For New York City's 8,000,000 ad versity-tempered citizens, the sanitation workers' strike was merely a nuisance at first. By the end of last week, it had turned into a genuine crisis. Nearly 100,000 tons of uncollected garbage lay in noisome heaps on sidewalks and in doorways. Trash fires flared all over town. Rats rummaged through pyramidal piles of refuse. Public-health authorities, warning of the danger of typhoid and other diseases, proclaimed the city's first general health emergency since a 1931 polio epidemic.
The confrontation between Mayor John Lindsay and the Teamster-affiliated Uniformed Sanitationmen's Association had been abuilding for months. The mayor thought that he had a tacit understanding with Union President John DeLury for a reasonable settlement. The city was willing to give an annual increase of $350, plus fringe improvements, to the 10,000 workers who now receive $7,956 after three years' service. But DeLury, apparently unable to sell those terms to his men, demanded $600. After sporadic negotiations, the union staged a wild rally at city hall two weeks ago, virtually forced DeLury to call a strike. Said he, ducking an egg thrown at him: "I accept the motion to go-go-go."
Immediate Rebuff. Next day, the strike was on. Refusing to knuckle under to what he called "blackmail, brute force and muscle," Lindsay fought back as best he could with legal action and calls for unity. He was determined to bring order into the city's chaotic labor relations and to counter the threat of public strikes that, though banned by state law, have been used to win fat contract settlements. "Now is the time and here is the place," he declared, "for the city to determine what it is made of."
Lindsay had DeLury jailed for ignoring a court injunction issued under a new state law, but this merely solidified the union. The mayor's pleas for help from other city employees were immediately rebuffed. On the strike's seventh day, Lindsay was forced to turn to his fellow liberal Republican, Governor Nelson Rockefeller. The mayor wanted the National Guard called in to clean up the city, and Rockefeller was the only man who could do it.
Rockefeller's relationship with Lindsay has never been more than coldly cordial, but even if it were warm, it is doubtful whether Rockefeller would have agreed to mobilize the Guard. The Governor has considerable rapport with labor, and particularly DeLury's union, which strongly supported him for re-election in 1966. Though he insists he is not a presidential candidate, he was loath to become a strikebreaking Governor (though such stern action would probably have helped among conservatives, who most distrust him). There were also material arguments against calling out the Guard: the cost to the city would have been far more than a contract settlement; the troops' effectiveness would have been limited by lack of training; and most persuasive, the city's million-member Central Labor Council might have called a general strike.