Cross posted on Daily Kos, Political Cortex and My Left Wing
Wed Dec 21, 2005 at 11:34:12 AM PDT
The strike in New York really is not as complicated as some of you are making it.
Let me try and sort it out in terms we can all understand.
First thing you should do is turn on your TV. Try CNN, Fox News or MSNBC. Now take a good look at the faces or the strikers.
What do you see?
Let me tell you what I see. I see mostly African-Americans and Hispanics. I live in New York, trust me most TWU employees are minorities.
Then I overlay that image against the backdrop of a billionaire, Republican mayor heaving a firestorm of bullshit, insults and inflamatory rhetoric against the strikers in an ill-concealed effort to turn public opinion against them.
Last time I saw such a racial divide was in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. I guess the learning curve is steep.
If we had, more of us might see some similarities, imperfect though they may be. Last time, it was the incompetent, unqualified, unelected president derelict in his number one responsibility–to protect the American people.
This time, it’s the billionaire Republican mayor waxing eloquent on the financial catastrophe the city is facing, and doing it shamelessly on the same day the Senate is voting to raise the co-pays for Medicaid beneficiaries!
There are other reasons why are we so upset with this strike. I’ll give you my opinion, which I know some of you won’t like. We are not happy when our servants strike. This is what the TWU employees are, aren’t they?
The value of the TWU workers is to serve the economic interests of the business and financial community. In New York, this is a cohort of extremely wealthy people. TWU workers are our servants. Do the fucking job, be grateful (you have a job), take your damn pension and shut the fuck up.
I see a group who are reminded daily from Bloomberg, Pataki, Bushco that they are under assault. They are right. Anyone in this country trying to survive in the middle class has seen nothing but financial erosion (and for many financial ruin) for the last five years. Think the bankruptcy bill. I see people who have seen their friends and neighbors losing jobs. Lose health care. Forced to work at Wal Mart for minimum wage jobs.
It is a bogus argument, IMO to say, they are doing better than me, therefore they should just shut up and get back to work. If they do that, we’ve all lost. And yes, the strike is hurting many, many innocent people. But to blame the strikers is to look for the wrong villian. That strikes me as vintage blame the victim.
More than anything, I see people who saw the callous disregard of the government to the Katrina survivors. I see people who saw that catastrophe and are saying over my dead body. If I don’t protect myself, my family, my future, who will? Not Mr. Bloomberg. Not the MTA. These people know, there is no safety net any longer in America.
You abandoned my brothers and sister in New Orleans. I learned well that I am nothing more than your servant.
I see people who are saying fuck you and your comfortable lives.
Fuck the $400 million a day the city is losing.
Bloomberg, Pataki and Kalikow could stop this by evening rush hour–it’s their choice.
They want to fool you, don’t let them.
Thank you for your diary.
I too, was struck by the billionaire’s hoi polloi ploy and also him basically calling TWU leaders thugs.
No racial/class overtones, there. No siree!
Some hack who actually had the nerve to appear on “Democracy Now!” this AM was actually trying to argue that $55K was a middle class wage.
With a family in New York? Is she crazy?
Yeah, it would suck to be stuck, but ya know what–every last damn one of us needs to realize that it’s not about us all the damn time. You know what? I’m inconvenienced with something every damn day. Deal with it and move on.
But yeah, the whole vibe is How DARE they act so uppity? I am inconvenienced!
Oh, but class divisions only exist in Europe, right?!
Bloomberg is a disgrace. He is a stupid hack. What he has been saying is beyond the pale.
Roger Toussaint should hang tough.
Hell, I do have issues about New York’s transit workers. A few of them were the rudest individuals around.
However, New York was the rudest city in America, in my estimation.
And especially rough on poor and working people, who are by and large service workers.
The bullshit that people lay on folks who bring them to and from work, make their coffee, help them dress, or help them get on planes is sometimes unimaginable. It seems as if people want something for free…or free wage slaves who smile while their hearts are breaking and their minds are splitting at the daily discount.
And in New York, where you have to be making at least $50,000 year in order to afford a decent apartment, there seems to be more of that kind of expectation.
People think retirement by 55 is just so selfish. Why should these people get that kind of benefit? If you were a service worker, you would be burned out by that time by the strain, the third rail, almost getting killed by passing trains, and even being attacked by some out of their minds homeless. I swear, there was one time where I read of service workers being killed while repairing tracks where they were scheduled to do work, but shouldn’t have been.
I think people should not be envious, period. These people have to deal with a lot of bullshit.
