< The Transit Strike Is Over. Or Is It?

The Transit Strike Is Over. Or Is It?

December 23rd, 2005 - by: danny

The Transit Strike Is Over. Or Is It?

PUBLIC TRANSIT IS BACK
FLASHING BACK TO THE TSUNAMI
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS 2005

And then it was over. Only it wasn’t. Not yet. The Transport Workers returned to work in New York City but without a contract and only the promise of “some movement” on the issues that forced the strike. The Department stores are thrilled. The buses and subways are running.

In the media, the leadership of the Transport Workers were being demonized as law breakers without anyone mentionioning that the people who run the subways had demanded give backs on pensions – a subject they are legally prohibited from raising because it is the legislature that deals with pensions for city and state employees, not labor negotiators. It was that demand that triggered the great three day transit strike that paralyzed a great city.

But no one mentioned that BOTH side were not exactly putting the public firstThe AP reported the “official narrative. Wayne Barret who covers city politics for the Village Voice goes deeper:

THE “OFFICIAL STORY”

“Faced with mounting fines and the rising wrath of millions of commuters, the city transit union sent its members back to work without a new contract Thursday and ended a crippling, three-day strike that brought subways and buses to a standstill.
“Union members were told to return to their jobs and start preparing to restore service. Buses were expected to roll around midnight, and most trains were expected to be running by the Friday morning rush, just two days before Christmas
“I’m ecstatic that it’s over, but I’m still really mad that they did it,” said Jessica Cunningham, 21, who was in town for the holiday. “I really think it’s screwed up that they decided to strike the week before Christmas.”

THE POLITICS BEHIND THE STORY

” All is right with the world. Within minutes of the announced transit settlement, George Pataki was on CNN trying to turn his handling of the strike into a presidential audition. Mike Bloomberg was back to being Mike Bloomberg, praising transit workers whose leaders he’d called thugs two days earlier. The MTA was suggesting that the strike-provoking pension issue was still on the table, though everyone in the city instantly understood that Peter Kalikow’s last-minute, $20-million demand was as dead as the bus yards in East New York have been since Tuesday morning.
The headline that stretched across the entire front page of the Times on Wednesday said: “City Scrambles as Union Is Hit With Big Fine.” Right underneath it was a headline on the evolution court decision that reported: “Issuing Rebuke, Judge Rejects Teaching of Intelligent Design.” It could just as well have been the headline on the judge’s ruling in the transit case, since there was clearly no intelligent design at this bargaining table. Why would a bottom line billionaire mayor who likes to run his government as if he were still CEO of Bloomberg LP defend an MTA that took a strike costing the city $400 million a day to win a pension savings of $20 million over three years? Even a closely held corporation like Bloomberg might dump a CEO who saw that as a winning gambit.
The pundits have contended that the $20 million cause of the strike was a pittance to both sides and that neither should have allowed it to spark such pain. But a six percent slice out of a puny starting salary for new transit workers for the first ten years of their employment is no pittance to those union workers. It is a pittance to the governor, who’s handed out billions and billions in cost of living and other pension giveaways, and to the mayor, who spent that much in the final month of his mayoral campaign. Dropping that stink bomb on the table a couple of hours before midnight Monday was an act of such colossal gall and incompetence that no editorial board or public official should even attempt to justify it.

http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/powerplays/archives/002251.php

The New York Times focuses today on the behind the scenes process: “The journey from standoff to resolution involved mediation, behind-the-scenes headway and back-channel communications.”

THE MEDIA COVERAGE

Does any one remember TWU Michael J Quill who used to strike on New Year’s Eve at a time of maximum leverage. Strikes are a form of industrial warfare and union leaders have to calculate when they think the can get best results. Whatever their grievances, the union did a piss poor job of communicating its demands and rationale, partly no doubt, because of the hostility they encountered in the media. This was obvious half a world a way in Hawaii from where Larry Geller observes how the media plays the blame game during strikes:

“It’s easy to cover the outrageous accusation that transit strikers are “thugs” (Really? That sweet lady I remembered in the token booth who
was always glad to give me directions? A thug?).What’s harder would be to avoid the popular and very deliberate targeting in the press of unions as the sole cause of the inconvenience caused by the dispute (usually
referred to, of course, as a “labor” dispute).

“Coverage of the NYC transit strike seems to be no exception. The acts of the MTA that brought about the walkout are omitted entirely or played down. What chicken journalism this is.

“When news media cover a strike, or even a threat of a strike, they often seem to play into and reinforce the common belief that strikes are the fault of labor, that union workers are causing us the trouble. Bad unions! Bad!

