Is empting the trash productive?

In the hopes of saving money, some government units and colleges are requiring their employees to empty their own trash in order to save in custodial costs. To give their employees an incentive to produce less trash they are also giving them smaller trash cans. What a plan. Cut your custodial costs while saving the environment at the same time.

While taking out the trash for most small people is something we do without a formal plan, I certainly have to question the logic of these bigger organizations. I can certainly imagine that their claim of cutting payouts to custodial employees and contractors is true. However, transferring work from the lower paid custodian to higher paid employees would even more certainly produce lower productivity results. Making the trash cans smaller would magnify this even more by making the higher paid employees empty their trash more often. Just imagine the cost of having a $100k per year person making a couple of trips a day to some central trash pickup location. Of course that cost will never show up in their accounting records making it appear that they have cut their total custodial costs when in fact they have increased it.

It’s easy to lose sight of the overall goal of any organization. To produce more output with less input. Shifting costs around to higher paid employees might do something for their humility, but it does nothing for their productivity.