December 20, 2005
Shutdown
Here I am at the end of day one working from home. Sometimes I'm really glad I work in the IT world. Patrick wrote about it this morning, but I thought I'd also weigh in on the strike.
What frustrates me is the whole state of what unions have become. They were founded out of the noblest reasons, to bring fair working practices to a world where capitalist gains won out over humanistic concerns such as working livable hours making livable money and having time off. But now we live in an era where a lot of people are making minimum wage, which is not livable, and union workers generally make a wage comparable to equally skilled white collar workers but many of their industries (such as steel and textiles) are failing in this country because trade is going to other countries where the prices are better because the pay is bad and people work in conditions equal or worse than pre-union era America. So - how much progress has there been?
And then you have this situation. Yes - the MTA should have offered more up front and shouldn't have boasted so much about having an extra billion dollars right before negotiations. But... it's hard to have sympathy when the union isn't being faced with some horrible injustice. They were offered (I think this was the final offer, but I may be wrong) a total of 10% in raises over the next 3 years, keeping retirement at 55, and current employees keep fully paid for health insurance and new employees pay 1%. This is a better deal than I have ever been offered. Especially the health coverage, which was one of the sticking points.
And so now college educated middle class people who can work from home (ie - me) inconvenienced. But more importantly, the poor working class people are hurt. People have to choose between walking miles, paying at least $20 per day in cab fares, or taking unpaid leave (possibly not even an option if they want to keep their jobs). Schools start 2 hours later leaving a lot of people with a child care gap. And perhaps the worst - there are the newstands that are on subway platforms, often run by recent immigrants who can barely scrape by and don't have an extra day's wages in savings, and now they can't even get into work even if they had customers. So I have to wonder - how is this really helping the cause of the worker? |
What frustrates me is the whole state of what unions have become. They were founded out of the noblest reasons, to bring fair working practices to a world where capitalist gains won out over humanistic concerns such as working livable hours making livable money and having time off. But now we live in an era where a lot of people are making minimum wage, which is not livable, and union workers generally make a wage comparable to equally skilled white collar workers but many of their industries (such as steel and textiles) are failing in this country because trade is going to other countries where the prices are better because the pay is bad and people work in conditions equal or worse than pre-union era America. So - how much progress has there been?
And then you have this situation. Yes - the MTA should have offered more up front and shouldn't have boasted so much about having an extra billion dollars right before negotiations. But... it's hard to have sympathy when the union isn't being faced with some horrible injustice. They were offered (I think this was the final offer, but I may be wrong) a total of 10% in raises over the next 3 years, keeping retirement at 55, and current employees keep fully paid for health insurance and new employees pay 1%. This is a better deal than I have ever been offered. Especially the health coverage, which was one of the sticking points.
And so now college educated middle class people who can work from home (ie - me) inconvenienced. But more importantly, the poor working class people are hurt. People have to choose between walking miles, paying at least $20 per day in cab fares, or taking unpaid leave (possibly not even an option if they want to keep their jobs). Schools start 2 hours later leaving a lot of people with a child care gap. And perhaps the worst - there are the newstands that are on subway platforms, often run by recent immigrants who can barely scrape by and don't have an extra day's wages in savings, and now they can't even get into work even if they had customers. So I have to wonder - how is this really helping the cause of the worker? |