According to press reports, Governor-Elect Spitzer is assembling a fully credentialed panel of wonks, lawyers and financiers. It’s good to know he will have a full supply of facts at his disposal, but facts are just the beginning of governing. First you have the facts. Then you have opinions about what the facts mean – hopefully the people Spitzer has hired will be truthful enough to distinguish between the two when advising him, or Spitzer will be sharp enough to realize if they are not. In the end, however, one has to decide what to do about the facts, and the right decision is generally not an automatic consequence of them. Decisions, unlike deals, also involve values, and it is in terms of values that the Governor-elect will have to speak if anything is going to get better. I am reminded of this because this a year ago New York City Transit was on strike, and our elected officials, particularly Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg, failed utterly to speak in terms of values.
The two kept repeating that the strike was illegal. So did the Daily News and New York Post. That is a fact. But why is it illegal? Why should it be illegal? Is it illegal because workers, all workers, should not have the right to strike? Because workers should not have the right to organize unions and bargain collectively? Because those with more power had simply taken away a basic human right from 40,000 workers through an unjust law, and were trying to use that power to force the union to sell out future generations of workers? Because there are those who believe no one should have the right to strike, and those who believe everyone should have the right to strike, and they cut a deal allowing some workers to strike but not others, with not much to choose between the two groups?
Certainly Roger Toussant argued that he was striking on behalf of the threatened rights of all workers, but Bloomberg and Pataki did not speak in terms of values. That won’t cut it.
In fact, there is a very good reason why the T.W.U. does not have a legal or moral right to strike, even if other workers do. The TWU has a de facto monopoly (because its market share is so large) of an essential service: mass transit into Manhattan, which accounts for 50% of all the private sector earnings in the state. And those who have a monopoly or de facto monopoly of essential services do not have a moral right to use that position to blackmail people.
If Ford workers go on strike, Ford customers can buy a car later, or buy a car from some other company, so the United Auto Workers cannot blackmail drivers. If a strike were to drive enough customers off, management risks bankrupting the company and the union risks its member’s jobs, so eventually they have to reach agreement for their mutual self interest. The same is true in just about any industry.
A transit strike in New York, on the other hand, is the equivalent of Con Edison shutting off the electricity, and telling us the city will be destroyed if we do no agree to triple the rates. It is the equivalent of all the farmers getting together and threatening to starve us if we don’t agree to pay double for food. Con Edison would never be permitted to do this, and farmers are not an organized monopoly. But the TWU is, and has been since transit unification in 1940.
In the mid-1960s TWU blackmail was conceded to, with a strike settled by a promise of pay without work after age 50, a promise that the City couldn’t possibly afford without terrible consequences. The cost postponed to the 1970s when services, including the transit system, collapsed as ever rising fares and taxes were diverted to the retired. That’s why the Taylor law was passed, and Taylor penalties are imposed. In exchange, public employees have a right to arbitration.
The TWU claimed it was forced to strike rather than go to arbitration because the MTA threatened lesser pensions for new members. Well, an arbitrator has ruled, and have pensions been reduced? No. An arbitrator has no legal ability to change the pension plan. In fact, the MTA and TWU together cannot agree to change the pension plan. Only the legislature can change the pension plan.
And in fact, the real reason the TWU went on strike a year ago is to blackmail the Governor into accepting, once again, a pension enhancement to allow retirement at age 50 after just 20 years of work (the current rule for transit workers is 25/55) – even though the pension plan is already in the hole. In the hotly contested factional struggle within the TWU, the New Directions movement, which Toussaint leads, had promised 20/50, and the parking permit privileged legislature had passed it without a single “no” vote. To stay in power, New Directions either had to get 20/50 or prove to the members it couldn't be got. Hence the strike.
That is why I believe the strike was terribly unjust, because it is unjust for TWU members, who are already so highly privileged in how early they get to retire compared with most of us, to threaten our well being by using that monopoly power to blackmail us to take even more. And that is why I’m not a fan of Roger Toussaint even though I (as I’ve written previously) am outraged by the tendency to award rich benefits to those cashing in and moving out in booms (like the 2000 pension plan) followed by repeated sellouts of the unborn when the bills come do. People who know how I feel about that assumed I agreed with Toussaint during the strike. But I know from my background in transit that the strike wasn’t about increasing the retirement age from 55 to 62, it was about cutting it back to 50. No matter what they tell you.
Yet neither Bloomberg nor Pataki spoke of any of this. They didn’t set out a vision of when a strike is morally justified and when it is not. They didn’t give reasons why the U.A.W. should be legally permitted to strike but the T.W.U. should not. They didn’t make any case at all. Pataki, the man they were trying to blackmail into a richer pension, basically hid out. Others kept repeating the strike was illegal and would be punished, as if it were just a matter of procedure and power, not right and wrong. I couldn’t believe it. Although in fairness, by last year if Pataki had come out with a strong moral statement, no one would have taken him seriously.
This state needs its leaders to talk about issues in terms of values and back up the talk, so that even if when we do not agree with them, we can at least respect them. They have to tell the truth about the way things are, and give reasons for the response. Non-decisions have been made, and deals cut, in the absence of values, and the poor response to the strike is just one example of this. This has to change.