"Rotten Mess"

New Yorkers, who thought they had experienced just about everything there was in the line of strikes, blinked incredulously at an item last week in their skinny, adless newspapers (see PRESS). It was a short interview with Michael J. Cashal, first vice president of old Dan Tobin's International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which was involved in New York City's walkout of truck drivers (TIME, Sept. 16). Said Brother Cashal: "This strike is a rotten mess."

It was indeed a mess. But it amused newspaper readers to see that a truckman could admit it.

Some 15,000 drivers of three teamster locals were out of control. They shouted down their leaders' pleas to accept one proffered settlement, shouted down proposals to return to work pending an agreement on wages & hours. They blocked many nonstriking drivers from working. They had just about choked off the metropolitan area's supplies of food when Dan Tobin stepped into the situation. He telegraphed an order: the nonstriking unions must abide by their contracts; sympathy walkouts must end.

Wheels within Wheels. Tobin's orders set hundreds of trucks rolling again. They averted an immediate food shortage, saved hundreds of thousands of workers from layoffs in building and other industries. But by week's end the pinch applied by the three striking locals began to take effect. Two large food chains (A. & P., Safeway) closed their 730 stores; about 1,000 other such stores were nearly out of supplies.

Then the mess deepened. Some 2,800 drivers and helpers of the United Parcel Service (department-store deliverers, for the most part) walked out in an unauthorized strike. Their complaint: they had not been paid for the time lost because of the general truck strike. Thousands of New Yorkers worried anew about their jobs--which were so closely geared to the wheels within the wheels of those big, loud, messy trucks.

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