State of the Union

I'm sure by now that you've all heard about the New York City Transit Strike and have been waiting for me to say something about it. After all, how could someone who has an opinion about everything from the price of a box of cereal to the theory of evolution not have an opinion about a historic event that has crippled the economy and livelihood of one of the most important cities in modern civilization.

Well, fear not. I have a lot to say on the subject, so pull up a chair, crack open a beer, and relax while I ruminate and rant about a union that's more selfish than a ball hogging point guard.

First off, how dare they go on strike when the temperatures are in the teens, on the week before Christmas, amidst an economy that's still recovering from 9/11, while we're still at war with Iraq. Who needs terrorists when you have union workers. Which is why they should have known better. Rule #1 in the Union Guide To Striking is to have public support. Coming into this most people would have been for hard working laborers getting their just due in salary. But after the details have come out the public is all against the greedy TWU with the perception being that the union just wanted to get their share of the supposed one billion dollar surplus that was recently announced. Since most transit workers already make more money than most straphangers, riders aren't going to happily support a strike if it inconveniences them in the slightest way. If the TWU would have continued operating without a contract and then striked after the holidays they would have saved face. Now they're likely to get two black eyes instead of just one.

I meant that in a figurative sense and not in a literal sense since the days of goon squads are long gone. Or are they? I could just see an angry mob of Brooklynites walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, crowbars and 2x4's in hand, taking it to a crowd of picketers in Midtown. And honestly I wouldn't blame anyone if they went to those extremes. Consider these following horror travel stories:

1. My friend Anthony who lives in Bensonhurst had to walk 6 miles from his house to the water taxi in Bayridge since he couldn't hail a cab. After getting to the ferry he had to wait in the freezing cold for two hours before finally squeezing onto a boat. He said that people in line were passing out due to hypothermia from being out in the cold for so long. The whole idea of thousands of people crowding onto ferries reminds me of that scene in War of the Worlds where everyone was trying to escape the alien invasion by way of boat. It was absolute chaos and that doesn't even begin to describe what this next guy had to go through.

2. A guy, whose conversation I overheard on the LIRR, had to trek through 4 of the 5 boroughs just to make it home. He started at a construction site in the Bronx then after a long hard day of work had to take Metro North into Manhattan at which point he stood in line for hours to get on a LIRR train to Queens where he then hoped to make his way into Brooklyn. As I'm writing this he's probably still not home. The guy that he was talking to commented that Brooklyn is our 9th Ward an ominous comparison to the flooding in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And I have to say that the comparision is dead on. Brooklyn with no way into the city other than by subway was the forgotten borough in all the contingency plans. Carpooling, ferries, ass backwards routes through Long Island all came up short. Brooklyn will forever be the face of this strike.

3. And what about my own travels. I left work at 4 pm to beat the rush but I soon realized that everyone else had the same idea as well. By the time I got to Penn Station there was complete and utter pandamonium. I would say that there were queues forming as people were boarding the trains but that would imply that there was some semblance of order. Rather it was more like a giant clusterfuck of humanity several city blocks wide. The kind of mob scene that you would expect to see at Walmart at 6am on Black Friday. One woman innocently asked, "I want to stand on line but I don't know where it is."

By the time I got home it was 8:30. Now you can strike all you want and make me late to work for the rest of time. I don't even mind walking 10 miles, battling the sub zero temperatures, being packed into a subway car like sardines, or getting trambled by a mob of people trying to get on the train. But when you make me get home at 8:30 and miss the first half hour of NCIS that's when I'm going to draw the line!

Where I really should have drawn the line is with the principle of why they are even striking. It's not like they are working under sweat shop like conditions for less than minimum wage. Quite the contrary. An entry level salary pays $41,000 a year. That's more than I make after spending $100,000 on a degree from a private university. Had I just dropped out of high school and gone to work for the MTA I would have been $200,000 richer than I am today.

Which is why this strike pisses off me and the millions of New Yorkers that depend on mass transit to earn a living. The greed of one union shouldn't affect everyone else. In fact, the mass transportation system is a public service. They shouldn't be allowed to strike or even have a union for that matter. Maybe it was necesasry back in the day but nowadays it's not necessary. They have good salaries. They have full benefits. They shouldn't be allowed to want more at the detriment to an entire city. There's a reason why this is the only transit union remaining in the country. And it's time for it to go.

Unfortunately, there's no one in government that has the balls to do anything about it. They just plan on fining the union a million dollars a day in hopes of bankrupting them. That may work but the strike could still go on for several days until that happens. Why doesn't someone step up and put an end to the strike by any means necessary. No more fines. No more court orders. Just end the strike already. If it's an illegal strike it should have been overturned at 12:02 am tuesday morning. What's taking so long?

While you ponder that also think about history. How we're living it right now. How this might be the last time you ever see a transit union strike or even exist after this gets settled. I have a feeling that the strikers might have struck out once we look back at the bigger picture. After all, a strike is more valuable as a threat than as an actual strike. A fact which the TWU may have learned the hard way.