Left Behinds: Settlement

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Settlement

So that’s over. The MTA dropped its pension demands (which were what made the talks fall apart) and the union accepted a small portion of the cost of health insurance. The union stays intact, the trains keep running. Have we all stopped caring about this already?

I hope not. I hope it matters to the city in the long run that its most radical union kicked its most corrupt public agency in the teeth. I hope we end up with transparency at the MTA and a revision of the Taylor Law to prevent public agencies from dragging their feet. (One current tactic of public agencies is to drag out negotiations, knowing unions are prohibited from striking and workers get no raises until the new contract is signed.) But I guess I don’t really believe we will.

Tags: MTA, subway strike, news and politics, transit strike, transit settlement

3 Comments:

At 1:55 PM, Solomon Grundy said…

I wonder what opinion polls are like a week after "the strike that didn't ruin Christmas."

Maybe with a bit of hindsight New Yorkers (or, white New Yorkers, since black New Yorker were on board from day one, as I wrote about here) will be a little more sympathetic to the union's position.

I thought Toussaint was just fine on the 11 o'clock news last night. Sympathetic, clear, pretty laid back, really.
At 4:42 PM, Solomon Grundy said…

Damn, that seems like a very ill-considered PR move.

Labor relations are so completely different in London than in NYC. In NYC, it was management that changed the timing of contract negotiations to just before Christmas, so that it would look like the union was trying to kill Santa if they went on strike, even though management was responsible for the timing. In London, the timing seems to be completely the choice of the unions.

Of course, in their defense, the Tube goes down so often that no one would notice they were on strike UNLESS it was on NYE. ;)
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Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Settlement

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