Somewhere after the first day of the strike, we began to notice something inspiring about New Yorkers – they are a remarkable family. What prompted this is hard to say. Maybe it was the cheerfulness of the cops as they tried to keep bicyclists from weaving through the crowds on the Brooklyn Bridge – or the president of Brooklyn, Marty Markowitz, using a megaphone to greet the throngs walking eastward across the span at the end of a long day by barking, “You’re back in Brooklyn, folks. It’s okay now. Everything’s okay.” Perhaps it was the example of thousands of New Yorkers managing to get to work cheerfully, some walking miles each way for jobs that pay half, nay, a third of what the least paid of the strikers was earning.

New Yorkers, we began to think, could take this strike in stride, and if management wants to play tough, we’ve little doubt that New Yorkers could manage for weeks, forcing the transit workers to reflect far more deeply than they have so far about what they want to risk. This is something to remember with the talks still underway. The employees of the MTA may be back in the tunnels and on the buses, but the negotiators for the city and state shouldn’t think that New Yorkers are eager to cave in. The strike was causing plenty of pain and inconvenience, but New Yorkers understood what was going on and could handle it. No one wants to be buffaloed into paying for the retirements at half-pay of transit workers who retire at age 55. New Yorkers would be prepared to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge for all of 2006, we’d warrant, rather than get saddled with a deal that is not fair and right.