Contracts covering nearly 4,000 sanitation workers across San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties expired at midnight Wednesday after Teamsters Local 396 and a slate of major waste-hauling companies failed to reach tentative agreements before the deadline. The union says negotiations are continuing even as the contract lapse raises the possibility of labor disruptions across the region’s sanitation industry.
The companies involved include Republic Services, Waste Management, Athens Services, CR&R, Ware Disposal, Park Disposal and AAA Disposal, according to NBC 7 San Diego. Republic Services, one of the largest haulers in the dispute, said its existing collective bargaining agreements with the union ended September 30, and that negotiations which began August 14 continued into Wednesday. The company said it plans to keep negotiating in good faith to reach agreements that benefit both employees and customers, per the same report.
Athens Services, meanwhile, is negotiating a successor collective bargaining agreement with Local 396 covering employees at its Paramount yard, and the company said operations and service are continuing as normal, the outlet reported. Other waste-hauling companies named in the dispute did not immediately respond to requests for comment, the station noted.
A Multi-Year Push to Align Every Contract at Once
The simultaneous expiration wasn’t a coincidence. Teamsters Local 396 spent years deliberately aligning contract end dates across eight waste hauling companies and 29 facilities throughout Southern California to midnight on September 30, launching its “Our Time Is Now” campaign back in October 2025, according to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. By synchronizing expiration dates across independent employers, the union maximized its regional leverage, creating the potential for a multi-county work stoppage if talks stall…