Maintenance workers strike

Somewhere – in Shakespeare certainly, maybe in some simple nursery rhyme – there must be a reminder that when some small painful thing happens to you and me it blots out even a vast catastrophe that staggers the newspaper headline.

I thought of it and then I remembered that the late James Agate has a comment on this rather heartless fact of life in the new selection from his 'Ego' diaries. It was 1935. He'd been to watch a day in the trial of an architect's wife and her lover. She was 38, the chauffeur lover 18. Came the day when the husband was hit over the head with a mallet and the couple was on trial for murder. It sounds like a humdrum, squalid business except, of course, for the couple on trial. Anyway, Agate was in court when the woman was asked what was her first thought when her lover came to her and told her what he'd done? And she replied, 'My first thought was to protect him.' 

It's the sort of line that a dramatist would give his right arm – a dollop of his royalties, anyway – to have invented. Agate remarked that it was the kind of thing which Balzac would have called 'sublime' and in the following days, Agate couldn't get that sentence, and the circumstances surrounding it, out of his mind and, just then, there was an appalling earthquake in Quetta in India and Agate put this down in his diary, 'This trial has moved me immensely, probably because I saw part of it while the dreadful affair at Quetta makes no impression. The 20,000 said to have perished in that earthquake might as well be flies. I see no remedy for this. One cannot order one's feelings and to pretend different is merely hypocrisy.' 

This, I'm afraid is nothing but unflinching horse sense. I, myself, make it up to myself by admiring immoderately those people – Red Cross volunteers, Salvation Army and such types – who instantly do something about it even though they obviously have lives and troubles of their own. 

Well, the past two or three weeks have reflected, once again, this embarrassing truth. I ought to be talking about the decision of Dr Kissinger – it's the first time he's come out with it – to resign as Secretary of State whether or not President Ford is re-elected. I ought to go on, perhaps, about the recent earthquake in the Soviet Union which had a force one-third as much again as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. There are, as we all know, dramatic shifts in the running order of the leading presidential candidates. 

But the truth, which all the religions of the world struggle to cope with, is that no matter how wide our sympathies, how passionate our admiration for this writer, that country, an actress, a football player, we're all born with a prior interest in one person – ourselves, and let me tell you that Dr Kissinger and the Soviet earthquake and Jimmy Carter and Governor Brown fade away like ghosts at dawn before the sentence regularly shouted at me during the past fortnight by my wife whenever I was going out empty-handed. 

'Don't go out,' she'd scream from some distant room, 'without taking out the garbage!' What is this? Am I trying to moonlight, or daylight, and add a little extra to the weekly take by becoming a spare-time dustman or, as we say, a sanitation worker? 

Of course not! Though there must be some scholars, clerks and other members of the sedentary professions in San Francisco who are very much tempted to do so when they consider that the dustmen of that city earn $27,000, or £14,000, a year. No. What's been happening here in New York is a strike of what we used to call 'handymen' and now call 'apartment house maintenance personnel'. 

By the way, a little, improving digression here. I'm always maintaining, in the presence of Americans, that the British still hold on to straightforward Anglo-Saxon English in contexts that Americans have learned to fog up with pompous Latinisms. On English roads for instance you come, from time to time, on a sign saying, 'Low Bridge'. In California, it says, 'Impaired Vertical Clearance'. Americans never, so far as I know, have a useful chat with anybody. They hold a meaningful dialogue, and so on. 

But in one part of life, of working life, it's the Americans who stick to the honest, old word and leave the British to mumble the euphemism 'industrial action'. Americans have never heard this phrase and, when in England, they ask, 'What sort of industrial action?' In America, they still 'strike'. 

Well, the men who keep things humming in the big apartment houses – that's blocks of flats – they walked out nearly three weeks ago. So, it was left to the tenants to run the lifts, stack the garbage, sort the mail and pick up their own, likewise the newspapers, and stoke the furnace, guard the front door, work in shifts around the clock keeping tabs on all visitors and demanding to see their identity cards, if any. If not, the house phone is rung and a voice, not recognisably the voice of a handyman, says, 'There's a gentleman down here who claims to be one Tim Sletter and says he has a date with you.' And you reply, according to mood, 'Send him up!' or 'Throw the bum out!'. 

