It’s bad enough to imagine the unsightly, unhealthy, stinking-to-high-heaven fallout from a garbage workers’ strike in mid-summer in hot and humid Boston. But, well, Boston is 3,000 miles from here, so we can leave that to the imagination here in Southern California, right?

Sadly, that would be wrong. As KABC reports, “Teamsters union workers in some Los Angeles County cities are honoring a strike in Boston by refusing to cross the picket line, leaving trash in bins along the sides of local streets.”

The Boston workers have been on strike since July 1, when Teamster-affiliated employees of Republic Services, which is the country’s second-largest trash company, walked off the job.

There is no contract dispute in our county. Nevertheless, the blameless people lack of Rosemead, Inglewood, Compton and Whittier and Santa Fe Springs have been without trash pickup.

In Orange County, affected cities include Santa Ana and Anaheim. San Diego County and Bay Area cities have also been affected.

All because of Teamster solidarity with a strike back East.

“Republic Services has been threatening a war with American workers for years — and now, they’ve got one,” said Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien in a statement reported by the Los Angeles Times. “The Teamsters have had it with Republic. We will flood the streets and shut down garbage collection in state after state.”

From far away, we can’t get into the weeds of whether the company’s pay proposal — which would boost compensation by 43% over five years, up retirement contributions and provide “zero-premium healthcare” — is fair or not, although it sounds pretty good on the face of it.

But we can entirely agree with the mayor of Chula Vista, John McCann, who said it was “incredibly unfair” that his city had to see its trash pile up because of a strike on the other side of the country.

“The goal they want to do is to get better wages and better opportunities for the drivers in Boston, but we have no control over that,” McCann said.

We do not. And yet the union puts the health of Californians at risk for the sake of some East Coast unions. That makes absolutely no sense. Unions are often ridiculous, but this is just absurd.