[lbo-talk] NYC Transit strike

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun Dec 18 06:44:40 PST 2005


The 30 Pound Snail Who Lives on Gar Lipow's Monitor wrote:


>For those of us seeing the NY city transit stike from a distance,
>what is the trick behind the management offer of binding arbitration?
> Is it simply that the union is certain to win a strike?Why go out of
>your way to provoke one in that case?

I don't know the answer about binding arbitration, though I'd guess that the union doesn't want to sacrifice any of its potential power and autonomy, esp in striking just before Xmas. In their own history <http://twulocal100.org/?q=history> they declare the 1982 introduction of arbitration to have been a union victory.

But I've got to say the Transport Workers Union has done nothing at all to build public support for what would almost certainly be a massively unpopular strike. I was in NYC for the 1980 strike, and it was absolute hell. And to a public used to cutbacks and DIY pension schemes, the TA's proposal to raise the retirement age from 55 to 62 doesn't sound unreasonable. (Of course, I don't agree, but I'm not the general public.) The union, and not management, would be blamed for forcing people to spend 2 hours walking to work and for the massive traffic jams. The union is widely seen as having lost the 1980 strike, and the political situation of labor is certainly no better today.

The TWU could have done something with the Transit Authority's plan to eliminate conductors and token-booth clerks, playing on public fears of crime & terrorism. (The TA is buying new automated trains that can be completely controlled by the driver, eliminating the need for a conductor to open & close doors. And with tokens gone, replaced by a computerized MetroCard system, there's much less need for clerks to be in every station; token clerks have been replaced by customer service people, but they're much fewer in number, and more & more stations will be unstaffed in the future.) But they haven't done any agitprop. No leafleting, no ads. Their website <http://twulocal100.org> features mainly reprints of newspaper articles. And given New York State's Taylor Law, which imposes enormous fines on public workers (two days of pay for every day of the strike) and unions for striking ($1.5 million in 1980), labor could get seriously screwed by a strike.

Doug



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