It was a trying time for us tenants, I can tell you but we did learn some useful things. A friend of mine, an old banker, phoned me one morning. He'd been running his lift for four hours that day and he said, 'You know something? It's not true that an elevator man is in an unskilled job. You have to know all about the weather.' One unfortunate thing we've learned – unfortunate for some of the handymen – is that much of the work of running a block of flats is easygoing labour at best and a lot of tenants are now wondering, along with lashings of landlords, if the house wouldn't get along just as well with fewer maintenance men. The strike, by the way, ended at four o'clock last Wednesday and at five o'clock there were the men back in uniform helping old ladies out of cabs, carrying bags, handing you mail and recognising old friends without peremptory challenge. 

They struck, as everybody does these days, for more pay and a shorter working week. Even so, it's quite plain that a lot of men are going to lose their jobs once for all. They didn't get what they asked for, since it's now well understood that the first increase they demand is like the first price a Persian quotes to you when you admire a rug. You simply walk round the block, get a second price, go out to lunch, come back and settle for the third price. In most strikes today we all, I think, make an assumption at the start ,which a friend of mine in California tells me is basically very naive. He's a labour lawyer, more accurately a fixer of disputes between employer and employees and sometimes he's brought in by a company, sometimes by the union to draft the new contract. 

Most of his adult life has been spent in bargaining between the two contending parties about such things as time-and-a-half, pension payments, redefining overtime, free hospitalisaion for working mothers, pregnancy benefits, new recreation ground and so on, and on and on. Well, the naive assumption we all make, according to this able and cunning negotiator, is that in every strike the dispute is presumed to be between the employer and the employee and is dramatised in the appropriate newspaper as a fight between the ruthless union and the company going broke or between the ruthless boss grinding down the faces of the working poor. And he says this is a bunch of, err... nineteenth-century ideology. He says that in more strikes than less, both the company and the union really want the strike to prove their need of recompense to some third party – the government, the controlling federal agency or the city council or even the consumer himself. 

It's been more than hinted, for instance, in this apartment building strike that – let's be discreet and say – 'some' union members and 'some' landlords were eager for the strike to try and prove to the state government in Albany and to the city fathers of New York City that rent control has to go. I think I'm right in saying that no other city in America still the rent control laws that were imposed nationally during the Second World War. 

There are something, I think over 2,000 buildings in New York, run-down buildings, modest houses, big, handsome apartment houses for upper middle-class people which, by law, cannot raise the rent arbitrarily. There is a city Rent Control Board and from time to time it yields to the pleas of the landlords that their costs of fuel, insurance, maintenance in general, not to mention the staff wages, have far outrun the biggest rents they are allowed to charge the tenants. 

Now I live in a building that has been rent controlled since before I moved in there in 1950 and in 26 years the rent has not yet doubled. It's been allowed by the board to go up in inching seven and a half per cents every two years on the theory that the increase will absorb the rising costs of everytning. And i have to admit it doesn't do it and though I ought to keep my mouth shut, except when counting my blessings, I must say I feel a little sheepish when I run into a young couple in an uncontrolled building who pay for two rooms what I pay for eight. And when a baby comes, they face more of a disaster than a boon and a blessing. 

The employees, the handymen, on their side say, 'Too bad about the landlords' expenses but the wage still doesn't keep pace with inflation'. They sense – and they sense correctly – that if rent control is abolished, then there'll be steeper rents and the tenants will fume and grumble, but there'll be enough money coming in to finance the rise in wages. I must say that the temptation on both sides to keep the strike going was very strong. Anyway, it's over and my own guess is that rent control for the big, upper middle-class buildings, at any rate, is doomed. 

So now! You want to know about Dr Kissinger and Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown? I'm afraid you'll have to wait. I have to take a bath and try to erase the smell of that last bag of garbage I took down during the memorable period when all men were recreated equal.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) 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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