Damn Blksista, you must have run into me when in new york. I am the only one I know who stands there rolling her eyes, making rude comments, and generally behaving disagreeably. Everybody else around me seems like so much politer and better behaved. :-))
Seriously though, new york’s rudeness is so much easier to take than rudeness elsewhere, precisely because it is so generalised and doesn’t target one specifically. Everywhere else, I am always left with the question whether the rudeness is directed to me because of my race or color, here I know these factors made not a whit of difference. An equal opportunity rudeness is really better for my mental health.
See, that’s why I like New York. They don’t give you fake and syrupy greetings. No phoniness.
It’s the same reason why you can almost take the blatant southern racism–at least they’re honest, right?
An equal opportunity rudeness is really better for my mental health.
Now that has the makings of a cool sig. :<)
Don’t be ashamed to be a New Yorker.
Be angry that your leaders do not represent you.
There is nothing wrong with being who you are.
There is everything wrong with someone else taking issue with it.
I read this on dKos earlier today, and I’m really glad you xp’d it here.
I am so glad, Nyceve, that you are posting this, ’cause i am so mad at the coverage of this strike and the response to it by well-heeled, smug assholes, that I could just explode.
All those people obsessing over the hardships caused by the strike speak as if they had no clue what the f*ing purpose of a strike is. Why do people strike? It is because this is the last resort when negotiations fail. Negotiations fail because the workers have used up whatever leverages they had, and now are out of all other options. Management refuses to deal with their concerns. So what is their last leverage–the outrage of the people at large that might force the management to listen to the workers.
So when teachers strike they don’t want to hurt the students, but they know that the voice of parents and students will be needed to get the management to listen and respond to their grievances. Same with any other group, including the transit workers.
And what is the sticking point in this strike? It is the refusal of the union to let there be a 2-tier system of the workforce. That is what the management, the city and the state are forcing upon them, and their refusal to have this inherently discriminatory system that will obviously hurt the union in the long run, is now being called thuggish and selfish behavior.
Oh! yeah, that’s right, lets screw the new workers and that way we can be unselfish!! Who spouts this shit!! The mayor and the governor.
And what is the amount that is creating so much heartburn–20 million dollars over the course of three years. Apparently that is the amount that the police department makes in overtime over a couple of days, which is what is happening during this strike. According to the Mayor, the city is losing over $400 million a day. HELLO!! You are willing to lose that but not willing to give $20 million.
Of course they think that people unlike themselves (in terms of race and class) have no right to make any demands whatsoever, and if they can screw this union, this will be another nail in the rights of the working -class people.
Sorry, this rant went longer than I had wanted, but I am really, really pissed!!
Poco-
It’s good that you’re pissed. This demonstrates that you’re one of the few thinking Americans left.
There’s plenty to be pissed about. Add this to the list.
I can tell you that by and large the working New Yorkers aren’t fooled: they’re for the strikers.
It’s only the limosine crowd, the Bloomberg millionaires, who think they can step on the transit workers and get away with it.
And polls (even one in the Daily News!) reveal that the New Yorkers who actually use transit are cheerfully putting up with the strike and pissed with the Mayor and MTA (which has a billion sitting in it’s coffers, which could be applied to stop this strike at any moment.)
Betcha the strike is settled, but soon. Bloomberg didn’t look back at former transit strikes, when the average New Yorkers were behind the transit workers all the way.
was supported by a crooked judge, and it was later found that they had two financial books, one for public display and one that they knew was the true picture of things.
They didn’t need to up the bus passes or have people pay $2.50 to get on a bus or a subway train.
And I thought New Orleans was corrupt…hell, these guys could take lessons from these grafters.
A billion dollars in their coffers? What the fuck do they want to do with all that money? Just hold onto it?
Don’t apologize–rant on!
The coverage is just so, so disgusting.
It just goes to show how much you can shape the perceptions of reality by most people when you control the media.
The NY Post was absolutely disgusting today. Headline: YOU RATS
The NY Post: why am I so absolutely unsurprised?
Yeah well, “Rats” was yesterday, today apparently the striking workers are worse than al qaeda. WTF?
Yes–the world’s greatest democracy…until you get out of line.
I mean, how foul is that?
!!!
Thanks for writing and sharing those thoughts.
The double standard guilt trip from Bloomberg is adding insult to injury.
I happened to catch on MSNBC, a lady saying that the city workers were grateful to the (more powerful) transit union for fighting this one for them because they knew their necks would be next on the chopping block.
I’m sorry the people have to walk to work, but imagine it beats being unemployed or drowning in your own home. Everything’s relative.
