Why is it laughable that $60K as a single salary would put someone in the middle class? Maybe you can’t raise a family including two kids and a non-working spouse while owning your own house in NYC on $60,000/year- or maybe you can (like my uncle who works for the MTA, owned his own house and had a stay at home wife and five children while living in Queens until recently moving to Long Island and quite a few other people I know) But how can it be laughable for a $60,000 single income to be middle class when the 1999 median household income in Queens was $42,439 and for the city as a whole was $38,293. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/36/3651004.html )
Maelin,
The rage here wasn’t about whether or not the rest of like our jobs.
The rage was about already very well compensated government workers throwing a public hissy fit and fucking over many other people in the process.
School attendance was vastly down because of these birdbrains. Businesses lost work because of them. Millions of people had very long walk in the cold because of them. Thousands of people lost a few day’s pay or crammed into an overcrowed metro north train or had to wait in traffic for hours.
Why? Because a bunch of assholes they wanted private sector raises while working a public sector job.
Maybe most people aren’t sympathetic because they actually understand what working for the government usually means.
And did you bother to read the part where I wrote my husband ALREADY works for the MTA? And he isn’t on strike because his last raise was only 4%? Or he has to pay for some of his health care costs?
And exactly do you think would constitute adequate compensation for pushing a broom or giving out metrocards or driving a bus? 80k? 100k? 250k?
I know, let’s make it a million dollar a year! :rolleyes: Afterall, nothing’s too good for our wonderful TA workers! Just look at the fabulous present they gave a few million people for Christmas!
The entire goddamned city must be nothing but lower class because the majority of workers make less than the stupid fucking local bus driver. They all must be starving to death while they take it in the ass.
The issue here isn’t unions. The issue is greed and stupidity. And the TWU is nothing but a monument to both.
Those striking workers may imagine they’re not accountable to us but they’re wrong. They just pissed off the public they’re supposedly working for. Do you really think many NYers are now going to go out their way to be polite to TWU members?
APPARENTLY - The strike is OVER
[meaningless nitpick]
1999 is not 2005. Queens is not all of NYC. Get some better quick facts. Rents & property values have gone up by a fair margin in the last 5 years or so. I’d say if you make $50,000, you have trouble living in any borough, much less Manhattan.
[/meaningless nitpick]
Now that it’s over, what did they agree on? I’m not hearing any details other than the union shall return to work tomorrow.
FTR, Toussant is a prick. Demanding less reprimands as part of your contract reveals a flaw in your thoughts about what work means.
I’m a generally pro-union guy who is usually sympathetic to unions. I would not ordinarily cross a picket line, for instance.
Having said that, this union is way out of line. I say fire all of them. Fuck 'em.
Wow. Just Wow. You must be single dumbest fucking person on the planet.
I certainly have more money than these union members and I am still outraged about all this. I don’t live in New York either. You know why I am mad? Because they screwed over people they are supposed to serve over a bunch of bullshit. Kids couldn’t go to school. People couldn’t get to work. Sometimes, it is just about right and wrong. You know right and wrong?..Oh, nevermind. What I am referring to when I say that is that is some people are raised in a way that makes them believe that some behaviors are better than others. If you don’t get it, you never will.
Would there ever be a line where you think they are asking too much? Where would that be? Virtually everyone thought they crossed it and held a whole city hostage for unreasonable demand. I suppose we should just start asking people what their salary and benefits should be to avoid all this unpleasantness.
You are a special person Maeglin. In the spirit of the holidays I will say that we are happy to have you on this board because in the interest of intellectual diversity.
In order:
$50,000 won’t cut it in Manhattan for a family. Singles can do it, though. A family can live for $50K in an outer borough; not the choicest neighborhoods, but not East New York either.
There was no agreement other than the transit workers are returning to work. While there is some grumbling about the union caving, most workers are much better off, and the city certainly is. They are returning to the bargaining table after Christmas.
Toussaint is a prick, no doubt about it. However, not for the reason you stated. MTA hands out reprimands to workers like pediatricians hand out lollipops. A 33000+ workforce received something along the order of 15,000 reprimands…something there is broken. No workforce should have approximately 1 disciplinary action for every 2 employees (yes, I know some employees probably received multiple reprimands - the number is still staggering).
I’m not disagreeing with you, but isn’t it possible that the workers are “earning” some–or most–of these reprimands? Given the sense of entitlement displayed by the union during the last couple of weeks, it makes me wonder.
I’m also agreeing that Toussaint is a prick for other reasons.
Hey, Maeglin. Eat a dick.
Sincerely,
friedo
Andy, unless you read city editions, you really don’t get a feel for some of the stupid shit transit workers can get reprimanded for. My mind draws a blank for specific examples (and NY Newsday’s search feature sucks eggs), but at least once a month the subway columnist would cover another worker screwed over by the MTA. Ah, here’s one I remember…as a bus driver, you can get reprimanded for letting people ride letting people ride in front of the yellow line. You can also get reprimanded for telling people to leave the bus if they cannot fit (and people will fill the bus until they are hanging out the door) and you can get reprimanded for failing to allow them to board. Plus you can be reprimanded for being late (which happens when there’s that one person who insists there’s just enough room and slows everything down as you try to close the doors enough to move the bus). Basically, reprimands are a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ thing. Do some people earn them. You betcha. A majority? I’m not sure I’ll even back that.
