Various must-reads on the (hopefully ending) NYC transit strike:
- Joel Kotkin and Harry Siegel in TNR, detailing how state and city governments (and more importantly, their tax bases) have become little more than funding vehicles for public-sector unions:
...During the past 30 years, public-employee unions have largely won the battle for urban political power by default. Other traditional power centers--neighborhood associations, small business organizations, reform groups--have over time receded from urban politics. Businesses, after all, can always go elsewhere, either to the suburbs or overseas; frustrated individuals often get worn down, electing to move on or give up. Public sector unions, by contrast, have remained powerful, withstanding occasional assaults by reformist mayors of both parties.
Democrats are usually seen as the beneficiaries of this situation, since they often receive cash and organizational backing from unions. But there is a downside to this support, which the current strike illustrates. City councils in New York, Los Angeles, and most other major cities are dominated by Democrats. Most council elections in New York, for example, are determined in the Democratic primary, which consistently sees low voter turnout. (In 2003, turnout in the city council primaries was 11 percent.) This magnifies the power of unions--since a handful of highly organized voters can easily sway an election--and makes Democratic politicians more or less beholden to the wishes of public employees. New York, where several prominent council members have already expressed support for the transit workers' union, may be the most obvious example of this problem; but it is hardly the only city afflicted.
- Noah Millman, simultaneously embracing Reaganism and Leninism (while willing to put much of his money where his blog is):
...I wish Mayor Bloomberg would fire every single transit worker and break the union. But (a) I don't think he (nor, I suspect, anyone else) has the clear authority to do so, and (b) he'd never do it if he did have the authority; he's a cautious, centrist, consensus managerial type. That's still a whole lot better than Pataki; Bloomberg has done much less to actually sell out the city's economic interests that Pataki has the state's. But he's no Ronald Reagan.
...I am normally highly resistant to Leninist "the worser the better" logic, but in this case we really do need to highten the contradictions. The sooner NYC and our other major cities and blue states realize that their contracts with public sector unions are absolutely unsustainable, the better for everyone. For that reason, I would say that the Bush Administration tax proposal I most strongly favor is also the proposal that would most hurt New Yorkers, and would cost me personally a great deal of money every year: eliminate the deduction for state and local income taxes.
As an aside, he is right about Pataki: it might be useful to remind those liberals who blame the party affiliation of Pataki and Bloomberg for the strike how Pataki won re-election by signing the state treasury over to Local 1099.
- Ryan Sager on the class war being waged in NYC right now - by the transit union against workers who make less than the average TWU member, who (probably) are more likely to live in the outer boros than in Manhattan or suburbia and thus have the most difficulty bypassing the strike by walking or taking Metro-North or the LIRR:
...[T]here is a class confrontation of a kind going on — but it's not between rich and poor. It's between the working class and what might be called the government-worker class.
The gap between the two groups has been growing for a while.
The private sector has been groaning under rising health and pension costs for years. Retired coal miners have lost company-paid health insurance in bankruptcy proceedings. Companies like General Motors have had to lay off tens of thousands of workers because of crushing pension costs.
Yet the benefits for public-sector workers keep getting fatter and fatter.
The reason is fairly simple. While only 8 percent of private-sector workers are unionized these days, some 40 percent of public-sector workers are unionized. And while the rigors of the free market forced private companies to become more efficient, the government faces no such constraints.
Instead, pliant politicians simply give the unions whatever they want, driving up health and pension costs — and sticking taxpayers (the ones trudging over the Brooklyn Bridge this week) with the bill.
It's no wonder average working New Yorkers are ticked.
Transit workers can retire at 55. Not many private-sector workers can do that.
Transit workers don't pay a single cent toward their health-insurance premiums. Not too many private-sector workers get that deal, either.
As one commenter wrote in to the TWU: "Get with reality . . . 90+% of people in this area will never be able to retire by 55 . . . pensions across America are going to default. Sad state of America, yes, but unfortunately the rest of us are in the same boat."
- This springtime City Journal piece I've linked to before about how to save the NYC subways also has some resonance now:
When today’s TWU leaders fight the MTA, they’re still carrying the banner for a whole anti-capitalist philosophy. Members see any concession not as a necessary compromise but as an unforgivable sellout to a sworn enemy. As the New York Times reported after the 2002 contract settlement, some workers had wanted to strike just to tell their children and grandchildren “that they fought the good fight, as did many transit workers who walked out in 1966 and 1980.” Of course, under New York law, it is illegal for public-service employees to strike. But that doesn’t stop the TWU from periodically forcing Gotham’s taxpayers and private-sector businesses to incur millions of dollars in emergency-planning costs when the TWU threatens to break the law and strike anyway, as it threatened three years ago.
Sound familiar?
Ms. Gelinas also has been promulgating the pro-privatization-and-competition line here (advocating that, in the event of a strike, the city and state take actions far tougher than they actually have), here (advocating privatization of the buses) and here (advocating using other buses to break the strike).