Long underwear, tights and just continue to move.
Car pool.
Ride bikes to work.
I’ll bet you, if this strike lasts a month, somebody would have lost five pounds.
NYC Central Labor Council
AFL-CIO
31 W. 15th St
Third Floor
NYc NY
10011
Make out the money order or check to the TWU Strike Fund.
Many of these workers also celebrate Hannukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa…
I had the same thought.
Think of it as kicking off the #1 New Year’s resolution a few days earlier.
There was this girl on Steve Gilliard’s who said she was the first in her family to become white collar, and knew where she came from. Her father had been a mechanic, retired at 55, and told of his disabilities after working late hours and early mornings at his job.
Her line to bitching commuters: “Walk you pussies!”
I know! Suck it up, already.
Unless you’re disabled or a senior, no sympathy from me. Rather, they should take a half second to learn why they were pushed to this action, and why the system’s sitting on $1 billion instead of making sure that the pensions are funded.
There wouldn’t be a pension “crisis” if corp, etc. would only fund them at the proper levels in the first place.
Better to let the government bail them out when the party’s over.
I knew I was pissed listening to the coverage this morning, but I didn’t know why, beyond my usual pro-labor attitudes. Yes, they are acting like the help is getting uppity.
A-Fucking-Men.
I’ve seen far too many so-called liberals whining over this and not batting an eye as Bloomie calls the strikers “thugs” (not so hidden racial overtones, of course).
I’ve been biking from Bushwick to almost midtown both ways for two days, and I think it’s absolutely worth it.
(btw, I emailed this to all my peeps because it is so, so dead-on. and some of my peeps needed to hear it.)
Even if they are, it seems that companies could arrange carpools for their employees.
I do not wish poverty on anyone, but I would like to see the “hack” who made the remark about a middle class wage try to live in NYC on $55K a year.
Many people, many Americans died for the cause of collective bargaining, and while I cannot be optimistic about its prognosis in the larger sense, I cannot help but wonder how many people who complain about this strike owe their college educations and their 401Ks to long years of a union father or mother’s labor.
Neither are the train lines from the suburbs. Long Island Rail Road (connects Manhattan, Queens and Long Island) Metro-North (connects Manhattan, Bronx, and Connecticut) and the Path trains from New Jersey are all running.
The big problem, as PlanetB points out, is connecting Brooklyn to Manhattan. And of course, walking to these train stations which are few and far between.
There a lot of pick-up points where people with cars pick up walkers (you have to have 4 passengers in every car to enter Manhattan during rush hours)
…coming right up.
Thank God for Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! for I have no idea if I’d ever learn anything with them.
The hack in question is Nicole Gelnias from the right-wing Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
Oooh, that’s “without” them.
I’m probably going to get skewered for this, but I think many people are downright jealous. Because unions have taken such a beating, getting $55K, health benefits and a pension is far more than most working stiffs in big cities. In SF, we went through this and while many supported the union (and I do), many were also flaberghasted at the perks they got in comparison to non-union workers. For example, in SF, a bus driver could not show up for work, and not call in, for something like 5 days and not get fired. Any of the rest of us would have been fired after day 1. It was a real problem during major events like the super bowl…you couldn’t get a bus because all the workers decided to just stay home and watch the game.
Now, I am not saying I don’t think these workers deserve a decent salary, decent pension and so on. However, the vast majority of workers don’t get of this, nor can they strike, nor can they complain. I’ve never had a pension plan in my life. I don’t even have a savings account of any kind. I don’t make $55K and I live in one of the most expensive cities in the US, often ranked even more expensive than NYC, and I have a kid to raise.
My point is, it is hard to feel sympathy when the city workers strike because they make more, have better job security, have pensions, and health insurance, while most are barely scraping by on two full time jobs with no security, no benefits, no pension and less pay. Furthermore, when the transit workers strike, it means one can’t get to work and will possibly get fired or docked pay.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I am all for unions and all for decent pay, benefits and pension. I am just trying to show the other side of the coin and why many liberal, working class folk get pissed off at these strikes. They know stiking is not an option for them and no one will ever stand up for their plight, which is often much, much worse than the unionized workers.
making what is considered to be a living wage in New York City?? And none of these companies in the city want to pay their own workers this kind of money, but keep asking them to pay for their own health benefits on less than $25 thou a year?
The middle class and the working poor are in retreat in New York. They are in retreat everywhere else. Whining and carping about what they’ve got in comparison to what you’ve got? What are you doing about what you could have as well? What, you’d like for them to get less so you’d feel better? That what they do is not as worthwhile because they work with their hands?
