Title: anonymous critique of the American
dream
[NOTE: if you think that
this is just a local New York problem, please rethink: as the author
(anonymous: please cite if you know who it is) points out, the
national trend is being made plain in this case. Who is
next?
Carolyn Birden
It now appears that the Transport
Workers Union has succumbed to
intimidation and pressure from the MTA, Gov. Pataki, the
Draconian (and probably
un-Constitutional) penalties imposed by the Taylor Law, and the
short-sighted lack
of support by the general public. After three days, the
strike effort has
collapsed. The TWU is now, to use the current street
vernacular, the MTA's
'bitch.' It is another nail in the coffin of what was once
called the American
Middle Class, that vast category of working people who have
achieved some
level of comfort and affluence through earned wages.
So here are a few things for all of us to think about:
Yes, the strike was technically "illegal" under a law
that is so bizarre and
anti-worker that it can actually impose fines of thousands of
dollars
against individual workers for not going to work, something you
might expect from
the former Soviet Union but not here in America.
What they aren't telling you is this. Under that same law,
New York State's
Taylor Law, it is also illegal for the MTA management to demand
alterations
in the union's pension program as a part of contract
negotiations, and that
is what this strike was all about. The MTA deliberately
provoked this strike
in order to break the union by refusing to obey the Taylor Law
themselves and
stop insisting on pension reductions. And still, even now,
the MTA
continues insisting on reducing the pension benefits of TWU's
future employees in
blatant violation of the very law they complain that the union
broke while
striking. It should not be part of these contract talks.
The MTA is continuing
to break the Taylor Law by refusing to abandon this issue as a
central point
of contract negotiations. So who broke the law first?
They aren't telling you that the projected long-term fiscal
problems
regarding the MTA's budget have little to do with funding the
TWU's pension for city
workers. It has a lot more to do with the MTA several
years ago taking over
the pension fund (and its legal responsibilities) of the LIRR's
union as a
political favor to Long Island's Republican politicians, who are
very tight
with that union's leadership. The LIRR pension fund
currently has a deficit of
1.2 billion dollars due to under-funding by the MTA which
currently has a
surplus in its treasury of one billion dollars.
They aren't telling you---because they'd rather not talk about
it---that for
years the Pataki regime and the city of New York under-funded
the MTA and
simultaneously turned a blind eye to MTA's borrowing of massive
amounts of
money for capital improvements in the system. Now the debt
bird has come home to
roost, debt service takes up 17% of the MTA's operating budget,
and they
want TWU rank and file workers to absorb the cost via the
expedient of reduced
pension benefits.
They aren't talking about the fact that in private industry one
major
corporation after another has resorted to raiding the pension
funds of workers as a
means of boosting profits and that now local and state
government is
starting to attempt to do the same thing in order to solve the
fiscal problems
created through their own managerial ineptitude. If the
MTA can reduce pension
benefits for the TWU this will quickly become a precedent for
reducing pensions
throughout all city and state agencies.
Everyone is wagging their finger at the union for striking just
before
Christmas but nobody pays attention to the fact that within the
past two
weeks---just before Christmas---General Motors announced the
lay-off of 30,000
workers.
People are saying 'well, I work in private industry and I don't
have a
pension, so why should transit workers have one' instead of
asking why it is that
the company they work for dissolved
their pension fund and abdicated their
pension responsibilities to workers ten or fifteen years
ago.
If we are really the great country that we like to believe we
are, then why
is it that the vast majority of working people in this country
were better
off thirty or forty years ago than they are now? Why is it
that in the 1960's
a blue collar worker with a good union job could buy a house, a
new car every
few years, save money in the bank and send his kids to college
while his
wife stayed home but now young adults with two income families
can't afford to
even buy the house? Why is it that health care costs have
risen to a point
where individuals cannot afford health care unless their
employer supplies it to
them and their employers are more and more often saying that
they cannot
afford it either?
Basic premise here: If we are a great country we will be
able to provide
health care to all of our citizens. If we are a great
country, life for our
citizens will improve with each generation, not get worse.
If we are a great
country, our economic system will focus on improving the living
standards for
as many people as possible, not just a selected few celebrities,
oil company
executives, and Silicon Valley tycoons.
Organized labor created the middle class in this country.
Even highly
skilled professionals like medical doctors have relied upon
unions for their own
affluence. If a physician in private practice has patients
who are mostly
working class people, his own income is sustained by their
ability to pay and
that ability to pay is largely the result of the medical
benefits historically
won by unions and the collective bargaining process.
If you are non-union but work in an industry that is heavily
unionized, then
you can bet that your pay scale is what it is because of those
unions who
have set the prevailing wage standard for the work you do in
your industry.
Unionized labor is now down around the 13% mark in the United
States of
America. In the 1960's it was closer to 40%. That
might not seem to matter to a
lot of people. But just remember that decent wages and the
forty (or
thirty-five) hour work week didn't evolve naturally out of our
wonderful democratic
political system and the kindly beneficence of corporate
America. It was
forced upon employers after many bitter struggles. Coal
miners in America once
worked 16 days six days a week in the mines for barely enough money to
live
on. (In winter they would only see daylight on Sundays.)
Without labor
unions they'd still be doing that today.
And another labor union got it's ass whooped this week, caving
in after a
three day strike. Whoopee! we can all ride the subways
again.
And celebrate another nail in the
coffin of Middle Class America.
--
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