October garbage strike prompts lawsuit

Yahoo! News. By S.A. Mawhorr, Daily Herald Business Writer. Sat Jan 17, 2004.

Angry about being left holding the bag or being stuck with an overflowing Dumpster during last year's garbage strike?

Now you can join a group of local residents suing six waste haulers for reimbursement for garbage pickups they paid for but never got during last October's 10-day strike.

About 8 million customers in more than 1 million homes and business in Chicago and its suburbs were affected by the strike and are deserving of monetary damages between $4 to $100, according to a statement from Robert Shelist and Mark Schwartz, the attorneys who filed the lawsuit Friday in Cook County Circuit Court.

"The most striking thing is the arrogance of the garbage industry in refusing to provide credits for missed pickups," Shelist said.

But industry representatives say customers aren't owed any money because the garbage was hauled away eventually.

"In the end all of the waste was collected," said Bill Plunkett, a spokesman for the Chicago Area Refuse Haulers, the group formed to negotiate last fall with Teamsters locals 731 and 301. "The companies worked very hard and put in a lot of overtime and incurred the cost of disposal for all that waste that had piled up."

Shelist doesn't buy it.

"The point is people contracted for garbage service at a particular day and time and that's not what they got," he said.

The haulers named in the suit include Waste Management of Illinois, Groot Recycling and Waste, Onyx Waste Services, Homewood Disposal Service, Allied Waste and BFI.

Named as plaintiffs on the lawsuit are a handful of individuals scattered around the area. But anyone who didn't get garbage picked up during the strike and never got a credit for the missed service is a party, Shelist said.

In a class-action lawsuit, those who are part of the class are automatically included and would have to make a special request to be excluded, he said.

IMPRIMIR