This Train is Bound for Nowhere

It's hard for me to write about the current subway strike.

On the one hand, Fox 5 News (the local Fox station, if you don't live in New York) thinks it's very easy and Manichean -- every five minutes or so they flash the logo "ILLEGAL TRANSIT STRIKE" on the TV screen. Poor Jodi Appelgate sounds so apologetic when she's required to make the point -- over and over again -- that the strike is in fact technically illegal. She must want to go home and take a nice long hot shower after work, to get the slime off.

One wonders how Fox 5 News would have handled Rosa Parks in 1955: "NEGRO ILLEGALLY SITS IN FRONT OF BUS."

But this is a complicated issue -- and what adds to the complication is that it affects me directly. I live in this city and don't have a car or a driver's license, which means that I have to rely on the subway to get around. I find this as inconvenient as anyone.

However, there are a few facts to consider.

The leadership of the TWU (the ones that Mayor Bloomberg refers to as "thugs") are holding up a principle. When they say they were forced into this strike I believe they're telling the truth. And the fact also seems to be that the MTA wants to use this strike as a way of crippling if not breaking the union. They're seeing 1981 and Reagan and PATCO all over again.

They are relying on the fact that the head of the union is a black man with a foreign accent and hoping that, the longer the strike lasts, the more public opinion will go against the union. But judging from the comments I'm hearing from New Yorkers, I'm not sure that's the case.

The MTA went from crying poverty in order to raise fares to claiming a billion-dollar surplus. There have been many claims that the MTA uses -- and this is a euphemism - creative bookkeeping. Witness the fact that the MTA suddenly "found" millions of dollars in extra money to offer the union at the 11th hour on Monday night in the hopes of averting a strike.

Look at it this way. Pensions in America are in peril. This strike is about holding up the principle that people who are not rich but who have worked hard all their lives deserve a secure retirement with a decent pension. Corporate America, with its Darwinian, dog-eat-dog mentality, is trying to take that away from them. The men and women of the TWU are not only fighting for their own pensions -- they're fighting for yours as well. Because if the MTA can get away with gutting the pensions of transit workers, then no pension of any worker anywhere in the United States is safe.

Maybe this strike isn't so hard to write about after all...

Tom Moran