It’s Beginning To And Back Again

Sometimes you can forgive the “hostile media” an opportunity to tweak things a little. A dry, wry report in the Times about how buses and subways restarted, for example:

Across the city last night, thousands of engines rumbled and roared to life. Compressors sputtered and pumped air pressure into brakes. The triumphant, suffocating scent of diesel fuel filled the bus yards. Darkened train platforms were suddenly bathed in wan light, sending rats scurrying. Doors opened and shut, opened and shut. Public-address speakers were tested to see if they had maintained their crystalline fidelity during 60 hours of imposed silence.

And Your Point Was What?

If in the end transit workers somehow get a worse deal than when they started, what exactly was the point? Now it emerges:

“In 21 years as a transit worker, this has probably been one of the best days of my life,” said Dennis H. Boyd, a train operator and member of the union’s executive board, who voted to end the strike. “The membership wanted to make a statement, they wanted to go to battle with the M.T.A., and we fulfilled that.”

Oh, so it wasn’t about refusing to sell out the “unborn” after all! In the end, it was about . . . respect. Some members of the rank-and-file were even more explicit:

Frank, a six-year vet who also works in a substation, says the strike had to happen because too many strike threats have gone nowhere in the past; the TWU needed to slap the city to remind folks that they’ve got some juice.

Oh, not to worry, all you all made your point. We certainly respect the fact that you can fuck over all of us in the respectful way you did. Sorry for ever doubting that you had it bad.

Indeed, everyone respects the financial and psychological damage you can incur:

The financial hammerlock of the three-day transit strike may have cost New York a whopping $1 billion, the city controller’s office said yesterday. Waiters missed out on the gravy train of holiday tips, retailers slashed prices in deserted stores and office workers lost productivity to the elaborate planning of normally uneventful commutes.

Everyone from mighty national chains to mom-and-pop stores to the transit workers themselves felt the pain.

“This strike killed the little guy,” said Mark Isreal, who owns the Doughnut Plant on the lower East Side. “I lost half my wholesale business — about $1,200 a day — because my driver was stuck in traffic.”

Isreal said the Dean & DeLuca cafe at Rockefeller Center turned away a big Doughnut Plant delivery because it was two hours late and had missed the breakfast rush.

. . .

Anastasia Donde, 22, a waitress at SoHo’s Cub Room, complained that she had made only $15 in tips Tuesday night. “Normally, I would make $100,” she said. “Christmas is an important time for my business. This is bad.”

. . .

As for the striking transit workers, the walkout cost them about $400 a day in lost wages and fines. Spread across 33,700 strikers and three days, that’s more than $40 million.

Three Days Later, Right Back Where We Started

As transit employees returned to work — without a contract — it’s unclear what was gained by the strike:

We’re back on track — but, oh, what a train wreck this transit strike has been to the city. Three days of sore feet from slogging around town while the subways and buses sat idle, three days of a $1 billion gut-punch to the local economy – and New York doesn’t even have a contract with transit workers to show for all the agony.

. . .

As officials calculated New York lost $1 billion in business during the strike, Mayor Bloomberg called the ordeal “a very big test for our city.”

“And I think it’s safe to say we passed with flying colors,” he said.

But the strike, which erupted early Tuesday as New Yorkers were preparing for the Christmas and Chanukah holidays, ended without a settlement of the thorny issues that led the TWU to shut down the nation’s largest transit system.

And it saddled workers with huge fines — an average of $1,200 each — many can’t afford to pay.

“It seems like what we started with is what we are getting now,” said dissident TWU board member Marty Goodman, who voted against going back to work. “Members are going to ask themselves what it was all for.”

Listening to the Local 100 dissidents, you have to feel bad for transit workers, who bore the brunt of their leadership’s intransigence. They lost something like nine days of pay over the issue of increased pension contributions for future employees. It’s hard to see how they’re not getting screwed here.

