Although he has no regrets about his career choice, the author does deplore the fact that the voices and comments of workers are thrown in the trash, when there is much to be gained from them. “At ENAP, where I studied management, it is one of the first things you learn: to test the ground before implementing a policy. But as a drainer, I was treated like shit all my life and no one ever wanted to listen to me or my colleagues,” he says. “However, at university, I learned that we should have done it.”
The drains are talking to you, listen to them
The garbage collectors rush by and do not have time to converse with the residents. Several interludes ofGarbage ! address the “language of garbage”, that is to say “messages” left by workers to nonchalant citizens; like a bin left on a car or a bag returned to the sender’s land. Residents can complain to garbage collectors, but never the other way around: hence this informal communication that needs to be deciphered.
Garbage !
Lux
144 pages