Strike Free
At this writing, New York City has gone to court and secured injunctions against the Transit Workers Union to prevent them from striking. The strike was set for midnight Wednesday, and officials were concerned that even though negotiations were proceeding smoothly, they might not be concluded in time. If the 33-thousand workers do strike, it will cost the union $1-million the first day and the fine will double daily thereafter.
Personally I think the whole union thing needs to be re-thunk. Let’s start with no strikes by municipal employees. In fact, there should be no municipal unions. For the most part they are political entities with far more power than they deserve, which they usually exercise to extort ridiculous contracts from weak-kneed politicians. They hold entire cities hostage to their demands, and that’s not reasonable.
Also not reasonable are their demands in this situation. New York City already pays its bus drivers an average of $56-thousand a year, and the benefits they receive make that figure look puny. Now the union is asking for 9% more a year for three years. Yeah, right.
Unions were formed for the right reasons; to protect workers from being exploited. And there was plenty of need for them. But at some point, the exploitees started looking like the exploiters. Now the unions are less focused on protection and more on feathering their own nests.
In an ideal world, no one would work for an employer who underpaid or abused workers, and no one would buy products from a company that mistreated its employees. And yes, it’s not an ideal world, but we need to progress from where we are and find a better system, like intelligent mediation. But we cannot have New York City transit workers threaten to stop transporting 3½ million people a day; the costs in terms of streets clogged, time lost, and pollution poured into the air is simply unacceptable.
And it’s not just an issue of public employees. It is an equally unacceptable practice for airline pilots to be able to cripple the international transportation scheme.
It is indefensible for any group to have power — let alone the willingness — to cause a disruption of the public infrastructure. And especially those who receive taxpayer funding. The government should be the employer of the last resort anyway, and perhaps should replace marginally-skilled labor with equally-skilled welfare recipients at a third the cost.
The bottom line is that people need to get a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work. Fairness in compensation and working conditions needs to be worked out in a reasonable manner without strikes, especially where the general public is concerned. Certainly we can figure it out.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.
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