Gothamist: Extra, Extra - The Transit Strike Edition

Think twice

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 13:33:49 -0500

The IRT was actively driven to insolvency, by a public sector that wanted control of it's lines. The BMT was profitable (in spite of the politically motivated IND, the artificial nickle fare, and every other trick up the government's sleeves) till Unification in 1940. The subways were never wholly private nor were they intended to be. Yes they were financed with government subsidies and debt (like the MTA) but also from equity (unlike the MTA). Who knows what the fare might be after re-privatization or what company would run the Subway. We could look at the HBLR in Jersey City as an example.

Peter Kirn

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 12:07:37 -0500

I guess no one is going to comment on the absurdity of the Sun suggesting we privatize the MTA. The writer needs to check the history books: the IRT and BMT were financial disasters, because of anti-competitive measures taken to keep the fare down artificially. It was hardly a triumph of free market economics. And IRT/BMT wouldn't have even existed without a colossal investment in infrastructure using tax dollars. What private corporation in their right mind would take on a subway and bus system with ancient infrastructure and a surly union? The fact that the MTA has been, largely, the success that it has been is a tribute to government-controlled mass transit and the appeal to a city like New York of using efficient public transportation. (Clear examples of mismanagement notwithstanding -- the trains themselves we love, as we're reminded now.) Privatization isn't impossible, but people would be paying a lot more than $2 a fare.

Think twice

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 10:50:53 -0500

The NY Sun is on the mark!

dhex

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 09:50:53 -0500

gee, the sun eddy wasn't that bad. i'm kind of surprised. getting some nice bus line competition would be a good start. sending the current mta board to prison would be pretty cool too, just as a warning to any future transicrats. "20 and out" - har!

MikeM

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 03:29:55 -0500

How exactly will the end of the strike come about? Mediation? Court order? The fines just become too excessive for the union? On one hand it seems like the TWU will not be appeased and there is no end in sight, but realistically speaking I just can't imagine this thing lasting into the weekend. Also, what I'd really like to know is whether there is any chance of going to bed without any word of the strike ending and then waking up to running buses and subways?

Larry Littlefield

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 02:30:29 -0500

Here is something else from http://www.rankandfileadvocate.org/issue9/wanted.htm It appears that the articles demanding a 20/50 pension on the main TWU website, which come up on searches, have been removed, but don't be fooled about what this strike is about. BTW, this veto may be the only good thing Pataki did in 11 years. Don't listen to that stuff about "respect" and "fighting for all workers." Read what they are actually striking for. WANTED: EFFECTIVE POLITICAL ACTION Gov. Pataki has vetoed Local 100’s 20/50 pension bill – again. The Local 100 leadership is organizing a big Lobby Day – again. This will be the fourth year in a row that Local 100 brings members to Albany to lobby for the union’s legislative agenda, including the 25/55 refund and a 20/50 pension. What do we have to show for these efforts? The legislature passes the bills and the governor vetoes them. In his message explaining his veto (see Pataki's Pocket Veto), Pataki made his conditions very clear. In fact, he has been surprisingly consistent in his reasons for rejecting the pension improvements we seek. He wrote, “I am constrained to disapprove the bill based upon the objections of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and the Mayor of the City of New York, who contend that this type of enhanced benefit should be the subject of mutual agreement through collective bargaining.” Pataki is letting us know that he will not accept a 20/50 pension, or refund our 25/55 money, unless the union gives something up in contract talks to win the MTA’s support for our goals in Albany. Pataki appoints the majority of the MTA board and he will not sign our pension bills into law unless his appointees tell him that the union gave up enough to make it worthwhile. Will sending 2000 people to Albany change his mind?