In fact, the Daily News makes a great point in its editorial today:

Of all the players, Toussaint fell the farthest. Roll the clock back. It’s 3 a.m. Tuesday. Kalikow offers the TWU raises that totaled more than 11% over three years, plus a .5% bonus, plus a new paid holiday on Martin Luther King Day, plus continued fully paid health care coverage for life, plus a plan to address TWU grievances regarding worker discipline.

Facing deficits and skyrocketing pension costs, Kalikow also proposes requiring new workers to contribute 6% of their salaries to a retirement plan that lets them pack it in at half pay after 25 years at age 55.

And, in violation of the Taylor Law, Toussaint walks, calling that single absolutely reasonable negotiating term an insult.

Now, after the invaluable intercession of three state mediators led by Richard Curreri, Toussaint is coming back to the table, where he’ll have to make concessions. Curreri signaled yesterday that the talks will take into account the ability of the MTA (the straphangers) to pay. He also pointed to a tradeoff: The MTA relents on pensions, and the TWU agrees its members will begin contributing to health care.

From the perspective of the MTA’s budget this could make perfect sense, but Toussaint’s troops may well view such a compromise as cuckoo.

It would mean that people not yet on the payroll would escape contributing to their pensions while the people who went out on strike, at great personal cost, would have to kick in for health care. [Emph. added]

So it’s possible — quite possible — transit workers will get a worse deal in the end.

I Declare The Strike Is Over

The Transport Workers Union has allowed its membership to return to work while negotiations continue between the union and the MTA:

Spelling enormous relief for the city’s 7 million commuters, the executive board of the Transport Workers Union has voted 36-5-2 to end the transit strike that has crippled the city over the last three days.

Although a contract agreement has not yet been reached between the Transport Workers Union and the MTA, the union — bowing to pressure — voted to return to work Thursday afternoon.

Transit workers have been asked to return to their jobs immediately, although it’s estimated that it take at least until late Thursday for the transit system to start resuming normal operation.

The first sign of significant progress toward ending the three-day-old transit strike came late Thursday morning as mediators who met separately with the transit union and the MTA all morning announced that both sides have agreed to resume talks while the union takes steps to return its members to work.

Representatives from the union and the MTA unexpectedly returned to the Midtown Grand Hyatt early Thursday morning, where they met separately with mediators from the state Public Employment Relations Board (PERB).

I’m Pretty Sure They’re Kidding But It’s Not Fucking Funny

This time, it’s actually a Thursday Styles story that makes you want to shit, piss and take out a machine gun and blow . . . Oops, was that out loud? “A Sense of Fashion is Lost in Transit”:

The cost of a transit strike to department stores and designer boutiques in New York during the week before Christmas and Hanukkah will undoubtedly be staggering. The cost to the greater cause of fashion could be even worse.

. . .

This week the strike began amid below-freezing temperatures, inspiring a few clever style strategies, but mostly a troubling assortment of faux pas. Some of them, like what appears to be a sudden outbreak of studiously mismatched winter accessories, are inexplicable in a city that should be accustomed to dressing for long stretches of cold weather.

“People are dressing like they work in outdoor booths at the flea market,” the designer Cynthia Rowley said.

. . .

. . . [T]he lasting trend is likely to be an incorporation of clothing designed for active lifestyles into business attire. Of the hundreds of bicyclists on the West Side Highway bike path and those walking their bikes across the Brooklyn Bridge, it was hard to guess where they were headed based on their spandex pants, Polar fleece parkas and towering layers of headgear.

Tony Melillo, the Generra designer, rides a bike to work year-round. He is befuddled by this sudden addition to the landscape, what he described as packs of riders wearing “weird, leotardy types of things and oversize purple Patagonia sweatshirts.” Mr. Melillo wears his own trim black sweat pants, a thin but heavy army-green coat from Burton and a baby blue cable-knit cashmere scarf from Charvet. His inspiration comes from the professionals, bike messengers who wear leggings under loose capri-length pants to avoid sticking in the gears.