Thanks to Reynolds’s ingenuity as a mediator and the city council’s eagerness to end the confrontation, a deal was finally reached. Unlike Loeb, the council agreed to bargain with the sanitation workers’ union and allow a dues checkoff. The council said the city was too financially strapped to grant anything but meager raises because it had spent so much on police overtime during the strike. Fortunately, a bighearted industrialist, Abe Plough, chairman of a large pharmaceutical company, donated nearly $60,000 ($430,000 today) to pay for an immediate raise for the sanitation workers. That made it possible to increase pay by ten cents an hour on May 1 and five cents more on September 1 (Loeb had originally offered a raise of eight cents an hour).