Larry Littlefield

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 02:13:12 -0500

For those of you who haven't been paying attention, San Diego is on the verge of bankrupcy because of deals to underfund pensions and increase benefits -- just like in New York in the 1990s (and 1960s leading to the 1970s). Services are being slashed, the quality of life is falling. The following editorial in the San Diego Times Union -- written the day after the Mayor resigned -- summarizes the situation. Unfortunately Donna Frye -- the liberal Democrat who was the only one on the City Council to vote against these deals -- lost the special election. Would that we had a Donna Frye in New York. Beyond blame game, the pensions must fall CHAOS AT CITY HALL By Robert J. Caldwell CALDWELL IS EDITOR OF THE INSIGHT SECTION. May 1, 2005 It's a grim measure of San Diego's fiscal and political plight that it drove Dick Murphy, a dutiful and conscientious man, to resign as mayor only four months into his second term. Murphy's stunning capitulation, in turn, leaves the city's crumbling political leadership in a state of near chaos. The city charter puts Deputy Mayor Michael Zucchet in line to become acting mayor when Murphy's resignation takes effect July 15. That would place Zucchet in the mayor's office two months into his trial on federal bribery charges in the sordid strippergate case. Even if he were to be acquitted, Zucchet is hopelessly compromised. He'd have zero moral authority and no credibility for even the most temporary stint as interim mayor. Yet, he seems utterly unrepentant and, apparently, unperturbed as he anticipates moving into the mayor's office. City Manager Lamont Ewell, struggling with little apparent success to stop the city's downward fiscal spiral, is also a lame duck heading for the exits. Ewell is staying on until year's end but his scheduled departure will still leave the city in the lurch; the crucial audits of the city's financial accounts for 2003 and 2004 unfinished, its creditworthiness suspended and the city effectively barred from the municipal bond market. Meanwhile, the apparent favorite to win a mayoral special election the City Council is expected to call is Councilwoman Donna Frye. She would be mayor today but for court decisions invalidating 5,000 ballots cast by voters in the three-way mayoral election last November. Those voters wrote in her name but failed to fill in the accompanying bubble as required. Frye is a populist gadfly with no fiscal expertise and no known plan to extricate the city from the compounding mess caused by the $1.4 billion underfunding of its municipal employee pension obligations. In these desperate circumstances, one might expect that Murphy, Ewell and newly elected City Attorney Michael Aguirre would be working together to sort out the mess and put the city on a stable course to recovery. Instead, Aguirre is acting less like the city's chief lawyer and legal adviser and more like an overly zealous investigative prosecutor out to discover and publicly identify wrongdoing at City Hall. Predictably, Murphy, Ewell and the City Council regard Aguirre as an enemy out to get them. Cooperation is all but non-existent. Meanwhile, the city remains under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office for possible civil and criminal violations of securities laws. Amid this wreckage, City Hall is poised to switch on Jan. 1 from its present city manager form of government to the strong-mayor model approved last year by voters. If you're asking how "America's Finest City" came to this, that's the first right question. How indeed? The second question is how San Diego extricates itself from the fiscal ruin that looms if nothing effective is done. Underfunding the city's municipal employees' pension system didn't begin on Dick Murphy's watch and that of the current City Council. It began a decade ago when Susan Golding was mayor, the highly regarded Jack McGrory was city manager and a different City Council was ensconced at City Hall. But the looming underfunding crisis was sharply exacerbated in 2000 and again in 2002, when Murphy was mayor and most of the current members of the City Council were in office. The ticking fiscal time bomb that Murphy and this council inherited only grew bigger and more menacing during their tenure. Beyond the crucial misjudgments of city officials, the underlying political cause of all this is straightforward -- the power and influence of public employee unions. Municipal employee unions have come to dominate city governments, including San Diego's. The unions are keys to the political endorsements and fundraising that keep city officials in office. Increasing the already generous (some would say lavish) public employee pension benefits keeps the unions and their leaders happy, and politically supportive. Underfunding those same pension obligations placates, at least temporarily, the taxpayers -- who must ultimately pick up about 70 percent of the tab --by postponing the day of fiscal reckoning. For San Diego, that day of reckoning, political and fiscal, has arrived. Extricating the city from this fiscal nightmare will require wholesale revisions in the municipal pension system. San Diego simply cannot afford a pension system scheduled to pay at least some retired city employees more in retirement benefits each year than they earned working full time at full salary. If these revisions cannot be adopted and implemented, or if the true extent of underfunding is not $1.4 billion but several times that, then the only alternative may be bankruptcy. Under the protection of federal bankruptcy statutes, the pension system could be reduced to affordable levels and the city's projected budgets could be balanced, by the courts. That's hardly an ideal solution but it may prove unavoidable. Either way, America's Finest City has a long way to go before it again lives up to its exuberant motto.

