The Best of 2005: New York City's Transit Workers
By Annette Bernhardt and Chitra Aiyar
December 31, 2005
Our vote for the best of 2005 is the New York City transport workers and their successful three-day strike last week.
In an era that is about as anti-union as you can get, more than 33,000 workers risked legal sanction, stood on freezing picket lines, and unequivocally stated their right to middle-class incomes, quality healthcare and pensions, and respect on the job.
Their action is an inspiring and much-needed antidote to the paralysis that we have allowed "globalization" to impose on us. Battered by years of outsourcing and stagnant wages, we slip into a fatalism that any worker is expendable, any firm can relocate, global competition is forcing a race to the bottom and there's nothing we can do about it. Wal-Mart jobs have taken our imagination hostage --and so we acquiesce to the impossibility of demanding living wages and benefits.
But of course that's just not true, as the transit workers reminded us by walking off the job, having the courage to disrupt business as usual (with great dignity we should add), and then winning most of their demands.
It's living proof of the power of organizing, and just as important, that there are plenty of industries where globalization does not in fact drive job quality.
Transit is just one example of an entirely local industry (and its workers made full use of that leverage). But think as well of nursing home workers, janitors, poultry processors, hotel workers, truckers, restaurant workers, security guards, child care workers, and even Wal-Mart cashiers. It's not international competition that has driven down wages in these industries, it's our own domestic policy decisions, from our failure to raise the minimum wage and enforce basic employment laws, to industry deregulation and the weakening of the right to organize.
Which means that there's plenty of room for change, and we can make it happen both as workers and as voters.
In New York City, the most immediate place where we'll see that change is in upcoming contract negotiations for hundreds of thousands of other public sector workers. For 25 years, no municipal union in the city has mounted a large-scale strike, not the teachers, police, paramedics, firemen, or day care workers, despite going years without a contract. That's because New York State law makes it illegal for public sector employees to strike, removing the one true lever that workers have. Yet despite severe penalties (the union currently has $3 million in fines hanging over its head), the transport workers took a stand.
It was one of those rare moments when someone dared to cross a line we all assumed was inviolate, showing us, with almost unbearable courage, that justice and the law are not the same thing.
In substance, what triggered the strike was not a conflict over current wages and benefits, but rather MTA's demand that future workers accept a lesser pension package. It was clearly a divide and conquer strategy meant to buy off the current workforce, but it lasted just about as long as it took union president Roger Toussaint to lay down first principles: "We will not sell out our unborn."
His refusal to abandon future workers will now be the standard for all of New York's public sector unions. In an age in which immigrant workers are routinely vilified as stealing jobs and driving down wages, the transit workers, 70% of whom are immigrants and people of color, raised the floor for everyone. To us that's the most inspiring lesson of all. Everyone understands that a house divided will doom the fight for working families, but it's been agonizingly slow work to put that principle into action and build common cause between labor, immigrants and communities of color, in a way that expands our very conception of economic justice. Last week we got a peek at what such a world might look like.
Yes, the strike disrupted the city and cost businesses some of their holiday profits; but giving in to the MTA's demands would have cost working families far more in the long run. And yes, escalating benefit costs are very real issues that both the public and private sector need to deal with; but knee-jerk solutions aren't the way to address root systemic problems in how we provide for health care and retirement in this country.
In short, the transit fight was about the future of good jobs for all of us. And through the workers' courage, we rediscovered core truths: nothing is inevitable, change is always possible, and giving in to powerlessness is the greatest enemy of all.
Which is just about the way to start off the new year that we can think of.
[Reproduced with permission.]