Welcome Aboard

The Times op-ed board waits a day to offer its take on the strike, and it makes you wonder who exactly supports Toussaint:

The New Yorkers who took to the streets yesterday, some walking miles to work or other appointments, deserved better than the explanation they got from leaders of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union — who said they had no choice but to tell their 33,000 members to begin an illegal walkout. That’s ridiculous.

Negotiations did not have to end when they did. There was no impasse. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state entity that runs the system, had compromised on several major points at the negotiating table. When Roger Toussaint, the union chief, walked away, his members were being offered a chance to continue to retire with full pensions at age 55. New hires would have to pay into that pension, but workers would continue to pay nothing toward their health benefits. That’s a deal that many riders, including those who struggle to pay the $2 fare, would gladly take.

The authority also made other concessions, including a better wage offer, that could be seen as generous, considering that its finances will be awash in red ink for foreseeable years and it cannot just let fares skyrocket to pay for any deal it cuts for its workers.

Many other issues remain to be hammered out, but none justify a strike, especially in the frigid days before the holidays. While New Yorkers fought the freezing cold, the transit union leaders seemed to be steamed about the enormous number of disciplinary actions against their members. The issue deserves study, but even the transit workers’ parent union did not see it as sufficient reason to strike.

The only remotely contrarian position is a bland rebuke of Governor Pataki, but substantively it’s no different than the Daily News or the Post, both of whose op-eds were ready to go yesterday.

Complete Odds

The Times’ Sewell Chan moves forward reports that the local and its parent organization are at “complete odds” with each other:

The transit workers’ union, despite taking the extraordinary step of calling its first strike in 25 years, has revealed itself over the last 48 hours to be an organization wrestling with considerable discord — a local union, in fact, that is at complete odds with its larger parent organization.

The union’s vote to strike, made at 1:15 a.m. yesterday in a closed-door session of the executive board, was opposed by three of seven vice presidents of the union, Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union. A fourth abstained.

And yesterday, merely hours into the paralyzing job action, Michael T. O’Brien, the international president of the parent union, the Transport Workers Union of America, urged the city’s transit workers to abandon the strike and return to work immediately. He said the parent union would provide no money or other assistance to Local 100.

Those two facts — a lack of unanimity among its own leaders and an absence of help from fellow transit workers across the country – could complicate the union’s ability to hold up under the mounting public criticism, enormous fines and escalating attacks by the city and state’s top political leaders.

Makes you think that the Village Voice’s Tom Robbins is simply shilling for Toussaint (“[U]nion sources said an agreement was reached in which the international agreed to state its disagreement – a move aimed at insulating it from heavy fines – while allowing the local to pursue the job action.”)

Update: Or not . . . a different day, a different Robbins take — now it’s “The Transit Union’s Family Spat” . . . so which is it?

Strike: Day Two

I’m still freezing my balls off and the Mayor didn’t change his clothes this morning:

This morning, with temperatures hovering around 25 degrees – which felt like 15 degrees when wind chill was factored in – Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg again walked over the Brooklyn Bridge from the city’s emergency management center to Manhattan to get to work at City Hall.

It appeared that he was wearing the same leather jacket and faded blue jeans he wore during Monday’s walk across the bridge. Instead of sneakers, he wore a pair of black tasseled loafers.

You Win

The Post finds the worst, worst, worst commuting nightmare — 67th and Madison to Cambria Heights in Queens, a total of 16 miles:

After eight hours on his feet yesterday working the overnight shift at a Madison Avenue building, a weary Andy Frederick had to walk home.

And walk, and walk, and walk.

The train that normally carried him in to Manhattan from his Cambria Heights home 16 miles away was out of commission by the time Frederick’s work day ended at 8 a.m., leaving the security guard with just two modes of transportation for his long commute — his left shoe and his right shoe.

“The cabs won’t come out to the outer boroughs,” said Frederick, who hoofed from Madison Avenue and East 67th Street to the 59th Street Bridge, then walked across nearly the entire borough of Queens. “You can walk or run.”

Not only did Frederick have to battle the wind and bitter cold that blasted him along the bridge, but he had to fight traffic. He was trying to get out of the city while everybody else was trying to get in.

But Frederick, 45, had a strategy for the distance and the cold.

“I run until I get winded,” he said, “and then I walk.”

Respect My Frozen Ass

Union President Roger Toussaint talks about “respect and dignity”, obviously respecting the fact that we froze our balls off trying to get to work:

The strike by 33,000 transit workers left some 7.7 million people, from school children to physicians, without their usual way to get around in 21-degree temperatures made chillier by a sharp wind. Some employers sent out chartered buses and vans to fetch their workers, while some people opted to stay home.

Many however, decided to drive, leading to traffic snarls as early as 5 a.m. at bridges and tunnels into Manhattan, as police officers turned away cars that had fewer than the four passengers required to enter Manhattan south of 96th Street.

So in a city where it is polite to avoid eye contact with passengers sitting inches away on a crowded subway, New Yorkers were compelled to hop into cars with perfect strangers in order to comply with the four-passenger rule.

“I was waiting and no bus came,” said Larissa Silver, 38, who lives in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn and works on Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. “Then a lady pulled up in a car and said, ‘Does anybody need a ride downtown?'”

Ms. Silver, who left her house at 5:30 a.m. to get there by 9 a.m., added: “So far, I’ve been lucky, but this is just the beginning. I don’t know how I’ll get home. I have no idea.”

That’s a three-and-a-half hour commute . . . one way! Respectable!