CHICAGO, Oct. 9 — The region's nine-day garbage strike ended with a deal at dawn on Thursday, but the messier part, the tens of thousands of tons of leftover trash, lay ahead.þþÿWe want to start hearing those trucks rolling as soon as possible,ÿ said Sean T. Howard, a spokesman for the mayor of Harvey, a Chicago suburb where municipal workers had gone so far as to start collecting some of the mounting trash on flatbed trucks. ÿWe're ready for the garbage trucks. We're begging for the trucks.ÿþþAfter all-night negotiations, representatives for the Teamsters union and the Chicago Area Refuse Haulers Association, an alliance of 17 private garbage companies, announced that they had reached an agreement on wages, health benefits and pensions. Later in the day, union members voted to approve the agreement. þþAmong other provisions, wages for the workers, most of whom now make $21 an hour, will increase by $4.70 over five years.þþÿI think this represents a good agreement for both sides,ÿ Bill Plunkett, a spokesman for the association of private companies, said on Thursday afternoon. ÿIt was the right thing to do for the workers. And for the customers, well, the garbage was piling up. We needed to resolve the looming public health threat.ÿþþBrian Rainville, a spokesman for the garbage workers, said, ÿThis is a fair deal,ÿ and added that the workers were eager to hit the streets and alleys of Chicago and its suburbs as quickly as possible.þþÿOur people live in this community and take pride in their jobs, and their trash hasn't been collected in a week either,ÿ Mr. Rainville said.þþCompany officials acknowledged that cleaning up what has been left, piled up, could take a week or longer, even as crews work nights and weekends.þþIn Chicago, where the private companies handle large apartment buildings and businesses, about 10,000 tons of trash has been accumulating each day in and around the large bins that line the city's alleys. þþCity officials, worried about health risks and rats, had grown increasingly impatient as the strike dragged on, just as the national spotlight turned here for Chicago Cubs postseason baseball.þþAt City Hall on Thursday, officials were cautiously optimistic about the agreement. They said they were calculating their extra clean-up costs while the strike went on, and planned to have city lawyers ÿfollow upÿ in recouping the sum.þþMeanwhile, Al Sanchez, the city's commissioner of the Streets and Sanitation Department, said he would keep his expanded city crews on ÿa strike-related clean-up modeÿ through the weekend just to be sure the city started looking tidier.þþþþ
Source: NY Times
