Taking it to the Brink - 25 April 2003

Last Tuesday, we - that's to say my wife, I and about half a million New Yorkers - were given a humbling reminder that a small, painful thing about to happen to you can blot out all interest in a catastrophe that staggers the headlines.

Put it another way: last Tuesday was a day when we rediscovered the truth that while an earthquake in China is very bad news, a toothache at the weekend is a disaster.

From last Monday morning on, we doomed New Yorkers felt the first twinge of a toothache and suddenly table talk about resettling Iraq, all such preoccupations were swept aside in view of an oncoming disaster, a 24-hour discomfort with no end in sight.

Last Monday morning two bodies, small teams of grim faced men, sat down together. One team being headed by the president of the New York Real Estate Advisory Board - a dapper, white-haired man in a sassy spring suit, white shirt, blue tie - and the other team led by the president of Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, a large, bespectacled, balding man with a toothbrush moustache, wearing a dark jacket, dark grey open shirt, no tie.

You guessed it: the sassy suit talking for the owners of 300 department buildings, the open shirt talking for the union.

Note it was the service employees' union, that protects the interests of every sort of worker who performs, according to its charter, "a public service".

The world public is generously defined, taking in such public service men as hotel waiters, bottle washers, janitors, garbage truck drivers, lift men, chefs, et cetera.

Well in this case the impending strike was of the men who staff the big apartment houses - what in England we used to call blocks of flats. That presents a confused image to Americans, who refer to a street length as a block.

Anyway our building, which is a comparatively small, modest, old 1928 building of 15 storeys, has a permanent daily staff of 13, from the supervisor, down through deputy to four doormen - who work in shifts, obviously, handle the house, telephone, check the identity of visitors, help old ladies with packages and steer old gentlemen out of the lobby onto the sidewalk.

In between are the cleaners and polishers, the back elevator lift men who deliver the mail, take away the garbage and the old newspapers. Two handymen who repair things - toilets - keep the boiler up to heat the radiators whenever the outdoor temperature drops below 52 degrees. If I've left anybody out, count 'em in.

These teams negotiated, is the word, all through Monday till 1am Tuesday, came back after a quick nap and sat and argued all through Tuesday.

Midnight was the deadline when the men would go on strike. Midnight Tuesday came and no agreement.

It had all about increases in wages, health benefits and pensions on one side and on the other side the plight of the landlords and owners in a declining economy and a weak market and since 11 September greatly increasing property taxes, price of fuel and insurance coverage.

By midnight Tuesday no settlement and I went to bed in a gloom, only slightly relieved by reading again about the threat to the reputation of old gents of Kent and Sussex and other counties of Galahad Threepwood's decision to write his memoirs of his early wild days on the town.

Of course by Tuesday the management had made all arrangements for the running of the building by volunteers, tenants.

I was not much use to them but I recall a prolonged, three-week strike in the spring of 1976 when I couldn't even begin to go out the front door without my wife's shrieking from some distant room - "Not there, the back elevator, don't forget to take down the garbage."

The mail was then delivered by a lawyer and an insurance man every two days.

We had to go down and identify any tradesmen who'd arrived to deliver a package.

Friends were a problem - down again to swear they were not spies, burglars, prove their identity, so on. It was a strenuous and wearisome three weeks.

This time the landlord had given us all identity cards in order to - well to come in after going out.

But I thought too late about the local pharmacy and the raft of medications that come in two or three times a week.

Still the honourable Galahad, that dapper rogue who always seemed out of place away from a race track or a hotel bar, he saw me off to sleep.

Wednesday morning. The New York Times headline said: "Strike looms as talks go beyond deadline".

I knew then that the worst had happened and sat up in bed there remembering the last time, hoping there were enough volunteers who knew how to handle the furnace and - these days - to separate the garbage of 130 tenants into three separate piles.

Then I knew that my phone would ring and a voice, not that of Noel the morning doorman saying, "There's a gentleman here, Mr Cooke, who claims to be Dr William Dorrell".

And you reply, according to mood, "Send him up" or "Throw the bum out".

But now, Wednesday morning, 9 am, sipping the tannin in a melancholy mood, I telephoned whoever was the temporary supervisor to confirm - he was probably an advertising man or the official of the bank who lives just below me.

But no, heaven be praised, it was the real man, the right stuff, dear, dear Joe Purcell.

"No strike," he said, "a contract was signed at 1 am."

So I knew the worst had happened only to the New York Times which must have gone to bed about midnight, an hour too soon.

How, you may well wonder, does a series of negotiations that's been going on and off for months run on until one hour beyond the deadline and in that one hour reach a settlement which next days both the real estate president and the union president publicly declare is a fair and equitable settlement for both sides?

The point here is that this is not freakish or odd, it's practically standard procedure.

I think back to a score of strikes, some nationwide industrial strikes - railroad workers, stevedores, postal workers, the mighty truckers, the Teamsters' Union.

Once the threat of a national train stoppage had President Truman seize the railroads and fetch the army in.

But nine times out of 10 the plot, the pattern of suspense, is the same.

First the media hint that an important labour contract expires two months from now. And the opposing parties had started negotiations.

No more attention is paid until, say, a week or so before the deadline and then an army of reporters descends on the hotel where the bosses' men and the union leader are sweating it out, sometimes shouting it out.

Every night the tension is strung tighter by such headlines as " No contract in sight" or "Both sides far apart".

And in the New York Times a brisk daily 2,000 words examining what they call "the nuance".

I had a friend in San Francisco, alas long gone, my closest friend in fact for 30-odd years - a neat, small, quick-witted Yankee who shared the view of human nature once ascribed to a famous Texas congressman: "he had the greatest reverence for his colleagues, with the usual reservations and suspicions".

This man's job? I suppose most outsiders would have called him a labour arbitrator, but he was not appointed by the major or the governor, he was in business for himself, simply to help to try and settle labour disputes.

Sometimes he was hired by the company, sometimes by the union.

He didn't care which side it was. He moved in to help write a contract or avoid a strike, even when - a situation he most enjoyed, he said - both parties are "crazy for a strike". He called himself "a hassle soother".

And I recall having a sit-down drink together one twilight which perfectly illustrated the usual situation.

He was going next day, on a Monday say, up to Oregon - he lived in San Francisco - to work on negotiating talks which had set Wednesday midnight as the strike deadline, just 48 hours away.

"Awful late isn't it?" I said.

"Not at all," he said. "It's the only time you can get some momentum going.

"They've spent three weeks or months at each other, explaining the pathos of their position, the offers they couldn't possibly take, now's the time to josh them along - provided, buster, you understand they're not going to settle till an hour or two after Wednesday midnight's deadline."

He described to me with chuckling relish how things go.

He meets them, he sits down with them, he greets everybody warmly, he suggests his favourite drink and somebody says "What a good idea".

He says: "Now for starters listen, men, this thing's not going on forever, the strike won't last for a month or throughout the summer, if it does you're both financially in shreds and all of you will spend two years digging yourself out of a deep, deep hole.

"Come on, fellas. Make it an 8% increase not 12 or six. Give the intending fathers one month's late pregnancy leave instead of six weeks post partum."

He had an Irish tongue and an Irish wit and he'd say: "By the time we'd passed the bottle round for an hour or more the two leaders were ready to sign through their sobs.

"It's my contribution to what Jefferson called 'domestic tranquillity'."

I never knew a man who loved his job more.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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