"Illegal and Selfish" NY Transit Strike

Mayor Mike Bloomberg, a billionaire unlike the workers themselves, laid it on thick today. For the second day straight, he tied up traffic being chaffeured across the Brooklyn Bridge so he could make a showboat walk back across the bridge with others. Nice.

But as much as everyone wants to resolve the strike and as much of an inconvenience as it represents this week before Christmas, I do wish people would also take the longer view.

What transit workers are fighting for - all the union hyperbole aside - or against is the effective destruction of their union and a good benefit package. What gets missed in this is that it is the city, rather than the union, who has refused to budge. The city of New York demands a two-tier union system that makes newer workers accept a much-diminished retirement and health care package over what is already provided for longer term workers.

History shows that once rights are taken away, they do not come back.

So while everyone is shouting about the selfish transit workers, stop to think when the last time was you saw a really good employee benefits package that some court wasn't willing to denude to make the corporation's stockholders richer still. That's what this strike is about.

I don't like unions myself, but I think we need them at this time in the country. To kill them means to kill the chance of having anything guaranteed by an employer stand up in court.