One recent thought about the NYC transit strike, that came to me while standing on a Metro-North train with several thousand fellow New Yorkers (and we were certainly the lucky ones). Caution: rampant, unverified and uncredentialed speculation ahead:

Don't defined-benefit pension plans and stock options, each as they were formerly ladled out, have something fundamental in common? In each case, companies and/or governments handed them out relatively freely, in part because of various accounting and/or regulatory reasons that enabled the grantor to underestimate the benefit's true cost - stock options weren't required to be expensed until recently, and various regulations make it easy for companies to underfund their pension plans. (True, the cost of pension plans also has been heavily affected by the same demographic forces bankrupting Social Security: increasing life expectancy and the massive slowdown in the increase of workers relative to the Baby Boom generation.)

And as we're finding out with respect to pensions, reflecting the true cost of the benefit make it that much less likely that any such benefits will be offered in the future, absent massive changes in the costs - something that understandably does not make workers happy. It is too soon to gauge the impact of the new rules requiring the expensing of stock options, but it will probably (and justifiably so) make it that much harder for companies to hand options out like candy, as opposed to the practice in the 90s.

Anyone else have any thoughts or actual knowledge of those issues, as opposed to the above random speculation?