Everyone seems to be in a dither over the possibility – following the rejection by the transit workers of the contract the union bosses had agreed to – that there will be another strike by bus and subway personnel. But we, for one, have a different read of the situation. By our lights, the subway strike turned out to be less of an inconvenience than we’d anticipated, and we were proud of the way New Yorkers took it, literally and figuratively, in stride. It certainly looks to us like the people who use the subways and buses to get to and from work and who pay the taxes and fares that pay the salaries of these union members understand full well the principles that are at stake. What the governor, the mayor, and what passes for the board and management of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority need to keep in mind is that New Yorkers would be happy to take a longer strike to get a fair and appropriate deal.

So by rejecting the deal the MTA agreed to, the rank and file has done the rest of us a favor. Now there is at least a glimmer of hope. The seven transit workers who tipped the scales against the contract presumably were persuaded by a radical fringe within the union that claimed the deal was a bad one because workers would have had to pay part of their salaries toward health insurance premiums. But to most wage earners in the city, the deal the TWU rejected was a veritable plum. The transit workers kept their pensions in place in the face of a national movement toward pension reform, and they still got raises of 3%, 4%, and 3.5% over the next three years and their contribution toward health insurance was kept to a meager 1.5% of their salaries, paltry compared to what private sector workers pay. Then there was the $130 million in pension premium give-backs to about 20,000 workers to refund money they had paid into the system ten years ago.

If that was a slap to the transit workers, it was an even bigger slap to New Yorkers who had thought they would gain something by toughing it out through a few days of inconvenience right before Christmas. Instead, the MTA had come up with a deal that didn’t touch the pension third rail at all, leaving the authority’s $1 billion pension liabilities to grow ever larger. This was the biggest sticking point by far before the strike, and yet by the end the authority had given up both its demand to increase the retirement age to 62 from 55 (no extra credit for resisting the union’s demand to lower the age to 50) and its demand that new workers – not even workers currently on the job – contribute a small percentage of their pay into the pension fund.

The union’s rejection of this largesse gives the MTA a rare second chance to do the right thing without having to wait for yet another three-year contract to expire. The authority will be doing a service for taxpayers and straphangers if it attends to the long-term stability of its pension system and rethinks raises for employees whose starting salaries are already more than double those of firefighters and policemen. It may be that all this will become a matter for arbitration. But it also may be that instability within the union leads to another illegal strike, as members more radical than even Roger Toussaint militate for walkouts until the subways become a ruinously expensive underground workers’ paradise. Let management feel no pressure from the public. New Yorkers – the long history of the city has shown – are a hardy lot. We’ve made it through occupying redcoats, rioting Copperheads, and terrorizing Islamofascists, and certainly will make it through another illegal subway strike, if it comes to that.