The city?s sanitation workers would receive raises totaling 17 percent as part of a tentative four-and-a-half-year contract announced yesterday by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. The deal also gives the city?s 6,600 sanitation workers an additional holiday, Martin Luther King?s Birthday, making them the first uniformed union to be given that day off. Harry Nespoli, the president of the Uniformed Sanitationmen?s Association, said that making that day a holiday for his workers was fitting because the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968 when he was in Memphis to back a sanitation workers? strike. In the final year of the tentative 54-month contract, the maximum salary for the city?s sanitation workers would rise to $67,141, up from the current $57,392.
See "Contract Deal Would Give Sanitation Workers 17% Raise Over 54 Months", Steven Greenhouse, The New York Times, July 17, 2007