If DeLury is a union spokesman in the truest sense, then he is also the union leader extraordinaire. "My problems are like a big family. I spend most of my time settling personality clashes and personal problems," he said. But he also plays a cagey game with city hall. Take a recent dispute over route changes to handle peak periods better: "If the city wants route changes, then we'll give them to it. But we want something in return; our production increased 10 per cent last year and 9 per cent the year before that. We are the only municipal department that can show productivity, and they don't want to recognize it because they know I'll ask for more. But I'm a reasonable man. You can't fight something that's right, but you can bargain for it." DeLury smiles, pounding the table for emphasis.
New York has offered DeLury the job of sanitation commissioner more than once. His response to why he didn't take the job is typical: "What? Do you think I'm crazy? I'll never work for a boss; I answer only to my membership." Nor has his experience offering suggestions been very encouraging. "Sure I gave the city an idea once, and I got clobbered by the public for it," he says, referring to the time when he suggested that his men go on at 6 a.m. to take advantage of the less congested streets, thereby increasing production. The problem was that on his schedule, lunch breaks came between 10 and 11 a.m., and the populus didn't cotton to the idea of seeing their tax dollars parked outside restaurants at 10 a.m. eating lunch. So it was back to a 7 a.m. workday.
Most innovations that come from the other direction--from the city--are met with skepticism by DeLury. But once convinced that an idea has some merit, he accepts it for a few mild concessions. The most frequently cited instance of this is the introduction of plastic bags, which he calls "the greatest thing that has happened in sanitation in my lifetime." The impetus for plastic bags came primarily from the business community, but once he saw the importance of the change, DeLury also backed the move. After being persuaded (and getting appropriate compensations for the union). DeLury fell in line; now he notes that the bags have cut back on injuries 40 per cent.
The current controversy in New York centers on the efficiency of the municipal sanitation force as opposed to private cartmen. DeLury counters that private cartmen are a "single operation," collecting high-mass garbage from restaurants, industries, and the like. His men, he says, not only have the more time-consuming job of collecting lighter-mass rubbish--which has to be compacted over and over again to equal the mass of one load of garbage--but they are also responsible for street cleaning, snow removal, and disposal operations. "I'm a great guy for studies, though," he says, willing to take on a comparative pilot program between the two to prove his point.
Another hesitation about the provate carters is their oft-mentioned, but unproven, connection with the Mafia. When DeLury is called on to broach that subject, he demurs by saying, "That's a very dangerous question for me to answer." In fact, Tuesday night he let slip for the first time that he has had a bodyguard, supplied by the city, ever since he received a death threat last October. "The FBI calls and says I must have a bodyguard, and I have. It's that simple," he said.
Despite his age, there is no indication that DeLury is on the way out. If anything, his position is stronger than ever, and it is clear that he already has in mind a new tact of negotiation.
"What I don't know, I hire the brains to tell me, and they do it," he said Tuesday. "I've got the brains. I have the most competent staff in New York City. Now we take every occupation and every wage in the country, and we evaluate them. We look and we see that we don't want to be known as teamsters anymore; I want to be an 'operational engineer'. What does a tractor driver get, for instance? All you can visualize when you hear 'sanitation worker' is this guy throwing trash in the backs of trucks. What you don't realize is that there are compressors and hydraulic snow plows on these trucks. This is a highly specialized, mechanical operation, and we should be paid accordingly.