(My cousin is a Queens bus driver, and this is from an earlier conversation from when they were on strike. I believe I’ve captured it fairly accurately, although some time has passed.)
Fair enough, D_Odds. I hadn’t realized the extent of that particular issue. Sounds like an issue the union could have used to gain some public sympathy, as oppossed to striking, which (to put it mildly) hasn’t.
I recall a case of one bus driver who fought off an attacker on his bus, and then was reprimanded for striking the “customer.”
Transit workers striking because they’re being treated like shit on the job? That I can sympathise with.
Transit workers striking because they want large raises and early retirement? Forget it.
Could be. If I am, then it must not take a lot of intelligence to live a reasonably successful life in as tough a place as NYC. I can live with your opprobrium.
Perhaps you are so mad because you are as emotionally ill-equipped to function as an adult as I am stupid? I do live in New York, and I have been essentially trapped in my neighborhood since the strike began. I suppose I will tell you the same thing I told all of the furious non-New Yorkers who wanted to turn the Middle East into a parking lot after 9/11. Fuck off. We really don’t need you to be angry on our behalf.
If by “virtually everyone” you mean the editorial board at the Daily News, fine. But “virtually everyone” from my NYC perspective is as disgusted if not more so with the MTA. Three years ago a strike was averted at the last minute when the TWU blinked and accepted the “economic hardship” position the MTA took.
I cannot say I blame them for being less willing to accept this position when the economic outlook has changed, the corrupt MTA’s opaque finances were investigated more thoroughly, and fares have risen twice in so much time. The money is going somewhere, and evidently not to the severely underfunded pension accounts. As a commuter who spends about ten hours a week on the trains, I can tell you that my ride certainly hasn’t improved in the past three years. Too bad the riders can’t go on strike.
As for an “unreasonable demand,” well obviously. As I am sure you are aware, bargaining is a signaling game of incomplete information and private preferences. You surely know how each side’s reversion offer signals strength of preferences to the other side, and how the purpose of negotiations is to furnish credible information about your partner’s type and to develop strategies monotonically increasing in type…no, wait, you probably don’t know much about bargaining at all.
It comes as little surprise to those who do that this entire dog & pony show is about only one thing, in this case, new employee benefit contributions. The MTA has already folded on raising the retirement age, and both sides have agreed more or less on yearly raises that are higher than the MTA offering and lower than that of the TWU. What were the other unreasonable demands that the TWU wanted? More terrorism training? How ghastly. A revision of the disciplinary policy? Sounds stupid until you find out that half the MTA employees are disciplined every year for the most idiotic reasons.
The outcome is anything but unreasonable, but it took prima facie unreasonable demands by both parties to get there. It’s how bargaining works.
But after the TWU blinked three years ago, “virtually” no one believed they would follow through with a strike this time. The MTA behaved accordingly. It refused to budge on almost any of the TWU positions from the very beginning. It didn’t send in Kalikow until the very end, after rhetoric had become heated and the issues seemed indivisible. It was a bargaining failure on both sides. The TWU was unable to convince the MTA that it was a “high type” until it called in a strike. This is due perhaps to Toussaint’s militant style as much as the MTA’s denseness. It called a bluff when the TWU wasn’t actually bluffing.
In the same spirit, I’m glad you’re here, too. If it weren’t for the ignorance, this place wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.
I absolutely agree with you. But the point of the bargaining exercise was to not let the MTA raise the retirement age and to get a reasonable raise, which they were denied in the previous contract. As it is looking now, the retirement age will stay the same and the raise will be anything but unreasonable from either point of view. It’s a damned shame that it took a strike for both parties to understand each other, but it is what it is.
All I can say is, if I were a 50+ lifetime employee of the MTA, I would be quite vexed if my cowardly union leader knuckled under and added seven years to my work life without at least forcing some sort of compromise.
Considering that current retirement age is 55, I’d like to see when a 50+ year employee was hired. Are they indulging in child labor now, too?
Geez, a 50+ year old employee. Sorry if it wasn’t perfecly clear, but it should have been perfectly obvious nonetheless.
At no point was such a change ever considered by any side.
Rents and property values sure have gone up in the past 5 years. But the average household income hasn’t increased by nearly 50 %. BTW, my post had the 1999 citywide median. It was lower than the median in Queens. Also, the fact that one person makes $50,000 doesn’t say a thing about household income. A pair of married transit workers could live well even in NYC on $100,000.
They agreed that the union would return to work and that there would be a media blackout. That’s it. They haven’t agreed on a contract yet.
Sounds ridiculous to me too. Just like it sounded ridiculous when the head of my agency demanded more disciplinary action. I can only assume that what Toussaint meant was that disciplinary action was being taken in unreasonable circumstance or that the some of the rules themselves are unreasonable. If he did, he sure didn’t get his point across well.
Except that the pension plan change was for future employees. People who are not currently employed by the MTA and don’t currently belong to their pension system. It was never about the current employees having to work longer. I am a union member, and I would be quite vexed if my union sent me out on strike and made me risk Taylor law fines and my job for something that wouldn’t even affect me, but only people being hired 2 or 3 or 5 years down the road, who are free to decide at that point whether they want the job with a retirement age of 62. Especially since the union was correct that pension issues aren’t really part of the contract as they must be legislated-and even if the MTA were to drop whatever they are actually demanding (probably an agreement from the union to support the change) the legislature start a new tier anyway.