“The immediate cause of inconvenience is that the workers have left their posts and so the trains won’t run. But they are not there because they want to have a day off, or because they are thoughtless of the trouble and even monetary loss that the action causes others. As workers, they are more sensitive to these losses than the management side, which raises the issue only for leverage against the union, not because they care about anyone’s well-being. And the press gobbles it up. (Turkey journalism?)

“It takes two to sign a contract. It can be said that the trains are not running because of MTA’s unwillingness to do what it has to do to keep them running. Or that they put the pension issue on the table illegally and too late for the union to deal with it through negotiation. Why, then, is not the press blaming the MTA for the gridlock in the streets?

“The MTA has failed to act responsibly in dealing with their own workers. ]When they do that, and precipitate a strike, there are consequences to the public. Consequences of the MTA’s acts.

Yet we never hear, never never in my experience, that the inconvenience is caused by management.

This is a PR strategy that is ages old, and one that consistently paints labor as the root cause of trouble to the point that it has become the common assumption.

The strategy goes deeper. Here in Honolulu it has become impossible to discipline or dismiss guards in the childrens’ prison because of provisions in their contract. Certainly, any guard who abuses a child should be held accountable. That they cannot be dismissed is a result of a very poor contract. It takes two to sign a contract, and the State of Hawaii has done a particularly poor job of it, and so bears responsibility for its inability to provide a safe environment for its juvenile charges.

However, the media blame only the union.

The stage has been set decades ago for the attitude that strikes are the work of unions and they are bad and disruptive. It’s probably too much to expect the consolidated and right-controlled media to reverse this view of labor and to produce a fair description of events. Bloggers outnumber pundits right now, let’s see what /we/ can do.”

THE GOOD UNIONS DID (AND DO)

Another letter circulatinga round from Dr Mark Naison, a professor at Fordham University,tackles the subject of the good that unions have done for New York. It’s called: “Things We Had When New York Was a Union Town.”

“One of the most disturbing things about the public discourse on the Transit Strike is that the media, elected officials, and many citizen are predisposed to see the Union as a disruptive force and the MTA as acting in the public interest. Many people would not be upset in the least to see the TWU broken, or at least dramatically weakened, and think that if the TWA and the city could determine wages, pensions and working conditions without union interference, the city would be a better place I think this view of unions is extremely shortsighted, especially in the light of New York City’s history. Is New York a better city now than it was 50 years ago, when more than half the city’s work force was unionized? Does it have better schools, public services, and better cultural and recreational opportunities for its poor and working class residents?

“Based on my own research in the Bronx African American History Project and the material offered in Josh Freeman’s book “Working Class New York” the answer to this question is a resounding NO! Here are some of features of New York life in the 40′s and 50′s, which the city unions fought for. which are no longer with us today.

1. Supervised recreation programs in every public elementary school in the city from 3-5 PM and 7-9 PM, which included sports, arts and crafts and music. These programs were free and open any young person who
walked through the door.

2. First rate music programs in every public junior high school in the city featuring free instruction for students in bands,orchestras and music classes. Students in those classes could take home musical instruments to practice

3. Recreation supervisors, as well as cleaners, in every public park in the city, including neighborhood vest pocket parks, who organized games and leagues and prevented fights.

4. A public housing program that constructed tens thousands of units of low and moderate income housing throughout the city and staffed these with housing police, ground crews and recreation staffs to make sure the projects were safe, clean and well policed

5. Free tuition at the city university, at the community college, college and graduate levels, for all students who met the admissions standards

6. Parks department policies which made sure that parks in the outer boroughs were kept as clean and environmentally sound as Central Park or parks in wealthy neighborhoods

7 Free admission at all the city’s major zoos and museums. These policies, all of which were eliminated during the 1970′s, meant that children in poor and working class communities had access to recreational cultural and educational opportunties which are today only available to the children of the rich

These programs were not there because of the foresight and compassion of the city’s business leadership. They were there because unions fought for them and demanded that elected officials they supported fund them

This is not to say that unions are right in every dispute, or that they are immune from arrogance, greed and corruption. But it should give pause to those who think that our lives would be better in a union free environment

Let me leave you with a some numbers. In the early 1950′s when 33% of the American work force was unionized, the United States had the smallest wealth gap ( between the top and bottom 20 percent of its population) of any advanced nation in the world. Now, when 13% of our workforce is unionized, we have the largest.

“Is this progress? Let’s think long and hard before we blame unions for city’s and the nation’s economic problems”

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