Strike! Day Two
Broadway outside my window is strangely empty today, at least as empty as it ever gets. Perhaps people are staying home, or gave up their cars to take the train in from the suburbs. Whichever. The novelty of this strike has worn off fast, even for me, and I'm lucky enough not to have to commute to an office. But yesterday I did have errands to do down around Lincoln Center, and so I wound up walking there and back—about 110 blocks all told. Today, Christmas shopping for the nieces and nephews, and there isn't much of that up here around Columbia University.
Meanwhile, the union is fighting with itself, as it should be. It's also facing fines of a million dollars a day, and additional fines for specific union leaders, for every day the strike continues—and it doesn't have a lot of money in the bank.
It did, however, manage to plant a wildly sympathetic story in the Times. It's just bizarre. Reporter Steven Greenhouse writes:
Just hours before the strike deadline, the authority's chairman, Peter S. Kalikow, put forward a surprise demand that stunned the union. Seeking to rein in the authority's soaring pension costs, he asked that all new transit workers contribute 6 percent of their wages toward their pensions, up from the 2 percent that current workers pay. The union balked, and then shut down the nation's largest transit system for the first time in a quarter-century.
Greenhouse emphasizes that the increase in health care contributions would save the MTA only $20 million over three years, roughly the cost of two days of police overtime. "This war was declared over a pension proposal that would have saved the transit authority less than $20 million over the next three years," he writes in a line that reads as if penned by transit worker union chief Roger Touissant.
After the jump, however, Greenhouse quotes one pension expert who says that the measure would save the MTA $160 million over ten years, and after that about $80 million a year. Which makes it sound more worth fighting for.
I suspect that with every passing day, the union's position will grow weaker. Tomorrow is Thursday, probably the last day many people will come to work before Christmas. The week between Christmas and New Year's is a downtime for most workers (although a very busy one for retailers). People will find a way to cope. According to Gawker, they're coping by a) walking to work, b) staying home and gambling on the Internet, and c) having sex.
Meanwhile, for the union, those fines will start piling up...and the workers will start calculating whatever raises they gain against whatever pay they lose.
