garbage collector

What did you want to be when you grew up? A doctor? Lawyer? Firefighter or brain surgeon? Maybe you achieved those dreams (congrats!) or maybe your idea of "success" changed radically as you got older. Reality is, if you can earn a living wage doing work you don't hate, with some decent benefits and time off, you're doing pretty dang well in life.

Not too many kids would say they want to grow up to become garbage collectors — and, in fact, there's a pretty strong stigma against the job — but they might rethink that if they knew how good of a career it actually is. One garbage collector was recently interviewed on TikTok where he was asked: "Can you make like six figures with overtime?" His response: "Oh, easily man."

The man who works for CR&R, an environmental services company in California, said "Starting pay is about $29 an hour, some drivers are making like $33." He says he and the other drivers routinely pull 12 hours days, working from 5am to 5pm, with overtime kicking in after 8 hours.

60 hours a week x $33 per hour puts him over $100k in pay before taxes and before factoring in the overtime pay. Now, those are long hours (very long), and hard work, but there are plenty of careers out there that demand the same hours and hard work and don't pay nearly as well. (Try working in an Amazon warehouse for about half the salary.)

The worker was then asked if he would recommend a career as a garbage collector to others. "Honestly, I would man just cause the pay is pretty competitive and the hours, there's a lot of work here. If you're into working overtime and everything like that..." you can do really well. Plus..."Really good benefits, I can't complain."

Watch the whole interview here.

Other sanitation workers were quick to verify: Being a garbage collector is tough work, but it definitely doesn't stink.

Some commenters pointed out that making $100k per year in California isn't much, but the one nice thing about working in sanitation is that you can do it almost anywhere, and it's a solid career pretty much everywhere you turn.

"42$ an hour in Seattle I made 155k last year lots of over time," one user wrote.

Someone commented that he makes $50/hour as a garbage collector in San Francisco. A user from Houston claimed $30/hour. A man from Illinois quotes $43/hour.

Photo by Ewoud Van den Branden on Unsplash

Garbage collectors who work for the city can also get government benefits and retirement, plus these workers can get union representation to protect their jobs, salaries, and benefits. There's also plentiful opportunity for overtime which can be worth 1.5x the usual hourly wage. But perhaps most importantly of all, what the job may lack in flash in sizzle, it more than makes up for in real-world impact.

Who wouldn't want to make our streets and communities cleaner!?

In a recent Reddit thread, a 24-year-old asked if he should be embarrassed about his job as a trash collector. The top response read: "Dude, I work for a health insurance company that makes it's profit by denying people life saving care. I'm ashamed of my job. You have nothing to be embarrassed about, you do honest work that benefits your community. I would love to tell people I worked in sanitation."

Blue-collar jobs where you get your hands dirty, so to speak, are widely viewed as less desirable than high-paying white collar jobs like computer programmer, consultant, or accountant. But that's starting to change.

Data shows more and more young people are going directly into the workforce or trade school and foregoing volatile technology-based careers.

Working for the postal service, driving for UPS, collecting garbage, or getting into a skilled trade like electrical or plumbing may not be glamorous, wealth-making careers; but if you're willing to work hard, they can provide you a really nice standard of living.

That's how jobs should work! If working 60 hours per week isn't for you, that's OK and understandable — but if you don't mind sacrificing for long hours, there should be a solid reward at the end, and at least in the case of garbage collectors, it sounds like there is. If you're looking for a career change and the ship has sailed on you becoming a world-renown rocket scientist, it's probably not too late to get your Class B driver's license and start picking up trash.