The Strike
By Like Roy, I had an uneventful day today, but I will be venturing into Manhattan tomorrow, and will also have to go in Friday because my parents are in town. I’m putting the over/under on walking to the Upper East Side from Astoria at 70 minutes…
On the political issue, the latest revelations about the strike make it clear that the union is right. Just as they were about to reach a deal, the MTA decided to ask for a huge increase in pension contributions from new workers:
On the final day of intense negotiations, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, it turns out, greatly altered what it had called its final offer, to address many of the objections of the transit workers’ union. The authority improved its earlier wage proposals, dropped its demand for concessions on health benefits and stopped calling for an increase in the retirement age, to 62 from 55.
But then, just hours before the strike deadline, the authority’s chairman, Peter S. Kalikow, put forward a surprise demand that stunned the union. Seeking to rein in the authority’s soaring pension costs, he asked that all new transit workers contribute 6 percent of their wages toward their pensions, up from the 2 percent that current workers pay. The union balked, and then shut down the nation’s largest transit system for the first time in a quarter-century.
Yet for all the rage and bluster that followed, this war was declared over a pension proposal that would have saved the transit authority less than $20 million over the next three years.
[…]Robert Linn, a former New York City labor commissioner, questioned the transportation authority’s decision – with the backing of the mayor and governor – to go to the mat over pensions with a union that can exact huge pain on the city in a year when the authority was enjoying a $1 billion surplus.
“They might have picked a union that was more willing to consider the subject,” Mr. Linn said. “It not just the considerable economic power of this union, it’s also the timing,” just before Christmas. “It’s tremendously problematic.”
Appalling–the union had no choice, and it’s just unconscionable that the government would force this strike at this time. Julia also makes the very important point that Bloomberg and Pataki wanted the MTA–which is now willing to force a strike over $120 million–to sell a billion-dollar plus piece of property for a fraction of the market value to build a stadium New Yorkers didn’t want. I would add as well that the MTA has been forced to take on debt because the state government has forced the MTA to borrow rather than receiving the subsidies that suburban road-building seems always to be able to get, and the MTA (stuffed with Pataki’s lickspittles) hasn’t done anything about it.
And, of course none of this is surprising. Pataki is serving upstate and wealthy interests–that’s what he was elected to do–and Bloomberg is his poodle. Here’s an idea: maybe the New York Times should stop endorsing Republicans for state and local offices. They don’t represent the city’s interests. (Not, of course, that they’ve learned anything. There seems to be a WSJ-sized disconnect between the editorial and news pages, as the paper is continuing to back its anti-urban, anti-mass transit Republican buddies.)