Pataki & Bloomberg: How to Bust a Union

[undeterred]

by Jack Random www.dissidentvoice.org

The New York City transit strike is over and millions of residents and tourists in the five boroughs are relieved that they will no longer have to suffer what the governor and the mayor characterized as an act of blatant lawlessness. Soon the discussion will shift from who was right and wrong to which side lost and won.

The great shame is that the debate that should have happened, the debate the people of this nation so desperately need to hear, never occurred. Every major media outlet gave only cursory coverage of the transit workers’ case. They uniformly preferred to give free reign to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor George Pataki, buying prologue to epilogue their condemnation of the strikers as thuggish, law-breaking, ungrateful laborers turning their backs on the hard-working citizens of New York.

It is perhaps unfortunate that the strike came in the holiday season, when those who are still watching the news were engaged with other concerns, including drilling in the Artic wildlife reserve, developments in the Jose Padilla case, the latest round of WTO talks, the Iraq election, renewal of the Patriotic Act, and the NSA domestic spying scandal. We had hardly recovered from the torture rendition scandal and the execution of Tookie Williams. Outside the greater New York area, few saw the transit strike coming and fewer were prepared to defend the beleaguered Transit Workers Local 100.

Beneath the constant drone of our ambulance chasing, gore seeking, “breaking news” addicted press, we are trapped in a perpetual three-day news cycle, inundated by a never-ending series of attacks on our liberties, our sense of justice, and our economic well-being. In this context, perhaps we should be forgiven for not rallying to the cause of the New York transit workers. The problem is: They are us. They are all of us. They are the working class of Bolivia, fighting against the privatization of water and public services. They are the jobless of the Gulf region and the homeless of New Orleans. They are the family farmers of Arkansas, the teachers, nurses and firefighters of California, the perplexed senior citizens in a maze of pharmaceutical options, the high school student whose last option is military service, and the family struggling to hang on to a lost way of life.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Dec05/Random1228.htm

[GrpCaptMandrake]

1. When a worker withholding his labor

becomes "lawlessness," this country has gone backward about 150 years.

[David Dunham]

2. NY Transit workers make average $60k per year and can retire at 55

This author is smoking something and totally out to lunch. NY transit workers are reasonably well paid and can retire at 55. Many private sector employees make less and cannot afford to retire until 65 or 70.

[Tempest]

3. I don't know where you get your figures

According to documents supplied by the union to the city, the medium wage for transit workers was around $40,000 a year. The city didn't contend the wage provided was out of line.

According to the Transit want ads, the beginning wage is $32,000 and the highest wage rate is $55,000 for workers.


Also, I couldn't find anything that said workers could retire at 55. Perhaps you provide something.

[David Dunham]

5. The MTA failed to raise retirement age from 55 to 62. That was the issue.

[David Dunham]

6. NY Transit Worker Salary Info (from Forbes)

According to the Manhattan Institute, the average bus or subway driver--the most-skilled job in the union by most standards--is already paid $63,000 a year. The person who sits behind the bullet-proof glass in what used to be called a token booth, and who now says for most purchases you have to use the metro-card machines, takes down an average of $51,000. And the least-skilled work, though certainly the dirtiest, is the subway cleaner who clocks in at an average of $40,000.

Compare that with the average New York worker. Take out Wall Street, where mega-bonuses skew the average unfairly, and the average private sector worker earns $49,000. Peel off the college-educated (which you don't need for most transit jobs) and the average income drops to well below $35,000. That includes everyone from a skilled factory worker to the clerk in Bloomingdale's.

Nationwide, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average unskilled worker (we'll put the cleaners in that category) earns $23,753 a year in the private sector; in the public sector that jumps to $30,056, but is still ten grand less than a New York subway cleaner. The disparity jumps even further when you look at the nationwide "transportation workers" as a specialty. There the average annual wage is $30,846 in the private sector and $34,611 in the public sector. Clearly, it pays to work for the government. But it pays even better to work for the MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority)--indeed 80% better. New York is expensive, but not that expensive.

[Tempest]

4. A poll taken showed NYers supported the union

More than half supported the union, less than 45% supported the city.

Bloomberg had best tread lightly. Pataki is already a dead man walking.