People have to raise kids and pay their bills. Service workers, whether it’s the people who make your Starbucks lattes, the flight attendants who greet you on the plane, or the guys who keep the tracks, put up with a lot of bullshit to keep things running. These are highly pressured jobs. You try it sometime, with screaming babies in unfolded baby carriages, having to bring in handicapped and strap them in, with a full load of folks, PLUS a couple of smelly, anti-social homeless, PLUS a schedule to adhere to with hardly any breaks. If some guy walks off the job for five days, perhaps he does need to get away and have a few of what I call “mental health days” and then get back to work. Maybe he’s got a sudden near/death in the family and cannot cope.
But sure, you’d want him in the saddle tout de suite. Never mind what he goes through and for how much.
If non-union, untrained people ran the subway trains and buses, bet you there would be even more problems.
Fifty thou is NOTHING AT ALL in NYC. You need that much to break even there. Now if it was $50 thou in Iowa, or Montana, then that’s different. You would be considered in the middle class. Not in NYC. Not in San Francisco. Not in San Diego.
“Whining and carping about what they’ve got in comparison to what you’ve got? What are you doing about what you could have as well? What, you’d like for them to get less so you’d feel better? That what they do is not as worthwhile because they work with their hands?”
This is pretty much what I expected in response. Once again, I was not speaking personally, I was speaking generally. Trying to show why some people are pissed off. But, your sentiment is why there is such a divide on the issue of public employee strikes. Are you saying that Starbucks employees, waitresses, preschool teachers, and salespeople deserve what they get because they didn’t work hard enough to get more?
“If some guy walks off the job for five days, perhaps he does need to get away and have a few of what I call “mental health days” and then get back to work.”
Would it be ok if everyone in the emergency room just didn’t bother to show up for five days because they needed a mental health vacation? People depend on bus drivers and nurses and teachers. While no one is going to deny them their right to mental health days, they do need to call in so that a replacement driver, nurse, or teacher can be arranged.
Where people should really be directing their anger is to the management of the transit systems. They are gatting big raises, making 6 figures, and getting far more benefits that the actual drivers and maintenance staff.
Once again, 55K is necessary in NYC and SF, but you do realize that most working class do not earn that much, don’t you? I’m not talking about people who drink Starbucks’ lattes, I am talking about the people making them. They need to get to their job making your latte so they can pay rent on their dive of an apartment that they share with three other people and they are supposed to be sympathetic towards the bus driver who makes three times as much and has health insurance and a pension?
for a “universal union.” A strong one, that covers everybody no matter what their job.
All the hardships you describe are exactly why the few people who do have union jobs fight for those benefits, some of which, like medical treatment and income when one is too old to work are simple, basic human rights.
And that is also exactly why you do not have a union job, and why your “government” does not provide you with medical treatment, housing, a living wage – because rich men want more money.
Unions are a holdover from a time when the rich grudgingly, and at the cost of many lives, permitted collective bargaining because they wished to avoid a Boshevik-type correction in the US.
By allowing some serfs to achieve a modicum of prosperity, housing, educating their children, they were indeed able to buy some time.
However, that time is running out, the number of people who like you, do not have a union job far outnumber the number of people who do.
And the unions themselves are increasingly pressured to stop doing what they are there to do – protect their members from having to work two jobs.
The reason that the companies will dock and fire the workers who cannot get to work is because they can. They do not need to take the time and effort to organize carpools to bring their workers in and take them home, because their workers have no union, and there is a limitless supply of desperate poor who live closer to the workplace or can get a ride whom they can hire for even less than they are paying you, just as they would if you became too sick to work, due to insufficient income to purchase preventive or timely medical treatment.
Your enemy is not the union worker. Your enemy are the rich men who deny you even those basic rights that union worker has.
Yes, this is exactly what I was getting at!!
We absolutely need a “universal union”, or at the very least, another workers’ revolution. We need to use these public employee strikes as a call to the general plight of all workers in the entire country.
I was playing a bit of devils’s advocate to show why the poor and working classes don’t always sympathize with the union workers, by emphasizing the differences in such jobs. I was not implying that union workers should get less, but that all workers should get more.
The working class continues to lose more and more ground each and every year. From vacation time, to overtime, to health benefits, to pensions, to breaks, to safety, ad nauseum, each of these continues to get chipped away every year.
For the record, I am personally pro-union, and have no problem with strikes of this nature. The workers are getting screwed and strikes like this remind people how much they depend on them every day.