NYC Transit Strike: MTA Demonstrates State of the Art Union Busting

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/nyregion/nyregionspecial3/16cnd-mta.html?hp&ex=1134795600&en=8a7ebf88e5b962ac&ei=5094&partner=homepage

The fissure seemed especially deep around 11 p.m. when a series of news conferences added a new level of tension to the already strained negotiations. Mr. Toussaint said union leaders had been called to an executive session with the transportation authority's top officials.

"As of this moment, we have no progress to report, and that's not good, because we have precious little time left before the deadline approaches," he said. "While we have precious little time, there still is time, and T.W.U. Local 100 is prepared in good faith to work with all our heart and soul to come to a resolution."

He was joined by the heads of several other major city unions, who criticized the transportation authority's efforts to give future transit workers a less generous pension and health benefits. Their appearance prompted an angry retort by the authority's top negotiator, Gary Dellaverson, who left the negotiating session to respond.

"To begin to characterize these negotiations as some broad-based attack on the labor movement or on working people in this city is simply wrong," Mr. Dellaverson said....


What Dellaverson said was a bald-faced lie. This is *precisely* a broad-based attack on the labor movement and working people in New York City (and the US--and the world, for that matter). The tactic is clearly to drive a wedge between current workers and those being hired after this contract. Dellaverson pretended that the union was spreading a lie that "current workers" were being told they would lose benefits or have to make concessions on pensions. The MTA is counting on the rest of us to think like Republicans and not give a shit about the next generation of workers.

A strike would inconvenience me, but if the transit workers can hold steady against this attack on their solidarity with yet-to-hired workers, my inconvenience will have been worth it.

I'm with the transit workers.

:toast: