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.

I'm not an expert in either labor law or for that matter criminal law, but as I understand it:

1. It is a crime in New York State, under the so-called Taylor Law, for state or local government employees to strike.

2. New York Penal Code §105 provides:

A person is guilty of conspiracy in the sixth degree when, with intent that conduct constituting a crime be performed, he agrees with one or more persons to engage in or cause the performance of such conduct.

So if the leaders of New York City's transit worker union knowingly vote to conduct an illegal strike, then how are they not guilty of criminal conspiracy, even if no strike actually takes place?

Any experts have any thoughts?

POST SCRIPT: As for the workers themselves (as opposed to the union leaders), the penalty under the Taylor Law for illegally striking is to lose double your daily pay for each day you illegally miss work. To this day my father still curses the names of the PBA leaders who conned rank-and-file police officers like him into striking back in January 1971. "We never made up for that lost pay!" he often still bitterly laments.

Apparently it no longer exists among labor unions:

Perhaps it was the anger of the moment, but when [transit worker union president Roger] Toussaint spoke to thousands of workers at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on Saturday night after they authorized a strike, there was an unusual twist. Holding a megaphone, he began a well-known labor chant by yelling, "What do we want?"

But many of the workers responded not with the word he expected, "Contract," but rather with the defiant word "Strike."

That would be despicable under any circumstances, but when it's also illegal, it becomes especially repugnant. Shame on them.

I guess the moral high ground means nothing to the unionized workers below ground.

New York's philosopher-king mayor, Michael Bloomberg, thinks he has the solution to a potential transit strike:

If a catastrophic transit strike comes at the end of the week, commuters should minimize the hassles of traveling by temporarily bunking with relatives or colleagues who live in Manhattan, Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday.

"If you work in Manhattan and live outside Manhattan, I would try to find somebody that's a friend that will let you use their couch. That would be the easiest thing to do," Bloomberg said.

Unless of course you have kids. Or pets. Or a life.

I'm surprised he didn't just tell people to buy $600 bicycles, like he did the last time transit workers threatened an illegal strike.

Here's my version of a contingency plan:

--Summarily terminate all striking transit workers after they miss one full workday and hire permanent replacements for them.

--Arrest and imprison the leaders of the transit workers union for contempt of court, and possibly criminal conspiracy.

--Seize all physical and financial assets of the criminal labor union.

--Invite competent New York City police officers, firefighters, EMTs, sanitation workers, health inspectors and other qualified municipal employees to work as temporary bus drivers and subway conductors. As an incentive, they would be paid overtime rates (out of the seized union assets). After all, it's not difficult to operate a subway train.

And that's the libertarian plan.

Here's the not-so-libertarian plan:

--Mobilize the New York State National Guard to run the buses and subways.

That is, of course, assuming we have any National Guard left in New York who aren't already in Iraq.

Finally, here's the reductio ad absurdum plan:

--Declare the New York City transit system a "disaster area."

--Find the hotel nearest your place of employment.

--Sit back, relax and enjoy.

--Send FEMA the bill.

And if anybody complains, then sue.

More thoughts at Soul of Wit.

For every new opening for a transit worker position, there are 30 applications.

Oppression...

I wonder which union represents the 29 people who were more than willing to work — for the going wage — and were turned away in favor of people who now claim to be "oppressed."

Some more facts:

--Transit workers pay exactly zero out of their paychecks for health care benefits. This would not change for existing workers — only new hires would, under the MTA's current offer, pay (an apparently unconscionable) 1% of their wages for health insurance.

Oppression...

--The average salary of a unionized New York City Transit employee is $48,000. The salary of a New York City police officer with five years experience is $44,100.

Oppression...

--Unlike the rest of the country, which is awakening (albeit slowly) to the realization that retirement should be pushed back to reflect both economic and life expectancy realities, the transit workers, who are already able to retire with full pension at age 55, now think that's somehow unfair and want to be able to retire at 50.

Oppression...

I wish I were that oppressed by my employer...

Michael Goodwin sums it up nicely:

That the transit union would strike over such minor changes reflects what one labor leader called "an ideology." It is the notion that every new contract must enhance wages and benefits and that no provision should be given up. At its extreme, it's an ideology that says an illegal strike today is justified because a worker hired tomorrow will get fewer benefits in 30 years.

While 29 willing applicants get turned away.

Oppression...

To review: A big sticking point in the labor negotiations in the New York City transit strike is pension policy. Under the current package, transit workers qualify for a defined-benefit pension at age 55 with 20 years of service. The MTA dropped a request for the retirement age of new hires only to rise to 62; the TWU not only rejected that request but instead demanded that the retirement age be dropped to 50.

You might have already known this; it's been widely reported.

