ARTICLE Ⅳ

John Delury

By RICHARD SCHWARTZ

He looks vulnerably small, John Joseph DeLury.

The 65-year-old leader of the Uniformed Sanitationmen's Assn. stands 5-5½, a squat, impish figure who seems lost in the mahogany sheen of an oversized president's desk. A swivel chair behind that desk all but swallows him up.

It's an illusory effect, for if nothing else John DeLury has demonstrated a larger-than-life assertiveness. He seldom speaks but in the imperative mode, and four-letter epithets are not unknown to him.

To the contrary, they are part and predicate of any bargaining sessions where his custom is to beleaguer and beguile adversaries. Though he can be a bully, DeLury is unfearing of intimidation by others. A case in point is the 15 days in jail which he spent for defying a court order to end the sanitationmen's strike.

His office demeanor is no less defiant. Should a conversation with a visitor get too mettlesome, there is always the swivel chair. With one tilt, DeLury can throw a cold shoulder; with another tilt, he can drop matters into the lap of an aide.

The aide, more likely than not, will be Jack Bigel. Officially a consultant to the union on pensions, Bigel is DeLury's double at negotiating sessions and, negotiating or no, is DeLury's dependable doer. One of the things he does is serve as a go-between in any encounters between DeLury and the press.

The two have been described by one city official as "the greatest song and dance team in labor negotiations."

"They (DeLury and Bigel) are masters of asking the sort of questions that if you answer, you're an ass, and if you don't answer, you're embarrassed," says the official.

So it came as little surprise that when a reporter asked DeLury to explain the facts of New York's dirty streets, Bigel quickly demurred: "Is that an impression or a fact—in which context do you place it?"

Alternately, one will be hardnosed and heated, and the other docile and conciliatory. With this tactic, the city official explains, "you end up thinking they've made a concession just in letting you talk with them."

"I would pay you if you would eliminate overtime," said DeLury, propping himself up in the chair. He had been challenged by the suggestion that his men drag their feet. The suggestion, he perceived correctly, was more on the order of an assertion, merely that the slower the sanitationmen go, the more the city has to schedule night and Sunday overtime.

As one worker has put it, "work is money"—but it's also an investment in the future. Under the terms of the sanitationmen's current contract, workers can retire at half pay after 20 years.

More than 1,000 men retired last year, and their half-pay was based on each man's total earnings in the 20th work year.

"Our men do not want overtime," insisted DeLury, gripping the arm rest and flinging his shoulder in a forward, aggressive posture. "Do not want overtime," he repeated.

"Downstairs [in the secretaries' offices] I'll bet you've got telephone calls from men telling they don't want to work tonight. The department has got to beg them to work."

PHYSICAL LIMITS

Bigel, his voice an octave lower, joined the conversation.

"As John says, they don't want overtime. They don't want overtime for one reason: it means an additional physical outlay of their energy. It doesn't mean they have to produce more carbon copies. You can recharge a battery, but you can't recharge or turn these guys on the next day.

"It's the difference between walking 12-14 miles and walking 20 miles each day," he went on. "It's the difference between lifting four tons and lifting five-and-a-half tons. It is still a matter of physical activity of the most arduous kind, and these men feel they have reached their physical limits after an eight-hour tour."

Despite the disavowals, the Uniformed Sanitationmen's Assn. is using the issue of overtime as a bargaining lever in its current squabble with the city's Office of Labor Relations.

DeLury wants the city to give all the sanitationmen an immediate 8.7 per cent cost-of-living pay increase, even though the sanitationmen's contract does not expire till the end of the year. If the city refuses to reopen negotiations, DeLury has said his men will refuse all but their regularly-assigned work.

Last year alone, the garbage tonnage increased nine per cent, but the work force in the same period, by DeLury's count, increased only 2.8 per cent. "How much do you want us to do?" he asks.

"They [the sanitationmen] are frustrated," DeLury said. "You think they like to be held in ridicule by the public which never puts the blame where it belongs?"

It belongs, he suggests, with city administrators.

"It's the old army game," he said. "They pass it down from the Mayor to the department, from the department to the sanitationmen. But it belongs upstairs. Not with the guys that are performing the job, but with the guys who should give us the men to do the job."

There's an immediate need for 2,500 more men, according to DeLury, "and they should be concentrated—the bulk of them—on cleaning the streets daily.

"Because the department says they clean up five times a week in the ghettos—which I know they don't—and three days or two days in other parts of the city, to me that's not doing the job," said DeLury. "Doing the job is doing whatever is required, however often it is required."

"Everybody," DeLury said with an emphasis of finality, "should shut up if they don't use the weight of their office or whomever they represent to see that the city provides it."

Linda Fosburg, who worked for five years in the community relations office of the Sanitation Dept. and now heads Citizens for Clean Air, is not particularly a fan of DeLury ("he's a pistol," Fosburg says), but she does feel sanitationmen are "sympathetic figures."

"They have a pretty rotten life being sanitationmen," she says. "Who, for instance, would talk to the garbageman about something? You stop a cop on the corner to ask him something, and you stop a fireman, but would you stop your garbageman?"

It's part, Fosburg says, of a `please-don't-make-me-face-it' complex that people have about garbage.

GARBAGE NOT FASHIONABLE

Even many of the pollution foes, Fosburg says, shy away from the subject of garbage in deference to more "fashionable" environmental issues of air and water.

"A lot of people we deal with who are concerned with air pollution are middle-class types, who are much more likely to deal with garbage as a kind of excrement problem.

"They have never been to the South Bronx, they have never been to sections of Brooklyn where the garbage collection is just abysmal. They can't imagine taking on the whole city structure, about financing to buy new trucks and changing the shifts of men."

And the people in those communities have other concerns.

"Those persons who are up against the hardcore problem," Fosburg says, "are already so downgraded in so many ways that they can't get mobilized. They're seeing dope and prostitution and murders and rapes and everything else in their lives, and garbage is only one more of those problems."

One group, however, that did take the issue on is the Young Lords. One evening last August they sparked a garbage-throwing melee at 110th St. near Park Ave. in East Harlem to protest the lack of collection services. "It launched us as a group," says Yoruba Guzman, one of the leaders.

"At the time, it was used as a strategy, an overall campaign issue to mobilize the community," says Guzman. "We realized there is garbage in the streets and always will be garbage in the streets.

"Whenever we'd go and rap to the people on the stoops, we'd bring it up," he says. "People liked it—they got rid of a lot of frustration by throwing garbage."

He says "the situation of garbage hasn't improved, but the situation of people's spirits have." But, Guzman adds, "if anything happens this summer, it's there to use as a barricade—it's the best way to stop cars."

The reason garbage is at the bottom of the pollution barrel, thinks Columbia University urban planning professor Sigurt Grava, is that it's not considered a "life or death" matter.

"Any problem comes in degrees," said Grava. "You can put up a scale: at one end there's immediate danger of death—it's going to kill you—and at the other end of the scale you have a sort of esthetic uncomfortableness about something.

"Garbage is one of those esthetically uncomfortable things," he said. "There's, of course, some danger because it putrefies and gives off gas, but it's mostly just a nuisance."