Strike Out
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
By the time this is published, the city’s transit workers will either be on strike, or the threat will have been postponed or peacefully resolved. Either way, there are some lessons to be learned for the next time around. The first is that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority would be wise to schedule its contracts with these workers to expire during some less-than-essential moment in the calendar. The height of the holiday shopping and tourism season doesn’t quite meet this standard. Neither would, say, the moment when New York is scheduled to host a national political convention or the Olympics. Better to choose one of those weeks in the summer when everyone is on vacation and the subway platforms are so hot no one wants to be riding anyway. Second, the transit workers — many of them African-Americans or more recent immigrants, many of them practically invisible, faces obscured behind their safety glasses or locked in token booths — are a vital part of the city’s everyday life. Over the past few days, as we asked the various train operators and token clerks whether a strike was on the way, we got back smiles, shrugs, rolled eyes. They were interactions that made us think of the union members as individuals rather than as mere labor costs to be kept down or cogs in the vast system that keeps the city moving every day.
Some of the public anger about the inconvenience associated with bringing the city to even the brink of a strike will naturally, and justifiably, be directed at the leadership of Transport Workers Union Local 100. But some of the anger, too, should be directed at Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki. Mr. Pataki was being disingenuous when he said yesterday that he didn’t want to intervene in the labor negotiations. He appoints the 17-member board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The mayor of New York recommends four of those board members. Nor has either advanced any strategic vision for the city’s public transportation problem. There are those, for example, who reckon that in the long run, the city’s riders — not to mention the transport workers — would be better served were the subways and bus routes returned to private ownership. It would be easier to find a proper wage level for subway employees, and a market level for the fare, were the subways and bus routes served by competing and independent private companies. Mayor Bloomberg laughed at the notion when we last asked him about it. Mr. Pataki has made no move for strategic reform. The leadership of the transport workers has much to answer for, but it’s not the only leadership that does.