LIFTMEN STRIKE

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXVI, Issue 111, 23 April 1936, Page 13

LIFTMEN STRIKE

Confusion in New York 1400 BUILDINGS AFFECTED Recently a New York lift strike threatened to develop into a nationwide struggle, says the Daily TeleS lf no agreement was reached between the men’s leaders and the property owners, a meeting of all the city’s trade unions was threatened to discuss calling a general strike in New York, and appealing to building employees to stop work all over the United States. ~ At a mass me etig Mr Bam dock, the strikers’ leader, roused the strikers’ feelings to fever heat. "A general strike,’’ he shouted, "would paralyse New York.’’ He threatened to "fight it out in the streets." Following the meeting there was a midnight march down the fashionable Park Avenue of 5000 strikers. They took the police completely by surprise. They smashed the glass doors of nine palatial apartment houses as they passed. The residents, many in night attire, watched from windows as the police were hurried to the scene in lorries with sirens screaming.

One patrolman fired shots in the air as bricks were flung at the towering Majestic apartments, overlooking. Central Park.

The tenants in this great block were faced with a difficult problem in finding their letters among the 10,000 pieces of mail which accumulated in the manager’s office. Four thousand city employees from various departments were mobilised for emergency duty by the Commissioner of Health. The disposal of refuse became a serious problem. Cases of real hardship were reported, among them: A doctor was forced to climb 17 flights of stairs in Park Avenue to reach a patient. Two tanks of oxygen had to be carried up teq storeys to a man suffering from pneumonia in another block of flats. Nine young women who attempted to climb to their office on the twentieth floor collapsed, and an ambulance surgeon had to treat them for hysteria and exhaustion.

The collection and delivery of laundry was another difficulty. Telegraph boys formed chains on the staircases of some office buildings to handle messages and deliver lunch-hour sandwiches. The union insisted that more than 25,000 workers were idle, and 2500 buildings affected, although it is also asserted that the owners of more than 1000 buildings had signed separate agreements granting the strikers’ demands.

The police, on the other hand, estimated that 1400 buildings were affected. Ten thousand strike-breaker c, many of them brought from hundreds of miles away, were engaged.