A Stitch in Haste

Judging from my extensive first-hand research (i.e., my bus ride home this evening), there is definitely something to this story:

Some riders insisted that something about their commute seemed awry: buses in eastern Brooklyn missing their schedules by 10 minutes or more; trash bins overflowing on Wednesday night in the subway stations at 72nd and 86th Streets under Broadway; clusters of station cleaners milling about early yesterday in Inwood, at the northern terminus of the A line.

Some at the authority say they suspect that disgruntled workers are deliberately slowing trains and buses to show their displeasure with the pace of negotiations. On Wednesday, management made a wage offer that union leaders rejected. Officials suggested that the workers were using minor and fixable problems as pretexts to slow down the workday.

Ah yes, the noble, exploited worker suffering innocently at the hands of the greedy capitalist oppressor.

Except that the MTA isn't capitalist. And its employees aren't suffering. Go figure.

I can get by if there's a transit strike — I walk to work in the morning and the only reason I take the bus home at night is so I have the energy to take Diamond for a long walk once I'm home.

But having 15 minutes of my life stolen by whining bus driver brats who don't have the brains to get a better job — or the balls to quit — is not the best strategy to endear me or my fellow New Yorkers to their cause.

As I've said many times: Labor unions are, at best, a Twentieth-Century solution to a Nineteenth-Century problem and have little if any role in the Twenty-First Century. And of the all monstrosities ever brought into existence by modern social policy, is there any more perverse than the "government employee union"? If unions were meant to protect workers from "exploitation," then does that mean that the government exploits too?

Any transit worker who commits misconduct, including a slowdown, in anticipation of a transit strike should be fired. Choices have consequences.