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 01:54:45 -0500

You can also go to: http://www.solidarity-us.org/atc/downs76.html Written by a member of the current union leadership (the then-dissedent "New Direction" movement) and see that this is about retiring at age 50 without kicking in a dime -- and shutting down the city until they get it. Get toward the bottom where a reasonably accurate description of the pension history is given. No TWU member would ever patronize a store or service establishment whose workforce retired at age 50 after 20 years on the job. Why? If you are paying one worker to do nothing for each one working, you need to charge twice as much, and the TWU members demand a better deal from us or they will go elsewhere.

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 01:42:30 -0500

Read the below from: www.lrp-cofi.org/TWU100/RTW/18/pension.html It is (once again) what isn't being reported. This is a dissident group blaming Roger Toussant for getting the state legislature to pass a pension plan that would allow workers to retire at age 50 after just 20 years of work, which it did last year. That plan would have required a 5.5% employee contribution -- most new NYC employees are forced to pay 5.85% into the pensions right now. Note the insistetence that strikes and threatened strikes got the big pension benefits of the past, including the Tier 1 pensions which led (with debts and other things) to the fiscal crisis and the collapse of the transit system in the fiscal crisis, and the inflation indexation (which no private pension has, among those that have private pensions) in 2000 that has put the MTA and the rest of NY governments in big financial trouble (their own reduced contributions in the 1990s are also to blame). Note the idiocy -- "make the bosses pay." The MTA is subsidized by tax dollar, and while the subway comes close to breaking even on its operating costs, nothing else does, and there are capital costs besides. Do these guys really believe they are striking against anything other than the riders, the taxpayers (our state and local taxes already number one), or the quality of service? _____________________________________________ For Workers’ Mass Action: Make the Bosses Pay for Pension Improvements! The 20/50 Pension Bill has passed the New York State Assembly and Senate, and now goes to Pataki to sign or veto. Toussaint’s machine is campaigning hard for it. They are taking advantage of the members’ just desire for earlier retirement to push a 20/50 retirement with a 5.5% pension contribution increase. Neither the membership as a whole nor even the Executive Board (EB) decided on the 5.5% figure. Toussaint imposed it unilaterally, in order, as he explained at the Mar. 30 EB meeting, to spare the MTA from increasing their pension contributions. That’s certainly in line with his declared “partnership” between the union and the bosses! Toussaint’s contract sellout stuck us with a wage freeze for the two years that will see inflation actually cut our wages. Now he wants to stick us with a further 5.5% wage cut. That’s upwards of $100 more from each paycheck for many members! Toussaint & Co. aren’t even mentioning our original contract demand this past fall for 20 Years And Out, Non-Contributory -- which they voted for! Maybe they will now say that the demand was “unrealistic.” How realistic is it to start with a giveback as high as 5.5% which will only encourage the MTA bosses and politicians to demand more? We should demand nothing less than 20-year and Out at Full Pension, Non-Contributory: Make the Bosses Pay! More to the point, how can we expect to get any improvement if we don’t fight for it? We got the Tier 1 pension (20/50 non-contributory) in 1968 because the bosses were afraid Local 100 would strike, as the Local had done victoriously just two years earlier. After 1968, the Legislature in Albany passed a law taking public sector pensions out of the contract and giving it to the state legislature and governor. Nonetheless, we got the current 25/55 at 2% total contribution (the first net improvement in 31 years!) tied to the 1999 contract because the MTA and the politicians were afraid of our growing strike movement.

NYCGuy40

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 00:10:59 -0500

Have you seen the TV commercials that the TWU has been running on NY-1 since 6am Tuesday morning? There are two different ones that I've seen. Question: if the TWU truly bargained in good faith, why did it go to the expense of creating commercials and then buying airtime to run them? Both acts would have to taken place well in advance of Monday's strike deadline--and both would have been a huge waste of money for the TWU had there been no strike. The TWU is screwing with all of us. Don't waste your sympathy on them. Tell them they should get their lazy asses back to work or spend the holidays in jail.

beekman

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 22:40:31 -0500

CL rideshare to the rescue http://newyork.craigslist.org/rid/ hey gothamist, hype this a bit, would ya?

mist.

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 21:57:45 -0500

speaking of scooters, anyone know if cops will be more lenient towards the scooter of the illegal kind during the strike?

Jason Gooljar

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 21:17:13 -0500

The NY Sun can go to hell!