Which was essentially my point. It wasn't the striking sanitation workers that brought the city to a standstill, it was the external forces that prevented alternative solutions to the problem that caused the standstill. If that force is union thugs, mob hit men or government lawyers doesn't really matter. Had the unions threatened to stop deliveries to and/or break legs of shop owner who accepted non-official currency in the Ireland example, that strike would have also lasted less than a week as well.

The crux of the argument in the article is that strikes in sectors that are undesirable/hard/underpaid are harder to replace, so there is quite a difference:

For the meagre effort of keeping a few extra tabs (something they were already used to) they could earn increased reputation or advertisement (while you go the pub 'bank' you might as well have a drink on your way out). The realy price at which people start providing banking functionality is much lower than the average wage of a banker (the banking sector is permission oriented!).

The price to get non-garbage collector to start collecting garbage tends to be much higher than the average wage of a garbage collector (the underbelly of society is obligation oriented!)

Stated otherwise, if everyone received the average rent, wages for dirty/unhealthy/boring/complicated/... jobs would rise, simply because they can stay home and live cheap. This would be the most neutral and emergent determination of wages since there is no master table from Washington/Moscow/Brussels to decree the relative wages. No need for endless protests and strikes.

Examples:

- dirty: toilet cleaner, garbage collector

- unhealthy or risky: fire fighter, chemical sector

- boring: monotonous factory work, high quality assurance inspection

- complicated: physics, engineering, ...

This does not mean everyone would end up with the same wage, the more collectively undesirable a job, the higher it would earn on top of your average rent.

You're making a lot of soup from very little meat.

There are plenty of other interpretations here. The simplest one is that in NYC trash collection is treated as municipal infrastructure, not a commercial business. People already pay taxes for garbage collection, so it's highly unlikely they'd decide to also pay vendors in short order.