Two-Day Garbage Strike in San Francisco Appears Over

Garbage haulers and Norcal Waste Systems reached a tentative contract agreement late Friday, effectively ending a two-day strike that left trash bins overflowing and uncollected waste cans dotting city streets.

The tentative agreement was announced by Mayor Willie Brown at a hastily called news conference. The workers were set to vote on the agreement at 10 a.m. today.

“The word should go forth to the citizens of this city that the garbage strike is over,” Brown said.

Residential garbage collection should resume Monday if the contract is approved, Brown said. Negotiators for the union and Norcal Waste attended the mayor’s news conference. A union negotiator declined to release details about the agreement.

Two hours before the news conference, Brown postponed calling a state of emergency, which would have meant that city workers would have been called upon to pick up trash.

Although Norcal Waste supervisors had been able to cope with the majority of commercial businesses--including hospitals, hotels and some restaurants--the story was different in residential areas.

Earlier Friday, health officials warned residents not to drop garbage into hospital trash bins and other areas where overflows could pose health risks.

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Dr. Sandra Hernandez, the city’s public health chief, said she was worried about rodent problems in the city’s North Beach, Chinatown and inner Sunset districts, all congested neighborhoods with large numbers of restaurants.

“We barely have an equilibrium with the rats now,” Hernandez said, adding that most big cities have rats in their sewer systems. “We don’t want to see them get a stronghold.”

Rats and the fleas that infest them have been the source of typhoid fever, rat fever and even bubonic plague, she said.

At the Stinking Rose, a busy Italian restaurant in the city’s North Beach neighborhood, owner Dante Serafini said his staff had triple-bagged and isolated the restaurant’s garbage, which normally is collected seven days a week.

“If it went on for a week,” he said, then paused. “Well, it couldn’t. They’d have to call in the National Guard.”

Trash haulers had been without a contract since Dec. 31. The main sticking point had been pension improvements, Brown said.

The company’s first offer--which would raise the average worker’s hourly wage from $20.58 to $23.33 over five years--included elimination of health co-payments and would raise current pension benefits 45%, Norcal spokesman Robert Reed said.

A second offer, which did not address benefits, pensions or early retirement, would raise the average hourly wage to more than $25.