But here's something that hasn't been widely reported, and which I only remembered because my father is a retired NYC police officer:

Pensions of retired state and local government employees in New York State are exempt from state income tax.

So not only do the transit workers already get an abnormally generous pension, but they also get a huge tax break on it -- at the expense of all New York taxpayers and not just bus and subway riders.

Continue enjoying your improvised commute...

It appears that the New York City transit strike is being terminated.

Which means that the strike lasted three days, and that the striking workers will therefore forfeit 6 days pay for their illegal acts, give or take.

Here are some hypotheticals: If the workers receive a 5% raise, then it will take 120 workdays for them to make up the forfeited pay.

A 6% raise would mean breakeven after 100 workdays. A 4% raise would require 150 workdays to recoup their forfeited pay.

And this of course would assume raises above and beyond whatever the transit workers would have gotten anyway had they never struck.

Taking that into consideration, perhaps increments of 1% (600 workdays to break even) or 2% (300 workdays to break even) would be better estimates.

Morons.

More thoughts at Cake or Death.

The New York Times would have you believe that the transit workers were the victors:

When [union leader Roger] Toussaint appeared before television cameras at 11 p.m. on Tuesday to announce the settlement, he commented little except to read an impressive list of new worker-friendly provisions: raises averaging 3.5 percent a year, the creation of paid maternity leave, a far better health plan for retirees, a much-improved disability plan, the adoption of Martin Luther King's Birthday as a paid holiday, and increased "assault pay" for bus drivers and train operators who are attacked by passengers.

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

Remember, what matters isn't what the transit workers got, but what they got as a result of the strike (i.e., the marginal benefit of striking compared to the marginal cost).

Although we cannot know exactly what would have happened had the workers not gone on an illegal strike, we know from the negotiations before the strike that the MTA was offering somewhere in the neighborhood of a 6-7% salary increase over three years. The workers got 10%.

That's about it -- 4 percentage points more at most.

The rest of the gobbledygook -- MLK Day and "assault pay" and such -- was all on the table before the strike; nothing on that "impressive list" was in any way a dealbreaker for the MTA. It is entirely illegitimate to assert that they were obtained as a direct result of the strike. The pension tug-of-war was a draw (sorta kinda -- see below).

Meanwhile, here's the strike's marginal cost to the workers:

--Six days lost pay. As I blogged previously, even assuming the high-end 4% incremental figure, that means that striking workers will have to work 150 days before they catch up.

--Potential court fines on individual striking workers on top of the two-for-one Taylor Law strike penalty.

--The union was fined $3 million, almost its entire net worth. Its leaders still face possible imprisonment.

--Transit workers must now pay health insurance premiums.

--The MTA won a critical concession: a 37-month contract, which means that the union will never again be able to hold the Christmas shopping season hostage.

--An inestimable amount of lost goodwill among ordinary New Yorkers.

It seems obvious to me that the MTA was the overall victor here.

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Except for this:

[The MTA agreed] to special payments of up to $10,000 for more than half the Transport Workers Union's members...
...
The union claimed its members were owed refunds because many subway and bus workers had years ago paid 5.3 percent of their salaries into the pension system.

But the system was later changed, allowing newer employees to pay only 2 percent of their income and still receive the same retirement benefits as the older workers.

So if I go to the supermarket today and buy a quart of milk for $1.25 and you buy it tomorrow for $1.00, that means I'm entitled to my $0.25 back? Ridiculous. The contract was what it was. The fact that subsequent hires faced a different contract falls under the category of "too bad so sad." There was no error, there was no fraud, there was no inequity.

But bleed the pension dry anyway. That's sure to help transit workers in the future.

The Legislature (which must approve the kickback) should, of course, reject this ludicrous giveaway. But they won't. Organized labor owns essentially all New York's hack politicians, including Republicans. They will ratify the payoff and tax-and-spend Republican governor George Pataki will sign it into law.

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A brief denouement:

Meanwhile, the TWU is reportedly considering fining those members who crossed the picket line during the strike. Union officials are trying to determine who continued to work during the work stoppage.

Members who crossed the picket line could be fined the amount of money they made during those three days. They could also be stripped of their union representation.

I had originally intended to write a major post on this topic alone, going into the various legal doctrines -- such as unconscionability, the "illegal contract" doctrine, unclean hands, in pari delicto, etc. -- that would render any such fines null and void.

Suffice it to say that this merely illustrates how ignoble and immoral these despicable union leaders have been during this whole sordid affair. Workers forced, against their will, to join a union and to pay dues, who when told to go on an illegal strike, decide instead to obey the law, feed their families and not hurt innocent transit riders. And for that, the lawbreakers who run the union want to fine them.

Incredible.

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More thoughts at Half Sigma.