The paper also interviewed a city sanitation worker. In 2006, Joseph Lerman, then twenty, got a call from the city informing him that he could report for duty as a collector. “I felt like I’d won the jackpot,” he recounts. Nowadays, Lerman gets up at 4 every morning to haul garbage bags for shifts of up to twelve hours. To his fellow New Yorkers, it’s only logical that he is well paid for his labors. “Honest,” the city spokesperson smiles, “these men and women aren’t known as the heroes of New York City for nothing.”
