December 20, 2005
Hostage For the Holidays
By John
Avlon
Every three years, New Yorkers are held hostage during the holidays
by the transit workers of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
It is a time-honored negotiation technique but a dangerous game
that brings our city to the brink of functional shutdown. New Yorkers
have every reason to be fed up with it. This isn’t a strike
for workers; it’s a strike against workers.
The benefits of 38,000 transit workers do not outweigh the rights
of 8 million New Yorkers. And yet the old school Transport Workers
Union sees only its own interests in these negotiations. Judges
have continuously determined that this strike is illegal because
it is a strike against public safety. As Calvin Coolidge famously
said dealing with a Boston police strike (and which Giuliani administration
Deputy Mayor Joe Lhota posted on a sign outside his office during
transit negotiations six years ago), "There is no right to
strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time."
The estimated economic losses to the city as a result of a strike
are astronomical: $440 million a day in lost business and $12
million a day in lost tax revenue. There is also the very real
potential cost in lives lost, with crippling traffic delaying
ambulances, isolating individuals in the coldest months of the
year.
Finally, there is the more pedestrian inconvenience of a strike.
Subways are our city's lifeblood. Without them, New Yorkers -
the vast majority of whom do not own cars - will essentially be
held hostage in their neighborhoods. And given our recent stretch
of freezing weather, the ability to walk to work will go from
unappealing to impossible for many people.
When you get beyond the rhetoric of oppression and look at the
real numbers, the MTA's case as victimized workers begins to look
more petty, pathetic, and myopic. The average annual salary for
a transit worker is well over $50,000 – for a 7 ½
hour workday before overtime. Bus maintenance workers receive
an average salary of $68,000 a year; train operators make $62,000
a year; station agents over $50,000 a year and conductors over
$53,000 a year. Add to this generous public subsidy the fact that
transit workers take an average of 13 days sick leave a year and
you have a picture of a classic overfed, me-first, feather-bedding
local union of the past.
The New York Transport Workers Union operates like the 1970s
never ended. It’s crafty but cartoon-ishly militant union
president, Roger Toussaint, faces the greatest threat to his leadership
from the left wing within his own union, who are concerned that
he is not radical enough for the rank-and-file. After all, there
has not been a transit strike in this city since 1980, and by
some labor calculations, the union is overdue for a flexing of
its muscle. Therefore, there is a personal and political incentive
for him to push this as far as he can to prove his leadership.
That is dangerous and dysfunctional. One man's ego should not
be able to grind our nation's greatest city to a halt.
But before transit workers get too arrogant even as they look
at their next prospective strike three years down the line, they
should realize that technology already exists that would make
them irrelevant. Already, trains in Paris, Cairo, and Calcutta
operate with computerized or automated systems. In Paris, the
Meteor Project was launched in 1998, with an automatic piloting
system that controls the train line's traffic, regulates speed,
manages alarm devices, and allows for traffic of automatic and
traditional conductor trains on the same line. There have been
no serious accidents reported since this system deployed in the
late 1990s, and more than a billion people have been transported.
Computers make the trains run on time and they don't threaten
to walk off the job. All of us are replaceable, but some are more
quickly replaceable than others.
Already, the MTA spends 80% of its operating budget on personnel
expenses. Of the one-year billion-dollar windfall surplus that
it currently has on the books, more than $450 million will go
to pay for existing unfunded pensions. We have an aging labor
population whose entitlement costs from pensions to Medicaid are
going to bring our city and state to the brink of bankruptcy in
the coming years because of unwise long-term labor agreements
made in the past. The transit workers - and all municipal workers
- need to understand this reality and adjust their expectations
accordingly. But instead, transit workers are resisting proposed
salary increases and fighting to secure unsupportable entitlements
such as the right to retire at age 55 with full benefits. That's
not fighting oppression; that's fighting for the right to live
in a fantasyland subsidized by hard-working New Yorkers who will
retire at age 65 or older.
The delusional days of wine and roses for labor leaders are over
and they are never coming back. Today, we need to think in terms
of generational responsibility. Labor relations need to be more
than a publicly subsidized job-protection scheme that passes the
buck to the next generation. That means not forcing today's schoolchildren
to fund Florida retirements for workers who've been off the job
for 25 years. The reality is that Unions’ don’t have
that much public goodwill left to waste.
Every time the transit workers hold our city hostage during the
holidays, they lose credibility and the sympathy of New Yorkers.
Now, for the first time in 25 years, America's largest city has
been stopped in its tracks by a transit worker strike. Last time
– in the balmy April of 1980 – it took 11 days to
resolve the issue. However long it takes this time, we will predictably
and pathetically be caught in the same web three years from now.
That’s why we should take steps to break this cycle of municipal
threat and mass victim mentality right now.
John
Avlon is a columnist for the New
York Sun and the author
of Independent
Nation.
