What If They Went On Strike And No One Was Awake To Know About It?

Although it hasn’t created mounds of uncollected trash like Tom Robbins warned, the strike by Waste Management workers continues into its fourth month:

A protracted and bitter strike by 115 workers for one of the largest private trash collection companies in the region, serving 10,000 businesses in New York City and Westchester County, has entered its fourth month and is drawing increased scrutiny from public officials.

The company, Waste Management, has hired or brought in replacement drivers, maintainers and helpers on a temporary basis and carried out its work mostly uninterrupted, while the union, Local 813 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, has failed to persuade the National Labor Relations Board to intervene.

Health care and overtime have been the main sticking points in the stalemate.

Since it began on April 3, the strike has received little public attention, because of the relatively few workers involved and the largely hidden nature of their work — retrieving bags of trash from curbs outside restaurants, hotels and stadiums late at night. Yet the growing tensions have officials taking notice.

According to the city’s Business Integrity Commission, a regulatory and law enforcement body set up to root out organized crime and corruption in the private trash hauling business and two other industries, some strikers have followed replacement drivers on their routes.

The commission said last week that it had received 82 complaints about “violent, unruly or threatening behavior” on both sides of the strike and that there had been three arrests, two of union members and one of a replacement driver.

. . .

Eugene G. Eisner, a lawyer for Local 813, said the company had not lost customers but had voluntarily given them up because it decided that the routes were unprofitable. He and several union officials noted that Waste Management is quite profitable on the whole. The company reported in February that it earned $1.2 billion last year on revenues of $13.1 billion. Some members of Local 813 even traveled to Houston for Waste Management’s annual shareholder meeting on May 5 to demonstrate outside the company’s headquarters.

A federally appointed mediator has been unable to broker a deal. On April 7, a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board dismissed the union’s accusations that Waste Management had engaged in unfair labor practices, a decision that was upheld on appeal on June 5.